WELL, we all know how popular the World Wide Web (WWW) is. It cannot be denied. The number of pages on this massive collection of hypertext-linked web pages grows at amazing rates, especially when one looks at the resources being poured into providing methods of finding information on the Web. Take a look just at the NCSA What's New Page. NCSA, the pioneer that created the original free version of Mosaic, maintains a monthly listing of new pages. The list is getting to be massive and it signals the diversity of the WWW, especially when one considers that the What's New page there probably fails to list many of the new pages which come into existence each month. Of course, unlike Gopher and FTP (file transfer protocol) which both have time-tested methods of searching for data and extensive lists of resources compiled by all sorts of topics, the WWW is more in its infancy, even if its growth appears accelerated by some type of growth hormone similar to what they feed to some cows to induce increased milk production. Increasingly there are places to search to find just the right information on the Web. Of course, NCSA and its What's New page is a good place to find the latest information about what is on offer. But, the What's New page is not all that is available to find just the right web page. The most interesting of the Web searching resources, in fact, are not static lists of information such as NCSA's What's New page. They are based on robots which can automatically scan the Net for new WWW pages and, in that way, maintain a database of Web pages without actually requiring manual registration of new pages. Take WebCrawler, a program that produces an index not just by titles and URL's (WWW addresses), but also by content. WebCrawler can 'traverse' the Web and build an index for later use. It can also search in real time in response to a user-supplied query. Similarly, JumpStation is another robot-based index that provides access to an index of WWW resources. Likewise, the WWW Worm, which won Best of the Web '94 as Best Navigational Aid, scours the Net for resources and currently maintains a database of more than 300,000 objects. Even though these tools automatically produce enormous searchable indexes of WWW pages, they have produced some controversy to the point of causing heated debate among some Netters. According to an information page on WWW robots, there have been cases of WWW robots visiting sites where they helped to overload servers, and network resources in general, with repeated requests for the same page or rapid-fire requests in succession. This, and other problems such as accessing parts of sites that really should not be touched by automated robots have actually led some to begin developing standards to help WWW servers communicate with robots, but that is still in the future in terms of widespread implementation. Even so, this information page provides an extensive list of most known robots and they do represent an efficient way to cut back on the time it takes to find just the right information on the Net. To find out how to access these resources, send a message to files before November 15 for an automated response. E-mail Arman Danesh at armand