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The goal of HuskySearch, technically a University of Washington research project, is to develop new search features that will improve results. It's the brainchild of Erik Selberg and Oren Etzioni (original creators of Metacrawler, reviewed 12/97), and has been available to all Web users for about a year. Mamma, in contrast, is an established search engine offering an array of services in addition to its basic search capacity. HuskySearch - A POWERFUL RESEARCH TOOL Are you doing research for a speech, business report, or master's thesis? Perhaps you simply want to get the best and most complete information available on the Web about your topic. If any of the above applies to you, you'll love HuskySearch (http://huskysearch.cswashington.edu/). Value-Added Results The results that HuskySearch yields are both comprehensive and above-average in relevance. HuskySearch adds precision to the items retrieved from every search by classifying the resulting web pages in several useful ways. HuskySearch first presents you with a list of web pages ordered by relevance (as most other search engines do). Web Sites Organized Into Categories As you scroll further, you'll find lists of web sites (a web site can have many web pages) arranged in various categories, depending on your search. For example, one of my searches yielded the following web site groupings: U.S. commercial sites, U.S. educational sites, U.S. governmental sites, U.S. organizational sites, North American sites, European sites, Asian sites, Australian sites, Other sites. Clusters of Subject-Related Web Pages Save Time Chart of Document Clusters: After the site listings, HuskySearch displays a chart of document clusters. A cluster is a group of results which the system considers to be similar based on words in their descriptions. For example, I did a search for information about how to buy a used piano. One of the clusters (containing 13 web pages) was based on the words and phrases buying (100%), buying a (69%), and buying a piano (54%). This cluster contained the most pertinent web pages, and helped me go directly to the material I needed. Some of the words and phrases that other clusters were based on included: piano tuning, sells used, piano for sale, instruments, etc.
The copyright of the article Metasearch Engine Reviews: HuskySearch And Mamma in Search Engines is owned by Paula Dragutsky. Permission to republish Metasearch Engine Reviews: HuskySearch And Mamma in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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