SiteLines - Ideas About Web SearchingSiteLines is written by Rita Vine, a professional librarian, web search trainer, and lead site evaluator of the Search Portfolio web search product.Together with other members of the Search Portfolio selection team, Rita monitors over 50 key alerting services related to web search tools, site announcements, and the business of web search. SiteLines is intended to present a distillation of the most... The Challenge of Evaluating Health Search Tools- October 27, 2005 Tony Gentile of Healthline has posted a long and interesting comment on my review of Healthline.com at http:www.buzzhit.com200510rita-doesnt-dig-us.html Near the end of his article, Gentile asks, Is your fundamental believe sic that only ad-free content can be trusted If so, unfortunately, that would put many companies out of business. I believe that there is good information on health matters provided by all kinds of web sources -- educational institutions, commercial web sources, and maybe...http://www.workingfaster.com/sitelines/archives/2005_10.html#000361 Wikipedia Founder Admits to Serious Quality Problems- October 20, 2005 It's hard to believe that the Wikipedia has led such a charmed life. Encyclopedia-by-committee, even with some editorial oversight, is prone to hazards. There's amazingly variable quality between entries, and it's almost impossible to prevent always-present hackers from inputting bad, wrong, or dubious information ...just for fun. So it's no surprise that the Register reports this week that Wikipedia's founder is reporting serious quality problems. Since when did information-by-committee...http://www.workingfaster.com/sitelines/archives/2005_10.html#000359 Scratching Under the Surface of a "New" Health Search Engine- October 18, 2005 Lots of buzz this week about Healthline.com, a new vertical search engine for medical information. Chris Sherman, in his SearchDay review, quotes the company's promotional material, which indicates that the site covers "62,000 web sites with between 45-50 million pages... and hosted content licensed from reliable content providers." However, my own initial examination showed a site that offers little to rival the best quality ad-and-sponsorship-free medical content on the web through..http://www.workingfaster.com/sitelines/archives/2005_10.html#000357 Google Scholar Grows - An Update- October 17, 2005 Google Scholar's chief engineer, Anurag Acharya, contributed a presentation Searching Scholarly Literature: A Google Scholar Perspective at the 9th World Congress on Health Information and Libraries, September 23, 2005. Some key points: The index has grown significantly in the last six months, although the company does not disclose the actual index size Coverage by category is focused on medicine and sciences -- medicine 22%; engineering 14%; biology and sociology, 13% each; physics 12% GS...http://www.workingfaster.com/sitelines/archives/2005_10.html#000356 New! Google Blog Search- October 6, 2005 Not to be outdone by upstart competitors (Technorati, Blogdigger, Feedster, and more), Google has announced a beta-version of its blog search. This is still a baby-beta version: it covers blog content back only to June 2005 so far, although it's reasonable to expect that the coverage will increase as takeup of the product ramps up. Unlike most Google search appliances, Google's Blog Search doesn't search the full text of blogs -- rather, it only searches the "feed" -- the part of the..http://www.workingfaster.com/sitelines/archives/2005_10.html#000354 |