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Like its figurative cousin, the cyberspace of the Internet is vast; but unlike the world of Voyager and Magellan, the Internet is finite. And while the Internet remains essentially unstructured, it is possible --- with enough sophistication and power --- to catalogue the connected realm. To index every word on every page of every available Web site. To bring order and meaning to an otherwise unwieldy behemoth.
This nice paragraph is unfortunately no longer found on the About AltaVista page.
What does it mean, every page of every available Web site? -- As of today, the answer as found on The Internet's Home Page (self-proclaimed) is:
AltaVista gives you access to the largest Web index: 30 million pages found on 225,000 servers...
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Documents 1-10 of about 20000 matching some of the query terms, in no particular order. |
If you are just looking for entry points to surf the crystallographic net, you may gleefully click away by hitting on any of the first ten links listed on the page. However, getting about 20000 matches does not really bring order and meaning to an otherwise unwieldy behemoth.
To see the real strength of AltaVista, you have to know what specifically you are looking for in the first place, and you also have to switch to the Advanced Search by clicking on the corresponding icon at the top of the AltaVista Home page.
Documents 1-2 of 2 matching some of the query terms, in no particular order.
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It is impressive enough that there are two matches, but a look at the
Web page explaining the Advanced Search syntax quickly reveals that using upper-case letters in our query was not the best idea, since this enforces a case-sensitive search for the keywords with upper-case letters. Trying again with "crystallography and broccoli" (case-insensitive search) produces a list with 47 Web pages! -- It is left up to you to find out about the actual nature of the relationship between Crystallography and Broccoli.
Surfing the Web makes one hungry! What about composing a menu with the help of AltaVista? Forced by my food-search instincts, I enter "recipe and broccoli and (rice or noodles) and (beef or chicken) and not garlic". Instantaneously there are about 400 links presenting the World Wide Cuisine based on my preferred ingredients. -- Try yours!
Of course, AltaVista also offers the opportunity to search for names and e-mail addresses. For example, a search for "howard near flack" produces a list with some 120 links. That is of course too long a list, but searching for "howard near flack and mail and telephone" reduces the number of links to just 12, which are quickly scanned to find his personal Home page.
This means, any person with a personal Home page is quite
easily located. However, for certain names you have to be quite
specific in order to reduce the number of matches. For example,
it needs as much as
"smith near (josef or joseph) and mail and (tel or
telephone or fax) and crystallography" to reduce
about 400000 matches for
"smith" to just five. -- In this case,
after all the effort, there is still not the desired information.
Continue with WhoWhere?, the specialized e-mail search.
- 10th Sept. 1996 - © Ralf W. Grosse Kunstleve - Not to be copied or reproduced without permission - Author's current manuscript