WebCrawler
WebCrawler was the first large-scale Web search engine, a university project when the Web was in its infancy. Today, WebCrawler takes a less-is-more approach to searching the Web. The pages at this site, starting with the home page, have plenty of white space, making WebCrawler easy on the eyes.
WebCrawler also offers less when it comes to customization options. You can set it to display either the page titles of foundsites or summaries, and you can ddetermine whether it shows 10, 25 or 100 results at a time. You can determine whether it shows a little icon to show relevancy or whether it displays a percentage. Beyond that, though, there are few additional tweaking options.
After the jam-packed pages of sites like Alta Vista, a little sparseness would be welcome--if WebCrawler provided more power. However, it consistently came in last in our search tests, often finding a fraction of the sites found by the high-end search engines like HotBot and AltaVista.
Among its more appealing features, however, is natural language querying. Like Infoseek's natural language querying tool, in our tests WebCrawler's worked well in some cases and not well in others.
One useful but uncommon querying capability that WebCrawler does support is proximity searching, which finds one word within a specified proximity of another. This enables you to, say, find Web pages in which "insurance" is located within three words of "fraud." This is a good way to find pages about
specific topics that don't lend themselves to phrase searching.
WebCrawler's search result pages have some pleasant surprises. If you search for, say, "restaurants in Chicago," the first item in the list asks if you want to see a map of the city. Like Infoseek, WebCrawler provides a "Find Similar Pages" link for finding pages that are like the one you selected. However, we found it difficult to learn much about the contents of pages because the summaries often were garbled. Also, we didn't have a high level of confidence in WebCrawler's relevancy rankings.
Over the years, WebCrawler has added a modest directory to its offerings that some may find useful. A fun aspect of the directory service is its listing of the most popular sites that people jump to from WebCrawler so you can see what's
popular.
Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that WebCrawler hasn't kept up with the times. Once a university research project, it now is maintained by a competitor--Excite. WebCrawler is like a personable pioneer, rich in history. But it's a bit out of date.
URLs for the Search Engines
AltaVista -http://www.altavista.digital.com
Excite -http://www.excite.com
HotBot - http://www.hotbot.com
Infoseek - http://www.infoseek.com
Lycos - http://www.lycos.com
WebCrawler -http://www.webcrawler.com
David Haskin is frequent contributor to Internet World.
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