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HOW TO WINNOW YOUR WEB SEARCHESALTHOUGH INTERNET SEARCH engines such as Yahoo!, Lycos, and AltaVista help track down information on the vast World Wide Web, sometimes they can be a little too helpful. A clueless Internet surfer who enters ``cars'' in any one of these engines is likely to wind up with a list of tens of thousands of Web pages that contain the word. Now, a tiny software company in Hong Kong, Knowledge Discovery Inc., thinks it has a program to help. The program, called More Like This, isn't a search engine but rather a database of words that are related. The idea is to help Net surfers generate better search-engine queries by adding related words. For example, if one were to search for information on the Pope, the software would suggest adding words such as ``Catholic,'' ``Vatican,'' ``papal,'' and ``Rome'' to eliminate extraneous Web pages--say, ``Robert Pope's Home Page''--from showing up. Users can even ``drag'' examples of what they are looking for, such as a Web page that has the history of the Vatican City, into More Like This, and the software will analyze the text on the page, finding and creating new word relationships for the topic. EDITED BY PAUL M. ENG
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Updated June 14, 1997 by bwwebmaster
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