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

About Ahoy!

Paper on Ahoy! available (appears in Proceedings of WWW6)

Presentation on Ahoy! available (given at WWW6)

What is Ahoy!?

Ahoy! is a free World Wide Web service designed to help you find the home pages of individual people on the Web. Ahoy! relies primarily on the Metacrawler to create a large list of web pages, some of which may be close to the target page. Ahoy! then uses a technique called "Dynamic Reference Sifting" to weed out the least promising pages, leaving you with a manageable number of choices. The effect of this "sifting" is that your search can proceed more quickly.

Sometimes even the best search engines have trouble locating someone's page. This might happen if the page is relatively new, or if the person has a common name. When the Metacrawler is unable to locate a good page, Ahoy! can sometimes guess the correct URL for the page.

Ahoy!'s ability to remove all but the most precise references, plus its ability to "guess" URL's makes Ahoy! unlike conventional search engines.

More details are available in a paper about Ahoy! and Dynamic Reference Sifting.

How does Ahoy! decide which pages are best?

Ahoy! decides what pages are most likely to be the home page of the desired person by looking at:

Whether the page is located at the same institution as the target person
Whether the page is located in the appropriate country
Whether the page has characteristics common to most home pages, e.g., whether it contains phrases like "home page"
Whether the page contains references to the target person.

Where can I read more about Ahoy!?

We recently published a paper on Ahoy! and Dynamic Reference Sifting (the general framework underlying Ahoy!) which you can browse at our site: (HTML-Format, ~65k)

Jonathan Shakes, Marc Langheinrich, Oren Etzioni: Dynamic Reference Sifting: a Case Study in the Homepage Domain (Paper on Ahoy!, in Proceedings of the Sixth International World Wide Web Conference, pp.189-200, 1997)

Are there bugs in Ahoy!?

Yes! Please check our known bugs page, or follow the "Bugs" link at the bottom of each page.

Thanks to:

The Softbot Hackers
Erik Selberg and his Metacrawler
Ellen Spertus
The friendly folks at Yahoo! for use of institutional lists within their database
The people at OKRA, WhoWhere? and Internet Address Finder for providing additional email information.
Christina DeMello at MIT, Chris Redmond at the University of Waterloo, and Mike Conlon at the University of Florida, for allowing use of their lists of Universities
Users who provide feedback -- we always want to hear suggestions for improvement!

ahoy@cs.washington.edu