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Showdown News Vol. 2 No. 3
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= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = AltaVista Relaunch Well, Showdown News has been on hold the past few months due to a busier than expected schedule. Now there is a great deal of search engine news and Showdown changes to cover. I hope to have more frequent issues this summer, and rather than include everything in this issue, we will just start with some of the more significant issues and changes. ALTAVISTA RELAUNCH AND MORE AltaVista launches a larger directory, bigger search engine index, and a new site in May. Their directory now includes
the full content from both the Open Directory and LookSmart with merged entries, duplicates removed, hierarchies
reworked, and entries sorted using AltaVista's relevance ranking. With over 2 million entries, AltaVista now claims
the largest directory.
Their search engine database now claims to have over 350 million records. The next Search Engine Showdown
comparison will see if it delivers on that promise. At the same time, they launched their new site for the "search
enthusiast." Raging Search available at either raging.com or ragingsearch.com offers another interface to the
AltaVista database. The clean, no banner ads page loads quickly, has no portal content, and searches AltaVista like
the simple search. In addition, the customize option finally lets the search see up to 50 results at once. AltaVista has moved its Advanced Search Center out of beta. The search features are the same, but the surrounding
portal content and information is now aimed at the advanced searcher and Web master. It has specialized search tools,
a Web Masters only section, discussion forums, and other features for the advanced searching community. LOOKSMART AND GALE LookSmart and Gale have announced an upcoming partnership that will make full-text articles from Gale available in
the LookSmart directory and via LookSmart's partner Web sites. It is supposed to be available this summer. Initially,
it should have about 340 titles available. See also Barbara Quint's report on Information Today's site. INKTOMI GEN3 Inktomi announced a significant size increase in April. From their one billion plus WebMap database (which is unavailable to the public for searching) they have now extracted a 500 million record database called GEN3. According to Inktomi, it is the duplicates and spam that makes up the bulk of the difference between the one billion and the half sized GEN3. Both MSN Search and iWon were supposed to "soon" be using the new larger database with other reports giving a
May launch date. As of early June, none of the Inktomi partners was using GEN3 yet. But there may be an
announcement from one of them any day now. TIMES OF CHANGE AT GOOGLE Google has added a family filtering capability, not directly available on the main page, but it can be turned on at the top of the results page. Their language limits are now "out of beta" as well. With the addition of the language limit to the top page, the number of results option has been moved to the results page. Google also has changed its results list and now clusters by site, showing only two hits from any one site. No option
to uncluster is available. The Cached Web pages are now linked as "Show Matches (Cache)." GoogleScout is now
labeled "Similar pages." In March, Google added a directory component using the Open Directory. GEOGRAPHIC SEARCHING In April, Northern Light launches its Geo Search which uses technology from Vicinity to search for geographic
information on Web pages. Searchers can use it to limit by street address, city, state, province, ZIP code, and area
code. You have to choose either the U.S. or Canada and it is only available for those two countries at this time. The
results include extracts of the matching addresses on a page. UPDATED OVERLAP AND UNIQUE HIT SHOWDOWN The overlap and unique hit analyses have been updated with data from February. This was their first update since September 1999. Despite some significant growth in the largest search engines, overlap continues to remain low, at least at the individual page level. Fast, AltaVista, Excite, and Northern Light found the most unique hits that no other tested search engine could find. GOOGLE REVIEW REVISED With all the changes in recent months, the Google Review on Search Engine Showdown has been updated to reflect
all the changes. The Google Inconsistencies page has also been updated to note that the link: and related: field search
cannot be com combined with any other search term. However, the site: field search only works if it is combined with
another search term. SEARCH ENGINE ARTICLES Greg R. Notess. "Internet Search Engine Update." from the forthcoming July ONLINE is available online. The May 2000 issue of ONLINE is a special Search Engine issue. See the complete table of contents and selected
articles online, but the full issue with all the articles is only available in print or via commercial online services. Presentations from the Fifth Search Engine Meeting held in Boston April 10-11, 2000 are now available online. The proceedings of the 9th International World Wide Web Conference held in Amsterdam May 15-19, 2000 are also available online. Many search engine issues are included, but not especially the Andrei Broder, et. al. "Graph Structure in the Web" which presents the Bow Tie Theory.
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