Charleston, SC
March 11-12, 1999
Advanced Internet Research:
Summary of Sites Noted
Gretchen Whitney, School of Information Sciences,
University of Tennessee
Greg Notess writes for Online and Database about searching on the Web, and has developed an excellent site with descriptions of the features of many of the major web engines and search tools. The site www.notess.com includes news of the engines and their capabilities, reviews of meta-engines, and a bibliography of readings.
SearchEngineWatch is also excellent for features and capabilities, and news. It's particularly targeted at web site developers interested in having their pages positioned better in the engines, and explains both policy and technical issues regarding how the various engines place a page in the retrieval display. Is the "membership fee" worth it? Yes, it's very informative and useful. His Power Searching Tutorial is very useful.
Open Directory Project, born as NewHoo, now owned by Netscape, represents an example of of community collaborative efforts at organizing information. It's uneven, young, enthusiastic, and international.
The Encyclopedia Britannica offers e-blast, a directory with reviews by human editors. So does NBC with Snap!, and the differences are significant between the scholarly and commercial approaches.
Sales of retrieval positions? It's a given at GoTo.Com, which even includes the price paid per click-through. More information about sales of hit rankings can be found at GoTo Sells Positions from SearchEngineWatch. Direct Hit also sells retrieval positions.
Mirago presents the world of the Web from the UK perspective. UTKMAX also offers a portal to the UK perspective. Note in particular the news stories, and their age in hours.
SmartBrowsing in Netscape has raised some privacy concerns. Privacy Forum, 11 August 1998, provides a discussion of Netscape's "What's Related" feature. The Alexa technology is described at the Alexa site.
GlobalBrain attempts to go beyond human directories and tap into the preferences of users themselves by tracking popular sites and integrating the results into the retrieval algorithms.
ISleuth offers "windows" into the major engines as a search aid, as well as directory capabilities.
Meta-interface Proteus offers a search query aid, easy access to major engine help files, and new interface.
One of the most exciting new tools is the KnowledgeCite Library. It is a "database of databases" from SilverPlatter providing access (in beta) to 17 bibliographic files (GeoRef, Agricola, ERIC, and four HW Wilson databases). It's in beta now, and scheduled for release in August of this year. It's exciting because of its explicit explanations of relevance, and its full implementation of thesaurii - as well as its close coupling with the local catalog.
Ranking mechanisms are changing: See Hotbot for its relationship with DirectHit: a compilation of sites that others doing the same search found useful, or at least visited. GoTo is simply selling site positions, first shown to the highest bidder.
Multi-media engines include Alta Vista's Photo Finder, and Scour.net. The first is very concerned about copyright issues, the second doesn't seem to be.
Research projects are focusing in part on clustering. The IBM Clever project is trying to develop an "Automated Resource Compilation," understanding both bibliographies and sites of significant content. GROUPER and HuskySearch work together to cluster results of a search by examining words in common in retrieved pages. Informedia Mediator is from a Swiss Bank, and offers interesting options in customization.
New interfaces are presented at SavvySearch (with a new mission) and Proteus.
Conversational interfaces ala Star Trek are on the horizon, and making strides from ELIZA. The Brain is not quite the Enterprise computer, but it's an interesting step forward.
Two programs of note mimic the ProSearch capabilities of the online bibliographic database era: Bullseye and Compernic 99 offer pc-based programs to enhance search preparation, resource decision-making, and downloading capabilities.
Asking people questions: on biology at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute AskAScientist program; on California natural history or Native American culture at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History; on weeds at pests at the Purdue University Plant and Pest Diagnostic Laboratory; on population genetics from Professor Michael Wooten at Auburn University (but this site is primarily for K-12 students); on whales at WhaleNet; on roses at the American Rose Society.
In astronomy, you can ask a NASA scientist at Ask A Nasa Scientist; ask an astronaut at the National Space Society; ask an astronomer at Case Western Reserve's Astro-Particle Physics Department or at another NASA site, Ask a Space Scientist, particularly for K-12 teachers or at Cornell's Ask An Astronomer.