Date: Wed, 23 Jul 1997 16:47:05 -0400 From: crispen@INTERNIC.NET Reply-To: TOURBUS-Request@LISTSERV.AOL.COM To: TOURBUS@LISTSERV.AOL.COM Subject: TOURBUS TOP TEN -- 24 JULY 1997 -- DOGPILE This post contains inline ASCII graphics which look best in a monospace font like Courier. Text-to-speech readers should turn off punctuation now. _________ ____________ ________ __________ _____________ ___ _ / | / | | / | \ | "Why | Surf When / You Can | Ride The | Bus?" / | \ |__________|__________/__________|__________|___________/ | \ / /______|----\ | Visit the TOURBUS website to see the Archives, |//////| | | FAQ, and Subscription Information! |//////| | | http://www.TOURBUS.com |//////| | \________________________________________________________|______|____| / \ / \ / \ \___/ \___/ T h e I n t e r n e t T o u r B u s \___/ Hi, kids! (Actually, considering that I am in Austin, Texas, as I write this, I guess it would be a little more appropriate if I said "HOWDY, kids" instead). :) Since this is the last of our "top ten" series commemorating TOURBUS' second birthday ("MINE!"), I figured that I would celebrate this occasion by sharing with you a bit of e-mail that I thought was hysterical. This following comes from my dad, who was kind enough to write last Thursday's TOURBUS post about the Mars Pathfinder. According to my dad, he found the following "press release" on a VRML discussion list earlier this week: MARS AIR FORCE DENIES STORIES OF UFO CRASH Valles Marineris (MPI) - A spokesthing for Mars Air Force denounced as false rumors that an alien space craft crashed in the desert, outside of Ares Vallis on Friday. Appearing at a press conference today, General Rgrmrmy The Lesser, stated that "the object was, in fact, a harmless high-altitude weather balloon, not an alien spacecraft". The story broke late Friday night when a major stationed at nearby Ares Vallis Air Force Base contacted the Valles Marineris Daily Record with a story about a strange, balloon-shaped object which allegedly came down in the nearby desert, "bouncing" several times before coming to a stop, "deflating in a sudden explosion of alien gases". Minutes later, General Rgrmrmy The Lesser contacted the Daily Record telepathically to contradict the earlier report. General Rgrmrmy The Lesser stated that hysterical stories of a detachable vehicle roaming across the Martian desert were blatant fiction, provoked by incidences involving swamp gas. But the general public has been slow to accept the Air Force's explanation of recent events, preferring to speculate on the "other-worldly" nature of the crash debris. Conspiracy theorists have condemned Rgrmrmy's statements as evidence of "an obvious government cover-up", pointing out that Mars has no swamps. I thought you'd get a kick out of that (personally, I am *still* laughing about the word "spokesTHING"). Anyway, here is some important information from the folks who are paying to keep our little bus on the road. Make sure to thank them for their support! /-------------------------- WOW, IT'S FREE! ------------------------\ Get the latest news and tips on MICROSOFT OFFICE Free Weekly guide from award winning author Woody Leonhard *** Rated 5 stars by "Office Computing" magazine *** \----- Join now! WOW@wopr.com -or- -----/ /-------------------[ GET PAID TO SURF THE WEB ]--------------------\ Join BIG BANG and every time you see an ad with our "galaxy" logo in the corner you get PAID. Click on it and get PAID again, up to $20 a month! Sign-up is free and takes minutes. Plus, if you join during our beta, you'll get a BONUS 1000 frequent flyer miles. Click now! \-------------------[ ]--------------------/ TOURBUS TOP TEN SITE #10 : DOGPILE TODAY'S TOURBUS ADDRESSES : http://www.dogpile.com/ Picking my last "top ten" site was pretty difficult. Looking back on all of the TOURBUS posts that I have written over the past two years, I was amazed at how many really cool sites we have visited. From Mercury Mail back on August 14th, to cnet on September 10th and 12th, to Seidman's Online Insider on September 26th, to Peter Langston's Fun_People list on December 12th . . . we have visited some majorly cool sites! But my last (and probably favorite) TOURBUS "top ten" site is Dogpile. If you have been on the bus for a while, you will probably remember we pulled our little bus of Internet happiness into the MetaCrawler search engine (http://www.metacrawler.com/) back on April 11th. At the time, MetaCrawler was my favorite search engine. MetaCrawler would send your search query to ALL of the Web's biggest search engines: Open Text, Lycos, WebCrawler, InfoSeek, Excite, Inktomi, Alta Vista, Galaxy and Yahoo. MetaCrawler then would collate the results and throw away all of the redundant URLs (the same URLs repeated in different databases). Well, thanks to a suggestion from a dear friend of mine in Texas (thank you, Michelle!), your fearless listowner has found a new search engine that may actually be even better than MetaCrawler (imagine that!). The search engine is called "Dogpile" and it can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.dogpile.com/ As with most of the advanced search engines, you'll need a forms-capable Web browser -- like Netscape Navigator, Microsoft Internet Explorer, NCSA Mosaic, etc. -- to be able to use Dogpile. Aaron Flin created Dogpile as ... the result of one person's search for a better search. It started when I got extremely frustrated with searching Yahoo and finding too few or no results and then trying AltaVista and getting 30000 or more documents. Naturally I tried other meta-search engines, some of which were very impressive, incorporating powerful features. However none would search starting with the search engine that gives the most focused results (in my opinion, Yahoo) moving on to search engines which, while not as focused, return more results. Further those other multiple search engine gateways would not allow the use of advanced syntax such as NEAR, which I use all the time, or leave in the option to get more pages from any search engine which returns more than 10 matches. [quoted from http://www.dogpile.com/about.html] So, Aaron created a meta-search engine that is both sequential (sending your queries to specific search engines based on the number and quality of "hits" that that search engine usually returns) and expandable (if AltaVista and Lycos each have 100 hits for your query, Dogpile will display the first 10 from each, and then give you the option of seeing the rest of those 100 hits from either -- or both -- AltaVista or Lycos). Best of all, Dogpile send lets you search the Web ... and Usenet ... *AND* FTP! Dogpile sends your Web queries to (in order) Yahoo!, Lycos' A2Z, Excite Guide, World Wide Web Worm, WWW Yellow Pages , What U Seek, Lycos, WebCrawler, InfoSeek, OpenText, AltaVista, Excite, and HotBot. Dogpile also searches through Usenet using Hotbot News, Reference.com, Dejanews, Excite News, Infoseek News, AltaVista, and Dejanews' old Database. Finally, Dogpile uses Filez, FTP Search, and Snoopie to search through FTP (but only the first word in your query will be passed on to these FTP search engines). While Dogpile's interface looks a lot like every other search engine you may have used, Dogpile does have a few unique features that you probably should know about. First, Dogpile lets you choose up to two "media" that you want it to search in. For example, you can have Dogpile search for the word "Squirrel" on the Web and then search for that word in Usenet. For most of you, though, you'll probably just want to have Dogpile search through the Web for your query and then stop. Also, Dogpile lets you set a "maximum wait" time for your search. This can be anywhere between 10 and 60 seconds. Running a search through Dogpile is pretty easy. For example, I had Dogpile search for the word "TOURBUS" on the Web, and Dogpile found: - 4 documents on Yahoo! - 0 documents on Lycos A2Z - 1 document on Excite Guide Search - 259 documents on Lycos (Dogpile only showed the first 10, but it provided links to where I can view the other 249 documents) - 5 documents on the WWW Yellow Pages Since I had set my maximum wait time to 60 seconds, and since the World Wide Web Worm search engine did not respond in 60 seconds, Dogpile gave up on that search. But, Dogpile did find a HUGE list of links from those first 5 search engines! (By the way, at the bottom of the page of links that Dogpile found was a button that said "Next Set of Search Engines" ... Dogpile still had *7* more search engines that it could have used if I had not found what I was searching for in that first batch of search engines!). Searching for something on the Net can be one of the most frustrating things you ever do. With so many search engines out there, and with each search engine returning different results, it is hard to know where to start. Dogpile really does solve this problem. Folks, I think I have found a new favorite search engine. :) WAIT ... there's more! Aaron Flin has informed me (repeatedly, in fact), that he has a *NEW* Meta search engine that may even be better than Dogpile! Be looking for a post on that in a few weeks! TOURBUS TOP TEN SITE #10 : DOGPILE TODAY'S TOURBUS ADDRESSES : http://www.dogpile.com/ -------------------------------- TODAY'S SOUTHERN WORD OF THE DAY -------------------------------- HEP-DESK (phrase) - A technical support center. Usage: "'puter's broke? Call the hep-desk!" (Special thanks to me for today's word) YOU CAN FIND ALL OF THE OLD SOUTHERN WORDS OF THE DAY ON THE SOUTHERN WORD HOMEPAGE AT http://ua1ix.ua.edu/~crispen/word.html [By the way ... that's "you-ay-won-eye-ex"] =--------------------------------------------------------------------= For info on my new book "Atlas for the Information Superhighway" Visit http://ua1ix.ua.edu/~crispen/atlas.html --------------------------------------------------------------------- =====================[ Tourbus Rider Information ]=================== The Internet Tourbus - U.S. Library of Congress ISSN #1094-2238 Copyright 1995-97, Rankin & Crispen - All rights reserved Archives on the Web at http://www.TOURBUS.com Join: Send SUBSCRIBE TOURBUS Your Name to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.AOL.COM Leave: Send SIGNOFF TOURBUS to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.AOL.COM PROMOTE your business on the Internet Tourbus. Reach over 80,000 people in a Net-friendly way. Our sponsors say "It works!" Make it work for you - contact BobRankin@MHV.net for details. Editors: Reprint TOURBUS in your publication for free - Ask me how. Send this copy to 3 friends and tell them to hop on the Bus! ===================================================================== .~~~. )) (\__/) .' ) )) Patrick Douglas Crispen /o o \/ .~ Network Solutions Inc. / The InterNIC {o_, \ { Business E-mail: crispen@internic.net / , , ) \ Personal E-mail: crispen@brigadoon.com `~ '-' \ } )) http://www.brigadoon.com/~crispen/ _( ( )_.' '---..{____} Warning: squirrels.