From hawick@oldnova.npac.syr.edu Mon Jun 26 21:18:26 1995 Date: Mon, 26 Jun 1995 18:13:29 -0400 (EDT) From: Kenneth A Hawick To: Geoffrey Fox , Barbara Mihalas , Paul Coddington Cc: Kenneth A Hawick Subject: SGI WAIS up. I have jury rigged another WAIS server on kopernik so we could evaluate its use for the InfoMall server. Its quite god for things like looking at all files with `Mid-Hudson' in them and such like but is disappointing for the likes of PCW. It returns the PCW files OK, but these tend to have meaningless filenames( like node000012.html ) as well as less than significant titles. It is consequently hard to see if your serch has returned anything of value other than by individual inspection of each url returned. Its hard to see how this might be improved for a latex2html'd document (like PCW), since even if we return the document 's, as Paul suggests, these machine generated ones tend to be fairly meaningless too. It might be OK if one knew one was searching only PCW (rather than the whole server, but even then its tricky to see how one would make sense of the output. So for PCW, the score is the most usefull criteria to decide which files to look at from the returned list. Slainte, Ken