THE IP EDITORS ...
Take Four Search Engines for a Road Test: + Alta Vista + Excite + Infoseek + Yahoo

THE WEB WOULD BE UNCONQUERABLE if it were not for the Prospector's handiest tools -- search engines. These smart little robots hike through the roughest wilderness, pointing you toward the gems you seek.

But a search can easily result in an avalanche of tens of thousands of hits -- and most of those fool's gold at that. Luckily, engines provide features to help you narrow your scope, to better hit your motherlode. Find out below how four leading engines compare from a prospect researcher's perspective.

This month, too, the Internet Prospector editors have run four popular search engines through a series of biographical test-searches. Don't miss the results of our Battle of the Search Engines.

Looking for a way you can use the Net's search engines to help rather than hinder your foundation research? Discover how to target your results with the Prospector's tricks of the trade .

And finally, see last month's Access column "WWW Search Engines -- What's in it for the Searcher? " to learn more about search-engine lore and methods Webmasters use to influence how their sites are indexed.

Alta Vista
Ah -- the view from atop the highest mountain -- stunning, breathtaking, and often overwhelming. Alta Vista was well-named. It is an extremely user-friendly search engine, with help screens that are easy to access from the top of any page.

Alta Vista looks for words -- defining" words" as any combination of letters or numbers that anyone has put on a web page. It does not index punctuation, and treats punctuation as a white space ...
(continued) - 16 Mar 97

Comments
Alta Vista has an index of 30 million web pages and claims the world's fastest spider -- Scooter, who covers 3 million pages a day. Last year, PC Online named Alta Vista the Web Site of the Year and Internet World Magazine gave the site an Outstanding Service Award.

EXCITE!
has indexed over 50 million URLS and excludes duplicate and dead links which should give an exact document count. Results can be sorted by relevancy or by site (categorizing your results under its particular root URL; for example, "www.ben.com/ben.html" is found under "www.ben.com"). Your search results are found at both the beginning and the end of the page. After reviewing your first ten hits, the query box is found at the end of the page, allowing you to perform a new search, modify or save your current search or switch your search from the Web to Usenet groups, classifieds or Excite site reviews (review topics are also along the left-side of the page). In this engine, you can search using Boolean logic by capitalizing the operators (like AND, OR, AND NOT), as well as use the "+" and "-" symbols. An example of this type of search is found right under the query box. Also, there are hotlinks to the Help and advanced search tips page, which are clearly stated with examples and explanations of your search results. One nice feature of the Help page is the explanations of browser error codes ...
(continued) - 16 Mar 97

Comments
Related pages and concepts found. Travel directions, maps, reviews. Over 300 newspapers and magazines; sort by publication. Reference pages with address, email and company searches. Many other services and features.

INFOSEEK
Claims to have indexed the full page (not just the summary) of over 50 million URLS. It excludes duplicate and dead links which should give an exact document count (including a count of those linked to your own page). The search function has a drop-down menu allowing you to choose Usenet or Newsgroups instead of the Web for your query. Search results are sorted by relevancy with title, summary, bytes-size and number of hits presented ...
(continued) -- 16 Mar 97

Comments
Automatic name recognition. Search within previous results. News, newswire and company searches. Maps, reference and other services.

Comments
Yahoo's underdog status and its success story of two Stanford students who helped pioneer Web indexing attract a loyal following among Internet users. Yahoo's easy-to-use interface of drilling down through subject categories is a plus for Internet couch potatoes who don't wont to bother learning a search engine's advanced search techniques.

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