Reviewed December 1997
Review by Paul Miller
Appearing to take the idea behind eLib's ANR services one step further, BIG offers users the ability to search descriptions of more than 65,000 web sites, each of which is placed in one or more categories (Art & Literature, News & Current Affairs, etc.). Sites are rated (the Natural History Museum's site gets a recommended single star, and I've yet to find a Best of the Web threestar site), and summarised in a brief description. Where a search of BIG doesn't turn up results, the query is automatically passed to Alta Vista, which is useful.
The interface to this site is good, although it seemed painfully slow when I tried it, and I was surprised both by the number of important sites it didn't cover and by some of the relative ratings given to those that were there.
Important factors in deciding how successful this service becomes, other than improving the speed of the hardware and/or network connection, will be how quickly they manage to add new reviews, and how efficiently they monitor the old ones in order to keep them current. I found one dead link in my amblings, and was disappointed to see that the BBC's excellent new News site hasn't made it into the News & Current Affairs section yet.
Still, this is an interesting idea, and a site worth keeping an eye on.
Reviewed by: Paul Miller
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Material on this page is copyright Ariadne/original authors. This page last updated on nn-Mmm-1997