Word-Oriented Searching--Narrative

WWC snapshot of http://www.rpi.edu/Internet/Guides/decemj/nar-search.html taken on Wed May 31 1:18:14 1995

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Word-oriented Searching

Finding information on the Internet has always been one of the most difficult things to do. Each time new information delivery tools have been developed, people have created ways to search the information spaces these tools create. Word-oriented searching is like looking through the white pages of a phone book or a dictionary--you look up a person or a business based on a name (and sometimes based on location). Using the resources and tools in this section, you can search information for a specific word or name. This word could be a topic or term (e.g., photosynthesis) or a proper name (person, machine, or geographic division). Some of the search tools ask you for key word(s). Based on your key word(s), the search tool finds matching items in a data base.

Searching ftp space

One of the first information delivery systems were ftp sites. Because there are so many of these sites, it is difficult to know which site contains what information. In order search these sites, the tool archie was developed. The word "archie" is variant of archive. You can use an archie server to query a database containing the location of files at ftp sites. To see how archie works from the Web, you can use an

ArchiePlexForm. You can also use telnet to login to a host running an archie server. To try the archie server via telnet at the University of Nebraska--Lincoln, telnet to archie.unl.edu login as `archie,' use `archie' as the password.

Searching gopher space

Another tool for storing and delivering information on the Internet is called gopher. Just as archie was developed as a tool to search ftp sites, a tool for searching gopher sites was developed called veronica. Veronica allows you to find keywords in gopher menus. You can search gophers oriented to particular subjects in the Gopher Jewels collection by using the

Gopher Jewels search interface.

Searching web space

The World Wide Web has given rise to

a rich information space consisting of many servers. Just as automated methods were developed for searching ftp space and gopher space, software has been developed to search the World Wide Web. Oscar Nierstrasz at the Centre Universitaire d'Informatique has created a tool containing

collected WWW Search Engines, and Martijn Koster has created a similar tool, a CUSI (configurable unified interface for several search engines in the Web). Another tool that integrates several searching engines on the web is External Info. These tools help you find information, specific documents, people, and organizations on the Internet based on key words or phrases.

Another method for finding information on the Web is to use tools that automatically traverse the Web and store references to Uniform Resource Locators (URL). Tools that do this scanning include wanderers, spiders, worms and robots. For example, the World Wide Web Worm, released in March 1994, searches through lists of known URLs. You can search through the Worm's list of World Wide Web HTML pages, sorted by title and find resources based on a keyword search of the URLs or the titles in Web pages.

Since the development of the Worm, Web spiders have been evolving new capabilities and better methods for searching the Web. Advanced spiders on the Web now include Lycos, Harvest WWW Broker, and the Crawler.

Searching WAIS space

WAIS is a system for organizing information so that natural language queries can be made against indexes of databases to retrieve resources. You can search the

WAIS Directory of Servers for specific terms.

Searching directory space

You can search for people or organizations through

Knowbot Information Services.