SiteLines - Ideas About Web Searching

Digitization of important historical medical journals

A large collection of important historical medical journals will be digitized and made available beginning in late 2004. From the press release:

"The Wellcome Trust, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), and the
U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) are joining forces to digitise the complete backfiles of a number of important and historically significant medical journals. The digitised content will be made freely available on the Internet - via PubMed Central and augment the content already available there.

The NLM will manage the project, host the archive and ensure that the digital files are preserved in perpetuity.

The list of journals to be digitised will include the Annals of Surgery,
Biochemical Journal, Journal of Physiology and Medical History. Digitisation
will commence in Summer 2004 and the first titles will be online early in
2005."

Recommended Resource: The Memory Hole

Spotted on Informine, the Memory Hole site exists to preserve and spread material that is in
danger of being lost, is hard to find, or is not widely known. Unlike the Wayback Machine/Internet Archive, which seeks to capture web information of all kinds at various points in time, the Memory Hole emphasizes preservation of "things that we're not supposed to know (or that we're supposed to forget)."

This site could be useful in providing examples of materials deliberately pulled off the Internet for reasons of security or public relations. Searchers will be required to perform their due diligence in testing and evaluating materials sited, as this site has a decided bias. Note to international searchers: the materials is predominantly of US interest.

Spyware/Adware Hijacks Google Search Results

In the June 16 issue of Search Engine Lowdown, Andy Beal reports that unintentionally installed adware/spyware can hijack your Google results and infect the results page with unwanted links. It doesn't actually hijack the actual results, it just changes the results after delivery to the desktop. You can see an example here.

Unfortunately this information came out just one day too late for me. Yesterday, after years of carefully avoiding downloading or opening of unknown files, I accidently hit the ENTER key and opened an unknown ZIP file from the web, which sent over 300 adware/spyware files into my computer, including the one that hijacked my Google results.

These are unbelievably nasty little beasts that are almost impossible to remove without software. After about 3 hours, which included searching some excellent discussion boards on adware/spyware removal, running Lavasoft's AdAware, Spybot Search-and-Destroy, and Spysweeper, I finally managed to rid myself of the perpetrators. (In fact, Spysweeper worked the best of all three, and was the only one able to get rid of the Google hijack.)

List of Library RSS Feeds

There has been a lot of interest in the last few months from libraries interested in using both weblogs and RSS feeds to promote their collections and services. However, for staff who aren't familiar with how RSS can be deployed, it's sometimes hard to understand how the technology can be beneficial.

So it's timely that a couple of lists of library-related weblogs have appeared. One, the list of library LSS feeds is arranged by topic and compiled by Gerry McKiernan of Iowa State University Library. Blog Without a Library by Amanda Etches-Johnson of McMaster University, has a long list of libraries with weblogs. Some of them have RSS feeds, but not all. Either of these sites are good ways to find models.

(corrected URL June 17 2004)

Recommended Resource: HuRiSearch

HuRiSearch, the Human Rights Search Engine, is a searchable database of over 1300 human rights sites in 58 languages.

The site is sponsored by HREA, the Human Rights Education Associates, an international organisation that supports training, education, and community-building in the area of human rights.

The site uses FAST technology (which formerly powered the Alltheweb.com search engine until it was replaced by Yahoo's) to power its site search. FAST's technology enables the use of double quotations to encapsulate phrases, and enables users to subsequently narrow their search by either doc type (e.g. pdf), or size of file. The wildcard symbol * is supported, but only at the end of words (e.g. countr*). Abbreviated help is available in the help files associated with the search interface. Overall, this is a high-quality, user-friendly site that can be a helpful alternative to general search engines for finding information resources in this field.

All those search engine shortcuts - like, who cares?

Wow, even more search shortcuts coming out on Yahoo and Google these days. I wonder how many information searchers ever use these command-line tools for calculations, FEDEX/UPS tracking, phone number lookup, definitions and more. Not many, I think.

So why do the search engines keep bombarding us with ever-more command-line shortcuts? Well, they want us to think that the world is a one-box "command central" for finding the world's information, which of course it isn't. However, from a business standpoint, those command-line search shortcuts enable all the search properties to offer very targeted ad placements to organizations that want to zero in on a particular clientele. See, for example, Google's pitch to potential advertisers on its Adwords program, which directly links some of those command-line searches to targeted local ad placements.

It's several months old now, but Michael Singer's article "New Google Shortcuts Tie Into Paid Listings" from January's Internetnews.com describes how the shortcuts clearly tie into targeted paid listings. Caveat searcher.

Recommended Resource: Bnet.com

Spotted on the BestBizWeb E-Letter, Bnet.com is another portal of resources to assist business decision makers in strategic planning, marketing, financial planning, human resources, leadership and more. Free registration is required to access some resources, but there is much of value here. Materials are extracted from many sources, including universities, private consultants, and some unique materials supplied by Bnet.com. This is one of the best business strategy portals I have come across on the free web. (By the way, Bnet is part of the Cnet.com brand family.)

Business web users have a hard time finding what they need

Hmm, are real people getting the message that while search is easy, finding good information can be a challenge for employees? In his article "Not So Simple Search" Jon Surmacz summarizes the results of a Delphi Group survey, which found that business web users are often frustrated with the quality of their search capabilities.

According to the survey, nearly 30 percent of business users spend more than 8 hours per week searching for electronic information, and more than 40% spend at least 7 hours per week (that's a full day!) hunting for information. 62% of the survey's respondents said that they are either dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with their search experience. Note that the definition of "search" included both web search tools, enterprise search tools for company intranets, and other proprietary databases.

Analysts at Delphi say that searching is easier if you know exactly what you need, but harder if you want to browse or discover something new. They lay some of the blame on the search tool designers, who need to design differently. But surely searchers need to think about alternate ways to search besides simply popping keywords into boxes and hoping for the best? There are any number of high quality search tools that permit browsing (think Librarians Index, Resource Discovery Network, even Yahoo's directory). Of course, tools aren't the only answer -- searchers also need to turn their brains "on" and, as Mary Ellen Bates proclaims, "get involved with information."

Mary Ellen Bates ponders newfangled search skills in a more-than-Boolean world

In the provocatively-titled "Is Boolean Dead?" in the April 5 2004 issue of EContent Magazine, professional searcher Mary Ellen Bates considers the changing nature of information-seeking in a digital world of big databases, search engines, and services that rely "on the 30,000-foot view of the information landscape." Bates remarks that traditional drill-down keyword approaches don't always work well with large, broad-based databases, and require the searcher to rely on intuition, fuzzier relationships with words and concepts.

Bates advises searchers to "to learn how to manipulate and, well, get involved with information, rather than just typing in words and waiting for the search engine or research source to evaluate the syntax, consult its inverted index, sort the results, and present us with an ordered list of "hits." We will have to understand the nature of the information we are looking at in order to recognize the answer when we see it. In fact, we will have to evolve into Zen researchers, unearthing the answer from a myriad of options rather than simply scrolling through 10, 50, or 100 Web sites, articles, or patents served up by our search tool. Not only will we have to be good searchers, but we will have to be good intuiters as well, able to know where to look for information and how to sort through all the options presented to us."

New and Improved US Blue Pages

The US Federal Government has made some improvements to the Blue Pages web site. Easy drop down menus permit guided state, city, and agency searching; an employee directory is also provided.