P E O P L E

CONTENTS
AltaVista
Google Search
Search Engine Comparison

ALTAVISTA
Venerable old AltaVista is still my first choice in search
engines. The Web site had a bit of a makeover October 25, 
with some nice new features added, including, it boasts,
"millions" more Web pages in the index.

Competing with portal sites such as Yahoo, AltaVista is
introducing a live feature with news, information, finance
and stock quotes.

In addition, the search feature has been sharpened.
By using a separate tab found at the top of the page, you 
can search AltaVista for images, audio and video. There 
is also a Yahoo-like category index organized by a human, 
discussion groups and shopping.

Helpful features include suggested queries, if the one 
you typed in doesn't quite fit the bill, and a Company 
Factsheet link that leads you to company contact 
information and even provides a map.

AltaVista claims to index more Web pages than any other 
engine, which can be a problem if your query isn't
precise. A natural language query resulted in, for me, 
some way-off-the-mark hits. Sorry, I wasn't interested in 
a pregnancy discussion group.

I'd stick with the basic search. When you're looking for
a person's name, enclose it in quotation marks, and if you
have more than one search term, precede each with a "+" to
be sure both terms appear in each hit.
http://www.altavista.com

GOOGLE SEARCH
Google search is a new kid on the block, having just
completed its beta-testing phase. It's one engine
to watch. It's fast and it's good. Very precise. It's a 
bare-bones search engine -- no shopping, no news, no chat. 

Google defaults to an "and" search, so you don't have
to worry about remembering your Boolean logic. You can't
specify an exact phrase to search, but I haven't had a 
problem with that. A search on a prospect's name brought up 
a page full of accurate hits.

A good feature is Google Scout. Google Scout will search 
the Web for sites related to one hit you would like to
explore further.

And, if you're a gambler, click on "I'm Feeling Lucky," 
which will take you directly to Google's top-choice 
result. Without doing a scientific survey, I can say that
this feature generally worked well for me, although, as I 
said, it is a bit of a gamble.

How does Google do it? Well, according to the site, it 
"analyzes all the content on each Web page and factors in 
fonts, subdivisions and the precise positions of all terms 
on the page" as well as "the content of neighboring web 
pages." All in less than the blink of an eye.
http://www.google.com

SEARCH ENGINE COMPARISON
These two engines, AltaVista and Google, are taking
very different approaches: one has become a do-it-all 
portal; the other is a basic search tool. So how do they
stack up?

I ran one of my favorite people through both:
Ben Cohen, founder of Ben & Jerry's ice cream.

AltaVista ranked as #1 a site about Cohen's Move Our 
Money Campaign to reallocate Pentagon spending. The second 
site was unrelated; the third was biographical information 
from the HUD government site. Fourth was a bio from the 
U.S. senate site. Fifth was an unrelated site.

Google put the HUD site first, an article on Cohen from 
Inc. Magazine second (including a link to a Web site 
listing Cohen's favorite Web sites), a review of a book 
about Ben and Jerry third and a book by Ben and Jerry 
fourth. Fifth was another book review.

Looks as though Google did better at knowing just which
Ben Cohen I was looking for -- all the top five results 
were the ice cream man. 

Disappointingly, none of the results linked directly to
the company home page. GoogleScout was clueless in this
respect, and I had to click through several erroneous
Company Factsheets on AltaVista to finally find a link
to that sweet little company in Burlington, Vermont.

Which just goes to show that we won't be replaced by
"intelligent" search engines any time soon.
 

Pam Patton