To paraphrase from the introduction: PhilllyFinder integrates two very useful capabilities: 1. browsing a list of web sites 2. searching web sites. It combines a web site indexing and search engine product with a directory product. The integration of a multiple web site search engine within a directory/portal system adds some unique functionality that the two stand alone products don't have.

In this document we illustrate how PhillyFinder makes it possible to get results which would be difficult, if at all possible to do with other search engine or directory products.

For an example of this, consider Yahoo. A user Alice who lives in Philadelphia wanted to travel to the Bahamas. She went to Yahoo and browsed to the category "/Recreation/Travel/By_Region/Countries/Bahamas/" as shown below.

From within the Bahamas category, Alice searched for the word "resorts". She made sure to select "just this category" before clicking the search button as shown below.

The first part of her results were fine as expected. Yahoo searched its directory for the word resorts and got back results only from sites listed within that category.

The second part of her returns were fine as expected too. The "Yahoo Site Matches" brought back results that were limited to the Bahamas category and its subcategories as shown below.

Not finding what she was looking for within Yahoo's directory of sites, she clicked on the "Web Pages" link to get results from full text searches on the web sites.

To her dismay, the "Web Pages" search brought back results from resorts in Denver, Las Vegas and several other places. Most of the sites returned on top were not related to Bahamas. They didn't even contain the word Bahamas in them.

Being computers and Internet savvy, Alice realized that this was because that her search had now been forwarded to a search engine and that search engine was not integrated with the directory she was browsing.

She wished there was a site on the web that integrated a search engine with a portal directory. She started looking for one and found the only such site on the Internet - Phillyfinder at finder.philly.com!

This functionality unique to PhillyFinder gives it an edge over other search engines and directory products. It adds very useful functionality to allow people to find things on the Internet that were extremely difficult to find with other search engines. There are several examples of finding things on PhillyFinder that would be very difficult, if possible in other search engines.:

• In PhillyFinder, Alice can browse to the category "Tourism & Travel/Historical Sites" and search for the word "tickets". The full text search of the pages on sites returns ticket information, but only from the sites listed under "Historical Sites" and its subcategories. In other search engines, she would have to think hard to form a query that would return ticket information from only relevant sites. Results from movie theaters, performing arts theaters and others would clutter the results.
• Another example would be searching for something, but limit the search only to web sites of colleges in the Philadelphia area. In any other search engine on the web, if at all possible to do, she would have to enter the URL of each college to be included in her advanced search query. In PhillyFinder, she just has to browse to the "Education/Colleges" category and search only the sites listed below. In fact, If she wanted to, Alice could even check the box next to the colleges whose web sites she wanted to search and fine tune her search even more.

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