Excite RIP. This review will continue to be available to provide an historical record of the search capabilities and database Excite used to have. It no longer reflects how Excite currently behaves. InfoSpace, the current owner of Excite.com, may do something else with the site in the future. |
Excite is one of the smaller search engines. But it is very well known, provides sophisticated personalization, offers excellent relevant results for very popular queries, and its News Search provides important access to Web versions of newspapers, magazines, and news wires. Use the table of contents on the left to navigate this review.
Databases: Excite offers its own directory database, Excite Channels, along with a current news database (known as NewsTracker or Excite News) and several reference databases such as a dictionary, almanac, and encyclopedia. It also has a small database of customized links for commonly requested search topics like companies, sports teams, and movies. These are displayed first, followed by the directory matches, and then the Web page matches from the Excite. Records from the News database or its Reference databases may also be displayed under separate headers.
Partners Using Excite: None at this time. The Excite database had been used in the past by Netscape and AOL Netfind. Netscape has moved to a combination of the Open Directory and Google. AOL Netfind started using Inktomi in August 1999.
Strengths:
* Personalization features
* High relevance on popular topics
Weaknesses:
* Boolean operators must be in all uppercase (AND)
* Smaller database
* No truncation or field searching
Default Operation: If multiple terms are entered, they are processed as an OR operation.
Boolean Searching: Excite searches can use the + for AND or the - for NOT. Excite also supports full Boolean searching with the operators AND, OR, and NOT. An OR search is the default when no operators are used. Either AND NOT or NOT can be used. Searching can be nested using parentheses. Note that Boolean operators MUST be in upper case to work. In their Advanced Web Search, neither the +, -, nor Boolean operators can be used. Instead, functions must be chosen from the drop down menus.
Proximity Searching: Phrase searching can be designated by double quotes "" around a search phrase. However, Excite does not always process a phrase search exactly as expected. It will ignore stop words within a phrase. For example, an Excite search on the phrase "difference principle" will also find documents that contain "difference in principle".
Truncation: No truncation searching is available.
Case Sensitivity: Excite is not case sensitive. All search terms look for a match regardless of upper and lower case are searched.
Field Searching: No field searching is available.
Limits: Excite automatically limits to English language searches (as of summer 1999). After running a search from the main page, a followup search box also has the language limit options. There is currently no way to search all language, and only one language can be searched at a time. No other limits are available on their regular search. Choosing either More Search or Advanced Web Search give the option for limiting the search to any of the nine following languages:
- Chinese
- Dutch
- English
- French
- German
- Italian
- Japanese
- Norwegian
- Portuguese
- Spanish
- Swedish
The Advanced Web Search also has limits by country (based on top level country domains), common U.S. top level domains (.com, .edu, .net, .org, .mil, and .gov), and an adult content filter.
Stop Words: Excite does have a stop word list. Many common words and numbers will not be searched.
Sorting: Results are sorted by relevance with groupings by site available at the end of each brief record. There is no way to "ungroup" the results the way Infoseek used to. It also does not identify which hits have more than one page per site available. Instead, every hit has the more from this site whether or not there is only a single hit from that site. There are no further options for sorting alphabetically or by date. Excite used to hvae an option to sort by site, but it only worked for the top 40 hits.
Display:
The display includes the relevance score, title, URL, and a brief summary. There is also an option to do a follow up search by selecting the "More Like This" button which creates a new search looking for records similar to the one chosen. Excite displays 10 records at a time, except when results are sorted by site. Then Excite displays the top (highest relevance scores) 40, but it will not give an option for displaying the rest arranged by site. The Show Titles Only option displays 20 at a time with the relevance score,title, and More Like This option only. In the Advanced Web Search, up to 50 records at a time can be requested.
Special Features: Excite's personalization capabilities is one of the most advanced.