Tech-View

Lycos vs. Alta-Vista

by: Robert Angelo Ragodon

Search engine is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web and FTP servers. The search results are generally presented in a list of results and are often called hits. The information may consist of web pages, images, information and other types of files.

Search Engine 1: 

Lycos is a Search Engine and a Web directory, it was born from a research project by Dr. Michael Mauldin in 1994. Lycos is a short for Lycosidea, which means the wolf spiders, who hunt for their prey. Lycos was a successful IPO in 1996 despite a total lack revenue. In 1998 it acquired Tripod, a web site where people built their own web sites.

Lycos withered after the dotcom crash of 2001, when it faded out in the face of Google's domination of the search market, and Yahoo's domination of the portal market. The Lycos company was purchased by Terra Networks in October 2000, and the merged company was renamed Terra Lycos yet the Lycos brand was the US franchise. (Overseas, the company continued to be known as Terra Networks, S.A.) The selling price was $ 12.5 billion dollars. On August 2, 2004, Terra announced that it was selling Lycos to Seoul, South Korea-based Daum Communications Corporation for $ 95.4 million dollars. In October 2004, the transaction closed, and the company name was changed back to Lycos. Lycos remained in business with a new management team in early 2006.

Advantages:             

• It offers a large database for documents
•  It has a relevancy Ranking
• It has a    Help    documents
• It has a adjacency indicators
• It has a ability to refine a search
• Simple keyword searching
• Abstracts provided of hits

Disadvantages

• Weak online advertising market
• It hasn't ability to restrict a search by date
• It doesn't supports phrase searching, full Boolean searching, Wildcard
• Ability to restrict search to a particular field eg: title

                                                                    

Search Engine 2: 

AltaVista   is a web search engine owned by Yahoo!. AltaVista was once one of the most popular search engines but its popularity declined with the rise of Google. Yahoo currently plans on discontinuing AltaVista, as it is underperforming.

AltaVista was created by researchers at Digital Equipment Corporation's Western Research Laboratory who were trying to provide services to make finding files on the public network easier. Although there is some dispute about who was responsible for the original idea, two key participants were Louis Monier, who wrote the crawler, and Michael Burrows, who wrote the indexer. The name AltaVista was chosen in relation to the surroundings of their company at Palo Alto. AltaVista was publicly launched as an internet search engine on 15 December 1995 at altavista.digital.com.

At launch, the service had two innovations which set it ahead of the other search engines; It used a fast, multi-threaded crawler (Scooter) which could cover many more Web pages than were believed to exist at the time and an efficient search running back-end on advanced hardware. As of 1998, it used 20 multi-processor machines using DEC's 64-bit Alpha processor. Together, the back-end machines had 130 GB of RAM and 500 GB of hard disk space, and received 13 million queries per day. This made AltaVista the first searchable, full-text database of a large part of the World Wide Web. The distinguishing feature of AltaVista was its minimalistic interface compared with other search engines of the time; a feature which was lost when it became a portal, but was regained when it refocused its efforts on its search function.

AltaVista's site was an immediate success. Traffic increased steadily from 300,000 hits on the first day to more than 80 million hits a day two years later. The ability to search the web, and AltaVista's service in particular, became the subject of numerous articles and even some books. AltaVista itself became one of the top destinations on the web, and by 1997 would earn 50 million dollar in sponsorship revenue.

Advantages

• Ability to restrict a search by date
• Ability to refine a search
• Help    documents
• Simple keyword searching
• Abstracts provided of    hits
• Invertedly of Lycos, it supports phrase searching, full Boolean searching, Wildcard
• It is capable to restrict search to a particular field eg: title

                                                            

Disadvantages

• Relevancy Ranking
• Adjacency indicators

                                                            

Features

Lycos

1. It offers a large database for documents
2. It has a relevancy Ranking
3. It has a    Help    documents
4. It has a adjacency indicators
5. It has a ability to refine a search
6. Simple keyword searching
7. Abstracts provided of    hits

Alta Vista

1. Ability to restrict a search by date
2. Ability to refine a search
3. Help    documents
4. Simple keyword searching
5. Abstracts provided of    hits
6. Invertedly of Lycos, it supports phrase searching, full Boolean searching, Wildcard
7. It is capable to restrict search to a particular field  eg: title

                                                            

Conclusion         

The best way how to determine which is the best is to conduct a searches and measure how they perform. Both of them had a well design interface and best search results.  The most frequently updated databases is  Lycos . The best query language is Alta Vista  .