__ Net Surf __
__ Infoseek's Ultra-Fawning Ad Copy and Other Search Wonders __
The battle of the browsers continues, while just a bit lower on the fight card, in smaller print, is the struggle for search engine supremacy. Search engines are the Net's answer to world championship wrestling and its bare-chested brawlers. They go by names like AltaVista, Excite, Lycos, and Yahoo!
Raising the clamor a few more decibels is the newest entrant from Infoseek Corporation. Named Infoseek Ultra, this search engine has been two years in the making and, says the company, beats the competition hands down. How good is the competition? That's another question (see "Seek and Ye Shall Find (Maybe)," *Wired *4.05, page 108).
You begin scratching your head when you link to the "check the facts!" anchor in the Infoseek Ultra tag line: "The best way to find what you want on the Net - check the facts!" There you find the headline "Comparison of World Wide Web Search Engines."
Heh-heh, heh-heh, uhhh, Butt-Head, isn't the Net different from the Web? Shut up, Beavis. Can't you see I'm, like, busy.
Scrolling down the page you find this: "If you're looking for speed, size, accuracy, currency, and the full range of search operators, Infoseek Ultra is the one to use. In fact, Infoseek Ultra is so powerful that it can do such searches such [sic] as finding your name, even if you type it without a space between your first name and last name. No other search engine on the planet can do this.
"Um, I personally don't know anyone who thinks that's important."
Further down the page you note Ultra's claimed "unique" features neatly arrayed in an HTML table. The trumpeted features are as follows: a "real-time" index that automatically adds a newly cited URL to your bookmark list; automatic name recognition (translation: if you type "John Makulowich" with initial caps, the engine accepts it as a name); capability to search any word (that is, handles a phrase like "to be or not to be"); ability to find all word variants (that is, handles substrings. Unique? Not!); and speed, touted as the fastest response time (by what measure?).
Continuing to blow its own horn, Ultra says it's found 80 million unique URLs and has indexed the full text of more than 50 million. You begin to wonder who writes this gushing ad copy as you start to look at the other search engines cited by Ultra. I hit Excite and found a banner ad that read "50 million Web pages + intelligent concept extraction = twice as powerful as Alta Vista [sic]." And then it hits me: Infoseek and Excite must be using the same ad agency. More evidence for my theory that the Internet is composed of only 50 users, each with a million .forward addresses.
Ultimately, I initiated searches with the different engines cited by Ultra using the term Kasensero, the village in Uganda that is supposedly the epicenter of HIV. The results? Ultra 1, AltaVista 0, Lycos 0, Excite 3, and Yahoo! 0. The scorecard never lies.
__ Being Dirigible __
Since robots won't be strutting around autonomously anytime soon, John Canny and Eric Paulos have circumvented the walking-robot problem by making theirs float. Like tiny, indoor Goodyear blimps, these shiny mylar friends are featured at the Interfacing Realitysite for tele-embodiment.
Radio signals connect the floating orbs to a local PC; a basic Internet connection renders the robots remotely controllable. With live audio and video from monitors carried by the telerobot (you'll need an AVI and an MPEGplug-in), a user in Tuscaloosa can pilot the robot around a convention in Sarasota and perhaps have a conversation with a colleague about the beneficial effects of Dramamine. Even though the robots have seen limited-use IRL, the site explores such heady topics as the cultural impact of cultivating floating robot friends in true liberal-arts fashion (both at UC Berkeley, Paulos is a graduate student and Canny a computer science professor). You must sign up to schedule your pilot session at the site.
__ Not YourType? __
Whether you're a devout Emigre zealot or just a budding font freak, you'll find nirvana at blue dot's typoGRAPHIC site. Meant to illustrate the history, poetry, and sublime beauty of type, typoGRAPHIC strives also to raise "relevant questions about how typography is treated in the digital media, specifically online." The site is truly beautiful to behold and demonstrates some illustrative, practical uses of Shockwave in the process: check out the "anatomy" area and actively compare the subtleties of various typefaces or explore the differences of type weights or point sizes. The extensive timeline, tracing graphic history from Gutenberg to Adobe, is not to be missed. What could be better? Impeccable design melded with typographic education.
__ "Taxi!" __
Everyone's got at least one great cab story. But not everyone's ridden in The Ultimate Taxi. This Aspen, Colorado-based traditional Checker cab is equipped with a laptop PC, wireless Internet connection, light show, dry ice, mirror ball, and compact MIDI recording studio. The site is lo-tech but hi-cheese: standard animation gimmicks propel a cab back and forth across your screen, and 3-D glasses are needed to best view content. An onboard Kodak digital camera allows passengers to have their picture taken and "beamed up to cyberspace" using GoGadget administration software created by Internet Direct - www.gosite.com. According to cabbie Jon Barnes, it's the only software for "safe Web publishing while driving a car" (and you thought cell phones were dangerous). Just don't get out of the cab before you've checked out the online gallery of such celebrity fares as Ringo Starr, Jerry Seinfeld, and Clint Eastwood. Send live email to the cab - and don't forget to ask for a receipt.
__ To Be Real __
Welcome to the waterfront of Farai Chideya, 26-year-old CNN political commentator, author of Don't Believe the Hype: Fighting Cultural Misinformation about African-Americans and producer of Pop&Politics. This Web site-as-syndicated-column presents the young journo's highly opinionated essays, miscellaneous writings, and dispatches, all of which razor in on everything from the Fugees to the 1996 presidential campaign. With charged prose and a graceful style, P&P fingers a pulse no one else dares take.
__ Back-Alley Graphics to Go __
Posturing pundits will continue to belittle the Web and bemoan its futility until they spot Gabriel's chariot in the sky. But what do they know? If you need a .gif to enliven an otherwise mundane Web site and you don't have Photoshop, it's the Web that'll answer your prayers.
Proving his devotion to both the Web and Nextstep, which he claims is "an incredible development environment for doing user-interface design and high-fidelity graphics," former NeXTer Keith Ohlfs has crafted Pixelsight, a Web site that's about as delicious as it gets. Pixelsightallows you to build GIFs on the fly by answering a few questions and submitting them to the server. The results won't disappoint.
Also on his site is a program that converts graphics to ASCII. Perfect for retrofying and low-resing any image, the ASCII-art converter is dangerously addictive. As Wired's guinea-pig surfer, I settled on an ASCII depiction of Elvis after losing a couple fun-filled hours to the thing.
As the computing environment evolves, OSes become lightweight, and networks become smarter, network-aware applications like those found on Ohlfs's site will only continue to prove that our savior can be anyone with an idea and some code.
__ Intel __
The shadowy image of the quasi-android peers out from microchip eyes on a page sure to challenge the most fanatical surfers. Get out the checklist. You need the right browser (32-bit), processor (Pentium for the PC), and RAM (at least 16 Mbyte). Anxious to sample the whole buffet? Try the Multimedia and Internet Tool Kit at www-cs.intel.com/tools/help/index.htm. You'll find links to two Web browsers, five VRML browsers, two sound players, a document viewer, a fractal viewer, two video players, and a multimedia player (and a partridge in a pear tree). Casually tossed into the midst of all this is some awesome understatement by Intel: "We realize that all these new technologies can sometimes be confusing...."* Hello*?!! Someone should hold a contest to see if anybody actually uses this site - Intel engineers excluded, of course. On a positive note, the step-by-step instructions for installing each client merit praise. Give yourself a weekend for full implementation.
__ Thanks to the Wired 4.10 Surf Team __
Jesse Freund freund@wired.com
David C. Krane david@mcqtr.com
John Kroger kroger@bitstream.net
Colin J. Lingle cjlingle@seanet.com
John Makulowich john@trainer.com
Larry Smith larrys@igc.apc.org
Anne Speedie anne@wiredmag.com
