14.0136 new meta-search software

From: Humanist Discussion Group (willard@lists.village.virginia.edu)
Date: Mon Jul 31 2000 - 10:03:50 CUT

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                  Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 136.
          Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                  <http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
                 <http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>

            Date: Thu, 27 Jul 2000 12:54:43 -0400
            From: "P. T. Rourke" <ptrourke@mediaone.net>
            Subject: For Humanist: LexiBot metasearch software

    Of possible interest to Humanist folks: this is obviously a disguised Press
    Release (on CNN.com, from a company called BrightPlanet), but it makes a good
    point about the opacity of databases to current search technologies and the
    software sounds interesting.
    Patrick Rourke
    ptrourke@mediaone.net

    Study says Web is 500 times larger than major search engines now
    show

    [Excerpts, 20% of article]

    While search engines obviously have come a long way since 1994, they
    aren't indexing even more pages because an increasing amount of
    information is stored in evolving, giant databases set up by government
    agencies, universities and corporations.

    BrightPlanet believes it has developed a solution with software called
    "LexiBot." With a single search request, the technology not only searches
    the pages indexed by traditional search engines, but delves into the
    databases on the Internet and fishes out the information in them.

    The LexiBot isn't for everyone, BrightPlanet executives concede. For one
    thing, the software costs money -- $89.95 after a free 30-day trial. For
    another, a LexiBot search isn't fast. Typical searches will take 10 to 25
    minutes to complete, but could require up to 90 minutes for the most
    complex requests. The privately held company expects LexiBot to be
    particularly popular in academic and scientific circles.

    http://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/07/26/deepweb.ap/index.html

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