From: "World Chess Championship", INTERNET:newsletter@mark-weeks.com Date: 00/03/28, 10:41 Re: Chess History on the Web (2000 no.7) For this review, I'm taking a break from looking at the bookmarks for the Chess History discussion group. Instead I'm going to look at what the search engines say about chess history on the Web. This is to find any overlooked sites and to catch up on current search engine technology. I used 'Search Engine Watch' by Danny Sullivan at... http://searchenginewatch.com/links/Major_Search_Engines/The_Major_Search_Engines/index.html ...as a starting point for this constantly changing technology. Sullivan lists 22 different search engines on this page. I first made a pass through all 22 entries on Sullivan's list and tried to search each on 'chess history'. This was to get my bearings and to become familiar with each site. For various reasons, I eliminated five -- Ask Jeeves, HotBot, Inktomi, Netscape Search, & RealNames -- from further consideration. I also eliminated the four directories -- LookSmart, Open Directory, Snap, & Yahoo -- because they use a completely different technology to classify sites. This left 13 search engines for further consideration -- AOL Search, AltaVista, Direct Hit, Excite, FAST Search, Go/Infoseek, GoTo, Google, IWon, Lycos, MSN Search, Northern Light, & WebCrawler. I then recorded the top five chess history pages listed at each search engine. This gave me a list of 65 pages apparently related to chess history -- 45 of these were unique because some search engines returned the same pages that other search engines returned. Of the 45 unique pages, 12 appeared in more than one search engine. For each of the 12, I'll give the number of times it appeared in the search engines, the title of the page, the address of the page, & a short description... Table 1 - Pages returned by more than one search engine. 7 - Chess History http://www.misc.traveller.com/chess/history/ This is Bill Wall's list of important dates in chess history & one of the discussion group bookmarks. I'm not surprised that it came out first -- it's an excellent introduction to the subject. 4 - Chess History http://www.deja.com/~chesshistory/ The Chess History discussion group; nice to see that it's recognized by the search engines. It appears that having 'chess' and 'history' in the page address are important to search engines. 3 - Home page of The Chess Variant Pages http://www.chessvariants.com/ Another of the discussion group bookmarks, which I'll be reviewing soon. It's an excellent site with a wealth of material related to the development of the rules of chess. 2 - History of Chess http://home.att.net/~valyana/ A Russian language page which I don't understand, but which is a list of links. It's not at all clear why two search engines -- FAST Search & Lycos -- flagged this. The phrase 'chesshistory' as a single word appears once as the key to a guest book. (*) 2 - Hellas Chess Club http://www.chess.gr/ A small doorway page which redirects to another page. The word 'history' appears twice on the doorway page, but I couldn't find it on the next page. 2 - Chess Hall of Fame: Best Chess Players in U.S. History http://www.chesslinks.org/hof/home.html Not one of the discussion group bookmarks, but I recently reviewed it along with the Excalibur Hall of Fame site, which is a bookmark. (*) 2 - Chess, the game of the Goddess? http://www.goddesschess.com/ An unorthodox page which starts with a quote by George Koltanowski, "Despite the documented evidence of chess historian H.J.R. Murray, I have always thought that the game of chess was invented by a goddess." This is worth a more careful look. 2 - History of Chess in Lebanon http://www.lebchess.org/history.htm The title describes the content. There are many Web pages which cover the history of chess in a country, region, or club. They could probably be cataloged & bookmarked, but it's not a job I want to tackle, because it would be difficult to maintain properly. (*) 2 - Untitled http://www.netcologne.de/~nc-jostenge/index.htm Another of the discussion group bookmarks -- one of the best sources for information about the origins of the game. 2 - Chess news and history: The Game is Afoot by Terry Crandall http://www.pstat.ucsb.edu/~carlson/chess Thirteen biographies of past grandmasters. 2 - RedWeb Chess - Mrchess - Chess Discussion - Bookstore - Rules - http://www.redweb.com/chess/ Lists U.S. champions & world champions. (*) 2 - Brief History of Chess http://www.romanchess.com/History_of_Chess.htm Eight paragraphs on 'A Brief History of CHESS and CHESS VARIANTS'. (*) ...How well did the search engines perform? Of the 33 pages which were returned by a single search engine, five came from AltaVista. This means that AltaVista did not return a single page matching the results of another search engine. What did AltaVista return? 1st - Games http://assembly.nerdworld.com/directory/games.html : Links to discussion groups related to games. 2nd - Computer Chess Programming http://www.xs4all.nl/~verhelst/chess/programming.html : A links page. 3rd - Home http://www.chesscity.com/ : Eric Schiller's site for Cardoza Publishing -- has a section on chess history with original material by Schiller. 4th - Chess For Students http://www.chessforstudents.com/ : A book store where the word 'history' doesn't appear at all, although the phrase 'chess history' is used in the meta tags. 5th - White Cloud http://www.whitecloud.com/ : A personal page unrelated to chess history. Only one site in the top five has anything to do with chess history. The AltaVista advanced search returned a different set of pages, but these were also not relevant to chess history. It appears that AltaVista has serious problems to determine relevance. DirectHit returned four pages which were not returned by the other search engines, but the pages appear to have something to do with chess history. All five pages returned by both FAST Search & Lycos matched a page returned by another search engine. In fact the two search engines returned the same pages in a slightly different order. Sullivan says, 'The Norwegian company behind FAST Search also powers the Lycos MP3 search engine', and '[Lycos] secondary results come from either Direct Hit or Lycos own spidering of the web'. It appears instead that Lycos is entirely dependent on FAST Search. I went back to Table 1 & marked the five duplicate pages with an asterisk '(*)'. These five sites were returned only by FAST Search & Lycos, so like AltaVista there was no overlap with any other search engine. Unlike AltaVista, most of the sites are relevant to chess history. Sullivan also compares the sizes of some search engines in millions of pages indexed... 300 FAST Search 250 AltaVista 214 Excite 211 Northern Light 138 Google 110 Inktomi 50 Go 50 Lycos ...which gives some idea of their relative scope. Of these eight, which search engine gave me the best results? It's certainly a personal choice, but I was most impressed with FAST Search, Google, & Northern Light. I've already excluded AltaVista, Inktomi, & Lycos. I'll add Go to the list. I moved my own site to a new address almost six months ago, but Go is the only search engine which still reports the address of the old site. This indicates that its index is stale. Another clue -- of the chess history sites that it returns, none is dated after mid-January -- which is not very impressive. --- Looking at the four directories... LookSmart has a category dedicated to 'Chess History', with nine sites listed. It also lists all sites in its directory which have the keywords 'chess' & 'history' in the descriptions of the sites. The list of 'Top 10 most visited sites' takes its results from DirectHit. Open Directory lists ten sites which seem to be the results of a search on the keywords 'chess' & 'history' in the descriptions of the sites. Snap lists the 25 'Most popular sites reviewed by our editors' including the 'Black Dog Billiard Cafe' and the 'Bastardo Game' (!?). These are followed by the six 'Most popular sites submitted by our members', including 'Canadian Sculpture reproductions'. There's something wrong here. Yahoo also has a category dedicated to 'Chess History', with eight sites listed. More sites are listed as a result of a search on the keywords 'chess' & 'history' in the descriptions of the sites. ...None of the four impressed me very much concerning chess history. The subject is probably too specialized to be covered adequately by a nonspecialist. This may indeed be true of most specialist subjects. It takes some prior knowledge & experience to compile a list of Web sites on a specialist subject -- nonexperts can't separate the wheat from the chaff. --- The last topic I want to mention is the meta search engine. This is a tool which merges & compares the results from multiple search engines. It automates the job I did to compare the results for chess history. Sullivan has a list of nine on his page... http://searchenginewatch.com/links/Metacrawlers/Major_Metacrawlers/index.html ...I looked at all nine & found that they did a good job of eliminating pages which had little to do with chess history. I was particularly impressed with SurfWax, which I had never seen before & which organizes the results in an original way. I'll definitely be using it for future Web searches. [I would normally have posted this on 1 April, but I'll be away from the Web for the next few weeks. The next review should appear on 15 April.] Bye for now, Mark Weeks