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	       Stanford Netnews Filtering Service Info

		  Tak W. Yan (tyan@cs.stanford.edu)
                    Department of Computer Science
                         Stanford University
                   
			    September 1994


( A )  W H O   A R E   W E

As part of the Electronic Library project at Stanford. we are providing a 
filtering service for USENET News (Netnews) articles. A user sends his 
profiles to the service, and will receive news articles relevant to his 
interests periodically. Communication to and from the service is via email 
messages. (A WWW interface for accessing the server is available at 
http://sift.stanford.edu.) It is an experiment on large-scale information 
filtering/dissemination. Please feel free to send suggestions, comments, or 
bug reports to tyan@cs.stanford.edu. 


( B )  W H A T   I S   N E T N E W S

Netnews, or USENET News, is a bulletin board system on the Internet. It is
organized into discussion groups (called newsgroups) covering a wide variety of
topics, e.g., from robotics to video game tips, from food recipes to politics.
Its total readership is in millions and daily traffic in tens of MBs. One 
problem with Netnews is the volume and diversity of information. Our filtering
service allows the user to express her interests in finer granularity (using 
profiles) than newsgroups, and hopefully can provide a better match of 
interests. 


( C )  A   S I M P L E   E X A M P L E

First we describe a simple example to show how the service works. We then talk
about how to pick a good profile. 

( C . 1 )  E x a m p l e

Suppose a user subscribes to the service with these settings via the email 
interface (a WWW interface is also available at http://sift.stanford.edu): 

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
mail netnews@db.stanford.edu
Subject: you may leave this blank
subscribe online information services
period 5
end
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

She will first receive an acknowledgement message from netnews, specifying
the email address the subscription is associated with. The user should keep
a record of this information, as she may need it in the future to remove
herself from the service.
 
After the subscription is successfully submitted, the user will receive email 
messages like this every 5 days: 

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