[SCC_Active_Members] Worio: a ?new? software history resource, maybe!

[Tim Shoppa]

In the past couple days the historic software archives I maintain
or host have been crawled by a new search engine that identifies
itself as "Worio".

The http://www.worio.com/ page says that it is affiliated with
the University of British Columbia (which I was connected with in
the 90's but not in the CS sense and I am not connected with Worio
or UBC today) and it is to be a search engine designed as a resource
for programming (presumably searches of source code etc.)

Certainly the pages it crawls seem to be heavily oriented in terms
of searching source code (it preferentially seems to be interested
in extensions that are "obviously" Fortran or Pascal or Macro or...
but of course not all OS's use extensions in this way or even have
extensions, and it still seems to somehow "know" even obscure
references to be source code.)

The page also says that beta testing of the search engine (as opposed
to just harvesting the web) will begin September 2006.

It will be interesting to see if it turns up as a useful resource
for researching historic source code. Certainly many "popular" search
engines purposefully rank old pages as less interesting
than new pages, and usually they give no option to reverse the 
order of the ranking. (Even google suffers from this.)

I hope that they offer date-sensitive
searches (and it also raises the issue that for pre-1970 code,
most web servers and clients will reject dates before 1970 as
being obviously corrupted.)

Tim.