Phantis:FAQ

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Revision as of 17:14, May 25, 2006 by Lazarus (talk | contribs) (How can I get in touch with Phantis?)
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About Phantis

Where is Phantis physically located?

Phantis is based in Norristown, Pennsylvania, USA. Norristown is a town approximately 25 miles outside the city of Philadelphia, the 5th largest city of the United States.

The mailing address fro Phantis is:

Decision Group, Inc.
c/o Phantis
P.O Box 176
Eagleville, PA 19408
USA

Who owns Phantis?

Phantis is a division of Decision Group, Inc., a marketing consulting company established in 1991, incorporated in the state of Pennsylvania.

The President and founder of Decision Group, Inc. is Mr. Lazarus Sismanis.

When and why was Phantis created?

Snapshot 1
Snapshot 2

Phantis was introduced to the public on May 1, 1997. It was one of the first ever services dedicated to archiving and indexing information pertaining to content related to Greece and the Greek diaspora -- or as we like to call it: Greek Cyberspace.

The images to the right show what Phantis looked like when it was first introduced.

How can I get in touch with Phantis?

By e-mail: Contact Phantis using the online Feedback Form

By telephone: You can reach Phantis by dialing: 610-631-5361 (and whatever country codes are required for calling the USA from where you reside, affixed prior to the above number.

By postal mail - send and inquiries to:

Decision Group, Inc.

c/o Phantis
P.O. Box 176
Eagleville, PA 19408
USA

The Directory

What is the Phantis Directory?

The Phantis Directory is an index of web sites related to Greece or to people of Greek descent.

The Directory is compiled by the Phantis people with information collected either through surfing the Internet or by proccessing Site Registrations submitted by individuals that own or represent a web site.

How is the directory organized?

he Phantis Directory is organized in two ways:

  • By Category: All listings are organized in categories and subcategories representing the broad nature of content of each individual site.
  • By Country: All listings are organized in country listings. Where applicable and if available, the country where the web site is based, or the country where the headquarters of a business resides, is used as the country under which a particular web site will be listed.

How does Phantis obtain the information listed in the directory?

The information that we list within the directory is obtained either through site registrations, or it is information that our people come across while browsing the World Wide Web - an activity that we constantly engage in.

I found some dead links in the directory. How often do you check their validity?

Phantis utilizes a robot mechanism that checks sites and listings for their validity once every month.

If our robot returns a 'reading' other than '200' (which means the site is OK), then the site is put on a flagged sites list and will be manually verified by the Phantis people.

My site was listed in the Phantis directory a little while ago, but now I don't see it. Why?

Our robot validates links in the directory approximately once a month. If the robot returns a validation reading other than '200' (which means the site is OK), then the site is automatically flagged out for manual validation.

During that period and until manual validation completes the particular web site listing is unavailable to the public. If our people verify that the site is still operative, then the site is placed once again in the directory listings.


The Search Engine

How do I get my site to appear in the Phantis search engine?

Phantis is a web crawler, a robot, just like those of Google and Altavista. A robot visits your site and extracts all the information, which it uses to construct huge databases. Phantis follows exclusion rules set forth by the robot.txt files.

In order for Phantis to visit your site and index the information available there, we must direct it to do so. That's where your registartion comes in. By registering your site with Phantis you are giving us your web address, so Phantis can actually process the contents of your site.

After Phantis has indexed your site, it will make that information available to everybody that is out there looking for it - provided of course they look for it on Phantis.

The contents of your site are analyzed into individual words. When somebody does a keyword search, then information from a particular page on your site is displayed, if it matches the criteria set forth by the person who does the search.

Does the Phantis search engine support complex (Boolean) searches?

The Phantis search engine fully supports complex logical (Boolean) searches.

Logical expressions can be composed using AND and OR operators, and subexpressions can be grouped using parenthesis. For example:

(alexander OR napoleon) AND (great OR macedonia OR france)

The same query can be expressed with the following Boolean operators:

(alexander|napoleon)+(great|macedonia|france)

Subexpressions in the parethesis can be an entire other boolean expression or even just a word, a pattern or a phrase.

Can I search for a specific word pattern?

Yes, Phantis offers full supports for pattern searches.

When searching for a pattern, using the character ? (question mark) means any character, while using the character * (asterisk - a wildcard) looks for a sequence of any characters.

For example, search for: expert* will return all results for words that begin with 'expert', i.e. experts, expertise, expertly, expertness, etc.

How do I exclude a word from a search?

You can exclude a word from your seaches by putting a - (dash or minus sign) in front of the word. For example, searching for:

hotels Crete -Chania

will return results with sites featuring the words ' hotels' and 'Crete', but without the word 'Chania'.

Can I limit my searches to or exclude a particular domain?

Yes. The Phantis search engine allows you to narrow your searches down to one or a few sites.

For example in order to find all documents containing the word 'Crete' on the site 'eot.gr', you type:

crete site:eot.gr

Using the same example, you can exlude sites from your searches by using the '-' sign, i.e.

crete -site:eot.gr

This will exclude results from the site eot.gr, while at the same time it seaches every other site available for the word 'crete'.

How do I search for a particular phrase?

Phantis gives you the ability to search for not only a set of words but entire phrases. To do so, all you need to to is surround the phrase with quotation marks, i.e.

"Sunday football game"

This will search for the entire phrase. In case you don't know the entire phrase you can use an asterisk instead of the word you do not know. For example:

"Sunday * game"