06/03/96 A TURBOCHARGED WEB SEARCHER

A TURBOCHARGED WEB SEARCHER

THE BATTLE OF THE World Wide Web search engines--public, ad-supported directories of the Web's vast contents--continues. The newest entry: a system called HotBot, made available by HotWired, an online site (www.hotwired.com) operated by Wired magazine.
As with competing search engines, such as Yahoo! and InfoSeek, HotWired plans to sell advertisers the ability to direct their pitches at selected classes of visitors. Advertisers will be able to target their messages not only according to the keywords that Net surfers type in but also by the visitors' location, type of computer, and other criteria.
Developed with help from Inktomi Corp., a technology-development company based in Berkeley, Calif., HotBot represents the commercialization of a research project at the University of California's Berkeley campus. Called Networks of Workstations (NOW), the project focuses on harnessing multiple high-performance computers to attack difficult problems in parallel. At its launch, the HotBot engine, using a collection of seven computers, will have indexed 50 million World Wide Web pages--twice as many, HotWired officials claim, as any competitor can offer. And, they say, the NOW technology will make it easy to add more computers so that the index can grow with the Web itself.
EDITED BY PAUL M. ENG By John Verity