Re: WWW Information Discovery Tools
"William M. Perry" <wmperry@guava.ucs.indiana.edu>
Message-id: <9304081759.AB08392@dxmint.cern.ch>
Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1993 12:59:31 -0500
From: "William M. Perry" <wmperry@guava.ucs.indiana.edu>
To: jackson@stsci.edu
Cc: www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: Re: WWW Information Discovery Tools
In-reply-to: <9304081736.AA20543@MARIAN.STSCI.EDU>
References: <9304081736.AA20543@MARIAN.STSCI.EDU>
Bob Jackson writes:
>In comparing WWW vs Gopher and WAIS, I admit
>that WWW is a more powerful data representation model.
>
>But, its ability to discover information is only as good as
>the links are and the links are made by hand.
>
>Gopher and WAIS have global information discovery tools
>which know more than any one person does about available
>resources, e.g.,
>
> WAIS's directory-of-servers
> Gopher's Veronica
> Gopher's ts/tb or jughead
>
>and which are created by software.
>
>Is anyone working on similar tools for WWW?
Well, right now it would be pretty trivial to modify my emacs browser to
follow _every_ link it finds and record it. Only problem would be in
keeping it from getting in an infinite loop, but that wouldn't be too hard.
Problem would be disk space & CPU time.
Once I get the browser stable, I can work on something like this - unless
someone else wants to work on it in the meantime. Might be more
stable/faster if written in C though. :) But then what isn't?
What type of format would the output have to be in? It would be very
easy to spit out "URL :: TITLE" into a file.
-- William M. Perry (wmperry@indiana.edu) --
'When you look long into the Abyss, the Abyss also looks into you.'
- Nietzsche