No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Imagine you "re looking for a pump. Would you prefer to open a catalogue, or to search through a globally distributed network of interconnected computers exchanging unthinkable amounts of information every second ? Don "t throw out the catalogue just yet, but you might be surprised by the wealth of pumping information already available, as Michael Cotter of World Pumps explains.
If ever a person could singlehandedly keep track of developments on the Internet, that time is long gone. The explosive expansion of the multimedia face of the Internet, the World Wide Web, and the fact that complexity on the Net seems to increase logarithmically with the number of sites, means that it is fast becoming impossible to track even a small portion of this ocean of information.
Wading through it isn't easy, and the perfect search program doesn't exist yet. Estimates suggest the Web is doubling in size every 4 months, and with this leading to a projected 150 million pages by the end of this year, sifting through all of it means compromise between comprehensiveness and relevance. Two search programs or "engines" generally recommended for the sheer breadth of their coverage are Alta Vista and Lycos.
Alta Vista excels at retrieving obscure bits of information from almost anywhere on the Web, and entering the simple query, "pumps", will currently yield about 70 000 results. Lycos gives 60 000 for the same query. The vast majority of the results will be of rather dubious value to the serious researcher, as every interpretation of the word "pumps" is sought and returned. Be prepared for innumerable references to shoes, medical equipment and shotguns.
Top marks for relevance, however, usually go to Infoseek. The "pumps" query produces only 9000 results because it covers less territory, but its search algorithms yield the best results without too much rubbish added. Infoseek has plans to release a second version called Moby next year which, like every other new search engine, aims eventually to include the entire Web.
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