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October 22, 1996


No Place Like Home Pages: Searching For Personal Web Sites

By STEVE DITLEA
Now that commerce and communications are all the rage on the World Wide Web, resources are being diverted from the personal home pages that helped settle the Internet frontier.

Just months ago, "What's New" and "What's Cool" listings on the Web featured links to individual biographies, art portfolios, pop culture shrines, political tracts and compendia of obscure knowledge -- all self published on the personal pages of Internet account holders. These days such original, noncommercial fare is seldom included in new or cool categories.


SEARCH AHOY!
THE HOMEPAGE FINDER

Ahoy! Logo

FIRST NAME (required)

LAST NAME (required)

ORGANIZATION (highly recommended)

E-MAIL ADDRESS (helpful)

COUNTRY (optional)

This is beta software!
Please report problems to ahoy@cs.washington.edu

Note: When you click the search button, a new window will open and you will be connected to Ahoy's web server. The New York Times has no control over the content or availability of Ahoy's server. When you have finished viewing the search results, you can return to this article by closing the search window. If your browser does not open a new window, use the "back" button to return to this page.
And while Web telephone directories and e-mail search engines abound, finding a friend's or a celebrity's home page out of the million or so personal pages posted since the Web became widely available in 1994 can be a daunting task.

Fortunately, new or expanded Web tools are coming online to help anyone seeking home page addresses.

Instead of scores of useless listings generated by entering a famous or common name into a general search engine like Alta Vista or Lycos, there is now a resource focused on locating personal home pages only: Ahoy! The Homepage Finder. Here typing in a person's given and family names (and optionally, organization, e-mail address, and country) can launch a query combining the efforts of nine popular search engines (including Alta Vista and Lycos), then filtering them to find what are actually personal home pages on the Web.

"We started with 15 rules, and now we have about 30 to define a personal home page," said Oren Etzioni, associate professor of computer science at the University of Washington and one of the creators of Ahoy!, which is still officially in its beta test phase.

A personal home page would seem like a simple concept to encode, but in fact there are many nuances that need to be accounted for. Is a personal home page any Web page that includes a person's name in the title, or should it actually contain key words like "home," "personal" or "link"?

If a name doesn't show up in a query with the nine-engine-powered Metacrawler search tool (also co-created by Etzioni), Ahoy! can seek out pages on institutions' servers, having taught itself the varied ways that home page are named by various servers.

"Here at the University of Washington we have over 125 different servers with their own naming conventions, but Ahoy! can usually find a new student's home page in under a minute," said Etzioni.

Jonathan Shakes, one of the University of Washington graduate students credited with establishing Ahoy!, admitted that the home page finder has "a bias in favor of .edu sites" -- that is, pages with an academic institution's educational suffix in their domain names. Nonetheless, this reporter has found Ahoy! to be the most reliable single tool for tracking down home pages, regardless of a person's institutional affiliation. (Shakes' own home page, as linked on the Ahoy! masthead is inaccessible, while Oren Etzioni's Home Page contains a wealth of papers on research into efficient information gathering on the Internet.)

The Yahoo! search engine, among the leading destinations on the Web, started as a link off the home page of one of the service's founders, Jerry Yang, while he was a student at Stanford University. Yang's partner, David Filo, recalled recently that they were compiling others' home pages from the start of Yahoo! in April 1994, though neither Yang nor Filo have found time to post a home page since Yahoo became a successful commercial service.

From the Yahoo! Entertainment:People page a fast search or extended scrolling through listings by letter of the alphabet can lead to any of 52,592 personal home pages at last count, most of them registered by their creators.

For those who prefer to search for home pages by group or category, Yahoo!'s Entertainment: People: Indices and Society and Culture: People pages can lead to intriguing discoveries.

Incidentally, David Filo disclosed that the most requested personal names on Yahoo! constitute a who's who of adolescent male fantasies, with "Pamela Anderson Lee, Jenny McCarthy, and Cyndi Crawford heading the list, and Jenny MacCarthy -- misspelled -- coming in 13th." The top male, at No. 16, is Michael Jackson. (All of these celebrity pages are created by fans, and might not qualify as "personal" pages by some definitions.)

Another service offering searches and categorized listings of personal Web homes these days is WhoWhere?'s Personal Home Pages site, with the categories more diverse than Yahoo's. WhoWhere?'s president, Gunjan Sinha, says that the service lists "5000 categories leading to 205,000 home pages."

"It's our vision to be the Yahoo! of personal home pages," Sinha said.

And before the end of the year, a home page component is scheduled to be added to InfoSpace's People Search page, which currently searches out personal telephone numbers and e-mail addresses. The new service will draw on "listings of 500,000 personal home pages," said Naveen Jain, who describes himself as InfoSpace's "founder and janitor" and an ardent believer that "the next stage in the history of the Internet, after people finding information sources, is people finding people."

As for the future of the personal home page, Jain foresees a day not to far off "when you have different home pages for different people who visit your site," customized to fit the business, social and individual functions of a personal home page on the World Wide Web.

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