April 27, 2006

Yahoo Adds Babel Fish

Yahoo has integrated the classic Alta Vista Babel Fish into Yahoo Search. The service should now be available at http://babelfish.yahoo.com/, if it is not, it should be live shortly.

I am told;

You can translate a block of text up to 150 words and conduct a search based on translated text. Users can also enter any URL into a "Translate a Web Page" box to convert the text of an entire Web page. In both instances, users select from an extensive list of 38 language pair choices. In addition, Babel Fish one click translation is available through the a button that can be added to the Yahoo! Toolbar.

In addition, Yahoo said they have made enhancements to the translations technology that enables "Simplified Chinese to be translated into Traditional Chinese and vice versa with high accuracy." Also, France and Germany users have an additional feature named "Search Translator," a feature that "searcher's queries and looks across the entire Web in multiple languages to find the most comprehensive set of relevant results. Yahoo! Search results are returned on one multi-lingual page."

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 12:01 AM | Permalink

December 21, 2004

Happy Belated Birthday to AltaVista

A bit of web search history!

Last week, December 15th to be precise, was the ninth anniversary of AltaVista's launch.

+ In 2002, Chris put together a SearchDay article to celebrate AV's seventh anniversary.

+ AV News Release: Digital Develops Internet's First 'Super Spider' from December 15, 1995, here.

+ The AV home page on May 11, 1996

A couple of passages from:

"Digital Equipment Offers Web Browsers Its 'Super Spider'. by Peter H. Lewis The New York Times, December 18, 1995

+ Allan L. Jennings, Digital's manager of advanced technology business development, said the company would decide later if it would eventually charge for the searching software, offer subscriptions, or make it available free and recoup its investment through advertising or sponsorship. It is expected that Alta Vista will draw large crowds to Digital's Web site and act as a showcase for Digital's own Internet products.

+ The Alta Vista searcher also enhances its performance by sending out what Digital calls a "brood of spiders," technically known as threads, to scan Web sites much more quickly. A super spider search can consist of as many as 1,000 simultaneous threads.

Mr. Fuller of Digital acknowledged the risk of millions of spiders clogging the Internet and potentially overwhelming the network connections of small Web information providers. He said Digital intends to detect the capacity of each Web site the spider visits and avoid a disabling drain on that site.

Posted by Gary Price at 7:35 PM | Permalink

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