Re:How AltaVista, the first good search engine, fell into th...
by Terretta on Saturday December 19, 2020 @10:55AM
(#25478160)
Yes... Enjoyed AltaVista and FAST (AllTheWeb)[1] for precision searching.
That reminded me of Architext, and EWS (Excite for Web Servers)[2], but a good bit of Googling (ahem) later, seems difficult to find much about most of the mid to late 90s standalone local search engines any more, except perhaps Inktomi. Most are not mentioned in Wikipedia search engine timeline[3].
Excite for Web Servers makes it easy for you to add searching -- Excite, Inc.'s advanced concept-based searching -- to your Web site.
Excite for Web Servers provides a simple Web-browser interface for doing all the things necessary to enable concept-based searching of collections of documents -- administering, indexing, and searching over the collections.
In particular, one can:
- define a document collection -- that is, specify a set of documents to be considered a single collection over which one can search,
- design customized pages for displaying to users who wish to search over that collection,
- index that collection, monitoring the progress, and
search the collection.
With Excite for Web Servers, it's easy to set up concept-based-searchable Web sites in minutes.
That reminded me of Architext, and EWS (Excite for Web Servers)[2], but a good bit of Googling (ahem) later, seems difficult to find much about most of the mid to late 90s standalone local search engines any more, except perhaps Inktomi. Most are not mentioned in Wikipedia search engine timeline[3].
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Development_Center_N...
2. https://www.wired.com/1998/01/excite-moves-to-patch-search-s...
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_web_search_engines
EDIT:
Using the search engine Qwant, I was able to find an original EWS (Excite for Web Servers) help page:
http://www1.udel.edu/Excite/AT-helpdoc.html
At the time, it was amazingly out of the box:
Excite for Web Servers makes it easy for you to add searching -- Excite, Inc.'s advanced concept-based searching -- to your Web site.
Excite for Web Servers provides a simple Web-browser interface for doing all the things necessary to enable concept-based searching of collections of documents -- administering, indexing, and searching over the collections.
In particular, one can:
- define a document collection -- that is, specify a set of documents to be considered a single collection over which one can search,
- design customized pages for displaying to users who wish to search over that collection,
- index that collection, monitoring the progress, and search the collection.
With Excite for Web Servers, it's easy to set up concept-based-searchable Web sites in minutes.