Dear Jim, I feel this sort of search option is very useful - I'm using it on my Medical Physics pages http://www.sgsmp.ch as well - but have made the opposite experience : I started with HotBot - everthing was fine (all close to 40 pages included in their index) until a few months later, when only 4 pages were left :-((. I contacted them - just a useless autoresponse, obviously nobody bothered to read my mail. I re-submitted my URLs - fine for a few weeks - then most pages were gone again ! Then I changed to Altavista - works fine so far. I have to add that I have only 40 pages (now) in this project, and submit each new page individually (they mention two days - but it may take up to 6 weeks until they actually index it !!) - a procedure unlikely to be practical for the large number of German Genealogy Pages in a centralized manner. But we could leave it to page authors - if you want to make sure your page is found by "our own" search engine, you should submit it to whatever it is (HotBot or Altavista) as soon as it has been moved to the final destination. Best regards - Wolf ---------------------- Wolf W. Seelentag, PhD, e-mail : wolf@swissmail.com Reherstr. 19, CH - 9016 St. Gallen, Switzerland Tel (home) : +41-71-2885121 Tel (work) : +41-71-4942233 Fax : +41-71-4942893

---------- Von: Jim Eggert[SMTP:EggertJ@LL.mit.edu] Gesendet: Donnerstag, 28. Januar 1999 19:35 An: webpages-l@genealogy.net Betreff: [webpages-l] uploaded pages

I've uploaded a new search page, in German and English versions: sitesearch.html sitesearch-d.html This page uses HotBot and no Javascript. HotBot provides a much better index of our site than does AltaVista, I don't know why. I tried to use HotBot's text version of the search engine, but it didn't return nearly as many hits, so unfortunately this search page returns HotBot's graphic results pages.

I've also uploaded suggested new versions of the German and English home pages that link to the search pages. genealogy.html genealogy_de.html

Please check these over (especially my maladroit German), and let's decide if we want to have such a search capability.

-- =Jim Eggert EggertJ@LL.mit.edu