Conference 7.286::digital

Sounds like a good suggestion for the "feedback" page.

		Steve

BTW, it's http://altavista.digital.com/ - no www in there (though adding a www
may work anyway).

			Steve

    Thanks for the foresight of our Palo Alter brethren/sistren, they've
    covered that base as well...
    
    :-)
    

    This is a GREAT implementation.  I have gotten 50 to 100 hits on 
    subjects that I got one or two using LYCOS or Web crawler.  And FAST.
    Congratulations to those involved !!!!!!!
    
    I have been using it through an external provider

    Just want to add my appreciation.  Surprisingly fast compared to other
    search engines.  Also easy to use.
    
    Axel

    I accidentally typed in www.altavista.com and got a Web page for a
    COMPANY named Alta Vista - any connection?? If not why the use of the
    name Alta Vista?
    
    cs

re Note 4337.6 by OHFS01::SCHESKY:

>     I accidentally typed in www.altavista.com and got a Web page for a
>     COMPANY named Alta Vista - any connection?? If not why the use of the
>     name Alta Vista?
  
        It was explained in the internet_tools conference that the
        lawyers knew of this and OKed it.  From that note it appeared
        that the name we should use for the service is
        altavista.digital.com, and not just "Alta Vista".

        It didn't explain why the name was chosen in the first place
        (but that was the internal project name for a long time).

        Bob

    Mega Dittos from Indianapolis to the developers of this technology.
    It is fast, fun, and seems to find everything in the world.
    
    Thanks,
    
    Steve Datzman
    

I have been using WebCrawler for a while, and it will eventually give you
what you seek, but it is difficult at best, with unbelievable numbers and
types of false hits.

I have used altavista.digital.com twice, both times with the vaguest and
fuzziest search parameters possible ("colorado real estate" looking for
land for sale in Colorado, and "santa claus track" which my 7 year old
son vaguely remembered as a web site which was tracking where Santa Claus
was delivering presents at that time).  *BOTH TIMES* the answer came back
in less than 5 seconds, and *BOTH TIMES* the first entry was exactly what
we were looking for, with some others being mostly on target.

Kudos, people!  Outstanding technology which I am going to use to show off
the power of Alpha to every one of my customers.

-- Ken Moreau

Okay, so when do we get around to using it on our intranet?  On notes,
internal newsgroups, stars, comets, asteroids, planets, vtx?

___Pete

I wouldn't mind using Alta Vista to search my mail drawers and folders for that
bit of information I always seem to need in a hurry.

Paul

    
      I agree with all of the above - great hit rate and -F-A-S-T-!
    
      I know it has the link to our home page at the bottom, but the 
    "about Alta-Vista" stuff should include some credits to the hardware
    supporting this application. Between the TV and radio ads, and now this, 
    we are finally getting some much deserved recognition. 
    
    						-long overdue.
    

    Great idea, Paul.  Let's all dump our Email into the database so that
    others may search it!  :-)
    
    Mark

    	All I can say is wow. Big wow. Very slick, fast. Almost scary.
    
    						RJD

    
    Just a warning with the Altavista search engine.  Documents including
    terms not preceded by a + or - sign are included in the results.
    
    In other words A + B will give you all documents containing A and all
    documents containing A and B.  You need + A + B for only documents with
    both.
    
    The help is not real clear on this, but it is in the FAQ, and it 
    appears to be how it works.
    
    Has anyone figured out what specifically is the meaning of the date
    which appears just after the title in the compact display ?
    
    Cheers,
    		John

    Like Alpha this Altavista is really really fast.  I told my brother
    about it and he posted a note about it in one of the usenet groups he
    frequently hangs out in and they all think it's awesome technology. 
    Including his business colleagues outside of Moscow who are using it
    now to search the www.  
    
    Now if we only got paid a $1 everytime someone used it to search the
    www with!!
    
    Great work folks!!
    
    Mav

    I too must add my 2-bits worth, this thing is major-league, and seeing
    that Digital logo doesn't hurt either.
    
    I was kinda bragging a bit to my wife about it, and she challenged me
    to find her brother at U-of-North Carolina, and within 30 seconds, I
    had his PICTURE on the screen! She's a believer in Alpha now...
    
    .mike.
    ([email protected])

    I gave the Altavista address to my brother.  He tested it on a number
    of things, including the name of an obscure, tiny hamlet in the
    Midwest where my grandparents used to live.  Lycos had given him five
    references to the place;  Altavista came up with 25.  I thought no one
    knew about it but he and I!
    
    Dataquest has recommended that Digital present Altavista to the
    industry as a gift, rather than trying to market or license it as a
    non-core business activity.  DQ says Digital would gain more that way 
    through reputation than it could in money.
    
    M

    AltaVista is also linked into by Yahoo as one of the "other" search
    engines.
    
    							Michael
    

    >Dataquest has recommended that Digital present Altavista to the
    >industry as a gift, rather than trying to market or license it as a
    >non-core business activity.  DQ says Digital would gain more that way 
    >through reputation than it could in money.

    I kind of agree with this.  As a free service, this page is going to be
    hit very often.  We should come up with little Digital ad's to place on 
    the page instead of the mountain and sky.  If Digital wants to make some 
    money, we could sell ads on it like many others are now doing.

    -Bruce

    How about a running total like MCI uses on their billboards?  Something
    like "Cyberspace is saving $XXXXXXX by you using the speed of Alpha
    and the free service of Alta Vista" where $XXXXXXX is updated with
    every hit and we use some $ figure for CPU time and access.
    
    No matter how many times I see the MCI board it catches my attention. 
    But I've also been known to think so far out of the nine dots to be
    invisible.

    Re: .15
    
    I think you're confusing + with AND.  + means the term following the +
    is required to appear in the page.  That seems pretty clear from the
    examples in the Help text...
    

    I've tried to get into this address twice, with no success.
    
    In Netscape I'm going to HTTP://WWW.ALTAVISTA.DIGITAL.COM/ AND/OR
    HTTP://ALTAVISTA.DIGITAL.COM/
    
    Neither has succeeded any time I've tried.  Do I have the wrong
    address?  Wrong time of day?  Bad luck?  

    Aside from web addresses, which (mercifully!) are case-insensitive, the
    rest of URLs are case-sensitive.  
    
    Hence HTTP://ALTAVISTA.DIGITAL.COM/ will not work because HTTP:// does
    not specify a hypertest transfer protocol request, but
    http://ALTAVISTA.DIGITAL.COM/ will work.  Best use all lower-case, by
    convention, and use uppercase only when you see it actually in print.
    
    Enjoy,
    
    Dan
    
    

>    Hence HTTP://ALTAVISTA.DIGITAL.COM/ will not work because HTTP:// does
>    not specify a hypertest transfer protocol request, but

And if that doesn't fix the problem, check to make sure that your browser
has proxies set appropriately.  By default you can only reach systems
inside the Digital firewall; you need to set the http proxy to a web
gateway in your area in order to get out.  altavista.digital.com is
outside the gateway now.

-- Erik
    
    

    Out of the blue I received Email from someone I don't know, asking me
    if I knew where to buy a copy of the poster "Dogs playing poker".
    I've no idea why *I* was asked, probably a reference from a friend.
    
    I connected to altavista
    
    -- in my mind, that's how I think of it already: "altavista". Not
    "digital altavista", not "digital search engine", just "altavista".
    That's probably a marketing mistake and we should change the name
    of the server to something obviously �digital�. But that's separate
    from the problem at hand --
    
    and entered "Dogs playing poker". Half a minute later there were maybe
    two dozen hits. I scanned the first page and had to skip 4 or 5 entries�
    until I found something that was obviously a store and shipped off
    the info back to the requestor, with a suggestion that he should use
    the "World's Best Search Engine" and the URL thereof.
    
      John
    _______________________
    �You altavista guys are slipping. When I entered my brother-in-law's 
    name, "Mike Davis", the right Mike Davis home page came up #1 of MANY.   
    The "Read Client's Mind" service must still need some work. :-)

Re .26

My wife will be thrilled to know I can get _another_ "Dogs playing poker" tie.

Serious Time-Wasting with the Web has gone to a new level.

    I saw a report the other morning on WHDH (Channel 7 in Boston) by
    their technology reporter. It was all about search engines and web 
    crawlers. I only caught the last part so I don't know if he mentioned
    Altavista but he did give his Email address so I sent mail to him
    yesterday giving him the URL for Altavista and asking him to take a
    look. 
    
    						Thom...

    What is the technology behind AltaVista?
    
    Very Large Memory?
    Very Large Database?
    
    Best Regards,
    John

    Anybody know what is the current notes file for Internet issues?  
    The one I have listed SOFBAS::INTERNET_TOOLS seems to no longer be on line.
    
    Also, are any of the Internet products people monitoring this
    conference?  Hello...
    
    cs

I think it's located at LJSRV2::INTERNET_TOOLS now.

	Regard,

The Notes conference TURRIS::EASYNET_CONFERENCES, especially note 2, contains
up-to-date information about the whereabouts of Notes conferences, including the
list of all conferences, EASYNOTES.LIS.

Paul

Thom,
Thanks for the E-Mail. We only had time to mention a couple of search 
engines by name, so the new Digital site was not  included in the narrative. 
However, I am mentioning it in the E-Mail queries I receive... and I'll 
check it out for my own use.

Mike Lawrence
7 News

    I decided to make a search from an international viewpoint (living
    close to the arctic makes one suspicious ;-) ).
    
    First search the third(?) largest city in Finland - Tampere
    10000 referencies in ~5 sec. Most of it propably due to transfer.
    
    Second search 'kalakukko' - a Finnish ryebread+fish pie (look for 
    further info from Alta Vista referencies ;-) ).
    33 referencies - fast.
    
    Third search 'Eura', which is a small commun in western Finland.
    Among non related referencies (200) also several valid ones.
    
    Forth search 'Honkilahti' - a very small commun in Finland, which
    does not exist any more as an independent entity (It has been merged
    to Eura). 3 referencies from fairly small www-servers in Finland.
    
    Then character tests: '�yl�tti' is the Finnish name of the 'bread' 
    delivered in churches during the Holy Communion. 12 referencies.
    
    'M�mmi' - a Finnish Easter food. 33 referencies.
    
    To me the above demonstrated
    
    1. Internet service building is amazingly active in Finland, so
    somebody must make quite a lot of business here around Internet.
    
    2. Alta Vista is FAST and has also a really good international
    coverage. If pointers to a name of a disappeared commun in texts in small
    internet services in Finland is covered, it must pretty well cover most
    of active services in the world.
    
    --Ritva 
                                                                       

    re .12
    
    Our marketing should actually produce an html page per server product
    for this purpose. Several www sites give information about the used HW.
    Giving a ready-made page in the distribution CD/diskette (or a pointer
    to our own respective web page) wouldn't certainly harm and would be 
    practically free an would save time from local sales office, when asked 
    to deliver this type of info.
    
    --ritva

Re .34:

>    1. Internet service building is amazingly active in Finland, so
>    somebody must make quite a lot of business here around Internet.

The last I heard, Finland had the highest number of homes online, per capita.
				/AHM

    Alta Vista is powered by an AlphaStation 250 4/266 (web server;
    196MB/4GB), an AlphaStation 250 4/266 (news indexing and news queries;
    196MB/13GB), an AlphaStation 400 4/233 (news spooler; 160MB/24GB), a
    DEC 3000 Model 900 (spider; 1GB/30GB), and an AlphaServer 8400 5/300
    quad-processor (web indexing and web queries based on input from the
    spider; 4GB/210GB).  Folks associated with the project have indicated
    they will be posting the hardware configuration on the site.

I got back a response from the AltaVista folks saying that an "About" page
was in the works.

I was amused/pleased to see that for the graphic accompanying a Boston Globe
article on CompuServe's removal of some sexually-related newsgroups that they
used an AltaVista search on 'newsgroups and censorship'. 

				Steve

	Well, there is now some words that say "Powered by Digital Alpha"
	on the AltaVista home page.

							mike

From:	US4RMC::"[email protected]" "Carina Rotsztain" 30-DEC-1995 13:10:59.94
To:	diode::crowell
Subj:	Specs

Thank you for your comments.  As we are starting up the Beta phase of the 
Alta Vista project, we are trying to respond individually to some of the 
messages we have received. 
 
We are putting the following hardware information on the site. 
 
Alta Vista is a very large project, requiring the cooperation of at least 5 
servers, configured for searching huge indices and handling a huge 
Internet traffic load.  The initial hardware configuration for Alta Vista is as 
follows: 
 
Alta Vista  -- AlphaStation 250 4/266 
             4 GB disk 
            196 MB memory 
            Primary web server for gotcha.com 
            Queries directed to WebIndexer or NewsIndexer 
 
NewsServer  -- AlphaStation 400 4/233 
            24 GB of RAID disks 
            160 MB memory 
            News spool from which news index is generated 
            Serves articles (via http) to those without news server 
 
NewsIndexer -- AlphaStation 250 4/266 
            13 GB disk 
            196 MB memory 
            Builds news index using articles from NewsServer 
            Answers news index queries from Alta Vista 
 
Spider -- DEC 3000 Model  900 (replacement for Model 500) 
            30 GB of RAID disk 
            1GB memory 
            Collects pages from the web for WebIndexer 
 
WebIndexer --  Alpha Server 8400 5/300 
            210 GB RAID disk (expandable) 
            4 GB memory (expandable) 
            4 processors (expandable) 
            Builds the web index using pages sent by Spider. 
            Answers web index queries from Alta Vista 
 
Thank you, 
Alta Vista Technical Support 


% ====== Internet headers and postmarks (see DECWRL::GATEWAY.DOC) ======
% Received: from thera.pa.dec.com by us4rmc.pko.dec.com (5.65/rmc-22feb94) id AA20646; Sat, 30 Dec 95 13:07:17 -050
% Received: by thera.pa.dec.com; (5.65/1.1.8.2/13Jul94-0558PM) id AA21418; Sat, 30 Dec 1995 10:05:33 -080
% Date: Sat, 30 Dec 1995 10:05:33 -0800 (PST)
% From: Carina Rotsztain <[email protected]>
% To: diode::crowell
% Subject: Specs
% Message-Id: <[email protected]>
% Mime-Version: 1.0
% Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

    Finally got connected...  Amazing!  Fast, beautiful, and I had a bit of
    pride in seeing our Logo on something worthwhile that actually WORKS!
    
    BTW:  Altavista was spoken of on Public Radio here in MPO yesterday
    during a wrapup of the biggest events of the year 1995.  They praised
    the site as blistering fast and thorough.  Unfortunately they never
    mentioned WHO had the boxes on which it ran!
    
    Oh, well. 

    Can anyone answer the question on the software used?  Is it a VLM
    RDBMS or a text database?  Many thanks in advance.  I have already
    had customer interest in the software for a variety of implementations.
    
    Regards,
    
    Dermot

What a great system!

The thing I'm very curious about is how it would scale...

What happens if the number of websites doubles?
What happens if the number of clients doubles?

How much and how can the system be expanded from its current
configuration?

One way it scales is by adding more processors, which they did late
yesterday.

/john

    altavista got two plugs in the latest Newsweek; a short article on
    altavista itself, and it was listed as Leslie Neilsen's "favotie search
    engine".
    
    I used it yesterday for Work-work (though through my private internet
    provider); I got me to suppliers (and datasheets) for PCMCIA card-side
    interface chips pretty quickly (+- transport delay)...
    
    ...tom

    re -1 Covert
    Glad to see that they were able to add the processors as I could notget
    access.  Ther are many  pointers to this now on the internet and
    Ultranet has it on their search menu.  I am glad to see that they have
    the wil and funding to meet the demand.  Again it is great but with the
    publicity by NPR , Boston Glob etc along with the users , I hope they
    have some more processors ready to throw at the demand.

    What volumes are we seeing access this server?
    
    Les.
    

    Is the AltaVista Search Server at all related to the Sequoia 2000 work
    recently discussed in the latest Digital Technical Journal?
    
    Randy
    

re Note 4337.42 by SIOG::OSULLIVAN_D:

>     Can anyone answer the question on the software used?  Is it a VLM
>     RDBMS or a text database?  Many thanks in advance.  I have already
>     had customer interest in the software for a variety of implementations.
  
        I too have noticed that the software gets little mention --
        yet it is as responsible as the hardware for the speed and
        capacity.

        The search engine is a version of Mike Burrows' NI2, which is
        a library written in C that maintains inverted indices of
        words.  It takes advantage of VLM in Alta Vista.

        NI2 is also the text search engine in the Workgroup Web Forum
        product.

        Another key piece of software is Louis Monier's Scooter web
        crawler that actually gets the information from the web.

        Bob

    Can customer purchase Alta Vista software?  If so, please say how and
    whom to contact.
    
    -Wilson Chu

    
    Newsweek, January 8, 1996, CYBERSCOPE column (page 15):
    
    ------------------
    
    HOT LIST
    
    Star Turn
    
    Everyone's getting wired, including some people you might not expect to
    be. In the debut of a new feature, CYBERSCOPE asked suave funnyman
    Leslie Neilsen to list some of his favorite Web sites:
    
    o  Hollywood Online -- http://www.hollywood.com/
    
    o  The Peeping Tom site -- www.ts.umu.se/~spaceman/camera.html
    
    o  Search site -- altavista.digital.com
    
    ------------------
    
    ONLINE
    
    Fast Find
    
    They say the World Wide Web is only as good as its index. Looks like it
    just got better. Last month Digital Equipment Corp. introduced Alta
    Vista, a search engine with access to a full index of more than 16
    million Web pages and 13,000 Usenet newsgroups. And since it stores that
    index on a computer that uses four speed-demon DEC Alpha processors,
    searches are wicked fast. Best part? Like most search engines, Alta
    Vista is free (http://altavista.digital.com).
    

    
    
    It would be nice if the www.digital.com home page even *mentioned*
    AltaVista.  Why should someone have to poke around to find it?
    
    Kevin
             
    

    re .36
    
    I do not hope to make a rathole out of this but:
    
    >The last I heard, Finland had the highest number of homes online, per
    capita.
    
    Yes, that's true. This nation really likes new technologies. We also
    have one of the largest populations of mobile phones, high quality,
    tightly competed telecom services overall, ATM commercially available
    etc.
    
    What has amazed me a little, is that Digital corporate has not
    tried to benefit from this real life laboratory of future. E.g. in
    Internet business we are all alone. There is no representative of
    Internet business group in Finland. All (small) investments to Internet
    business are coming from the local SBU and SI.
    
    --Ritva

With you in Finland, Ritva, and with such successes to demonstrate, why
would you need IBG?

___Pete

    It would be helpful if someone responsible for Alta Vista would publish
    the hours when it is available - it is frustrating to just get a
    "connection refused" message as has been the case for the last hour or
    three.  Probably no-one expects 24 hour availability, but with all the
    hype many Europeans could fail to share the Alta Vista experience if
    nightly downtime is routine.
    
    Richard (@9:18 GMT, 4:18 EST)
    

	Talking of Finland's exports, let's not forget Linux.  Hey,
	maybe that's why they're so well up on the Internet too!

	Dave

    re: .49
    
    Thank you Bob.  It's a superb product with multiple business
    opportunities.
    
    -Dermot
    

    re: .54
    
    I got in at 6:00am est with great response.  Yesterday, during the snow
    here in the eastern US, access was slower, because, probably, every
    webbie east of the Mississippi was logged on.  
    
    I don't think they take the server offline, it's just an access
    problem.
    
    ....maybe?
    
    gc

    Reply to Note 2994.0 (Is Alta Vista up for sale?)
    in LJSRV2::INTERNET_TOOLS states ....
    
    
    "Have them contact Allan Jennings @LJO...or the dtn is 226-2190."

Re: .51

What - you mean having the AltaVista logo and "AltaVista" in big letters, 
plus "Flash - Check out the web's most comprehensive index" on the opening
page isn't enough?

				Steve

    Steve,
    
    I think that's on the Digital PC Home page, not the Digital Home page.
    
    I just checked www.digital.com (it's on my other window right now), and
    I see no mention of Alta Vista.
    
    Theo

    
    
  Re. -1
    
    Steve, you might want to take another look at www.digital.com, and 
    Flash for that matter.  No mention of AltaVista.
    
    Kevin
      

    It was there, though, for a couple of weeks. The current home page
    was just updated two days ago.

Re: .61, .62

Seems like there's now a new Flash, on TPC results. Alta Vista is old news.

Hmm - must be a cache somewhere that keeps giving me the old page.  I'll try
a reload....  yeah, now it's been updated. 

				Steve

    
    What I hate most about Netscape is the default setting for the cache. 
    The time window is so big, you always get old pages.  But they come up
    fast!  ;^)
    
    - Sean

Netscape?  I don't use no steenkin Netscape.  (Really, Netscape is ok, but
doesn't run on my platform of choice.  I use Spyglass Enhanced Mosaic.)
Anyway, I think it's the server cache which did me in, not the browser.

					Steve

You could use the 'search' engine of the Digital Web Server but if you
search for Altavista (one word) you get nothing and if you search for
Alta Vista (two words) you get the following:

Alpha AXP ISV Application Update
   Miscellaneous -- Abstract , Text 
   March 1994, 377 Pages 

VxWorks Realtime Tools for DEC OSF/1 Alpha, V3.1A 
   Software Product Description (51.39.04) -- Text 
   January 1995, 15 Pages 

VxWorks Realtime Tools for Alpha, V 3.2
   Software Product Description (51.39.05) -- Text 
   January 1995, 15 Pages 

Isn't is amazing the forthought that some groups have referencing things
that didn't exist for almost a year. :-) 

Actually finding anything on the Digital server is a nightmare. The indexes
don't work, nothing is intuitively obvious. Isn't it a shame that we can't
even advertise our own products on our own server. 

I searched for "AltaVista" and came up with 31 hits, few of which had anything
to do with altavista.digital.com.

				Steve

    
    I did a search of a string from the WWW.DIGITAL.COM homepage
    and got "A word from bob palmer".. It's dated Nov 95....  We should
    have it search our site everytime it changes?  
    
    I think it's funny it finds no mention of itself on the WEB...
    Just lots of houses for sale on Alta Vista Street in LA!!
    
    Jon
    

BTW, Steve, do you know how we're supposed to report bugs with Spyglass
Enhanced Mosaic?  I've found lots of them in the past two weeks.

/john

    Report the bugs to the DECwindows folks.
    
    			Steve

    re .53 ;-)
    
    But you must know it Pete. I'm in SI and I'm paid to earn consulting 
    money, not to sell Internet servers. I have some sort of a local
    agreement to support Firewall sales though. We have had some success
    with Firewalls ;^).
    
    --Ritva

Yeah, Thom, I've used it a few times. Very fast, but it seems to come up 
with more cites "off subject" than Lycos or even Yahoo, and it's harder to 
"customize" the search.

Mike Lawrence
7 News

    
    Re: .64 by  GVA02::DAVIS 
    
    >Seems like there's now a new Flash, on TPC results. Alta Vista is old news.
    
    After you click on the latest Flash, at the bottom of the target page
    you will find a "flash back" hotspot. That takes you to the previous
    Flash announcement. Not sure how long they keep these around, but I
    went back as far as the Internet and connectivity announcement (don't
    know the date but the file is named flash-39.html -- current flash is
    flash-42.html).
    
    JP

>	Talking of Finland's exports, let's not forget Linux.  Hey,
>	maybe that's why they're so well up on the Internet too!

	Can't resist advertising another similar Free UNIX project from
	same country - Lites, which is even more advanced techology than
	Linux, based on Mack MK (Real Micro kernel). We have received
	commitment of porting Lites to Alpha as well. 

Re: Pete's comment us and IBG

	Well, we could sell a whole lot more of these InternetWhatEverServers
	having some more support and resources from corporation... In fact
	our SBU/ABU totally lacks the focus to this business now. :-(

Re: All comments referring to VTX IR in all Notes around the world:

	When we're going to change the VTX IR to more recent technology?
	VTX IR is pain to use, slow and it doesn't support feasible 
	downline loading mechanisms. People not using All-in-1 or 
	VAXmail are out of luck if they wish to receive DOC or PPT 
	files....

	IMHO: we should make some major effort to finalize Web based
	IR (WIR instead of VTX IR) as VTX IR restricts access and is
	far too slow to be considered as major interface to important
	information, not to mention the UI - or the lack of it.

	Best regards,

		-jari

    the other night I logged onto AltaVista from home
    to show someone our great Search Engine....from home
    I have to use LYNX to connect to the net.  And I could
    not get AltaVista to work at all.

    I could not find any help to 'help' me.

    Are there secrets that I am missing?  From Lynx, I could
    not figure out AT ALL how to type a search string.
    any help out there?
    bob

re: .77

>    Are there secrets that I am missing?  From Lynx, I could
>    not figure out AT ALL how to type a search string.
>    any help out there?

Alta Vista does look a bit confusing from Lynx (and I have to fight
the urge to use right arrow instead of down arrow to move to a field
immediately to the current one's right :-).

One of the first few lines of the display has a long text field
with a hot spot called "Submit" immediately to its right.  Move to 
the text field with the up/down arrows and type in your search
criteria.  Than press the down arrow to move to the "Submit" hot
spot.  Press right arrow to "push" the Submit button.

-Hal

From:	US1RMC::"[email protected]" "MAIL-11 Daemon"
To:	Multiple recipients of list TOURBUS <[email protected]>
Subj:	TOURBUS - Jan 09 1996 - Alta Vista, Baby!

    /~~~~~~~~~|~~~~~~~~~~~~/~~~~~~~~|~~~~~~~~~~|~~~~~~~~~~/~~~|~\
   |     "Why | Surf When / You Can | Ride The | Bus?"   /    |  \
   |__________|__________/__________|__________|________/     |   \
  /                                                    /______|----\
 /    Send INFO TOURBUS to [email protected]   ///////|    |
 |   Or visit http://csbh.mhv.net/~bobrankin/tourbus   |//////|    |
 |                                                     |//////|    |
 ~~~/~~~\~/~~~\~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~/~~~\~~~~
    \___/ \___/  T h e   I n t e r n e t   T o u r B u s  \___/


TODAY'S TOURBUS STOP: ALTA VISTA
TOURBUS ADDRESS ----> http://www.altavista.digital.com

Move over, Lycos!  There's a new kid on the block and he's bigger, better
and faster than you.

Oh, by the way... this is Bob.  Patrick and I switched days *again* due to
the LISTSERV problem last week.  Just for the record, we tried to send out
a Tuesday post last week, but LISTSERV was frozen solid and we had to use
the 6000-amp TOURBUS battery to jump start it.  Everything appears to be
working now, but there's a massive snowstorm assaulting the eastern US, so
I hope this Bus makes it through...

Patrick will be with you every Thursday now, but he did want me to make one
very important announcement:

--> Due to the overwhelming demand (six people - all Yankees no doubt),
--> Patrick has created a SOUTHERN WORD OF THE DAY archive on the Web!
--> Check it out at http://ua1vm.ua.edu/~crispen/word.html


Webis Caninus
-------------

And just one more little thing - remember that crack Patrick made about
my face in the last issue?  Little does he know, I am actually a Shetland
Sheepdog.  You can see my face and decide for yourself whether or not it
poses a risk to society.  (Go to http://csbh.mhv.net/~bobrankin and click
on the sketch to see the "real" me.)


Alta Vista, Finally
-------------------

Alta Vista is a tres cool Internet search tool developed by Digital.  This
newcomer to the field boasts a database of over 16,000,000 web pages and
some 13,000 Usenet newsgroups.  Just feed it a search word or two and
Alta Vista hits you with the results before you can lift your finger
from the mouse button.

According to Digital, "ALTA VISTA is the result of a research project
started in the summer of 1995 at Digital's Research Laboratories in Palo
Alto, California.  By combining a fast Web crawler with scalable indexing
software, the team was able to build a large index of over 16,000,000 pages.

Since announcing the site about three weeks ago, they are handling over two
million requests per day using some high-powered hardware and software
developed by researchers at Digital.


One-Stop Shopping
-----------------

The really nice thing about Alta Vista is that it can query both the Web
and Usenet newsgroups.  And my testing shows that it finds 5 TO 10 TIMES
the number of hits that Lycos, InfoSeek or WebCrawler can muster.

And the Lycos home page STILL says they are "10X larger" than any other
web searcher almost a month after Alta Vista's arrival - Oops.  I got a
kick out of the fact that Webcrawler and InfoSeek didn't even know about
Alta Vista when I ran queries there!

Some other notable features of Alta Vista are:

  * Boolean searching with AND, OR, NOT and NEAR operators
  * Case-sensitive and quoted-string searching
  * Ability to search on portions of a URL

And though this is not advertised, it appears that Alta Vista will do a
Usenet search if your Web search comes up empty.  That's really slick.


Attach Drool Bibs Securely, Please
----------------------------------

In case you're interested in the technical details, the Alta Vista system
consists of 5 networked computers.  (Rumors that a squirrel-powered
generator supplies power to the site could not be substantiated.)

 * The AlphaStation 250 4/266, (with 4 GB disk and 196 MB memory) handles
   all the HTTP traffic to the site, running a multi-threaded Web server.

 * The AlphaServer 8400 5/300, (with 210 GB RAID disk, 4 GB memory, 8
   processors), the largest machine built by Digital, builds the index
   using pages sent by Scooter.  It currently serves a Web index of 30 GB,
   but most requests take under a second.

 * Scooter is a DEC 3000 Model 900 (30 GB of RAID disk, 1GB memory).  The
   "super-spider" runs from this machine, fetching pages from the Web and
   sending them to the Web Indexer.

 * Two additional computers, sporting 37 GB of disk and 350 MB of memory
   handle the Usenet spool and indexing for the system.

If you don't know a gigabyte from a garden burger, let me translate the
preceding information for you from the original Geek:

"YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEOOOOOOOOoooooowwww!  This is one hot little number."
It makes the 486 on your desk look like the "+" key on one of those cheap
solar-powered calculators.  Roughly speaking, this getup has about 400
times the capacity of the lump of plastic and silicon that graces my desk.
But hey, I've got got a nice blue "INTERNAUT" bumper sticker on mine!


Squealing Off The Lot
---------------------

Let's take this baby for a test drive and show off what it can do.  I ran
a simple query on "TOURBUS" at four different search sites and found the
number of hits varied widely:

  --> Alta Vista=800+, Lycos=186, Infoseek=70, WebCrawler=24

Not bad, but can this thing find any hits on "snarch" (the funniest word
in the English language)?  Sure enough, there are two:

  - Evelyn Snarch, BA'33, McGill University
  - Law Firm "Snarch & Allen", Vancouver BC

The other guys were positively Snarch-less.  OK, here's one more that
illustrates several of the fancy features in one shot...  Let's say
we want to find all the web pages that contain "Boardwatch Magazine"
but are NOT resident on the Boardwatch web site.  Kind of a "who's
talking" scan.

  Try: "Boardwatch Magazine" AND NOT www.boardwatch.com

Tick, tick, tick... three seconds later we have another 800 hits.
And just in case you're wondering how many web pages contain the word
"the" - Alta Vista authoritatively answers: "about 10,000,000".


Sky So Blue
-----------

This kind of technology has the potential to revolutionize the way we
deal with information.  We're on the brink of being able to make the
sum total of written human knowledge available and searchable by ordinary
schmucks.  (Gee, I hope that's not a cuss word anywhere.)

The mere fact that you are reading this means you have a tremendous
advantage over your friends and colleagues who are not "wired".  Access
to scientific data, government records, and historical documents;
recipes, art, news, and the collective wit and wisdom of the online
community empowers you in a way you can probably not begin to imagine.

Make it a personal goal to start realizing that potential this year!


 +-------------> Earn Transferrable College Credit Online <---------------+
 |  Seven University of Wisconsin-Stout courses begin 2/5/96 on America   |
 |  Online. Register now for "Critical Thinking and Issues Analysis". To  |
 |  visit UW-Stout's virtual campus on AOL use keyword "EUN".             |
 +-------- Send mail to [email protected] or call 715-232-2693 ----------+


 ======================================================================
  SUBSCRIBE  : Send SUBSCRIBE TOURBUS Firstname Lastname
               to [email protected]
  unSUBSCRIBE: Send SIGNOFF TOURBUS to [email protected]
  Web Site   : http://csbh.mhv.net/~bobrankin/tourbus
               (stop in for back issues and the logo contest)
  Advertising: E-mail [email protected] w/ Subject: SEND TBRATES
======================================================================

     TOURBUS - (c) Copyright 1996, Patrick Crispen and Bob Rankin
 All rights reserved.  Redistribution is allowed only with permission.
     Send this copy to 3 friends and tell them to get on the Bus!

    
    	As the guy who taught Patrick to play ice hockey, I'm not at all
    impressed.
    
    	But then I use AV all the time. 
    
    	You got to remember the source, U of WI- Stout has only three
    days a year it *doesn't* snow, and the two of 'em are DEC bigots
    anyway. :-)
    
    
    	Now if we can get WIRED to write said article...
    
    
    			the Greyhawk

    G'day,
     I see that the Consortium of Aquaria, Universities and Zoos - 
    
    "The Consortium for Aquariums, Universities and Zoos (C.A.U.Z.) is a
    large international network of scientists and educators in
    universities, zoos, aquariums, conservation organizations, and
    governmental agencies who are dedicated to worldwide conservation." 
    
    
    has AltaVista as one of its search engines.. update 10-Jan!
    
    
    derek
    
    

When it's on the internet and it's free...

Being the best is everything, being second best is nothing...  search engine
or web browser, it doesn't matter.  

So ... we should spin off Alta Vista as a public company and make billions on
the IPO :-)

- jeff

The Boston Globe has a news wire story this morning saying that Digital is 
going to try to commercialize Alta Vista, though just how this would be done
is unknown - it may be that advertising will be accepted, or the technology
will be licensed, etc.

				Steve

    
    Sounds like an opening for another VP!
    
    jc

    makes sense if we wish the service to continue.  The R&D dollars have
    been well spent, but the care and feeding of the beast will far exceed
    the initial startup.
    
    Mark

    I believe there's a commitment to keep AltaVista free, since it's
    a great advertising benefit for Alphas and for Dec as an internet
    presence.  I wouldn't be surprised to
    see ad space sold on the site, and I think they've mentioned
    selling the technology for companies' internal use.
    

also in the Globe's Business section, their PluggedIn
list of Surf Sites for the Internet Explorer (tech 
weenies only) includes altavista.

> I wouldn't be surprised to see ad space sold on the site...
    
    Gee, they could practice right now.  How about an ad space that says
    
    	'Digital Alpha servers -- the power behind Alta Vista..."
    
    with appropriate graphics?
    
    -Mark

    
    
    A friend of mine, a salesman for a medical equipment company, claimed
    that he read about Alta Vista in Newsweek. He is very impressed with
    it, especially the speed, (he's a big net surfer) and was chastising 
    me for not telling him about this earlier !
    
    
    Bob

    Anyone see the article in today's Boston Herald business section on
    Digital Internet capbilities through Alta Vista??? Great press and 
    positive comments! Must reading to perk up your day!
    
    Phil

    Could someone post the article here for those of us who can't get the
    Boston Herald.
    

(Previous two replies moved here from separate topic)

    
    What is neat about the Web Crawler is that it instantly builds our
    desktop presence so broadly, exposing people to the great network
    engineering this company does in a context that an average person can
    reach out and experience.  It would undoubtedly take us years to sell
    enough desktop devices at retail to have this similar exposure and new
    customer use.  
    
    And, it enhances our efforts to rebuild our Connectivity/Networking
    company image while featuring what the unleashed power OF Alpha servers and
    Unix is all about.  It's great stuff.  Keep it coupled with the DIGITAL
    logo and let's go.
    
    As for selling advertising on this server, right now this is about the
    cheapest advertising we could do to help rebuild our image for DIGITAL
    - if we sell ads, why help our competitors get more attention, since
    they might very well buy ad space and we would not be able to say no.
    But this will be more fully explored, I am sure. IF we can work through
    some issues, I am more inclined to support having this as a value added
    banner for other company's pages, which bring back more potential 
    customers to seeing what DIGITAL is all about - not some other firm.
    
    Bottom line - the technology display for people unfamiliar wih digital
    is awesome, and we should all feel good about the positive mentions we
    are getting.  Nice to be HOT again, yes? 
    
    Bill Troy

    re: Note 4337.93 by AKOCOA::TROY 

>  -< "Great for the image" >-

    
>    As for selling advertising on this server, right now this is about the
>    cheapest advertising we could do to help rebuild our image for DIGITAL
> 
>    
>    Bottom line - the technology display for people unfamiliar wih digital
>    is awesome, and we should all feel good about the positive mentions we
>    are getting.  Nice to be HOT again, yes? 


    When I pull up Alta Vista, I see a small Digital logo and a copyright.
    What percent of people that use this service are going to notice this 
    logo and understand who is bringing Alta Vista to them.  Alta Vista
    could become more recognizable than Digital.

    I think we need  to make "Digital" more prominent on the page. Maybe we
    should add  "Whatever it takes" or the current phrase.

    -Bruce

    Is there an equivalent to altavista for all of our VTX and Notes Files.
    
    It would be really nice to quickly access our "massive" knowledge
    base that is contained in all of our notes files and vtx pages.

    COMET and STARS do very good job on the Notesfiles.  VTX IR is supposed
    to do similar things for VTX, although I never had much luck with it
    myself.
    
    - Vikas

    
    	I'd sell HP, IBM, SUN, COMPAQ ads on the altavista page any day of
    the week.
    
    	Let's see $.10 an impression, 2-million impressions a day, and
    thank you very much. Nice revenue, mostly margin, nice pop to the
    old bottom line.
    
    	This is *still* a business, isn't it?....
    
    
    		the Greyhawk

re Note 4337.96 by HELIX::SONTAKKE:

>     COMET and STARS do very good job on the Notesfiles.  VTX IR is supposed
>     to do similar things for VTX, although I never had much luck with it
>     myself.
  
        VTX IR only searches the IR database itself (a very
        significant collection), not the entire collection of VTX
        infobases.

        Bob

	You could be doing this on a great PC from Digital!  Check
	out our <hotlink> !

___Pete

> Alta Vista could become more recognizable than Digital.

  Like "VAX" was? Like "DEC" may be?

                                   Atlant

    
    
    re: .97 - the prcing algorithms for Web Pages are much less generous
    than that, and in fact are increasingly not based on pure 'hits' or
    exposures.
    
    You miss the long term for a relative few bucks - naaah.

    
    	So, Bill, who says we have to price at the market?
    
    	We never have before....
    
    
    		the Greyhawk

    PC WORLD, Jan. 1996 issue's cover story is on WWW search engines
    ('from the editor' is a page titled "A Guide to the Best Internet Search
    Tools").  It lists an index to search engines, which engines had the 
    most hits, which one had the most relevant hits, etc.
    
    Of the 60 search tools out there, tested were 11 of the most popular,
    up-to-date.
    
    Favorites:
    Lycos (http://lycos.cs.cmu.edu/) - (at press time) indexes more than  
    1.5mil Web pages.          
    Infoseek (http://www.infoseek.com/) - indexes fewer Web pages, but
    includes Usenet groups.
    Yahoo (http://www.yahoo.com/) - favorite directory.
    
    One test was searching on 'recipe wheat beer'.  Lycos returned 437
    hits.  Infoseek, around 200.
    
    Too bad they didn't wait until the March or April issue.  Would have 
    been nice press...

>    One test was searching on 'recipe wheat beer'.  Lycos returned 437
>    hits.  Infoseek, around 200.
    
I too have been observing people rating search engines on how many hits they
find.  Alas, I personally think the LESS hits you find the BETTER the search
engine, assuming of course that the hits returned are what you really wanted in
the first place.  After all, what good is getting 10K hits when only several
dozen (or even 1) contain the information you're really looking for. 

I think part of the reason all this hooplah over search tools has been so big is
that people haven't had access to this kind of capability before.  I've been
using an MCS internal tool called STARS for years to index notes files, making
it extrememly easy to find obscure information.  I, along with other people,
have been proposing for years for people in other parts of the company to try
this technology in their daily jobs with minimal interest.  

Now that web searching is finally in vogue, I suspect people will begin to
start using tools like AltaVista to search notes files. The only problem here
is when you want a specific note and get 1000 hits, you're screwed!  Clearly,
there needs to be a whole new class of user interface and methodology for doing
this.  Searching on words is fine when browsing, but when looking for something
specific, it just doesn't scale.

-mark

I updated my list of interesting links today

	(External): http://www.ultra.net/~covert/
	(Internal): http://bulova.zko.dec.com/people/john_covert.html

And added AltaVista.  Previously I had listed Yahoo as "_the_ information
source of information sources".

Now I list:

      AltaVista -- The _most_complete_ WWWeb Search Engine 
      Yahoo Search -- The _best_organized_ WWWeb Index 

Think about the difference.  If you're looking for information about a
subject, AltaVista is the best.  But if you're trying to find the XYZ home
page, you should probably try Yahoo first.  If that fails, click on Yahoo's
AltaVista button, and you're not just taken to AltaVista to reenter
your search -- your search is sent to AltaVista and you get the response.

/john

Re .104:

More hits implies that it's more likely that the search did find what you're
looking for.

Most search engines allow the user to refine an existing search.  Of course,
learning to use it is an acquired skill.  However, I'd rather be able to quickly
discard irrelevant hits in a big database than come up empty in a small
database.  If you were paying someone to do research for you, you'd want results
not excuses, too.
				/AHM

re: "Most search engines allow the user to refine an existing search."

Does AltaVista support this?

RE: .107

	There's an Advanced Query button and help for refining searches.

							mike

    Just a quick response to the person who asked about being able to
    search notes conferences/VTX stuff.
    
    A group of the internal notes conferences have been made into VTX
    infobases and are thoroughly searchable using VTX's search engine.
    You can access this in several ways:
    
    1.  $ VTX/SERVER=WELKIN/OBJ=101
    	Choice 99 takes you to the indexed notes conferences
    
    
    2.  $VTX/SERVER=IMBUSY/OBJ=134
    	This takes you directly to the VTX server in Galway, Ireland that
    	contains the indexed notes conferences
    
    Once you're there, this is what you'll see:
    
     Welcome to the VTX V6.2 demo server.
    
            Each choice leads to a page from which only one index is 
            visible. From this page all of the indexes are visible.
    
              1  PC + IBMPC-94             6   MS VISUAL C++
                         
              2  MS-Windows                7   TeamLinks and Office 
    
              3  Windows NT                8   PATHWORKS + V5
    
              4  MS Languages              9   MAC 
    
              5  MS VISUAL BASIC           10  PC DECstation 
    
              11  VTX                      12  JOBS
    
              13  DECnis                   14  Internet Tools       
    
        N E W. V6.2 of VTX is now available (9-May-95) on OpenVMS VAX
    	and Alpha.
            See HNGOVR::GALPUB$:[VTX$PUBLIC.V62...] for the kits.
    
    
    So - If someone wanted to donate an alpha and lots of disk space and
    memory, we could index all of the notes conferences and make them 
    searchable through VTX.  Nightly updates are done on all the above
    listed conferences.  Sure makes finding information much easier.
    
    Now - searching all the VTX infobases is another story.  It could be
    done, but would be a major undertaking since many of the VTX infobases
    in the company are not currently using the text retrieval capability of
    VTX, may still be running old versions of VTX that pre-date text
    retrieval, and may not have anyone left who actually maintains them.
    
    Gita

RE: .109

	Please don't take offense, but most people in this notesfile
	would rather have the search engine be Web-based, not VTX.
	I only use VTX when I absolutely have too. (like VTX PRICE)

							mike


	FWIW, yes, I know there is a VTX for Windows and a VTX-Web gateway
	of sorts, but what is more usefull to me is a Web-centric view,
	not VTX.

Why does the 11-Jan LIVEWIRE article on Alta Vista go to such pains to
_not_ call it Alta Vista?

    The name "Alta Vista" is already taken (in the computer industry).
    
    Hence, "Alta Vista AXP".  ;-)

     
     	  Ed Canty	  508.264.6672
     	  Sarah Miller	  508.264.6673
     	  Patrick Ward	  508.264.6696
     	  Tom Madden	  508.264.6675
     	  Don Bradley	  508.264.6678





                  DIGITAL'S 'SUPER SPIDER' BECOMES

               INTERNET'S FASTEST-GROWING SEARCH TOOL


     ...In Less than a Month, Digital Equipment's Hot Technology
                 Surges Past Two Million Hits Daily

        ...Company Considers Licensing, Advertising Offers...



MAYNARD, Mass., January 11, 1996 -- Within weeks of its introduction, 
Digital Equipment Corporation's advanced "super spider" technology 
has become the fastest-growing information search and indexing
capability on the Internet's World Wide Web, the company said today. 
Paralleling the technology's phenomenal climb to more than two 
million "hits" or transactions per day is the keen interest from 
leading Internet companies seeking to negotiate business agreements.
     "It has become clear that Digital has built the better 'cyber
mousetrap' for capturing all of the information on the World Wide
Web," said Samuel H. Fuller, vice  president of Corporate Research. 
"Inquiries from firms doing business on the Internet have risen on
the same steep curve as user interest in the technology.  They are
seeking to license the technology, use it internally, or advertise
products and services on its home page.  We will give careful
consideration to all of these potential opportunities," he said, 
"before making final decisions in the coming months."

User Commentary
     "Web users who have tried the Internet's first super spider 
software that we code-named Alta Vista are astounded by its speed and
comprehensive response to their information queries," Fuller added.
     Internet-savvy newspaper columnists have strongly recommended 
that readers put the technology through its paces, as they have.  
"The results, I promise, will blow you away," said David Plotnikoff,
writing in the San Jose Mercury News in the heart of Silicon Valley. 
"Digital Equipment Corporation's Alta Vista is less than a week old,
and it's already made its way to the top of my hotlist," he added. 
Norfolk Virginian-Pilot DoubleClick columnists Roger A. and Richard
A. Grimes found Alta Vista "...hands down the best search engine...
and it's simple to use."  Richard also selected it for InfoNet's 
"Cool-Site-of-the-Day," which he maintains, just days after it was 
officially launched.  In his "Postcard from Cyberspace" column in the 
Los Angeles Times, Daniel Akst called Alta Vista "...my favorite new 
Internet search engine...Searches are surprisingly fast and 
reasonably accurate, and search results are presented quite 
coherently."
     From England, Jack Schofield, computer editor of The Guardian
comments, "...Alta Vista is my favourite word-search engine....It is
the power and speed of the searching that makes it great.  It can do
searches nothing else can manage."
     Many Web users have acted on these recommendations and shared 
their excitement about Alta Vista in Newsgroups and via E-mail.  Some
examples:

     "I tried it and was boggled by its speed and depth...This site 
blows the socks off all other Web search engines," said Nathan Sovik,
Ph.D., University of Michigan.  Phenix Management International's Al
Doran of North York, Ontario, comments that Alta Vista "...may be the 
hot site of the year!  You will find just about anything you are
looking for with this search engine."  And Dr. Tony Mace of
Management Accountancy & Computer Education in Sussex, UK, said,
"It's very good for picking up obscure pages which other search
engines miss."
     Digital is continuing its public test of the technology.  Web 
users can access Digital's super spider and provide feedback through
Digital's Internet address at:  http://altavista.digital.com  
     Researchers at Digital's Palo Alto facility have documented 
daily usage since the technology's introduction on December 15, when
300,000 hits were logged.  The number doubled on Monday, December 18. 
By Wednesday, December 20, it had jumped to 1.5 million.  Following
the holiday period, the number reached more than two million daily, 
beginning January 4.

Quadrupled Capacity
     The technology's super spider and super indexer employ next-
generation software and advanced networking, powered by Digital's
top-of-the-line AlphaServer 8400 system.  The scalable hardware
already has been upgraded to quadruple its original capacity -- from
two to eight processors, and double the memory -- to keep pace with
demand.  AlphaServer 8400 systems can be upgraded incrementally to 12 
processors in a single system and as many as 96 processors in a
cluster of Alpha computers.

Most Comprehensive Search
     Digital's super spider technology surpasses the limitations of 
current information services by delivering the most complete, 
precise, and up-to-date information of the Web's entire text.  It 
conducts the most comprehensive search of the entire Web orders of 
magnitude faster than spiders used in conventional information search 
services. The super spider creates and dispatches a "brood of 
spiders" that crawls the entire Web.  Second-generation scalable 
software simultaneously locates and indexes text as it finds Web 
pages.  A powerful search engine enables Web users to conduct precise 
searches for specific information by looking for phrases, specifying 
key words, using case-sensitive matches, and restricting searches to
titles or other parts of a document. 
     The super spider has crawled the Web at up to 2.5 million pages 
per day, finding and indexing more information than any other spider 
or crawling service.  It is enroute to finding every page and 
indexing every word of text on the Web.
     Digital Equipment Corporation is the world's leader in open
client/server solutions from personal computing to integrated
worldwide information systems.  Digital's scalable Alpha platforms,
storage, networking, software and services, together with industry-
focused solutions from business partners, help organizations compete
and win in today's global marketplace.  Specific information on
Digital's Alpha and Intel platforms, storage, networking, software,
and services is available on the Internet and can be accessed through
the Digital home page:  http://www.digital.com
                                 ####


Notes to Editors:  Digital, the Digital logo, and AlphaServer are 
                   trademarks of Digital Equipment Corporation.

     		   A "hit" is commonly used to define a transaction 
                   at a Web site or area, and is a standard 
                   measurement of Internet activity.


David Plotnikoff     San Jose Mercury News     [email protected]
Roger A. Grimes	     Norfolk Virginian-Pilot   [email protected]
Richard A. Grimes    Norfolk Virginian-Pilot   [email protected]
Daniel Akst	     Los Angeles Times	       [email protected]
Jack Schofield	     The Guardian	       [email protected]
Nathan Sovik, Ph.D.  University of Michigan    [email protected]
Al Doran	     Phenix Management Intl.   [email protected]
Dr. Tony Mace	     Management Accountancy    [email protected]
		     & Computer Education      


CORP/96/160

    I don't want to go down a rat-hole, especially since this note string is
    dedicated to Alta Vista, but I'd like to ask Mike (4337.10) if he could
    explain himself more fully.
    
    I'm not convinced that most people in this notesfile would rather have
    a Web-based search engine and I'm not sure that most people in this
    notesfile have ever really used the VTX search engine.  VTX PRICE is
    NOT using VTX's built-in search engine, by the way.  It's a forms-based
    application accessing an Rdb database.  But - that's a different topic.
    
    What is it about VTX that makes it an anathema for many people to
    even consider it in relation to WWW?  Notes and mail, while they get
    their detractors, don't seem to be the brunt of so much disgust.
    
    I'm talking about the technology, not the way it's been utilized or
    under-utilized within Digital.  We have to distinguish between the
    technology and its inherent capabilities and the implementation of that
    technology.
    
    And - the VTX/WWW gateway is being enhanced and will include full text
    retrieval capabilities (and forms capabilities also).  Would that make
    VTX more valuable since it could be accessed through any web-browser?
    
    We can take this topic to it's own note if folks want to continue this
    discussion.  Or we can just let it die here :-)
    
    Gita

re advertising on AltaVista

IMHO, we should advertise two things only on AltaVista:

	1. Digital products

	2. Strategic partnerships.

And I'm not sure about the second.

/john

    >What is it about VTX that makes it an anathema for many people to
    >even consider it in relation to WWW?  Notes and mail, while they get
    >their detractors, don't seem to be the brunt of so much disgust.
    
    1. The old technology sucked so badly that people don't CARE whether
       the new technology is any good.
    
    2. My problem isn't with the technology, it's with what populates
       (or more accurately, what doesn't populate) the VTX universe.
       All too often the information I wanted isn't available through
       VTX.  If a library doesn't stock the books and periodicals I need
       to do my job, I go to a different library.
    
    3. See the note on our crumblimg infrastructure.  Aside from the
       maintenance problem, our infrastructure (things like DECnet,
       Notes, VTX, VAXmail, ALL-IN-1, etc). is getting old, and out-of-date. 
       It is also increasingly proprietary.  Streamlining twenty year old
       technology doesn't disguise the fact that it's twenty years old,
       and moving further from the mainstream by the day.

    Re: .115
    
    No offense intended, but since you asked, VTX has a horrible, horrible
    user interface.  It's very difficult to find things (VTX HCCS_UZ or
    something like that, holy cow, plus the search facilities are
    very very limited.)  Try finding a product description if you
    don't have the magic part number or the magic word in the
    Sys&Ops title.  Try finding anything without paging down level
    after level, making a wrong guess as to the next level and then
    backing up.  Try looking at page after page of text instead of
    easy links.  Try pawing thru the Benefits doc one paragraph to a
    screen instead of in book format.
               

Here's an example of why I don't like VTX:

Just last Friday, a new hire asked me about a random comment I'd made
about vanpools (she'd had it with driving in :-).

I knew that *somewhere* on VTX there was van pool information.

Tried VTX Livewire, went down all the choices for NEWS and EMPLOYEE SERVICES/
								ACTIVITIES
 -nope

Tried keyword search on VANPOOL.
 - nope
Tried VTX, followed the directions in 97:

VTX> SEARCH
- got 
  "Queries cannot be posed at this point"

Tried VTX VANPOOL
 - nope

Tried VTX COMMUTE
 - nope

Tried VTX COMMUTING
--BINGO!

Our new hire was not impressed.

Gee, that was impressive, I said sarcastically.  

Contrast that with Vaxnotes DIR/TITLE or SEARCH  and AltaVista...
there's just no comparison.


Bobbi

	I don't think I have anything to add. The previous 2 replies said
	it all.

							mike

    re: .116
    
    Right on!!!  A clear message of whose technology and internetworking
    knowhow was used is much more valuable toward making this company known
    to the masses.  How often do you get a chance to display industrial
    strength computing to such a diverse audience - and have them actually
    able to use it, touch it?  If we market this thing right, it should do a
    great deal toward making AlphaServer systems the Industrial Strength 
    Internetservers - we are already getting inquiries from firms like INFOSEEK
    (who use Sun stuff now).
    
    As for VTX - we seem to be stuck in VT100 mode forever.  As Susan
    Powter says "Stop the Insanity" - and the PF1 pain. VTX can't go fast
    enough, IMHO.  
    
    Bill Troy  
    
    
    
    
    
    

Why do I loathe VTX?

1. My primary desktop device is a Digital UNIX system.  No VTX client exists
for this platform, so it is painful for me to telnet into a legacy system
(ULTRIX or VMS) just to use VTX.

2. As a field person, I am increasingly directed to look for material
in VTX IR.  If I find a presentation I like, there is NO-WAY for me to
download it to a PC over the network (I am sorry I don't grok
ALL-IN-ONE or Teamlinks!).  VTX IR refuses to use Internet-accepted
standards of UUencode or MIME to send binary documents.  I would much
prefer to browse such information using my favorite WWW browser, and
simply click on a selection to have it downloaded.
    

    Oh my another I hate VTX rat-hole ...... well sadly for many the
    default desktop device is still the good old VT terminal.  I just
    recently got access to PPP dialup service and I am happily surfing the
    net, downloading to my hearts content.  We're in a transition period
    and VTX still has it's place until the transition in complete.  The
    suggestions by the VTX type a few notes back were meant as POSITIVE
    improvements that might help those who are not Netscaped.  Take them as
    that.
    
    Re. -1
    
    Suggest if you're not into ALL-IN-1, you might consider MailWorks for
    UNIX and connect your PC via TeamLinks (or MSmail or Exchange) to it.
    Then mail the VTX stuff to that system. 

Mostly my reactions are the same as those eloquent people who have gone
before me, but I can't resist adding a few personal comments:

RE: 115

>    I'm not convinced that most people in this notesfile would rather have
>    a Web-based search engine 

After the last few flames you still want to say this? :^)

>                               and I'm not sure that most people in this
>    notesfile have ever really used the VTX search engine.  VTX PRICE is
>    NOT using VTX's built-in search engine, by the way.  

With respect, if I get to it via the VTX keyword, then I am using VTX.
As an end-user, I don't care if you are using the latest search engine
capability which is about to be patented, or have a whole group of people
typing back at me over the network: the only thing that counts is "can
I easily get to the information I am looking for?".

Notes and mail, for all of their clumsy VT style interfaces, let me get
to the information I am looking for.  All too often, for all too many
of us, VTX does not.

>    I'm talking about the technology, not the way it's been utilized or
>    under-utilized within Digital.  We have to distinguish between the
>    technology and its inherent capabilities and the implementation of that
>    technology.
    
Again, with respect, no we don't.  As end-users we can and will only 
judge based on the sum total package of technology, its implementation,
the content available by that technology, and the ease of access to that
content using that technology.

>    And - the VTX/WWW gateway is being enhanced and will include full text
>    retrieval capabilities (and forms capabilities also).  Would that make
>    VTX more valuable since it could be accessed through any web-browser?

I believe so, but until that functionality is available to me to judge,
I can only judge on what I have available today.

One of the biggest adjustments I had to make when I moved from Engineering
to the Field is to learn that the amount of work that an engineer puts 
into a product has **NOTHING** to do with how valuable that product is to
the end-user.  I can't count the number of times I, and my brother/sister
engineers, have sweated blood over a feature only to have it ignored by
the end-user as of no value, and then to receive immense amounts of kudos,
praise, bonuses, thank-you letters, etc over a trivial piece of code which
we just whipped off in a few minutes.

I understand that you are justifiably proud of the work you have done in
making VTX the best that it can be.  And you may be correct in saying
that it beats the WWW in terms of search algorithms or indexing ability
or (insert your favorite feature here).  But the bottom line is that it
is not useful to the vast majority of Digital employees, and (worse for
you) even less useful to the industry at large.  Some of the reasons
have been stated by the previous few notes, but it seems to me that they
come down to a few:

1) It doesn't run on the platforms they currently use, either by not
   running at all (Digital UNIX) or being incredibly late to market such
   that another program established itself in the users mind (Windows).

2) It doesn't have an interface which is similar to the interfaces that
   people are used to (the whole <PF1>-<ENTER> thing on earlier releases).

3) The information in VTX is stale, out-of-date, missing, or just plain
   inaccessible because you can't do full content searches easily, but
   can only enter keywords (HCCZ_US?  give me a break!  I can't even begin
   to comprehend what that might mean, and I would certainly never guess
   it as a keyword) or titles.  Try finding anything about HSZ40s in VTX
   sometime.  You get no hits at all, even when you specify * as the
   place to search.  And I personally have received 4 e-mails in the last
   week announcing wonderful new documents available in VTX IR, which I
   am interested in obtaining, but which I was unable to find in VTX IR,
   even though I had both the title and the document ID.  You can easily
   (and almost certainly correctly) claim that it is my ignorance of the
   features of VTX that prevented me from fetching these documents, and
   I will certainly agree about my lack of knowledge.  But don't you see
   that if I (with >20 years of writing and using software on a daily
   basis, who casually picks up new programs and makes them productive
   with no training or documentation, and who is paid by Digital to do
   this for customers) can't do this with VTX, less technical people are
   completely out-of-luck?

You may say (correctly) that this last point is totally out of your control,
such that it is up to the information providers to supply the keywords and
indexes, and to keep the information fresh.  But to end-users such as myself 
there is no distinction between the tool and the content, such that a failure
of either renders the tool useless.

Another discussion debated whether you wanted to have a massive number of
hits on a vague query, or a smaller number of more accurate hits.  I myself
prefer the first, because it is easier to wade through a large list to 
find what I am looking for.  But my experiences with VTX IR show the worst
possible case for a search engine: I know the information is in there
somewhere, but I get *no* hits whatsoever using many imaginative queries.
I can't wade through what I don't get back...


RE: .122

Mail the things to your VAXmail account, then do a MAIL> EXTRACT/FOREIGN
to the file.  The /FOREIGN qualifier isn't documented, but it does work.
Then use KERMIT or your favorite file transfer program to move them to
your PC.  Yes, it is crude, but it is the way I do it daily.

-- Ken Moreau

VTX is centralized, the Web decentralized.  If I have information I want to
make available to the world from my UNIX system, what must I do to get it
organized, up, and into a VTX database, and at what cost in elapsed time?

	a.  Learn a lot more about VMS than I want to know.
	b.  Find someone running a VTX server on a VMS system.
	c.  Humbly obtain permission to put things into its database.
	d.  Learn the VTX tools, and how to organize VTX databases.
	e.  Organize and insert the information in VTX's proprietary way.
	f.  Maintain the information.  There and only there.
	g.  And now it's available on VMS and PCs, but not UNIX.

By contrast, what if I want to make the same information available over the
Web?

	a.  Servers run on nearly every platform.  Choose any.
	b.  If it's not already running a Web server, get it running.
	    (Or use ftp-like access if I'm impatient.  No difference to
	    the user.)
	c.  Organize the information either in directories (ftp-like) or
	    in hypertext, in very well-known formats.
	d.  Now it's available everywhere and I can change it using a wide
	    selection of third-party tools and plain old text editors.
	e.  And oh yes, it can link to anywhere else on the Web, internal
	    or external, for maximum up-to-dateness and completeness.

And did I mention the wide selection of browsers?  And Java?  And CGI
scripts?  And the fact that new hires will all already be familiar with it?
Oops, better mention those things.

___Pete

About royalty PAKs in Europe, comment from Jari Tavi:

	John Heneghan from ESSB complained that they don't have funding
	to support "VTX/PAK solution which needs patching all the time and
	eats too much from their valuable resources to maintain".

As I've heard remarked about a PC: "It's so user-friendly you want to kick
it through a window!"

___Pete

    So: what makes you think the people who can't design decent VTX-based
    applications will magically be any better at designing Web-based
    applications ?
    
    What makes you think that people who can't be bothered keeping their 
    data on VTX up to date (or can't get funding...) will be any better
    with Web-based applications ?
    
    Split the religion/technology discussion from the reality (or better
    still take it elsewhere?).
    
    see ya
    john

re: Note 4337.115, esp. "I'm talking about the technology, not the way
it's been utilized or under-utilized within Digital."

Many don't give a hoot about the technology. You have to deal with the
market's perception, which is poor, and which is all that really
counts.

    Maybe I missed it amongst all the praise and flames but just in case,
    I'd like to suggest that super-spider technology could also be used in
    places other than the WWW. For example, marrying the search engine to
    the Lexis/Nexis/Medis (TMs)  databases. Or the Encyclopedia Brittanica.
    Can you imagine buying a hard drive with a fully indexed EB on it and
    the Alta Vista search engine? A "Home Information Center" (TM) brought
    to you by the fine folks at Encyclopedia Brittanica and Digital Equipment.
    
    Would it be possible to index the U.S. Internal Revenue Income Tax code
    and offer that as a 3rd domain to search? With appropriate disclaimers,
    of course.
    
      John

    re: .127
    
    Well said .... VTX IR for all of its blemishes finally provides a
    central point of reasonably up-to-date information.  Distributed data
    with no one chartered to maintain it gets us back to the days of many
    out-of-date VTX databases ... just now we get a sexier way to get at
    old data.
    
    ;^)

    RE: .116
    
    Exactly.  Remember what the WWWeb is:  Interactive Television, Rev.
    0.9.
    
    Digital has the hottest show on the WWWeb network (substitute ABC, NBC,
    FOX, or CBS if you really want to stretch the metaphor).  If we are in
    the network business, sell ad space to H-P, Silly-G, Ford, etc.  If we
    are in the networkING business, use the spot to publicize major
    competitive wins, new product announcements, etc.  
    
    Digital has built it.  The masses are coming.  It's time to leverage
    the lowest cost per marketing message medium ever invented.
    
    $0.02
    
    gc

    >What makes you think that people who can't be bothered keeping their
    >data on VTX up to date (or can't get funding...) will be any better
    >with Web-based applications ?

    Because updating the data on the Web is a lot easier than updating the
    data on VTX?  Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I was told once that
    you need to manually insert page breaks for multi-screen documents in
    VTX, and that you need to update the "page n of m" data yourself.  Talk
    about the stone age.  And that brings me to one of my biggest gripes
    with VTX - harcoded 24 line pages.  I haven't used a 24-line terminal
    in years.  Even our VT terminals are capable of displaying more than
    24 lines these days.

    Alfred

    Another issue that is worth mentioning is that VTX doesn't layer
    technology in the same way the Web does.
    
    Take search engines as an example.  If I want to find stuff in VTX I
    have to go with the search technology implemented by the VTX infobase
    provider.  If it is poor or old technology, I have little choice but to
    use it and/or complain.
    
    With the Web, if a new search engine comes out with new capabilities
    (e.g., Alta Vista), I can use it immediately.  No muss, no fuss.  If it
    can see the page, it can index the info.
    
    This logic also works with Web browsers and so forth.  As the
    technology increases, it IMMEDIATELY becomes available for use on all
    pages, both old and new.  The infobase maintainers need do NOTHING but
    keep their data up-to-date.  They can leave many of the details of
    accessing their data up to those who create such technology and leave
    the access technology preferences up to the end users.
    
    The Web's layered approach means it will succeed well beyond anything
    that the VTX monolith can dream up.
    
    -- Russ

    My turn to compliment Alta Vista. Last weekend, preparing to install
    Win95, I decided to run the Win95 demo CD that only myself and maybe a
    million others were mailed by MicroSoft. When I invoked the program, I
    was rudely greeted by an error message informing me I could not run the
    demo because file PCCLIP.VBX was out of date. Nothing that came with
    the CD explained the problem: nothing on the CD jacket, nothing in any
    of several readme files. Not good. I wonder how many people had this
    problem.

    Rather than calling MicroSoft or Gateway, the answer was quickly found
    using Alta Vista to search for:

    	+ "pcclip.vbx"

    Because of phrase support (quoted text), Alta Vista took me straight to
    the answer. I could not get any other search engines to so easily
    answer the question except by dropping the VBX extension. Possibly I
    just don't know how to use phrase support in other search engines, but
    then they also don't have the excellent HELP notes that Alta Vista
    has to teach me how.

    Thanks Alta Vista.

    Incidentally, the answer was that the file I needed was on the CD and
    it only needed to be copied to WINDOWS\SYSTEM directory. 

    I've had similar excellent results with other uses of Alta Vista. I
    especially like the intuitive simple query syntax and the ability to
    define my own ranking for advanced query results.

    - Bob

	This is not meant to be offending memo against VTX, rather I
	comment our overall way of using and selling technology.

	VTX (and VTX IR implementation) has some good and weak points:

	+ VTX/CBR Engine is efficient and well implemented

	+ VTX has _some_ tools to create and update/maintain VTX
	  hierarchy

	- CBR does not support well enough language variants (other than 
	  en_US and en_EN...)

	- very few of our databases allow real CBR searches


	But why do we ignore some things totally:

	1 We don't support the Marketing idea "Use what you sell", rather
	  we're using something that is next to impossible to sell in large
	  scale. 

	2 Instead of putting effort to productise our strenhgts to 
	  emerging and growing markets (CBR for example) we just keep
	  on keeping up old and out dated solution. Where is our effort
	  to develope HTML document management and editing system? If
	  we want to be in the markets it would generate us more visibility
	  and REVENUE than trying to sell VTX. Well, we're not in application
	  business anymore...

	3 Time of VTX is over. Existing customers will like VTX/WWW gateway,
	  but very very few customers will buy VTX for new projects.

	4 If we want to be market leaders or even strong followers, we must
	  understand and use the technology ourselves. I'm not saying that
	  we should forget VTX or drop support for VTX IR, BUT IMHO: We
	  should put primary development focus and effort to Web based
	  replacement, and we should do it SOON. In fact I feel that we
	  should use Web as primary distribution center for IR documents
	  and leave VTX as a historical/secondary option for those who
	  can't or don't like to use Web.

	5 Even Internet contains much Hype around it, it surely creates
	  expectations and guides some decisions on what companies are 
	  doing in (near) future. For example Intranet consept will probably
	  build up as a Hype as well, but there will be markets around that 
	  consept, and soon we have missed the boat again! 


	Some reasons for personal frustration as well:

	- VTX IR (implementation) is #1 tool I _should_ use, but currently
	  it may take 4-5 tries to submit the document before it really 
	  accepts my request and mails the document I've requested. For
	  some reason the document delivery seems to be far too unraliable.
	  (And no, it is not disk quotas or anything like that. All other
	   mail flows without problems and I have typically even hundreds of
	   megabytes free disk to receive mail)

	- Searching VTX is pain as stated so many times before. Finding
	  documents you know that exist in VTX database can be almost
	  impossible.

	- As mentioned before: Quite a many of Digital employees don't 
	  have All-in-1 or even VAXmail account, and I find it little
	  irritating to "have a VAXmail account" only to receive FOREIGN format
	  VAXmail's - ugh. And ftp'ing or (even worse, yuck) Kermiting them to
	  PC.

	In short: VTX and VTX IR doesn't fill my needs and expectations neither
	as internal tool or product we're expected to sell! Still for example
	VTX IR is expected to be PRIMARY tool to support our business - there's
	a conflict here...

		-jari

    
    	Massively fascinating.
    
    	A company that spends hundreds of thousands of dollars to
    "influence", "propose", and "promulgate" standards refuses to
    standardize on *ONE* methodology for the dissemination of all
    information to its employees, suppliers, and customers.
    
    	Maybe we need another VP?
    
    		the Greyhawk

Re .129:

>    Would it be possible to index the U.S. Internal Revenue Income Tax code
>    and offer that as a 3rd domain to search? With appropriate disclaimers,
>    of course.

Cornell Law School's Legal Information Institute
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/26/waisindex searches the Internal Revenue
Code already .  Furthermore, Alta Vista visited some, but not all of the pages
already.  The whole thing will be indexed at some point because I resubmitted
the main page just now.  So just throw +url:http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/26
into your tax query.  Or, store the URL
http://altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=q&what=web&fmt=.&q=%2Burl%3Ahttp%3
A%2F%2Fwww.law.cornell.edu%2Fuscode%2F26 as a bookmark, and you have a
prepackaged US Tax Code query - just augment the query box when you visit that
page to refine the query to perform the specific search you want.
				/AHM

> Or, store the URL
> http://altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=q&what=web&fmt=.&q=%2Burl%3Ahttp%3
> A%2F%2Fwww.law.cornell.edu%2Fuscode%2F26 as a bookmark, and you have a
> prepackaged US Tax Code query - just augment the query box when you visit that
> page to refine the query to perform the specific search you want.
    
    Try doing THAT with VTX!
    
      John

Who guides our advertising agency with ideas immediately pertinent to our business?

I read the news that ALTAVISTA is the most heavily used WWW search engine and just thought what a 
brilliant opportunity that should be!  If we were feeling bullish, then perhaps the agency could "tart up" a 
message along the following lines.......

WWW is where the Internet is at........
ALTAVISTA is where the WWW is at..........

If you're lost on/off/near/far from the Internet DIGITAL ALTAVISTA is the only thing you need to 
know!

OR.....

Digital ALTAVISTA, the definitive yellow pages of the WWW!

:-)

    I agree with nearly all of the criticisms given so far for VTX.  But I
    think there are additional factors to consider (which I may have missed
    in all the noise).
    
    Why are we still investing in a proprietary, in-house-only solution?
    
    We have a choice: develop tools that work for lots of people in lots of
    situations, that we might be able to sell or at least use to leverage
    sales of other products and services (i.e., Internet / Web kinds of
    things); or develop tools that only work in-house on Digital-specific
    platforms (VTX).
    
    If you're going to spend money developing something, and can spend it
    on something that will have a large customer base or on something with
    a small customer base, isn't it better to spend it on a large customer
    base?
    
    Another problem I see here is one that I have seen many, many times in
    my career.  Somebody sees a problem and develops a solution.  Time
    passes, and the people who developed that particular solution fixate on
    it, and don't (or won't or can't) see that the world has changed around
    them.  A related problem is focussing on the 'best' solution, even if
    it is not the solution that the largest number of people (especially
    customers) want.  It can be difficult and painful for the people who
    are using (and especially supporting) that solution to accept the
    changes the world has made around them, and I sympathize.  But it's
    best in the long run for everybody to face reality and accept the world
    as it is, not as we would like it to be.
    
    I am willing to postulate that when VTX was originally developed it was
    the best solution possible at the time.  But times change, and VTX just
    hasn't kept up with the way most people want to go.  There comes a time
    when what the most people want becomes the 'best' solution, regardless
    of the technical issues.
    
    I am acutely aware of supporting people that only have VT family
    character cell terminals.  I myself am usually on the trailing edge of
    technology.  Until very recently my only access to "the Web" was with
    Lynx, a character-cell browser, and got very frustrated when I hit a
    page that would only work in netscape.  I got Internet access later
    than most people.  I've had to support Digital product in environments
    where NOBODY had a workstation or DECwindows, and all of the solutions
    proposed by Digital required DECwindows.  Before that I worked at a
    company where nearly all of our revenue came from people who only had
    teletype machines.  You won't find anyone more concerned than I am with
    preserving older interfaces when necessary (I can refer you to Digital
    product managers who got chewed out by me when they changed user
    interfaces for no good reason, before I came to work here).
    
    But you also have to face real-life business decisions.  Does it really
    make sense to pour money into supporting VTX anymore?  Does it make
    sense to spend money putting information into a proprietary system when
    the same effort can put it into a much more widely accessible system?
    
    For people who still have only character cell terminals, instead of
    investing in VTX isn't it better to spend a little time putting the
    information into a web site in such a way that it can still be accessed
    with Lynx or other character-cell web browsers as well as the fancier
    Netscape browsers?  It CAN be done, with little or no extra work over
    Netscape-only links, and there are tools to do it.
    
    Yet one more argument: I just attended the OSSG Quarterly
    Communications Meeting.  The message was strongly given that our future
    is with the Windows Affinity program.  Alpha, VMS and Unix all have
    their (important) places, but we are going to be moving away from some
    of our traditional products and into supporting applications on
    Windows.  I don't see where VTX will fit into Digital's future.
    

             <<< HUMANE::DISK$SCSI:[NOTES$LIBRARY]DIGITAL.NOTE;1 >>>
                        -< The Digital way of working >-
================================================================================
Note 4337.140                 Alta Vista WEB Server                   140 of 140
WOTVAX::ALBA::gracie                                 17 lines  16-JAN-1996 13:08
                     -< Advertise it...go on be bullish! >-
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Who guides our advertising agency with ideas immediately pertinent to our 
business?

I read the news that ALTAVISTA is the most heavily used WWW search engine and 
just thought what a brilliant opportunity that should be!  If we were feeling 
bullish, then perhaps the agency could "tart up" a 
message along the following lines.......

WWW is where the Internet is at........
ALTAVISTA is where the WWW is at..........

If you're lost on/off/near/far from the Internet DIGITAL ALTAVISTA is the only 
thing you need to 
know!

OR.....

Digital ALTAVISTA, the definitive yellow pages of the WWW!

:-)

    Actually, the people who do bad designs of VTX info can still
    do bad web page designs and the user will be better off with a web
    browser than VTX, because the browser's find command will be able
    to locate search strings, not like VTX where only certain magic
    words are known.  Besides, it's such a no-brainer to produce
    a decently formatted web page by cribbing from the sources of other
    web pages that I have to believe this stuff will almost automatically
    improve.
    
    I curse (well, at least mutter) everytime I have to reach/look for
    PF1 Enter instead of clicking...
    
    So, the page marks are inserted by hand?  Now I know why the updated
    Benefits info comes out one tiny paragraph to a page, sigh.
    

    Is it possible for one of the Alta Vista team to post the hours of
    heavy usage and the hours of lightest usage ?
    
    What a GREAT product !

    And.......Lycos, the 'other' web crawler, just decided to remove their
    Sun Servers, and replace 'em with 8400's. Said 8400's to display the
    digital logo on the Lycos page.  Another WIN for Digital!

    All you need is one line, or icon on AV: "What's New From Digital".
    
    How many times per day will computer literate people see it?  Multiply
    by 3-7 percent and you know how many messages you have delivered. 
    Divide that number into the capitalized and recurring costs of building
    and maintaining AV, then compare with print, TV and Radio for
    equivalent cost per message.  
    
    Hopefully.... someone in the business units is doing this
    (Hint...Hint!)
    
    OK, $0.04
    
    gc

    
    I've just tried Alta Vista a few times with now luck.  Service too
    busy..   Is the service now oversubscribed???   
    
    

    Re: .146 Alta Vista oversubscribed?
    
    I saw the 'too busy' message awhile back when there was a temp bug
    in queueing.  I can reach AV now.  The last I heard, as the load
    increased more hardware was going to be brought online.
    

I sure hope the company will continue to scale up the hardware around
Alta Vista as demand increases. Also, I would really love to see a
supplemental Buena Vista for Digital internal use that would include 
things like indexes of our internal notesfiles, news-groups, and other
relevant sources of information.

>Per

P.S.	Why doesn't anything happen when I press PF1-ENTER in Alta Vista?

    G'day,
     Where does one report 'features' in AltaVista?
    
    I inadvertently left the trailing " marks off a query. What I got was a
    real surprise..
    
    "healthfund  ... healthfund nnnn erotica nnnnn ignored o:nnnnnnnnnn
    and pointers to Playboy!
    
    tried just " as the query and got veal, ctor, eggro as results from
    three queries!
    
    "<space>"<space>"<space> gave me the AltaVista home page!
    
    
    so want random searches, just put in " as the query!
    
    
    Regards
    Derek

There is a "Feedback" link on the main page or just send mail to
[email protected].

			Steve

    I think that the technology that Alta Vista introduced will have
    a profound effect on learning resources.
    
    At home, my kids have drastically reduced the use of our CD-ROM
    encyclopedia and instead use the WEB as their source of information.
    
    Last week, for example, one of my children was given an assignment:
    given a lattitiude and longitude of an island in the south atlantic,
    try to figure out the characteristics of the island: climate, crops,
    imports, exports, ...
    
    Well, my kid first did a search for Maps of the Antartic Region.  Do
    know what the exact query was but he did find a map and he printed it
    out on our cheapo special color printer.
    
    Then, given the lattitude and longitude determined the islands that
    were close to it.  Turns out they were the Falkland, South Georgia,
    south Sandwich, and some others.  For each of them, he found maps,
    desciptions of geography, ... all courtesy of Her Majesty's
    Commonwealth of Nations Web Site.   And all for FREE!  More was
    available in other web sites but I would have had to pay money to gain
    access.
    
    Facinating stuff!
    
    -David

    The World Wide Web:
    
    The Worlds Largest Library.
    
    gc

    > The World Wide Web:
    
    >    The Worlds Largest Library.
    
    That's an interesting claim.  What do you base it upon?  Distribution
    of information over a worldwide geography?
    
    Mark

Just to add a touch of humor to this topic, I was searching
for some info on Archive's Python tape drives recently, so 
queried A/V with: +Archive +Python
and came up with thousands of references to Monty Python 
audio and video clip archives!

I then re-queried with: +Archive + Python -Monty

re: .141
>> Digital ALTAVISTA, the definitive yellow pages of the WWW!
More like, the world's largest colection of Post-It notes. :-)

    Because of information content - anything on the WWW or newsgroups 
    will get indexed sooner or later.
    
    I read someplace that the WWW grows at about 1% a day.  My presumption
    that this means WEB pages.
    
    If you want to try something interesting, do a search on some academic
    subject, say "Solid Modeling" or "Configuration Management", or
    "Paquime Civilization" (a pre-columbian water culture in northern
    mexico).  So, in addition to the library of Monty Python clips you can 
    also find serious research results.
    
    -David

    re:153
    
    If joe sixpack wants to find out information, he (she) can:
    
    - call a friend
    - go to the local library
    - get a CD ROM
    - Go to the Library of Congress
    
    If you define a library as a place from which you can extract
    information, I am not aware of any other source that has as rich a
    content set as the WWWeb.  
    
    No we can argue about the quality of the content, etc.  as of today,
    but as time marches on, the WWWeb will be THE route of access for
    information.
    
    My kids are on the WWWeb almost nightly to do research, and with Alta
    Vista, and other search engines, it just gets better.
    
    I'll turn the question around.  Where else is as much information
    readily accessible?
    
    gc

the web is good and getting better.
in some ways it is better than a large research library.
in some ways it is not as good as a suburban town library.

it wins big on being up to date.
it has great depth in some areas, but is spotty, and is generally
weak in historical coverage.

the last time i looked, i could use almost all of the 1990 u.s. census,
but there was nothing for 1790-1980.

a town library probably has several thousand biographies, covering many
hundred people.  most of that information is not on the net.

try poetry or drama. same story when i tried some titles.

project gutenberg is a noble effort, but i estimate less than 1% of the books
in your library are on the net.  that might include 10-50% of what is
important to most people.

almost every phd thesis of the last few years is available online.
almost none of those from earlier are available.
my local library has 25 years of ny times and boston globe.
how far back do the on line archives go?

your town library probably has several histories of the town.
i checked several nearby towns, and found a bare outline or nothing online.

the web is great, and the whole internet is an even better research tool,
but it will be a very long time before it will be the best tool for
some subjects.  it may already be the best FIRST tool for most subjects.

    This is [part of] a note I posted in the internet tools conference. I
    think it should be here too, for wider consumption. It illustrates the
    power of word-of-mouth advertising, and demonstrates what an
    opportunity AltaVista gives us to make ourselves and our products known
    to a very wide, highly susceptible audience (an opportunity we're not
    taking properly, IMO).
    
    ---snip---
    
    One thing I don't understand is why the AltaVista page doesn't SCREAM
    Digital at people. The adverts for ourselves should come on the first
    half of the page, not a little mention at the bottom of the form. If
    people want to use Digital's free service, the least they could do is
    have to click past a few lines telling them how great the kit is
    they're using.
    
    I was mailed this today (I've extracted the relevant stuff); it's a
    very interesting view on AltaVista, and very good press indeed. There's
    a lot of food for thought there...
    
    Cheers, Laurie.
    
    
INTERNET-ON-A-DISK #15,  January/February 1996 
Newsletter of public domain and freely available electronic texts    
Circulation:  direct =  9,000, indirect (estimated) = 100,000+    
    
This newsletter is free for the asking.  To be added to the distribution     
list or for back issues, please send requests to [email protected]  
Back issues are also available at our Web site -- 
http://www.samizdat.com/  
Cited by Net Guide Sept. 1995 as one of the top 50 Web sites in the world. 
Cited by Internet World Jan. 1996 as the Best Personal Web Page of 1995.

[SNIP...]

THE ALTA VISTA REVOLUTION
by Richard Seltzer, B&R Samizdat Express

The Internet is a strange new environment, where you can expect 
the unexpected and need to be prepared for major changes to occur 
over night.  It's much more like Oz than Kansas.

The historical examples of such changes include the Netscape
Navigator and Yahoo.

The Netscape Navigator is now so commonly used as an Internet 
browser that it's easy to lose sight of how revolutionary it was when it first 
appeared around September of 1994.  At that point in time it was virtually 
impossible to use the Web from at home.  With a 14.4 modem, the browsers 
of that time simply timed out before you got anything useful.  It was a 
frustrating experience.  I could get everything I wanted using my connection 
from the office over the corporate network.  And there were many users at 
other corporations and educational and research institutions.  But the home 
market simply didn't exist.  To really connect to the Web from home, I would 
need to get an ISDN line and buy about $1000 dollars worth of hardware to 
make that work with my PC.  Or I'd need some other high-speed expensive 
solution.  Then the Netscape Navigator suddenly appeared.  It was six times 
faster than anything else at the time.  It was like getting a six times faster 
Internet connection for free.  All of a sudden, it was easy to use the Web 
from home, and home use started to grow at a phenomenal rate, opening up 
a wide variety of business opportunities.

Around that same time -- early fall of 1994 -- the number of Web 
sites had increased to the point that it was becoming very difficult to find 
what 
you wanted when you wanted it.  This problem had led to the development of 
the electronic mall as a business concept.  The idea was to host or link many 
separate Web sites in an organized fashion -- to impose order on the disorder 
of the Web at large.  The idea was to create the ideal "on-ramp" -- to invite 
people to come in to this particular site because here they could easily see 
-- 
organized like a mall -- all the kinds of things that they might be interested 
in; 
and like in a mall, the visitor could be attracted to wander into this or that 
other store because of its proximity to the one they were looking for.  That 
looked like a good business model.  And then a couple of students from 
Stanford put together their Yahoo site.  This didn't involve any fancy 
technology, no search engines that would go out and actively check what's 
on the Web.  Basically, their service was just an outgrowth of the lists of 
interesting sites which they had compiled for their own use.  They made it 
available for others, and made it easy for people to submit info about their 
own Web sites to be added to the data base.  All of a sudden it was very 
easy to find a Web site that you wanted when you wanted it.  Yahoo grew 
at an astronomical rate -- both in terms of the sites it listed and in terms 
of 
the number of users.  This simple and effective solution made the 
"electronic mall" obsolete over night.

Now Alta Vista, a new free service from Digital Equipment, 
(http://www.altavista.digital.com) breaks the mold.  It is now 
possible not just to find a Web site you might be interested in, but to search 
the full text of nearly every document on the on the Web and in newsgroups.  
That means you can locate a document on a computer in China or anywhere 
else on the Web probably far quicker than you could locate it on your own 
hard drive.  This makes it easy for you to identify resources and for others 
to find you.  At the same time, this capability changes the whole concept 
of a Web site.  People no longer have to navigate by way of your "home 
page".  You no longer have the ability to control the context and 
experience of the user who visits your site.  Rather people  will find the 
documents they want directly -- diving straight into files you buried deep 
in subdirectories.  Suddenly you have to rethink how you structure and 
present your information.  

We introduced that concept in our last issue, a week before Alta Vista went 
public.  ("Who Controls the Context? -- Search Engines and the Fate of 
Carefully Constructed Web Sites" http://www.samizdat.com/context.html).  
Now it's time to take a closer look at  this new capability and its 
implications.

**DESIGNING FOR ALTA VISTA

If you have a Web site, search for it using Alta Vista.  And if you aren't
delighted with what you find, go back and redesign your pages, because
you can expect that many of the people who might want to visit your
site will be using this tool.

First, are the titles of your pages appropriate and useful?  If people
get to those pages by hyperlinks from your home page, the title
is insignificant; hence you might be using some internal shorthand
for your own convenience.  But the title of each and every page is
the first thing that users of Alta Vista will see, and will be an important
criterion in their decision to go to your pages or other similar ones.

Second, what are the first three lines on each of those pages? As a default,
that's what an Alta Vista user is shown, together with your page titles.
Ideally, those lines should provide a clear and crisp picture of the
contents of that page, so people interested in that subject matter
will know that they want to look at the whole thing.

Next, can you be found the ways your potential visitors are likely to
search?  For instance, you may have all your company's press releases
on line.  But the phrase "press release" probably never appears on
any of those pages.  In other words, someone searching for "XYZ
Company" AND "press release" might find nothing.  So simply add
that phrase to those pages, and soon (not immediately; after the Alta
Vista "spiders" have visited there again) people will be able to
find them.  Likewise, consider any and all key words and phrases that 
might logically occur to people looking for the kind of information you
provide and add those words to your documents -- perhaps as a 
extra line at the bottom.

Also, remember that many people will be looking for other
people and searching by their full name.  If individuals are mentioned
on your pages, make sure that the full names appear -- first name
followed immediately by last name -- somewhere on those pages.
And if the name is a common one, be sure that other terms
immediately associated with this particular "John Smith" appear
with the name.

If you have a page that is particularly important to you and you
want to make sure that people searching for that particular piece
of information or product/service will find you -- and that your
page will come out high on the list of search hits -- you might
consider carrying this principle to extremes.  For instance, at the
bottom of the document or anywhere in the form of a "comment"
that won't be seen by visitors, but will be noted by the search
engine, repeat your key word many times.

**USING ALTA VISTA AND FINDING THE LIZARD

I first approached Alta Vista as a researcher using it as a tool to
learn more about my own Web site and how I could improve it.

A simple search for link:samizdat.com gave me a list of nearly 150
Web pages that have hypertext links to my site.  I had had no idea that
so many people valued what I was doing.  And it was a pleasure to check
out those other sites and see what we have in common.  Because I thought
it would be of interest to my viewers I created a page with a list of
hyperlinks to all the sites with hyperlinks to my own (simply by saving
the source of the pages the Alta Vista search created).  
http://www.samizdat.com/links.html
And to encourage more sites to create such links, I offered to
continually update this list, asking Web masters to contact me
directly.

Then I began searching for the topics that are important to me -- subjects
I cover at my Web site.  I was delighted to discover that not only could
I find far more Web pages with Alta Vista than with any other search
engine, but, also, a set of simple but powerful commands made it easy
to refine my searches and home in on my particular needs.

For example, I searched for "The Lizard of Oz," the title of a book I
wrote and self-published 22 years ago and which is now available at
my Web site (http://www.samizdat.com/liz1.html) I discovered that 
a play with that title will be performed in a town in Pennsylvania this 
February.  At first I thought this might be the children's play which I had 
adapted from my own book. But inquiring further, I discovered that
this was a story adapted from the Wizard of Oz by other writers.
I also found another, different play with the same title being 
performed in Tasmania; and half a dozen works of art, all originating
in Australia, which is often referred to as "Oz."

Some writers who would like to make their information freely available 
over the Internet, hesitate to do so because they are uptight that others 
might 
plagiarize their work -- not just make it more widely available, but 
change the name of the author, or lift chunks and appropriate the
work piecemeal in another context.  Now, in a matter of seconds, and
at no cost, you can search the entire Web not just for titles, but
for any chunk of text.  And the fact that such detection is so easy
should be a powerful deterrent for any would-be plagiarizer

Try Alta Vista and let your imagination run free.  And be sure that
your kids will do the same.  Don't be so naive as to presume that 
simple-minded censoring schemes will keep them away from certain 
kinds of information if they actively want to find such information.

And keep in mind that with a free tool as powerful as this, with
only a beginner's Internet knowledge, you could set yourself up
in business finding informaiton of all kinds on the Internet for
clients on request.

**WHAT'S NEXT?

I love Alta Vista.  It is perfect for today's Internet.  But keep in mind that 
it's designed for the static text-based Web of today.  It cannot handle 
graphics, voice or video.  It doesn't tell you anything about the contents 
of databases connected to the Internet, or information stored on the 
Internet in forms other than Web pages or newsgroups.  It gets nothing 
from sites that require registration or sites with dynamic interactive 
applications.

It represents a revolutionary advance.  But there will be more
revolutions.

We can expect that increasingly more of the content available over
the Internet will be stored in data bases.  The provider of the 
information won't have to go to the expense of converting it to 
.html (the Web format) or restructuring it in the form of Web pages.  
Rather, in response to queries, the information will be converted on
the fly from a variety of formats to .html and possibly other formats 
as well, for immediate one-time delivery to the user.
  
And more and more conent will include audio and video, sometimes 
combined with text, and sometimes combined with CD ROMs and 
telephones and television -- a glorious mind-bending mixture of media
far beyond the reach of today's Alta Vista.

So Alta Vista is revolutionary.  It is today's answer.  But already
the question has changed.

It's like Alice in the land through the Looking Glass.

I'm not an engineer.  I'm just a writer.  And I have no advance 
knowledge of technology that can do multimedia searches or
that could probe multiple heterogeneous databases linked to the Internet.
It's hard for me to imagine how a multi-media search could work 
without the use of keyword tags applied by human observers.
And it's hard for me to imagine that the owners of databases would 
want to allow search engines to probe their guts and pump out their 
data to index it for retrieval.

But on the other hand, there are a lot of creative engineers out there 
who want to make a buck and who just love a challenge like that.

My guess is that there will be solutions to both these problems within 
two years.  

And my guess is that the solution will be of the "agent" variety, 
rather than the massive Altavista-style spider/search engine.

In other words, the individual user will launch a program which the user 
has given a very specific search task -- like playing "Fish" on a 
mega-scale -- find me all XYZs.  And like giving a bloodhound a piece of 
clothing to sniff, you will give your agent samples of the kinds of 
things you are looking for -- and these samples might be text, graphics, 
sounds, video, etc.  The agent will then independently poke around 
everywhere -- might use a search engine like Altavista for the text 
stuff, might log in and register as a user at publicly available database 
sites (or even log in with password at database sites which require 
membership and to which the user is a member), and then come back -- 
perhaps a day or two later -- with a set of clues and pointers to stuff 
that's close, or the thing itself, if there's an exact match.

Anyway, such are my speculations.

**NEAT TRICKS

Users are sure to find more applications for this great tool than the
designers ever intended.  Please send us email ([email protected])
to tell us about your experiences, and we'll share the best ideas in 
Internet-on-a-Disk and at our Web site.

Here's one brilliant trick which was recently posted to newsgroups,
and which the author gave us permission to include here.  
Be sure to check out his Web site next time you go surfing:
http://www.mcs.net/~jorn/html/hyper.html

**Subject: WWW/Netnews: A nifty trick courtesy Altavista
From: [email protected] (Jorn Barger)
Newsgroups: alt.culture.usenet,alt.culture.www,
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.misc
Date: 10 Jan 1996 23:35:55 -0600

Digital's phenomenal new WWWeb search engine at
<URL:http://www.altavista.digital.com> has such sophisticated
capabilities that I've been able to add a new link to my home page,
offering most of my *news postings* from the last month (but
self-updating/ never out of date) via:

<URL:http://www.altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/query?
pg=q&what=news&fmt=&q=from%3Ajorn.mcs>

(You can set up whatever query you like, there, submit it, and
clip the URL of the returned page...)

Be sure to read their very clear help pages for more handy tricks,
like collecting virtually *all* the pages that link to any one of
yours...
**********************************************************

    [SNIP...]

    
    RE: .148
    
    Per, have you tried COMET (http://www-comet.alf.dec.com/8031/ ? It
    indexes the TIMA STARS databases and a lot of our internal notes
    conferenses. 
    
    /Kjell

RE: .159

404 Not Found
*************

The requested URL /8031/ was not found on this server.

re .159:

Thanks.

re .160:

Use http://www-comet.alf.dec.com:8031

The typo was a '/' instead of ':'

>Per

re .161:

Welcome to COMET V2.0 
**********************
This version is obsolete ... please consider migrating
******************************************************
to V3.2 
********

    At 7:45am EST I got a "server busy, try again later" message that
    is persisting. OK, I don't mind that the server is SO popular as to be
    saturated before many Americans are even at work, but I -am- bothered
    by the fact that my only alternative appears to be to wait and manually
    retry the request later.
    
    Would it be possible to have a "queue this" button in addition to the
    "Submit" button? If too busy the server would stick the request in a
    queue and process it as resources become available. My window would
    effectively hang indefinitely but sooner or later it would either get
    the response or a timeout if Alta Vista went down. (I envision getting 
    periodic messages of the form "You are now number NNN in the queue".)
    
    A lot of times I don't mind minimizing my window and doing other work
    while waiting. Not always, which is why another button is needed.
    Unless AHM has another magic script...
    
      John

    It's been dead all day from Brussels (16:51, right now).
    
    Laurie.

Well, another button would have to send the request to a totally different
server.

The 503 Server Busy error means your TCP/IP connection request couldn't
be served by the HTTP daemon at the present time.

The message didn't even get into the AltaVista software.

It is unlikely that the actual problem is current load; it would appear that
the HTTP daemon is completely wedged and not servicing any requests at all.

/john

    Speaking of buttons, I'd like to suggest that ALL of the Digital logos
    on the Alta Vista pages be enabled to point to our home page URL.  The
    little one at the bottom seems to do it, but not the bigger one in the
    middle of the page.  (I have also sent them mail via the feedback
    link.)
    
    	/jeff
    

>    but I -am- bothered
>    by the fact that my only alternative appears to be to wait and manually
>    retry the request later.
    
    Why, John, there are *plenty* of alternatives: Yahoo, Lycos,
    WebCrawler,...  :-)
    
    But you knew that already.
    
    -Mark

    The last two days I've had a weird problem on AltaVista, I try to tell
    it to search the Web, but it keeps coming back with Newsgroups.  Must
    be something in my setup.

I've read that if it comes up empty on the web, it will automatically look
at newsgroups.

			Steve

>I've read that if it comes up empty on the web, it will automatically look
>at newsgroups.

simple enough to test, which I did.

	o	searched news for 'altavista'
	o	used title of first hit 'new altavista an incredibly powerful
		search engine' for another EXACT search
	o	found 5 unqiue entries (most were re:)
	o	applied same search to web - came up empty!

if above assertion was correct, wouldn't it have found entries in newsgroups?

-mark

    I've seen the exact problem while using some version of the Compuserve-
    distributed browser.  Can't say I really tried any troubleshooting
    beyond doing a few reloads, but the problem just wouldn't go away. 
    Since switching to Netscape, I've never seen an instance of the
    reported misbehavior.  This doesn't prove anything, but you can put
    this on the circumstantial evidence heap.  --Bob 

    Nice endorsement for Alta Vista in today's Wall Street Journal.
    
    In his "Personal Technology" column, Walter Mossberg lists 20 sites
    worth recommending.  (for search engines)..."the best I've seen is
    (DEC's) new Alta Vista.   It finds more citations in less time than any
    other search engine I've tried."

  Now *THERE* would be an interesting pair of queries:

    o Search for "DEC" (or "dec")

    o Search for "digital" or even "Digital"


  Which would have a higher ratio of hits referring to "Digital
  Equipment Corporation"? :-)

                                   Atlant

>  Now *THERE* would be an interesting pair of queries:
>
>    o Search for "DEC" (or "dec")
>
>    o Search for "digital" or even "Digital"

just for laughs I tried it:

	DEC -      .27M
	Digital - 1.33M

While I know there are *lots* of references to the word Digital, I forgot that
DEC is also a month!

This starts yet a whole different way to think about information, namely using
names that are unambiguous.  If you have a name that is fairly unique, like IBM
or EXXON, the likelyhood of people finding things dramatically increases.  How
would I even begin to find thing about Digital the company?  Maybe we should
forget the whole digital branding thing and try xyzzy for a name!  8-) 

Yikes!  I just did a search on xyzzy and found 3255 hits!!!  I looked in the
news groups and found 291 more.  groan...

-mark

    the mosaic that comes with WinCIM 2.0 always ends up searching news and
    returning results in compact format, so matter what I request.. to get
    a web search and/or detailed results I have to edit the URL of the
    request..
    
    today I found that if I can manage to get to the request page that has
    *buttons* instead of editboxes for the search/result options, it seems
    to work OK..
    
    Whatever..
    
    ...tom

    re .174

>  Now *THERE* would be an interesting pair of queries:
>
>    o Search for "DEC" (or "dec")
>
>    o Search for "digital" or even "Digital"

>>  just for laughs I tried it:
>>
>>	DEC -      .27M
>>	Digital - 1.33M

    But with Alta Vista a better query for our DEC would be

       " DEC " yielding an estimated 100K matches

    I'm happy I tried this. The 6th listing is a interesting reference to 
    "Linux-FT on the DEC Alpha" PC.

    - Bob

        That's because the Spry Mosaic that you are using is one of the
        most brain-dead browsers on the market. We have had nothing but
        trouble with it on the OpenVMS Web server's CGI programs. It seems
        that it sends the fields back on forms in reverse or random order
        (depending on versions). Alta-Vista's engine expects a well
        behaved browser and you don't have one. Get Netscape or Internet
        Explorer. Also bug Compuserve to get it's act together. They know
        about the problem and have not taken any action about it.
        
        

    I *have* the internet explorer. I also have Quarterdeck Mosaic. 
    
    Finding the time and the inclination to get one of them to work with
    compuserve is the problem.
    
    ...tom

Compuserve is my internet provider.  I downloaded and use Netscape with no 
problems.

Jim

[Reproduced without permission]

                   Take a spin on the web with Alta Vista

By JOHN BYCZKOWSKl
Gannet News Service

Alta Vista today is the elephant's memory of the Internet. It seemingly
remembers everything.

I routinely punch my last name into Internet search engines, to see what pops
up. Lycos <http://www.lycos.com> returned 14 hits; Inktomi
<http://inktomi.berkeley.edu> returned 17 hits; Webcrawler
<http://webcrawler.com> returned zero.

But Digital Equipment Corp.'s Alta Vista <http://altavista.digital.com>
returned 86 hits, pointing me to a few copyright violations and introducing
me to Byczkowskis I didn't know existed.

Alta Vista is a "super spider," a combination of computer programming,
engineering and equipment that attempts to build a complete index of the World
Wide Web.

In the month that it has been up and running, it has become the best place to
begin searches for anything on the Internet. It is huge -- indexing 16.5 million
web pages -and surprisingly fast. The site is getting 1.7 million hits a
day.

"The need for this is absolutely tremendous; the response is matching that
fact," lead researcher Louis Monier in San Jose, Calif., said. "Digital wants
to show we have quite a bit of expertise, the right gear, and we know how to
put all the pieces together to do something that's never been done before."

And Alta Vista is somewhat frightening. This powerful new search engine
reinforces the point that many cybersurfers are slow to grasp: Anything you
whisper into the Internet, Alta Vista might hear, and it might echo within its
cavernous memory for years to come.

A spider is an automated Internet surfer, juiced on fast computers and a fast
connection. Alta Vista can open 1,000 connections simultaneously, and retrieve
30 pages a second, allowing it to sweep the Internet in eight days. It saves all
of the text but none of the images, since those can't be searched in an index.

All this text, 100 gigabytes worth, is converted to a 30-gig index stored on a
server and can be searched by any user connected to it.

Alta Vista's spider crawls around the Internet (hence the name "spider"),
recording good links and bad, following trails through web sites, saving the
pages and then retracing its steps to follow the next branch.

Has this raised the bar among spiders?

"All other spiders are simply running out of steam," Monier said.
"Technologically, they are not at the level we are."

Bob Davis, chief executive officer of Lycos Inc., disagrees. What Lycos does
that Alta Vista doesn't is check for relevancy, indexing what it decides are
vital references in documents to screen out irrelevant terms, he said.

Lycos also has a way of indexing binary files -- pictures, audio files, and
others -- that Alta Vista can't. And this week, Lycos' index will include 18.5
million pages. "We're quite a bit large than Alta Vista," Davis said.

A rivalry is brewing. Still, Lycos found some things that Alta Vista didn't and
likewise for Inktomi. The search for the perfect Internet index continues.


E-mail John Byczkowski with questions, comments and suggestions at
[email protected] or [email protected]

        Grumble -- Alta Vista still can't find my external home page
        (on www.tiac.net), whereas Open Text
        (http://www.opentext.com:8080/) and Yahoo (since it uses Open
        Text) can (Lycos can't, however).

        Bob

    re: .181
    
    The spider may have timed out retrieving your page --
    that's what happened just now when I tried to access it.
    tiac seems to be a pretty slow site.
    

    re: 181
    
    I emailed them to complain about the same problem... they said that,
    due to tremendous response, they had fallen behind on updating the
    "system" with new sites.
    
    This would imply that AV is not as automated as we believe.
    
    gc

    Don't know if this has been mentioned before, but I keep getting :
    
    '503 Service Unavailable - The service is too busy to accept your
    request - try again later'
    
    How many concurrent connections are permitted ? Could it be that the
    server will need a bit more oomph to cope with all the demand ?!!
    
    Jamie.

I tried last night and got a message that they were doing another hardware
upgrade and that web searches were unavailable.

I also noted that the owner of www.altavista.com now has a link to
altavista.digital.com.

				Steve

    On Monday, AltaVista reached 3 million hits a day, and denied 11,000
    requests for service due to lack of capacity.  They are now up to
    ten processors, and expect another turbolaser to roll in in about two
    weeks.  They're working like demons over there, so give them
    a break when the service is temporarily down to add additional
    hardware.
    

    They also are scaling back access from within Digital's firewall so 
    external folks will see better performance levels.
    
    I was at our local library last night and one of the librarians
    mentioned how much they enjoy using it. So it seems that we really are 
    doing something that is getting and holding the publics attention, I 
    just hope we can keep the momentum going!
    
    Barry 
     

    re: .187 They also are scaling back access from within Digital's 
    firewall so external folks will see better performance levels.
    
    I'm told that's not correct, no scaling back has taken place.
    

    I hope the powers that be realize that when Clinton signs the
    Telecommunications Reform Bill tomorrow, that material on Alta Vista
    will become illegal in the US.  The part of the bill known as the 
    Communications Decency Act prohibits making "indecent or obscene"
    material available to minors online.  Search for any dirty word or
    phrase you care to on Alta Vista and see what you come up with... 
    
    I'm sure this thing has been debated to death in Soapbox, but the fact
    of the matter is that it passed the house and senate and Clinton will
    sign it into law soon.  When that happens, Alta Vista, and hundreds of
    thousands of other web pages will become illegal under US law.
    
    See www.vtw.org for more info.
    
    -Steve
    
    P.S. I think this bill is ludicrous, and I seriously hope that no one
    in charge of Alta Vista does anything to change it, except for perhaps
    turning the background color to black in protest.
               

    I have been asked to retract the first portion of my reply .187
    All I was doing was repeating a statement I had seen in the Internet_
    Tools notesfile (note 3090) which I'm told is incorrect, we are NOT
    scaling back access to Altavista in any way, shape or form and my
    most sincere apologies go out to anyone and everyone who may of been 
    offended by this statement.
    
    regards,
    
    Barry 
     

    Is there a way to AltaVista from inside *without* going through the
    firewall ?

    No.  But I have no trouble getting at it from New Hampshire.
    
    			Steve

    
    For an interesting and timely Altavista testamonial, see
    
      http://www.socool.com/socool/news/geekref.html
    

	The AltaVista web server is now up to "10 billion words found in
	over 21 million Web pages" according to the latest info. The
	index was rebuilt. I've already found more stuff.

							mike

 The following was extracted from a new magazine publication I received
 the other day called NetGuide (March 1996).  Among other things, they
 have a "Cyberguide" section where they've evaluate various web sites
 and judge "each site on concept, content, presentation and ease of use,
 keeping in mind that Pat Average and Bill Gates have different resources
 to work with."  Five Stars (*****) is listed as: "An exemplary site with
 universal appeal.  Subscribe now!  Go straight to the top of the book-
 mark list!"

 -Andy
                    --------------------------------------

High Flying Computerware
 by -K.S.

Rave reviews for Digital Equipment Corp.'s Alta Vista, a massive Web and
Usenet newsgroup index with a high-performance search engine.  When we
asked fellow NetGuide staffers how they'd rate the site, one enthused, 
"Definitely a five!  I use it ALL the time!"

Alta Vista says it's the largest Web index, cataloging more than 16 
million Web pages and 13,000 newsgroups that are "updated in real time."
To put it to the test, we borrowed a friend with an interest in zeppelins 
images of dirigibles adorn the walls of his bathroom!) and ran a simple
query that produced nearly 10,000 Web documents and 1,000 Usenet postings.
Since we had the Hindenburg in mind - and not Led Zeppelin's "Stairway
to Heaven" - we tailored our search using an advanced query feature.
"Airship AND (zeppelin OR dirigible) AND NOT led" brought our results
down to a more manageable size: 15 Web documents and two Usenet articles,
all relevent.  It helps to read the tips and do a bit of tinkering first.
And one gripe: Only 10 results at a time are shown, even using "compact
form."

AltaVista goes to the top of the bookmark list, indeed - but with search
tools getting ever better, there's always room at the top.

World Wide Web: http://www.altavista.digital.com/

    RE: NETguide:
    
    I was very pleased that they gave Altavista 5 stars too. My only 
    complaint was that there was little fanfare given to Digital for 
    building and providing this service to the net.
    
    And except as the host the Altavista Service itself, Digital wasn't 
    mentioned in any other context.
    
    FLAME ON
    
    I quickly looked in back of the March NETguide and looked up some
    of the Advertizers:
    
     IBM
     AT&T Business networks
     Compuserve
     MCI
     Microsoft
     Lotus Development
    
    Nah... We're not in the same business as these companies so who 
    needs to know that Digital Equipment makes the best Firewalls, 
    Network Tools, Internet Security Tools, Collaberation tools and 
    Fastest Search Engines...
    
    FLAME OFF
    
    What would have been really great is to have an Ad in this month's
    NETguide that talked about all the Internet services Digital
    can provide to our customers...
    
    And just like Altavista... They're all 5 stars...
    
    Hello... Marketing... Hello... Anyone home?
    
    
    John Wisniewski

    I know that this is the wrong string, but since you brought it up we
    could advertise in a LOT of magazines for the price of a few decals in
    Winston Cup racing.
    
    r
    [Sure I'd like to see our name there too, but we've got to walk before
    we can go ffffffffaaaaaaaaaaaasssssstttttttttttt!.]
    
    8^)
    

I noticed this at the bottom of some j-random WWWeb page:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The following text is provided to help Internet search engines locate this 
page more effectively:

travel travel travel travel travel travel travel travel travel travel 
lodging lodging lodging lodging lodging lodging lodging lodging country 
inns country inns country inns country inns country inns bed and breakfast 
bed and breakfast bed and breakfast bed and breakfast bed and breakfast B&B 
B&B B&B B&B B&B B&B rso rso rso rso rso rso hotels hotels hotels hotels 
hotels hotels hotels motels motels motels motels motels motels motels 
accommodations accommodations accommodations accommodations accommodations 
retreats retreats retreats retreats retreats retreats tourism tourism 
tourism tourism tourism tourism tourism tourism USA USA USA USA USA USA USA 
USA USA America America America America America America America Alabama 
Alabama Alabama Alabama Alabama Alabama Alaska Alaska Alaska Alaska Alaska 
Alaska Arizona Arizona Arizona Arizona Arizona Arizona Arkansas Arkansas 
Arkansas Arkansas Arkansas Arkansas California California California 
California California California Colorado Colorado Colorado Colorado 
Colorado Colorado Connecticut Connecticut Connecticut Connecticut 
Connecticut Connecticut Delaware Delaware Delaware Delaware Delaware 
Delaware Delaware Florida Florida Florida Florida Florida Florida Florida 
Georgia Georgia Georgia Georgia Georgia Georgia Hawaii Hawaii Hawaii Hawaii 
Hawaii Hawaii Hawaii Idaho Idaho Idaho Idaho Idaho Idaho Iowa Iowa Iowa 
Iowa Iowa Iowa Illinois Illinois Illinois Illinois Illinois Illinois 
Indiana Indiana Indiana Indiana Indiana Indiana Kansas Kansas Kansas Kansas 
Kansas Kansas Kentucky Kentucky Kentucky Kentucky Kentucky Kentucky 
Louisiana Louisiana Louisiana Louisiana Louisiana Louisiana Maine Maine 
Maine Maine Maine Maine Maryland Maryland Maryland Maryland Maryland 
Maryland Massachusetts Massachusetts Massachusetts Massachusetts 
Massachusetts Massachusetts Michigan Michigan Michigan Michigan Michigan 
Michigan Minnesota Minnesota Minnesota Minnesota Minnesota Minnesota 
Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi Mississippi 
Missouri Missouri Missouri Missouri Missouri Missouri Montana Montana 
Montana Montana Montana Montana Nebraska Nebraska Nebraska Nebraska 
Nebraska Nebraska Nevada Nevada Nevada Nevada Nevada Nevada New Hampshire 
New Hampshire New Hampshire New Hampshire New Hampshire New Hampshire New 
Jersey New Jersey New Jersey New Jersey New Jersey New Jersey New Jersey 
New Mexico New Mexico New Mexico New Mexico New Mexico New Mexico New 
Mexico New York New York New York New York New York New York New York North 
Carolina North Carolina North Carolina North Carolina North Carolina North 
Carolina North Dakota North Dakota North Dakota North Dakota North Dakota 
Ohio Ohio Ohio Ohio Ohio Ohio Oklahoma Oklahoma Oklahoma Oklahoma Oklahoma 
Oklahoma Oregon Oregon Oregon Oregon Oregon Oregon Pennsylvania 
Pennsylvania Pennsylvania Pennsylvania Pennsylvania Pennsylvania Rhode 
Island Rhode Island Rhode Island Rhode Island Rhode Island Rhode Island 
South Carolina South Carolina South Carolina South Carolina South Carolina 
South Carolina South Dakota South Dakota South Dakota South Dakota South 
Dakota South Dakota Tennessee Tennessee Tennessee Tennessee Tennessee 
Tennessee Texas Texas Texas Texas Texas Texas Utah Utah Utah Utah Utah Utah 
Vermont Vermont Vermont Vermont Vermont Vermont Virginia Virginia Virginia 
Virginia Virginia Virginia Washington DC Washington DC Washington DC 
Washington DC Washington DC Washington DC Washington State Washington State 
Washington State Washington State Washington State Washington State 
Washington State West Virginia West Virginia West Virginia West Virginia 
West Virginia West Virginia West Virginia Wisconsin Wisconsin Wisconsin 
Wisconsin Wisconsin Wisconsin Wyoming Wyoming Wyoming Wyoming Wyoming 
Wyoming Fishing Fishing Fishing Fishing Fishing Fishing Golf Golf Golf Golf 
Golf Golf Tennis Tennis Tennis Tennis Tennis Tennis Biking Biking Biking 
Biking Biking Biking Skiing Skiing Skiing Skiing Skiing Skiing Ocean Ocean 
Ocean Ocean Ocean Ocean Mountains Mountains Mountains Mountains Mountains 
Mountains Hiking Hiking Hiking Hiking Hiking Hiking national park national 
park national park national park AAA AAA AAA AAA AAA AAA Mobil Mobil Mobil 
Mobil Mobil Mobil Fodors Fodors Fodors Fodors Fodors Fodors Frommers 
Frommers Frommers Frommers Frommers Frommers Romance Romance Romance 
Romance Romance Romance Romantic Romantic Romantic Romantic Romantic 
Romantic gay lesbian kosher cycling vegitarian children pets japanese 
spanish french italian german handicap wheelchair smoking antiques beach 
horseback riding jacuzzi shopping restaurant tavern huntsville birmingham 
montgomery mobile anchorage fairbanks juneau denali glacier honolulu oahu 
maui kauai volcano hilo phoenix tucson flagstaff grand canyon little rock 
hot springs san francisco los angeles san diego napa valley sacramento lake 
tahoe yosemite monterey san luis obispo denver pueblo rocky mountains 
hartford mystic new haven orlando miami west palm beach cape canaveral cape 
kennedy pennsicola tallahassee gainesville everglades key west fort 
lauderdale jacksonville daytona beach tampa walt disney world disneyworld 
disneyland st.  augustine sea world atlanta olympics savannah appalachian 
boise sawtooth sun valley chicago indianapolis des moines cedar rapids 
wichita topeka kansas city lexington bowling green louisville new orleans 
baton rouge shreveport portland bangor acadia camden baltimore chesapeake 
bay wilmington rehoboth beach boston worcester springfield cape cod 
nantucket martha's vineyard berkshires detroit ann arbor lansing grand 
rapids minneapolis st.  paul jackson gulfport biloxi vicksburg st.  louis 
ozarks billings great falls lincoln las vegas reno hoover dam leake mead 
burlington montpelier rutland manchester nashua green mountains white 
mountains quechee winnipesaukee killington stowe sugarbush waterville 
valley trenton newark atlantic city cape may albany syracuse buffalo 
rochester adirondacks catskills lake placid saratoga long island niagara 
falls finger lakes fire island montauk albuquerque santa fe carlsbad 
caverns aztec ruins bismarck fargo grand forks greensboro winston-salem 
raleigh durham chapel hill fayetteville charlotte blue ridge mountains 
great smoky mountains cape hatteras national seashore toledo akron 
cleveland columbus sea world cincinnati dayton portland eugene ashland 
medford cape perpetua crater lake mt.  hood redwoods pittsburgh allegheny 
philadelphia scranton poconos gettysburg hershey valley forge columbia 
charleston hilton head island savannah spartanburg greenville beaufort 
rapid city sioux falls badlands mount rushmore knoxville nashville 
chattanooga memhis opryland dallas houston san antonio el paso amarillo big 
bend corpus christi austin galveston fort worth the alamo salt lake city 
provo ogden bryce canyon arches zion richmond arlington alexandria roanoke 
charlottesville charelston appomattox harpers-ferry monticello mount vernon 
shenandoah colonial williamsburg seattle tacoma mt.  rainier mt.  st.  
helens madison milwaukee green bay apostle islands casper cheyenne flaming 
gorge devils tower yellowstone

    gross... if this catches on, soon half of the contents are just
    spurious words to increse hit counts...
    

Just thought I would pass this on.  I was talking with a customer several
weeks ago and we started talking about Alta Vista.  He was real enthused
because his 4 year old son had some type of skin condition that was getting
worse, and the medicine he was on wasn't helping.  So on whim, he did a
search on AV and came up with some research paper from some University down
in the Southern United States (he is in Canada).  Seems this paper discussed
some research on his sons condition and recommended some type of prescription
medicine.  So he went back to the doctor with paper in hand.  The doctor was
stunned!  They changed his prescription, and he is doing *much* better.

Brad.

A colleague here has just been diagnosed with a
pituitary tumor. Further tests are starting now but
this person has already collected a wealth of information
from the net via Alta Vista - papers, images, diagrams,
descriptions of all the possible types of tumors and
treatment options, etc.

    Well, I wanted to see what I could find out about the rumoured links
    between "mad cow disease" and organophosphorous pesticides (a family
    friend with a pathology degree who is also a keen gardener says it's
    well known...). Nothing on the Web, but one reference found in News -
    in The Archers newsgroup!

    For the OP link see back issues of 'Private Eye' in the section
    Old Muckspreader.  I believe the Eye is now published on the Net
    but don't know about back issues.
    
    Calvin

    A partner is interested in the architecture of AV, if it's open to be
    integrated in other apps, and if it can be used to search non-Web
    texts. Whom do I have to contact?
    
    Thanks for any hints.
    Hung

    Start with the link in the footnote section of Alta Vista itself,
    "About Us".  It describes the hardware, software, products, and people
    behind the interface.  
    
    DougO

    
    The new CSBU unit is chartered with bringing this technology
    to the market. Till that happens, Digital's SI will be vehicle
    to bring the technology to early adopters. I am managing this (SI)
    engagement. Please send me E-mail describing the opportunity for
    us make a determination.
    
    RV Rao
    
    SI Internet Practice Leader

    I used AltaVista yesterday to search for a news article that AltaVista
    showed in the 25Feb96 Phila Inquirer.  It sent me to a page that told
    me that info was not available.  It asked me to contact them by email.
    This was their reply to my search:
    
    The story you linked to is no longer available on our site.
    Unfortunately, AltaVista makes permanent links to stories that exist
    only temporarily on our site. We're looking into ways to have our
    machine talk to their machine so this will stop happening.
    
    John McQuiggan
    Deputy manager
    Philadelphia Online
    http://www.phillynews.com
    215-854-5002
    
    Seems this must be happening quite often.
    

    re: .207
    
    I don't believe that's correct.  The links seem to just stay in
    place for awhile, as I've seen non-existent links eventually
    disappear.  I don't know how often AV is rebuilding its database.
    

The problem i always have with AltaVista, which by the way i think is "Quite
Good" is shown up if you enter my name (enclosed in quotes) as a search item?

Last time i looked i got around 60 hits but every page of the normal 10 hits
gave around 6-8 duplicates removed, AltaVista has 10 pages of hits but only
displays arond 15-20 hits!

Gerald

Yesterday's WSJ had an another plug for Alta Vista, but with a twist.

Seem that it's becoming fashionable to use Alta Vista to see how many hits 
a person has, as a sign of notoriety, and to brag/ask about it at cocktail 
parties.  It has even been used for background checks.  On woman told of how 
she used Alta Vista to check on a man she had just started dating, and she 
found several entries by him in a foot fetish discussion group.

She dropped him.

there was a thing in the Boston Globe today about yet another search tool
called ALL4ONE (I forget it's URL but you can find it with altavista).  Anyhow,
it takes a query and submits it to altavista, yahoo, web crawler and lycos.  It
brings up 4 panes and put the results in each pane.  kinda interesting but a
very busy display...

-mark

    
    See:
    
      http://www.cnet.com/
    
    Or, more specifically: 
    
      http://www.cnet.com/Content/Reviews/Compare/Search/
    
    C|Net Central (monstrous web site and tv show) compared 19 search
    "tools" recently. Their recommendations:
    
    	MetaCrawler - simultaneously queries Yahoo, Lycos,AltaVista,OpenText 
        	      and then strips out duplicates.
    
    	Yahoo       - "easy to use"
    
    	AltaVista   - Honorable Mention "incredible depth and breadth" and 
    		      "sophisticated search language". 
    
    					
    								- Mac
    	
            

    
    	I just tried out All 4 One, and searched for
    
    	raging slab
    
    	which resulted in AltaVista 10,000, Lycos 3300, Yahoo 1 and
    	WebCrawler 8.
    
    
    	And
    
    	"raging slab"
    
    	netted AltaVista 132, Lycos 19, Yahoo 1 and Webcrawler 8.
    
    	Are we that much better than everybody else?
    

    
    I hope someone has/will nominate AltaVista for the NII awards.
    
    Entry info @ http://www.gii-awards.com
    
    Dan
    
    ----------------
    Sponsored by more than 60 industry, government and community leaders,
    the National Information Infrastructure (NII) Awards recognize innovation 
    and excellence in use of the "Information Highway." 
    
    From electronic commerce, Intranets and telemedicine to community
    networks, educational Web sites and broadband, the NII Awards looks for 
    projects that show the world the power and potential of networked, 
    interactive communications. 
    
    Winners will be featured in TIME Magazine, Business Week, PC Week, Internet 
    World, Web Week, Inter@ctive Week, Network World and other leading 
    publications. All entrants will be featured in an international database 
    and will receive other benefits. 
    
    Early entery:  March 13th,
    Deadline:	   May 1st. 
    

    
    	Interesting little tidbit here:
    
    	Exiting Netscape while in All 4 One, I was asked if I wanted
    	to "close all windows and exit Netscape".  That was the only
    	Netscape window I had open, but for some reason it appears
    	that All 4 One has the appearance of multiple windows.
    

Frames?

/john

    
    	Yeah, it's got 4 frames in it, 1 for each search engine used.
    
    	But why would Netscape think it had multiple windows open?
    

RE: Note 4337.216 by COVERT::COVERT "John R. Covert" >>>

> Frames?

Can you say JAVA?
    
    

Frames don't require Java.

/john

    just curious about compression and alta vista...
    
    can anybody describe how much alta vista uses
    compression techniques? How much trading of CPU time for
    storage space does it do in that regard?
    
    

    
    A summary of search engines in the latest issue of Windows (April 1996,
    Vol. 7 No. 4. page 166) treats AltaVista as "just another search engine",
    says it's "frequently busy" due to overloading during the day, and claims
    that Lycos and OpenText index more pages.
    
    At least it's mentioned...
    
    len.
    

       http://www.cnet.com/Content/Reviews/Compare/Search/altvist.html
    
    "Digital's Alta Vista is a powerful search engine that covers the World 
    Wide Web as well as Usenet newsgroups. Its simple queries are
    remarkably accurate, and its advanced queries offer the impressive
    ability to drill down and uncover exactly what you're looking for." ...
    
    ... and from the comparative reviews section...
    
    http://www.cnet.com/Content/Reviews/Compare/Search/ss3.html
    
    "As the table shows, Alta Vista provides the most powerful search
    capabilities of all the single-search engines we reviewed."
    

    
    Dan, I agree that AltaVista is great, I quoted the Windows magazine
    stuff only to call attention to our inadequate PR; what are the respective
    circulations of Windows Magazine and c|net?
    
    len.
     

    haven't  read all .200    but sitting here listening to PBS debate on
    ARPA INTERNET use.   I've used ALTA VISTA - great engine... 
    
    If a system could (big brother) identify a user (kids still figure out
    their own ways some parents can't.,..)  would there be any benefit 
    to adding classes to the data served?   How does this V-chip work
    anyhow?
    
    It seems there is a common ground between cybersace and realiity still,
    how can Digital and our business partners help accomodate "user based
    internet use.  "
    
    Authentication assumed, should record selection expression always
    take into consideration the user age?   what other classes?
    
    
    

And in case you didn't notice, the Alta Vista machines are now running 
Digital UNIX V4.0 (which has not yet gone to SSB).  V4.0 contains quite
a few speed enhancements which happily benefit Alta Vista.

    Yeah, and it is displaying for the world to see a message that a
    "hardware failure" wiped out the index.  Just what potential customers
    want to see...
    
    				Steve

    Re: .226 for the world to see a message that a "hardware failure" wiped
    out the index.
    
    Incredible.  I left voice mail for the person I know who works
    over there.  They've hired some new people recently, I think
    probably someone is, how shall I say this, not quite up-to-speed.
    

  The problem, of course, isn't the statement. If some major
  piece of functionality (like the index!) vanishes, someone
  is likely to notice, and we ought to offer an explanation.
  (Maybe it could have been spin-doctored better, but we
  ought to offer an explanation.)

  The problem is that the index vanished. Wasn't Alta Vista
  important enough (by now) for Digital to ensure that such
  stuff couldn't occur? Don't we have the technology to ensire
  that such stuff couldn't occur? Doesn't Digital management
  have a clue?

  As usual, we're finding a way to take a massive win and
  turn it into a public embarrassment.

                                   Atlant

    Well, they're using RAID, but probably for performance not data
    preservation.  After all, the data is temporary anyway and can be
    rebuilt (better than before!)  It might not hurt to do snapshots of the
    index and keep them offline in case of problems like this, unless
    rebuilding the index is fast enough.
    
    			Steve

    I was just there and I didn't see any problem with the index.
    
    				-John

 ... I was just wondering, this evening, whether Alta Vista could shed any
 light on an old newspaper tradition I heard of awhile back -- the "Occult
 Hand Society."  It was said to be comprised of all reporters who had managed
 to sneak past their editors the inCREDibly hackneyed phrase "... it was as if
 an occult hand had...".  
    
 "Occult Hand Society" produced no hits.  I guess this society, if it exists,
 hasn't been discussed on the web yet...
    
 "occult hand", on the other hand, produced, as the third hit, a pointer to
 http://grelb.src.gla.ac.uk:8000/~sam/humour/Conspiracy.html
    
 which I began reading with interest...  until I realized that **I'd written
 it MYSELF!** and sent it anonymously to Tom Parmenter's DESPERADO distro
 list, whence someone had extracted it & posted it to alt.folklore.computers
 early in 1995...
    
 I guess I've liked that phrase for awhile... :-)
    

re: .231

I know what you mean.  The first time I tried Altavista I looked
up my own name.  I was amazed (and perhaps a bit concerned) to find
references to things I said in a news group back in 1992.  Apparently
someone had read one of my restaurant reviews and put it on a web
page.  Quite a reminder to be careful what one says on the net. :-)

-Hal

I found archives contining things I wrote in 1986.  Frightening.  (That
they were kept, that is; of course they were still 100% correct, natch!)

___Pete

    I found a months-old article in the library of a local online "real"
    newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News, which included, with credit, a
    recipe I'd posted several years ago to a foodies newsgroup.
                     

.232>  Quite a reminder to be careful what one says on the net. :-)

A friend told me not too long ago that, just for grins, he looked up the
name of a candidate he was scheduled to interview.  The interviewee's name
showed up in a posting someone had made to one of the alt.sex newsgroups....

I never did ask whether that was discussed in the interview.... :-)

    Re: .235
    
    Sounds like an urban legend is being born.  There was a posting to the
    RISKS DIGEST recently by a manager who'd thought of looking up the
    name of someone coming into interview.  Just for grins, the manager
    looked up -his own- -unusual- name, and found a posting by someone of
    the same name to an alt.sex newsgroup.
                             

Well,in one of the earlier searches I did for my somewhat
unusual name I found an alt.sex entry and nearly freaked. 
Turned out to be a a rather lusty poem about the character
from "Sound of Music". :*) Thank God it seems to be gone
now! liesl

    I did a search for my name in Alta Vista. (First and last, in quotes).
    It pointed me to a page that sells sex videos. Seems that someone used
    the same name as mine when they directed one of the videos. (I'd bet
    money that it isn't his real name though!) :-) :-) :-)
    
    Harry
    

    That's just Mother Digital's way of ensuring you NEVER get another job.
    
    :-)
    

    re .238
    
    Oh cmon Harry, you're not asking us to believe that's your real name
    are you? :-)                                               ^^^^
    
    Kevin
    

    Well, that name DOES appear in ELF...

    Re .240 Born with it, live with it. ;-)
    
    Harry
    

         (With thanks to Richard Seltzer for many of these insights)
    
    When I was a kid, I was really interested in Ham Radio.  I thought it
    would be totally cool to browse the world's airwaves and chat with
    folks around the globe.  It seemed so glamorous.  So I slaved over my
    Morse Code and basic FCC and ARRL manuals.  I got my Amateur's License
    and quick took my saved-up allowance and bought a short-wave receiver. 
    Finally, for protracted periods of time, I could actually listen in on
    what was being said -- from the 2-meter band thru the 160-meter bands!! 
    At the same time, I started saving up my allowance & oddjob-earnings so
    I could buy a transmitter.
    
    But -- to my dismay -- the huge majority of the chatter that I recall
    hearing on the ham bands in the late 1950s sounded like this:  "Hello
    -- I receive you 5 by 5 -- I have a Kilowatt Hallicrafters, Model
    KF77G, and a Belden SuperMonstrosity 900Z Rotating Phased-Array
    antenna... the neighbors hate me 'cause I ruin their view off this
    hilltop, and they hear me in their tooth fillings, but the heck with
    them, I'm a DX'er."  Very little about what life was like in the UK, or
    Argentina, or even in Tucson.  No exchange of views on the meaning of
    life, or even politics.
    
    So I gave up being a ham.
    
    When the WWW was young, it was growing explosively.  There was little
    order.  Announcement services (first, NCSA's What's New pages, next
    volitional automated Announcement Directories like Bob Fleischer's
    (still flourishing on our Intranet at
    http://www-ad.mso.dec.com/announce/pa-toc.html ) and
    URLs-placed-into-universal-taxonomy-via-human-wetware systems (e.g.,
    Yahoo!) and simple webcrawlers (like JumpStation and later Lycos) began
    doing their thing.
    
    Before these finder services came into being, folks were beginning to
    despair of a way to bring order to this exponentially growing chaos. 
    Things were getting better...  slowly...
    
    AltaVista Search changed all that -- by what feels to me like at least
    2 orders of magnitude -- by listening to (virtually) EVERYTHING on the
    public Internet.  And indexing every word of it.  And by making the UI
    to that index simple to use, with engaging & clever online HELP.  And
    by having the HW strength and SW elegance and sheer mondo-pipeline-to-
    the-'Net bandwidth to deliver its results with blinding speed.
    
    All of a sudden it was as if something was listening to everything on
    the web AT THE SAME TIME and I could use it find what *I* want.  To
    blow right past the stuff I don't find interesting or exciting.
    
    To automagically winnow -- from the burgeoning mountains of chaff of
    the world's chatter & the terabytes of useless-to-me info -- the stuff
    I want to read, and have time to read.  
    
    To find on the Web what was probably there on the Ham bands, but which
    I could not find on my own.  
    
    For me, AltaVista Search makes the Web what I wanted Ham Radio to be,
    but which the Web was in danger of losing because of its own success.
                                                   

    Carl Sagan and other astronomers/cosmologists have, for the past few
    decades, been developing more and more sophisticated systems to scan
    the universe at all possible frequencies that can penetrate Earth's
    atmosphere, and to record as much as possible of what's out there, and
    to search for something exciting -- non-random noise.  (Of course, they
    have to rule out periodicity from rotating black-holes, but let's not
    fall down THAT rat-hole for this analogy).  They call this sort of
    research SETI -- the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.
    
    Every time they have the funding, they add more & larger antennas in
    more places on the Earth, more computers with more sophisticated
    signal-processing technology, and they hone their heuristic algorithms
    to discriminate better between "natural" events and those that might be
    caused by the electronic emissions from some sort of civilization
    (_pace_ those who say that we cannot envision all the signals that
    totally alien civilizations might emit).
    
    You can see where this is going...  SETI researchers listen ACROSS AS
    MANY FREQUENCIES AS POSSIBLE in AS MANY DIRECTIONS AS POSSIBLE for AS
    MUCH TIME AS POSSIBLE and LOOK FOR "EXCITING INFORMATION" amidst a
    literal UNIVERSE of "non-exciting" stuff, and REMEMBER WHERE THEY WERE
    POINTING THEIR ANTENNAS when they heard the good stuff, AND WHEN IT WAS
    that they heard it, so they can REDIRECT THE ATTENTION of the HUMAN
    BEINGS who use the system to WHENCE THE EXCITING STUFF COMES.
    
    AltaVista Search is DIGITAL's Search for Exciting Text on the Internet.
                                                                 

    You're on a roll, Dan.  Stay up late more often ;-).
    
    DougO

    Tnx, DougO.  The cool thing is, I have a homey example of just how true
    .243 and .244 are for me, that I'm working up to shareable format.  I
    just ran outta steam last nite.  :-)
    
    Though it's a bit antisocial in DECnotes intranettiquette, and to
    maintain the numerical continuity of this narrative, I'll glom note
    4227.247 in this string and replace it later today (time permitting)
    with a pointer to my homey little example.
    

                 http://www.ljo.dec.com/IBG/people/kalikow/seti/
      :-)
    

    re .247
    
    That short musical essay was beautiful, brought tears to my eyes.

re Note 4337.243 by DRDAN::KALIKOW:

>     AltaVista Search changed all that -- by what feels to me like at least
>     2 orders of magnitude -- by listening to (virtually) EVERYTHING on the
>     public Internet.  And indexing every word of it.  

        How long can this be kept up?

        It seems unlikely that one system, no matter how large we try
        to make it, can contain *ALL* of the information on *EVERY*
        other web server for very long (assuming continued vitality
        of the Web and the internet).

        Bob

<<< Note 4337.249 by LGP30::FLEISCHER "without vision the people perish"
                     -< isn't a "crash" to come some day? >-
    
>       How long can this be kept up?
>
>       It seems unlikely that one system, no matter how large we try
>       to make it, can contain *ALL* of the information on *EVERY*
>       other web server for very long (assuming continued vitality
>       of the Web and the internet).
>
>       Bob
    
    An excellent point.  One that occurred to me (and I assume to ISBU
    Mgmt before me) when I heard that they'd decided to assign a central
    role to the AltaVista Search engine in ISBU's future plans.  I'm
    assuming that we've decided, as a matter of corporate policy, to apply
    Whatever It Takes to keep that site useful to the planet.  This means
    expanding it as far as is reasonable, and when a point of max capacity
    is reached, to start diluting its coverage in some graceful &
    predictable way.  Possibly restricting one instantiation to a given
    IP-domain geograpy or suchlike.
    
    One can only hope that the web grows that fast.  Is disk and memory and
    net bandwidth and CPU dropping in price faster than the Web's growing? 
    Your point is that the Web'll outstrip them.  Great!!
    
    
    
    

    Hopefully, with Tru-Cluster, new memory boards and new CPUs 
    we can grown Altavista to meet demands.
    

re Note 4337.251 by WOTVAX::HILTON:

>     Hopefully, with Tru-Cluster, new memory boards and new CPUs 
>     we can grown Altavista to meet demands.
  
        But, also hopefully, if Tru-Cluster and the Web are both
        successful, a number of those web sites owned by media
        conglomerates (or government publications offices)
        conceivably could be equally large -- that's my point.

        Bob

    ... and then they'll ALL want AltaVista Searchers for their Intranets,
    and we'll have to design cooperating public-internet AltaVista
    Searchers that do a mind-meld somewhere...  and sell THOSE to the
    GPO's... and we'll get rich beyond the dreams of avarice... :-)
    

    You ever hear of the recent play "Six Degrees of Separation?"  One of
    its central notions is the well-known factoid that you can almost
    always...
    
    Well, why should I try to remember it right, or to say it myself...?
    
    http://www.altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=q&what=web&fmt=.&q=
    %22six+degrees+of+separation%22
    
    Hit #8 of ~500 --
    
    http://www.uccs.edu/~mzcarpio/sixdegr.html
    
         "There is a theory that everyone can be linked by 6 degrees of
         separation. That is to say, between any two people, the first
         person knows someone who knows someone who knows the other person,
         within six people. 
    
         For example, between you and me, someone I work with, could be
         related to someone, that went to college with someone, who knows
         someone who they befriended on vacation at the camp site next to
         them, who is a childhood friend of someone that knows you."
    
    Thing is, AltaVista Search **itself** reduces the number of "clicks"
    between me any any web-pages in which I'm interested from indefinitely
    large to finitely small.  Rather than having to surf aimlessly, I just
    start at Digital's AltaVista Search site...
    
    :-) 
    

    You remember the old saw to the effect of "The sum of all human
    knowledge is typed into USENET... about every two weeks?"
    
    Well, with AltaVista Search, you have a far better chance of LOCATING
    the bit of it that you want...
    
    Oh and BTW, I realized that I missed part of my own point in .254!  Not
    only does AV Search connect you efficiently with other WEB-pages of
    interest to you...  it also, as demonstrated MANY times, actually makes
    connections with other PEOPLE directly.  Eliminate the 5 middlemen!
    
    :-)
    

  On the other hand, while I now routinely joke about "consulting
  the Great Oracle AltaVista" whenever I need a fact, there are,
  provably, things AltaVista, the Web, and Usenet do *NOT* know
  about. It isn't quite the sum total of human knowledge that's
  typed into the 'net every two weeks, it's more like "everything
  of interest to computer types plus a smattering of other stuff".
  (My "interesting rathole" detector just went off!)

  I look forward to the day when the sum total of human knowledge
  really *IS* accessible through search engines such as AV.

                                   Atlant

    True, Atlant.  I'd best have my hyperbolometer recalibrated. :-)
    

Yet I am often astonished to see what obscure piece of knowledge is easily
located with AltaVista (and what strange other things I find while doing
the search).

				Steve

re .254 (As if any anecdotal evidence were needed)

I did a search on my father's/grandfather's name. I found my grandfather's 
name in one of the indexes to the correspondence archives of 
geologist Francis Shepard (archives are at Scripps Institute of 
Oceanography). Apparently, Grandpa--a mining engineer and rockhound--wrote 
at least two letters back in the 40's or 50's to Shepard.

Elsewhere, a friend and neighbor is the son of the late Robert Dietz, 
geologist and oceanographer (archives soon to be at SIO), whose professor, 
mentor, and best friend was...Francis Shepard.

    I just got to take some off-site training regarding the Internet.
    AltaVista was outstanding (maybe a little bias here).  We also used
    Yahoo and several others I won't name (if you can't say anything
    nice, etc.) ;-)
    
    Try as I might though, I never did find DRDAN on his surfboard ;-)
    

    Check out THEBAY::JOYOFLEX 788.68, a farewell note from one Brian
    Patman, a gem of a fellow who left DIGITAL in 1991 to work at Lloyds of
    London.  I'd never met him in person, but he could write the BEST
    limericks (and worse) that I've ever seen.  After he left, I lost track
    of him...  and when AltaVista Search came up worldwide, I looked in
    vain for traces of his name on the 'Net.  I just did it again, and also
    came up blank.  The following note explains why.
    
    This afternoon, I wrote THEBAY::JOYOFLEX 788.90 ...
    
    Hey, this thing works both ways!!
    
    If you've never visited that file, be forewarned.  It's a den of those
    who like to play with words.  Puns, and worse...  If you want to see
    what happened and not add JOYOFLEX to your NOTES$NOTEBOOK, then
    
    Notes> open/nonotebook thebay::joyoflex 788.98
    
    will do ya.
    
    Enjoy,
    
    Dan$off_to_an_happy_cyber-reunion!
    

        In its recent article on the Internet and online services,
        Consumer Reports had a sidebar listing four or five
        noteworthy and useful web sites.  AltaVista was one of them.

        Bob

    Just got wind of a p�an of praise to AltaVista Search Service in the
    May issue of BOSTON Magazine.  Title something like "DEC Deals an Ace"
    (-:take that, brand-folk:-)...  It's said to read something like "I and
    millions of others hated DEC because they stranded us with the Rainbow
    PC...  But now I've found AltaVista, DEC is virtually godlike once
    more."  
    
    Details!!!!  :-)
    
    
    

> "I and millions of others hated DEC because they stranded
> us with the Rainbow PC...

  "Millions?" We sold *THAT* many Rainbows? Wow! :-)

                                   Atlant

	Geez, when are people going to get over the friggin Rainbow.
	That was eons ago. It was a great machine for what it did. I
	owned one for a few years. But that was what, 12 years ago?
	How many people were stranded with Trash-80's? How many people
	were stranded with IBM PC Jr.'s?? How many people feel stranded
	with a 286/386/486 lately? 

	Like the Eagles said, "Get over it!"

							mike

    Node Volatile Summary as of  1-MAY-1996 14:39:18
    
        Node           State      Active  Delay   Circuit     Next node
                                  Links
    
     6.197 (TRS80)                                MNA-0       
    

>    Node Volatile Summary as of  1-MAY-1996 14:39:18
>         Node           State      Active  Delay   Circuit     Next node
>                                  Links
>     6.197 (TRS80)                                MNA-0       
    
Which, by the way is on my OSF "clump", which is served
by SEGFLT (Segmentation Fault.)  Appropriate, perhaps?

     The May '96 issue of Internet World has a benchmark of the major search 
sites. Their findings are:

     Most Relevant Results: Infoseek Guide
     Most Comprehensive Results: AltaVista

     There are more details on the benchmark in that article...

-Jk

    Most relevant vs. most comprehensive?

    talk about vague.

re Note 4337.270 by POLAR::RICHARDSON:

>     Most relevant vs. most comprehensive?
>   
>     talk about vague.
  
        I suspect that these are informal equivalents to the classic
        measures of text retrieval performance, precision and recall.

        "Recall" measures the extent to which you get all the
        possibly relevant documents, and "precision" measures the
        extent to which you weren't presented with documents that
        actually had no relevance.

        Bob

		   Tasty Bits from the Technology Front
                 To read this issue of TBTF on the Web see
         <http://www.atria.com/~dawson/tbtf/archive/05-12-96.html>

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

<some articles deleted here>

||| Ultraseek |||

According to a story on page 3 of the current Internet Week (subscribers-only
URL not supplied), Digital's Alta Vista was being entirely too successful for
Sun's taste. The search engine had garnered rave reviews since its introduc-
tion in 12/95 [5]. It kept winning prizes, such as "Best Search Engine" in
the C/Net Awards for Internet Excellence [6]. It routinely harvested fav-
orable press ink for Digital and for the Alpha chip technology on which Alta
Vista is built. Sun's own UltraSparc technology could use that kind of ex-
posure, Sun reckoned; so last January Sun asked Infoseek (the first Internet
search company): please build an Alta Vista killer.

The result is Ultraseek [7]. It won't open up to the public until June and
the advance access granted to the press is hampered by a test database of
limited size -- so adjust your PR filter accordingly.

Ultraseek runs on a single Sun Microsystems Ultra Enterprise 4000 server
and claims a speed up to 1000 transactions per second. Infoseek says that
Ultraseek's speed advantage over other search engines grows wider the larger
the database and the more complex the query. Using patented technology lic-
enced from Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Infoseek claims query perfor-
mance will go down by a factor of only 10 for each 1000-fold increase in
database size.

The Alta Vista search site is currently handling in the neighborhood of 10
million hits per day. Assuming that a third of these hits are search re-
quests, the Ultraseek engine could process these 3+ million transactions
in about an hour. This BOTEC suggests that Ultraseek may have a raw capac-
ity tens of times greater than that of Alta Vista today.

[5]  <http://www.atria.com/~dawson/tbtf/archive/12-18-95.html>
[6]  <http://www.cnet.com/Content/Features/Special/Awards/ss5.html>
[7]  <http://www.ultraseek.com/>

- - - - - - - - - - - -

<some articles deleted here>

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
TBTF alerts you weekly to bellwethers in computer and communications tech-
nology, with special attention to commerce on the Internet. See the archive
at <http://www.atria.com/~dawson/tbtf/>. To subscribe send the message
"subscribe" to [email protected]. Commercial use prohibited. For
non-commercial purposes please forward and post as you see fit.
______________________________________________________
Keith Dawson   [email protected]   [email protected]
Layer of ash separates morning and evening milk.

>Ultraseek runs on a single Sun Microsystems Ultra Enterprise 4000 server
>and claims a speed up to 1000 transactions per second. Infoseek says that
>Ultraseek's speed advantage over other search engines grows wider the larger
>the database and the more complex the query. Using patented technology lic-
>enced from Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Infoseek claims query perfor-
>mance will go down by a factor of only 10 for each 1000-fold increase in
>database size.

interesting, especially since they don't say what the size of the DB was that
they did the 1000/sec against.  If it was indeed 1000th the size of something
that would be of production size, we're already down to 100/sec.

just for grins, does anyone have any info on how AV scales against DB size?
have we published the max tps for AV?

-mark

    >The Alta Vista search site is currently handling in the neighborhood of 10
>million hits per day. Assuming that a third of these hits are search re-
>quests, the Ultraseek engine could process these 3+ million transactions
>in about an hour. This BOTEC suggests that Ultraseek may have a raw capac-
>ity tens of times greater than that of Alta Vista today.

    Unless 10 Million hits is all Alta Vista can handle, this seems to be 
    misleading.  

    What is BOTEC?

    -Bruce    

> What is BOTEC?

  Back-Of-The-Envelope-Calculation, that is, a quick calculation
  hastily scrawled on any available scrap of paper.

                                   Atlant

    I would really like to have an Alta Vista tee shirt, one with the color
    logo.  
    
    Is there such a thing yet?  Have you ever seen one?
    
         

    hmmm, who's the Land's End fella?

    Land's End fella - Fred Dryer?
    

    
    	Was he the 1 who played "Hunter"?
    

    Thank you for the Land's End suggestion, but I'm thinking more "low
    end" than they would probably provide for Digital: I'm picturing a nice
    inexpensive tee shirt with the AltaVista logo on it, big and bold, with
    the colors as you see on the web page.
    
    Such a thing just MUST exist, don't you think?   I just know that there
    is a stack of these somewhere in the world.  And if there isn't, there
    should be!

    I can get you one.
    
    All I need is camera ready art work that can be used to duplicate the
    logo on the shirt.  My husband is in this business - I would like one
    for my customers, so if you get me the artwork, I'll give you one of
    the shirts for your effort.
    
    What do you think?

    
    	I think you could get in trouble for doing something like that,
    	if Digital would rather their trademarked/copyrighted logo not
    	be used on shirts.
    

I'm interested in AltaVista T-shirts, baseball caps, badges etc.. Shout 
when we have them!

Dave.

	Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Check out Weird Al
	Yankovic's new home page. 

	http://www.epix.net/~lexf/al.html

								mike

    It's not just imitation ... he's using a real link to Alta Vista.

    
    Cute sig ...
    
>From: [email protected] (Sam Nelson)
>Newsgroups: comp.security.misc,comp.os.vms
>Date: 15 May 1996 12:13:04 GMT
  :
 <snip>
  :
>Sam.                                 (Insert bandwidth-wasting disclaimer here)
>      If all you have is AltaVista, everything looks like a web-search...

    fwiw,
    	Hein.

    
        I almost drove off the road today when I heard Imus in the
        morning on WEEI clumsily trying to pitch Altavista after the
        Altavista ad aired.  But then again, this is a great leap for a
        Digital product to get such air time. 8-)

I guess if IBM can get Howard Stern to push OS/2, then I guess it is only 
fair the have Imus to promote Alta Vista!


							-Paul

         Loudmouth self-promoting iconoclastic USA talk-show host.
    
    imho of course... :-)
    

re .-1

However, I suspect the demographics of his audience are right in line with 
where we should be directing our ads.  And I believe his audience is quite 
large.

    A-haa, I see you don't disagree with my characterization...  
    
    As I also don't disagree with YOUR point! :-)
    

Yet another national Talk show host is doing ads.  After the
regular ad ran on his show, they had a 30 second spot with Tom
talking about how great Alta Vista is.  

    The May issue of Computer Shopper, in the Tech section, had a nice
    quote:  "Alta Vitsa makes the rest of the pack look like, well, a
    bunch of yahoos".

    
    	Now THAT'S gonna leave a mark.
    

My immediate and favourite answer to anyone asking me, "What is..?", "Where can 
I..?", "How do I..?", "Do you know ..?" is,


	"Have you searched through Altavista [today] ?"

-Jk

    Who he, what his show about, pls?
    

    So doesn't this product deserve a tee shirt?
    
    No one has ever made an authorized tee shirt?
    
    Sounds like they'd be very popular, and they could have the URL and
    everything... 
    
    I just know this thing exists.  

Have you seen the AltaVista badges? They are great. I managed to get one 
but gave it away to a VAR exhibitor at an Internet show so he could wear it. 
Imagine if all Digital and channel partners wore these at exhibitions and 
seminars... Imagine kids wearing them...Imagine car stickers...mouse 
mats...pens...

Where's my t-shirt?

Dave ;-)

    I hate to sound negitive, BUT, there does seem to be a downside to
    Alta Vista.  That's the time required to get new data or change old
    stuff.  We're talking about data being 4-8 weeks stale; we're talking
    4-8 weeks after submitting a new URL for Alta vista to visit the site.
    
    Well folks, there's a whole lot of other servers that have
    fresher data.
    
    Imagine your company is a stadum with 100,000 guests.  One of them has
    dropped dead.  you have 8 weeks to find him.
    [spoof of current Atla vista ad]
    I did write to the Alta visa folks a while back.  They had said they
    ran out of storage, but that in days they were doubling the size of
    the site.
    It won't take the press too long to jump on the fact that while it can
    give search results very fast, the data it acts on is very outdated.
    

Wasn't Tom Leykis a Boston-area talk show host who was fired for some
unsavory behavior (wife-beating or some such)?

 Yes.  Apparently he had over consumed alcoholic beverages at a WRKO
 Christmas party and upon returning home became violent.  He continued
 at the station, though sponsors began to pull their ads from his show
 and he was given the boot.


 He now has a syndicated show from LA.



 Jim

    Alta Vista is an absolutely great product that most of my customers are
    viewing as a sign of a revived Digital and a testimonial to Alpha.
    
    I'm not suggesting to change its name.  Having said that, I was with
    some customers yesterday (Polycenter Assetworks friendly) and was
    responding to their questions about the impact of the Digital/CA
    alliance.  Clearing up some misinformation about the "ownership" of
    PAWs, I told them that the product was renamed "AltaVista Manager for
    Backoffice".
    
    They *all* laughed.  In explaining the "AltaVista" family of connectivity
    products as a reason for the name change I asked what they would call
    the former Assetworks.
    
    One guy immediately quipped that AltaVista EGS would sound better
    ("Extremely Good S***") and is easier to verbalize :^)!
    
    bt
    

I was at some page the other night, and one of those annoying advertisement
panels popped up, advertising Lycos.

It claimed to have indexed more than twice as many pages as AltaVista...

Could this be true?  
Does someone need to address this?

JPB

>    I hate to sound negitive, BUT, there does seem to be a downside to
>    Alta Vista.  That's the time required to get new data or change old
>    stuff.  We're talking about data being 4-8 weeks stale; we're talking
>    4-8 weeks after submitting a new URL for Alta vista to visit the site.

once again we have more dis-information in the system as I know for a fact not 
all of AV data is that old, at least newsgroups aren't.  I regularly search on
my son's name to see what he's up to and find entries no more than a a day or
two old. 

perhaps someone in the know could give us more specifics here...

-mark

    re .306, Mark,
    I don't know how you can call it disinformation?  I have a memo from
    the Alta Vista group explaining their problem.  I have information on
    URLs submitted to Alta Vista that were not [yet, weeks later] never
    hit.
    

>    I don't know how you can call it disinformation?  I have a memo from
>    the Alta Vista group explaining their problem.  I have information on
>    URLs submitted to Alta Vista that were not [yet, weeks later] never
>    hit.
    
I read your message again and I guess I misinterpretted it.  sorry about that...

it sounds like you're saying when specific URL's are submitted it can take a
looong time to get into the index.  When I read it I thought you were saying the
indexing process was 4-8 weeks behind.  oops...

-mark

    re: .305
    
    I believe Lycos counts URLs they've found referenced (and many of these
    are actually aliases for the same host/page like www.digital.com and
    www.dec.com). They may have the title of the page or the anchor text
    for the reference, but have not indexed the contents of the page
    itself.
    
    On the other hand, I believe AltaVista counts pages it has actually
    visited and whose contents it has indexed.
    
    There was a little treatise I ran across on one of the major search
    engines' main pages called "Truth in counting" or something like that.
    Might have been Excite or Inktomi.
    
    -Tom   

The following is extracted (ironically, as you may see) from an online
Macintosh-oriented netzine called TidBITS (issue #333, 17 June 1996).
Permission to post is appended.

Question for discussion - would the author of this posting also like to be able
to have the New York Times purge its database and archives of a similarly 
embarrassing letter to the editor that might have been published years
earlier?  And from the all the libraries who keep the NYT?

- tom]
================================================================================

UberVista is Watching You!
--------------------------
   Kirk McElhearn <[email protected]>

  I was recently attracted by yet another spider crawling around the
  Web, called AltaVista. Since a big problem on the Internet is
  finding what one is looking for, it is always a plus to find a
  big, fast search engine. AltaVista is such a search engine,
  another of the many like InfoSeek, Lycos, Excite and all the rest.
  The difference with AltaVista is its power, and the claim that it
  covers more than thirty million Web pages. I tried it out.

<http://www.altavista.digital.com/>

  At the time, I had only been prowling around on the net for about
  two months. I had my own home page, and some other work present at
  different sites. I wanted to see how much of a trace I had left,
  and was curious if there were other people with my name out there.
  What I found surprised me. My family is small, and my last name,
  McElhearn, is uncommon. So I started by entering my name into
  AltaVista's search form, and prepared myself for about 30 seconds
  of waiting.

  First surprise: It did not take 30 seconds, more like 5.

  Second surprise: There were 32 occurrences of my name. If you have
  been leaving tracks on the Web for years, you may think 32
  occurrences isn't that many. After I posted a message about this
  to the Future Culture mailing list, some other people on the list
  tried it, and came up with numbers far higher than mine: hundreds,
  even thousands. But, as a net novice, I was surprised by my 32
  occurrences.

<http://futurec.xtc.net/>

  Out of the 32 occurrences, 30 were about me, and two were about
  other people with the same last name (maybe cousins?), one of whom
  won a high school shot put championship. The rest pointed to me,
  all right, from a letter of mine published in the second issue of
  Wired, to posts to the Info-Mac digest, to my home page, to my
  essay for the 24 Hours of Democracy project, and more.

  Well, at first I though that was pretty cool. After all, don't our
  genes want to makes sure we leave our marks on the planet? But the
  more I think about it, the more I think that a Pandora's box is
  being opened. The best way to describe AltaVista is by using the
  words of the company behind it:

  "AltaVista is the result of a research project started in the
  summer of 1995 at Digital's Research Laboratories in Palo Alto,
  California. By combining a fast Web crawler with scalable indexing
  software, the team was able to build a large index of the Web in
  the Fall of 1995.

  "After two months of internal testing, we produced an even larger
  index consisting of the full text of over 16,000,000 pages. We
  made the site public on the 15th of December 1995. Within three
  weeks of launch, we were handling over two million HTTP requests
  per day."

  The Web Indexer, the most powerful part of the setup, is an
  AlphaServer 8400 5/300, with 6 GB of memory, and 10 processors.
  Digital claims that the server handles most requests in less than
  a second.

  This is only a part of the picture. Another server handles the
  hits and requests, and a news server maintains a current news
  spool for the News Indexer, which dynamically updates the database
  of newsgroup articles. So, AltaVista is trying to be a repository
  of, more or less, everything that goes through the Web and Usenet,
  which means a lot of email is there because their robots index
  archived mailing lists.

  The whole thing has awesome power. Given the growth of the
  Internet and available processing power, AltaVista should be able
  to keep up with the traffic and provide this service for a long
  time.

  I say, "mind your own business."

  I mentioned my experiment to fellow members of a Mac users' group.
  One of them, a techie with pocket protectors, expressed awe at the
  power. Another was amazed at the nosiness of the machine, the fact
  that it didn't respect privacy. What about privacy?

  When I subscribe to a mailing list, no one asks if I have given up
  the rights to use my posts for any reason. Although my words are
  public (but only in a limited sense; that is, to those who are
  also subscribed) I might not want them to be at the disposition of
  any robot around. After all, Digital never asked if they could use
  my material to show off their computers (because the goal of the
  operation strikes me as just that: advertising for the powerful
  computers Digital makes). And what about my rights? Here in
  France, everyone has a legal right to verify and modify any
  information concerning them that is kept in any database. I wonder
  how Digital would react if I asked them to remove some of my posts
  from its database? Or if I wanted to exercise my right to the
  copyrights on those words?

  Many people contrast electronic information and communication with
  books, saying that books are permanent, but electronic information
  is not. I think AltaVista exemplifies just how permanent such
  information can be. Not only does it float around in the
  Internet's ether, but it is also indexed in a database where
  someone can easily fish for it.

  The danger of this is obvious. Let us say that I have been posting
  to the alt.sex.minerals newsgroup, talking about how I like to do
  it with pumice. In ten years, if my wife wants a divorce, she can
  hire a bot to snoop around and find that post, along with others,
  and get child support, keep me away from the kids - the whole nine
  yards.

  Or what about a young hacker, who later grows up and runs for
  political office? Another party may find it useful to learn he was
  spouting anarchist ideas in his youth. He will not be able to say
  he did not inhale.

  Many of us have ideas that we later renounce, but when the words
  are there in black and bits, it is hard to place the necessary
  distance between the us-then and the us-now.

  What to do about it?

  It seems difficult to control this kind of snooping. Companies
  will make money from our words just as they always have. And the
  search engine is useful to those seeking information. But the
  danger is real, and it is right around the corner. I am not a
  Luddite clamoring for a return to the dark ages; I think the
  Internet will change the way our future happens. But we must be
  aware of the dangers, and react accordingly.

  The first thing is to demand that we be able to strike from the
  record anything that we no longer want available. We should have
  the right to filter what is made available in this manner. No one
  has the right to exploit our words without our permission. While
  AltaVista is not financially exploiting them, it is using them to
  advertise, which I see as being much the same thing.

  [Over a month ago, I sent email to AltaVista inquiring about their
  policy for removing people from its database, but I have not
  received a response. Kirk has also sent a draft of this article to
  Digital, and he has received no response. AltaVista has an
  extensive disclaimer which states in part: "In general, Digital
  believes that persons who make information available on the World
  Wide Web or in newsgroups do so with the expectation that such
  information will be publicly and widely available. Digital further
  believes that its making newsgroup postings and links to publicly
  accessible Web pages available at this site is legally permissible
  and consistent with the common, customary expectations of those
  who make use of the Web and Usenet communications media." -Tonya]

  The second thing is to be aware that someone is listening, and
  that whatever we say publicly on the Net will be stored. Even in
  private email, encryption is perhaps the only way to keep our
  communications safe from wandering eyes. Of course, this is not
  possible in every part of the world. Countries such as Iran and
  France can put you in jail for using encryption.

  Don't forget, the walls have ears.

  P.S.: When I wrote this text, in March, I found 32 occurrences of
  my name. The last time I checked, there were 78.


$$

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 -------------------------------------------------------------------

    If you're afraid of the technology, then stay away from it I say.

    re .311
    
    You make a BIG mistake !! Technology COULD be fantastic... it depends
    how it's used !!! And I say that technology *MUST NOT* be a mean to
    have acces to any data which involves PERSONAL informations.
    Think about Human rights !!
    A dictature may start like that.. don't forget as you could be involved
    as a victim, later... but it'll be too late. Look in some other
    countries how is use the 'technology' against people rights
    
    Conclusion: don't confuse Technology and Use of technology. There is
    a *BIG* difference.
    

    I'm a lot more worried about Lexis-Nexis which provides people's
    home addresses, etc. to any subscriber than I am about AltaVista.
     

>>>    I'm a lot more worried about Lexis-Nexis which provides people's
>>>    home addresses, etc. to any subscriber
     
    http://www.switchboard.com provides name, address and telephone number
    of 90 million names and 10 million business.  No subsrciption is needed
    -- unless you would like to provide them with  even *more* information.


    							-Paul

    re: .314
    
    Switchboard will remove your info if you ask them.  Lexis-Nexis
    won't and, until recently, was even including people's Social
    Security numbers.
    

    re: If you're afraid of the technology, then stay away from it I say
    
    Don't stay away, but respect it and understand the implications of
    its (mis)use.
    
    My name?  MadMike Age: 21+ maybe
    My Address: General Delivery.
    Cars: None.  Wife/husband: none, children: none
    Salary: $5.00
    Hobbies: Breathing
    May we send you more info?  No.
    
    {thank you for taking our survey}
    

    
    re: If you're afraid of the technology, then stay away from it I say
    
    Or make it work your way.
    
    According to c|Net's recent article on privacy (see http://www.cnet.com)
    you need only put the following at the top of your USENET postings to
    prevent Altavista and other spiders from adding your post to the 
    catalog:
    
    				x-no-archive:yes
    
    								- Mac

    RE: last.
    
    That only applies to well-behaved spiders; any organisation with
    sinister motives could ignore that flag...
    
    Cheers, Laurie.

    This counter-argument may only be a fig-leaf, Laurie -- but if
    AltaVista's spider IS well-behaved, and if other publicly-available
    spiders are, and if the characteristic of such spiders is that they
    maintain long archives of news postings that have long since fallen off
    the edge of lesser disk-storage systems -- then to me it is less likely
    that some unscruplous divorce lawyer could get his hands on the
    hypothetical "I like to do it with pumice" posting simply because some
    putative organisation with sinister motives putatively is ignoring that
    flag.  How would said lawyer access said system, and prove the
    existence of said pumice-pounding-posting?
    
    (Loved that metamorphic-metaphor, btw)
                                

And I think our dear DrDan has fallen off the edge at last. :*)
liesl (who also adores alliteration)

    :^)

  Don't I get any credit for alliteratively linking petrology wiv linguistics?
  

    Last night (19th June 1996) the Nightly Business Report did a
    short piece on Yahoo!, the company that recently went public and saw
    massive demand for its shares -- instantly making multimillionares
    out of the two ~25-year-old founders. (Good for them!)
    
    It was mentioned in passing that Yahoo! already has a number of
    competing companies "such as Lycos and AltaVista".
    
    Now there IS a software company named AltaVista, but they don't compete
    with Yahoo! And last I checked they were nice enough to include a
    pointer to the AltaVista search engine from their homepage. But they
    -aren't- the company NBR reported as competing with Yahoo!
    
    Digital is a -sponsor- of Nightly Business Report, and they can't even
    get our name right.
    
    Any bets on the likelihood of a correction?
    
      John

It's obvious that the plan is to change our company name to AltaVista,
given our recent product naming changes.

At the last DECUS, I got a laugh out of the audience by putting up a slide
for my talk saying:

		Introducing AltaVista OpenFortran


				Steve

re: .324

>It's obvious that the plan is to change our company name to AltaVista,
>given our recent product naming changes.

Even taking the invisible smilies on this comment into account, there is
something about this whole approach that should cause people to be concerned.
As Alan Martin (i think it was /ahm, that is) said in the Marketing notesfile,
this concept of diluting a unique and successful product name by attaching
it onto everything else in sight is called "line extension".  Pick up Ries
and Trout or some other intelligent Marketing book and you'll see lots of
warnings about how this can backfire (with case histories).

Do we have ANY grasp of Marketing in this company?

:-(  paul

Re: .325

That last was a rhetorical question, I presume.  Most everyone reading
here knows that the answer is "negatory".

				Steve

    
    Re .last - Steve,
    
    Yea...most everyone reading here knows the answer is "negatory", but to 
    quote from the Harry Copperman ABU/SBU Integration memo:
    
    	"In today's market, it isn't enough to have great products, 
    	great people and great marketing --  we've proven we can do that."
    
    So it looks like the people that really matter don't know it!!
    
    					Ed
    
    

    re: .323
    
    I saw the NBR this morning and had the exact same comment as .323
    
    Additionally, the tag line "Whatever it Takes" on our logo
    just doesn't make it.  I know this has been discussed at
    length so just add me to the current tag line opposition FWIW.
    The only time our customers mention "Whatever it Takes" in my
    experience has been when they want us to belly up with more than
    our fair share of effort or margin contribution to a deal.
    
    Back to AltaVista....
    
    I wonder if anyone ever considered AlphaVista for the product
    line name.  Does that seem to make sense to anyone else?
    

The thing is that Yahoo and AltaVista aren't competitors.

Yahoo consists of a bunch of people who catalogue and organise Web sites so you 
can find things in a nice structured manner.

AltaVista is a search engine that builds and uses an indexed database so you can 
search for things in an unstructured manner.

They complement each other nicely.

PJDM

>The thing is that Yahoo and AltaVista aren't competitors.

According to the syndicated NPR show "Real Computing" (nee "Software Hardtalk")
with John C. Dvorak, which I heard last night, Yahoo and Digital have an
agreement wherein Yahoo will incorporate AltaVista technology into the
functioning of their site. 

I was also stunned to hear them report that HP has announced the "fastest
workstation in the world."  They explicitly stated, and it was reported as news
rather than as "HP claimed," that the cpu was faster than Digital's Alpha.

    The *non-shipping* 180MHz PA-8000 CPU has a higher SPECfp95 rating than
    the *shipping* 400MHz Alpha 21164.  But the Alpha has a higher
    SPECint95 number than the HP chip.  So who's faster?

re .-1

>                         -< D*mn lies and statistics? >-
>
>    The *non-shipping* 180MHz PA-8000 CPU has a higher SPECfp95 rating than
>    the *shipping* 400MHz Alpha 21164.  But the Alpha has a higher
>    SPECint95 number than the HP chip.  So who's faster?

D*mn lies? I've asked this before. Please provide the part number for a 
SHIPPING system that includes a 400 MHz 21164 - I don't care whether it's an
AlphaStation or an AlphaServer. Please provide an estimated delivery date
for said system that can be quoted to a customer.

You folks might have these hot boxes internally (as, I'm sure H-P does with
their PA-8000 boxes) but they aren't available in the field. Until I can
order AND get a firm delivery date on either of these systems, I'd say both
H-P and we are just blowing smoke.

tim m.

>D*mn lies? I've asked this before. Please provide the part number for a
>SHIPPING system that includes a 400 MHz 21164 - I don't care whether it's an
>AlphaStation or an AlphaServer. Please provide an estimated delivery date
>for said system that can be quoted to a customer.

    I'll second that request!  Heck, I don't care about shipping or not,
    just give me a part number that I can look up in VTX PRICE?  Besides
    the 5/300 to 5/400 upgrade (304XR-BW) which alledgedly won't ship until
    October, you can't even find a 400Mhz CPU part number.
    
    				-John

    Re .332, .333:
    
    The chips are shipping.  Sorry, can't help you with systems.  Someone
    from the SBU here?

I thought the question was about the fastest WORKSTATION,
not the fastest chip.

So OK, they out bring that hummer and we "announce" the 21264 based 
workstation and return the favor.   

    The 400 MHz versions for the 8xxx won't be available until August.  I 
    don't believe anything will be available on the Price File for at least
    30 days prior.  Therefore, don't expect it until July time frame.  If
    you REALLY need it I suggest that you obtain an old sales update and
    check out the Product Manager's and send them a request or go to the
    respective conference and look there.
    
    	Regards, 

...with its "powerful query language and SmartRelevance ranking system",
although my personal experience was that they're not: 
1. Alta Vista yieled better (more usable) results.
2. The Alta Vista user interface is better: you can enter another search without
the need to go back to the main page.

But the others don't sleep...

Any other experiences with HotBot?



Question: Is there an (internal use, beta, whatever...) version of Personal Alta
Vista available (WIN95 platform)? From the customer reaction upon a presentation
of this future product I'm under the impression that there are lots of potential
business opportunities with personal or enterprise Alta Vista. Thanks for any
pointers,

	-Peter

    
    I typed the words "Coors Field" into HotBot and got 2203 returns, the
    first of which were just what I was looking for.
    
    I typed "Coors Field" into AltaVista, and got 800 matching docs, pages
    I was looking for on 2nd page of returns.
    
    Very broad search I admit.  I could have been looking for anything...
    
    

        My impression of HotBot has always been that it is slower
        (including slower loading its initial query page) and the
        simple query form does not have the flexibility that
        AltaVista's does (the "+", "-", quoted strings, and trailing
        wildcard make the simple query form do most of what I'd ever
        want from a complex query).

        I'm waiting for UltraSeek to come fully up -- it seems to be
        more of a copy of AltaVista regarding interface. :-}

        When I want high quality searches, I often turn to
        MetaCrawler -- http://metacrawler.cs.washington.edu:8080/

        Bob

        Well, Ultraseek missed its promised June introduction
        entirely -- its search page (http://www.ultraseek.com:5005/)
        still proudly proclaims:

        "The material on this site is a sneak-preview of the service
        that will be available in June. There are only about 1
        million documents in the test database"

    This past Sunday print of the Seattle Times (Personal Technology
    section) put Alta Vista at the top.  The full web page article is at
    
    	http://www.seattletimes.com/ptech/thisweek/features.html#1
    
    --svb

    Hotbot is certainly MUCH faster to query than Altavista. It lacks the
    ability to search newsgroups but then Altavista's newsgroup database is
    so totally out of date that I find it of little use anyway.
    
    Before someone jumps down my throat for that last statement I'll
    qualify and explain : From within Dec I can read newsgroup articles
    from XRN and then search in Altavista and not find those articles in
    the search. Some of these are up to a week old but still not found.
    Older articles that I used to be able to find have since been archived
    off. Is the news database still properly maintained ? How up to date is
    the database meant to be ? How up to date is it in reality ?
    
    Jamie.

    re: .342
    
    I could be wrong, but I suspect the AV guys turn their spider loose 
    on the web only every few weeks. Using your test, there could be long
    periods where your favorite newsgroup articles don't show up...

    I too could be wrong (the "AV guys" referred to in .343 run things from
    t'other side of the continent) but it seems to me that spidering (for
    searching out new web pages & their content) is a different thing from
    newsgroup-reading.  In the latter case, the info comes to YOU rather
    than needing to be found by Scooter.  The question then reduces to how
    often newsgroup content is "collected" from the doorstep as it were,
    and how often indexed.  Which I don't know.  Lots of help, eh?
    

    Well last time I looked the AltaVista home page said the news groups
    were indexed "in real time". Which I took to mean hours rather than
    weeks. Maybe it needs clarification, or maybe it's out of order. Who
    knows ?

    I've said this in the Internet Tools conference, but following a
    statement in a user group on the Web, which alleged that AltaVista
    hadn't been updated since 29 April, I checked, and I was unable to find
    anything later than 19 April. I searched for some common words, with a
    date of post 1 May, and nothing was found.
    
    I had enough reservations about our calling half our product set
    AltaVista<mumble>, but to discover that our flagship Web product is
    more than 10 weeks out-of-date (which means it might as well not
    exist), and the word is out on the Web, was most disturbing. It looks
    like it's both feet, both barrels.
    
    Hopefully, someone from the IBG will tell me I'm mistaken, in which
    case I apologise for alarming people, but if I'm not, who's going to
    handle the damage limitation, and when will it be fixed? This now
    reflects on a lot of products, and the entire Corporation, in a *very*
    public way.
    
    Cheers, Laurie.

    It's not all broken. I searched Usenet for the name of a US colleague
    who is a frequent Usenet poster. The most recent entry was July 4th.

    Yeah, lo and behold, after I mentioned this in the Internet Tools
    conference on Friday afternoon (European Time), this morning
    everything's much more recent (I ran exactly the same search). It looks
    like the Spider ran over the weekend. No comments from anyone that
    matters though...
    
    Laurie.

    Well it appears that some update has been performed but it's still only
    partial. A lot of stuff I've posted and read from home cannot be found.
    Maybe the update is still running ? It'd be nice to know exactly what
    is happening. Maybe they think we won't notice ;-)
    
    Jamie.

    That's what I said back in .301.  old data.
    
    It's kinda like two librarys.  one has one research librarian, but buys
    books/magazines every week.  It takes you a while to find information
    that you need.
    The other has a nearly unlimited budget, buys unlimited books,
    magazines, has hundreds of research librarians ready to help you, BUT,
    buys its books, magazines every 6 years.
    
    Which library would you go to?
    
    They did a new scan last week.  scanning every two months, seems to me
    a bit too infrequent, especially to the sites that request the scan.
    
    ed
    

    RE .350
    
    But why any real delay at all in updating the news database ? I'd
    expect that to be pretty well up to date give or take a day. Certainly
    Yahoo is much more up to date in this respect.
    
    Jamie.

    Is there anyone we can mail, with *real* feedback? If people internally
    are noticing problems, we should try and fix 'em, as Altavista is
    really our flagship product out there.
    
    The 'standard' support line is probably flooded with dross and other
    such stuff.

    
    They should be running a 'spider' against themselves as a full feed
    news server.  No need to go searching far and wide for news articles.
    
    Interestingly enough the advanced search picks up all the current
    news articles from a group I read: rec.video.satellitel.dbs, and
    yet the SIMPLE search only finds a few articles from today.
    
    Maybe it's a problem with simple searches and not with how
    often the news articles are updated to alta vista?
    
    
    

> Interestingly enough the advanced search picks up all the current
> news articles from a group I read: rec.video.satellitel.dbs, and
> yet the SIMPLE search only finds a few articles from today.
>
> Maybe it's a problem with simple searches and not with how
> often the news articles are updated to alta vista?

  There definitely are bugs in Alta Vista. I did a query once
  (several things ANDed together) which returned n items. I then
  added another AND term and the new query returned *MORE* items.
  This is not possible.

  I think it may have been a "simple" query, but I don't recall for sure.

                                        Atlant

actually, as i understand it, AND in an alta vista search
will provide more search results...  searching for "item1"
AND "item2" AND "item3" will give lists of all pages that
have any of the items listed...  +"item1" +"item2" +"item3"
is what you want if you want to narrow the search to pages that
include all those items on one page...

this AND that will give all pages with "this" all pages with 
"that" and all pages with both...

"this" +"that" will give only those pages that include both...

of course, i could be mistaken... :^)

				da ve

    
    	And you can add a "-" to ignore a page including that phrase/	
    	word.
    
    	It's a big mess ... I had been using
    
    	a +b +c
    
    	for I don't how long before I realized that I had forgotten
    	the leading +.
    

    re .355
    
    I think you are mistaken. 
    
    "this" +"that"   Will give you only sites that contain "that", but ones
    that have "this" as well will get listed first.  But you will get sites
    that do NOT contain "this".
    
    + is like AND, - is like NOT, and nothing is like OR.
    
    -Steve
    

    
    now that the Alta Vista search training is over... 8^}
    
    My point was the articles ARE there, and they ARE current.
    The 'simple' search mechanism just isn't cutting it to find them...
    
    I have no idea who internally really supports this.  The feedback
    button didn't seem like it was the right place to report a technical
    problem.

>    + is like AND, - is like NOT, and nothing is like OR.
>    
>    -Steve

...how do I interpret information posted by "not Steve"   :)

    I submitted my homepage URL and the next day it was indexed.

    
    Today, I put an advanced search query into AltaVista and got very poor
    results. It seems that AltaVista was more interested in giving me
    adverts related to one part of my query, than getting my query totally
    correct.
    
    Most of the results it gave me were from the same site who's advert
    appeared at the top and bottom of the page. After following a few links
    I discovered that _none_ of them satisfied (all) my query.
    
    Perhaps it was a genuine mistake, but the cynic in me says otherwise!
    
    Russell.

    There are ways you can create a web page to encourage hits (like
    repeating key words or phrases that are likely to be search targets,
    perhaps even in non-printing ways).
    
    It is more likely that the advertisement's HTML was organized to
    encourage search engines (like AltaVista) to generate hits than
    AltaVista was biased to find advertisements.

AltaVista Search claims to try to reject attempts to "load the deck" so to
speak.  But it is clear (see the latest Consumer Reports) that AltaVista
tailors the ads based on what you searched on.

BTW, for those who use a proxy server, a fast way of eliminating the ads is 
to add doubleclick.net to your "no proxy" list.

					Steve

> Today, I put an advanced search query into AltaVista and got very poor
> results. 
> Most of the results it gave me were from the same site who's advert
> appeared at the top and bottom of the page. After following a few links
> I discovered that _none_ of them satisfied (all) my query.

	Could you tell us what your query was so we can check this
	for ourselves?

	I have found that AltaVista indexes parts of documents that 
	do not appear within the browser as part of the text, for 
	example, the links.  Could it be that your query matched
	part of the some URLs that are linked to from those pages?

    
    	I also think that some hits are caused by included META tags and
    	not just included text.  So you wouldn't see the META tags unless
    	you looked at the source.
    
    	I haven't done any experimenting with this, but it did occur to
    	me after AltaVista constantly gave me a slew of pages that didn't
    	seem to contain my requested phrase[s].
    

    
    The consumers report article was very troubling, as it appears that
    AltaVista is collecting information without the users knowledge.  While
    this "may" be benign right now, it's the tip of iceberg for privacy
    issues downstream.
    
    

    
    Thanks for the replies.
    
    I wasn't aware of the META tags trick. I looked at the HTML source of a
    few links and, hey-presto!, lots of words for search engines to pick up
    on (including the ones I was searching for).
    
    That, coupled with the adverts being tailored to my query, brought me
    to the wrong (cynical) conclusion. whoops!
    
    Russell.
    

>BTW, for those who use a proxy server, a fast way of eliminating the ads is 
>to add doubleclick.net to your "no proxy" list.

The easiest way to eliminate the ads is to use the text-only version.

I hate to be a capitalist spoil sport, but the site
http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Alley/7028/hasta.htm , while making some
innocent enough fun of our AltaVista site, does play fast and loose, not only
with our AltaVista mark (recasting it as "HastaLaVista"), but also with our
valuable logo, recasting it as "gigital".

While we're worrying about trademarks, etc., it would be nice if the title of
this topic was corrected by replacing "Alta Vista" with "AltaVista". Other
topics in this conference similarly suffering are:

  4805  PCBUOA::KRATZ        27-AUG-1996   146  Alta Vista to possibly go public
  4910  batman::dlee         14-OCT-1996    11  Top 50 web sites (Alta Vista is No. 4)
  4947  STRATA::STANDING     30-OCT-1996     5  Alta Vista has a Blimp?

    	Sounds like it's in good fun....from the "This is a Parody, OK"
    link:
    
    -------------------------------------------------------------------
    Well, folks, here you go: this month's parody of a Web page you all
    know and love.
         If, after viewing the parody, you don't know what I'm lampooning,
    you can come
         back here and jump to the Webpage I'm lampooning. (Though if you
    have to go
         through all that, odds are you won't enjoy all this. Jokes that
    have to be explained
         are invariably unfunny.) I hope to churn out a new parody every
    month or so (you
         know, in my copious free time). So check back every once in a
    while.
    
         Needless to say, this is all meant to be good fun, and is provoked
    by no malice,
         ill-will, personal animus, commercial interest, etc. Indeed, the
    sites I parody are
         usually those that I use myself with great frequency. I'm not
    making any money
         from this. Any similarities to persons living or dead is purely
    coincidental. So, long
         story short: I hope you are capable of savoring this fun in the
    lighthearted spirit in
         which it was intended. If not, too bad: this kind of speech is
    clearly protected by
         the First Amendment.

    If anyone from Digital complains about this, we'll get nothing but bad
    press.  Having a parody is nothing more than the price of doing
    something right for a change -- making a "product" that's used by the
    mass market.
    
    It's flattering.  We should chuckle and move on.
    
    From http://www.geocities.com/SunsetStrip/Alley/7028/farce.htm
                                  [Image]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
                           This Month's WebParody
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

     Well, folks, here you go: this month's parody of a Web page you all
     know and love. If, after viewing the parody, you don't know what I'm
     lampooning, you can come back here and jump to the Webpage I'm
     lampooning. (Though if you have to go through all that, odds are you
     won't enjoy all this. Jokes that have to be explained are invariably
     unfunny.) I hope to churn out a new parody every month or so (you know,
     in my copious free time). So check back every once in a while.

     Needless to say, this is all meant to be good fun, and is provoked by
     no malice, ill-will, personal animus, commercial interest, etc. Indeed,
     the sites I parody are usually those that I use myself with great
     frequency. I'm not making any money from this. Any similarities to
     persons living or dead is purely coincidental. So, long story short: I
     hope you are capable of savoring this fun in the lighthearted spirit in
     which it was intended. If not, too bad: this kind of speech is clearly
     protected by the First Amendment.

     And let me know what you think. Cheers.

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            for the week of 4/7/97

    
    
    Lighten up Steve, its a joke. 
    
    It will serve to do two things:
    
    1. help cement familiarity with the real product branding. Heaven
    knows, we may even end up with a household name on our hands, probably
    our first. When the public can identify your brand even when its
    parodied, then you've done something VERY right.
    
    2. Soften the image of DIGITAL as stiff east cost puritans who lost the plot
    ages ago and who are more concerned with surface level superificality
    than real underlying business change.
    
    The value of the logo is bound up with the image behind the logo.
    Personally I'd take a little fun being poked at the logo if it served
    to help brighten the world's view of the company.
    
    
    - John
    
    
    
    

    >2. Soften the image of DIGITAL as stiff east cost puritans who lost the plot
    >ages ago and who are more concerned with surface level superificality
    >than real underlying business change.
    >
    
     Was this necessary?  If you've got something specific to say, say it.
    
    

re .391

It made perfect sense to me.  Maybe you need to read it again while looking in
a mirror?

    r.e .391
    
    Fred,
    
    I thought it was obvious what I was saying.
    
    Our image is very caught up with a kind of staidness. We are perceived
    as pedestrian. Even when we produce exciting things its not our nature
    to walk to the top of the hill and shout about it. It permeates product
    decisions, marketing decisions, restructuring approaches and how we
    relate in many ways to our competition. Bob Palmer descibed this in an
    interview as something like an "East Coast thing". I am just reiterating.
    
    This aggravates many of us who see this as a MAJOR impediment to anyone
    believing the "Whatever it takes" message. How can you simply believe
    it from a company with a lack of passion, that has, for the last few
    years taken a backseat to everything yet leads in so much?
    
    No one would go to a major conference expecting to be rattled by a Bob
    Palmer speech. They do for McNeely, Gates, Ellison. No one is going to
    expect us to stand up and state a leadership direction for anything. 
    
    We are for Windows, but we are also for NCs
    
    We are for Alpha, but we are also for Intel
    
    Java will change the world, but so will ActiveX
    
    We make the best clusters, but we are for the inferior Microsoft stuff 
    
    We'll give our software away so we wont annoy the industry leaders
    
    We make the finest mail products IN THE WORLD, but you should go to
    Exchange
    
    We mumble about OpenVMS quality, but only when the customer says they
    specifically want it and only after we have qualified that they dont
    want something else
    
    
    We tell customers to accept us for what we are when we fail to deliver
    
    We leave our best wares in the Lab, we put the sizzle into NSIS add-ons
    instead of the products
    
    I could go on. There are MANY MANY good things about our culture that
    many customers see as real positives. Unfortunately there is also an
    inate thread that translates to innapropriate passiveness that really
    annoys many of them.
    
    I guess that's what I meant and absolutely anything that cuts into some
    of that will go down well with me.
    
    _ John  
    

    A long time ago I read a book about Mad Magazine.  When they started
    doing parodies (this is the tie-in to the topic) of movies and TV
    shows, they asked studios for publicity photos to work from.  The
    studios instead threatened lawsuits and made sure nothing was
    available.  So the magazine had to work from memory or advertisements
    or use subterfuge to get the material.  More talk of lawsuits.  Soon,
    however,  the studios saw that there shows became more popular when
    they were parodied - the more biting the better.  After that, the
    magazine was beseiged with action photos of every movie and TV show
    before it was released.  People begged them to do them.    
    
    My point is that it creates name recognition.  It also gives the
    product a certain validity.   They are going to misspell the trademarks
    on purpose.  You can't prevent it, and you shouldn't want to.
    
    Ben

    
    re: -1 the person complaining about this was probably in marketing 
    and wouldn't understand anyway.