Portada by Grete Pasch

Search Systems in Internet

When the Web was just beginning, there were relatively few users and not much to see. Each user could easily add on to his homepage a list of the pages that interested him. It was then that Jerry Yang and David Filo, two students from the University of Stanford, started to compile a list of the best pages. The product of this endeavor is Yahoo, the company that produces one of the most popular directories in Internet, and an excellent starting point for navigating the Web.

Yahoo is a directory classified by subject, similar to the way a library would be. But, this is where the problems begins. How can one classify human knowledge in a dozen categories, without offending anybody? For example, should the pages on "movies" be under "art" or under "entertainment"?

Yahoo depends on the work of dozens of persons that catalog who decide under which category each site should be listed. But, due to the velocity with which the Web grows, it is more and more difficult to hire enough people to visit, check and classify each page in each site. It is precisely here that we can see the usefulness of two types of specialized programs: the robots and the search engines. One of the first robots that went through the net was "Lycos", and it is still widely used. Information collected and indexed by a robot can reach dozens of gigabytes and, therefore, a great computational capacity is needed to process it.

The search tools use different commands and notations, but we can offer two suggestions that apply in all cases. First, invest a little time in reading instructions in order to carry out advanced searches. For example, HotBot narrows results by date or by programming language. Alta Vista offers the possibility of specifying boolean searches and to specify an exact name. MetaCrawler searches by geographical region. Secondly, carry out the same search using at least two different tools, since it not probable that two sites have indexed in the exact same way, or try one of the "super-indexes" like MetaCrawler that carries out several searches simultaneously. And do remember that the Internet world changes constantly.

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July, 1997