Keeping up with Search Engines and the Web

If you ever have the opportunity to attend a session with Gary Price (formerly of “List of Lists”, now of Resourceshelf.com fame) take it!! In three fast paced, action packed sessions at the recent SLA conference in Nashville, Tennessee, Gary (a librarian by trade and now a consultant and web guru) presented updates on web and search engine developments, tips and tricks of the trade and future trends.

Gary reiterated what we may already know. As librarians we are not doing a good job of marketing our databases. In many cases users either forget or don’t know about subscription databases. According to Gary, 95% of searches are conducted using google and yahoo. The reasons these types of search engines succeed is because they always give the user something, but usually there is no relation between the answer to quality and relevancy. Conversely, if the answer is not in the first 4 or 5 entries, then it doesn’t exist.

Most searchers are using uncontrolled vocabulary – the average number of search terms used for any search is 2.5. Search engines are in the business of making money and, with many search engines, results are being manipulated through search engine optimization. There is a huge teaching, facilitating and evaluating role for the information professional to assist people in meeting their information needs. “A small amount of education (librarian as educator) would produce a quality answer in a shorter period of time” (Price, 2004).

Search Engine Highlights

Vivisimo www.vivisimo.com
Check out dynamic clustering of larger and broader topics. Vivisimo also provides a preview “function” for easy viewing of a web page without losing the original search sites (click on “preview” on any web site citation).

Gigablast www.gigablast.com
This is a sole proprietor search engine developed and operated by one person. Every page has a direct link to the Internet Archive WayBack Machine back to 1996.

Online Translator www.faganfinder.com
New engine recently developed by an 18 year old Canadian student. The Translation Wizard is one useful site listing many translation tools which matches up the translation you want with a tool that can handle it. Give it a try!

Teoma/Jeeves www.teoma.com
Provides three new features: Results of relevant web pages with links to Refined Results of related sites and Resources Links from experts and ”enthusiasts”.

Terrafly www.terrafly.com
A specialized database containing satellite images. Simply enter a US address for a bird’s eye aerial image view of the location. A very neat feature!

Topixnet www.topix.net
Gary Price indicated that this news engine has more unique sources that any other database – try this if you are really having problems with a search.

Altavista www.altavista.com
To note: Much of the advanced search functionality has been eliminated as the proximity operator and truncation features have recently been phased out.

Google www.google.com
If you click on “cached” in the URL address line, your results will indicate where your search terms appear in the web site.
To note: The addition of amazon books and the near future inclusion of 2 million OCLC records may result in many irrelevant hits – particularly because duplicate information has not been removed.

Yahoo www.yahoo.com
Yahoo now uses its own database (formerly used google’s engine). Yahoo pages can now be personalized (eliminates the cluttered/busy Yahoo home page). Specialized services such as “yahoofinance” have been added. Search shortcuts are now available – specialized features designed to enable you to find results quickly.
Smartsort http://shopping.yahoo.com/smartsort Take a look at this unique site – enables you to rank products by brand name, cost, specifications, manufacturer, etc. with a sliding ratings scale.

Trends Highlights

Multimedia Searches

Voice recognition technology. Two web sites illustrate the latest developments:

www.campaignsearch.com
Gathers campaign-related video and audio files from a number of web sites and uses spoken language analysis software to automatically identify audio/video news related to a user’s search.

www.pbs.org
Databases were created using voice recognition technology. Search by keyword and, where available, sites will be listed where your search term is spoken; you will be able to listen to a segment in Real Audio or watch a program on streaming video.

Metadata / Federated Search Engines

These sites merge search results from a number of different databases. Good examples - www.science.gov searches 30 databases and over 1700 science web sites with access to over 47 million pages of government science information.

OAIster http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister
An open access institutional repository from 301 science and academic institutions. Contains 3.2 million records which can be searched simultaneously.

Personalized Search Pages

www.findory.com
News service engine that allows you to personalize your page by saving searches of articles that interest you.

Internet Archives www.waybackmachine.org
You can now search and view the Internet Archive's enormous collection of web sites, dating back to 1996 and comprising over 10 billion web pages. One-third of this engine is now key word searchable in http://recall.archive.org. Wayback also has a music archives of 10,000 concerts for a wide variety of musical artists.

Gary Price’s complete presentations can be found at:

Specialized Search Tools
http://www.resourceshelf.com/2004/specializedsearch04.html

Extreme Searching & Other Goodies
http://www.resourceshelf.com/2004/newsdivision04.html

References

Price, G. (2004). Comments from ResourceShelf. Retrieved from http://resourceshelf.freepint.com on June 16, 2004.

Arden Matheson is the Head, Business Library for the Haskayne School of Business at the University of Calgary.

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