Feedback Fuels Quest to Rev Up Search Engines

What I really want from the Web is content that delights, informs, provokes or proves useful.

But as I described a few weeks ago, finding it isn’t so easy. Despite the plethora of search engines that offer to make Web life easier, the results too often are irrelevant, duplicative or just odd.

Readers offered a host of additional suggestions for effective searching, and I’ve already adopted some of them myself and learned more about alternatives that are starting to take hold.

My new favorite alternatives are the “meta”-engine sites that search simultaneously through multiple databases. The ones I’m using are noncommercial, fast and execute several parallel searches in a single swoop.

Since Yahoo, Alta Vista and the other search engines point to unique databases of Web sites, it is easy to see the advantage of a single search that returns results from all of them.

* At the invitation of lawyer Michael Etzioni, I tried Metacrawler, at https://metacrawler.cs.washington.edu. Despite a warning from Etzioni that “I have to admit I am biased because my brother invented it. . . .” in fact, it is a keeper.

* Another site that works much the same way is SavvySearch, (https://guaraldi.cs.colostate.edu:2000). It offers to choose the most appropriate search path, or allows the reader to do so.

In much the same fashion, there are PC software programs that create simultaneous searches, including FastFind (https://www.symantec.com), WebFerret (https://www.vironix.com) and WebSeeker (https://www.ffg.com).

There are other new or expanded approaches to the problem of finding what we seek easily and in few steps. A new company called I Love the Web has a site (https://www.ilovetheweb.com) that is simple to look at, simple to use and simple in appearance. It also gets on your nerves quickly, because of the “I love the . . .” theme, but that could be my taste.

What the company does is list lists.

Now, Yahoo, among others, has done this for a while. But ilovetheweb is much simpler. IloveCars brings up car sites, iloveTheWeather brings up weather-related sites, and so on for newspapers, mutual funds, movies, TV stations, job searches. If you love something they have not yet decided to love, they offer iloveWeb searches. But, in all honesty, there is a lot to love.

LookSmart (https://www.looksmart.com) is possibly even easier to use, if you like this “meta-database” approach.

Colorful and graphical, it is a series of listings created by the people behind Readers Digest. The name of the company is a perfect description: What you see is a series of push-button menus that help a user narrow the search by topic area. Four clicks later, there is a neat display of sites, each with a digest of its contents.

It’s quick, it’s intuitive, and it seems fairly extensive when the query fits easily in a category. LookSmart also offers its own list of favorite sites along the lines of Yahoo or ilovetheweb, and even makes it easy to launch the traditional Web search.

Another service, SemioMap (https://www.semio.com), offers a search “map,” an intriguing approach that also depends on categorization. In this case, the categories are created on the fly.

Enter a search for “workplace,” for example, and the software behind it will examine the concepts behind the query results and create categories based on the words in the responses. The sites contributing to the results automatically sort into the correct categories as selected by the software.

The workplace query created categories related to law, human resources, women and others. Thus narrowed, the query could be repeated, narrowed or crossed with another search. We could look for “romance and the workplace,” for example. The approach is slow but very effective.

The thinkers behind the company are academics in linguistics and semiology, people who know how to categorize language for concepts and compute the semantics.

Laurie Zoob, marketing director for the 15-person company, said the intent really is to sell such software to corporations for internal use or use on their Web sites. But it’s also available to consumers as a search vehicle at the company Web site.

For more information about developments in the search engine business, readers might want to visit LEO, a free service offering advice from librarians and information specialists (https://www.leonline.com/searchinsider).

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Terry Schwadron is deputy managing editor of The Times and oversees latimes.com, its Web site. He can be reached via e-mail at terry.schwadron@latimes.com