WWW Information Discovery Tools

marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
Date: Thu, 8 Apr 93 13:13:56 -0500
From: marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
Message-id: <9304081813.AA27614@wintermute.ncsa.uiuc.edu>
To: jackson@stsci.edu, www-talk@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: WWW Information Discovery Tools
In-reply-to: <9304081804.AA27578@wintermute.ncsa.uiuc.edu>
References: <9304081736.AA20543@MARIAN.STSCI.EDU>
	<9304081804.AA27578@wintermute.ncsa.uiuc.edu>
X-Md4-Signature: 2600e0962e9a2c4c04f4f816f45fab75
Marc Andreessen writes:
> 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?
> 
> Yup -- they're called Gopher and WAIS.

Actually, my first answer was a little too cute for its own good.  The
real answer is that we (for one) are working on what could be termed
similar tools for wide-range hypermedia resource discovery, but it's
too early to tell how much we're going to be able to do or how it's
going to turn out, so there's not much else I can say about it at the
moment....

Marc

--
Marc Andreessen
Software Development Group
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
marca@ncsa.uiuc.edu