Netscape says it is getting smarter about how to search the Web and it's sharing what it's learned with online users in a new and improved search service announced today for its Netcenter portal service.
"The most frequent complaint we hear from users is the lack of relevant and high-quality results," said Dave Beckwith, senior director of search directories and business analysis for Netcenter. "That's why our new search service is optimized for relevancy."
Netscape Search is built on Netscape's Open Directory Project, a guide to more than 650,000 sites that have been organized into over 100,00 categories by more than 13,000 volunteer editors, says Dariusz Paczuski, senior program manager for Netscape search. Since launching a year ago, the Open Directory Project has doubled in size every three months and claims to be one of the largest lists of Internet sites available online.
Netscape also said it licensed the services of Google.com, a search service that looks at more than 60 million additional sites to find and rank sites and documents.
Users of Netscape's Communicator software will be able to access the new search capabilities using Netscape's Smart Browsing technology. Instead of clicking over to the search page in order to enter their query, Communicator users can type the word "search," a space and the term they are searching for within the browser location bar whenever they want to conduct a search.
Netscape's announcement comes a week after Inktomi announced new technology designed to enable its search engine to perform more relevant searches and on the heels of an announcement that saw Netscape parent America Online sign on to use the Inktomi search engine within its online services. Paczuski said that AOL and Netscape are working on a coordinated search to redefine what search is and to explore search options. In the future, one option may be to convert AOL's search services to the Netscape Search, but for now, the companies will offer search options "that cater to the audience for each brand," Paczuski said.
