Re: Search Engine Sizes Scrutinized

Dave Long (dl@silcom.com)
Tue, 13 Apr 1999 19:55:54 -0700


> Another in the stupid idea series. What ever happened to the projec that
> was trying to store everything that was ever put up on the WWW?

As far as I know, Brewster is still at it, although the Alexa[1] client might
have changed his focus a bit. The "various arrays of front ends" would
probably give him nightmare flashbacks to WAIS days :-)

On a related note: Navilinking was supposed to be a hypertext tool for
Navipress that, like a spell checker, would pop up a list of suggested links
for the text you'd just typed. We had an engine that did a nice job of
picking out phrases to anchor, but lacked suitable databases of URLs to link
(since you were likely to already have what was local to your server cached in
the wetware). It would have been nice to take another run at that with the
Alexa database, but c'est la pomme de terre.

On WikiWikiWeb[2], the *WikiWord takes care of resolving a link (and, to some
extent, the role of multiple links), but one still needs to know of its
existence beforehand. A tool that suggested *WikiWords might be useful, if
not semantically so, then at least to lexically ensure that one used the
*CanonicalWikiForm.

-Dave

[1] <http://www.alexa.com/>
[2] <http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?StartingPoints>