New Vertical Search Engine helps Information Technology Students find what they need on the Web

Edcomp.com (at http://www.edcomp.com) is now online and available, as of April 18, 2005, for all Internet users to search for computer related learning and training content that are freely available on the Web. Thousands of Information Technology (IT) students are taking advantage of the site's database of over 140,000 free Internet educational resources that are indexed by the site's search engine. This niche search site is now using the Nutch open source search engine, available from http://incubator.apache.org/nutch/. Its powerful engine does it all, including spidering, storing, indexing, and displaying search results for many simultaneous users. This implementation of Nutch targets computer and IT students and others seeking to gain further knowledge and to learn more by using the vast freely available resources of the Internet.

"Along with adding more free online computer and IT training and educational resources in the future, we will also be adding features to Edcomp.com's indexed resources in the future, including for each, the number of user hits, user ratings and comments, and cached pages with an opt-out option", said Scott Turton, one of the general partners of DeepSearcher, which owns Edcomp.com. Turton has owned and managed portal type web sites for the last 7 years. "Going forward with Nutch's open source search engine gives us the required future technical and functional development of our mission critical application, while at the same time freeing our time and resources so we can focus on the things that we do best, one of which is researching and validating all of the best free computer related training, educational, and tutorial resources on the web today," said Turton. Also on the forefront is tighter integration with DeepSearcher's other IT portal training and education websites, http://www.intelligentedu.com and http://www.educationonlineforcomputers.com. DeepSearcher's future plans include niche and specialty search engines, one of which is already online as http://www.genealogylocator.com.

Students and users of Edcomp.com are excited about and grateful for this new search tool. A recent informal poll of Edcomp.com users elicited responses such as "Its a great site, very useful, thank you," "I love your educational resources," "Its the best site for IT training," "a fantastic search engine, I enjoy it very much," and "I'm able to find most of the things I want."

"Search engines are now generally regarded as the killer app of the Internet, and we want to play a role in this arena, as they relate to smaller, vertical or niche areas of interest," said Turton. Experts agree that niche, or vertical search engines are currently an up and coming force to be reckoned with on the Web and offer an efficient alternative to traditional search engines when the results returned by general-purpose search engines contain advertising related sites and other non-relevant search results. A recent article in SFGate.com (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi"file=/chronicle/archive/2005/04/04/BUGJ9C20VU1.DTL) stated, "Driving the search industry's niche evolution is the reality that the general purpose search engines of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN fail to find relevant links for many queries. The theory is that vertical search engines, as they are often called, will be more effective in connecting users with the information they want."

Contact Person: Scott Turton
Telephone Number: 720-988-6985
Email Address: scott_turton@intelligentedu.com

For additional information contact Scott Turton using contact information above.

Edcomp.com is a vertical search engine providing its users with the best free computer and Information Technology related educational, training, and tutorial resources on the web today.

DeepSearcher, is a recently organized Colorado general partnership which owns and operates 4 vertical search and portal web sites: Edcomp.com, Intelligentedu.com, EducationOnlineforComputers.com, and GenealogyLocator.com. Its website is located at DeepSearcher.com.