TRACKING SEARCH ENGINE RESULTS

While the form tracking capabilities of Mind-It can be used as a current awareness tool for tracking changes to search engine results, there are a couple of other services specifically designed for this purpose.
The Informant

First, from Dartmouth College and Push Technologies, comes the Informant (http://informant.dartmouth.edu) with its motto of being "your personal search agent on the Internet." The Informant can deliver a current awareness report of new search engine results via email or the update can be retrieved directly from its Web site. It can track changes to search engine results and changes to specific Web pages.
On the search engine side, belying its academic roots, it gives a maximum of three searches that can be run. Only four search engines are offered: Lycos, Excite, Infoseek, and AltaVista. The full power of the advanced searching capabilities of each search engine is not available. Instead, the Informant only provides an option for either ANDing all the terms or combining multiple terms with OR.

In each of the three available searches, only one search engine can be monitored at a time. In addition, the only time intervals available for the monitoring frequency are 3, 7, 14, 30, and 60. Yes, that's days, not hours.

The Informant can be licensed for use on an intranet or on the Internet. If it is licensed and you have the UNIX platform to run it on, it can be configured to monitor additional search engines, more search terms, and at more frequent intervals.

The Informant also includes a Web page change tracking system, with up to five URLs that can be entered. While the Informant is less sophisticated than most of the other services discussed here, it can be effective for those only interested in a couple of searches on the specific search engines available.

TracerLock

A more robust current awareness tool for search engine results is TracerLock (http://peacefire.org/tracerlock). The free service is offered by Peacefire, an organization opposed to Internet censorship and filters. TracerLock offers email delivery of current awareness reports for search engine results and Usenet news search results.
TracerLock is only somewhat more robust than the Informant and is more limited in other ways. TracerLock offers up to five Web searches for tracking and they may expand that number. On the other hand, TracerLock only uses AltaVista. No other search engines are available.

By relying exclusively on AltaVista, the full power of AltaVista's advanced search syntax can be used. The searches are run using the AltaVista advanced search form, so use Boolean operators and the other capabilities available from the advanced form rather than the + - system of the simple search form. Figure 2 shows the screen used for entering the searches to be monitored along with samples of searches. Complex queries can be entered, and the box scrolls right for longer search statements. The date to the right is set by default to three days prior to the day the searches are set up. The date is used in the AltaVista search as a date limit to find the most recently changed pages. TracerLock will only report the first ten such changed pages per search.

USENET NEWS

Reference.com, a current awareness tool for Usenet news discussed in the July/August 1998 ON THE NET, demonstrates some of the potential problems with these services. In the latter part of 1998, the Reference.com server was down for a few days, and the email current awareness deliveries ceased. Its current awareness service has remained unavailable until late December.
Since these services do not have the financial backing of large corporations or the preponderance of use that the portals, search engines, and subject directories have, they may be considerably less reliable. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that any of these services will be around next week, that they will continue to deliver their product, or that they will run it the same way tomorrow. Many of the services mentioned here do have some track record of success and reliability, but, as with so much on the Internet, there is no guarantee of permanence.

So what alternatives are there for current awareness of Usenet news postings when Reference.com is down? Using Mind-It's form tracking capabilities in conjunction with a DejaNews search form is one possibility. TracerLock is another.

Just as TracerLock can monitor up to five AltaVista Web searches, it also can handle up to five AltaVista Usenet searches. Again, the full capabilities of the advanced search syntax can be used. The date limit captures the recent postings, and AltaVista does have a separate database of Usenet postings from both DejaNews and Reference.com.

But also check back with Reference. com. By the time this is published, it should be up and running again. Try to log in or to establish a new account. If it ends in an error message, it is still broken. If not, it may be available again as a Usenet current awareness tool.


post by santan...30th...july......