A Beginner's Guide to the Internet/INTERNET.ISO/text/faqs/seek.inf

Text File | 1995-05-19 | 14.6 KB | 364 lines

>From: InfoSeek Corporation <[e-mail]>
Subject: Your message to [e-mail]

This is an automated reply to your message requesting more
information about InfoSeek.

The "[e-mail]" e-mail address always sends this
introductory information. If you would like to request a
specific document or get an account, your request should be
sent to a different e-mail address as explained below.

InfoSeek is now making a limited number of free accounts
available for testing and market research purposes.
Information on how to apply for an account is included
below. It's easy and simple and there are no forms to fill
out. The whole process takes about 60 seconds and your
account will be immediately activated upon receipt of your
request.

We have also recorded your e-mail address and will send you
all future annoucements.

This message contains:

        o Background information about InfoSeek
        o How to apply for a free account
        o How to get more information

============================================================
BACKGROUND INFORMATION ABOUT INFOSEEK
============================================================

"It's too hard to find anything on the Internet."

"Finding information takes too long, you have to know which
vendors and which collections to search, you have to know
the specific query language for the system, you have to be
careful in formulating your query, you have to look through
too many or too few hits, the hits aren't sorted in
relevance order, there's too much pressure when you are
being charged for connect time, it's too expensive if you
don't find anything, and it's too expensive if you do."

Can you relate to this? Finding information today is just
plain too hard and too expensive. It's the reason we started
InfoSeek. By making it very easy to find information and by
requiring our information suppliers to provide their
information at reasonable prices, more people will have
rapid access to information. And that's a big win for
everyone.
========================================

Mission

InfoSeek Corporation's mission is to deliver products that
make it possible for computer users to quickly find
information stored anywhere in the world. Using a single,
easy to use information tool, users connected to the
Internet will be able to browse, search, and retrieve
information from multiple local and remote collections.

The problem

Information today is widely available, but it's often
expensive and difficult to find. All of today's information
systems are limited in scope to only that data organized for
access through a vendor-specific interface. We have "islands
of information" where it is difficult to access anyone
else's data in a uniform manner. For example, you must use
the Dow Jones interface to search Dow Jones for a financial
analyst report and the Dialog interface to search a database
there.

Compounding this segmentation is that even within a single
vendor the tools are difficult to use. Users want a single,
easy to use tool that provides uniform access to all data,
whether that data is from local, remote, private, corporate,
or commercial sources. That is what InfoSeek is all about.

InfoSeek's approach

In late 1994, InfoSeek will establish an Internet full-text
search service that is compatible with existing Internet
end-user tools and protocols. UNIX, PC, and Macintosh Mosaic
users can use a single "point and click" user interface to
browse, search, and retrieve information stored at InfoSeek
or accessible from other Internet search servers.

Queries can be expressed in plain English, e.g., "Who makes
the fastest 400 dpi laser printer?" InfoSeek software hides
the complexity of where the data is located and which
protocols were used to retrieve the information. Within a
few seconds, article titles are returned sorted in relevance
order.  Clicking on a title returns the original article
with query terms highlighted.

The search system we are using is extraordinarily accurate.
On average, in the top 20 documents returned from a query,
over 60% are relevant.  In extensive independent laboratory
tests of over 31 different full-text search systems, no
other search system performed better than this and most were
quite a bit worse. If you've been frustrated in the past
with other search systems, you should be pleasantly
surprised using InfoSeek.  It is easy for novices to use,
yet has capabilities that meet the needs of the most
sophisticated professional searchers.

In 1995, in addition to offering the search service, we will
also be providing our search software and Internet server
software to anyone who wants to make their information
accessible over the Internet for either commercial or
non-commercial use. This will expand the network of
information sources available to all InfoSeek subscribers.

InfoSeek has applied for patents on two novel approaches for
finding information across distributed databases.  First,
users are not required to know "where" to search for the
information. If the information is located on any
participating computer(s) anywhere in the world, InfoSeek
will be able to locate it within a few seconds. Second,
InfoSeek can accurately rank the query "hits" from multiple
servers into a single relevance ordered list, even if
multiple heterogenous search engines are involved in the
query. Solving these two problems was required in order to
truly provide access to global information resources and, to
our knowledge, no other company's search approach has solved
these two problems.

Background

InfoSeek was started in January 1994 by Steve Kirsch,
formerly founder and president of Frame Technology (makers
of FrameMaker), as well as founder and president of Mouse
Systems (makers of the Sun optical mouse).  The development
team has extensive experience in the design and
implementation of wide-area document search and retrieval
systems.

InfoSeek, which is privately held, has raised over $2M in
two rounds of financing. Investors include Menlo Ventures
and founders and executives from Sun, 3Com, Frame, InterOp,
Kodak, and Alex Brown.

============================================================
HOW TO APPLY FOR A FREE ACCOUNT
============================================================

140 Computer Publications Now Searchable from Mosaic!

InfoSeek, in conjunction with Ziff Communications, is
offering the Computer Select article database from over 140
computer publications for a limited time absolutely FREE to
the first 5,000 users who are willing to answer a short
survey during our testing period.

Using plain English queries processed by a very powerful and
accurate full-text search system, you can obtain information
on a broad variety of computer related topics, such as
stories on companies, products, people, and the latest
computer technologies and trends.

The Ziff Computer Select On-Line articles database contains
the full text of recent articles (from April 1993 through
July 1994) from 140 computer related periodicals including
The Seybold Report, InfoWorld, MacUser, MacWeek, PC Week,
Communications of the ACM, IEEE Computer, and many more.
Plus, it also contains selected abstracts from the New York
Times, Wall St. Journal, San Jose Mercury News, etc. Over
72,000 articles (approximately 300MB of data) are included.

Here are some actual queries that can be typed in exactly as
they appear:

   o A developer might want to look up algorithms or find
out about development tools or technologies, e.g.,

      Who makes toolkits for transport independent RPC?
      What is JPEG?
      What is Kerberos?
      Tell me about MIME.
      What is Spec 1170?
      Who is Kibo?

   o A computer operations manager might want to look at
articles/reviews/prices on equipment or software before
making a purchase, e.g.,

      Who makes the fastest Pentium PC?
      Who makes the fastest 486 computer?
      Who makes the best laser printer?
      Which digital tape drive has the best data reliability
      in the industry?
      Which Ethernet cards have the best performance?
      How will the bugs in the Ethernet chips affect us?
      Who makes the best RAID system?
      What's the difference between the NEC 5FG and 5FGe?
      What are the considerations for selecting a UPS?
      What should I consider when buying a network server?

   o A product manager or business analyst might want to get
information about other companies or technology trends,
e.g.,

      Who acquired ASK?
      Who is the new president of Sun Microsystems Computer
      Corp?
      What were Apple's 4th quarter earnings?
      Where is Frame Technology located?
      Who is the president of RSA Data Security?
      What companies make CAD packages?
      Does anyone make an SGML viewer?
      What is the ticker symbol for HP?

All of these queries, typed in exactly as they appear above,
will produce a list of up to 20 of the most relevant
documents within a few seconds. And, in all cases, the first
or second document in the list will contain exactly the
information you are looking for. When you click on a title,
the full document text will be quickly downloaded so you can
read it or print it for your own use.

Extensive on-line hypertext help is available which
completely describes how to make the most effective use of
the system including how to use all the special advanced
query operators.

If you are using the latest 2.x release of Mosaic on any
platform (UNIX, PC, or Macintosh), we invite you to apply
for a FREE account which will give you full access to the
database.  In return, we ask that you respond to a brief
survey that will be sent to you during the test period.
Please note that since this service is being provided to you
absolutely free, InfoSeek reserves the right to terminate
this offer at any time and to terminate any account at any
time and for any reason.

If you are a Mosaic user and you are interested in
participating in this trial, send an email to:

        [e-mail]

The Subject line can be blank. However, the body of the
message must contain one line of the form:

        password <your email address> <password>

where the first argument is your preferred e-mail address
that we should send further instructions to and the second
argument is the password which you would like to use to
protect your account. Please do not include any spaces in
your password or e-mail address. The e-mail address you
supply must be your full email address, or the preferred
subset thereof (e.g., [e-mail] is preferred to
[e-mail] if both addresses work).

For example, if your Internet e-mail address is
[e-mail], and if you want to protect your account
with the password "wombat", you would send email to
[e-mail] containing a single line in the body of
the message:

        password [e-mail] wombat

Our automated responder will process your request and send a
reply back to the e-mail address you have supplied within 60
seconds from when we receive it. The confirmation will have
the username and password for your account as well as
instructions on how to get to the server. You should then be
able to log in.

If you have any trouble logging in, please send e-mail to
[e-mail]. If you don't get a quick response to
your password request, it may mean that either we are
currently down (this is rare), or your e-mail gateway is
slow. In either case, you will normally not need to repeat
your request.

For technical, copyright and support reasons, we ask that
you not share your account with anyone. Plenty of accounts
are available. Please refer other Mosaic (or WWW) users who
are interested in getting an account to send e-mail to
[e-mail] so that they will get on our mailing list
and read this introductory information. Another reason to
refer people to [e-mail] is because account
registration procedures may change from time to time, but
this e-mail will alway contain the current instructions.
Thanks!

MINIMUM SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

IMPORTANT NOTE: Most commercial on-line services only
provide a limited amount of connectivity to the Internet.
For example, you cannot at this time use the InfoSeek
service from Prodigy, CompuServe, America Online, Dow Jones,
or Apple e-World because these services do not yet provide a
Mosaic-compatible browser. You MUST use Mosaic or a
WWW-compatible browser that supports **both** forms and
authentication in order to use the InfoSeek service. All the
latest 2.x NCSA Mosaic versions support InfoSeek. Use the
Help pulldown to see what version you have; you must have
either Mac (alpha 2 or better), Win (alpha 4 or better), or
UNIX (2.1 or better). Lynx 2.0 also works. MacWeb 0.98
appears not to. If you are not sure if your browswer
supports authentication, try loading
http://www.infoseek.com/cgi-bin/query and see if you get a
dialog box asking for a user name. To test forms, try:
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/Docs/fill-out-f
orms/example-11.htm


============================================================
HOW TO GET MORE INFORMATION
============================================================


For more information about InfoSeek, you can use our
automated request server.  Send e-mail to:

[e-mail]

with the command:

send titles

in the body of the message.  A wide variety of documents are
available through the request server such as:
        o information on how to get a free copy of Mosaic or
Lynx via ftp
        o information on licensing Mosaic for commercial
re-distribution
        o information for the press (screen shots in TIFF
BinHex format, Q&A)
        o information on how to put your information on our
server
        o information on how to get our software for your
own server
        o the complete list of journals included in Computer
Select
        o the complete list of request server commands
        o pricing (site licenses, educational pricing, etc.)
        o how to win $100 by solving a user mystery
        o the current bug list
        o usage tips
        o and a lot more....

InfoSeek Corporation
2620 Augustine Dr #250
Santa Clara, CA 95054

Phone: [phone]
FAX:   [phone]

E-mail:    [e-mail] (automated server; sends
general information)
           [e-mail] (automated request server)
           [e-mail] (for submitting questions,
bugs, suggestions)

WWW:       http://www.infoseek.com/

This document was last updated on July 20, 1994.