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Copyright 1998 The New York TimesJuly 11, 1998
As Search Sites Add More Features,
Is Searching the Web Getting Any Easier?By MATT LAKE
imple Web search sites, it seems, are passé. Over the past few months, most of the major search sites have repositioned themselves as "portals" -- the new buzzword used to describe the places most people start surfing when they log on to the Web. Besides search capabilities, these portals offer news, sports scores, horoscopes, local weather reports, free e-mail and a stack of other high-gloss features.
Part of the reason search sites are adding these features is that in their quest to generate regular customers -- and make money by advertising to them -- they're focusing on ways to encourage visitors to look at many pages on their site before moving off elsewhere. If they stayed pure to the search ideal, visitors would see two pages -- one page with the search form and another page with the results -- and then be off.
Which begs the question: With all of this emphasis on adding other services, are search sites doing anything to make finding information on the Web any easier?
Nicole Schooley / CyberTimesFor the most part, the answer is yes. The most popular portals -- including Yahoo, Excite, Infoseek, Lycos and AltaVista -- are still search sites at heart. People visit them to seek out other information on the Web, and the relevance of the results they get is what keeps them coming back. This need to retain customers -- not to mention competition among the various search companies -- has led to some advances in the way search sites deliver results.
Excite, for one, has added some useful features to its basic search technology. If you enter the name of a public company, for example, the first result Excite returns is the company's street address and the Web address of the its official site, as well as the company's stock symbol and current price. Search for the New York Mets, and you'll see recent scores and a schedule of upcoming games. And if a company or team you're searching for is in the news, Excite also delivers links to related news stories.
Excite calls this "channelized search," because it draws information from Excite's own news, business and sports channels as well as its database of external Web pages. The technology that drives it is called Jango, which Excite acquired along with the company that developed it, NetBot.
According to Jango's product manager, Kristin Hoefer, this isn't actually adding any information that wasn't already available at Excite -- it's just making it more accessible. "We're bubbling up content," says Hoefer, "so consumers can get the benefit without having to drill down to the channels." Excite will be adding more channels of search results at the rate of several per month. Next up are results drawn from reviews of movies, computer products and video games.
Another feature Excite offers is the ability to narrow a search using what the company calls "intelligent concept extraction." This technology enables Excite to offer related links on its results pages based on what it "thinks" a user is searching for. For example, if you see a listing on the results page that's almost what you're looking for, you can click a link labeled "search for more documents like this one" to turn up similar sites, or choose from a list of ten related keywords Excite suggests at the top of each results page.
In theory, it's a good idea, but in practice, some of the suggestions are downright puzzling. If you do a search for "Newt Gingrich," for example, Excite offers relevant keywords such as "GOP" and "Republicans" -- but also a healthy smattering of irrelevancies ranging from "glittering" and "wallow" to "giraffe." A search for The New York Times suggested "Wednesday," "gist" and "loathing" (among others). The next day, Excite offered "wildfires" and "USA Today" as related keywords.
Excite isn't the only search site to try for more intuitive Web searching. Infoseek has developed something called ESP -- extra search precision -- designed to improve the quality of its search results. The premise? Searches will turn up links to more relevant Web sites, plain and simple. But although ESP is prominently fanfared on the site, there's no clear description of how it works -- and a company spokeswoman was similarly tight-lipped.
"Unfortunately we cannot go into detail," explained Jennifer Mullen, Infoseek's manager of search and directory. "What we can say is, it learns about what pages have the highest quality by examining all the pages in the Web."
Although Infoseek doesn't search for Web sites and news headlines in one pass, it does offer the ability to search for news and company information. For more than a year, Infoseek has provided the option to select the type of information you're searching for -- such as a company or news -- right next to each search box. This feature has received so many accolades that competitor Lycos recently added a similar selection.
Lycos is also attempting to highlight some of its channel information -- though at the moment, this attempt is no more than three links to the news, reference and personal Web page sections of its site. Click on a link, and Lycos automatically searches for your keywords in that channel -- but there's no guarantee there will be any results.
Another search site, AltaVista, has also added to its search features. The company has licensed a handy tool called the Real Name System that finds the official Web site of thousands of companies, products, brands and advertising campaigns. The downside, however, is that in order to be included, companies have to register with Real Name at $40 a year per name -- an expense that many companies haven't yet taken on.
AltaVista provides another service that none of the other search sites offer, thanks to a deal with Systran Software: If you find the perfect site but discover that it's written in a foreign language, two clicks will translate a page in French, German, Spanish, Italian or Portuguese into English -- or vice versa.
Despite being the most widely recognized of all search sites, Yahoo is a bit of a maverick. Unlike the other sites, its searches are restricted to sites it has formally reviewed -- and therefore the results are often not as comprehensive as the other search engines. But Yahoo does benefit from the developments of the other sites -- if you don't find what you want in Yahoo's results, a quick click on one of the other search sites listed at the bottom of the results page will automatically launch the same search at another site.
The one thing that Web search engines get right almost all of the time is advertising. For at least three years, most of them have been matching the ads they serve up to words you're searching for. Enter a keyword like "IBM" at Excite, for example, and an ad for IBM's e-business solutions appears prominently. Search for travel-related topics, and Microsoft's Expedia service gets a plug.
If this smacks of something unsavory, be grateful that the search results themselves are based on technology and not commerce. A few years back, a minor-league search site sold top billing in its search results to advertisers -- and was widely criticized for it. Fortunately, that's one feature that never caught on.
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