Matrix, Search Engines: JumpStation

JumpStation and JumpStation II

The JumpStation was designed to search the Web by document title and header. JumpStation II was intended to supercede the original JumpStation, with forms support and additional search options, but was never completed. The server used an automated robot for it's data acquisition.

Key Links

Organization

• Both services were solely searchable resources which scan internal databases built by a document gatherer. Uses could search for keywords in the document titles, headers, and/or subjects with the following limitations:
  • Multiple Keywords were treated as if grouped by a Boolean Or in JumpStation, and by Boolean And in JumpStation II.
  • The original JumpStation did not allow as much flexibility in combining keywords for searching, and didn't perform subject searching (where a "subject" is a word that occurs frequently within a file.
  • There were no sophisticated search controls such as root and suffix management, real boolean searching, or match quality control.
• Both servers allowed forms-based access, but the older JumpStation was the only one to provide non-forms support.
• The content of this server had no particular focus or orientation.

Administration

• Documents were primarily gathered by a Web robot, but there was an indication that the administrator performed some indexing work also.
• Response times for reasonable searches averaged about 15-30 seconds.
• As stated above, this index was been unsupported for a long time, and has since been discontinued. The latest server statistics indicated that the database contained 275,000 entries spanning 1500 servers. Towards the end, however, many of these were dead or obsolete links.
• Additional Services
  • The documentation for the JumpStation was never very usable beyond the front page, and the information for JumpStation II was only a little more organized but just as incomplete.
  • The search pages supplied only a minimal explanation of the options or the nature of the search to perform.
  • The information returned by a (verbose) search includes document title, timestamp, file size, and file type.