Tobi

The creators of the search engine Tobi – the company i-Rose – are proud of the title of the first Slovenian internet search engine. If we disregard the modest search engine within Mat’Kurja, we can attest to this, even though it has only seen the light of day recently. More than 250,000 documents with Slovenian IP addresses are entered in the search database, which is supposed to represent the vast majority.

The registration in the collection is automatic, with the help of a robot that searches for documents. Sometimes it is necessary to enter if the path to the first page, all the others then find a robot that combs all the pages in a few days and makes all the changes to the collection. We can search all text, keywords, page titles, author’s email address, image descriptions, etc. Although the creators of the Tobi search engine promise to try to bring the search options as close as possible to the method used in the Alta Vista search engine in the future, they are currently lagging behind, as the search engine does not support the use of operators. This is why the Tobi search engine knows how to ignore very common words like and, or, for, is, etc. Searching with operators, and the like can be very useful in a slightly more complex search. Example: if we are looking for everything from Coca-Cola to various refreshing drinks; we write “cola -cola”. Operators allow much more – although they seem a bit complicated, in certain cases they can greatly simplify our search and, above all, shorten it. The search results are numbered, accompanied by the size of the document and the date is organized and transparent. The number of hits is really large, especially in general terms, so the introduction of operator-assisted search would be very very useful. The high number of hits is also due to the fact that some documents in the collection are duplicated. The order of the hits does not depend on the degree to which the document matches the search terms, as do all major global search engines.

… The comparison with Toby is devastating for Kekec. In the best cases, Kekec showed about three times less hits, in some even a hundred and several times less. … In fact, neither of the two search engines (Tobi and Kekec) is entirely satisfactory. Tobi is a solid product, separated from perfection only by small things, and for Kekec we can say that the shortcomings outweigh the advantages for now. …

If I compare the search engine Tobi and Kekec with the directories Mat’Kurja and Slowwwenia.com, I find that Tobi is the best in terms of search power, followed by Mat’Kurja and Slowwwenia.com. Slowwwenia.com is leading the way in terms of appearance, followed by Tobi and Mat’Kurja. Kekec is the last here too, who, if for no other reason, at least because of his sympathetic name, I wish him a speedy recovery. Slovenian directories and search engines do not lag far behind (if at all) their relatives from abroad. Each of them has some virtues that the other does not, but unfortunately this more or less also applies to the shortcomings, so the ideal directory or search engine does not exist yet. This means that other directories that we overlooked in this comparison can also get involved in the fight.