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RSS feedsAn associate professor of philosophy and religion at the University of Evansville in the United States has upped the stakes in the end-user revolution by launching a bespoke Internet search engine which is specifically designed for students and teachers of the ancient world. A beta version of the new service was launched late last year.
Named after the dog in Homer's Odyssey, Argos only indexes those Internet resources which are relevant to the study of the ancient and medieval worlds. As a result, claims its creator Professor Anthony Beavers, it is the first of a new breed of search engines. "To differentiate it from a global search engine like Alta Vista we have coined the term LASE, or limited area search engine," he told IWR. "Argos is the first peer-reviewed LASE."
The Argos index is created using an accreditation system, with eight approved associate sites accrediting other sites by including them in their indices. "We simply feed Argos the eight addresses of our associate sites," explained Professor Beavers. "It then goes off and searches those sites and indexes everything they link up to, with the exception of any pages for which an associate site has included a special HTML tag instructing Argos not to index them."
In order to limit the search to relevant topics, Argos has been programmed only to search down directory structures, not up. This prevents the engine from linking out indefinitely into the wider web environment.
Explaining the background to the initiative, Professor Beavers told IWR: "I'd been working on a book on the ancient world and needed to gather data quickly and efficiently. But I was finding it very difficult to locate relevant Internet resources using the major search engines because of the sheer number of hits. I thought: if we could pre-filter what went into the search engines, we could improve the quality of results."
The President of the University of Evansville was enthusiastic about the idea and provided $13,000 to kick-start the project, enabling Professor Beavers to buy a Pentium PC and a 2GB hard disk. He then arranged for a computer science student at Evansville, Hiten Sonpal, to write the software.
Apart from providing a smaller, more relevant, sub-set of Internet resources, Professor Beavers expects Argos to be more up to date than larger search engines. "I tried three sites on Alta Vista yesterday," he said. "All three were gone. An engine that size simply can't keep up to date."
Another bonus, he pointed out, is that Argos will enable the creation of permanently updated online bibliographies. "For example," he explained, "I have a Web site called Exploring Ancient World Cultures which is effectively an online history text book. What I can now do is create a hypertext link from the word Plato in the text directly into a search for Plato on the search engine. In this way, Argos can provide an encyclopaedic index of a refereed portion of the Internet, enabling academics to build dynamic bibliographies of Internet resources."
During its beta crawl Argos indexed 22,000 pages, but Professor Beavers expects it to have upwards of 50,000 Web pages after the next update. "We've recently had a number of new associate sites join us," he explained. "In addition, we've developed the ability to include gopher sites and FTP servers in the index."
With over 30,000 searches conducted in the first month, Argos is already proving a hit. "I've already been contacted by a number of other disciplines interested in setting up LASE sites for their own subject area," said Professor Beavers.
"I'd like to see a whole series of LASEs connected via a central server," he continued. "So if we had, say, one for political science, one for philosophy and one for economics we could link them up. Users would then be able to decide what portion of the Internet they wanted to search, and they could do it in a stepped way: when they did a search for, say, Plato in Argos there would be a link that would allow them to have their search request passed on to associated LASEs."
Professor Beavers is keen, however, to avoid spending too much time developing LASEs himself. "I'm a teacher and researcher ? I don't feel running a search engine makes very good use of an academic's time," he commented. "The intention is to offer the software to other academic institutions to develop their own engines."
So is there a role for librarians in all this? "I haven't actually discussed Argos with our own library," Professor Beavers commented, "but I guess someone in library resources would be the best person to be running a service like this."
