Information motherlode and searching-type links
(or, I Know It's Around Here Somewhere)
When it comes to raw information, the Net is the world's largest, slowest disk drive. You know that what you want is probably there somewhere, but you're not sure it's worth looking. Back in the early days of Usenet discussion groups, it was possible to r
ead all the messages posted in a given day. Today, with 10,000 or so groups, you might not be able to count all the messages in a day. Likewise there is no practical way to wander the web unguided. The indexes and subject guides help in finding spe
cific items, and we rely on the judgement of other humans for broader collections, just like you're doing now, and just like I do when I look for things to add to Info-Rama. "Intelligent agents" which learn our preferences and seek out info for us are int
riguing, but unproven.
Web Spiders
These indexes are very large. The spiders crawl over new web sites and can tell you, for example, such things as every web page in the world that mentions "borscht."
- The newest and baddest: Digital's Altavista Huge. Fast. Scary.
- WebCrawler index, owned by America Online.
- Lycos at Carnegie-Mellon: over 5 million entries, they say.
Subject Guides
These are more like card catalogs, though most incorporate search tools too.
- Yahoo, a business grown out of a Stanford student project, is a popular and comprehensive list.
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WWW Library
- University of Michigan's Internet Public Library
- The Yanoff List is a good list of Internet resources (including non-Web stuff)
- Serious information hunters won't overlook good old Gopher, toothy ancestor of the web
- The Harvest "information discovery and access system" is a complicated and ambitious.
- Go hog wild at the Library of Congress
- And if you're really compulsive, use the All-In-One Search Page
Special Interest Resources
- Skim a thin film of world-wide information at CityNet
- Find out who's on tour (or post your own dates) at Musi-Cal
- The Web's Edge focuses on "underground" stuff, and has a wacky icon system...
Filters/Agents
- Stanford's netnews filter can send
you every Usenet post mentioning "floor wax" and "dessert topping" (or
other keywords of your choice).
- MIT's Webhound wants to bring you your slippers and morning web page (or it would if it was working, which it doesn't seem to be at the moment.)
Back home to Info-Rama
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