December '98 Meeting Notes
Business Meeting:
HRiA's Board has been developing the new HRiA's By-Laws. Each member was e-mail a copy prior to the December 17th business meeting. The proposed By-Laws were discussed and modified By-Laws can be viewed by clicking on hyperlink and the modified By-Laws will be e-mailed to all members prior to the January 1999 meeting. Additional discussion will be held at the January 21, 1999 Business Meeting and final proposed copies will be e-mailed to all members and the acceptance of the new By-Laws will be voted on at the February 1999 General Meeting.
Cliff McWaters gave the treasurer's report.
Buck Huff discussed the need for additional advertising and the adoption of
HRiA's main logo of 
. All
future correspondence will us this logo and it will be used on the main page at HRiA's
Internet Site. The need for advertising was discussed and the Board will place
additional advertising prior to the next General Meeting on January 21, 1999.
Individuals interested in serving on HRiA's Board should contact Mel Miller via e-mail and addition information can be obtained from any HRiA Board Member. The nominating committee will compile the list and present it to the members at the March 1999 General Meeting.
General Meeting:
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World Wide Web Meta Search Engine Links |
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Disclaimer:
This page contains hyperlinks to World Wide
Web sites that are created and maintained by other organizations. I have included these
links because I believe that visitors to the HRIA site may find them of interest. Keep in
mind neither the author nor the Hampton Roads Internet Association necessarily endorse the
views expressed on these Web sites. Also, I do not guarantee the accuracy or completeness
of any information presented on these sites.
1Blink searches: InfoSeek, AltaVista, HotBot, AlcanSeek, Yahoo!, Northern Light, Excite, Lycos, Thunderstone, Euroseek, & Planet Search.
1Blink offers a unique 1Blink Rover, a small browser-like search window that you can keep open while you surf the net. At any time you can select the window and type a search value and launch 1Blink from there. 1Blink has a very simple interface, a search window with one button (Blink), doesn't get much simpler. The result set has search results grouped by search engine.
Quick Quest (2Q) requires a frames, multiwindow and linked JavaScript capable browser. Netscape Navigator 4.0+ and Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0+ are examples of browsers that can use all of 2Q's capabilities. Frames and multiwindow support are always turned on for those browsers. You will receive a big, bold message in 2Q's main frame (i.e., this section of the web page) if JavaScript is not enabled for your browser. There are two primary search modes, "Wired in Web" and "Wired In Web MetaSearch"
Wired in Web simultaneously searches four of the following:
Directories: AltaVista, Excite, GoTo.com, HotBot, InfoSeek, Lycos, NationalDirectory, Northern Light, Starting Point, WebCrawler, What's New Too
Indexes & Reviews: eBLAST, LookSmart, Magellan, Mining Co., Point of Origin, Point Top%, Snap, TopTenLinks, Yahoo!
Wired in Web MetaSearch searches the following meta search engines:
1Blink, Ask Jeeves, Cyber411, DogPile, Highway 61, Internet Sleuth - Directories, Internet Sleuth - Indexes, Internet Sleuth - What's New, Mamma, MetaCrawler, MetaFind, SavvySearch Directories & SavvySearch Indexes.
Simultaneous searching in both modes involves launching 4 seperate browser instances, one for each search engine being queried. It will be intersting to see how this is received on my laptop (Pentium 133, 32MB)
Cyber411 is a parallel meta-search engine. You can now search up to 16 of the most popular search engines at the same time by entering a query string just once. The query is reformulated to fit the syntax of each search engine and the results are gathered, duplicate URLs are removed and the results displayed as they are received from the engines.
FOREIGN LANGUAGE SUPPORT: Cyber411 now supports all languages within its normal search query.
SEARCH SYNTAX: Cyber411 now supports full Boolean search queries. You may now use the power of Boolean logic (AND, OR, NOT, etc.) to create more powerful queries to return more specific, targeted results.
Cyber411 can search:
AltaVista, DejaNews, Excite, Galaxy, Goto, HotBot, LookSmart, Lycos, Magellan, Northern Light, PlanetSearch, Search.com, Thunderstone, WebCrawler, What-U-Seek and Yahoo.
Dogpile can Search:
The Web: Yahoo!, Lycos' A2Z, Excite Guide, GoTo.com, PlanetSearch, Thunderstone, What U Seek, Magellan, Lycos, WebCrawler, InfoSeek, Excite & AltaVista.
Usenet: Reference, Dejanews, AltaVista and Dejanews' old Database.
FTP: Filez and FAST FTP Search. (Only the first word will be passed on to FTP Search.)
Weather: Enter in any City, State or Zipcode in the world.
Stock Quotes: Enter Tickers or Company Name.
Business News: Search for Business News. Africa News , Agence France , M2 Airlines, Asiainfo, Business Wire , Canadian Corp , Content Factory, Fednet, Infolatina, Inter Press, Interactive Sports, Itar-Tass, M2, Phillips, PR News, PIO, Resource News, SABI, UPI, UPI, US Newswire, Washington Tech, WENN, Xinhua.
Other News Wires: Yahoo News Headlines, Excite News and Infoseek NewsWires.
FlyCatcher can search:
Datasynch by LookSmart, Lycos, WebCrawler, Yahoo, LInkMonster, Excite, and Global Online Directory
Very clean and simple interface!
How it Works: Highway 61 is a "meta-search" site. Your search will be sent to a number of Internet search engines and the results will be compiled into a single page.
Highway61 can search:
Yahoo, Lycos, Webcrawler, Infoseek and Excite.
Your search is treated differently by each of these sites. Generally, multiple words are treated as a boolean "or," meaning results may contain any one of your search terms. If you only want results that contain all of your search terms, use boolean "and." This is the same as putting a plus sign (+) in front of each word. boolean "or", you can still place a plus sign (+) in front of one or more words. Yahoo always treats multiple words as a boolean "and," meaning all search terms must appear in any matches.
Some of the sites may timeout before returning their results, especially if you're a "type a" personality and set your patience level low.
You can indicate how many hits you would like per search by choosing "Lots" or "Bury me" "Lots" will return anywhere from about 35 to 75, "Bury me" will return about 60 to 125.
The results are ranked for your convenience. The ranking is based on: how many sites a link was found at, how those sites ranked it and the current temperature in downtown Natchez, Mississippi, one of the hot spots on the real Highway 61!
Allows user to select multiple search engines to use. Internet Sleuth claims to have the capability of searching over 3,000 different Web databases so I'm not going to attempt to list them all.
I like this meta engine because it allows you to select the search engines that are used for your serach. The interface is a bit confusing but it does offer quite a bit of flexibility.
Why use Mamma ? Most users are familiar with search engines like Lycos and Infoseek. Mamma is unlike such search engines. Mamma is what we call a smart meta search engine. This search will query the top search engines on the Web and create a virtual database.
What's the advantage? Mamma offers simultaneous coverage of the major search engines in one simple query. Mamma analyzes your queries and properly formats the words and syntax for each source it probes. So you no longer have to remember the syntax for each search engine. Mamma will then organize the results into a uniform format, and presents them by relevance and source. This is why we call the program "Mamma" she's the Mother of all search engines. Mamma will also allow users to use any type of search syntax so you don't need to learn a special syntax. Moreover, Mamma can include special syntax by itself for queries that are not correct. This is why we call it a smart meta search tool...both beginners and advanced users can benefit from it. Why search one when you can search all. Use MAMMA.
MetaCrawler can simultaneously search:
AltaVista, InfoSeek, WebCrawler, Thunderstone, The Mining Co., Excite, Lycos, Yahoo & LookSmart.
Personal preferences allow you to configure which search engines to use.
Surfy can simultaneously search:
Yahoo!, AltaVista, Excite, HotBot, Lycos, InfoSeek, Northern Light, Snap, WebCrawler, Live Topic, LookSmart and Eblast.
Results returned in multiple windows, each minimized upon completion of search. In addition to the search engines listed above Surfy also offers search of a number of other sources.
webtaxi.com (beta version 3.0), is a breakthrough navigation service designed to help Internet users conveniently search the World Wide Web. webtaxi.com enhances the existing capabilities of current versions of Netscape Navigator. This free service was developed to offer efficient point and click access to search engines, newsgroups and thousands of hard-to-reach databases. webtaxi.com provides a single interface for both parallel and nonparallel methods of searching multiple sites.
I'm going to take their word on this one. The machine I used to do most of this research did not have Netscape loaded so I really couldn't evaluate the features effectively. It appears that it does not support simultaneous searching of multiple search engines.