SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING NEWS

Lisa Guernsey reported for The NY Times: Two weeks ago, online newspapers and magazines were buzzing with news about Linda Chavez, President Bush’s first choice for labor secretary.

But from the results coming up in most popular search engines, you would never have known it. Instead of retrieving articles about an illegal immigrant who had lived in Ms. Chavez’s home, a Google search on “chavez” led to several encyclopedia entries on Cesar Chavez, the American labor leader and advocate of farmworkers’ rights.

Lycos turned up several Web sites with information about Eric Chavez, an Oakland A’s third baseman. On Alta Vista, some of the first results linked to Ms. Chavez’s old columns for an online magazine, but none of the links provided even a hint of the fact that she had become front-page news.

“I don’t see anything that anyone would feel is relevant to her given the context of this past week,” said Danny Sullivan, the editor of SearchEngineWatch.com, as he typed “chavez” into other search engines.

His demonstration illustrated a problem that has long been apparent longtime problem that has to anyone casting about for online news reports: search engines can be pitifully inadequate, partly because they rely on Web-page indexes that were compiled weeks before. It is not just timely material that seems to escape their reach. Pages deep within Web sites are also often missed, as are multimedia files, bibliographies, the bits of information in databases and pages that come in P.D.F., Adobe’s portable document format.

In fact, traditional search engines have access to only a fraction of 1 percent of what exists on the Web. As many as 500 billion pieces of content are hidden from the view of those search engines, according to BrightPlanet.com, a search company that has tried to tally them. To many search experts, this is the “invisible Web.” BrightPlanet prefers the term “deep Web,” an online frontier that it estimates may be 500 times larger than the surface Web that search engines try to cover. And that uncharted territory does not include Web pages that are behind firewalls or part of intranets.

To dig deeper into the Web, a new breed of search engine has cropped up that takes a different approach to Web page retrieval. Instead of broadly scanning the Web by indexing pages from any links they can find, these search engines are devoted to drilling further into specialty areas–medical sites, legal documents, even Web pages dedicated to jokes and parody. Looking for timely financial data? Try FinancialFind.com. Seeking sketches of molecular structures or even scientific humor? Biolinks.com may help.

“Instead of grabbing everything on the Web and then trying to deal with this big mess,” Mr. Sullivan said, these boutique search engines have decided to do some filtering. “They may say, we’ll pick 40 sites that we know are related to this topic,” he said. “And that means you won’t get these irrelevant search results.”

Some search engines go even further, sending out finely tuned software agents, or bots, that learn not only which pages to search, but also what information to grab from those pages. Either way, the theory is the same: The smaller the haystack, the better chance of finding the needle.

Finding those smaller haystacks can be a challenge in itself. It is the same problem faced by patrons who walk into a library, said Gary Price, a librarian at George Washington University and co-author of the forthcoming book “The Invisible Web” (CyberAge Books). People may know to come to the library, but they probably do not know which reference books to pull off the shelf. Of course, in such cases, patrons can at least consult a reference librarian. On the Web, people are usually fending for themselves.

“The end user should have a better idea of all the different options that exist,” Mr. Price said. “But this is easier said than done.”

Lately, however, a few specialty search engines have been popping up on lists of most-visited Web sites–evidence that people are learning to find them. MySimon, a service that specializes in culling product prices and information across 2,500 shopping sites, is one of the most popular. In December, the site attracted 5 million unique visitors, a huge increase from its 1.9 million visitors a year before, according to Jupiter Media Metrix, an Internet research firm. FindLaw.com, a search engine and Web- based directory of legal information, has as many as 900,000 visitors a month.

Moreover.com, a site that opened in 1999 with a search engine that gathers headlines from 1,800 online news sources, has also appeared on Jupiter Media Metrix’s reports of Web use, which track only sites with at least 200,000 visitors a month. Last month, about 340,000 people visited Moreover.com’s pages–and that is without any consumer marketing from the company, which offers the search engine free as a teaser for businesses that might buy its search software.

Like most specialty search engines, Moreover manages to find those news stories because its bots have been designed to hunt for only specific pages within a specific realm of the Web. They are like sniffing dogs that have been given a whiff of a scent and are taught to disregard everything else. Font tags in the source code underlying the Web page, for example, are a giveaway. Between 6 and 18 words in large type near the top of a Web page look a lot like headlines. In most cases they are, and the site’s bots retrieve them, using the headline as the link in the list of search results.

Once in a while, however, those supposed headlines turn out to be something else, like a copyright disclaimer page. So to filter further, Moreover’s spiderlike bots learn the structure of the Web address, noting which words and numbers show up between the slashes. If an address ends with the word “copyright,” a bot may decide to disregard that page. Similar rules are used to categorize the news articles so that people can narrow their searches before even entering a search term. “Our spiders are very good readers,” said Nick Denton, Moreover’s chief executive.

MySimon also employs bots that are designed to hunt for very specific information. But first the bots must watch the click- through routines of MySimon employees who have learned the ins and outs of particular online shops–like exactly which pages typically provide prices, sizes or shipping fees. Once trained, the bots follow those paths themselves, prowling shops for information to put into databases and then display online. For example, one bot is assigned to Amazon.com’s bookshelves; another is assigned to its electronics merchandise.

“What we’re doing is teaching our agents to shop on behalf of consumers,” said Josh Goldman, president of MySimon.

Meanwhile, general search engines have also decided to offer smaller fields for foraging. Northern Light has a news search service that searches a two-week archive of articles on 56 news wires. It also offers a “geosearch” service that allows people to look for businesses based within a few miles of a given address. Google recently opened an “Uncle Sam” area, where people can search for governmental material.

Services that limit searches to audio or video files–typically found under the heading “multimedia search”–are now offered on sites like Alta Vista, Excite and Lycos. And shopping search engines are linked from almost all of the major search sites.

But again, many Web users do not know that the narrow searching tools exist. So reference librarians and library Web sites are now directing their patrons to those areas on the Web. Mr. Sullivan, Mr. Price and Chris Sherman, a search guide on About.com who is working with Mr. Price on the “Invisible Web” book, are among the several information- retrieval experts who have built online directories of specific search sites. Another tool is the LexiBot, a downloadable program designed by BrightPlanet to demonstrate the search technology it sells to businesses. The LexiBot, which costs $89.95 but is free for the first 30 days, gathers information simultaneously from 600 search sites and databases–including the databases that form the basis of specialty search engines.

The harder part may be to change people’s behavior. All the boutique search engines in the world will not alter the fact that the majority of Web surfers are still inclined to type a single keyword into a huge, general search engine and hope for the best. The thought of narrowing a search–by either going to a specialty search page or clicking through a menu of choices on a general search site–does not seem to occur to most users, Mr. Sullivan said.

He poses this challenge to the major search sites: Wouldn’t search engines be more helpful if they would automatically narrow a search without requiring their users to make that realization on their own?

“Can you automatically detect what database to search,” he asked in posing his challenge, “based on what people have typed in?” During the second week of January, for example, perhaps a search engine could have been directed to steer people to news sites whenever they typed in words that made headlines, like “chavez.”

A few search engines have tried to take that step, with mixed results. For example, when Mr. Sullivan typed “chavez” into the search box at Ask Jeeves earlier this month, the site pointed to a recent news story–a link provided by Ask Jeeves’ editors who were assembling information about potential members of a Bush cabinet. Using the same search a few weeks later, the news reports were nowhere to be found. (Paul Stroube, the company’s vice president for Web production, said that the news link disappeared because Ms. Chavez was taken off Ask Jeeves’ list of President Bush’s nominees.)

Unless the big search engines get better at delivering timely information, searchers might be better off with Moreover.com and other news-oriented search services. With those, Mr. Sullivan has found success. Two weeks ago, in a Moreover search using the word “chavez,” more than 30 relevant stories appeared, at least half of which had been posted that day.

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