Semantic Web The future for smart searching likely depends on converting the concept of Semantic Web to reality. Tim Berners-Lee, father of the World Wide Web, in an interview with Otis Port in Business Week, describes directions and means for realizing the Semantic Web. The Web's Weaver Looks Forward - Interview with Tim Berners-Lee, Business Week Online (March 27, 2002)
Meaning comes through establishing the relationships of things. Documents are flat and boring - hard to penetrate, but ... "Corresponding to the links between the documents, there's also a real relationship between real things, like the ownership of a house by a person. The Semantic Web allows the meaning of the links to be expressed so a machine can process it." Some companies are working with the Resource Description Framework - a way of using the XML markup language to represent the relationship between real things.
Fast / AlltheWeb: High Rankings' Advisor newsletter has some bits about the Fast search engine from Martin Schaedel of StarGlobe in the UK.
- Fast isn't refreshing its index every 9 to 12 days - more like 30% every 7 days and the rest on a 28 day cycle. The 9-12 day claim by Fast was always suspicious - often search results were clearly older.
- Database has 600 million validated URLs out of a total of 900 million - about the size we thought. Fast still plans to index 2 billion URLs.
- Fast is indexing some pdf files and multimedia - these will be included in search results.
- Fast has added a pay-for-inclusion program. Good news is that this may help in indexing content from dynamic databases.
The High Rankings' Advisor newsletter is "a free, weekly email newsletter discussing the latest news and information in the world of search engine marketing.". See http://www.highrankings.com/issue004.htm
Search Techniques Chris Sherman identifies "seven stupid searching mistakes" in a two-part issue of SearchDay. The list is good and Sherman provides advice on how not to make these mistakes. Generally these aren't fatal errors, though some can skew the results.
Part 1 (March 27, 2002)
1. Using stop words - ie very common words like prepositions and articles. Look for field of dreams and most search engines will ignore the of. Enter "field of dreams" with quotation marks to require words together - this will work in most cases.
2. Misusing boolean. Looking for A or B or C can be a problem if we don't use the right construction for the search engine. Sherman is right - learn the rules. WebSearchGuide has cheat sheets for the major search engines in the Tutorial on Research.
3. Using very general words (Sherman says "being ever so vulgar"). Good advice from Sherman - make the query more specific.
4. Using words with multiple meanings. We don't always appreciate that our word has more than one meaning. Search engines that cluster results can help enormously. Use Vivisimo, Teoma, or Wisenut.
Part 2 (March 28, 2002)
5. Using uppercase. In the past search engines were somewhat case sensitive - to a query in uppercase the search engine only brought back exact matches. To prevent accidentally narrowing results, Sherman recommends use of lowercase most of the time. But today it is hard to find a search engine that will respond to uppercase when we want it to - such as for proper names. Only AltaVista has this capability. AltaVista Advanced recognizes case, and in Altavista Basic we must use quotation marks -- "Turkey" . Hotbot can handle "unusual mixed" case - but how many times do you search for NeXT computer? It's not very useful. MSN is said to support mixed case searches but is not reliable.
6. Not requiring proximity. Most places we can ask for words together by using quotation marks "this is a phrase", but some search engines don't look for exact phrase. Sherman notes that we can use Altavista to look for words Near each other. Altavista also lets one search for words Within n words of each other. For more information on this see Proximity in the WSG tutorial on Search Syntax.
7. Looking in the wrong place - using the wrong tool. True - good as Google is, it can't do everything. We need to select the right tool for the job. He recommends the Tip sheet from Nueva School on Choose the Best Search for your Information Need.
The web-based Mastering Web Searching course offered through Continuing Education at the Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto addresses all of these problems and more. Check here for more information on content and dates.
Browser 123 Explorer takes first and second place, leaving Netscape in a distant third. Can AOL change that by replacing IE with Netscape for AOL subscribers? Already IE 6.0 has 30.4% of share, second only to IE5.0 . Netscape has 7%. IE Still Rules the Browser Market - for now (March 27, 2002) ZDNet
Biographies: New Zealand has put online its Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. There are 3,049 names in the collection, said to be very varied in lives lived. They are all dead - regrettably. We won't find Kiri Te Kanawa on the list. Photos enrich the collection. Some entries are in Maori.The section, What is 'Our Land, Our People'?, gives some historical background. Wired reported on this in Kiwi 'Who Was Who' Goes Online (March 25, 2002)
The American National Biography is also online (http://www.anb.org/). It has 18,000 names. Published by Oxford University Press, there is a biography of the day and some free articles, but the main collection is by subscription only.
In the UK, the New National of National Biography is expected to come online in 2004 with 50,000 biographies.
News: Kevin Elliott reviewed the beta Google News service and found it "lightweight". He prefers Fast with its selection from 3000 resources rather than just the 100 at Google. He does grant that this is only the beta version and could improve. Google's New News Search (March 18, 2002). Also see his list of News - Headline Search Engines - has some great news-search tools.
Tools: Highlight passages on a web page, annotate, save, and share these notes and the page with other people. Do this with WebHighlighter, a free utility recommended by PC Magazine. See Where Did I Read That? by Patrick Philippot - PC Magazine (April 9/02) Requires Windows and IE4.0 or above. I haven't tried it but sounds very handy.
Copyright: Earlier in the week Google was required by the Church of Scientology to remove links to Xenu.net, a site that is critical of the church. The church charges that the pages were violating the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act. (See Cult forces Google to remove critical links - March 21). Xenu.net pages have since been restored under the provision for "fair use" which "permits copyrighted material for personal, education and other purposes". Google restores Scientology links Reuters (March 22, 2002). This won't be the last word.
Dollars: Will you pay for content? Jupiter Media Metrix thinks so. It has predicted that sales of content (music, text, images) will increase to US$5.8-billion by 2006 from US$1.4-billion in 2002. Jupiter also said though - "70% of online adults can not understand why anyone would pay for online content." National Post carried this story in Study predicts end of free Web content : "US$5.8B market by 2006: But businesses that charge face uphill battle" (March 21, 2002)
Google: Get tips and news about Google at this new blog - google.blogspace.com. Great idea but will take some time to develop.
Tools: Preston Gralla of Anchordesk recommends three tools for capturing Web pages for searching and viewing offline in Seek and ye shall find--with these Web research tools (March 20, 2002). They are Surfsaver, Gralla's favourite, Internet Researcher, and Offline Commander.
Adobe Acrobat 5.0, the full software package - not the reader, can also be used to grab groups of pages and search for words. As well one can update the information on the web page by revisiting the website. Acrobat will compare the new to old and update the pages.
Weblogs: Blogging may replace e-zines and e-newsletters as a source of current awareness - or at least overshadow. Fast Company magazine recognizes its increasing influence in a set of articles starting with All the News That's Fit to Blog by John Ellis in the April issue. He sees a shift from the "the market for analysis, commentary, and opinion" represented by pundits in the newspapers to the informality and community of peer -o-peer. John Ellis himself has joined the bloggers as well as several of his journalism friends at Fast. Related articles recommend several other bloggers.
Google vs Altavista: Richard Seltzer, one of the authors of Altavista Search Revolution (1998) posted a long commentary about Altavista to Slashdot. He identifies several strengths to Altavista - mainly the more powerful search commands such as combining host and link. He thinks it may be making a comeback. Others weigh in in a long threaded discussion of the relative merits of Google and Altavista in Google's Weakness, Altavista's Strength. Google is still the favourite but there are many good points about Altavista.
Google does News: Google has a new search service for news. Google has been indexing news resources for some time. These are listed at http://www.google.com/news/. Today it also has a search engine specifically for news - http://www.google.com/news/newsheadlines.html. This provides headlines in 5 groups and a searchable database for the past week. Google makes scanning of search results easier by grouping related stories together.
Google under attack: The bloggers are banding together to "bomb" Google with links in order to get higher rankings on names, stories and events. It works. BBC News reported,"If a few hundred blogs host the same link and describe it in the same way then, as far as Google is concerned, the page they refer to is likely to be a good resource on that subject." Google hit by link bombers (March 13, 2002) The history and workings of the Google bomb are described in the article Google Time Bomb at Corante. Today these bombs are being used by bloggers for fun and games and sometimes just causes, but, as John Hiler at Cornante warns, it's just a matter of time before someone uses them to make money.
Looksmart to buy Wisenut: Often during these Internet years companies with exciting technology have been swallowed up by larger companies - never to be seen again. Will this happen with Looksmart's purchase of Wisenut? Looksmart is really in the paid listings game - charging sites for being included in the directory. The Wisenut technology could help in presenting search results - and would be better than Looksmart's alphabetic listing. Also, the clustering done by Wisenut could help in creating subject categories - assuming Looksmart exploits that feature. There may be some improvement in Looksmart, but I'm doubtful that it will compensate for the loss of a very promising search enginge. An article in Internet News comments on the purchase -- LookSmart to Buy WiseNut (March 12, 2002)
Search Engine Size Stats: Greg Notess has updated various statistics concerning search engine size and reach. Relative Size Showdown, based on data from March 4-6, puts Google at the largest effective size (no surprise) and Wisenut in second spot (somewhat of a surprise). Notess also analyzes pages at Google to find about 1.4 million pages indexed (73% of database), 500 million unindexed (25%) and 35 million being other filetypes (1.75%).
Online Population: CyberAtlas keeps a chart of online populations by country. Worldwide the Internet population is estimated in Feb 2002 at 445.9 million, and expected to grow to 709.1 million in 2004. As a percentage of population the citizens of Iceland use the Internet more than any other country.
Iceland 167,000 users, 60%
United Kingdom 33 million users, 55.4%
United States 143 million, 51.4%
Canada 18.8 million, 44.9%
CyberAtlas also links to articles about individual countries.
Librarians help Michael Moore: Michael Moore, known for his film Roger and Me about General Motors, is on tour promoting his new book Stupid White Men. It nearly didn't happen. After September 11 books that criticized certain powers were less favoured. Steve Outing in the E-Media Tidbits weblog gave a very abbreviated account of Moore's story - including the part where a librarian, outraged at the suppression, called other librarians and together they lobbied for the book's release.
Net Use: Pew Internet and American Life project has new data on what Americans do online. 95% do email and 80% search the Internet for answers to questions. 70% get news and 66% gather travel information. Get the whole list at http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/chart.asp?img=Internet_Activities.jpg. This is part of a report about Getting Serious Online from studies in March 2001.
Bias: Chris Sherman asks the question - are search engines biased? in SearchDay, March 11, 2002. Likely they are. He points to an article -- Assessing Bias in Search Engines by Abbe Mowshowitz and Akira Kawaguchi in the journal Information Processing & Management (http://www.elsevier.com/cdweb/journals/03064573/samplecopy/viewer.htt) - registration required. Read Sherman's comments first.
Web Searching: Even better, Sherman reminds us of the Virtual Chase (http://www.virtualchase.com/). The subtitle is Legal Research on the Internet, but Genie Tyburski, the creator, has much to offer all Net researchers and especially library professionals. There are sections on evaluating quality, conducting training, doing research, getting company information, finding people, as well as the core material on legal research.
Analyzing Links: Dr Gary Flake and others at the NEC Research Institute have found that the Web is self-organizing. Communities form around common interests and can be identified through analysis of the links between pages. This analysis may help in developing better search engines and web directories and filtering content to specific interests.
See Search engine makes social calls by John Whitfield (March 7, 2002) in Nature Science Update and Self-organization of the web and identification of communities (March 6, 2002) issued by the NEC Research Instititute.
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Meta Search Engine: New metasearch engine www.allsearchengines.co.uk - picks up the UK versions of Overture, Altavista, Yahoo, Mirago, Lycos, and MSN. The WOrld version has Hotbot, Wisenut, Yahoo, Altavista, Teoma, Open Directory Project, and MSN. In all, this is a good collection of engines. One can select engines after the first search. Shows relevancy scores on results. Also has metasearch for MP3 and Images.
New Site: Turner Online at the Tate -- Works of JMW Turner, the English artist of the 1800s, have been put online at the Tate - nearly 300 drawings and over 30,000 watercolours, some never seen before by the public. All of these were in the bequest he made to England on the condition they be kept together in a special gallery. That gallery has turned out to be the Web. Read BBC News article Rare Turner works go online and visit the Turner Collection.
Weblogs: Jeff Warren finds promise in new web sites where there is intelligent comment and discussion about the passing scene. (See Point and Think, Globe and Mail, Saturday March 2, 2002) "Instead of self-contained essays, the Web's new intellectual hothouses offer diverse networks of opinion, and active participation. Reader power is where the Web really comes into its own". He cites Plastic, Slashdot, and Metafilter as three examples where users create and comment on the news. Especially noted are Arts and Letters Daily in New York (oh for even an hour every week to spend with Arts and Letters) and OpenDemocracy from the UK where a discussion about globalization is in process.
The print article also listed other sites "with brains". These didn't make it into the online version. They were: Edge.org (big names, big issues); Nobel.se (educational resources from Nobel); Center for Book Culture (archive of author interviews); Xrefer.com (reference search engine); Guardian Books (books.guardian.co.uk) (interviews, reviews, bios); The Atlantic (books again); Slate ("sardonic" view); Spiked-Online.com (UK opinion); NYT Books (current reviews - read it now, and some essays); Zmag.org/Znet.htm (activist essays for people committed to social change).
Almost in the form of a thread, Mathew Ingram added more at the Globe site on Back to the future with blogs . He writes, ""Blogging" is a return to the kind of gleeful anarchy that made the Internet so much fun"
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