Matrix, Search Engines: ALIWEB

Archie-Like Indexing of the Web

In theory, such a database can be as up-to-date as a Web Wanderer and doesn't need to traverse the Web. However, in practice little effort has been made to publicize this service and the information it contains is rather insignificant to services such as Lycos or YAHOO!

Key Links

• Nexor (Home) : http://web.nexor.co.uk/public/aliweb/search/doc/form.html
• Indiana University (Mirror) : http://www.cs.indiana.edu/aliweb/search
• List of ALIWEB Mirrors: http://web.nexor.co.uk/public/aliweb/doc/search.html

Organization

• ALIWEB is solely a Web search engine, based on a Perl script that searches an internal database.
  • Features and Limitations
    • The server accepts Multiple Keywords, Substrings, or Regular Expressions.
    • There are no provisions for Boolean or Proximity Searching.
    • Additional controls let you restrict searches to certain content types or documents from a particular Internet domain.
  • You can specify a maximum number of matches, and sorts all results by match quality.
  • The user can specify which document fields to search, including titles, descriptions, keywords, or document URL's.
• The server supports only Forms-based searches.
• The server does not restrict documents by content.

Administration

• Documents are added to the database by users who create an index to their own collections, and register that index with the ALIWEB server. The server will then automatically retrieve that file thereafter, and apply any changes to its internal database.
• ALIWEB runs on a single computer, but is mirrored by several other servers. The Nexor server seems to be very responsive to user requests, and completes most searches within 10 seconds.
• The server indexes 6,000 links from more than 2800 registered sites, which are added or modified by the very users who maintain the documents However, I had difficulty selecting keywords which would give any results.
• The latest date logged on an ALIWEB page is December, 1994. If there are later updates or revisions, they are not logged in the ALIWEB History document.
• Additional Services
  • The server describes how to create index files and register your own documents.
  • For administrators that want to create their own mirrors, the server provides instructions and install files.