Ahoy! The Homepage Finder: 1996 - 2000

Note: Ahoy! The Homepage Finder was retired from service in 2000 and the code is not available.

Ahoy! The Homepage Finder

Ahoy! The Homepage Finder was a fielded web service that embodied Dynamic Reference Sifting for the domain of personal homepages. Given a person's name and institution, Ahoy! filtered the output of multiple web indices to extract one or two references that were most likely to point to the person's homepage. If it found no likely candidates, Ahoy! used knowledge of homepage placement conventions, which it had accumulated from previous experience, to "guess" the URL for the desired homepage.

Problem Statement

Robot-generated Web indices such as AltaVista are comprehensive but imprecise; manually generated directories such as Yahoo! are precise but cannot keep up with large, rapidly growing categories such as personal homepages or news stories on the American economy. Thus, if a user is searching for a particular page that is not cataloged in a directory, she is forced to query a web index and manually sift through a large number of responses. Furthermore, if the page is not yet indexed, then the user is stymied.

Results

Ahoy! searches took 9 seconds on average. On 74% of queries from our primary test sample, Ahoy! finds the target homepage and ranks it as the top reference. 9% of the targets are found by guessing the URL. In comparison, AltaVista can find 58% of the targets and ranks only 23% of these as the top reference.

Additional Information

Ahoy! was a research project developed by graduate students Jonathan Shakes and Marc Langheinrich advised by Oren Etzioni. Jonathan and Marc received their Master's degrees in 1996 and 1997. With the research successfully completed and the graduation of these students we were no longer able to maintain this service in a university setting. As a result Ahoy! The Homepage Finder was shutdown from service in 2000.

• Ahoy! received national attention when called Ahoy! "the most reliable single tool for tracking down home pages...".
• A Paper on Ahoy!, Dynamic Reference Sifting: a Case Study in the Homepage Domain, was a finalist for the the best paper award at The Sixth International World Wide Web Conference.
• Ahoy! slides from The Sixth International World Wide Web Conference
• Additional Information about Ahoy!
• A screen shot from Ahoy!

Resources

For similar services we suggest trying the following sites: www.researchindex.com and http://hpsearch.uni-trier.de/

Computer Science and Engineering, 2001