Scouring the Net will be faster, easier
By Daily Bruin Staff
Oct. 5, 1998 9:00 p.m.
Tuesday, October 6, 1998
Scouring the Net will be faster, easier
COMPUTER: Search engine created by Bruins undergoes multimedia
improvements
By Dennis Lim
Daily Bruin Contributor
Computer users looking for audio and video on the Internet can
now do so faster and more efficiently, if five UCLA students have
it their way.
Next week at the Internet World Conference in New York,
Scour.net, an Internet search engine created by five UCLA computer
science students, will unveil improvements to its website to
increase its efficiency.
Scour.net specializes in looking for audio, video images and
animation on the Internet but has experienced problems since its
creation in December 1997.
Problems such as inactive web pages, or dead sites, have
prevented Scour.net visitors from downloading music and images from
the Internet.
"We do have some enhancements that will pretty much take care of
the problem of dead sites on Scour," said Dan Rodrigues, president
and CEO of Scour, Inc.
According to Rodrigues, increasing the frequency that Scour.net
checks the web for sites that offer music will eliminate the
problem with dead sites.
Currently, Scour.net automatically checks the Internet only once
a day for sites that offer songs or images on the Internet. Many of
the websites that Scour.net retrieves audio files from, however,
are on servers that exist on individual computers. And many of
these servers house personal home pages, which usually stay on-line
for only part of the day.
When the individual servers go off-line – which they
periodically do as people turn off their computers – their websites
become inaccessible, making a search done by Scour early in the day
obsolete as the day goes on.
These improvements would increase the number of times that
Scour.net checks the web for audio and video sites to about once an
hour.
Students who frequently use the website to find songs on the
Internet to download say that the website needs improvement.
"They should find a way to automatically take the dead sites off
of their listing," said Andre Campo, a second-year business and
economics student and frequent Scour.net user.
"When I look for songs on Scour.net, it lists a lot of dead
sites along with the active ones. I feel like I’m wasting my time
whenever I use it," he said.
Campo and other computer users feel, however, that they have no
choice but to use the website, as it is one of only a few sites of
its kind.
Other websites and networks either do not provide the same
ability to search the Internet that Scour does, or provide only a
short list of songs to choose from instead of looking for the
actual songs.
"We’ve received some complaints about the music and the dead
sites, but they have been relatively small compared to our growth,
so there can’t be that much discontent with our web site," said
Jason Droege, director of marketing for Scour.
Within the last year, Scour.net has become a popular destination
for web users, said Scour officials.
While the website regularly receives more than 15 million
visitors a month, Droege said revenues have grown 20,000 to 30,000
percent since last January.
He added, however, that Scour.net’s real strength lies in its
ability to look for images on the Internet.
"The music and the dead sites are just a small part of our web
site," he said.
"The real backbone of our website has been the images and videos
that we provide through our site. We have two major additions that
we plan to show next week that will put us on top," Droege
said.
Not only will repairs be made to the site to increase
efficiency, Scour.net will be adding new programs to allow the site
to do more.
Scour will make an image comparison program that will allow
users to search for images by comparing them to other pictures.
Even without a name users could look for other images to
retrieve.
The second addition will give users the ability to see a smaller
picture of an image before they download it, allowing users to
discriminate between pictures they like and do not like before
downloading them.
These add-ons come as a result of Scour’s partnership with NEC
(Nippon Electric Company), a computer manufacturer.
"Our growth has been through the stratosphere since we opened
up," Droege said. "These enhancements will make our website even
stronger."
Comments, feedback, problems?
© 1998 ASUCLA Communications Board
