Date: Sun, 3 Aug 1997 00:56:30 -0400 From: crispen@INTERNIC.NET Reply-To: TOURBUS-Request@LISTSERV.AOL.COM To: TOURBUS@LISTSERV.AOL.COM Subject: TOURBUS -- 31 JULY 1997 -- ALTAVISTA REVISTED 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?" / | \ |__________|__________/__________|__________|___________/ | \ / /______|----\ | FREE BIRTHDAY CARDS THAT MOVE WITH THE TIMES |//////| | | Choose from a selection of FREE animated greeting |//////| | | cards by @loha. Sure to amuse, tickle & entertain |//////| | | your cyberpals. Plus- register with our reminder |//////| | | service & never forget another special occasion! |//////| | | Check it out: |//////| | \________________________________________________________|______|____| / \ / \ / \ \___/ \___/ T h e I n t e r n e t T o u r B u s \___/ Hi, kids! Greetings from sunny Decatur, Alabama, "soon to be the world's cleanest city" . . . and also the home of my mommy and daddy. By the way, I want to apologize for the lateness of today's post. Due to a travel schedule that pretty much took me all over the United States last week, I am just now getting the chance to sit down in front of a computer to write this. As I keep saying, "TOURBUS is distributed every Tuesday-ish and Thursday-ish." Well . . . I guess today's post is "ish." :) Anyway, I want to thank the following sponsors for keeping our tardy little bus of Internet happiness on the road for another week. 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TODAY'S TOURBUS STOP: ALTAVISTA REVISITED TODAY'S ADDRESSES: http://www.altavista.digital.com/ http://altavista.skali.com.my/ http://www.altavista.yellowpages.com.au/ http://www.altavista.magallanes.net/ http://www.altavista.telia.com/ Yes, I know that we last visited AltaVista on April 24th. However, the nice folks at AltaVista have introduced so many new features in the past few weeks that I thought it would be appropriate to pay them a repeat visit. For those of you who may be new to the Bus (or the Net), AltaVista is one of the Internet's premier search engines. What makes it so cool? Well, AltaVista's Web index contains over 60 gigabytes of information. By way of comparison, that's roughly equivalent to the amount of information that can be stored on 43,885 floppy disks (I think). AltaVista's homepage can be found on the Web at http://www.altavista.digital.com/ Oh, that "digital" part of the address is very important. If you leave it out and try to go to "www.altavista.com" you'll end up at some e-mail software company instead. So what is new at AltaVista? Well, one of their newest features lets you limit your search results to only those pages published in a particular language. To do this, just use the language pull-down menu on AltaVista's main home page. Looking for a squirrel page written in Finnish, or a physics page written in Latvian? AltaVista can find it for you! At present, AltaVista can search for pages written in the following languages: Chinese Greek Norwegian Czech Hebrew Polish Danish Hungarian Portuguese Dutch Icelandic Romanian Engli alian Russian Estonian Japanese Spanish Finnish Korean Swedish French Latvian German Lithuanian Of course, you can still search for documents written in any language, but the ability to limit your searches to those documents written in a particular language is rather helpful, especially if you are one of the billions of people in the world who speak a language other than English. AltaVista has also added five-ish new mirror sites around the world: ASIA: http://altavista.skali.com.my/ AUSTRALIA: http://www.altavista.yellowpages.com.au/ LATIN AMERICA: http://www.altavista.magallanes.net/ NORTHERN EUROPE: http://www.altavista.telia.com/ SOUTHERN EUROPE: http://www.altavista.magallanes.net/ I said "five-ish" because it looks like the Latin American and Southern European mirrors are identical. Still, if you are not in the United States, these mirrors will give you the opportunity to take advantage of AltaVista's powerful search engine without having to wait for a connection to AltaVista's main site in Palo Alto, California. Finally, AltaVista has replaced its "LiveTopics" tool (which we talked about on April 24th) with a new tool called, simply, "Refine." Here is how it works: Hop on over to "www.altavista.digital.com" and then run a regular keyword search. You can do this by moving your cursor to the search box, typing in the keyword(s) for which you are searching, and then hitting the "search" button (or hitting the return key on your Mac or the enter key on your PC). Just for giggles, let's try a keyword search for Patrick Crispen. Once you start your search, AltaVista will scan its huge database and display its results on the screen. For example, a search for Patrick Crispen will generate about 16,000 hits, and a search for "Patrick Crispen" (with the quotes) will generate about 2,300 hits. We talked about this back on April 24th, but it bears repeating: by using the phrase "Patrick Crispen" (with the quotes) we've limited our search to only those Web pages that have the word "Patrick" directly next to the word "Crispen." As we have already seen, doing a keyword search for Patrick Crispen (without the quotes) gives us 16,050 documents. Obviously, that is *WAY* too many documents. Is there a way to "prune" this down a little? YES! After you have conducted a search with AltaVista, click on the "Refine" button (located to the right of the "search" button at the top of the page that shows your results). According to AltaVista, Refine "analyzes the contents of documents that meet your original search criteria and displays groups of additional words, called topics, to use in refining your query." For example, if you search for Patrick Crispen, and then click on "refine" after the results appear, you'll get a list that looks something like this: 99% Crispen, roadmap, patrick, letter ... 85% Alabama, tuscaloosa, commands, neat ... 78% Listserv, get, letters 62% Squirrel, squirrels, myriad, chomping %< snip snip snip %< Each group of topics has its own pull-down menu which allows you to "require" that group be included in the next search, "exclude" the group of words, or ignore ("...") them. You don't have to "grade" all of the groups, though. I have found that "requiring" or "excluding" only 4 or 5 groups works quite well. Once you have finished "grading" a few of the topic groups, click on the "search" button on the screen (or press the return or enter key on your keyboard). AltaVista will conduct a new search according to your instructions, and display the new results on your screen. If all goes well, the next batch of hits that AltaVista displays will actually include a link to exactly what you are looking for. Confused? You shouldn't be. AltaVista's refine tool is REALLY easy to use. Just try it once, and you'll understand what is going on. That's about it for this week. AltaVista have introduced so many new features in the past few weeks that you really should pay their site a visit. I promise that you will like what you see. TODAY'S TOURBUS STOP: ALTAVISTA REVISITED TODAY'S ADDRESSES: http://www.altavista.digital.com/ http://altavista.skali.com.my/ http://www.altavista.yellowpages.com.au/ http://www.altavista.magallanes.net/ http://www.altavista.telia.com/ -------------------------------- TODAY'S SOUTHERN WORD OF THE DAY -------------------------------- HOMINY (interrogatory): an inquiry about number or quantity. Usage: "Hominy times I gotta tell you to don't do that?" (Special thanks to Alan Coburn 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.