Feb. 2000 Search Engine Briefs

Feb. 2000 Search Engine Briefs

From The Search Engine Report
Feb. 3, 2000

Octopus Gives New Views To Information

Octopus.com is an incredibly useful and powerful new tool for gathering and viewing information online. You can drag-and-drop information such as stock quotes, news headlines, all types of company information and other data to create "views" of information that you can return to for reuse. It's one of those things you really have to see to understand, but don't let it being different scare you away. You might find yourself addicted. Be forewarned, however -- the site is still in beta, so expect glitches.

Octopus
http://www.octopus.com/

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Inktomi Measures The Web

Inktomi has upgraded its service to make use of web mapping and clickthrough measurements to help improve its relevancy. As part of its development work, the company has been working with the NEC Research Institute, which has conducted two well-publicized studies of the size of the web. Their latest figure now puts the web at more than 1 billion documents, up from 800 million last February. I'll be revisiting this story in a future issue, to explain further how Inktomi hopes the web mapping will improve its relevancy.

Inktomi WebMap
http://www.inktomi.com/webmap/

More about the mapping project, with some interesting statistics.

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Excite Enlarges Index

Just before the newsletter was to go out, Excite announced that its index had hit the 250 million mark. That includes both 210 million web pages and 40 million multimedia objects. I'll follow up in a future issue.

Excite
http://www.excite.com/

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AltaVista Free Access Grows; Excite Also Offers It

AltaVista has announced that its free Internet access service has hit 1.5 million users, while Excite has just launched a similar service.

AltaVista Free Internet Access
http://www.microav.com/

Excite Free Internet Access
http://freeworld.excite.com/