We're always happy to explain how we publicise our information online. Here are just some of the places you will find references to our customers' Web pages.
Lycos is the name of a program which explores the World Wide Web and indexes the documents it finds. It currently [July 1995] holds references for over 4 million documents, and the full text for approaching half a million documents.
Lycos is queried by typing a key word, or words, and the program will then return the "best" matches it finds for those key words. Documents with the key words occurring in the title or early on in the document will be retrieved before documents in which the keywords occur near the end, and documents with multiple occurrences of the keywords before documents with only a single occurrence.
All of our pages are registered with Lycos once they are online; this means that they will be included in the index when it is next updated, rather than having to wait for the program to find them on its own.
http://lycos.cs.cmu.edu
[Editor's note: these days [March 1996] Lycos claims to have over 30 million documents indexed. It has also changed addresses: the current address is http://www.lycos.com/]
Yahoo is a hierarchical index, which allows you to follow branches from a top level of approximately 20 subjects to find your chosen topic. It also offers a keyword search facility as an alternative.
Unlike Lycos, Yahoo is not built by searching the Web automatically; instead, it only provides links to information about which it has been told. Also, while Lycos will include all information registered with it, Yahoo's editors reserve the right to edit the information provided, so not every link will make it in.
We do register all pages with them, but cannot guarantee that the editors will reference them.
This service is provided by Internet Development Ltd, who are based in the north of England. Their index includes new Web pages within the UK -- personal as well as commercial -- but again you have to let them know that the pages exist! The index is updated approximately once a week, and all of our customers' pages are included, as well as our own page.
http://www.u-net.com/develop/intdev/ukweb/ukweb.html
[Editor's Note: Now incorporated into Internet Magazine's What's New pages, with a link from the old site.]
The oldest of the What's New pages, now proliferating all over the Net. It is a useful resource, but the time lag between submitting an entry and its being announced online can reach two weeks, which makes it less useful for timely information. All new clients' pages will be submitted, though the index does not usually accept updates to those details (e.g. for product promotions).
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/Docs/whats-new.html
[Editor's Note: This list is no longer published, but there are archives available at the site.]
Originally this index promised to have every announcement posted within 24 hours. These days their deadline has increased to 36 hours, probably because they are receiving over 200 announcements a day! Less widely-used but more timely than the NCSA page, everything we add is announced there.
http://newtoo.manifest.com/WhatsNewToo/index.html
This is a newsgroup (much like a large-scale bulletin board) which provides a place to announce new resources on the World Wide Web. Each announcement must carry a keyword (such as COMMERCIAL: or PERSONAL:) to show the type of resource. Most announcements are posted within two or three days. This allows people who do not use the Web as frequently to keep track of new items which might interest them.
[Editor's Note: No longer carries commercial announcements.]
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