Bosco,
Maybe this will help??!!! <vvbg>
Best,
Steve
_______________________
March 9, 1999
Asian Technology
Search Engines Net Strange Responses
To Asia-Related Queries on the Web
By STAN SESSER
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
THE INTERNET contains more than anyone would want to know
about almost anything. It's all there; the only problem is finding it.
That's where search engines come in. Renowned recently for making
investors rich -- the market capitalization of Yahoo! alone could someday
approach the gross domestic product of Japan -- search engines are
supposed to whip their way through the Internet, pull out items by using
keywords, classify the items, and present them to Internet users in order of
relevance.
But, alas, they're imperfect vehicles, akin to having the world at your
fingertips, but discovering that someone snatched away your keyboard.
Time and again, I find myself spending hours in fruitless searches that
should take minutes.
Here's an example. The other day, I wanted to see whether search
engines, which are based mostly in the U.S., give short shrift to Asian
topics. That would certainly seem to be confirmed when I asked Yahoo
(http://www.yahoo.com) for entries on Wang Dan, the Chinese dissident.
A grand total of four items popped up, the first being someone's home
page, which offered the chance to click on "Nathan's birthday thing." The
second was another useless home page. Only the third and fourth, which
were identical, involved the real Wang Dan, the text of a petition he wrote
to be presented to the Chinese government.
SO I TRIED WhatSite, a search engine founded by Chinese engineers in
the Silicon Valley, and devoted exclusively to topics Chinese
(http://web.whatsite.com). It was even worse, a prime example of the
bizarre things that search engines sometimes turn up. The first of 34 listings
mysteriously was for a sex magazine called Adult Stars, the second,
believe it or not, for a company in Denmark that "specializes in
microperforation of prelacquered steel and aluminum coils." (Could the
"Dan" in "Danish" have led to this listing?")
Orientation, a search engine that covers "new realms beyond North
America and Western Europe" (http://www.orientation.com), knew who
Wang Dan was, but had nothing in the first 10 items after 1996, when he
was still in prison. The immediacy of the Internet?
My favorite search engine, HotBot (http://www.hotbot.com) came to the
rescue. HotBot not only knew about Wang Dan, but offered useful
information -- a chance to click on news headlines about him, then on sites
that provided valuable background and documents.
Consumers are increasingly using the Internet, so next I tried a consumer
topic. But neither HotBot nor anyone else could come close to satisfying
what should have been a simple search. Since all sorts of hotels and
airlines now offer special deals on the Internet, I tested 10 search engines
by asking for "discount Tokyo hotels." The results were entertaining, but
not if you're actually planning to go to Tokyo.
The listings ranged in number from one on Orientation to an astonishing
8,400,745 on Infoseek. Eight million listings, for hotels in one city that offer
a discount? Since there was no help button to guide me in narrowing the
search, I clicked on "About Infoseek." Up popped a page that offered the
chance to find Infoseek's latest stock price.
Infoseek (http://www.infoseek.com) lists its search results in order of
relevancy percentages, which I suppose means the chance that they'll be
helpful. No. 4, coming in at 84%, was information on a Tennessee
Williams play in Denver called "In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel." That was the
most far afield, but not the strangest of the high-up listings. Fourth on
Dogpile (which "fetches" rather than searches) was the "Go2Seoul"
homepage. A list of discount cruises appeared third on Excite.
Metacrawler's No. 3 was a guide to shopping, eating and lodging in
Manila. Maybe they're trying to tell me something about the desirability of
visiting Tokyo.
SO WHAT Tokyo hotel should I stay in? Whipping through the 10
search engines, I felt lucky to come up with any Tokyo hotels at all, much
less ones with a discount. But on Metacrawler, I thought I hit the jackpot:
a listing of hotels under a big blue and red banner that trumpets "Discount
Japan Hotel." On the list was Keio Plaza Intercontinental, a huge hotel in
Shinjuku I remembered walking past many times. A single room, said
Metacrawler, could be gotten for $212. To see how much I'd be saving, I
called the hotel and asked for the price of a single. The answer: $150.
I also had high hopes for Ask Jeeves (http://askjeeves.com), a really neat
search engine where you can actually ask a question rather than type in
key words. "Where can I get a discount on a cheap Tokyo hotel?" I
inquired of Jeeves. Back came an answer that included the very same
Keio Plaza. The least-expensive room: $306.
The Internet revolution notwithstanding, next time I think I'll call my travel
agent. |
