COMPARISON BETWEEN 2 SEARCH ENGINES

In E-Learning, we also cover about search engine that we prefer to use to search our information. this comparison, I would like to compare about LYCOS and ALTA VISTA interm of interface and speed.

Interface

• Similarities
  Lycos and Alta Vista effectively have two interfaces - one for simple keyword searching and another for more advanced sort of question using Boolean operators. Simple keyword search interfaces are located on the home page of each search engine, so these are the first interfaces that the user sees, and many users tend to use these by default rather than exploring the other options available. Both of this search engines provide a fast and easy to use tool for searching. They also provide the ability to refine the search once the results of an initial search have been posted on screen.




• Differences
  Lycos - offers its advanced search form under a hypertext link from the home page called Enhance your search. Lycos provides a small query box into which search keywords can be typed. The Search Options menu enables the user to choose and or Boolean operators (it can be implemented by placing a dash (-) in front of a keyword). It also provides a feature known as relevancy and adjacency ranking and this is implemented when it sorts the search hits. The documents that need to be search will appear at the list follow the keywords and also the particular choice of words.
  Alta Vista - offers its Advanced Query mode under its clickable logo at the top of the home page. Alta Vista only performs relevancy ranking on your hits if you specifically ask it to by specifying keywords in the Results Ranking Criteria box. It is currently a test version, and upgrades will be made once the developers have evaluated user responses. Alta Vista also enables a user to restrict their search to particular fields of a document such as the title of a document, the URL, the host and the links contained within a document. It also supports full Boolean searching.

Speed

Both of this search engines are generally provide a fast and easy to use tool for very simple things to searching. The speed also depends on the size of the World Wide Web and the generally diverse nature of material available. It may have some sort of problem to search if they do not have the related keywords.To keeping up the rapid growth of World Wide Web, Lycos has updated their entire database every month, and new pages are added on a weekly basis. Alta Vista had used 20 muti-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. It used a fast, multi-threaded crawler (Scooter) which could cover a lot more Web pages than were believed to exist at the time and an efficient search back-end running on advanced hardware