Lycos and search software developer Inmagic, Inc. are offering a new free search product, the Lycos Site Spider, which the company claims is superior to existing offerings.
Aimed at Windows NT-based Web sites, Site Spider gathers and indexes a site's pages and links, then feeds the information into Inmagic's text database. The resulting catalog will let users search individual Web sites by document content, dates, and byte sizes.
The move puts Lycos in position against its competitors already distributing free search software. Excite and Infoseek both offer similar utilities - the latter for a fee - using them as marketing tools to increase brand awareness of their parent search engines.
Lycos' product seeks to one-better its competitors by way of a Java applet that dishes out more information about the content of a site before they search. Called a "word wheel," it appears next to the search field and is meant to reduce trial-and-error searching by presenting an overview of keywords common to the site and lists of document titles.
"You're a click of a button away from seeing all the keywords on the site, so you eliminate the notion of the frustrated search where you end up with 500 documents or you end up with no documents," said Inmagic President Phillip Green.
But as Excite recently discovered with its free and unsupported search package, such offerings can be a burden when problems arise.
A security hole in Excite for Web Servers recently opened sites to a vulnerability where an intruder could issue commands to a Unix server through the utility's search field. Sites using the affected version of that software became vulnerable to malicious users with a mind to alter - or delete - Web pages. Excite provided a patch to fix the problem.
Because of a different design, Inmagic's Green said the Lycos product is not open to the same vulnerability. "The two engines are apples and oranges," he said. "Ours uses a CGI (common gateway interface) program." Thus, he claimed, the only thing a search string can do is query the search engine - not perform any other commands.
But Kris Carpenter, Excite's product manager for search service, said no matter what the approach there are no security guarantees. "It's probably an overstatement to say that by using these other scripting technologies - CGI - that they're necessarily going to be able to avoid security holes," she said. "If there's a way to manipulate a technology, someone figures out a way to do it."
Lycos is also touting a for-fee support line to help site administrators using the product. Excite once offered the same service, Carpenter said, but ultimately decided that product support was not something a search company could be devoting resources to.
"We'll continue to focus on other aspects of our business that we are engaged in," said Carpenter. "Providing support for a software product is not a business that we will move into."
Green said the Lycos spider is only available for NT systems since that platform represents the greatest demand for the service. The Lycos technology is able to index, however, via the http protocol, pages residing on any type of Web server.
