February 2001 Archive

New Update Available

Internet Search Engine Update from the March issue of Online available at the Online Inc. Web site.

AltaVista Default Operations

Back in January, AltaVista made some changes to how it processes multiple term searches. On their simple search page, in general, searches with four or less terms are now an automatic AND while searches with five or more terms are now an automatic OR. See more details in the updated AltaVista review.

Deja Acquired by Google

Deja.com is gone. The Usenet news repository and search engine has been acquired by Google and is now available with a completely different interface at Google Groups. The Deja.com and dejanews.com domain names redirect to Google Groups. At this point, posting capabilities are gone as are the advanced search capabilities of the old Deja. Only the past six months worth of Usenet postings (from Aug. 2000 on) are available. The press release implies that more of the old postings will be added. More details are available in the Google Groups Usenet Help file, which also mentions that the current database contains only Usenet postings archived by Google. This implies that none of the Deja database has actually been loaded yet on Google. While it is great to know that search access to the Usenet archives will continue, at this point the database is considerably smaller and the search features much less powerful than we had on Deja last week.

Google Field Searches

I have updated my Google review as well as the feature chart, and search engines by features pages to reflect Google's other new field searches. The intitle: and inurl: field searches are not available in the advanced search but can be used in the regular search box. These can also be combined with other search terms, unlike the allintitle: and allinurl: fields used by the advanced search.

AltaVista Changes

AltaVista has made some major changes to its site again. Much of the portal content is gone and it loads faster. The background is now white. Check back for more details later.

New Edition: Showdown News Newsletter

The latest issue of Showdown News has been sent out to subscribers. The Web edition is available under the archive listing.