bitsifter
friday, august 23

[sift this] Here's the scene: The phone rings and it's Richard the friend from a former company. We're talking Fantasy Football and during the conversation, we traveling the web, looking up stats, examining schedules, arguing trades... the web is essential part of our conversation.

Integral to the composition of the web is the idea of Instant Gratification -- with a click of a link, you can immediately find information relevant to any idea you might think of. We've created ourselves a second brain which is, albeit slower, but vast in it's composition.

The ability to quickly find information in the web has improved with ultra-fast web indexes, but until recently, these indexes have only solved half of the problem -- the money going into the indexes has focused on hardware to provide lightspeed querying facilities and ignored the issue of the lag between when a new site is published and when it is available to the general public via an index.

The Bitsifter Digest went on-line in the middle of June '96. Within a week, the link was posted to most of the major indices, here's a small sample of what we found:

Yahoo -- "Bitsifter" not found
Excite -- "Bitsifter" not found
Alta Vista -- Bitsifter found July 15th
Infoseek -- "Bitsifter" not found

There is a bit of apples to oranges comparsion in this list. Yahoo bills itself as the premiere content site by claiming they review each site to place it in it's own catagory, but this is Instant Gratification we're talking about and it's late August.. almost two months after the Digest went online. Why should publishing a site be any slower than finding it?

Slowly, the top indicies of the web have figured this out. Infoseek currently holds the lead to rapid page submission via their Ultra engine -- just submit the URL and they download the page and immediately index it. Alta Vista features a similar service although their indexing process is within a day.

Alta Vista barely acknowledges this feature on their web page while Infoseek introduces the service as part of a entirely new version of their search engine. In either case, the instant advertisingfeature immediately raises the bar on "must have" features in a web index.

[sift this] The ripples of the introduction of the Pointcast Network are still making their way through Net. News conglomerates are wondering "How did we miss that?" Netscape considers "Why didn't we buy them?" and Microsoft suggests "How can we completely dominate their market and put them out of business in 12 months?".

Meanwhile, all the players have succeeded in producing Pointcast clones that compete well against each other, but still have considerable ground to make-up before I'll be changing my screen-saver --the most recent addition being internet veteran Yahoo with My.Yahoo.Com.

It is basically wrong to park your home page on the company which provides you with your browser -- I'd equate the act with getting all of your car service done at the dealership which sold you your car -- sure, it feels like home, but how come it costs so much to go home? Yahoo deals with intelligent indexing of information, so it is a logical extension for them to even further index that information into a page customized to your particular tastes. They fulfill that role in clean, low-bandwidth page which doesn't necesssarily amaze, but certainly works.

More changes to the Digest this week. Webcom Communications, our web page provider, is good enough to provide us with the access logs of who peruses the Digest. We've been annoyed to find that folks are linked to random pages based on the inept indexing capabilities of web spiders. This has resulted in two new additions to the footer of our pages, the Cover link will take you to the most recent front page and the Index link will redirect you to a brand new service called the Bitsifter Index.

The Index is primarily used as a tool for us. As the amount of information grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to determine who said what about whom. It also serves as an interesting metric for the topics which interest us. The Index itself is stored in a Paradox database and automatically generated each week with the posting our new articles.Enjoy in moderation.

Finally, more work was done on the presentation of the Digest at varying resolutions. Sadly, I'm afraid that 800x600 on a PC looks crappy, 1024x768 remains the resolution of choice.