In Search Of...

iWon

iWon's search engine may keep US users in the green (the site gives away US$10,000 a day and US$1,000,000 a month), but its search capacity may leave you seeing red, at least in terms of how much information you get. iWon returns relevant results inconsistently and is generally only average in effectiveness.

iWon uses a Web-text search engine from Inktomi, answers natural-language queries via Fact City (which specialises in fact and statistical queries), incorporates a directory from LookSmart, and supplies lists of the Web's most popular sites through Direct Hit. You can limit your search by site title, domain, or url and use various Boolean, exact phrase, and wildcard operators.

Even so, query results are often egregiously irrelevant. For example, if you use a minus sign to exclude a word, the engine isn't smart enough to ignore words similar to those you have excluded. When we searched on truffles -chocolate, iWon returned a site called "Truffles Chocolates". We were unimpressed with the natural-language engine, which is good at questions about films or music but speechless when we asked, "What does WAP stand for?" or "Who wrote The Remains of the Day?"

Because many of its features are so US-orientated, Australian users may find that this is not the site to bookmark.

iWon

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