Excite NetSearch   &  NetReviews Directory   R - Add URL   

Excite claims to have more than 11.5 million web pages indexed. This is a little more than half as many as Alta Vista, but still one of the larger repositories of web pages on the net. Excite distinguishes itself from the other engines by having reviews of over 50,000 websites. Magellan comes up second with about 30,000 reviews. You can also search 10,000 newsgroups with Excite out of a total of about 20,000. I believe Alta Vista and Deja News both cover more newsgroups and articles. Excite uses a spider to find information about websites. One of the best features of Excite is its excellent relevancy rankings which is one of the finest I've seen. Displays of results are also clear and very readable, but lacking the website's URL. Excite uses a "unique concept search technology" to search and summarize websites in addition to keywords. Searches can be made on concepts or keywords. I really can't see much difference between the two, or much benefit of the concept search. A description of their Advanced Query Language is available as are answers to Frequently Asked Questions. I would not characterize the Advanced Query as very advanced, nor particularly effective. A powerful feature of this engine is its Query by Example capability. Just click on the button next to the best result and it will find more similar websites. Excite also has a directory of its NetReviews. Excite owns another directory called city.net that contains information on over 2,100 cities. You can submit a URL to Excite. Excite seems to update its database fairly frequently and is more current than most robot based search engines. Excite uses the number of links it finds to a site as a factor in gathering information and also uses postings to "what's new" locations. A company profile and a live video camera of Excite Corporation are also there. (5/1/96)