Matrix, Search Engines: excite!

excite! NetReviews, excite! NetSearch

Key Links

Organization

• excite! NetReviews provides 16 major categories, 57 minor categories, with 5 to 10 sub-headings under each, and contains over 50,000 abstracts. The front page offers easy access to the first and second category lists, and each list features a recommended selection from that subject area. The index also provides cross-references between relevant items.
• excite! NetSearch performs two kinds of searches: keyword searching and concept-based searching. A keyword search returns documents that contain all or most of the entered keywords. On the other hand, a concept search extracts the meaning of the keywords, and returns related documents in that subject area.
  • excite! uses a custom search engine designed by Architext software, its parent company. Users can search Web documents, NetReview abstracts, or UseNet newsgroups and classified ads.
  • Queries can contain multiple keywords, which are treated as a "fuzzy AND" type of search -- as if they are linked by both a Boolean And and Boolean Or. This means that result sets include documents containing any of the entered keywords, but those containing more than one keyword will be assigned a higher weight.
  • Unlike Lycos and InfoSeek, the search engine does not weight documents by the proximity of keywords in the fulltext.
  • The search interface does not support true Boolean expressions, proximity searching, keyword truncation, or any of the other useful query tools.
  • Documents are assigned a "confidence rating" based on the quality of of the match between your query and the suggested documents.
  • The index and document summaries are built by extracting keywords from a document's text, with emphasis on keywords toward to beginning of a file and fully punctuated sentences. There is no mechanism for specifying what fields to search across (eg, titles, URLs, or abstracts).
• excite! NetSearch does not provide support for non-forms users.
• Information in the excite! NetSearch and NetReviews is not restricted by form or content.

Administration

• NetSearch documents are indexed automatically by a custom Web searcher, which is run once a week. NetReviews are paragraph-sized abstracts (written by excite! staff) of interesting or useful documents.
• Most searches complete with 5-10 seconds.
• The searchable index contains over 11.5 millions documents, content from over 10,000 Usenet newsgroups, and the abstracts from the excite! NetReviews.
• Both the NetSearch page and NetReviews index are very clean and well organized, although the title graphics and advertisements are a bit large.
• Additional Services
  • The service provides both a short FAQ document and a well-stocked Handbook describing services.
  • The title graphic provides easy access to key excite! services, including a current news page, cartoons, and columns. Unfortunately for text-only users, there are no easy links to these services (or to the NetReviews) without image-map support.
  • As a user navigates the NetReviews subject tree, a new or popular document review from that subject area is displayed at the top of the page.
  • Users are encouraged to suggest documents for inclusion in both the NetSearch and NetReview portions of excite.
  • Search results include document title and link, a summary extract, and a "confidence rating" percentage for the query match. NetReview abstracts include document title and link, as well as a fairly clear and accurate assessment of the document collection.