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Re: LYNX-DEV and AltaVista


From: Foteos Macrides
Subject: Re: LYNX-DEV and AltaVista
Date: Sun, 16 Feb 1997 10:46:50 -0500 (EST)

Subir Grewal <address@hidden> wrote:
>On Sat, 15 Feb 1997, Foteos Macrides wrote:
>
>:As things presently stand, it seems doubtful that anyone will ever again
>:be able to find those explanations via an Alta-Vista search of the
>:lynx-dev archives, and it's unknown whether anyone in the Lynx User
>:Communitee will take the initiative to set up a search service, and have
>:the spare time to maintain it in a competent and conscientious manner. 
>
>I had a look at AltaVista today.  A search for lynx-dev on www.flora.org
>yeilds about three documents, which are eseentially the indices and
>nothing more.  Not much help for someone intending to search on a
>particular topic.  It's just possible that AltaVista lost part of its
>index, I know there have been changes made to Altavista recently (for
>instance, when you search for a _very_ common set of words it now presents
>you with a blank page listing only the number of times the terms occur in
>the index).
>
>Hopefully AltaVista will begin indexing properly sometime soon, they have
>the top page indexed, so their robot should find the rest of the site
>soon.
>
>I was able to find 3 search engines that seem to be indexing the flora.org
>archives.  Excite, InfoSeek and MetaCrawler.  I've set up a page which
>contains forms to submit queries to 6 search engines (pre-set to restrict
>the search to the flora archives) the page is at:
>
>       http://www.crl.com/~subir/lynx/search-archives.html
>
>I still don't get the complete mechanics of each search engine so I may
>have failed to restrict the searches efficiently.  Feedback would be
>appreciated, pointers to other search engines welcome. 
>
>I resubmitted the Flora URL to Lycos and AltaVista, let's see what
>happens.  Can someone do HotBot, they have a really screwed up form to add
>URLs that I can't make head or tail of, I guess it must work on
>MSIE/Netscape. 

        InfoSeek just has old database entries for the lark.cc.ukans.edu
archive site, which is shut down (so trying to fetch the hits just returns
404s), and has old entries for flora documents, but it's not indexing
/lynx-dev/lynx-dev/ or /lynx-dev/html/

        Excite and MetaCrawler are indexing both of the flora archive
directories, and the hits are complete and current, so they're both all
set, and perhaps should be moved to the top of the list, or to a document
with a link in the "Lynx links" cover page, to which additional search
links can be added as the services are verified to have become reliable
and frequent for /lynx-dev/lynx-dev/ and /lynx-dev/html/

        The problem of incomplete and too infrequent indexing by Alta-Vista
appears to be longstanding, so it remains to be seen when/if that will be
corrected.

                                Fote

=========================================================================
 Foteos Macrides            Worcester Foundation for Biomedical Research
 address@hidden         222 Maple Avenue, Shrewsbury, MA 01545
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