March 1997
Internet Prospector

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.

Features: Automatic name recognition means that you do not have to use double quotation marks and capitalization to receive hits on a person's name (I still tend to use the quotation marks or at least capitalization since many other engines use this technique). Nevertheless, the "Tips" that appear at the end of the page sometimes suggest using capitalization, meaning you can do case sensitive searching, but it is not necessary, to find AIDS rather than aids. By using the double quotation marks you can search for exact phrases, including those with single letter words or quotations. Infoseek also allows Plain English queries, or you can phrase questions and get answers. The engine is programmed to return variations on your search, for example Apollo 13 will garner Apollo-13 and Apollo13 thus broadening your search (but catching typos). It has field-based searching by link, site, url or title, so you can find how many are linked to your Web page or find pages related to a particular URL.

Help offers clear quick or detailed information and examples on search syntax and operators, how-to search and browse the Web, the meaning of your results and how to narrow or broaden your search.

Infoseek provides two search vehicles, Ultrasmart and Ultrseek. Use Ultrasmart to search within your previous results, thus narrowing your initial search, and to perform field queries to search urls, sites, titles and images. Ultraseek, as well as other resources on the home page, are used to search through the Web. Other extras are Related Topics - other areas in the Directory that are relevant to your query and Related News - news stories that apply to your search.

Within its confines, Infoseek offers many "Other Collections and Features" to help you search the Web including: headlines listed by category; personalized news set to your interests (or sent to your e-mail inbox or desktop); the month's News Wires from Reuters, Business Wire and PR News Wire which are updated daily; Premier News offering the day's news from seven major national news organizations like CNN, New York Times and the Washington Post; Web FAQs; and the capability of adding a shortcut to Infoseek on browser. Some other tools at this site include: lookups for e-mail addresses, stock quotes, phone numbers, company profiles of over 45,000 top public and private companies in the U.S.(seems to be busy a lot during primetime but a great feature), global directories, maps and driving directions, reference materials, mail services, classifieds and retail information, downloads and event information.

http://www.infoseek.com

(From PJ Smith)