Web Crawlers to Index Java

Dave Andrews

A testimony to the expected popularity of Java on the Internet comes from developers of Internet search engines who are investigating ways to index Java applets. Once engines like Digital's Alta Vista, Lycos, and others make these new searchable indexes available, users may be able to search for and find specific Java applets.

A Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) tag called Applet has two fields (the name of the applet and its URL) that should help search engines find and locate Java applets, says Louis Monier, lead researcher on the Alta Vista Web search engine project at Digital Equipment Corp. Monier, w ho notes that Alta Vista has already indexed about 22 million pages on the Web, says the search tool now indexes Java applets by their names.

However, indexing Java applets is tricky, says John Leavitt, director of product development at Lycos, which is also investigating how to index other types of content (such as sound and video) on the Web. "We can't look at compiled Java code and say, `Aha, this is code for a Java spreadsheet applet'." But indexing will at least narrow the field.

Search engines will benefit from developers that assign intuitive names to their applets, Monier says. "If someone makes an applet and gives it a name that's totally obscure, the indexer will have difficulty making sense of it."