WebCrawler by Lawrence Kong

Introduction to a Web Site -
WebCrawler

by Lawrence Kong

The World Wide Web site I chose is the WebCrawler. The reason I chose this site is that it is an alternative to other Web site search engines which I use a lot. Since whoever starts exploring the World Wide Web won't have too many addresses at hands, such site will help them to search the addresses of their interested topics.

On January 27, 1994, Brian Pinkerton started the development of the WebCrawler at the University of Washington and by November 14, 1994, the WebCrawler answered its 1-millionth query. The query was "NUCLEAR WEAPONS DESIGN AND RESEARCH". By the WebCrawler Statistics given at November 14-20, 1995, there were already 13,917,238 queries even since the WebCrawler started its service and had a steady increase of around 4% compare to the previous week. And here is a graph from the WebCrawler site telling us about the Statistic of Web users using WebCrawler as a query tool.

The aim of WebCrawler is to provide a high-quality, fast, and free Internet search service. By June 1, 1995, the WebCrawler started its operation on the well known dial up service provider America Online as a public service to the Internet, and is operating from the current Internet location, http://webcrawler.com/.

It is very easy to use the WebCrawler to search for the World Wide Web site that contains the topic or keyword you like. For example, I would like to know if there is World Wide Web sites contains information about unionway, a software which can help display and input Chinese characters under Windows (non-Chinese). Then I key in the keyword "unionway" and click search. Then it displays result with 12 sites contains the word "unionway" Then I click one of them and find out that I can download a demo version of it. Isn't that a fast and easy way to find and get something. Another example, I input two words Asian, AIDS. I hope that it can find sites that contains both words (About Asian AIDS patient), but I find out that since AIDS can mean help, so there are some sites that contains information about job seeker for Asians. So I go back and input three words this time Asian, AIDS, disease. I found that it gave me what I wanted, Asian AIDS patient (with disease). So when you use WebCrawler, remember to provide as much keywords to the search engine in order to narrow down the Web sites found.