>I hope when they refer to "our spider technology", they are referring to
>something genuinely unique. If not there are a great many cases for
>prior art, notably my Wanderer which (while no longer the best) was the
>first one around in spring of '93.
Mmm ... I think I first saw JumpStation in January '93.
Simple spiders existed before; I used one in November '92 to fill a proxy
cache and fake a live Internet connection for a demo, but it wasn't used for
indexing purposes.
>I agree that some comment or clarification from Lycos would be good.
The author has been seen to post to this list, before it moved.
I should think the summaries may be patentable; in fact this thought first
occurred to me when I saw his short talk on Lycos at WWW'95 in Darmstadt,
in the workshop on Web indexing. But I haven't heard from Lycos since.
There may be some unusual tricks in running the spiders as well. If XOR-ing
bitmaps can be patented, why can't a bunch of details in spider technology?
-- Reinier Post reinpost@win.tue.nl