Ask More of Perseus

The Perseus Project is pleased to announce new searching facilities for our digital library and the first in a series of improvements to the Perseus architecture. The Perseus Lookup Tool unifies searching across images, sites, buildings, artifacts, secondary articles, and primary texts. For example, a search for Rhodes or Segesta will find not only Perseus catalog entries for those sites, but also entries in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites, coins, vases, and images. The query "Who was Pericles?" will find occurrences of Pericles, and the alternate spelling Perikles, in titles of Historical Overview sections, in image captions, in Perseus encyclopedia entries, and as the title for a text. The query "Hercules and the lion" will find Hercules, Heracles, and other alternate names along with the word lion.

The improvements to the Perseus Lookup Tool are a direct result of user comments and questions the Perseus webmaster has received since the introduction of the Perseus WWW site. This new searching feature more closely follows the format of other search engines on the WWW and enables users to ask broader questions. The previous Lookup Tool would not return any results for a query such as "What is Athenian tragedy?", for example. Although this question is addressed in Perseus--in this case, a number of sections are devoted to tragedy at Athens in the Historical Overview by Thomas Martin--the old Lookup Tool would not have informed the user of this. Now, the improved searching ability will guide a user to not only the relevant sections of the Historical Overview, Encyclopedia, etc., but also to a list of the works of tragedy in Perseus. Early response to the new Lookup Tool has been positive. Please let us know what you think!

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document placed on-line 6/21/99, LMC