Obstacles in Searching

Users searching the Internet is inefficient (and Slow!)
Commercial services are nice (yahoo, Alta Vista), but…
- Because of their scope they become out of date quickly
- A robot may visit your site and not come back for months
Some sites have indexed themselves
- Nice if you’re browser is at their site
- Some sites have good retrieval technology
- Others have home grown searching tools
  - Slow - done in real time, perl based
- Only get the documents at that one site