General
Phibot is a collaborative research project of the University of Mainz, the German Research Center of Artificial Intelligence and Brainbot Technologies. The front page displays science news headlines along with dates and summaries, which are links to full articles. Phibot is one of the best science search engines around, with a large database. Results are accompanied by a list of related words to add to your query.
Index
Phibot has two separate indexes, one for regular web pages, and one for news. The web page index contains 150 million pages, of which 5 million are physics-related. The news index is updated frequently, as the news sources used by Phibot are recrawled every fifteen minutes. Pages stay in the news index for two weeks, and results are labelled with the date that they were crawled. Just like Google, web search results may contain links that Phibot has not yet indexed, but are deemed to be relelvant. All indexed web pages have a link to [scan] which is a text-only cache of the page. Results are clustered by site, only two results per site will be shown unless you click on "more results from..." Each index is displayed in a separate box, and if you search for both news and web pages then news results will appear at the top.
Search Help
Phibot uses a default AND operator, meaning that search results must include all of the words you enter. Stopwords are used, however you can still search for them with a + like +the. Use a minus sign (-) to exclude words. Searches are not case sensitive.
Algorithms
Phibot is one of very few search tools for which you can choose which algorithm to search with. An algorithm is an ordered set of steps, or in this case, the method used to decide which pages to show you in what order. Currently, however, the optimized vectorspace is exactly the same as the vectorspace model, but not the advanced.

This page was last updated on March 29, 2002. Submit changes here.