Your science web site #5 can benefit from reading this. If you want to set up a science-based website, then this file may give you some useful tips, and also makes an offer from The Syndicate which you cannot refuse. There are two potential weak links in the chain between you and the viewer, which we will discuss. This file is biassed towards physics (no surprise there), but should give you ideas to pursue with other sciences and indeed any other subject.
The significance of #4 and #5 is explained below.
The first weak link is the way your website initially downloads. Look around the Internet, and you will see too many websites which begin by downloading a massive graphics file BEFORE anything else can be read. The viewer is likely to hit the stop button long before the download is complete. It is suggested that your initial page be a text-only page, and that it begin by stating the business of the website. If you are using any special features (3D JAVA etc...) you can mention them, but do not put them on the first page. Make your first page something which an old-fashioned web browser can access easily, and you will find that this helps with search engines as well.
If you do put graphics on your first page, try to confine yourself to icons or icon-like graphics. Particularly on the top of the first page, include the 'height=' and 'width=' bits in your line
You can omit them, but if you do, as your graphics are downloaded the text on your page will jump about, which is tough on any reader who might actually be interested in what you have to say. It is suggested that you take trouble to get the height and width attributes right at the visible top of your first page. Lower down the page, you need enter only approximate values for height and width, or omit them altogether.
If you want to see how nasty a download can be without the 'height=' and 'width=' attributes set, then we can point you in the direction of certain well-known search engines. Just try using these engines, and you will soon see what is wrong. You will also see huge masses of GIF files being downloaded. GIForrhoea is not nice.
It might be best not to have GIF files visible at all in your initial download. You can do a lot with HTML alone at the top of your page, with GIF pictures further down to pop up later. Make your biggest heading (h1) a hotlink to give a bit of colour, and mix headings of different sizes for variety, remembering that h3 and h5 are supposed to be italic. Use the horizontal rule code hr and you should be able to put together something visually interesting. With GIF files placed below, the viewer won't even realise what you have done and the download will proceed smoothly. Look at the author's website to get the idea. Try clicking on the coloured title to see what happens. Other pages on your website could have coloured horizontal rules made with GIF files. Any such GIF files along with icon-like GIF files could be pre-uploaded at the bottom of the home page so that they pop up at once when a subsidiary page is loaded. You can use pre-formatted text to create lots of white space between the end of the home page and these pre-uploaded GIF files.
A photograph of yourself is rather pointless, since most people know already that you have just one head and so on. If you must include one, make it small, and black and white. Put it on a separate page with other details about yourself. If you produce a scientific journal, avoid a picture of the front page of your journal if it is any longer than 20 kilobytes. We won't name any offenders here, but there are people who ought to know better!
Where graphics are essential to your site, consider putting a small version of the picture with the text, but having a larger version accessible by the viewer clicking on the small picture. Look at the author's website, listed below, for ideas on 'expandable pictures'. This website is copyright, but the basic idea of the expandable/shrinkable picture cannot be copyrighted, so go ahead and use it.
In general, you should warn people about any file longer than 50 kilobytes which downloads from your website. The author's Alt-N-S reflex is now quite well developed, and he uses it often on monster downloads. If you look at the author's website you will see many computer programs no longer than 20-30 kilobytes, and they all do much more than many downloads ten times the size. Why should big donwloads be necessary? There are indeed times to have them, but these are times when your audience ought to be forewarned.
Avoid fancy colour schemes. Unvisited hotlinks should be blue-ish and should turn red-ish once visited. Never reverse these colours (but some idiots do). Please do not reduce these colours to shades of grey. Text in anything but black on white is always harder to read, and much more vulnerable to anything going wrong. In particular, you should avoid text on a parti-coloured or patterned background unless you actually want to keep your website secret. Unfortunately some search engines are among the principal offenders. Have a look around various websites to see just how bad some sites can be.
Remember to include an E-mail address and invite comments and complaints. You may also receive offers of hotlink exchanges (see below) which simply cannot be made unless you include an address. Many people use their name as an E-mail link, as has been done here. Look above.
If you have some computer software, look at the author's website for ideas on publishing it. You can publish source code, and also compile it, PKZIP it and make that available. The author has been working with QBasic, but note that a program written in Pascal can be compiled to a standalone version, PKZIPped and published. We suggest that you at least provide an object-code version to run on any Pentium.
If you are starting from scratch, consider JAVA, but try to keep it 'plain vanilla' JAVA. Also, get hold of a JAVA compiler (they do exist) for MS-DOS or Windows, and provide a compiled version of your program to run on a Pentium. JAVA is normally an interpreted language, which is not quite good enough for an application like a relativistic flight simulator (to be found on the author's website).
You are formally advised not to use frames. We don't want to stand in the way of progress, but you should first produce a decent website without using frames before introducing them. If you use frames, include a decent NOFRAMES section. It suggested that you also provide hotlinks to the frames pages from the NOFRAMES section for anyone who is interested, and also for spider robots so that they can get through to your frames pages, which they could not otherwise do (if you do not understand the significance of what is being said here, then frames are not for you).
There is a lot of crank material on the Internet. The usual quick giveaway is the inability to spell. You are therefore advised to pay extra attention to your spelling if you want to persuade us that the Earth is flat. Go over your website from time to time, proof-read it and check difficult words with your dictionary.
Just don't forget what a good flavour 'plain vanilla' is. Anyone who finds your website by looking in a search engine has probably looked at a lot of utter drivel before finding your site. It really does come as a relief to find something normal! One virtue of CompuServe's HPWIZ (deliberate plug) is that it denies you the means to produce silly websites. You can still use HPWIZ to knock together a basic website, and then delete all evidence of the use of HPWIZ at a later date. We comment on this again below.
Don't get intimidated by the above remarks or paralysed by indecision or perfectionism. Use something like HPWIZ to put together a basic website, get it submitted to a few search engines, and add the fancy features later, which you can do bit by bit. Your website should be maturing all the time rather than starting with something over-ambitious which subsequently never changes.
The second weak link is in submitting your website to various search engines. In your initial efforts, you might end up in the top thirty or forty hits of any standard enquiry you can think of. Look at the websites listed above you, and you will quickly become angry to see just how much rubbish there is cluttering up the Internet, not genuine competition, but just rubbish. Your aim should be to be in the top ten, and anything less than the top twenty is outright failure.
It is suggested that you start with Infoseek, the easiest search engine for a beginner to submit to. You can find a hotlink to Infoseek below. Submit your home page using the 'Add URL' feature, and it will be instantly accessible on Infoseek. Read the advice given by Infoseek on improving the position of your website, a position which you will probably consider to be unsatisfactory to begin with. You will want to add META tags.
We need not describe here in detail how to include META tags. When you include them the simplest thing to do is to use the block editor to get the relevant text from this file, and then to re-edit it to your requirements. The subject of your website, for example 'Your Science Web Site', should appear some five times near the beginning of your page, which we have labelled #1 to #5 above (you cannot see #2 and #3 if you are looking at this with a web browser - use a plain text editor). The subject should appear in the document title #1, in the two meta tags #2 and #3, in the main title #4 and close to the beginning of the actual text #5. Add your META tags, and then re-submit your page, though you will find that Infoseek imposes a 24 hour embargo on resubmissions.
While you are kicking your heels, try the following enquiries (in lower case)
on Infoseek. You will soon come across 'gateways' produced by the author, all of which put you onto the same ultimate page of his website. Produce a few gateways of your own, add the META tags to the best of your knowledge and ability, and submit your gateways one at a time, checking each time that your META tags produce the desired effect. The point of these gateways is that they each deal with a specific type of enquiry and appear at the top of any search. If the gateways were amalgamated, the value of any one of them would be diluted, and they would appear lower down the search.
Pretty soon, you should be able to establish some correlation between what you put in your META tags, and what you see searching Infoseek. Twenty four hours will have elapsed, and so you can resubmit your early efforts to Infoseek, as improved by your new knowledge. After a few days and a few improvements and uploads, your Infoseek empire should be well-established.
As you become finally satisfied with each page submitted to Infoseek, submit the same page to AltaVista (hotlink below). You can only submit pages at the rate of one a day to AltaVista. Check each page the next day and wait until you can find it. You can track down a page on either Infoseek or AltaVista with the enquiry
and once you are satisfied that AltaVista has captured a page, you can go on to submit the next page.
Remember that if you use a search engine every day, then you will usually get yesterday's results presented on a repeat enquiry. To see today's result, you need to 'reload' the page, with something like Alt-N-R or the Reload or Refresh button on your browser. Don't get fooled into thinking that yesterday's submission to AltaVista or Infoseek hasn't appeared yet when it has!
Infoseek and AltaVista both have a 24 hour-ish feel to them where you submit a page and 24 hours later, it is there and finished with. For this reason, we will refer to these as 'Single Page/Single Day' search engines. They are currently the only major search engines which operate in this mode, but you are doing pretty well to have a presence on them, since they are two of the most important engines, and AltaVista also deals with a lot of Yahoo enquiries.
Once you are finished with Infoseek and AltaVista, it is suggested that you concentrate on producing a decent website. Add a site map to your website, such as the one to be found on the author's site (see below). Add an alphabetical index as well if you wish. It will all help for the next phase, described below under 'Entire Website/Entire Month Search Engines'.
If your website is about physics, then get registered with TIPTOP (hotlink below). TIPTOP can operate instantaneously, though by the time you have registered and written all your summaries, you will be back on a 24 hour timescale. TIPTOP is publicised in Yahoo (hotlink below) on the physics page, which is probably how most people find it. If you are not a physicist, then you might find something like TIPTOP on your particular subject by looking in Yahoo at the top of your subject page where it lists 'directories' and 'indices'.
Consider CompuServe or any other service like it as a search engine. You can always upload an HTM file like this one to the relevant CompuServe library. If your website's home page is not graphics-intensive, then you can just upload this home page with all GIF links deleted, and all hotlinks expanded to full 'http://ourworld ...' form. Otherwise you can upload an HTM file which points to your website, and also key GIF files and program files if any. It's up to your inventiveness. Make your HTM file well laid out so that the casually curious without a web browser can still read your file with an ordinary text editor, and check that you are at least talking sense before they acquire a browser. Once you have sorted out Infoseek, AltaVista and CompuServe, you are a respectable player in the game, and can proceed to ...
Make up a web page such as SYNDIC.HTM (see below) consisting of nothing but hotlinks to other pages on your site. Put the home page, all your gateways, and any site map or alphabetical index page on this page. Include also any other page which assists with the general connectivity of your site. Then submit SYNDIC.HTM to all the Entire Website/Entire Month search engines listed below, starting with Excite and Hotbot. As you do so, you will get messages back claiming that your website will be indexed in 2-4 weeks. Be cynical and mark this down as an entire month.
If you've done a good job with Infoseek, then you should get a good showing in due course with the EW/EM search engines. If you don't get a good showing, there is little you can do about it unless you are prepared to do everything by remote control over month-long timescales. Console yourself with the thought that most people will probably concentrate on Infoseek and AltaVista anyway with an article like this one in the public domain. Infoseek and AltaVista do seem to have the edge over other search engines. For example, other search engines will not handle the simple 'url:' enquiry mentioned above despite the fact that it is more obviously desirable for an EW/EM search engine than an SP/SD engine! What are they playing at?
What is supposed to happen is that after one or two weeks, a spider robot sent by the EW/EM search engine visits your website, follows through all your hotlinks, and builds up a picture of your site for its database. Any external hotlinks found on the site will also be added to the index for a future visit from the spider robot. The internal connectivity of your site does help with this process, so we might expect an EW/EM engine to do a better job for the mature website.
There is most certainly a niche in the market for a good EW/EM search engine, but how well existing EW/EM search engines do has still to be established. It is difficult with the current generation to make even the most basic enquiries about the status of a submission. If you submit something and enquire about it the next day, you will get a message about your enquiry not being in the index, but there is usually no way to find out if this means that you are still on the robot's 'to do' list. or the 'already rejected' list. You might as well chuck your website at a Black Hole.
Infoseek only operates, apparently, in SP/SD mode, making it easiest for beginners to submit to. AltaVista operates in both SP/SD and EW/EM modes, and with Yahoo available as an alternative front end, you might think that AltaVista would be everyone's favourite search engine. Before making up your mind, try AltaVista with the two test strings
with quotes in the second string. If the results are different, ask yourself why.
Probably every search engine will in time operate in both SP/SD and EW/EM modes, or face extinction. We could do with a few extinctions anyway. Why should anyone be misled by some rubbishy search engine which pretends to be the equal of Infoseek and AltaVista?
While you are waiting for your EW/EM search engine to spider your site, look around. You may find websites which are just lists of links to other sites. Try to get yourself on these lists if they are relevant. Once you are on a list, add a hotlink to that list on your own website. There is good reason to do this.
You will soon discover for yourself that the Internet has many flaws. A spider robot, being only a machine, finds it hard to cope. Plenty of connectivity within your website helps it, but your website as a whole can still be dropped from a search engine at random, which is tough if you had to wait a whole month to get on it in the first place.
Two independent websites are independently vulnerable to being dropped at random, but if they contain hotlinks to each other, then a broken link can be repaired. The spider robot follows all internal and external links, and will revisit a lost site in due course if there is a link from another site. For this reason, if you find a link to your site on another site, it is in your interest to include a hotlink to that site on your own site. This hotlink can go on an obscure page like SYNDIC.HTM (see below), but as long as it exists you have an insurance against being dropped from a search engine.
Accordingly, we will make you an offer. Put a hotlink to the author's website
on a subsidiary page on your website like SYNDIC.HTM, and submit your subsidiary page to Infoseek or AltaVista. That is all you have to do.
Once a month the author searches Infoseek and AltaVista with the string
which will disclose the existence of your link. As long as your website does not contain personal abuse, pornography or Nazi propaganda, the author will reciprocate by putting a hotlink to your website on SYNDIC.HTM. This page is known to all the EW/EM search engines listed below, so you have a chance of being listed in these search engines with no effort on your part, though it is recommended you make the effort anyway. You can verify that the author is playing fair with you by looking at SYNDIC.HTM at any time, but please allow up to a month for your link to appear.
It is suggested that you negotiate bilateral deals of this sort with other people as well since a search engine like WebCrawler will actually be influenced by external links to your site. You may also find multilateral schemes in existence if you search different engines with
Regarding entries in search engines as vertical connectivity, it is a good idea to get some horizontal connectivity established as well. That's what the Internet is all about.
Once you have reciprocal hotlinks set up, it is in your interest to get the other website submitted to every search engine. There is nothing to stop you submitting someone else's website, or a page from Yahoo, Galaxy, the World Wide Web Virtual Library, TIPTOP or Astroweb. In fact, if what some search engines claim to do is correct, then the mere act of exchanging hotlinks will syndicate websites through to other search engines anyway, so you would only be speeding up something which happens regardless. There is no need to re-submit the author's website since it is well-covered already.
Try to get at least one placement on Yahoo. Unlike a search engine, Yahoo consists of a hierarchy of pages of links. Once you are on a page, you can include a hotlink to that page on your own website on a page like SYNDIC.HTM. You can submit that Yahoo page to all other search engines if you like, if you don't mind telling everyone about your 'competitors'. It takes time to get on to Yahoo, but once on, you are in a strong position. Yahoo will only drop you if there is human intervention (in practice, never), and with Yahoo you can set up reciprocal links to submit to other search engines. This is equally true of any Yahoo-like directory. Yahoo submissions are best effected by going to the page you want to be on, and choosing 'Add URL' from there.
You can always produce your own version of Yahoo powered by E-mail, and many people have done something like this for their favourite subject. Yahoo also makes a good place to find out about these particular directories. Note that TIPTOP is not a directory like Yahoo because although you can search on it with enquiries like 'relativity', the results are dynamically generated. By contrast, the pages of Yahoo are static and therefore they can be pointed to. Anyone can produce a mini-Yahoo, but few people could produce a mini-search engine like TIPTOP.
If you produce a mini-Yahoo yourself, get it registered with Yahoo. Like should attract like. If you work in a specialist area, consider a mini-Yahoo as a disguised vehicle for promoting your own work, but be aware of the responsibilities you are taking on. If you are a student, then producing a mini-Yahoo now could look good on your CV. There are economists who will argue that if you are running a business, then you are better off producing a directory where you are obliged to mention your competitors, rather than leaving things to chance (the customers might not buy anybody's product). In this spirit, any directory you produce should be comprehensive.
Other services similar to Yahoo are Galaxy and the World Wide Web Virtual Library. Galaxy takes submissions and will notify you by e-mail before they appear, but you are likely to get just a hotlink to your site under an appropriate category, and nothing more. The main benefit of Galaxy seems to be that it will help you with EW/EM submissions, which is a worthwhile benefit. A secondary benefit is that Galaxy and WWW-VL may contain categories not in Yahoo.
Unlike Galaxy and Yahoo, the World Wide Web Virtual Library is distributed and much of it is maintained by volunteers. This is good news because you are likely to get a quicker response from an enthusiastic volunteer, speaking from experience, so we have put WWW-VL first in the listings below. Galaxy appears before Yahoo simply because you get an e-mailed notification. You will often find cross-references between Galaxy and WWW-VL and between Yahoo and WWW-VL, so the distinction between these three services is not a sharp one. You may wish to volunteer to maintain part of WWW-VL yourself.
As a foretaste of Things to Come, look at TIPTOP's VLAB page (hotlink below). If you just happen to qualify for VLAB, then grab the opportunity because VLAB is computer-generated and instantaneously regenerated if you make amendments. Put a reciprocal hotlink to VLAB on your own website, but don't bother to submit VLAB to every search engine because the author has done it already. If you find anything as good as VLAB elsewhere, congratulations! Astronomers may care to look at Astroweb, which offers something similar operating on a weekly cycle. With Astroweb, your submission goes at once into a computer-generated queue which you can at least check up on at any time (if only they all worked like this!), but you may find that you remain in the queue for more than one week. The good news is that this queue is on a static page which is presumably visible to every major search engine, and Astroweb itself is well represented on all the major engines so this page can be found at once.
All your activity will take time. While you are waiting, consider preparing various card indexes. This author has both a card index with one card about every page, program or GIF file on his website, and another card index which operates like a perpetual calendar. You don't have to go to these lengths, but it is not unreasonable to do so if it turns out that you have to after all. With his perpetual calendar in operation, the author is able to submit a rota of selected key pages from his website to every EW/EM search engine every few months.
We will say a word about time-wasters. Techniques known as 'spamming' are a waste of time, because search engines have got wise to them. Good organisation based upon the knowledge disclosed here should easily make up for refraining from spamming. Two search engines, Infoseek and WebCrawler, accept E-mailed submissions, but this facility is hardly worth the bother, though we have put the E-mail addresses below anyway. You will see offers to submit your website to hundreds of search engines (how many copies of Yellow Pages do you keep?). Again, it usually turns out that these offers are hardly worth pursuing. Some search engines not featured here are amazingly bureaucratic to submit to, even though no one has ever heard of them. Anything calling itself 'Yellow Pages' is often like this. It is best to pursue the advice and best practice given here, honestly. This advice is given by an active player in the game, and is subject to criticism and modification. Maybe the magic bullet is out there somewhere, but we haven't seen it yet. We'll let you know if we do, but perhaps this file itself is that magic bullet.
We remind you that you can be dropped by a search engine for no obvious reason. Check your presence on every SP/SD search engine you have submitted to about every three months or so. Resubmit your site to every EW/EM search engine every three months or so.
Search engines are unable to evaluate the intrinsic merit of your website. The United Flat-Earth-and-Einstein-was-Wrong Society gets the same consideration as a website which actually discloses the secrets of turning lead into gold, faster-than-light travel, cold fusion and living forever. If you put all these secrets on one website, it may even devalue your site's status with the search engine since it is no longer a monograph. Use 'gateways' to compensate. There is no meter which tells a search engine how often your site is visited. The only measurement which can be done is the number of hotlinks from other sites to your site, and some search engines are indeed influenced by this, though of course those other sites must also be known to the search engine. Gangs of Flat Earthers could promote their cause by setting up lots of straw websites all pointing to the main site, and submitting all these straw sites to every search engine.
It is rumoured that some search engines index only a fraction of the pages submitted to them, so your lead-into-gold page could get captured, while your faster-than-light page is ignored. One can hardly blame the search engine for doing this once one has heard the other side of the story. There appears to be little you can do about this, thought you might try adding META tags to your priority pages in an effort to give hints to the search engine. Consider also any specialist directory or page of links for your own subject, something like TIPTOP or Astroweb. An external reference to your faster-than-light page may prompt the search engine to take a second look. Try negotiating an extended exchange of links with this author or someone else.
Search engines make money by selling advertising. The Acme Spaceship Company could buy the word 'spaceship' from a search engine, so that if anyone includes that word in an enquiry, then Acme appears in a prominent position, either as a banner or as number one. Accordingly, as commercial rivals search engines do not poach links off each other. They can poach from a static page of links which is in a different category (voluntary, charitable or public library). Search engines never do things like going through CompuServe's /homepages/ and indexing every site. If you never submit your site to anything, it will remain a secret. Maybe this is what you want. You can always send postcards to selected people so only they know of your site. Scientists, by definition, will want their site as widely publicised as possible, but we hear that some scientists really are ignorant of the need to track down at least one search engine.
Occasionally you may come across services such as MM-Physik and Astroweb which have many mirror sites. A listing in such services is well worth having, because once you feature on all these mirror sites, it looks as if yours is a popular site as far as any spider robot is concerned, and you get a better placing. Once you are on all the mirror sites, track them down and then include reciprocal hotlinks from your own site. Submit every mirror site to every search engine, along with your own site, and you should find that you are home and dry. If you want further advice on this topic, please e-mail the author. This is the state-of-the-art approach to getting publicised, and we would be interested to hear of further developments. The author's page of links to relativistic flight simulators is in MM-Physik and Astroweb. Let's record our appreciation of what's being done for us.
Infoseek and AltaVista are apparently the only search engines which support the 'link:' enquiry described here. This makes other search engines look parasitic. We can guess how things will go in the future (see note below). Don't get obsessed with your placement on search engines which may be heading for the chop anyway, and think in terms of the year 2000 before the Internet comes of age. Some search engines are downright frustrating to work with for the simple reason that they are downright frustrating to work with. These remarks conclude this article.
Advertisement: Click here to read about the author's recommended best practice on search engines.
It is suggested that you bookmark this file under 'Personal Favourites' or something similar while you are using it. Have a quick look over the author's website ...
... and then just work through each of the following hotlinks in order ...
General-purpose search engines accessible from Yahoo have *stars* around them. Specialist search engines found in Yahoo have -dashes-. General-purpose search engines which work with MetaCrawler have +plusses+. MetaCrawler is a super-search engine which passes on its queries to several other engines.
- TIPTOP - (for physicists)
(Take a quick look in Yahoo to see if there are any search engines or directories like TIPTOP covering your particular subject but don't spend too much time on it.)
(CompuServe and any other like it.)
(AltaVista also works as an EW/EM search engine.)
Submit to all the following search engines in one go and then forget about them for a month. Jump on to the next bit (about Static Pages of Links).
Have several submissions 'on the go' at once. The more the merrier.
Put a link to
on a page like SYNDIC.HTM on your science website, submit it to Infoseek and/or AltaVista (preferably both) and wait a month, during which time you could be negotiating other bilateral deals. Then check SYNDIC.HTM to see if the author has reciprocated. The author is open to negotiating more extensive exchanges of links if you contact him by e-mail.
Yahoo lets you have two entries per website. It is suggested that you use both of them at once, because Yahoo submissions can keep you waiting. You will have to wait again if anything goes wrong.
(Look in Yahoo, Galaxy or WWW-VL to see if there are any external pages of links or indices like mini-Yahoos covering your particular subject. Get yourself on them, and then include reciprocal links to them on your website in a page like SYNDIC.HTM. Create your own mini-Yahoo if you wish, and submit it to Yahoo, Galaxy and WWW-VL. Look also at the categorised listings to be found in search engines like Infoseek and Magellan to see what you can find. If you ever find anything as fast as TIPTOP's VLAB then you've struck gold!)
After you appear in a few static pages of links, put reciprocal hotlinks on your own website and re-submit your website to every EW/EM search engine to help things along. You would do well to do this every three months or so anyway. Also refresh your pages on Infoseek and AltaVista every few months, depending upon how enthusiastic you are. You could also re-submit a few external pages from Galaxy, Yahoo, WWW-VL or other static pages if these happen to contain links back to your website. We suggest here that you stick to external pages with no obvious owner.
When you first start with your website you are the New Boy or New Girl and it is pretty bewildering. You track down search engines and submit like it tells you to, but that is often the last you see of your website. It is hoped that this file tells you how to become an Old Lag as fast as possible. Once you have attained this status, and only then, you may consider stopping the use of CompuServe's HPWIZ and just writing the HTML pages yourself.
This file has an HPWIZ-generated file as an ancestor. HPWIZ was used to do a last generation of an HTM file which was then copied to another directory. The file was edited to obliterate all evidence of HPWIZ, and then re-edited several times to its present form. The author rarely writes any new HTML and in principle he is ignorant of the language. Usually he just uses the block editor to pinch existing bits of HTML for re-use. This makes life easy when dealing with all those reciprocal hotlinks which he talks about.
Note: Excite, WebCrawler and Magellan are all owned by the same people and their amalgamation is frequently predicted. What is written here represents 'current wisdom' and is open to change. We have not been nice about the current generation of EW/EM search engines, but let it be stressed that the EW/EM concept is a perfectly respectable one and there is room for a variety of different trades. We don't mind it taking an entire month if it does a good job, and we can make enquiries about work in progress like we can do with Astroweb.
This author is running CompuServe's Mosaic with Yahoo on his home page and Infoseek as his standard search engine. You may find this the most satisfactory choice. Infoseek on your home page would attempt to reload itself every few days, which is irritating. AltaVista on your home page may cause the odd web browser crash in some systems, but AltaVista is accessible from Yahoo anyway. Putting other search engines in either of these prime positions is up to you, but note one rational configuration.
If you are lazy, just accept the author's offer of a hotlink exchange and submit the exact relevant page only to Infoseek along with your home page. With luck, every other search engine should find its way to your site over the course of time, if what they claim to do is correct.
E-mail the author with any comments you have on: