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Introduction

With the rapid growth of the internet, there is an increasing interest in making electronic libraries accessible through the World Wide Web. Even within the ``firewall'' of a corporation, it is possible to use the elegant HTTP protocol without alienating security.

There exist several freely available search engines suitable to organize Web pages (see e.g. WAIS (Thinking Machines Corp.), SWISH (EIT), Isite (CMDR), Glimpse (U Arizona), Aliweb (Nexor).

The Bell Labs library offers a search package called Slimmer which is used to organize LINUS and http://www.att.com. For more information on this engine, contact: Bob Waldstein, wald@library.att.com, 908 582-6171.

To organize larger Web sites, some business units of AT&T prefer licensing an ``off-the-shelf'' commercial engine, easy to install, supported and maintained. This report provides a set of pointers to information regarding the most widely used commercial search engines for WWW servers. Technical terms and abbreviations are appended.

We are aware that this survey is not exhaustive. New products appear almost dayly on the market. In particular, many universities are starting to commercialize academic search engines. Good examples include: ``Inquery'' of the University of Massachussets Amherst which is the engine used in Infoseek and the Library of Congress THOMAS system; ``Pursuit'' which is the search engine of ``Lycos'' the famous spider of Carnegie Mellon University.



Isabelle Guyon
Tue Nov 14 15:02:35 EST 1995