Translated material
Note 61: altavista: first approximation
Rubric: Our networks
Altavista: The first approximation
Anton Nosik
Before we start our story on today's topic, joyful news: the Russian -speaking version of the best Internet textbook of all time and peoples is widely available on the server of the EFF Fund (EFF) - EFF's Guide to the Internet, v.2.22, translated by Andrei Milvid. Previously, the same textbook was called the "Internet guide for full sucker" (Big Dummy's Guide to the Internet). The textbook is completely godlessly outdated, because the version available in the Russian translation was written in 1994, before the invention of NTSKAP and Explorer, before the creation of the majority of graphic Internet programs for Windows, Xwindow and Macintosh. This is exactly what, paradoxically, is one of the main advantages of the guide. Instead of meticulously painting (like most of the latest guidelines), which button in which window you need to click in order to look at the picture, the author of the manual Adam Gaffin explains the principles of action and the basic concepts of the network in a very simple and affordable language. A person who has dealt with these basics will be able to master the location of various teams in a friendly interface of window -shaped Internet programs in an additional two and a half minutes.
The address of the Directory in which the Russian versions of the textbook in Alt Coding (DOS, CP866) and KOI8 are lying on the EFF server: KOI8:
http://www.eff.org/pub/net_info/eff_net_guide/other_versions/russian/
If you (as I can) will not be able to connect with this address, you can take the text in alternative encoding from the home page of our heading, where I put a copy:
http://www.sharat.co.il/vesti/dummyalt.zip
To read the files of alternative Russian encoding in DOS, you can use the "liar" - the RUSICHICATION of Naum Shiks lying at:
http://www.sharat.co.il/nosik/vrun.zip
The program in unpacked form takes 3 kilobytes.
We leave Gaffin’s textbook at rest and move on to our rams.
Our story will go today about the search engine Alta Vista. I dare to hope that this wonderful car is familiar to all our readers who travel through the network. I and many of my acquaintances Altavista page loads immediately when the peeping is launched (and not even the Altavist itself, but its local copy on my disk, since I often have to run Netskaype and an explorer in the state of the state). The reader, who is for some reason unfamiliar with Alta's addresses, is invited to write down:
http://altavista.digital.com/
Another “improved” copy of the Altavists, combined with the Yahoo catalog, is located at http://av.yahoo.com/. On the scale of the entire web, it is serious competition for the main Altavist, but I and many of my friends are simply too lazy to rebuild.
How to look for a word or concept you need in Altavist - I think you don’t need to explain for a long time, because the syntax of this search engine is simple to disgust. Let's try to run in the main provisions and rules.
* If you just need to find a word, then you enter this word on a line for searching arguments, and click the Submit button. If you need to find a phrase, contain it in quotation marks.
* If you are not sure of how the upper and lower registers of letters are combined in the desired text - you write the whole word to the lower registry, and then all the options for its spelling will be found. If you have indicated at least one letter in the sophisticated word in the upper register, then the entire search is strictly register -dependent. That is, when searching for the word Graves (graves) you will be given all the documents about graves and all pages with the mention of Robert Graves. If you look for the word Graves, then as a result of the search, only those documents in which this word begins with a capital letter will be shown.
* If you are not sure of how the desired word is written, you can use the argument of the template search. For example, if you are not sure how the word Foreign is written, you can look for Fore*N or just Fore*.
* If you want to find not a text, but a picture with any image, then you can use the word Image. For example, Image: Clinton will give a list of pages with the image of the American president, and Image: Lenin - 16 lines for images of the founder of the Soviet state. How this search works is not known for certain, but with the syntax that the creators of the search engine (Keyword Image:*), it does not work at all. Say, the search for the Argument of Nossik Image:* will give you 246 links on the author of these lines, completely regardless of the presence of any pictures on the found pages. In turn, the search for Image: Nossik will not give out a single link - again, regardless of reality. I am not writing this from petty vanity, but in the order of illustration that the search algorithm using the Image key is, in principle, is not too reliable.
* If you want to find all the pages located on the same server, then the Host key helps:. For example, a search for host: www.sharat.co.il produces 156 links, and at Host: www.ibm.net.il as much as 189. What is not surprising, because the IBM server in Israel was registered in December 1994, and Sharatovsky in July 1996. So we have a certain handicap in this sense.
* If you want to find all the pages that contain references to a specific www server, it is very useful to use the auxiliary word Link. For example, Link: www.sharat.co.il will give you 39 addresses, including the page of May Ivanch Mukhin (Roman Leibov), the server of the American National Library of Poetry, Voters Telecom Watch, the List of Israeli sites on the server of Zhenya Neustadt, the Russian library of Maxim Moshkov (RAS), the home page of the Matta Wright scripts, and even The site of some dark Scandinava, who found and filled with us the "Mirror" of the lovely English instruction "10 ways to determine what your page sucks."
* If you want part of the words to be contained in the found document, and the part is preferably, then the mandatory words should be added +. For example, +Canada +Immigration "FREE EVALUATION". At the same time, about 10,000 documents will be issued to you, most of which the phrae evaluation is not contained, but those where it is, will be bred first. (The same search, with a tough requirement of the phrase "free evaluation" will give out only 13 addresses).
* If the word that you are looking for can be found in different contexts, and you know for certain which of the contexts you are not suitable (for example, we are looking for Sharon, referring to Ariel and not Stone), you can exclude the words that are found in an unnecessary context. For example, indicate the search argument +sharon ariel -stone. We draw attention to the fact that documents containing the English word Stone (stone) from the search results will not be excluded, but only such documents where Stone is written with the title letter. The absence of a plus before the name Ariel is due to the fact that the minister can call Arikom in the desired document.
In the next issues, we will continue the travel to the bowels of the Altavists, after which we will get to the cherished archipelago of the waders and speculate in this regard about the rapid growth and commercialization of the Russian web ...