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On Wed, 29 Mar 1995 CybrMdaGrp@aol.com wrote:

> I have trialed HeadUp about 5 times over the last three years. Never stay
> with it because:
> a) its way too expensive for what it is
After seing their prices, it makes Dow Jones' News Retreival seem cheap.

> b) hits are not all that great (accurate)
Many companies hire/train special "librarians" to search these databases
VERY Carefully.  Even then there were complaints about "noise".

> c) their automated e-mail sender for full articles just plain doesn't work!
DJ Clip works, but sends to MCIMail - at 50 cents/page extra.

> d) pay per article really irks me
Unless you buy/price in bulk, ($20/200 articles) it gets very difficult 
to manage and maintain.  Unfortunately, many of these price structures
were designed for IBM Mainframes - Even if they could support 400 users
at a time, milking $30,000,000 out of them over less than 5 years takes
some tricky price structures.

> I keep trying it twice a year to see if its getting any better but it's not
Even the big services are finding ways to get out low cost bulk information.
It's getting to the point where it is cheaper to have a couple of small
UNIX boxes/publication than it is to get the specialized hardware/software
required to search a single 300 gigabyte database.  With 1 gig disk drives
at $500 each, and UNIX servers at less than $2,000 (250,000 for the high
performance SMP jobs), it actually makes more sense to provide references
back to the original sources.

It should be only a matter of time before the legal/contracting 
agreements catch up to the technology.

> Mercury News NewsHound svc is by far the most cost effective, but I feel just
>  a bit uneasy about what it's searching and what it may be missing.

There are several text engines out there.  WAIS is great, and it doesn't 
miss much.  The biggest problem is that it finds so much and you only
want the first 100 hits.  Which is most important? Relevance or Recent?

	Rex Ballard


From rballard@cnj.digex.net Wed Apr  5 17:39:47 1995
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