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SHOWDOWN NEWS
The Search Engine Showdown Online Newsletter
October 22, 1999 Vol. 1 No. 5
By Greg R. Notess, Search Engine Showdown
http://www.notess.com/search/
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The search engines continue to swap databases, change features, and add new content. It has been another busy month with more big changes on the way. Here is a summary of search engine changes in the news, new content and updates to Search Engine Showdown, and a selection of search engine articles. For those of you coming to Online World in Chicago, I will be presenting a session Wednesday morning entitled "Search Engines: Failures, Glitches, & Solutions."

SEARCH ENGINE NEWS:

AltaVista is planning a big unveiling of new features on Monday, Oct. 25 at 11 AM EST. Part of the changes will include the addition of the Open Directory. AltaVista will drop LookSmart, and early rumors have it that the Open Directory results will appear at the bottom after the regular search engine results. What others changes will come remains to be seen.
<http://www.altavista.com/av/content/teaser.html>

AltaVista has signed an agreement with RemarQ. That content will probably be available on Monday, but at this point AltaVista also plans on keeping up its own Usenet databases. AltaVista also has a new international mirror: AltaVista Sweden.
<http://www.altavista.se/>

Britannica is now going to include the full text of the Encyclopædia Britannica. The announcement earlier this week brought so much traffic to the Britannica.com site that it crashed and was unable to handle it. It is still not up, but a message displays saying that it should be available again soon. In the meantime, this means we are cut off from the Britannica Internet subject directory as well.
<http://www.britannica.com/>

Google has officially launched out of beta. It dropped the exclamation point from its name, the graphic relevance bar, and the beta background. It has added GoogleScout, a "more like this" feature.
<http://www.google.com/pressrel/pressrelease4.html>

The new iWon uses an Inktomi search engine, directory engine, and shopping engine. They may be the first to Inktomi directory engine. They also offer sweepstakes incentives to use their service. Each time a registered user uses iWon, they are entered in a daily $10,000 cash sweepstakes and a monthly $1 million sweepstakes.
<http://www.iwon.com/>

MSN Search has also launched its new version. They have completely dropped Inktomi as their search engine and replaced it with AltaVista. The directory is LookSmart.
<http://www.altavista.com/av/content/pr092399.htm>

Northern Light's alert service has moved out of beta. The alerts require an account but you can get an account for free. They can be set to send you alerts by email when new content that matches your search request appears in their Current News database or their general Web database. Much of the new material in the general Web database may actually be older Web pages which Northern Light is just crawling for the first time.
<http://www.northernlight.com/docs/press_company_pr99_1014.html>

Oingo, a meaning-based search engine, is now in beta. It is currently using the Open Directory and AltaVista databases. Oingo gives options for searching different meanings of words for those terms entered in the search box.
<http://www.oingo.com/>

SavvySearch has been acquired by CNET. No immediate changes appear to have been made to its interface.
<http://www.cnet.com/Company/Releases/101499.html>

SEARCH ENGINE SHOWDOWN NEWS:

Many reviews have been updated to reflect the changes mentioned above. In addition, the Infoseek and HotBot reviews have had sections for Strengths, Weaknesses, and Databases added. Updated Infoseek News URL and review. The HotBot and Northern Light reviews have had Inconsistencies pages added. They are linked from the Weaknesses section and you can use the linked report forms to add your own observations of inconsistent behavior.
<http://www.notess.com/search/reviews/>

Added reviews for Deja.com and RemarQ and updated the Usenet news page. Now that RemarQ can search messages, it was added, while Reference.com was pulled since it has been unavailable for so long. RemarQ is rather slow at searching messages so Deja.com or AltaVista's Usenet database are the better first choice for searching, but RemarQ does have some posts that the others do not.
<http://www.notess.com/search/usenet/>

The page for miscellaneous search engines was updated with the addition of the email list directory Tile.net and Forum One for searching Web discussion forums.
<http://www.notess.com/search/others/>

Phone number search engines page updated now that AltaVista uses (and owns) Zip2 and Excite does not. Worldpages and Acxiom source information added.
<http://www.notess.com/search/phone/>

SEARCH ENGINE ARTICLES

Greg R. Notess. "Internet Search Engine Update." ONLINE. 23(6): online, Nov. 1999..
<http://www.onlinemag.net/OL1999/engine11.html

Greg R. Notess. "Intricacies of Advertisement Information on the Web." ONLINE. 23(6): online, Nov. 1999.
While not directly related to search engines, this article does discuss some of the difficulties and partial solutions to finding ads you had just seen moments before.
<http://www.onlinemag.net/OL1999/net11.html>

Jason Meserve. "New Technology Makes Searching Easier," CNN.com Technology Section. October 12, 1999.
The article briefly discusses several natural language search products, including Oingo, LexiQuest, Worldfree.net's KnowAll, and Albert.
<http://cnn.com/TECH/computing/9910/12/new.search.idg/>

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Showdown News: copyright © 1999, Greg R. Notess
This may be forwarded to others if it is forwarded
in its entirety including this copyright notice.
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