RE: Searches - good news and bad

I believe you will be pleased with the interface to
AltaVista that is available
with the SETI-search search engine at
http://www.seti-search.com. It is a
not-for-profit search engine interface designed for blind
and low-vision users.

AltaVista is the default search engine, so you only need to
enter your search
term or phrase into the form and submit it. There are also
interfaces to AOLsearch,
Excite, Google, HotBot, MetaCrawler, CNET, Dictionary.com,
DiscoveryHealth.com,
AllRecipes.com and Voila.com (just recently added).

Since the major engines are constantly changing/fine tuning
their algorithms, it
is a struggle to keep up with them...but we try, and user
feedback helps us a lot.

It was our frustration with AltaVista and the other major
search engines that
caused us to develop this speech-friendly search engine
interface.

It works well with text-only browsers. (If you have any sort
of problem using
the tool, please use the on-site form to email us!)

Everyone's feedback and suggestions are most welcome.

Regards,
The SETI-search Editors


-----Original Message-----
From: w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org
[mailto:w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org]On
Behalf Of Charles McCathieNevile
Sent: Saturday, May 27, 2000 4:41 PM
To: WAI IG
Subject: Searches - good news and bad


I was told AltaVista had released a super-lean search
service, along the
lines of google. So I tried it. Annd this is what I got:

We're sorry. Raging.com does not support text-only browsers.
For a superior
text-only search, please visit [link]AltaVista.

I faked my user agent string, and got a perfectly usable
(nice, clean,
simple) search engine.

Anyone have a constructive approach to the problem?

Charles McCN

--
Charles McCathieNevile    mailto:charles@w3.org    phone:
+61 (0) 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative
http://www.w3.org/WAI
Location: I-cubed, 110 Victoria Street, Carlton VIC 3053
Postal: GPO Box 2476V, Melbourne 3001,  Australia

Received on Saturday, 27 May 2000 21:34:25 UTC