A software robot named Lycos, designed to help people to find information on the World Wide Web now has a search facility that will carry out text searches in Web documentsm, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Query searching Web pages is nothing new but Lycos’s creator Michael Maudlin at Carnegie Mellon University reckons his service is technically superior because it will perform searches on the text of documents and not just the titles. Maudlin named the system Lycos after a latin abbreviation for wolf spider because it hunts down information. It does this by cataloguing Web documents then identifying links between these documents. Maudlin says Lycos has downloaded about half of the World Wide Web so far, amounting to 280,000 Web pages catalogued into 1.6m documents. Lycos receives 106,000 requests for information per week, with numbers growing by 10,000 each week. He is now looking at ways to finance the system’s expansion through subscription, advertising or making a charge per ind ividual transaction.
