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*                                                            *
*                         CYBERSPACE                         *
*         A biweekly column on net culture appearing         *
*                in the Toronto Sunday Sun                   *
*                                                            *
* Copyright 1999 Karl Mamer                                  *
* Free for online distribution                               *
* All Rights Reserved                                        *
* Direct comments and questions to:                          *
*   <kamamer@yahoo.com>                                      *
*                                                            *
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Everyone knows if you need to find something on the web, you 
turn to a search engine. But which one do choose? There are a 
dozen major search engines available to netizens. What's the 
difference, aside from slightly different systems that weight 
hits? After all, HotBot, AltaVista, Lycos, and the rest are all 
mining the same source. 
 
Search engine owners and investors are wondering the same 
thing. When you're trying to market basically an 
undifferentiated product and you have many competitors, snazzy 
packaging tends to be your only method of getting and keeping 
market share. Unlike whiskey, packaging doesn't really work 
with the web. When was the last time you re-visited a site 
simply because it looked pretty? 
 
To attract and keep market share, major search engines have 
introduced a wide range of "value-added" services. 
 
Yahoo! offers an ezine ("Yahoo! Internet Life"), the kid 
friendly Yahooligans!, and regional Yahoos like Yahoo! Canada 
and Yahoo! New York. With its My Yahoo! service (my.yahoo.com), 
you have access to customizable news page, a nifty "push" news 
ticker, and an innovative "3D Stock Viewer". You can even 
subscribe to Yahoo's email service, a sort of clone of 
Hotmail's web-based email system. 
 
Lycos, one of the oldest web crawlers, doesn't offer quite the 
innovative range of services provided by Yahoo!. What it does 
offer to compete with Yahoo! looks hastily added. Lycos' 
biggest gee-whiz service is its customizable road map system 
and trip planner. Punch in any two cities and Lycos will spit 
out directions (what highways to use, which ones have tolls), 
distances, and maps. I punched in a route search between 
Toronto and Tampa. I found the maps were of little help but the 
text-based directions were quite useful. 
 
AltaVista (www.altavista.digital.com) and HotBot 
(www.hotbot.com) are the heavy weights in the battle between 
the web search engines. 
 
HotBot is user friendly and produces more accurate searches for 
the inexperienced user. On the down side, I've found HotBot to 
be very slow. Other than the content offered by its "strategic" 
partners like the Microsoft Network's travel booking service 
and a "NewsBot" headline site, HotBot doesn't offer much in the 
way of value-added content. 
 
AltaVista is fast and no nonsense but until you learn it's 
arcane language for narrowing searches, you can get a lot of 
false hits. AltaVista does offer one mind-blowing value added 
feature, although it's hidden from the main page. If you go to 
babelfish.altavista.digital.com, you'll find a page that will 
translate phrases (or even whole web pages) into French, 
German, Italian, Portuguese, or Spanish. It also works the 
other way, translating, say, German into English. 
 
AltaVista's "babelfish" site (babelfish is a nod to Douglas 
Adam's /Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy/, in it, the galaxy's 
citizens wear tiny babelfishes in their ears and the fish 
psychically beam translated speech into the mind of the wearer) 
may not make you fluent in five languages, but it might help 
you get the gist of a web page or email. 
 
While I'm unilingual, knowing only enough French to order a 
dozen bagels from a /depanneur/ in Mount Royal, I've worked 
side-by-side with a (human) translator for half a decade and I 
know that translation is more (black) art than science. More 
than a little gets lost in almost any by-the-book translation. 
There's an urban legend that when John F. Kennedy visited 
Germany and made his famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" 
pronouncement, his German was poor and he really called himself 
"a jelly donut" not "a citizen of Berliner." 
 
To test the AltaVista translation facility, and this legend, I 
punched in "I am a jelly donut". I got back "Ich bin ein 
Geleeschaumgummiring." All right, I then punched that back in 
and had AltaVista translate it back into English. I got "I am a 
jelly foam rubber ring." Ick. 
 
Use this site with discretion.