Jane Hadley:
>Tweeters is more visible than we might imagine. A powerful,fast new search
>engine is Digital's "Alta Vista." It's so powerful it almost finds too
>much stuff. At any rate, I typed in simply "birding" and did come across
>both Tweeters (about 32nd or something like that in the list of hits) and
>also one of the links at Dan Victor's Tweeters web site.

Thanks for this note. I'd seen a PR about Alta Vista recently. This
engine searches every word of every hypertext file it can chase a link
to, continuously apparently, on a slew of Alpha workstations
(these are workstations somewhat faster - two or three times - than the
fastest Pentiums) working in parallel. Most search engines just
search headers, etc.

DEC has put it up as a public service because they've not figured out
whether or not there's a market for such a thing and if so how much
it is worth. Besides, DEC's always been that sorta company - in
large part I owe my career to their willingness to let some crazy
high school kids become semi-official allies of one of their
minicomputer software groups.

- Don Baccus, Portland OR <donb at rational.com>