360 Powered promises all the world

October 2 2000

As most readers of Pandia will know, the search engines' ability to present an up to date and complete picture of the World Wide Web is limited. The search engine databases cover but a part of the more than 2 billion pages that are out there. Moreover, they seem to cover different parts of Cyberspace, making it necessary to use more than one.

Some of the search engines may take more than 6 months to register a new site. The content provided may be history by then. Then there is the question of file formats. The search engines register regular webpages, like the one you are reading now, they do not index Acrobat PDF-files, Postscript files and the so-called "hidden web", i.e. content in databases that requires you to use a search form to fetch information.

Now the Internet and intranet infrastructure company 360 Powered claims that it has found a solution to these problems.

In a press release, Gary W. Tripp, CEO of 360 Powered, says that "the breakthrough concept is that we allow those with the content to automatically report to a central, fair and open index. 360 uses Push-Indexing (TM) to automatically capture all dynamic content found in databases, PDF and Postscript files."

360 Powered claims it has the ability to index every word on every page, every day. If this is true, they are probably on to something big. According to the company he technology will

• scan documents for meaning and analyze them for concepts to deliver more relevant search results
• index content automatically and submit incremental changes every 24 hours
• list sites in the 360 Powered search index within 24 hours of registration
• refresh the 360 Powered search index every 24 hours to accurately represent the latest content.

But how will they do it?

As far as we understand it, 360 will encourage Web hosts, site managers, and other content providers to download the indexing agent from the 360 Powered website and install it on a Web server or site. This one-time process takes as little as 15 minutes to complete.

Every 24 hours, the agent will scans all specified Web content and transmits index data to the 360 Powered search index. In addition to indexing every word on every page, 360 will analyze text for concepts and generate metadata. This process enables users to perform meaning-based searches.

To maximize efficiency, the agents will detect incremental changes and index only new and updated content. Hence, searchers using 360 Powered should get up to date, accurate and relevant search results. You should be able to find content posted yesterday today.

Content providers may set up Index Cards to explicitly describe and contextualize their sites via categorical, demographic, and geographic metadata. This is probably a more advanced variant of the present meta tag system, where Web masters includes keywords and text that describe the content of the site. So far no one has succeeded in making a standard for meta tags that classify the sites according to a common scheme.

360 Powered will license access to its index to information portals, probably in the way Inktomi and Looksmart do today.

It remains to be seen whether the technology can fulfill these promises. 360 will now invite companies to test the system in a more limited way.

If the technology is up to the task, we guess that one major stumbling block will be to make Web masters download the 360 "indexing agent" and report the necessary meta data (content description, categorization). If the company can get one of the major portals on board, most professional Web masters and search engine promoters will do so in order to attract visitors. There are, however, a lot of sites out there that are run by not so search engine savvy people.

Then, of course, 360 must protect the system from so-called "spammers", i.e. Web masters that tricks the search engine into believing that the pages are about something they definitely are not.

• 360 Powered home page

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