by Jonathan Shakes, Marc Langheinrich, and Professor Oren Etzioni at the University of Washington

Directed Search

Ahoy! has a method of locating homepages not indexed by any of the web's various search engines: it "guesses" the URL of the page. To inform its guesses, Ahoy! extracts patterns that are common between other homepages it has found at the same institution. If Ahoy! cannot find the page using the search engines, and if Ahoy! has previously learned something about the patterns in pages at the target institution, Ahoy! will create a series of guesses and check to see if any of them are the desired page.

Here's an example of the output while Ahoy! is trying to guess an URL:

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