October 27, 2004
Yahoo Does Boolean
I was reviewing Greg Notess's excellent article on key changes in the Yahoo! database and search syntax, published in the July/August issue of ONLINE Magazine, and was particularly struck by his observations on link checking and Boolean capabilities.
It seems that Yahoo can produce results for full Boolean nested searches, which Google can't do (at least not yet). Using a fairly complex search on benchmarking of computer expenditures for consumer goods industry (which a week earlier had baffled one of my smarter student groups) and it appeared to deliver results consistent with the Boolean search statement.
So for search situations where you have exhausted other approaches and need to try an engine with full Boolean capabilities, Yahoo! seems to be the answer, at least for now.
Australian and New Zealand Business Information Sources
In the September/October issue of ONLINE Magazine, Nicole Sackers, Michelle Nutting, and Sinead Williams of the Australian Taxation Office contribute a valuable overview on how to find quality business information for the region.
United Nations Research Guide
Spotted on Resourceshelf:
(from the guide home page) "This guide is designed for researchers and information professionals with an interest in United Nations documentation. It presents an overview of the various types of documents and publications issued by the Organization (e.g, reports, resolutions, meeting records, sales publications, press releases) and gives guidance on how to work with them. The Research Guide also provides information on actions taken by the General Assembly as well as the Security Council and introduces researchers to major fields of UN activities: human rights, international law, and peacekeeping."
RECONCILING THE ORDER OF THE LIBRARY WITH THE CHAOS OF THE WEB
Spotted on RLG's Shelflife, some insightful quotations from Judith Pearce of the National Library of Australia on the relationship/collisions (you choose) between the library and the web (extract from Shelflife:)
Noting that the library has long been "a metaphor for order and
rationality," where the search for information is aided by knowledgeable
librarians, Judith Pearce, director of business analysis at the National
Library of Australia, contrasts such structure with the "anarchy" of the
Web: "The Web is free-associating, unrestricted and disorderly. Searching
is secondary to finding and the process by which things are found is
unimportant. Collections are temporary and subjective where a blog entry
may be as valuable to the individual as an unpublished paper as are six
pages of a book made available by Amazon. The individual searches alone
without expert help and, not knowing what is undiscovered, is satisfied."
Services like Google and Amazon have raised the expectations of library
users. For others, they have introduced a "world of information in which
libraries and their collections have new audiences and new roles to play."
Pearce describes recent changes at the National Library, aimed at reducing
the separation between the Web site and the library catalog in order to
draw users into the collection. Visitors to the new color-coded site do not
even need to know what a catalog is in order to find information, she says.
(National Library of Australia Sep 2004)
http://www.nla.gov.au/nla/staffpaper/2004/pearce2.html
October 14, 2004
Education Research, RAND Corporation
Spotted on Infomine:
"RAND posts reports of its public policy research on education topics.
Issues such as K-12 assessment and accountability, school reform,
teachers and teaching, higher education, military education and
training, and worker training addressed."
These reports are part of a large ongoing research effort by RAND in topical areas including education, Child Policy, Civil Justice, Energy & Environment, Health & Health Care, International Affairs, National Security, Population & Aging, Public Safety, Science & Technology, Substance Abuse, Terrorism & Homeland Security and Transportation.
October 11, 2004
Cautionary Tales of the Wikipedia
Genie Tyburski of the Virtual Chase contributed a brief summary recently of some tests of the Wikipedia encyclopedia. The Wikipedia is a collective encyclopedia which accepts contributions and edits from any contributor, using software to control blatant vandalism. The Wiki model should make any serious searcher cautious, but the Wiki encyclopedia is well known and popular nonetheless. (It will come up high in search results of any search on the keyword encyclopedia.)
I was thinking about the Wiki model today, and it struck me that its "majority-rules" approach to information isn't really much different from those of search engines that rely on link analysis to rank order resources. Anytime I conduct a web search for unknown information in a tool like Google, which uses link analysis in its PageRank algorithms, my results will favor popular, frequently-linked resources. Isn't that almost the same majority-rules approach as wiki-style resources?
October 08, 2004
The Looksmart/UC Berkeley Partnership
Spotted in John Battelle's weblog:
In its continuing effort to gain market share and "convert" users to its search product, Looksmart has done an affinity deal with UC Berkeley's Cal Athletics.
The deal applies the same principles that business organizations such as credit card companies use, which directly gives back $$ to the specific group (in this case the university's athletics programs). Looksmart will supply paid listings and results for visitors to calbears.com and calbearssearch.com, as well as a toolbar applications.
The idea is that if you use the Looksmart search tool, a portion of the revenue that Looksmart earns by delivering paid placement and ads will be returned to the institution. Berkeley gains revenue; Looksmart gains eyeballs over time.
Will Google and Yahoo users switch to the Looksmart brand in order to support their university? Should a prestigious academic institution be promoting lower-quality search tools which display paid results, over other higher quality web search resources? Should they be promoting the use of any commercial web search tool which derives its revenue for paid listings? And will Berkeley users know the difference, or care?
October 05, 2004
Recommended Resource: Fraser
Spotted on ResourceShelf, the Federal Reserve Archival System for Economic Research (FRASER) seeks to make available federal economic data. Over 40 thousand pages of historical economic data are currently in the database, including bank statistics 1896 - 1955; the Annual Statistical Digest; Banking and Monetary Statistics 1914-1970; Economic Indicators 1938-2004; and more. Files are searchable through FRASER's web interface. This is an immensely valuable archive of data for historical economic research.