InfoSeek may turn into a popular Internet service as the Internet becomes more commercialized. People continually ask why such-and-such isn't available on the Internet, and all too often the answer is, "Because they can sell that data, so why would they give it away?" InfoSeek has an extremely accurate searching engine and some of that sort of data, in this case part of the Ziff-Davis Computer Select database of computer publications. InfoSeek includes 147 publications (some full text, some just abstracts) for a total database of over 79,000 articles (324 MB) ranging from Nov-92 to Dec-93. You can search everything with plain English queries using a Web browser (although MacWeb and Mosaic 1.0.3 don't work with InfoSeek - I used Mosaic 2.0a8 successfully, and Lynx works fine for command-line folks).
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/ ncsa-mosaic-20a8-ppc.hqx
ftp://ftp.tidbits.com/pub/tidbits/tisk/tcp/ ncsa-mosaic-20a8.hqx
Until 14-Oct-94, InfoSeek accounts are free; after that they will be commercial (InfoSeek plans to automatically close free accounts after 15-Oct-94, and you will never be billed as a result of having set up a free account), so if you want to play with InfoSeek for free to see if full text searching on mainstream magazines is useful to you (it's tremendously useful to me), get an account soon. After 15-Oct-94, the Computer Select database will be brought up to date and maintained, although pricing hasn't yet been set. Send email to <info@infoseek.com> for information on how to get an account. They've asked me to request that you put "TidBITS" in the Subject line. Feel free to connect to InfoSeek's Web site before you get an account, but all you can do without an account is browse the list of included publications. [ACE]
