[Ahoy! The Homepage Finder]
by Jonathan Shakes, Marc Langheinrich, and Professor Oren Etzioni at the University of Washington

Ahoy FAQ!

This documents answers the most common questions people have about our service. Please read this file first, before you decide to send mail to ahoy@cs.washington.edu. Chances are your question is answered below.

How do I add/delete/find information with Ahoy!?

If you want your homepage in our out of our service, read this first:

Tell me more about Ahoy!

Please read the sections below if you're looking for more information about this project:

How can I add my homepage or email address to Ahoy!?

Because Ahoy! accesses other search services to obtain results, Ahoy! maintains no database of its own. Thus, Ahoy! does not require that URLs be registered with it; rather, they need to be registered with any one, or all, of the search services that Ahoy! uses.

Yahoo maintains a list of services that will register your URL with multiple search services:

Please use those to register your URLs. If you don't see your site listed after a couple of days, then you should go directly to each service and submit the URL directly.

If you want to list your email address listed, please contact the various email directories that Ahoy! uses directly:

How can I remove my homepage or email address from Ahoy!?

Because Ahoy! accesses other search services as well as variuos email directories to obtain results, Ahoy! maintains no database of its own. Thus, in order to prevent your pages/entries from showing up in Ahoy!, you need to contact those search/email services directly and request deletion of your entry.

Here are some links to get you started:

I am looking for information about a person. Can you help?

Since we don't maintain a database, we have no additional information about the person other than you can find using our system. We also don't have the time and resources to assist with individual search requests, so if you need help finding a certain person, we are unable to provide anything else than our automated search service. Sorry!

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 various techniques to weed out the least promising pages, leaving you with a manageable number of choices. The effect of this "information filtering" 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 directly locate the correct URL for the page.

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

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)

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:

Why didn't Ahoy! find the page I'm looking for?!

Ahoy! works in two ways:
  1. It filters the output of other search services, and
  2. It sometimes tries to guess the URL.
If neither technique works, Ahoy! will fail. Ahoy! does not currently maintain its own list of homepages. If you are sure that the homepage you were looking for does exist, but Ahoy! was unable to find it, you should following the link labelled Ahoy! considered xx references from the Metacrawler that is displayed at the bottom of the Results page. If you find that one of the other services found your page but Ahoy! did not display it, please let us know -- that's a bug!

Why did Ahoy! fail to identify my homepage?!

If you found your homepage by manually locating it in the Metacrawler output that is shown at the bottom of the response page (i.e. follow the link labelled Ahoy! considered xx references from the Metacrawler), but Ahoy! says it was unable to find it, you might have found a bug in Ahoy!. Please read the following section on how to submit a bug report.

However, if the homepage you'd expected to find is not in the Metacrawler output, Ahoy! probably did its best to find it. See the section "What is Ahoy!?" in this docyment to find out more about how Ahoy! works, and better understand why it failed.

I found a bug! What should I do?

If you feel you have found a bug in Ahoy!, you should let us know immediately. However, before you do so, you should make sure you looked at our list of known bugs before you contact us, and also ran your search a second time and check if you can reproduce the problem.

Then, send us mail at ahoy@cs.washington.edu containing

  1. the name of the person you were looking for,
  2. any institutional, email or country information you specified,
  3. the time & date of your search,
  4. and what exactly went wrong:
We will try to fix the problem as fast as we can, but bear in mind that Ahoy! is a student research project and not a commercial web site!

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ahoy@cs.washington.edu