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... Not-So-Smart Answers at AskJeeves- August 31, 2005 The latest additions to AskJeeves "Smart Answers" were reported by Gary Price in his August 22 Search Engine Watch blog. Although the latest additions expand on the existing Jeeves collection of sources that are pre-selected to handle queries for many common factual searches, they remain, like so many other "answer" capabilities of the major search engines, pretty mundane. Search Portfolio's research team tested many popular topics (e.g. marijuana, botox) to see if Smart...http://www.workingfaster.com/sitelines/archives/2005_08.html#000348 More Silly Search Engine Size Stories- August 26, 2005 Since Yahoo disclosed the jump of its index size to just over 19 billion (!) documents, I've been following a series of interesting posts at the Technologie du Langage blog from Jean Vronis, professor of Information and Technology at the University of Provence. In great detail (and in English), Vronis recounts, with good link references, the index-size story starting with Yahoo's announcement. He then systematically and persuasively refutes both the allegations of database size and the research.http://www.workingfaster.com/sitelines/archives/2005_08.html#000345 Google Tests "Commercial" Listings in "Organic" Search Results- August 22, 2005 From August 19's Clickz, an article on Google's testing of commercial listings in the 6th-8th position in "pure" search results. I replicated the test of the keywords on demand and the results are clearly visible. Interestingly, what isn't at all obvious is that the results are commercialsponsoredpaid in nature. The only apparent difference is the line above and below the commercial results, and the absence of either CACHED or SIMILAR PAGES links that usually company Google results. I.http://www.workingfaster.com/sitelines/archives/2005_08.html#000342 Data Mining Primer- August 17, 2005 From the US government, Data Mining, An Overview, is a short primer for those wanting to understand what data mining is all about. By Jeffrey Siebert, an infomation analyst at the US Congressional Research Service. In PDF format....http://www.workingfaster.com/sitelines/archives/2005_08.html#000341 Interesting Tool: Copyscape- August 4, 2005 Plagiarist alert! There's an interesting online tool to help those of you who want to track those who has lifted content off your website. Copyscape uses Google API technology to identify distinctive sentences and phrases from your site and then sniffs around for other sites that use the same or similar phrases. Although Copyscape tends to sniff out a lot of blogs (probably because bloggers copy or paraphrase stuff a lot from other sources), this is a great way to track unapproved uses of your..http://www.workingfaster.com/sitelines/archives/2005_08.html#000340 An Info Pro's View on Yahoo Search Subscriptions- August 2, 2005 In "Searching More of the Opaque Web" Mary Ellen Bates provides an excellent overview of the relative merits of Yahoo! Search Subscriptions, Yahoo's new (and still fairly modest) service selling low-cost journal and news articles from a small group of sources such as Consumer Reports, New England Journal of Medicine, Wall Street Journal, Lexis-Nexis and Factiva. Bates reminds us that the service doesn't allow for comprehensive coverage: it only allows searching of a subset of each...http://www.workingfaster.com/sitelines/archives/2005_08.html#000338 |