| features | AltaVista | Excite | HotBot |
| URL | www.altavista.digital.com | www.excite.com | www.hotbot.com |
| Coverage | WWW, usenet, listservs | WWW, usenet, 60,000+ Web site reviews, listservs | WWW, usenet, listservs |
| What is indexed | Text minus stop words. No words contained in images. | Text plus related concepts, minus stop words. No words contained in images. | Text minus stop words. No words contained in images. |
| Major commands | AND, OR, NEAR, AND NOT
(note AND NOT) + Must contain this word - NOT this term * wild card. Use at end of word or after first three letters. Advanced Search: Choose Date range, or assign weights. |
AND, OR, AND NOT
( ) for nested Boolean Must use caps. Commands turn off concept search + Must contain this word - NOT this term |
AND, OR AND NOT
( ) for nested Boolean Must use caps Modify options: "must contain" or +, "should contain," "must not contain"(or -). Also | and ! |
| Default search | OR | a fuzzy AND (not a forced match). | AND. Change to "any of the words" for OR. |
| Phrase searching? | Use " ". Won't find common words like "the" or single letters | No. | Use " ". Won't find common words like "the" or single letters |
| plural/singular truncation or wildcard | use * | Automatic. | No. |
| Case sensitive | Yes. Upper case is matched exactly. Lower case queries match both upper and lower case. | For capitalized proper names only. | For either a person search or for "interesting case "only: mixed case such as NeXt. |
| Search by field | Search by fields such as title, keyword, url, link, site, image. Use this format: url:query | No. | Search by fields: geographic location, media type, date range, or site. Use pull-down menus or "meta words." |
| Proximity (near) search | NEAR within 10 words | Concept searching avoids the need. | Just phrase search. |
| features | Infoseek Ultra | Lycos | Open Text |
| URL | www.infoseek.com | www.lycos.com | index.opentext.net |
| Coverage | WWW, usenet, one month of Reuters, PRNewswire and BusinessWire, company profiles | Keywords, titles, links of Web pages. Also archived listservs, gopher, ftp. | WWW, Usenet |
| What is indexed | Text minus stop words. No words contained in images. | Keywords, titles, links. No words contained in images. | Every word. Open Text has no stop words. |
| Major commands | , use comma to separate names
+ Must contain this word - NOT this term | to build sets., e.g,. A|B means search term A, then search for term B within the first set of A. |
Menus to find alternate spellings, to control
percent relevance required, detailed results display.
- for NOT . after term to force exact match $ Truncation |
Use drop down menus for:
AND OR BUT NOT NEAR Followed by (phrase) |
| Default search | OR | OR | AND |
| Phrase searching? | Yes. Any phrase. Quotes not necessary, but can enclose in quotes. | No. | Yes. Use "followed by in Advanced search or "exact phrase" in simple search. |
| plural/singular truncation or wildcard | Automatic parsing. | Automatic search for word ending variants. | Enter each word form separately. No automatic singular/plural. No wildcard. |
| Case sensitive | Yes. Upper case is matched exactly. Lower case queries match both upper and lower case. | No information available. | No information available. |
| Search by field | Search by fields such as title, keyword, url, link, site, image. Use this format: url:query | No. | Fields: Title, URL, summary, first heading. |
| Proximity (near) search | Enclose in brackets to find within 100 words. | No. | Yes (NEAR). |