In 2017 my Website was migrated to
the clouds and reduced in size.
Hence some links below are broken.
One thing to try if a “www” link is broken is to substitute “faculty” for “www”
For example a broken link http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Pictures.htm
can be changed to corrected link http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Pictures.htm
However in some cases files had to be removed to reduce the size of my Website
Contact me atrjensen@trinity.eduif
you really need to file that is missing
It may seem surprising, but I’m having better results in
most cases these days using Microsoft’s Bing search engine than either Google or
Yahoo ---
http://www.bing.com/ Google
still has the huge advantage of cached documents that can be found after they
are no longer posted at their original Websites.
Jensen Comment
If you're searching for an entity's home page, DuckDuckGo is a better
alternative, although Google Search got better after criticisms that home
pages were hard to find in search outcomes. For example, if you searched for
a hotel's home page Google used to give priority to travel companies that
would book the hotel rather than begin with that hotel's home page. I
suspect this is because the travel agencies provided more advertising
revenue to Google or paid to be listed early on in search outcomes.
If you're searching for some things like people, towns, and companies
Wikipedia is sometimes better. For product searches, Amazon is often a
better search engine.
Google has specialized search engines to factor into the comparisons. For
example consider the following:
Free Residential and Business Telephone Directory (you must listen to
an opening advertisement) --- dial 800-FREE411 or 800-373-3411
Free Online Telephone Directory ---
http://snipurl.com/411directory [www_public-records-now_com] 800 Numbers.net: Find 1-800 Numbers for (most) Any Company ---
http://www.800-numbers.net/
Google Free Business Phone Directory --- 800-goog411
To find names addresses from listed phone numbers, go to
www.google.com and read in the phone number without spaces, dashes, or
parens
International Dial Code Directory ---
https://www.callersmart.com/articles/8/International-Dial-Code-Directory
YouTube added a cool feature for videos with closed
captions: you can now click on the "transcript" button to expand the entire
listing. If you click on a line, YouTube will show the excerpt from the
video corresponding to the text. If you use your browser's find feature, you
can even search inside the video. Here's an
an example of video that includes a transcript.
Gary Flake demos Pivot, a new way to browse and
arrange massive amounts of images and data online. Built on breakthrough
Seadragon technology, it enables spectacular zooms in and out of web
databases, and the discovery of patterns and links invisible in standard web
browsing.
Gary Flake is a Technical Fellow at Microsoft, and the founder and
director of Live Labs.
Recently purchased by Google, the Aardvark site is
a great way to get quick answers to questions large and small. Visitors can
type in their question into the text box on the Aardvark site, and the site
will find just the right person to answer the question. Users are encouraged
to send questions via Twitter or email as well, and it will generally take
just a few minutes to get an answer. Essentially, Aardvark sends out these
questions to people in a users' network who are available via IM or email in
order to find a suitable response. The site also includes sample questions
and contact information. This version is compatible with all operating
systems.
You may have played "duck duck goose" growing up,
but have you used "DuckDuckGo" yet? It's a new search engine that is geared
towards those folks browsing the web who are looking for a general,
all-purpose way to search for materials online. DuckDuckGo doesn't track
users like some search engines, and there's even a "Goodies" section. In
this section, users can personalize their search homepage, learn about their
syntax commands, and also find out information about their keyboard
shortcuts. This version is compatible with all operating systems.
If you're interested in a way to quickly search
for information without opening a new tab, Searchlet is for you.
Visitors can just highlight any text on any page to search Google,
Wikipedia, or any number of dictionaries. Visitors can simply drag the Searchlet button to have it added to their bookmarks for quick
reference. This version is compatible with all operating systems
One web page for every book ever
published. It's a lofty but achievable goal.
To build Open Library, we need
hundreds of millions of book records, a wiki interface, and lots of
people who are willing to contribute their time and effort to building
the site.
To date, we have gathered over 20
million records from a variety of large catalogs as well as single
contributions, with more on the way.
Open Library is an open project: the
software is open, the data are open, the documentation is open, and we
welcome your contribution. Whether you fix a typo, add a book, or write
a widget--it's all welcome. We have a small team of fantastic
programmers who have accomplished a lot, but we can't do it alone!
Open Library is a project of the non-profit
Internet
Archive, and has been funded in part by a grant from the
California State Library and the Kahle/Austin Foundation.
Social Networking for Education: The Beautiful and the Ugly
(including Google's Wave and Orcut for Social Networking and some education uses
of Twitter)
Updates will be at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm
People are flocking to online social networks.
Facebook,
for example, claims an average of 250,000 new
registrations per day. But companies are still hunting for ways to make
these networks more useful--and profitable. In the past year, Facebook has
introduced new services aimed at taking advantage of users' online contacts
(see "Building
onto Facebook's Platform"), and Yahoo announced
plans for an
e-mail service that shares data with
social-networking sites. (See "Yahoo's
Plan for a Smarter In-Box.") Now a company called
Delver,
which presented at
Demo
earlier this week, is working on a search engine that
uses social-network data to return personalized results from the larger Web.
Liad Agmon, CEO of Delver, says that the site
connects information about a user's social network with Web search results,
"so you are searching the Web through the prism of your social graph." He
explains that a person begins a search at Delver by typing in her name.
Delver then crawls social-networking websites for widely available data
about the user--such as a public
LinkedIn profile--and builds a network of
associated institutions and individuals based on that information. When the
user enters a search query, results related to, produced by, or tagged by
members of her social network are given priority. Lower down are results
from people implicitly connected to the user, such as those relating to
friends of friends, or people who attended the same college as the user.
Finally, there may be some general results from the Web at the bottom. The
consequence, says Agmon, is that each user gets a different set of results
from a given query, and a set quite different from those delivered by
Google.
"We have no intention of competing with the Googles
of the world, because Google is doing a very good job of indexing the Web
and bringing you the
Wikipedia
page of every search query you're looking for," says
Agmon. He says that Delver will free general search queries such as "New
York" or "screensaver" from the heavy search-engine optimization that tends
to make those kinds of queries return generic, ad-heavy results on Google.
"[As a user], you're always thinking, how can I trick Google into bringing
me the real results rather than the commercial results?" Agmon says. "With
this engine, we don't need to trick it at all. You can go back to these very
naive and simple queries because the results come from your network. Your
network is not trying to optimize results; they just publish or bookmark
pages which they find interesting." As a consequence, the results lean
toward user-generated content and items tagged through sites such as
del.icio.us.
Find home values, reverse phone numbers, animated population growth maps,
specialized research sites and more.
The first thing to try is to feed the phone number into a search engine such
as Google, Bing, or Yahoo. This of course will not work for unlisted phone
numbers.
March 18, 2008 (PC World) If
you dig around the Web long enough, you're bound to find
things somebody might not want you to know. (Maybe, like
me, you hang your laundry out in the backyard.) This
week I have a bunch of sites to help you dig up the dirt
and do some serious research.
Find the Dirt on Your Neighbor
With two free Web services, I found the address of a
neighbor, his first and last name, his phone number and
how much his home is worth. If
Zillow
would only update its images, I could even tell you if
he hangs his laundry out in the backyard.
met a
neighbor while walking the dogs, and we chatted a while.
When I got home, I decided to pop something in the mail.
(It was some census tract stuff if you must know.) He
lives about two blocks down the road, but for the life
of me, I couldn't remember the guy's name or his street
address. Okay, sure, I could've just dropped by his
house. But what would I have to write about today, eh?
I popped
open Zillow and searched on my neighborhood until I
found the image of his house, then clicked on it. Zillow
told me lots of stuff about the value of his home. What
I needed--and got--was his street address.
Now that I had his street address, I went to the Reverse
Lookup tab at
http://www.reversephonelookup.com/411Locate, entered info in the
Reverse Address Lookup section, and got lucky. In a
second, I had Jess's name. You might not be so
fortunate--411Locate doesn't always come up with the
right name.
Dig This: Tempted to buy a set of those newfangled
color-pencil input devices? Be sure to
read the review first--it
details advanced features, usability, and, no surprise,
bugs.
Trulia's Hindsight: Watch Cities Grow
If
you enjoyed Zillow, you might also like
Trulia.
But there's more to this
real-estate site than you might expect. I was poking
around the other day and discovered
Trulia Hindsight, which shows
annual population growth in most parts of the U.S.
Once
you're on Trulia Hindsight, click on Plano, Texas.
You'll see a city map paint on the screen and a timeline
at the bottom of the page will begin to advance. The map
begins to populate, showing how the area developed over
time.
Use the
contrast slider on the bottom right to adjust how much
of the background you want to see and the slider on the
bottom left to zoom in or out of the map.
Once you get your bearings, grab the timeline slider,
move it to the left, then slowly move it to the right.
Type a city and state into the search field at the top
to find your hometown. Unfortunately, the site doesn't
have data for every area. If your town isn't on Trulia's
radar, try
downtown Los Angeles.
Dig This: You've gotta watch
The Front Fell Off. My editor
started kvetching that while hilarious, it also looks
quite plausible. And she complained that the actors
aren't getting credit even though there are lots of
clips floating around the Internet. Okay, so here it
goes: The guys are Australian comedy team
Bruce and Dawe.
Top 5 Little-Known Research Web Sites
AskNow
lets you ask a librarian a
question. If they ask you where you live, say California.
OWL, the Online Writing Lab,
lets you look up the whys and wherefores of grammar. The
Phrase Finder is a handy
thesaurus for phrases. Need a fact checker?
Refdesk.com has all the
facts--or links to them--you'll ever need. Visiting the
LibrarySpotis like walking into the local library and walking
into the reference room. The site's part of the
StartSpot Network, which includes HomeworkSpot and
MuseumSpot.
Dig This: Whenever I
go to CES in Las Vegas, my first stop is the craps table
for some fast action--and maybe a chance to make a
couple of bucks. Yet after watching these
videos of Texas Hold'em--the
game that "takes five minutes to learn and a lifetime to
master"--I may have to find a low-stakes game.
Dig This, Too: Need a change of pace? Try
Reel Fishing. You'll need
patience and a steady hand.
Digg is perhaps one of the web’s best known sites,
and it contains various content submitted by users from all over the world.
Dugg 1.1.5 is a tiny widget that can help Digg devotees (and Digg neophytes)
search and find content on Digg quickly. Visitors can view stories for
specific topics or users and also check out what friends might be “digging”.
This version of Dugg is compatible with computers running Mac OS X 10.3.
Question
What does Walt Mossberg think about the Ask3D search engine?
But Ask's new system, called "Ask3D," is a much
bolder and better advance in unifying different kinds of results and presenting
them in a more effective manner. It shows, once again, that Ask places a higher
priority than its competitors do on making search results easy to navigate and
use. Both new systems are now the defaults on the search sites. You don't have
to do anything special to use them. Indeed, Google's change is so subtle you may
not even notice it for some searches.
Walter S. Mossberg, "Ask.com Takes Lead In Designing Display Of Search Results,"
The Wall Street Journal, June 28, 2007; Page B1 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118298543501150751.html
Free Residential and Business Telephone Directory
(you must listen to an opening advertisement) --- dial 800-FREE411 or
800-373-3411
Free Online Telephone Directory ---
http://snipurl.com/411directory [www_public-records-now_com]
800 Numbers.net: Find 1-800 Numbers for (most) Any Company ---
http://www.800-numbers.net/
Google Free Business Phone Directory --- 800-goog411
To find names addresses from listed phone numbers, go to
www.google.com and read in the phone number without spaces, dashes, or
parens
You might want to check if your
cell phone numbers can be easily obtained:
When it comes to
many questions (products, science, etc.) , I refer people to http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/
This fantastic site now has a new search engine.
When it comes to encyclopedia-type questions my next favorite referral is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
If you don’t like something in a Wiki module, you can change it yourself
from your browser.If you don’t
find a module, you can perform a service for the world by writing a module.
Sometimes wandering through the wilds
of Wikipedia can result in confusion. For Dennis Lorson, his wandering
led him to create this handy application. With Pathway 1.0.3 visitors
can retrace their own steps through Wikipedia by creating a graphical
network representation of article pages. It’s worth a try, and it will
work with all computers running Mac OS X 10.4.
CatsCradle 3.5 ---
http://www.stormdance.net/software/catscradle/overview.htm
Many websurfers enjoy going to sites that might be
based in other countries, and as such, they might very well encounter a
different language. With CatsCradle 3.5, these persons need worry no more,
as this application can be used to translate entire websites in such
languages as Thai, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian. This version is
compatible with all computers running Windows XP or 2000. (Scout
Report, September 1, 2006)
Congoo, a search engine launched this month and
partnered with Google, gives registered users free online access to a
selection of publications that normally required a subscription or a
pay-per-view fee to read. After downloading the Congoo plug-in and
registering, users can get access to "between four and 15 articles per
month per publisher." Publications available include the Encyclopaedia
Britannica Online, Financial Times, BusinessWire, Editor & Publisher,
The New Republic, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, The Denver
Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer and other major U.S. newspapers. Congoo
is available at http://www.congoo.com/.
Critics of Congoo note that many public
libraries, such as the San Francisco Public Library
(
http://www.sfpl.org/sfplonline/dbcategories.htm ),
also offer free access to subscription databases.
And your own college and university library may also have online
subscriptions that you can access at no additional fee.
Are you looking for pop music from Senegal? The
latest news from Romania? It's a fairly safe bet that you can use
RadioSure to locate radio stations that will fit the bill. With this
program, users can search over 12,000 radio stations, and even use a
record button to save audio segments for later use. The stations are
categorized by style of programming, city, and language. This version is
compatible with computers running Windows 2003 and newer.
No A Grades to 83.33% of search engine users. They say they trust their favorite search engines, but
there’s a distressing lack of understanding of how engines rank and present
pages -- only 38 percent of users are aware of the distinction between paid or
“sponsored“ results and unpaid results.“ And only one in six say they can
always tell which results are paid or sponsored and which are not.“ The
funny part about this last bit is, nearly half of users say they would stop
using search engines if they thought the engines were being unclear about how
they presented paid results.
David Appell, "Search Engines," MIT's Technology Review,
February 11, 2005 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/blog.asp?blogID=1732&trk=nl
Generally speaking, even those
who are most gung-ho about new ways of learning probably tend to cling to a
belief that education has, or ought to have, at least something to do with
making things lodge in the minds of students--this even though the
disparagement of the role of memory in education by professional educators
now goes back at least three generations, long before computers were ever
thought of as educational tools. That, by the way, should lessen our
astonishment, if not our dismay, at the extent to which the educational
establishment, instead of viewing these developments with alarm, is adapting
its understanding of what education is to the new realities of how the new
generation of 'netizens' actually learn (and don't learn) rather than trying
to adapt the kids to unchanging standards of scholarship and learning.
Jensen Comment
Yikes! When I'm looking for an answer to most anything I now turn first to
Wikipedia and then Google. I guess James Bowman put me in my place. However,
being retired I'm no longer corrupting the minds of students (at least not apart
from my Website and blogs ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
I would counter Bowman by saying that Stupid is as Stupid does. Stupid "does"
the following: Stupid accepts a single source for an answer. Except when
the answer seems self evident, a scholar will seek verification from other
references. However, a lot of things are "self evident" to Stupid.
There is a serious issue that sweat accompanied with answer searching aids in
the memory of what is learned ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
But must we sweat to find every answer in life? There is also the maxim that we
learn best from our mistakes. Bloggers are constantly being made aware of their
mistakes. This is one of the scholarly benefits of blogging ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm
Borrowing a page from the popular video-sharing
site YouTube, a new online service lets people upload and share their papers
or entire books via a social-network interface. But will a format that works
for videos translate to documents?
It’s called
iPaper,
and it uses a Flash-based document reader that can be
embedded into a Web page. The experience of reading neatly formatted text
inside a fixed box feels a bit like using an old microfilm reader, except
that you can search the documents or e-mail them to friends.
The company behind the technology, Scribd, also
offers a
library of iPaper documents and invites users to
set up an account to post their own written works. And, just like on
YouTube, users can comment about each document, give it a rating, and view
related works.
Also like on YouTube, some of the most popular
items in the collection are on the lighter side. One document that is in the
top 10 “most viewed” is called
“It seems this essay was written while the guy was high, hilarious!”
It is a seven-page paper that appears to have been
written for a college course but is full of salty language. The document
includes the written comments of the professor who graded it, and it ends
with a handwritten note: “please see after class to discuss your paper.”
"Web Searches That Really Bear Fruit: New Free Tools Aim to Make
Online Results More Relevant by Tracking Your Reactions,"
by Katherine Boehret, The Wall Street Journal, January 15, 2009 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123189045689079109.html
There's nothing more frustrating than a fruitless
Web search -- or one that returns results that distract you from your
original goal. Search giant Google knows this all too well and realizes that
there's a chance you might switch to another search engine if you get tired
of poor results.
This week I tested two free tools that attempt to
make your Web searches more relevant by learning from users' reactions to
search results: Google's SearchWiki and Surf Canyon Inc.'s namesake tool for
Web browsers. These two don't necessarily compete against each other; in
fact, they can be used in tandem. But after initially entering a search
query, SearchWiki requires additional work on the part of the user that many
people may not want to do. Surf Canyon works automatically as you go,
sorting results according to real-time user behavior.
But who wants to do all this work? Google says your
votes don't influence the way other Google users see search results, nor do
they affect your search results if you aren't logged into Google. You can
see the number of votes a URL got from fellow voters, as well as comments
made about the URL -- but only after you select a link at the bottom of the
search-results page. If you promote a URL, you'll automatically see what
other people think about this link.
SearchWiki depends on people to rank their own
search results by promoting favored URLs to the top of a screen and knocking
others to the bottom. It is available to most people who are logged into a
Google account, and these user preferences are remembered if the same
searches are performed at other times.
This sorting is done using elegant animation;
preferred URLs float to the top of the screen when selected and unwanted
results disappear in a magic-trick-like poof when removed. Comments about a
link can be typed into a word bubble beside the URL and all comments are
available to the public, labeled as posted by "Searcher" unless you create
another nickname for yourself. People can also add preferred URLs to a
search-results page if, for example, they know a better link about something
than those that show up.
But who wants to do all this work? Google says your
votes don't influence the way other Google users see search results, nor do
they affect your search results if you aren't logged into Google. You can
see the number of votes a URL got from fellow voters, as well as comments
made about the URL -- but only after you select a link at the bottom of the
search-results page. If you promote a URL, you'll automatically see what
other people think about this link.
SearchWiki depends on people to rank their own
search results by promoting favored URLs to the top of a screen and knocking
others to the bottom. It is available to most people who are logged into a
Google account, and these user preferences are remembered if the same
searches are performed at other times.
This sorting is done using elegant animation;
preferred URLs float to the top of the screen when selected and unwanted
results disappear in a magic-trick-like poof when removed. Comments about a
link can be typed into a word bubble beside the URL and all comments are
available to the public, labeled as posted by "Searcher" unless you create
another nickname for yourself. People can also add preferred URLs to a
search-results page if, for example, they know a better link about something
than those that show up.
For your efforts, you'll create a small collection
of results that are saved in your account, sorted by date and time should
you ever want to revisit them. This could come in handy in some
circumstances, such as if you were researching a topic and you forgot to
save Web pages as you went. Google confusingly calls these "SearchWiki
notes," though they really include all of the links you voted on, as well as
typed-in notes about links.
SearchWiki is a tough sell because most of us are
already trained to surf the Web quickly, skipping ahead and back through
links without taking the time to rank those results or comment on them. And
it only works with Google searches.
If you like the idea of more personalized Web
searches but would like to use other search engines or don't want to do
extra work, you might like Surf Canyon. Once downloaded, this tool displays
bull's-eyes beside certain results to show that Surf Canyon has found
additional related hits. Clicking on this bull's-eye reveals those suggested
links, pulled from deeper down in the search results, and these links might
have bull's-eyes of their own. This cascade of data goes on and on as an
algorithm studies which of the returned results you do or don't choose.
You might be deterred from using Surf Canyon
because it must be downloaded before it works on Internet Explorer or
Firefox. (A version of Surf Canyon for Apple's Safari browser is due out
within a month.) This tool works with Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Live Search
and Craigslist, and just started working with LexisNexis's LexisWeb.com
legal-search engine.
Surf Canyon might not seem to be doing much at
first, but it changes and reflects your preferences as you make them. For
example, a search for "Obama dog" originally returned results about how the
President-elect and his family are narrowing their search for a puppy. But
as I opened more links related specifically to Mr. Obama's daughters, more
results appeared on screen about Sasha and Malia. Each time I hit the
browser's Back button to return to the original search page, Surf Canyon
offered a new set of relevant URLs.
I tried looking at Craigslist.com for last-minute
inauguration tickets, and one hit listed an inauguration-appropriate dress
that someone was giving away free. The Surf Canyon bull's-eye appeared
beside this result, and when I selected it, three more dress listings
appeared.
Surf Canyon recently released an option for users
who want long-term personalization, found at my.surfcanyon.com. It lets
people select sources from which they prefer to receive news, shopping,
research, or sports and entertainment results. Individual sites not listed
on this page can also be added to a list of sources to use; likewise, sites
can be added to a blacklist so results never come from them.
Unlike Google, Surf Canyon doesn't save your
history or usage profile. And if you haven't created personalized
preferences using the link above, it responds solely using your
as-they-happen signals, like when you choose one link over another.
Google's SearchWiki is asking users to do extra
work, which may not be practical for many users. But if you do use it, this
tool's personalized, saved results could be a real boon. Surf Canyon worked
well for me with multiple search engines, retrieving data from result pages
I likely wouldn't have opened. Either way, your days of futile Web searching
are numbered.
LocateTV will search over 3 million TV listings
across all channels in your area
Type in the name of a TV show, movie, or actor
Locate TV will find channels and times in your locale http://www.locatetv.com/
Songza
Search for a song or band and play the selection ---
http://songza.com/
I tried it for Arturo Toscanini, Stan Kenton, and Jim Reeves.
The results were absolutely amazing!
SpiralFrog.com, an ad-supported Web site with a terrible
name that allows visitors to download music and videos free of charge, commenced
on September 17, 2007 in the U.S. and Canada after months of "beta"
testing. At launch, the service was offering more than 800,000 tracks and 3,500
music videos for download ---
http://www.spiralfrog.com/
Are you looking for pop music from Senegal? The
latest news from Romania? It's a fairly safe bet that you can use RadioSure
to locate radio stations that will fit the bill. With this program, users
can search over 12,000 radio stations, and even use a record button to save
audio segments for later use. The stations are categorized by style of
programming, city, and language. This version is compatible with computers
running Windows 2003 and newer.
Zaba Search free database of names, addresses, birth dates, and phone numbers.
Social security numbers and background checks are also available for a fee ---
http://www.zabasearch.com/
"Become.com Selected as Best
Search & Comparison Site by eLab eXchange Experts!" Posted by Donna Hoffman, UCR
eLab Sloan Center for Internet Retailing, June 22nd, 2008 ---
Click Here
The Internet experts at the
eLab eXchange, using data from Nielsen/NetRatings
and their own expert judgment, selected
Become.com as the
clear winner out of 8 sites in the best search and comparison web site
contest. eLab eXchange members selected the
Jellyfish Smack Shopping site as the best search
and comparison web site from a set of 8 sites.
Jellyfish is a terrific site, but pales next to
Become.com when considering
search and comparison shopping sites because Jellyfish
doesn't bring together search, product comparison, reviews and other
features to help consumers find what they are looking for. Jellyfish is more
like a different kind of
social shopping site than a search and comparison
site.
Experts deemed Become.com to have the greatest
chance for success in the category based on key Web usage statistics,
including unique audience, reach, total number of sessions, sessions per
person, total minutes and page views. On all those metrics, become.com blew
away the competition.
However,
Like.com, chosen a distant third by the members of
the eLab eXchange, was judged by the experts as a site to keep a careful eye
on. Its metrics are trending up and people spend more time per person than
they do on Become.com.
In other words, Like.com is stickier,
although Become.com visitors are more engaged and there are many more of
them.
Like.com is a great looking site and the visual
search feature is innovative. But it doesn't have the breadth or depth of
become.com. The experts thought that consumers might find it a useful
adjunct to Become.com.
Become.com offers online consumers a good set of
search tools, an easy to use interface, and plentiful reviews. It is easy to
navigate and good looking. Key Web 2.0 features including discussion forums
and product reviews are obvious reasons that consumers are visiting in
droves. Further, the advertiser links are well done (and not annoying), and
there are plentiful external links to further information, and handy price
comparison tools.
Google is a great search engine, but it's also more
than that. Google has tons of hidden features, some of which are quite fun
and most of which are extremely useful— if you know about them. How do you
discover all these hidden features within the Google site?
See
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=675528&rl=1
Amid the flurry of news over Microsoft's bid for Yahoo and Google's
rebuttal, a research announcement by Google went largely unnoticed. Last week, the search giant began a public
experiment in which users can make their search results look a little
different from the rest of the world's. Those who sign up are able to switch
between different views, so instead of simply getting a list of links (and
sometimes pictures and YouTube videos, a relatively recent addition to the
Google results), they can choose to see their results mapped, put on a
timeline, or narrowed down by informational filters. Dan Crow, product
manager at Google, says that the results of the experiment could eventually
help the company improve everyone's search experience.
Kate Greene, MIT's Technology Review, February 6, 2008 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20162/?nlid=857
Jensen Comment
You can read more about this experiment at
http://www.google.com/experimental/index.html
Bob Jensen's Search Helpers ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm Free Residential and Business Telephone Directory (you must listen to
an opening advertisement) --- dial 800-FREE411 or 800-373-3411
Free Online Telephone Directory ---
http://snipurl.com/411directory [www_public-records-now_com]
800 Numbers.net: Find 1-800 Numbers for (most) Any Company ---
http://www.800-numbers.net/
Google Free Business Phone Directory --- 800-goog411
To find names addresses from listed phone numbers, go to
www.google.com and read in the phone number without spaces, dashes, or
parens
You might want to check if your
cell phone numbers can be easily obtained:
Google added historic map overlays to its free interactive online globe of
the world to provide views of how places have changed with time.
"Google Earth maps history," PhysOrg, November 14, 2006 ---
http://physorg.com/news82706337.html
"Finding Yourself without GPS: Google's new
technology could enable location-finding services on cell phones that lack GPS,"
by Kate Greene, MIT's Technology Review, December 4, 2007 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19809/?nlid=716&a=f
As more mobile phones tap into the Internet, people
increasingly turn to them for location-centric services like getting
directions and finding nearby restaurants. While Global Positioning System
(GPS) technology provides excellent accuracy, only a fraction of phones have
this capability. What's more, GPS coverage is spotty in dense urban
environments, and in-phone receivers can be slow and drain a phone's
battery.
To sidestep this problem, last week Google added a
new feature, called My Location, to its Web-based mapping service. My
Location collects information from the nearest cell-phone tower to estimate
a person's location within a distance of about 1,000 meters. This resolution
is obviously not sufficient for driving directions, but it can be fine for
searching for a restaurant or a store. "A common use of Google Maps is to
search nearby," says Steve Lee, product manager for Google Maps, who likened
the approach to searching for something within an urban zip code, but
without knowing that code. "In a new city, you might not know the zip code,
or even if you know it, it takes time to enter it and then to zoom in and
pan around the map."
Many phones support software that is able to read
the unique identification of a cell-phone tower and the coverage area that
surrounds it is usually split into three regions. Lee explains that My
Location uses such software to learn which tower is serving the phone--and
which coverage area the cell phone is operating in. Google also uses data
from cell phones in the area that do have GPS to help estimate the locations
of the devices without it. In this way, Google adds geographic information
to the cell-phone tower's identifiers that the company stores in a database.
Apple Macintosh - Search for all things Mac
BSD Unix - Search web pages about the BSD operating
system
Linux - Search all penguin-friendly pages
Microsoft - Search Microsoft-related pages
U.S. Government - Search all U.S. federal, state and
local government sites
Universities - Search a specific school's website
Whether the Google books settlement passes muster
with the U.S. District Court and the Justice Department, Google's book
search is clearly on track to becoming the world's largest digital library.
No less important, it is also almost certain to be the last one. Google's
five-year head start and its relationships with libraries and publishers
give it an effective monopoly: No competitor will be able to come after it
on the same scale. Nor is technology going to lower the cost of entry.
Scanning will always be an expensive, labor-intensive project. Of course, 50
or 100 years from now control of the collection may pass from Google to
somebody else—Elsevier, Unesco, Wal-Mart. But it's safe to assume that the
digitized books that scholars will be working with then will be the very
same ones that are sitting on Google's servers today, augmented by the
millions of titles published in the interim.
That realization lends a particular urgency to the
concerns that people have voiced about the settlement —about pricing,
access, and privacy, among other things. But for scholars, it raises
another, equally basic question: What assurances do we have that Google will
do this right?
Doing it right depends on what exactly "it" is.
Google has been something of a shape-shifter in describing the project. The
company likes to refer to Google's book search as a "library," but it
generally talks about books as just another kind of information resource to
be incorporated into Greater Google. As Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google,
puts it: "We just feel this is part of our core mission. There is fantastic
information in books. Often when I do a search, what is in a book is miles
ahead of what I find on a Web site."
Seen in that light, the quality of Google's book
search will be measured by how well it supports the familiar activity that
we have come to think of as "googling," in tribute to the company's
specialty: entering in a string of keywords in an effort to locate specific
information, like the dates of the Franco-Prussian War. For those purposes,
we don't really care about metadata—the whos, whats, wheres, and whens
provided by a library catalog. It's enough just to find a chunk of a book
that answers our needs and barrel into it sideways.
But we're sometimes interested in finding a book
for reasons that have nothing to do with the information it contains, and
for those purposes googling is not a very efficient way to search. If you're
looking for a particular edition of Leaves of Grass and simply punch in, "I
contain multitudes," that's what you'll get. For those purposes, you want to
be able to come in via the book's metadata, the same way you do if you're
trying to assemble all the French editions of Rousseau's Social Contract
published before 1800 or books of Victorian sermons that talk about
profanity.
Or you may be interested in books simply as records
of the language as it was used in various periods or genres. Not
surprisingly, that's what gets linguists and assorted wordinistas
adrenalized at the thought of all the big historical corpora that are coming
online. But it also raises alluring possibilities for social, political, and
intellectual historians and for all the strains of literary philology, old
and new. With the vast collection of published books at hand, you can track
the way happiness replaced felicity in the 17th century, quantify the rise
and fall of propaganda or industrial democracy over the course of the 20th
century, or pluck out all the Victorian novels that contain the phrase
"gentle reader."
But to pose those questions, you need reliable
metadata about dates and categories, which is why it's so disappointing that
the book search's metadata are a train wreck: a mishmash wrapped in a muddle
wrapped in a mess.
Start with publication dates. To take Google's word
for it, 1899 was a literary annus mirabilis, which saw the publication of
Raymond Chandler's Killer in the Rain, The Portable Dorothy Parker, André
Malraux's La Condition Humaine, Stephen King's Christine, The Complete
Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, Raymond Williams's Culture and Society
1780-1950, and Robert Shelton's biography of Bob Dylan, to name just a few.
And while there may be particular reasons why 1899 comes up so often, such
misdatings are spread out across the centuries. A book on Peter F. Drucker
is dated 1905, four years before the management consultant was even born; a
book of Virginia Woolf's letters is dated 1900, when she would have been 8
years old. Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities is dated 1888, and an edition
of Henry James's What Maisie Knew is dated 1848.
Of course, there are bound to be occasional howlers
in a corpus as extensive as Google's book search, but these errors are
endemic. A search on "Internet" in books published before 1950 produces 527
results; "Medicare" for the same period gets almost 1,600. Or you can simply
enter the names of famous writers or public figures and restrict your search
to works published before the year of their birth. "Charles Dickens" turns
up 182 results for publications before 1812, the vast majority of them
referring to the writer. The same type of search turns up 81 hits for
Rudyard Kipling, 115 for Greta Garbo, 325 for Woody Allen, and 29 for Barack
Obama. (Or maybe that was another Barack Obama.)
How frequent are such errors? A search on books
published before 1920 mentioning "candy bar" turns up 66 hits, of which
46—70 percent—are misdated. I don't think that's representative of the
overall proportion of metadata errors, though they are much more common in
older works than for the recent titles Google received directly from
publishers. But even if the proportion of misdatings is only 5 percent, the
corpus is riddled with hundreds of thousands of erroneous publication dates.
Google acknowledges the incorrect dates but says
they came from the providers. It's true that Google has received some groups
of books that are systematically misdated, like a collection of
Portuguese-language works all dated 1899. But a very large proportion of the
errors are clearly Google's own doing. A lot of them arise from uneven
efforts to automatically extract a publication date from a scanned text. A
1901 history of bookplates from the Harvard University Library is correctly
dated in the library's catalog. Google's incorrect date of 1574 for the
volume is drawn from an Elizabethan armorial bookplate displayed on the
frontispiece. An 1890 guidebook called London of To-Day is correctly dated
in the Harvard catalog, but Google assigns it a date of 1774, which is taken
from a front-matter advertisement for a shirt-and-hosiery manufacturer that
boasts it was established in that year.
Then there are the classification errors, which
taken together can make for a kind of absurdist poetry. H.L. Mencken's The
American Language is classified as Family & Relationships. A French edition
of Hamlet and a Japanese edition of Madame Bovary are both classified as
Antiques and Collectibles (a 1930 English edition of Flaubert's novel is
classified under Physicians, which I suppose makes a bit more sense.) An
edition of Moby Dick is labeled Computers; The Cat Lover's Book of
Fascinating Facts falls under Technology & Engineering. And a catalog of
copyright entries from the Library of Congress is listed under Drama (for a
moment I wondered if maybe that one was just Google's little joke).
You can see how pervasive those misclassifications
are when you look at all the labels assigned to a single famous work. Of the
first 10 results for Tristram Shandy, four are classified as Fiction, four
as Family & Relationships, one as Biography & Autobiography, and one is not
classified. Other editions of the novel are classified as 'Literary
Collections, History, and Music. The first 10 hits for Leaves of Grass are
variously classified as Poetry, 'Juvenile Nonfiction, Fiction, Literary
Criticism, Biography & Autobiography, and, mystifyingly, Counterfeits and
Counterfeiting. And various editions of Jane Eyre are classified as History,
Governesses, Love Stories, Architecture, and Antiques & Collectibles (as in,
"Reader, I marketed him.").
Here, too, Google has blamed the errors on the
libraries and publishers who provided the books. But the libraries can't be
responsible for books mislabeled as Health and Fitness and Antiques and
Collectibles, for the simple reason that those categories are drawn from the
Book Industry Standards and Communications codes, which are used by the
publishers to tell booksellers where to put books on the shelves, not from
any of the classification systems used by libraries. And BISAC
classifications weren't in wide use before the last decade or two, so only
Google can be responsible for their misapplications on numerous books
published earlier than that: the 1919 edition of Robinson Crusoe assigned to
Crafts & Hobbies or the 1907 edition of Sir Thomas Browne's Hydriotaphia:
Urne-Buriall, which has been assigned to Gardening.
Google's fine algorithmic hand is also evident in a
lot of classifications of recent works. The 2003 edition of Susan Bordo's
Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (misdated 1899)
is assigned to Health & Fitness—not a labeling you could imagine coming from
its publisher, the University of California Press, but one a classifier
might come up with on the basis of the title, like the Religion tag that
Google assigns to a 2001 biography of Mae West that's subtitled An Icon in
Black and White or the Health & Fitness label on a 1962 number of the
medievalist journal Speculum.
But even when it gets the BISAC categories roughly
right, the more important question is why Google would want to use those
headings in the first place. People from Google have told me they weren't
included at the publishers' request, and it may be that someone thought
they'd be helpful for ad placement. (The ad placement on Google's book
search right now is often comical, as when a search for Leaves of Grass
brings up ads for plant and sod retailers—though that's strictly Google's
problem, and one, you'd imagine, that they're already on top of.) But it's a
disastrous choice for the book search. The BISAC scheme is well-suited for a
chain bookstore or a small public library, where consumers or patrons browse
for books on the shelves. But it's of little use when you're flying blind in
a library with several million titles, including scholarly works, foreign
works, and vast quantities of books from earlier periods. For example the
BISAC Juvenile Nonfiction subject heading has almost 300 subheadings, like
New Baby, Skateboarding, and Deer, Moose, and Caribou. By contrast the
Poetry subject heading has just 20 subheadings. That means that Bambi and
Bullwinkle get a full shelf to themselves, while Leopardi, Schiller, and
Verlaine have to scrunch together in the single subheading reserved for
Poetry/Continental European. In short, Google has taken a group of the
world's great research collections and returned them in the form of a
suburban-mall bookstore.
Such examples don't exhaust Google's metadata
errors by any means. In addition to the occasionally quizzical renamings of
works (Moby Dick: or the White Wall), there are a number of mismatches of
titles and texts. Click on the link for the 1818 Théorie de l'Univers, a
work on cosmology by the Napoleonic mathematician and general Jacques
Alexander François Allix, and it takes you to Barbara Taylor Bradford's 1983
novel Voice of the Heart, while the link on a misdated number of Dickens's
Household Words takes you to a 1742 Histoire de l'Académie Royale des
Sciences. Numerous entries mix up the names of authors, editors, and writers
of introductions, so that the "about this book" page for an edition of one
French novel shows the striking attribution, "Madame Bovary By Henry James."
More mysterious is the entry for a book called The Mosaic Navigator: The
Essential Guide to the Internet Interface, which is dated 1939 and
attributed to Sigmund Freud and Katherine Jones. The only connection I can
come up with is that Jones was the translator of Freud's Moses and
Monotheism, which must have somehow triggered the other sense of the word
"mosaic," though the details of the process leave me baffled.
For the present, then, scholars will have to put on
hold their visions of tracking the 19th-century fortunes of liberalism or
quantifying the shift of "United States" from a plural to singular noun
phrase over the first century of the republic: The metadata simply aren't up
to it. It's true that Google is aware of a lot of these problems and they've
pledged to fix them. (Indeed, since I presented some of these errors at a
conference last week, Google has already rushed to correct many of them.)
But it isn't clear whether they plan to go about this in the same way
they're addressing the scanning errors that riddle the texts, correcting
them as (and if) they're reported. That isn't adequate here: There are
simply too many errors. And while Google's machine classification system
will certainly improve, extracting metadata mechanically isn't sufficient
for scholarly purposes. After first seeming indifferent, Google decided it
did want to acquire the library records for scanned books along with the
scans themselves, but as of now the company hasn't licensed them for display
or use—hence, presumably, those stabs at automatically recovering
publication dates from the scanned texts.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
I think the phrase "disaster for scholars" is very misleading. Google's Book
Search has certainly been a delight for me. Also Google had the resources and
stamina to fend off all the court challenges. In general, the major universities
have been in favor of this project from get go.
A project this massive is bound to have startup problems, but Google is
adaptive and will listen to its critics. It's better to have the world's largest
digital library than a bunch of decentralized smoke stacks of from the previous
century.
In addition
to providing easy access to billions of web pages, Google has many
special features to help you to find exactly what you're looking
for. Click the title of a specific feature to learn more about it.
• Book
Search
Use
Google to search the full text of books.
•
Cached Links
View a
snapshot of each page as it looked when we indexed it.
•
Calculator
Use
Google to evaluate mathematical expressions.
•
Currency Conversion
Easily
perform any currency conversion.
•
Definitions
Use
Google to get glossary definitions gathered from various
online sources.
• File
Types
Search
for non-HTML file formats including PDF documents and
others.
•
Froogle
To
find a product for sale online, use Froogle - Google's
product search service.
•
Groups
See
relevant postings from Google Groups in your regular web
search results.
• I'm
Feeling Lucky
Bypass
our results and go to the first web page returned for your
query.
•
Images
See
relevant images in your regular web search results.
•
Local Search
Search
for local businesses and services in the U.S., the U.K., and
Canada.
•
Movies
Use
Google to find reviews and showtimes for movies playing near
you.
•
Music Search
Use
Google to get quick access to a wide range of music
information.
• News
Headlines
Enhances your search results with the latest related news
stories.
•
PhoneBook
Look
up U.S. street address and phone number information.
• Q&A
Use
Google to get quick answers to straightforward questions.
•
Refine Your Search -
New!
Add
instant info and topic-specific links to your search in
order to focus and improve your results.
•
Results Prefetching
Makes
searching in Firefox faster.
•
Search By Number
Use
Google to access package tracking information, US patents,
and a variety of online databases.
•
Similar Pages
Display pages that are related to a particular result.
•
Site Search
Restrict your search to a specific site.
•
Spell Checker
Offers
alternative spelling for queries.
•
Stock and Fund Quotes
Use
Google to get up-to-date stock and mutual fund quotes and
information.
•
Street Maps
Use
Google to find U.S. street maps.
•
Travel Information
Check
the status of an airline flight in the U.S. or view airport
delays and weather conditions.
•
Weather
Check
the current weather conditions and forecast for any location
in the U.S.
• Web Page Translation
Provides you access to web pages in other languages.
The yet-to-be-developed technology detailed in the
patent application carries serious implications for the future of search
technology, particularly in regard to the Google Book Search project.
What could that mean for the future of academic
research and the role of libraries? In an interview, Wendy P. Lougee,
University of Minnesota librarian, frames the would-be technology in the
context of “discoverability” — the ease with which an item can be found
through a search.
“With respect to images, the challenges have been
in the metadata,” or the data that contextualizes items in a database, she
says, and the potential technology “could significantly enhance” librarians’
ability to catalogue and retrieve information.
A new application lets Facebook users start their
library research in the popular social-networking system. The
plug-in
provides an interface in Facebook for searching the
popular Worldcat database, operated
by the nonprofit OCLC. The group’s Web site says
the index includes more than a billion items in more than 10,000 libraries.
So far the application does not seem to be listed
in Facebook’s official directory. But a quick search of Facebook’s other
applications shows that more than a dozen other academic libraries have
created their own search tools for the social-networking platform. The
University of Notre Dame
has one, for instance, as does
Elmhurst College,
Pace University, and
Ryerson University.JSTOR,
the popular, nonprofit digital archive of scholarly publications, also
offers
a Facebook application.
One thing I discovered when
I invited Wired Campus readers to join my Facebook friend group
is that librarians are some of the most enthusiastic
nonstudent users of social networks. But can Facebook, known as a place for
socializing, become part of the research process as well?
The Fidus Writer is an application that
academics will be most excited to learn about. This version functions as
an online collaborative editor made specifically for academics who need
to use citations and formulas. The program is focused on the content
rather than the layout, which means users can publish it later in a
variety of formats. The site also contains an FAQ and information about
updates. This version is compatible with all operating systems running
Google Chrome.
Jensen Note
The Wolfram Alfa site is fantastic for computing answers from formulas,
generating graphs, and formatting formulas for documents ---
http://www.wolframalpha.com/
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign announces
the availability of a newly-digitized collection of Abraham Lincoln books
accessible through the Open Content Alliance and displayed on the University
Library's own web site, as the first step of a digitization project of
Lincoln books from its collection. View the first set of books digitized at:
http://varuna.grainger.uiuc.edu/oca/lincoln/
The University of California's eScholarship Repository has recently
exceededfive million full-text downloads,according to the university The eScholarship Repository, a service of the
California Digital Library, allows scholars in the University of California
system to submit their work to a central location where any users may easily
access it free of charge. The idea is to ease communication between
researchers. Catherine Mitchell, acting director of the CDL publishing
group, says the number shows that both content seekers and creators have
embraced the service, allaying concerns among researchers that others
wouldn't contribute to the repository.
Hurley Goodall, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 16, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2667&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
How It Works ---
http://snurl.com/BookSearch
A significant extension of our groundbreaking Look Inside the Book
feature, Search Inside the Book allows you to search millions of pages
to find exactly the book you want to buy. Now instead of just displaying
books whose title, author, or publisher-provided keywords that match
your search terms, your search results will surface titles based on
every word inside the book. Using Search Inside the Book is as simple as
running an Amazon.com search.
The Fidus Writer is an application that academics
will be most excited to learn about. This version functions as an online
collaborative editor made specifically for academics who need to use
citations and formulas. The program is focused on the content rather than
the layout, which means users can publish it later in a variety of formats.
The site also contains an FAQ and information about updates. This version is
compatible with all operating systems running Google Chrome.
Jensen Note
The Wolfram Alfa site is fantastic for computing answers from formulas,
generating graphs, and formatting formulas for documents ---
http://www.wolframalpha.com/
This post is something of a public service
announcement. Two weeks ago the
Google Scholar team
announced that users
could now create alerts for their favorite queries.
I would explain how to set up a Google Scholar
Alert, but both
Google and
Resource Shelf have already done so. Instead, I'll
discuss how this new featuer might be useful to the ProfHacker community.
Google Alerts
have been around for awhile. Users can set up a Google
Alert for any query, and Google will automatically email them a digest of
all new hits for that query. Users can set how many results they'd like
included in the emails, how often the emails should be sent, and what email
address(es) different alerts should be sent to. Google Alerts can help you
stay abreast of a particular topic, such as a developing news story. Many
folks also set up Google Alerts for their name, their company, or a
particular project, so they can track how those topics are being discussed
across the net.
Google Alerts pull from Google's entire index,
however, which is not always useful for research questions. I could set up a
Google Alert for an author I write on—say, Nathaniel Hawthorne—but I'd
likely have to wade through many high schoolers complaining about reading
The Scarlet Letter before finding any new scholarly work on the
author. Google Scholar Alerts pull results only from scholarly
literature—"articles, theses, books, abstracts," and other other resources
from "academic publishers, professional societies, "online repositories,
universities," and other scholarly websites. In other words, Google Scholar
Alerts provide scholars automatic updates when new material is published on
research topics they're interested in. A Google Scholar Alert for "Nathaniel
Hawthorne" would email me whenever a book or article about Hawthorne was
added to Google Scholar's index.
I worded that last sentence carefully in order to
point to some problems with Google Scholar, and by extension with the new
Google Scholar Alerts.
Peter Jacso wrote last September about serious
errors in Google Scholar's metadata, particularly with article attribution.
What counts as "new" in Google Scholar is also problematic. An article will
appear in a Google Scholar Alert when it's indexed—that is, when it's new to
Google Scholar, even if it's actually an older article.
As Jacso points out, however, Google Scholar
remains valuable for "topical keyword searches," which is what most folks
will set up Alerts to track. No one should set up a Google Scholar Alert and
consider their research complete‐but Alerts can be a good way to keep
abreast of new scholarship on a variety of topics, or on the wider context
of a particular research interest. I work on nineteenth-century apocalyptic
literature, for example, and I've set up a Google Scholar Alert for several
variations on the word "apocalyptic." The emails I've received comprise work
on apocalypticism from a variety of periods and geographical areas. Even if
I can't read most of these works in full, I've found it useful to get this
larger overview of scholarship on the topic.
Alternatives to Google Scholar: The next generation discovery
citation indexes — a review of the landscape in 2020 (I)
In
terms of cross disciplinary citation indexes that are used for discovery,
everyone knows of the two incumbants — Web
of Science and Scopus(2004).
Joined by the large web scale Google
Scholar (2004),
these three reigned as the “Big 3” of citation indexes for roughly a decade
more or less unchallenged.
However 10 years later, around 2015 and in the years after, a new generation
of citation indexes started to emerge to challenge the big 3 in a variety of
ways .
As
of time of writing in 2020, some of these new challengers have had a couple
of years of development. How do things look now?
First off, using newer techniques and paradigms, we have for-profit
companies like Digital Science launchingDimensions (2018) whichstrike
me as challengers to Scopus and Web
of Science in
the arena of citation/bibliometric assessment, just as Scopus itself
was a challenge to the older Web of Science back in 2004.
On the other end of the spectrum we
have therise
of more “open” citation indexes . In particular, a very important player
in this area is the relaunchedMicrosoft
Academic(2016) which
not only uses web crawling style technologies like Google Scholar to scour
the web, applies the latest in Natural Language Processing (NLP) /“semantic”
technologies and makes the dataset dubbed Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG)
available with open licenses.
Semantic Scholar(2015)is
yet another project with Microsoft ties ( funded by the Allen Institute for
AI) that play in the same area andreleases
data with open licenses. One of the more “Semantic” features of
this search engine is that it types citations into whether the cite is for
citing of background, methods or results using machine learning.
While scite (2018) a
new citation index by a startup does not provide open data, it’s selling
point is the use of NLP to type citation relationships into “Supporting”,
“Disputing” and “Neutral” cites which is yet another way of contextualizing
research by describing citation relationships.
Besides the two above mentioned well
funded think tanks projects, we also see more grassroot like movements like
2017'sI4OC
(Intiative for open Citations)—
an amazingly successful push to get publishers to deposit and make
references open in Crossref as well as efforts by OpenCitations.net (a
founding member of I4OC) to extract citations from open access papers from
PMC to produce theOpenCitations
Corpus (OCC),
which have served to further increase the pool of Scholarly meta-data and
citations that are available in the public domain/CCO.
For
the first time in history, by combining some or all of the below
c)
data made available in Microsoft
Academic Graph and
other sources
it
is now possible for new big and comprehensive, mostly free to use
“hybrid/merged” citation indexes to arise from the aggregation of the above
mentioned sources. Still even with the raw materials freely available, one
must still not underestimate the effort needed to combine, normalize and
clean the data as well as the effort to create compelling user interfaces
that add value.
Others include Scinapse, NAVER
academic, Scilit and
more. But
do these new alternatives add anything interesting or desired by users to
the table?
Such hybrid type citation indexes, may also have question marks hanging over
them in terms of speed of updates, cleanliness and consistency of data from
merging so many varied sources and questions of sustainability as they rely
on upstream projects and initatives to continue providing the raw materials
required to construct the index.
Continued in article
"SAVVY SEARCHING Google Scholar revisited," by Pe´ter Jacso,
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to revisit Google Scholar.
Design/methodology/approach – This
paper discusses the strengths and weaknesses of Google
Scholar.
Findings – The Google Books project
has given a massive and valuable boost to the already rich and diverse
content of Google Scholar. The dark side of the growth is that significant
gaps remain for top ranking journals and serials, and the number of
duplicate, triplicate and quadruplicate records for thesame source documents
(which Google Scholar cannot detect reliably) has increased.
Originality/value – This paper
discusses the strengths and weaknesses of Google Scholar.
Keywords Data collection, Worldwide
web, Document delivery
Google Scholar had its debut in
November 2004. Although it is still in beta version, it is worthwhile to
revisit its pros and cons, as changes have taken place in the past three
years both in the content and the software of Google Scholar – for better or
worse.
Its content has grown significantly -
courtesy of more academic publishers and database hosts opening their
digital vaults to allow the crawlers of Google Scholar to collect data from
and index the full-text of millions of articles from academic journal
collections and scholarly repositories of preprints and reprints. The Google
Books project also has given a massive and valuable boost to the already
rich and diverse content of Google Scholar. The dark side of the growth is
that significant gaps remained for top ranking journals and serials, and the
number of duplicate, triplicate and quadruplicate records for the same
source documents (which Google Scholar cannot detect reliably) has
increased.
While the regular Google service does
an impressive job with mostly unstructured web pages, the software of Google
Scholar keeps doing a very poor job with the highly structured and tagged
scholarly documents. It still has serious deficiencies with basic search
operations, does not have any sort options (beyond the questionable
relevance ranking). It recklessly offers filtering features by data
elements, which are present only in a very small fraction of the records
(such as broad subject categories) and/or are often absent and incorrect in
Google Scholar even if they are present correctly in the source items.
These include nonexistent author
names, which turn out to be section names, subtitles, or any part of the
text, including menu option text which has nothing to do with the document
or its author. This makes “F. Password” not only the most productive, but
also a very highly cited author. Page numbers, the first or second segment
of an ISSN, or any other four-digit numbers are often interpreted by Google
Scholar as publication years due to “artificial unintelligence”. As a
consequence, Google Scholar has a disappointing performance in matching
citing and cited items; its . . .
Accounting
History Libraries at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) ---
http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/accountancy/libraries.html
The above libraries include international accounting history.
The above libraries include film and video historical collections.
MAAW Knowledge Portal for Management and Accounting ---
http://maaw.info/
This includes a link to
the Digital Collection in this library.
My reason for mentioning this is explained below.
In 1986 when Steve Zeff
was President of the AAA, I was his Program Director for the annual meetings
in the heart of Times Square (Marriott Marquis). Although NYC is always a
relatively high priced hotel city and a rather poor choice for accompanying
families with small children, NYC did have some huge advantages for me as
program director and for registrants who attended some unique sessions in
NYC.
The biggest advantage
(aside from the private showing of CATS that I've already mentioned) was
that we could get some top investment bankers from Wall Street to appear on
the program. Those particular sessions were so well attended that people
were packed into the meeting rooms like sardines. Those speakers would've
never taken the time to take a day off to fly to be in a concurrent session
of the AAA annual meetings. But they agreed to take the time off to take a
cab to Times Square to be on our program.
I suspect that there
will be similar advantages for the 2009 meetings in NYC if the AAA can
arrange for parole of some of the top Wall Street speakers. It would really
be nice to compare how the messages changed between 1986 and 2009.
I've already mentioned
that, before I retired in 2006, I captured nearly two decades of video of
sessions at accounting educator meetings, especially the American Accounting
Association annual meetings. I suspect that some of those 1986 NYC sessions
are among the 200+ videotapes that I donated to the National Library of the
Accounting Profession at the University of Mississippi.
It may be necessary to
travel to the University of Mississippi to view these tapes, but Dale
Flesher can probably arrange it so researchers can view these and other
archived presentations on my tapes. Dale has my only copies.
The National Library of
the Accounting Profession at Ole Miss has a home page at
http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/accountancy/libraries.html
This includes a link to the Digital Collection in this library, but these
are only a small percentage of the recordings available in the library.
I mention my video
tapes because in later years I taped two successive annual meeting
presentations by Denny Beresford when, as Chairman of the FASB, his
struggles to get FAS 119 and 133 launched were just getting started under a
storm of controversy. People don't realize that the SEC virtually mandated
that the FASB generate FAS 133. SEC Director told Denny that the “top three
priorities at the FASB should be Derivatives, Derivatives, and Derivatives.”
I have made audio
recordings of Denny's two successive sessions available online. Denny is not
only an articulate speaker he has a great sense of humor. One of my all time
favorite lines is when he referred to a "derivative as something a person my
age takes when prunes just quite do the job."
Encyclopaedia Britannica to let readers edit content Encyclopaedia Britannica, the authoritative reference
book first published in 1768, is to let readers edit its entries, it said
Friday, as it battles to keep pace with Internet resources like Wikipedia. From
next week, visitors to the publication's website, Britannica.com, will be able
to submit proposed changes to editors, who will check them and make alterations
if they think they are appropriate. Users whose suggestions are accepted will
then be credited on the site, the firm said in a statement. Gorge Cauz,
president of the US-based firm, insisted that the publication was not trying to
be a wiki -- a collection of web pages which allows users to edit content --
like Wikipedia . . . But some technology commentators say the step is a doomed
attempt to preserve Britannica's subscription-based business model in the face
of the challenge from Wikipedia, which is free. The Times reported that while
Britannica.com attracts 1.5 million visitors per day, Wikipedia attracts roughly
six million.
PhysOrg, January 23, 2009 ---
http://www.physorg.com/news151938162.html
Jensen Comment
Whereas full text is available on Wikipedia for fee, Encyclopeaedia Britannica
only provides full text to paid subscribers. Subscriptions are about $70 per
year and a complete bound set is $2,000. Britannica is more reliable for
accuracy on topics covered, but Wikipedia overwhelms Britannica in terms of
millions upon millions of more topics covered. A scholarly approach might be to
first look up a topic in Wikipedia and then try to authenticate it in
Britannica, but this will only work for topics covered in Britannica. Also
Wikipedia has millions upon millions of "discussion" commentaries that vastly
widen the perspectives covered on many topics.
Abstract
Previous attempts at studying collaboration within Wikipedia have focused on
simple metrics like rigor (i.e. the number of revisions in an article’s
revision history) and diversity (i.e. the number of authors that have
voluntarily contributed to a given article) or have made generalizations
about collaboration within Wikipedia based upon the content validity of a
few select articles. By analyzing the contents of randomly selected
Wikipedia articles (n = 1,271) and their revisions (n = 85,563) more
closely, this study attempts to understand what collaboration within
Wikipedia actually looks like under the surface. Findings suggest that
typical Wikipedia articles are not rigorous, in a collaborative sense, and
do not reflect much diversity in the construction of content and
macro-structural writing, leading to the conclusion that most articles in
Wikipedia are not reflective of the collaborative efforts of any community
but, rather, represent the work of relatively few contributors.
Wikipedia stands as an undeniable success in online
participation and collaboration. By looking more closely at metrics
associated with each extant Wikipedia article (N=3,427,236) along with all
revisions (N=225,226,370), this study attempts to understand what
collaboration within Wikipedia actually looks like under the surface.
Findings suggest that typical Wikipedia articles are not rigorous, in a
collaborative sense, and do not reflect much diversity in the construction
of content and macro–structural writing. Most articles in Wikipedia are not
reflective of the collaborative efforts of the community but represent the
work of relatively few contributors.
The key challenge for the scholarly community, in
which I include academic publishers such as Oxford University Press, is to
work actively with Wikipedia to strengthen its role in "pre-research." We
need to build stronger links from its entries to more advanced resources
that have been created and maintained by the academy.
It is not an easy task to overcome the prejudices
against Wikipedia in academic circles, but accomplishing that will serve us
all and solidify an important new layer of knowledge in the
online-information ecosystem. Wikipedia's first decade was marked by its
meteoric rise. Let's mark its second decade by its integration into the
formal research process.
Continued in article
Casper Grathwohl is vice president and publisher of digital and
reference content for Oxford University Press.
A new search engine from TigerLogic Corporation, of
Irvine Calif., is being pushed to scholars and researchers, among others.
Called,
ChunkIt, the search engine refines results from
other search engines and databases, and displays chunks of text surrounding the
key words. In one of the company's
promotional videos, shown below, a stressed-out
college student uses ChunkIt to narrow a search on the Russian Revolution via
the Lexis/Nexis database. The student sports an Oberlin College sweatshirt and
gripes about meeting a deadline for a research paper in two hours. Steven J.
Bell, a research librarian at Temple University,
picks apartthe video on a blog from the
Association of College and Research Libraries, noting that it gives short shrift
to the skills of librarians. He questions why the student would need ChunkIt to
refine his search when Lexis/Nexis already has tools available to narrow search
results. His conclusion? ChunkIt is appropriate for use with other search
engines like Google, but not with library databases. Andrea L. Foster, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 15, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3166&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Growing up as an
aspiring javelin thrower in Kenya, the young
Julius Yego
was unable to find a coach: in a country where runners command the most
prestige, mentorship was practically nonexistent. Determined to succeed, he
instead watched YouTube recordings of Norwegian Olympic javelin thrower
Andreas Thorkildsen, taking detailed notes and attempting to imitate the
fine details of his movements. Yego went on to win gold in the 2015 World
Championships in Beijing, silver in the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics, and
holds the 3rd-longest javelin throw on world record. He acquired a coach
only six months before he competed in the 2012 London Olympics — over a
decade after he started practicing.
Yego’s rise was enabled by YouTube.
Yet since its founding, popular consensus has been that the video service is
making people dumber. Indeed, modern video media may shorten attention spans
and distract from longer-form means of communication, such as written
articles or books. But critically overlooked is its unlocking a form of
mass-scale tacit knowledge transmission which is historically unprecedented,
facilitating the preservation and spread of knowledge that might otherwise
have been lost.
Tacit
knowledge is knowledge that can’t properly be transmitted via verbal or
written instruction, like the ability to create great art or assess a
startup. This tacit knowledge is a form of
intellectual dark matter,
pervading society in a million ways, some of them trivial, some of them
vital. Examples include woodworking, metalworking, housekeeping, cooking,
dancing, amateur public speaking, assembly line oversight, rapid
problem-solving, and heart surgery.
Before video became
available at scale, tacit knowledge had to be transmitted in person, so that
the learner could closely observe the knowledge in action and learn in real
time — skilled metalworking, for example, is impossible to teach from a
textbook. Because of this intensely local nature, it presents a uniquely
strong
succession problem:
if a master woodworker fails to transmit his tacit knowledge to the few
apprentices in his shop, the knowledge is lost forever, even if he’s written
books about it. Further, tacit knowledge serves as an obstacle to
centralization, as its local transmission provides an advantage for
decentralized players that can’t be replicated by a central authority. The
center cannot appropriate what it cannot access: there will never be a state
monopoly on plumbing or dentistry, for example.
Some will object that tacit
knowledge acquisition must be possible without close observation of a
skilled practitioner; otherwise we would never see skilled autodidacts. It’s
true that some are able to acquire tacit knowledge by directly interacting
with the object of mastery and figuring out things on their own, but this is
very difficult. True autodidacts who can invent their own techniques are
rare, but many can learn by watching and imitating.
The scarcity
of people who can truly learn from what they’re given is why the massive
open online courses of the early 2010s
didn’t work out,
with 95% of enrolled students failing to complete even a single course, and
year-on-year student retention rates below 10%. Learners who wish to acquire
tacit knowledge, but who are unable to figure things out on their own, are
therefore limited by their access to personal observation of skilled people.
Massively
available video recordings of practitioners in action change this entirely.
Through these videos, learners can now partially replicate the
master-apprentice relationship, opening up skill domains and economic niches
that were previously cordoned off by personal access. These new points of
access range from the specialized trades, where electricians illustrate
how to use multimeters
and how to
assess breaker boxes,
to less specialized domestic activities, where a novice can learn
basic knife-handling techniques
from an expert. YouTube reports that searches in the “how-to” category has
grown
70% year-on-year.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Two days ago a replacement gasket for an Amana lower freezer door arrived (from
Amazon). When I commenced to take the old gasket off I discovered that replacing
the old gasket was going to be a bit trickier than I realized for a very old
refrigerator that came with our house when we purchased the house 15 years ago.
I had no original refrigerator manual and most likely would have to spend hours
locating the manual if I had one in the first place. So I went to YouTube and in
seconds found dozens of helper videos for replacing Amana freezer door gaskets.
I watched one of these videos and discovered how to take out 32 panel screws to
remove the inner door panel and how to heat my new gasket in a clothes dryer to
get it to shape properly for replacement.
The training needed to do the job took me less than ten minutes on YouTube.
Millions of similar training videos are available for fixing almost anything
imaginable and addressing a myriad of health issues should the need ever arise.
My point here is that YouTube makes it easy to find just-in-time training
modules in a matter of seconds.
Over the years I've occasionally written tidbits about the Monte Hall
problem. But it helps to renew my old memory on this and other technical
education issues that come up every day. First thing I went to Wikipedia ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem
Then for added kicks I went to a sampling of the many YouTube modules on the
Monte Hall problem (search for Monte Hall) at
www.youtube.com
My point here is that YouTube is truly amazing for training and education
needs. It's better than Wikipedia in terms of coverage of topics like freezer
door gasket replacements or replacing the starter cord on Toro lawn mower (which
was also a problem for me this summer).
Of course YouTube now has amazing free education channels maintained by top
educators (think complete course modules for many disciplines)--- https://www.youtube.com/edu
My point here is that YouTube is evolving to a point where it's easy to lose
sight of the many wonderful ways you can learn from YouTube. It's not the
YouTube you forgot to follow closely over the last 10 years even though you used
it for specific needs quite often.
Some of the most wonderful things in life really are free. Activists seeking
to break up giant tech companies like Amazon and Google should keep one thing in
mind. Those tech companies can bring us a lot of wonderful things for free or
with ease because of the ability to cover losses in one area with profits in
another area. What would happen to the many wonderful free videos we get on
YouTube or the free or very cheap books that can be downloaded from Amazon if we
tear those companies apart?
Sure we can take all the videos about repairing freezer gaskets (so I would
have to phone for a maintenance technician) and videos of the Monte Hall problem
away from the public. And sure we can restore some shopping in malls (think
bookstores) by banning online shopping from Amazon. And we make it a lot more
expensive to file tax returns by removing all the tax helper videos from YouTube.
Jensen Comment
I am a cheerleader for Wikipedia. However, one of my criticisms is that coverage
across academic disciplines is highly variable. For example, coverage of
economics and finance is fantastic. Coverage of accountancy can best be
described as lousy. It's a Pogo thing. When I look for the enemy I discover that
"He is us."
Disciplines covered extensively are generally strong in both theory and
academic debate, particularly philosophy and science. Accountancy is weak in
theory and the top academic research journals in
accounting will not publish replications or even commentaries. This
greatly limits anything interesting that can be posted to Wikipedia ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
Academic leaders in philosophy and science are nearly all covered extensively
in Wikipedia. Academic leaders in accountancy are rarely mentioned, and when
they are mentioned their Wikipedia modules are puny and boring.
What academic accounting leader has an extensive Wikipedia module? I've never
found a single one.
When I look up academic economists I not only find frequent Wikipedia
modules, virtually all of those modules contain summaries of their research and
summaries of controversies surrounding their research. I've never found a
Wikipedia article about an academic accounting researcher that contains
summaries of the controversies surrounding that professor's research.
Accounting research won't have much respect in the world until its leading
researchers are in Wikipedia, including summaries of controversies of their
research findings. The enemy is us.
We all know the dangers of relying too faithfully
on Wikipedia, which can sometimes lead us astray. But the platform remains a
productive resource for initial forays into obscure topics. Wikipanion
streamlines users' Wiki browsing and search activities with history grouped
by visitor date, advanced bookmarking, and multiple search methods. Think of
it as a quick and easy way to explore Wikipedia. Users can upgrade to
Wikipanion Plus for a small fee, but there is plenty to enjoy here,
including a fun link to Wiktionary, which will provide a dictionary type
entry for each term entered. Compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch
running iOS 7.0 or later.
Wikiverse (data visualization of Wikipedia concepts) ---
http://wikiverse.io
Experts vs. Amateurs Searching the Web The credibility war rages on in the world of Web 2.0.
Those who say information provided by Internet
research tools needs to be vetted have
made their casein several ways.
Knol,for example, appears to be Google's answer to
Wikipedia. And for now, while the project is under development, authors can
contribute content by invitation only. The plan is to let users rank the wheat
among the chaff; the highest-ranking articles would pop up first in a Google
search. A clear example is
Mahalo.It's essentially a search engine run by
staff members, who hand-pick links for popular search terms. That's a familiar
concept for
academic libraries. There
is resistance to the idea that experts have lost their place in the
indiscriminate, user-generated Web 2.0. John Connell, an education-business
manager at Cisco Systems, writes in his
blogthat experts and laymen can coexist on the
Web: "We are not dealing with a zero-sum game of any kind -- the rise of one
source of information does not (necessarily) cause the dissipation of another.
Why then do those who espouse the ‘cult of the expert,’ for want of a better
term, feel it necessary not just to have access to the authoritative information
(in their terms) that they seek, but to deny those who want access to the ...
trivial information they want? "It is elitism, pure and simple." The question
is, do users need someone else to filter information for them? We know from past
reports that the
"Google Generation"has a hard time sorting the
relevant from the trivial. But isn't it better to teach them how?
Hurley Goodall, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 14, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2818&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Is banning of Wikipedia/Google
for coursework both stupid and wasted effort?
Some professors
ban their students from citing Wikipedia
in papers. Tara Brabazon of the University of Brighton, bars her students from
using not only Wikipedia, but Google as well,The Times
of London reported. Google is “white bread for the mind,”
Brabazon said. “Google offers easy answers to difficult questions. But students
do not know how to tell if they come from serious, refereed work or are merely
composed of shallow ideas, superficial surfing and fleeting commitments,” she
said. “Google is filling, but it does not necessarily offer nutritional
content.” Inside Higher
Education, January 14, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/01/14/qt
"The University of Google," by Andrea L.
Foster, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 17, 2008 ---
Click Here
Tara Brabazon, professor of media studies at
Britain’s University of Brighton, was expected Wednesday to criticize Google
and what she sees as students’ over-reliance on the search engine and
Wikipedia in an inaugural lecture at the university. She calls the trend
“The University of Google,” according to an article Monday in The Times, and
labels the search engine “white bread for the mind.” The professor bans her
own students from using Wikipedia and Google in their first year of study.
A columnist for the paper responded in a piece that
accuses Ms. Brabazon of snobbery. “Curiosity, it seems, can only be
stimulated by trawling library shelves or by shelling out substantial
amounts of money,” he writes, sarcastically.
January 17, 2008 reply from Derek
Very interesting. I understand Brabazon’s point
about students’ over-reliance on Google and Wikipedia, but I don’t know if
banning those web sites helps to improve students’ information literacy. I
think students need to know how to use these kinds of web sites wisely.
If I can make a plug here, our teaching center just
started a new podcast series featuring interviews with faculty about issues
of teaching and learning. The first episode, available
here, features an interview with a
(Vanderbilt) history professor who uses Wikipedia to
teach the undergraduate history majors in his class how to think like
historians. He’s a great teacher and interviewee, and I think he offers an
effective way to use Wikipedia to help him accomplish his course goals.
Jensen Question
How will Professor Brabazon deal with the new and authoritative
Google Knol?
Jensen Comment
So how might a student find refereed journal or scholarly book references using
Wikipedia?
Most scholarly Wikipedia modules have footnotes and
references that can be traced back such that there is no evidence of having
ever gone to Wikipedia.
For example, note the many scholarly references and links at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jung
Don't overlook the Discussion tab in Wikipedia. Here's
where some information is turned into knowledge by scholars.
If there is not a footnote or a reference, look for a
unique phrase in Wikipedia and then insert that phrase in Google Scholar or
one of the other sites below:
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign announces
the availability of a newly-digitized collection of Abraham Lincoln books
accessible through the Open Content Alliance and displayed on the University
Library's own web site, as the first step of a digitization project of
Lincoln books from its collection. View the first set of books digitized at:
http://varuna.grainger.uiuc.edu/oca/lincoln/
How It Works ---
http://snurl.com/BookSearch
A significant extension of our groundbreaking Look Inside the Book
feature, Search Inside the Book allows you to search millions of pages
to find exactly the book you want to buy. Now instead of just displaying
books whose title, author, or publisher-provided keywords that match
your search terms, your search results will surface titles based on
every word inside the book. Using Search Inside the Book is as simple as
running an Amazon.com search.
For example,
Wikipedia describes how Jung proposed
spiritual guidance as treatment for chronic alcoholism ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jung#Spirituality_as_a_cure_for_alcoholism
Professor Brabazon might give a student an F grade for citing the above link.
Instead the student is advised to enter the phrase [ \"Jung\" AND \"Alcoholism\"
AND \"Spiritual Guidance\" ] into the exact phrase search box at
http://scholar.google.com/advanced_scholar_search?hl=en&lr=
Hundreds of scholarly references will emerge that Professor Brabazon will accept
as authoritative. But never mention to Professor
Brabazon that you got the idea for spiritual guidance
as a treatment of alcoholism from Wikipedia.
Also there's a question of how Professor Brabazon
will deal with the new Google Knol
"Google's Answer to Wikipedia: Google's Knol project aims to
make online information easier to find and more authoritative," MIT's Technology
Review, January 15, 2008 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/20065/?nlid=806
Google recently announced Knol, a new experimental
website that puts information online in a way that encourages authorial
attribution. Unlike articles for the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia,
which anyone is free to revise, Knol articles will have individual authors,
whose pictures and credentials will be prominently displayed alongside their
work. Currently, participation in the project is by invitation only, but
Google will eventually open up Knol to the public. At that point, a given
topic may end up with multiple articles by different authors. Readers will
be able to
rate the articles, and the better an article's
rating, the higher it will rank in Google's search results.
Google coined the term "knol" to denote a unit of
knowledge but also uses it to refer to an authoritative Web-based article on
a particular subject. At present, Google will not describe the project in
detail, but Udi Manber, one of the company's vice presidents of engineering,
provided a cursory sketch on the company's blog site.
"A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first
thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to
read," Manber writes. And in a departure from Wikipedia's model of community
authorship, he adds that "the key idea behind the Knol project is to
highlight authors."
Noah Kagan,
founder of the premier conference about online communities,
Community Next,
sees an increase in authorial attribution as a change
for the better. He notes the success of the review site
Yelp,
which has risen to popularity in the relatively short span of three years.
"Yelp's success is based on people getting attribution for the reviews that
they are posting," Kagan says. "Because users have their reputation on the
line, they are more likely to leave legitimate answers." Knol also has
features intended to establish an article's credibility, such as references
to its sources and a listing of the title, job history, and institutional
affiliation of the author. Knol may thus attract experts who are turned off
by group editing and prefer the style of attribution common in journalistic
and academic publications.
Manber writes that "for many topics, there will
likely be competing knols on the same subject. Competition of ideas is a
good thing." But
Mark
Pellegrini, administrator and featured-article
director at Wikipedia and a member of its press committee, sees two problems
with this plan. "I think what will happen is that you'll end up with five or
ten articles," he says, "none of which is as comprehensive as if the people
who wrote them had worked together on a single article." These articles may
be redundant or even contradictory, he says. Knol authors may also have less
incentive to link keywords to competitors' articles, creating "walled
gardens." Pellegrini describes the effect thus: "Knol authors will tend to
link from their articles to other articles they've written, but not to
articles written by others."
Google,Inc. recently announced two new services as
part of its Google Research University program.
Google Search "is designed to give university
faculty and their research teams high-volume programmatic access to Google
Search, whose huge repository of data constitutes a valuable resource for
understanding the structure and contents of the web." For more information
and to register for the service, go to
http://research.google.com/university/search/
Google Translate "offers tools to help researchers
in the field of automatic machine translation compare and contrast with, and
build on top of, Google's statistical machine translation system." For more
information and to register for the service, go to http://research.google.com/university/translate/.
Flickr has
unveiled a new project, dubbed
The Commons,
which will
give Flickr members an
opportunity to browse and tag
photos from Library of Congress
archives. The goal is to create
what
Flickr
likes to call
an "organic information system,"
in other words, a searchable
database of tags that makes it
easier for researchers to find
images.
The pilot
project features a
small sampling
of the
Library of Congress’ some 14
million images. For now you’ll
find two collections. The first
is called “American Memory:
Color photographs from the Great
Depression” and features color
photographs of the Farm Security
Administration-Office of War
Information Collection including
“scenes of rural and small-town
life, migrant labor, and the
effects of the Great
Depression.”
The second collection is the The
George Grantham Bain Collection
which features “photos produced
and gathered by George Grantham
Bain for his news photo service,
including portraits and
worldwide news events, but with
special emphasis on life in New
York City.” The Bain collection
images date from around
1900-1920.
In effect
the Library of Congress has
become a Flickr user,
complete with its own stream
and while
it’s great to see these image
available to a much wider
audience, we’re not so sure how
much it’s going to help
researchers.
If you’re
looking for historical
photographs do you want to
search through comments from
self-appointed experts
criticizing the composition
skills of photography pioneers
or adding
the
ever insightful “wow?”
Then
there’s the inevitable comments
soliciting photos to be added to
whatever banal and increasingly
inane groups and pools that
Flickr members have come up
with.
The tagging aspect will no doubt
produce something of value, but
pardon our cynicism, this may
well turn out to be a good test
of whether the positive aspects
of the Flickr community outweigh
the negative.
Google,Inc. recently announced two new services as
part of its Google Research University program.
Google Search "is designed to give university
faculty and their research teams high-volume programmatic access to Google
Search, whose huge repository of data constitutes a valuable resource for
understanding the structure and contents of the web." For more information
and to register for the service, go to
http://research.google.com/university/search/
Google Translate "offers tools to help researchers
in the field of automatic machine translation compare and contrast with, and
build on top of, Google's statistical machine translation system." For more
information and to register for the service, go to http://research.google.com/university/translate/.
Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Open
Encyclopedia, and YouTube as
Knowledge Bases
A professor wrote to me drawing a fine line between
information and knowledge. Information is just organized data that can be
right or wrong or unknown in terms of been fact versus fiction. Knowledge
generally is information that is more widely accepted as being "true"
although academics generally hate the word "true" because it is either too
demanding or too misleading in terms of being set in stone. Generally
accepted "knowledge" can be proven wrong at later points in time just like
Galileo purportedly proved that heavy balls fall at the same rate of speed
as their lighter counterparts, thereby proving, that what was generally
accepted knowledge until then was false. "Galileo
Galilei is said to have dropped two
cannon balls of different masses from the tower to demonstrate that
their descending
speed was independent of their
mass. This is
considered an apocryphal tale, and the only source for it comes from
Galileo's secretary." Quoted from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaning_Tower_of_Pisa#History
In my opinion there is a spectrum along the lines of data to
information to knowledge. Researchers attempt to add something new and
creative at any point along the spectrum. Scholars learn from most any point
on the spectrum and usually attempt to share their scholarship in papers,
books, Websites, blogs, and online or onsite classrooms.
That professor then mentioned above then asserted that
Wikipedia
and YouTube were
information databases but not knowledge bases. He then mentioned the problem
of students knowing facts but not organizing these facts in a scholarly
manner. He conjectured that this was perhaps do to increased virtual
learning in their development. My December 5, 2007 reply to him was as
follows (off-the-cuff so to speak).
Although I see your point about information versus knowledge, the
addition of the “Discussion tab” in Wikipedia changed the name of
the game. As “information” gets discussed and debated and critiqued
it’s beginning to look a whole lot more like knowledge in Wikipedia.
For example, note the Discussion tab at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_Design
And
when UC Berkeley puts 177 science courses on YouTube (some of them
in biology), it’s beginning to look a lot more like YouTube
knowledge --- ---
http://www.jimmyr.com/free_education.php
With
respect to virtual learning, my best example is Stanford’s million+
dollar virtual surgery cadaver that can do more than a real cadaver.
For one thing it can have blood pressure such that a nicked artery
can hemorrhage. Learning throughout time is based on models and
simulations of sorts. Our models and simulations keep getting better
and better to a point where the line between virtual and real world
become very blurred much like pilots in virtual reality begin to
think they are in reality.
Much
depends on the purpose and goals of virtual learning. Sometimes
edutainment is important to both motivate and make learners more
attentive (like wake them up). But this also has drawbacks when it
makes learning too easy. I’m a strong believer in blood, sweat, and
tears learning ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
When I put it into practice it was not popular with students of this
generation who want it to be easy.
You
note that: “These
students have prepared but it is poorly arranged, planned, and
articulated.” One thing
we’ve noted in Student Managed Funds (like in Phil Cooley’s course
where students actually control the investments of a million dollars
or more of a Trinity University's endowment) where students must
make presentations before the Board of Trustees greatly improves
students “planning and articulation.”You can read more about
this at the University of XXXXX (December 4) at
http://financialrounds.blogspot.com/
Note that the portfolios in these courses are not virtual
portfolios. They’re the real thing with real dollars! Students adapt
to higher levels of performance when the hurdles require higher
ordered performance.
Much
of the focus in metacognitive learning is how to examine/discover
what students have learned on their own and how to control cheating
when assessing discovery and concept learning ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm
We
studied whether instructional material that connects accounting
concept discussions with sample case applications through hypertext
links would enable students to better understand how concepts are to
be applied to practical case situations.
Results from a laboratory experiment indicated that students who
learned from such hypertext-enriched instructional material were
better able to apply concepts to new accounting cases than those who
learned from instructional material that contained identical content
but lacked the concept-case application hyperlinks.
Results also indicated that the learning benefits of concept-case
application hyperlinks in instructional material were greater when
the hyperlinks were self-generated by the students rather than
inherited from instructors, but only when students had generated
appropriate links.
I look forward to your
writings on this subject when you get things sorted out. You’re a
good writer. Scientist's aren't meant to be such good writers.
Wikipedia in Hardcover?
Yes in terms of selected modules you want in hard copy near your desk
"The Open-Source
Encyclopedia, Now in Hardcover," by Brock Read, Chronicle of Higher
Education, March 10, 2009 ---
Need a gift for that open-source enthusiast in
your life who happens to have some bookshelf space to fill? A German
company called
PediaPress has come to the rescue: For a
not-unreasonable fee, it will create a book that compiles your favorite
Wikipedia articles.
PediaPress has been at this since January, when
it started printing volumes drawn from Wikipedia’s German-language
edition, but late last month it added to its repertoire six new
languages: French, Polish, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and Simple
English (from a version of the encyclopedia written for children and for
adults learning English as a second language). Regular English is on its
way soon. It’s taking longer to work out the kinks, though, since that
encyclopedia is so massive.
Assembling a book is pretty easy: Wikipedia has
set up
a
Web site that lets you drag-and-drop your way
through the process. A 100-page book will set you back $8.90 (additional
pages cost more), plus shipping, and it’ll be at least halfway handsome
— if the photo below, from Wikipedia user He!ko, is any guide.
(photo not shown here)
So the books look
perfectly good. But then comes the $64,000 question: Will people really
pay for a hardbound copy of something they can view online for free? As
like-minded books-on-demand projects such as the Espresso Book Machine
have shown, there’s at least some kind of a market for readers of
made-to-order books, so it’s not inconceivable that some Wikipedia
visitors will order special volumes as gifts or buy texts that they can
mark up with marginalia. Wikipedia says the press is doing brisk
business: It sold more than 1,000 German-language books in its first
month of operations.
Jensen Comment
Whereas finance is one of the best topics covered in Wikipedia, accountancy
sadly has terrible coverage. My additions tend to be rejected on the basis
of their length.
It sort of puts accountants in their places when
aardvarks get better coverage than accountancy.
"Who's Messing with Wikipedia? The back-and-forth behind controversial
entries could help reveal their true value." by Erica Naone, MIT's
Technology Review, February 6, 2009 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/web/22076/?nlid=1757&a=f
Despite warnings from many high-school teachers
and college professors,
Wikipedia
is one of the most-visited websites in the world
(not to mention the biggest encyclopedia ever created). But even as
Wikipedia's popularity has grown, so has the debate over its
trustworthiness. One of the most serious concerns remains the fact that
its articles are written and edited by a hidden army of people with
unknown interests and biases.
Ed Chi,
a senior research scientist for augmented social cognition at the
Palo Alto Research Center
(PARC), and his colleagues have now created a
tool, called
WikiDashboard,
that aims to reveal much of the normally hidden
back-and-forth behind Wikipedia's most controversial pages in order to
help readers judge for themselves how suspect its contents might be.
Wikipedia already has procedures in place
designed to alert readers to potential problems with an entry. For
example, one of Wikipedia's volunteer editors can review an article and
tag it as "controversial" or warn that it "needs sources." But in
practice, Chi says, relatively few articles actually receive these tags.
WikiDashboard instead offers a snapshot of the edits and re-edits, as
well as the arguments and counterarguments that went into building each
of Wikipedia's many million pages.
The researchers began by investigating pages
already tagged as "controversial" on Wikipedia: they found that these
pages were far more likely to have been edited and re-edited repeatedly.
Based on this observation, they developed WikiDashboard, a website that
serves up Wikipedia entries but adds a chart to the top of each page
revealing its recent edit history.
WikiDashboard shows which users have
contributed most edits to a page, what percentage of the edits each
person is responsible for, and when editors have been most active. A
WikiDashboard user can explore further by clicking on a particular
editor's name to see, for example, how involved he or she has been with
other articles. Chi says that the goal is to show the social interaction
going on around the entry. For instance, the chart should make it clear
when a single user has been dominating a page, or when a flurry of
activity has exploded around a particularly contentious article. The
timeline on the chart can also show how long a page has been neglected.
Question:
What vexing problems do Wikipedia Authority and Online Product Reviews share
in common?
Simson Garfinkel takes a look at
authority and sourcing in Wikipedia world with
an article in the latest edition of Technology Review. He focuses
on Wikipedia’s requirement to cite published sources in adding
information to Wikipedia articles. Yes, with a mob-written encyclopedia,
a requirement for citing published, vetted sources makes sense, he
writes.
“But there is a problem with appealing to the
authority of other people’s written words: Many publications don’t do
any fact checking at all, and many of those that do simply call up the
subject of the article and ask if the writer got the facts wrong or
right,” Mr. Garfinkel writes. “For instance, Dun and Bradstreet gets the
information for its small-business information reports in part by asking
those very same small businesses to fill out questionnaires about
themselves.”
This policy is particularly problematic if you
are the authority on a particular topic, but you can’t use your own base
of knowledge. Jaron Lanier, a futurist, had problems changing a
statement on the Wikipedia entry about himself that said he was a
filmmaker. He wasn’t a filmmaker, yet every time he removed that
non-fact, someone put it back in.
He finally got the item changed, but was then
criticized for editing his own wikientry. (PR directors who maintain
their college Wikipedia pages, take note.)
Comments
Doesn’t the problem of unreliability of other sources apply to
any secondary or tertiary work? ;) (…and on that note, I
suggest reading the Wikipedia page
Wikipedia:Reliable sources …)
"Online User Reviews: Can They Be Trusted? They're all over the Web.
Everybody reads them. But are reader reviews reliable enough to depend on
when it comes to spending your cold, hard cash?" by Robert Luhn, PC World
via The Washington Post, October 23, 2008 ---
Click Here
Anyone can write a product review, and
everybody reads them. But can you trust them? I refer, of course, to
reader or user reviews, the kind you find on Amazon, Buy.com, Epinions,
PC World, Yelp, and even the sites of tech product manufacturers, such
as Dell. They're everywhere.
But it's the fraudulent reviews--positive
reviews contributed by "readers" paid by the company being
evaluated--that worry critics and advocates alike.
In an October 2007 poll conducted by the PR
firm Burson-Marsteller, 1000 savvy Web consumers (dubbed "e-fluentials"
by some wordsmith who evidently was unfamiliar with the term "
effluent") were clearly convinced that fake reviews are endemic--and
could result in a backlash from online consumers.
The numbers tell the tale: 48% (up from 39% in
2001) believe that fake reviews are being planted on consumer sites. 57%
say they won't buy a product if the reader reviews seem suspect. And a
whopping 76% claim to double-check what they read online. All are signs
of a healthy skepticism.
So, how pervasive are falsified reviews?
Beau Brendler, Director of Consumer Reports'
WebWatch site, says that the bottom line is: "[Fake reviews] happen all
the time--but proving it, quantifying it--is very hard."
WebWatch--whose motto is "Look Before You
Click"-- says on its site that its credibility campaign has led more
than 170 sites, including CNN, CNet, The New York Times, Travelocity,
and Orbitz to agree to uphold WebWatch's credibility guidelines.
Barbara Kasser, author of Online Shopping
Directory For Dummies and Internet Shopping Yellow Pages, says: "There's
no way to check the reviewer's veracity or if they're on the
take--they're anonymous." Another concern: the reviewer might not be
competent. "How did [the reviewer] use the product? Did they use it
properly? Did they follow the manufacturer's directions? There's no way
to know," she points out.
Why So Enticing?
Many ordinary people consider reviews written
by consumers to be more reliable, more critical, and ultimately, more
useful than many other sources of information. At least that's what they
told The Nielsen Company in a survey conducted in April 2007. The top
three most trusted sources: "Recommendations from consumers" (78%),
"Newspapers" (63%), and "Consumer opinions posted online" (61%). (In a
story that PC World posted in 2003, we generally agreed with the above
perceptions--but we're a bit more cynical now.)
Certainly, reader reviews have come a long way
since the era of Usenet and reader forums. Depending on the site and its
readers, you may find pithy commentary, long-winded rants, numeric
ratings, pros and cons, graphs, and even reviewer videos.
But Mitch Meyerson, author of the book Guerilla
Marketing on the Internet, thinks that "influenced" reviews (paid for or
not) are pretty common. For example, says Meyerson, "authors often
enlist friends, colleagues, and clients to review their books on
Amazon."
According to Blogging Tips founder and Web
developer Kevin Muldoon, "tech sites usually have fair, accurate
[reader] reviews...but there are definitely more fake reviews [on sites]
covering cosmetics and hotels." Read Muldoon's blog entry on his own
guidelines for how he reviews products.
Anna Patterson's last Internet search engine
was so impressive that industry leader Google Inc. bought the technology
in 2004 to upgrade its own system.
She believes her latest invention is even more
valuable - only this time it's not for sale.
Patterson instead intends to upstage Google,
which she quit in 2006 to develop a more comprehensive and efficient way
to scour the Internet.
The end result is Cuil, pronounced "cool."
Backed by $33 million in venture capital, the search engine plans to
begin processing requests for the first time Monday.
Cuil had kept a low profile while Patterson,
her husband, Tom Costello, and two other former Google engineers -
Russell Power and Louis Monier - searched for better ways to search.
Now, it's boasting time.
Web index: For starters, Cuil's search index
spans 120 billion Web pages.
Patterson believes that's at least three times
the size of Google's index, although there is no way to know for
certain. Google stopped publicly quantifying its index's breadth nearly
three years ago when the catalog spanned 8.2 billion Web pages.
Ex-Googlers: Where are they now? Cuil won't
divulge the formula it has developed to cover a wider swath of the Web
with far fewer computers than Google. And Google isn't ceding the point:
Spokeswoman Katie Watson said her company still believes its index is
the largest.
After getting inquiries about Cuil, Google
asserted on its blog Friday that it regularly scans through 1 trillion
unique Web links. But Google said it doesn't index them all because they
either point to similar content or would diminish the quality of its
search results in some other way. The posting didn't quantify the size
of Google's index.
A search index's scope is important because
information, pictures and content can't be found unless they're stored
in a database. But Cuil believes it will outshine Google in several
other ways, including its method for identifying and displaying
pertinent results.
Content analysis: Rather than trying to mimic
Google's method of ranking the quantity and quality of links to Web
sites, Patterson says Cuil's technology drills into the actual content
of a page. And Cuil's results will be presented in a more magazine-like
format instead of just a vertical stack of Web links. Cuil's results are
displayed with more photos spread horizontally across the page and
include sidebars that can be clicked on to learn more about topics
related to the original search request.
Finally, Cuil is hoping to attract traffic by
promising not to retain information about its users' search histories or
surfing patterns - something that Google does, much to the consternation
of privacy watchdogs.
Cuil is just the latest in a long line of
Google challengers.
Other contenders: The list includes swaggering
startups like Teoma (whose technology became the backbone of Ask.com),
Vivisimo, Snap, Mahalo and, most recently, Powerset, which was acquired
by Microsoft Corp. (MSFT, Fortune 500) this month.
Even after investing hundreds of millions of
dollars on search, both Microsoft and Yahoo Inc. (YHOO, Fortune 500)
have been losing ground to Google (GOOG, Fortune 500). Through May,
Google held a 62% share of the U.S. search market followed by Yahoo at
21% and Microsoft at 8.5%, according to comScore Inc.
Google has become so synonymous with Internet
search that it may no longer matter how good Cuil or any other
challenger is, said Gartner Inc. analyst Allen Weiner.
"Search has become as much about branding as
anything else," Weiner said. "I doubt [Cuil] will be keeping anyone at
Google awake at night."
Google welcomed Cuil to the fray with its usual
mantra about its rivals. "Having great competitors is a huge benefit to
us and everyone in the search space," Watson said. "It makes us all work
harder, and at the end of the day our users benefit from that."
But this will be the first time that Google has
battled a general-purpose search engine created by its own alumni. It
probably won't be the last time, given that Google now has nearly 20,000
employees.
Patterson joined Google in 2004 after she built
and sold Recall, a search index that probed old Web sites for the
Internet Archive. She and Power worked on the same team at Google.
Although he also worked for Google for a short
time, Monier is best known as the former chief technology officer of
AltaVista, which was considered the best search engine before Google
came along in 1998. Monier also helped build the search engine on eBay's
(EBAY, Fortune 500) online auction site.
The trio of former Googlers are teaming up with
Patterson's husband, Costello, who built a once-promising search engine
called Xift in the late 1990s. He later joined IBM Corp. (IBM, Fortune
500), where he worked on an "analytic engine" called WebFountain.
Costello's Irish heritage inspired Cuil's odd
name. It was derived from a character named Finn McCuill in Celtic
folklore.
Patterson enjoyed her time at Google, but
became disenchanted with the company's approach to search. "Google has
looked pretty much the same for 10 years now," she said, "and I can
guarantee it will look the same a year from now."
Jensen Comment on July 28, 2008
Thus far the hype seems to be more hyped than the performance on this first
day of trials. For example I typed in the following in both Cuil and Google:
"Basis Adjustment" AND "FAS 133"
Google gave me hundreds of hits and many of them were quite relevant to
my research.
Cuil gave me four hits and most of them were irrelevant to my research. Cuil
said it had 1,116,835,248 hits, but I could only find a way to list four of
these hits.
Go figure! Thus far the "World's Largest Search Engine" has a ways to go.
Another limitation is that Google has many cached documents where the
original link is no longer active. Cuil does not mention a caching service.
First turn your speakers on and read in "Excel Magic Trick #73" in Cuil.
Results: Nothing!
Next read in ""Excel Magic Trick #73" in Google.
Google's cached version takes you to an interesting video on the
significant-digits bound in Excel.
Please let me know when and where Cuil is better than Google.
Also is Cuil like Yahoo in that early listing priority of hits goes to
advertisers' sites?
If that's the case, Cuil will be a bummer. It does have Preferences
button, but thus far that seems to be inactive.
I do a great deal of google searching almost
everyday and so this is of great interest. To run a quick test, I went
to cuil.com (which is supposed to stand for "cool") and entered "audit
simulation." I received nine rather large blocks of information relating
to web sites that I found to be mostly irrelevant. I then tried
"auditing simulation" and got pretty much the same thing. I also noticed
that it was looking for "audit" and "simulation" separately and that
there was no option for an advanced search, which on google allows you
to combine words into phrases and sentences. I then tried "audit
simulation" again, but this time with the quotes. This improved the
results slightly, but most of the hits were still not very relevant. The
links did have more information attached to them, but the information
seemed to take up too much space. When I type "audit simulation" or "auditng
simulation" into the basic google search page or toolbar, I get http://realaudit.com
as most relevant. This makes more sense to me and when this link does
not come up in cuil.com at all, it leaves me thinking that cuil still
has a long way to go. Thanks again, for the tip,
We've been testing the engine for the last
hour. Based on our test queries Cuil is an excellent search engine,
particularly since it is all of an hour old. But it doesn't appear to
have the depth of results that Google has, despite their claims. And the
results are not nearly as relevant.
. . .
It seems pretty clear that Google's index of
web pages is significantly larger than Cuil's unless we're randomly
choosing the wrong queries. Based on the queries above, Google is
averaging nearly 10x the number of results of Cuil.
And Cuil's ranking isn't as good as Google's
based on the pure results returned from both queries. Where Cuil excels
is with the related categories, which return results that are extremely
relevant. With Google, we've all gotten used to trying a slightly
different search to get the refined results we need. Cuil does a good
job of guessing what we'll want next and presents that in the top right
widget. That means Cuil saves time for more research based queries.
And I want to reemphasize that Cuil is only an
hour old at this point, Google has had a decade to perfect their search
engine.
Question
How does Google's new Wikipedia-like online Encyclopedia differ from the
real Wikipedia?
Hint
Colleges may one day give scholarly performance credit for authoring a
module in Knol. In a sense it's like exposing your scholarship and research
in such a way that the entire world may become "referees" of you
contribution. Of course most of the modules fall into the realm of
scholarship (mastery of existing knowledge) rather than research
(contribution to new knowledge). The catch of course, is that the author
must approve the reviewer's call. Darn! The rejected reviews may be, in most
instances, be published in Wikipedia. In that sense Wikipedia is more
academic.
"Google Presents
Wikipedia Competitor," by Andrea L. Foster, Chronicle of Higher Education,
July 23, 2008 ---
Click Here
Google today
launched Knol, an online encyclopedia that, in
many ways, mimics Wikipedia, the popular encyclopedia that anyone can
edit. As in Wikipedia, anyone can create a page in Knol. But changes to
the page become active only after they are approved by the page’s author
or authors. And unlike Wikipedia, the author’s name is featured
prominently on Knol articles.
Among the featured articles on the
Knol
site today are “How to Backpack,” “Lung Cancer,”
and “Toilet Clogs.”
Daniel Colman, director and associate dean of
Stanford University’s continuing-studies program and author of the blog
OpenCulture,
predicted in December that Knol would have a
hard time attracting experts to write articles.
I get free online access to Encyclopaedia Britannica': Is this my
just reward?
Encyclopaedia Britannica, which apparently
fears being nudged into irrelevance by the proliferation of free online
reference sources, has started giving bloggers free access to its
articles, TechCrunch reports.
Reference sites such as Wikipedia, which are
often criticized for their amateur (if zealous) authorship sources, have
made the expensive, expert-vetted, hard-bound book set a less popular
purchase. (Comscore analysis, also reported on TechCrunch, found that
“[f]or every page viewed on Brittanica.com, 184 pages are viewed on
Wikipedia,” or 3.8 billion v. 21 million page views per month).
Under a new program entitled Britannica
WebShare, the encyclopedia publisher is allowing “people who publish
with some regularity on the Internet, be they bloggers, webmasters, or
writers,” to read and link to the encyclopedia’s online articles. The
company seems to hope that by offering its services free to Web
publishers, links to Britannica articles will proliferate across the
Internet and will persuade regular Web surfers to cough up $1,400 for
the encyclopedia’s 32-volume set, or perhaps $70 for an annual online
subscription.
Posted Comments as of April 21, 2008
“What’s that laugher?” Sir Colin wondered aloud to no one in
particular. The entire room sat in nervous silence.
“I say, what is that laughter?”
— S. Britchky Apr 21, 12:50 PM #
The Encyclopedia Britannica print edition is worth every penny of the
$1400 I paid for it. Other readers should note that the print edition of
the set is marked down each year, to below $1000, near the end of its
run, as the next year’s edition approaches publication. I don’t work for
Britannica, but in my opinion, every home library should have a set. I’d
be lost without it., even though I have full access to the Internet.
— Richard Apr 21, 08:49 PM
Jensen Comment
Woe is me! Should I continue to be one of the billions or join the millions?
This is the classic issue of open source versus refereed publishing.
Refereed articles, including Encyclopaedia Britannica, assign a few highly
qualified referees to pass judgment on the accuracy and relevance of each
module once and some modules are not reviewed again for many years.
Wikipedia freely allows the entire online world to edit each module in real
time. Do you have more faith in one-time decisions of experts or real-time
decisions of possibly millions of people with expertise ranging from dunder
heads to the best experts in the world on a given topic.
What Encyclopaedia Britannica has going for it is that it prevents dunder
heads from messing up the module. What Wikipedia has going for it is that
experts generally override the dunder heads of most topics, although errors
may remain indefinitely in modules that nobody online is particularly
interested in to a point of searching for the module on Wikipedia.
There also is the "problem" in Wikipedia that organizations and
individuals such as the CIA, FBI, IRS, Israel, Russia, Barack Obama, Hillary
Clinton, John McCain, and the Fortune 500 largest corporations are
"maintaining" certain modules about themselves and sensitive terms. This is
both good and bad. It prevents kooks from spreading lies about these
organizations/individuals, but it also affords these
organizations/individuals to present their own biased accounts of
themselves. Fortunately Wikipedia added a Discussion Tab to each module
where even the kooks are allowed to express opinions on the modules. Readers
can then choose whether to read the discussions or not.
Now what about scholarly journals. Should the refereeing be done by two
or three experts (sometimes cronies) selected by the Editor or should the
working papers be exposed open source to online people of the world who can
then publish feedback regarding the strengths and weaknesses of the research
paper or other scholarly work? Me, I'm an open source kinda guy!
A researcher at Trinity College Dublin has
software that lets users map the links between Wikipedia pages. His Web
site is called “Six Degrees of Wikipedia,” modeled after the trivia game
“Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.” Instead of the
degrees being measured by presence in the same film, degrees are
determined by articles that link to each other.
For example, how many clicks through Wikipedia
does it take to get from “Gatorade” to “Genghis Khan”? Three: Start at
“Gatorade,” then click to “Connecticut,” then “June 1,” then “Genghis
Khan.”
Stephen Dolan, the researcher who created the
software, has also used the code to determine which Wikipedia article is
the “center” of Wikipedia—that is, which article is the hub that most
other articles must go through in the “Six Degrees” game. Not including
the articles that are just lists (e.g., years), the article closest to
the center is “United Kingdom,” at an average of 3.67 clicks to any
other article. “Billie Jean King” and “United States” follow, with an
average of 3.68 clicks and 3.69 clicks, respectively.
More detailed information can be found on Mr.
Dolan’s
Web site
When the online, anyone-can-edit
Wikipedia appeared in 2001, teachers, especially college professors,
were appalled. The Internet was already an apparently limitless source
of nonsense for their students to eagerly consume — now there was a Web
site with the appearance of legitimacy and a dead-easy interface that
would complete the seduction until all sense of fact, fiction, myth and
propaganda blended into a popular culture of pseudointelligence masking
the basest ignorance. An Inside Higher Ed article just last year on
Wikipedia use in the academy drew a huge and passionate response, much
of it negative.
Now the English version
of Wikipedia has over 2 million articles, and it has been translated
into over 250 languages. It has become so massive that you can type
virtually any noun into a search engine and the first link will be to a
Wikipedia page. After seven years and this exponential growth, Wikipedia
can still be edited by anyone at any time. A generation of students was
warned away from this information siren, but we know as professors that
it is the first place they go to start a research project, look up an
unfamiliar term from lecture, or find something disturbing to ask about
during the next lecture. In fact, we learned too that Wikipedia is
indeed the most convenient repository of information ever invented, and
we go there often — if a bit covertly — to get a few questions answered.
Its accuracy, at least for science articles, is actually as high as the
revered Encyclopedia Britannica, as shown by a test published in the
journal Nature.
It is time for the
academic world to recognize Wikipedia for what it has become: a global
library open to anyone with an Internet connection and a pressing
curiosity. The vision of its founders, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, has
become reality, and the librarians were right: the world has not been
the same since. If the Web is the greatest information delivery device
ever, and Wikipedia is the largest coherent store of information and
ideas, then we as teachers and scholars should have been on this train
years ago for the benefit of our students, our professions, and that
mystical pool of human knowledge.
What Wikipedia too often
lacks is academic authority, or at least the perception of it. Most of
its thousands of editors are anonymous, sometimes known only by an IP
address or a cryptic username. Every article has a “talk” page for
discussions of content, bias, and organization. “Revert” wars can rage
out of control as one faction battles another over a few words in an
article. Sometimes administrators have to step in and lock a page down
until tempers cool and the main protagonists lose interest. The very
anonymity of the editors is often the source of the problem: how do we
know who has an authoritative grasp of the topic?
That is what academics
do best. We can quickly sort out scholarly authority into complex
hierarchies with a quick glance at a vita and a sniff at a publication
list. We make many mistakes doing this, of course, but at least our
debates are supported with citations and a modicum of civility because
we are identifiable and we have our reputations to maintain and friends
to keep. Maybe this academic culture can be added to the Wild West of
Wikipedia to make it more useful for everyone?
I propose that all
academics with research specialties, no matter how arcane (and nothing
is too obscure for Wikipedia), enroll as identifiable editors of
Wikipedia. We then watch over a few wikipages of our choosing, adding to
them when appropriate, stepping in to resolve disputes when we know
something useful. We can add new articles on topics which should be
covered, and argue that others should be removed or combined. This is
not to displace anonymous editors, many of whom possess vast amounts of
valuable information and innovative ideas, but to add our authority and
hard-won knowledge to this growing universal library.
The advantages should be
obvious. First, it is another outlet for our scholarship, one that may
be more likely to be read than many of our journals. Second, we are
directly serving our students by improving the source they go to first
for information. Third, by identifying ourselves, we can connect with
other scholars and interested parties who stumble across our edits and
new articles. Everyone wins.
I have been an
open Wikipedia editor now for several months. I have enjoyed it
immensely. In my teaching I use a “living syllabus” for each course,
which is a kind of academic blog. (For example, see my History of Life
course
online
syllabus.) I connect students through links to
outside sources of information. Quite often I refer students to
Wikipedia articles that are well-sourced and well written. Wikipages
that are not so good are easily fixed with a judicious edit or two, and
many pages become more useful with the addition of an image from my
collection (all donated to the public domain). Since I am open in my
editorial identity, I often get questions from around the world about
the topics I find most fascinating. I’ve even made important new
connections through my edits to new collaborators and reporters who want
more background for a story.
For example, this year I
met online a biology professor from Centre College who is interested in
the ecology of fish on Great Inagua Island in the Bahamas. He saw my
additions and images on that Wikipedia page and had several questions
about the island. He invited me to speak at Centre next year about
evolution-creation controversies, which is unrelated to the original
contact but flowed from our academic conversations. I in turn have been
learning much about the island’s living ecology I did not know. I’ve
also learned much about the kind of prose that is most effective for a
general audience, and I’ve in turn taught some people how to properly
reference ideas and information. In short, I’ve expanded my teaching.
Wikipedia as we know it
will undoubtedly change in the coming years as all technologies do. By
involving ourselves directly and in large numbers now, we can help
direct that change into ever more useful ways for our students and the
public. This is, after all, our sacred charge as teacher-scholars: to
educate when and where we can to the greatest effect.
How helpful is Wikipedia to scholarship? Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, told
educators last year that students shouldn't cite his sprawling Web site:
"For God's sake, you’re in college," he said. "Don’t cite the encyclopedia.”
It's a safe bet that most professors agreed with that assessment. But
according to BBC News, Mr. Wales has now modified his message. He told
attendees at a London IT conference this week that he doesn't object to
Wikipedia citations, although he admitted that scholars would "probably be
better off doing their own research." From the BBC report, it's hard to tell
how gung-ho Mr. Wales is about Wikipedia's academic value. But the online
encyclopedia's efforts to improve the quality of its articles might be
starting to pay dividends: A German magazine recently compared 50 Wikipedia
articles with similar pieces in Brockhaus, a commercial encyclopedia.
According to the study, the Wikipedia articles were generally more
informative.
Brock Read, Chronicle of Higher Education, December 7, 2007 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2598&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
See, I'm not the only one!
University of Texas Professor Praises Wikipedia
Scholars often take swipes at Wikipedia, claiming that
it dumbs down education and encourages intellectual laziness.
Some professors have even banned their students
from using it for research. But in an
articlethis week in Science Progress, a
scholar at the University of Texas at Dallas argues that such bans are
irresponsible. David Parry, an assistant professor of emerging media and
communications at the university, writes that students need to become
familiar with new and non-static forms of communication. He encourages his
students to read Wikipedia’s “history” and “discussion” pages, saying they
explain how articles were produced. And he says the online encyclopedia’s
entry on global warming does a good job of explaining both the controversy
and the science surrounding the issue.“Like it or not, the networked digital
archive changes our basis of knowledge,” Mr. Parry writes “and training
people for the future is about training them for this shift." Andrea L. Foster, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 14, 2008 ---
Click Here
It goes without saying that Wikipedia modules are always
suspect, but it is easy to make corrections for the world. I
think this particular model requires registration to
discourage anonymous edits.
What is often better about Wikipedia is to read the
discussion and criticisms of any module. For example, some
facts in dispute in this particular module are mentioned in
the “Discussion” or “talk” section about the module ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Mahmoud_Ahmadinejad
Perhaps some of the disputed facts have already been pointed
out in the “Discussion” section. Of course pointing out
differences of opinion about “facts” does not, in and of
itself, resolve these differences. I did read the
“Discussion” section on this module before suggesting the
module as a supplementary link. I assumed others would also
check the “Talk” section before assuming what is in dispute.
Since Wikipedia is so widely used by so many students and
others like me it’s important to try to correct the record
whenever possible. This can be done quite simply from your
Web browser and does not require any special software. It
requires registration for politically sensitive modules.
Wikipedia modules are often “corrected” by the FBI, CIA,
corporations, foreign governments, professors of all
persuasions, butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers. This
makes them fun and suspect at the same time. It’s like
having a paper refereed by the world instead of a few, often
biased or casual, journal referees. What I like best is that
“referee comments” are made public in Wikipedia’s
“Discussion” sections. You don’t often find this in
scholarly research journals where referee comments are
supposed to remain confidential.
Reasons for flawed journal peer reviews were recently
brought to light at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#PeerReviewFlaws
The biggest danger in Wikipedia in generally for modules
that are rarely sought out. For example, Bill Smith might
right a deceitful module about John Doe. If nobody’s
interested in John Doe, it may take forever and a day for
corrections to appear. Generally modules that are of great
interest to many people, however, generate a lot of “talk”
in the “Discussion” sections. For example, the Discussion
section for George W. Bush is at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:George_W._Bush
You already know about Wikipedia -- or
think you do. It's the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit,
the one that by dint of its 1.9 million English-language entries
has become the Internet's main information source and the 17th
busiest U.S. Web site.
But that's just the half of it.
Most people are familiar with
Wikipedia's collection of articles. Less well-known,
unfortunately, are the discussions about these articles. You can
find these at the top of a Wikipedia page under a separate tab
for "Discussion."
Reading these discussion pages is a
vastly rewarding, slightly addictive, experience -- so much so
that it has become my habit to first check out the discussion
before going to the article proper.
At Wikipedia, anyone can be an editor
and all but 600 or so articles can be freely altered. The
discussion pages exist so the people working on an article can
talk about what they're doing to it. Part of the discussion
pages, the least interesting part, involves simple housekeeping;
-- editors noting how they moved around the sections of an
article or eliminated duplications. And sometimes readers seek
answers to homework-style questions, though that practice is
discouraged.
But discussion pages are also where
Wikipedians discuss and debate what an article should or
shouldn't say.
This is where the fun begins. You'd be
astonished at the sorts of things editors argue about, and the
prolix vehemence they bring to stating their cases. The
9,500-word article "Ireland," for example, spawned a 10,000-word
discussion about whether "Republic of Ireland" would be a better
name for the piece. "I know full well that many Unionist editors
would object completely to my stance on this subject," wrote one
person.
A ferocious back and forth ensued over
whether Antonio Meucci or Alexander Graham Bell invented the
telephone. One person from the Meucci camp taunted the Bell side
by saying, "'Nationalistic pride' stop you and people like you
to accept the truth. Bell was a liar and thief. He invented
nothing."
As for the age-old philosophical
question, "What is truth," it's an issue Wikipedia editors have
spent 242,000 words trying to settle, an impressive feat
considering how Plato needed only 118,000 words to write "The
Republic."
These debates extend to topics most
people wouldn't consider remotely controversial. The article on
calculus, for instance, was host to some sparring over whether
the concept of "limit," central to calculus, should be better
explained as an "average."
Wikipedia editors are always on the
prowl for passages in articles that violate Wikipedia policy,
such as its ban on bias. Editors use the discussion pages to
report these sightings, and reading the back and forth makes it
clear that editors take this task very seriously.
On one discussion page is the comment:
"I am not sure that it does not present an entirely Eurocentric
view, nor can I see that it is sourced sufficiently well so as
to be reliable."
Does it address a polarizing topic from
politics or religion? Hardly. The article was about kittens. The
editor was objecting to the statement that most people think
kittens are cute.
These debates are not the only
treasures in the discussion pages. You can learn a lot of stray
facts, facts that an editor didn't think were important enough
for the main article. For example, in the discussion
accompanying the article about diets, it's noted that potatoes,
eaten raw, can be poisonous. The National Potato Council didn't
believe this when asked about it last week, but later called
back to say that it was true, on account of the solanine in
potatoes. Of course, you'd have to eat many sackfuls of raw
potatoes to be done in by them.
The discussion about "biography"
included random facts from sundry biographies, including that
Marshall McLuhan believed his ideas about mass media and the
rest to have been inspired by the Virgin Mary. This is true,
said McLuhan biographer Philip Marchand. (Mr. Marchand also said
McLuhan believed that a global conspiracy of Freemasons was
seeking to hinder his career.)
Remember, though, this is Wikipedia,
and while it tends to get things right in the long run, it can
goof up along the way. A "tomato" article contained a lyrical
description of the Carolina breed, said to be "first noted by
Italian monk Giacomo Tiramisunelli" and "considered a rare
delicacy amongst tomato-connoisseurs."
That's all a complete fabrication, said
Roger Chetelat, tomato expert at the University of California,
Davis. While now gone from Wikipedia, the passage was there long
enough for "Giacomo Tiramisunelli" to turn up now in search
engines as a key figure in tomato history.
Wikipedia is very self-aware. It has a
Wikipedia article about Wikipedia. But this meta-analysis
doesn't extend to "Wikipedia discussions." No article on the
topic exists. Search for "discussion," and you are sent to
"debate."
But, naturally, that's controversial.
The discussion page about debate includes a debate over whether
"discussion" and "debate" are synonymous. Emotions run high; the
inability to distinguish the two, said one participant, is "one
of the problems with Western Society."
Maybe I have been reading too many
Wikipedia discussion pages, but I can see the point.
Jensen Comment
This may be more educational than what we teach in class. Try it by
clicking on the Discussion tab for the following"
"CIA, FBI Computers Used for Wikipedia Edits," by
Randall Mikkelsen, The Washington Post, August 16, 2007 ---
Click Here
"CIA and Vatican Edit Wikipedia Entries," TheAge.com, August 18,
2007 ---
Click Here
Jensen Comment
Wikipedia installed software to trace the source of edits and new
modules.
On Wikipedia, you never really know who wrote
the article you're reading. Some are written by experts, but others are
written by people with time on their hands who may or may not know what
they're talking about. Actually, most Wikipedia articles are written by
a combination of the two. But Google's new Web encyclopedia,
announced last tweek,
will put the authors of articles front and center, so you'll always know
who is talking and what their qualifications are. The question is, which
model will produce a better quick-reference guide? Daniel Colman,
director and associate dean of Stanford University's continuing-studies
program and author of the blog OpenCulture, picks Wikipedia to win this
face off. He thinks that Google's planned encyclopedia
will have a hard time attracting experts to write articles,
whereas Wikipedia works by letting everyone write
articles that are then often corrected by experts. "Take my word for
it," writes Mr. Colman. "I’ve spent the past five years trying to get
scholars from elite universities, including Stanford, to bring their
ideas to the outside world, and it’s often not their first priority.
They just have too many other things competing for their time." Others
have pointed out that Google's project, called knol, is similar to other
efforts to create authoritative topic pages, like
Squidoo. There is
at least one key factor in Google's favor though. Knol authors stand to
make money for their efforts. "At the discretion of the author, a knol
may include ads," Google's Udi Manber, said in a statement announcing
the service. "If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide
the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those
ads." Those ad dollars would be more than professors make for writing
journal articles, which are usually written for no compensation at all.
. . .
There is at least one key factor in Google’s
favor though. Knol authors stand to make money for their efforts.
“At the discretion of the author, a knol may
include ads,” Google’s Udi Manber, said in a statement announcing the
service. “If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the
author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads.”
Those ad dollars would be more than professors
make for writing journal articles, which are usually written for no
compensation at all.
CiteBase
Citebase is a trial service that allows researchers
to search across free, full-text research literature
ePrint archives, with results ranked according to
criteria such as citation impact.
Gateway to ePrints
A listing of ePrint servers and open access
repository search tools.
Google Scholar
A search tool for scholarly citations and abstracts,
many of which link to full text articles, book
chapters, working papers and other forms of
scholarly publishing. It includes content from many
open access journals and repositories.
OAIster
A search tool for cross-archive searching of more
than 540 separate digital collections and archives,
including arXiv, CiteBase, ANU ePrints, ePrintsUQ,
and others.
Scirus
A search tool for online journals and Web sites in
the sciences.
Borrowing a page from the popular video-sharing
site YouTube, a new online service lets people upload and share their
papers or entire books via a social-network interface. But will a format
that works for videos translate to documents?
It’s called
iPaper,
and it uses a Flash-based document reader that can
be embedded into a Web page. The experience of reading neatly formatted
text inside a fixed box feels a bit like using an old microfilm reader,
except that you can search the documents or e-mail them to friends.
The company behind the technology, Scribd, also
offers a
library of
iPaper documents and invites users to set up
an account to post their own written works. And, just like on YouTube,
users can comment about each document, give it a rating, and view
related works.
Also like on YouTube, some of the most popular
items in the collection are on the lighter side. One document that is in
the top 10 “most viewed” is called
“It seems this essay was written while the guy was high, hilarious!”
It is a seven-page paper that appears to have been
written for a college course but is full of salty language. The document
includes the written comments of the professor who graded it, and it
ends with a handwritten note: “please see after class to discuss your
paper.”
Social scientists and business scholars often use SSRN (not free) ---
http://www.ssrn.com/
If you have access to a college library, most colleges generally have
paid subscriptions to enormous scholarly literature databases that are not
available freely online. Serious scholars obtain access to these vast
literature databases.
Zotero is a
free,
open source extension
for the
Firefox browser, that
enables users to collect, manage, and cite
research from all types of sources from the
browser. It is partly a piece of
reference management software,
used to manage
bibliographies and
references
when writing essays and articles. On many major
research websites such as digital libraries,
Google Scholar, or
even
Amazon.com, Zotero
detects when a book, article, or other resource
is being viewed and with a mouse click finds and
saves the full reference information to a local
file. If the source is an online article or web
page, Zotero can optionally store a local copy
of the source. Users can then add notes, tags,
and their own
metadata through the
in-browser interface. Selections of the local
reference library data can later be exported as
formatted bibliographies.
The program is produced by
the
Center for History and New Media
of
George Mason University
and is currently available
in public beta. It is open and extensible,
allowing other users to contribute citation
styles and site translators, and more generally
for others who are building digital tools for
researchers to expand the platform. The
name is from
Albanian language "to
master".
It is aimed at replacing
the more cumbersome traditional
reference management software,
originally designed to
meet the demands of offline research
Zotero is a tool for
storing, retrieving, organizing, and annotating
digital documents. It has been available for not
quite a year. I started using it about six weeks
ago, and am still learning some of the fine
points, but feel sufficient enthusiasm about
Zotero
to recommend it to anyone doing research online.
If very much of your work involves material from
JSTOR, for example – or if you find it necessary
to collect bibliographical references, or to
locate Web-based publications that you expect to
cite in your own work — then Zotero is worth
knowing how to use. (You can install it on your
computer for free; more on that in due course.)
Now, my highest qualification for
testing a digital tool is, perhaps, that I have no
qualifications for testing a digital tool. That is not as
paradoxical as it sounds. The limits of my technological
competence are very quickly reached. My command of the laptop
computer consists primarily of the ability to (1) turn it on and
(2) type stuff. This condition entails certain disadvantages
(the mockery of nieces and nephews, for example) but it makes
for a pretty good guinea pig.
And in that respect, I can report that
the folks at George Mason University’s Center for History and
New Media have done an exemplary job in designing Zotero. A
relatively clueless person can learn to use it without
exhaustive effort.
Still, it seems as if institutions that
do not currently do so might want to offer tutorials on Zotero
for faculty and students who may lack whatever gene makes for an
intuitive grasp of software. Academic librarians are probably
the best people to offer instruction. Aside from being digitally
savvy, they may be the people at a university in the best
position to appreciate the range of uses to which Zotero can be
put.
For the absolute newbie, however, let
me explain what Zotero is — or rather, what it allows you to do.
I’ll also mention a couple of problems or limitations. Zotero is
still under development and will doubtless become more powerful
(that is, more useful) in later releases. But the version now
available has numerous valuable features that far outweigh any
glitches.
Suppose you go online to gather
material on some aspect of a book you are writing. In the course
of a few hours, you might find several promising titles in the
library catalog, a few more with Amazon, a dozen useful papers
via JSTOR, and three blog entries by scholars who are thinking
aloud about some matter tangential to your project.
Continued in article
Using Speech Recognition in a Search Engine Boston-based startup EveryZing
has launched a search engine that it hopes will change the
way that people search for audio and video online. Formerly known as PodZinger,
a podcast search engine, EveryZing is leveraging speech systems developed by
technology companyBBN
that can convert spoken words into searchable text with about 80 percent
accuracy. This bests other commercially available systems, says EveryZing CEO
Tom Wilde.
Kate Greene, "More-Accurate Video Search: Speech-recognition software
could improve video search," MIT's Technology Review, June 12, 2007 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/18847/
The University Channel makes videos of
academic lectures and events from all over the world available to the
public. It is a place where academics can air their ideas and present
research in a full-length, uncut format. Contributors with greater video
production capabilities can submit original productions.
The University Channel presents ideas in a
way commercial news or public affairs programming cannot. Because it is
neither constrained by time nor dependent upon commercial feedback, the
University Channel's video content can be broad and flexible enough to cover
the full gamut of academic investigation.
While it has unlimited potential, the
University Channel begins with a focus on public and international affairs,
because this is an area which lends itself most naturally to a many-sided
discussion. Perhaps of greatest advantage to universities who seek to expand
their dialog with overseas institutions and international affairs, the
University Channel can "go global" and become a truly international forum.
The University Channel aims to become,
literally, a "channel" for important thought, to be heard in its entirety.
Television has become so much a part of the fabric of our world that it
should be more than an academic interest. It should be an academic tool.
The University Channel project is an
initiative of Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and
International Affairs, which is leading the effort to build university
membership and distribution partners. Technical support, advice and services
are provided through the generosity of Princeton University's Office of
Information Technology. Digital video solutions courtesy of Princeton Server
Group.
For those users who are finding their current RSS
feed software a bit unruly, they may wish to check out this latest version
of the Advanced RSS Mixer. The application can be used to combine different
RSS feeds into one aggregate feed, and it also contains a built-in RSS
keyword filter. The basic interface is quite easy to use, and for keeping
track of RSS feeds, this application is most handy. This version is
compatible with computers running Windows 95 and newer.
CatsCradle 3.5 ---
http://www.stormdance.net/software/catscradle/overview.htm
Many websurfers enjoy going to sites that might be based
in other countries, and as such, they might very well encounter a different
language. With CatsCradle 3.5, these persons need worry no more, as this
application can be used to translate entire websites in such languages as Thai,
Chinese, Japanese, and Russian. This version is compatible with all computers
running Windows XP or 2000. (Scout Report, September 1, 2006)
Compfight describes its purpose as "a search
engine tailored for visual inspiration." It is a bit different than
other mainstream photo search engines, and visitors can get started by
clicking on the "Show me what compfight can do" link. Compfight returns
grids of images organized by license type, text tags, and those that are
"safe" for all audiences. Visitors can also sign up for their Twitter
feed and also send them feedback. Compfight is compatible with all
operating systems.
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Question
What new online people finders are making it easier to find the whereabouts of
people in your past? Hint: One of the sites has very large and pointed ears.
Zaba Search free database of names, addresses, birth dates,
and phone numbers. Social security numbers and background checks are also
available for a fee ---
http://www.zabasearch.com/
"Searching for Humans: Various websites are trying to make it easier to
find friends and colleagues online," by Erica Naone, MIT's Technology Review,
August 20, 2007 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19270/
Jaideep Singh,
cofounder of the new people-search
engine
Spock,
says he wants to build a profile for
every person in the world. To do
this, he plans to combine the power
of search algorithms with online
social networks.
Singh says he got the idea for Spock
while looking for people with
specific areas of expertise among
his contacts in Microsoft Outlook.
Although he has two or three
thousand people listed, he could
only find people he was already
thinking about.
Spock is designed to solve that
problem by allowing users to search
for tags--such as "saxophonist" or
"venture capitalist"--and then view
a list of people associated with
those tags. Singh could have
manually entered tags for each of
his contacts into Microsoft Outlook,
but capturing every interest of each
particular individual would be
time-consuming. Spock uses a
combination of human and machine
intelligence to automatically come
up with the tags: search algorithms
identify possible tags, and users
can vote on their relevance or add
new tags. Registered users can add
private tags to another person's
profile to organize their contacts
based on information that they don't
want to share. For example, a
contentious associate might be
privately labeled as such.
The
social-network component of the
website introduces an element of
crowd commentary into the search
process.
George W. Bush
is tagged
"miserable failure," with a vote of
87 to 31 in favor of the tag's
relevance as of this writing. Users
aren't allowed to vote anonymously,
and the tag links to the profiles of
people who voted.
Singh hopes
social networks will also help with
one of the main problems in people
search: teaching the system to
recognize that two separate entries
refer to a single person--a problem
called entity resolution. For
example, a single person might have
a
MySpace
page, a
Linked In
profile, and a write-up on a company
website.
Steven Whang,
an
entity-resolution researcher at
Stanford University, says that there
are several aspects to the problem:
getting the system to compare two
entries and decide whether they are
related, merging related entries
without repetition, and comparing
information from a myriad of
possible sources online. Finally,
Whang says, there is a risk of
merging two entries that should not
be merged, as in the case of a name
like Robin, which is used by both
men and women.
Many of the
people-search engines try to get
around these problems by encouraging
people to claim and manage their own
profiles, although Whang notes that
this is a labor-intensive approach.
Although there are many sites where
people could claim their profiles,
Singh says he thinks one engine will
eventually dominate, and people will
make the effort to claim profiles
there. Bryan Burdick, chief
operating officer of the
business-search site
Zoominfo,
says that 10,000 people a week claim
their profiles on Zoom, in spite of
having to provide their credit-card
numbers to do so.
Singh has also
introduced the
Spock Challenge, a
competition to design a better
entity-resolution algorithm. He says
that 1,400 researchers have already
downloaded the data set, and they
will compete for a $50,000 prize,
which will be awarded in November.
Continued in article
The Accoona Super Target search engine is at
http://www.accoona.com/ That being said, Accoona looks, at first glance, not
much different than other search engines — including Google itself. Its
bare-bones initial interface follows the same design: A central search field
with buttons that let you search the entire Web or confine your search to news
or business sources. Searching On Scott I started with a general Web search on
"Scott Joplin" on Accoona and Google, and found quite a bit of disparity in the
results (112,393 for Accoona and 4,130,000 for Google). When I did a search on
the phrase "mp3 players," I got similar results: Accoona came up with 6,031,343
results, while Google boasted 187,000,000. Quite frankly, while I appreciated
Google's higher numbers, that alone wouldn't have made Google my preferred
search engine — how many people go past the fifth page of results, anyway? There
was also some variation in which sites came up in what order, but again, there
were no really important differences.
Barbara Krasnoff, "Accoona: A New Google Alternative? The latest search engine
to hit the Web, Accoona offers additional business info and a nice filtering
ability. But is that enough? InternetWeek, March 20, 2006 ---
http://internetweek.cmp.com/handson/183700172
Academics should remember that Google Scholar greatly narrows down the search
hits ---
http://scholar.google.com/
Fee Based Google
Specialized Services (including an enterprise-level
search appliance) Google Inc. added two beefier Minis to
its line of business search appliances. The Mountain View,
Calif.company said Minis
are now available with
capacities of 200,000 documents and 300,000 documents
for $5,995 and $8,995, respectively. The new versions
were in addition to the current 100,000-document
appliance that sells for $2,995. Google also sells an
enterprise-level appliance that can search up to 15
million documents. The device starts at $30,000 for
searching up to 500,000 documents.
Antone Gonsalves, "Google Unveils Two Search
Appliances," InternetWeek, January 12, 2006 ---
http://www.internetweek.cmp.com/showArticle.jhtml?sssdmh=dm4.163237&articleId=175804113
Question
What is Boxxet (box set) and why might it be the next big thing when
searching on the Web in your discipline?
At the O'Reilly
Emerging Technology Conference in San
Diego this week, a new software
application was introduced, called
Boxxet
(pronounced "box set"), which allows
online interest groups to form by
aggregating content from users, instead
of the more traditional way of
networking around a person or event. The
software is meant to build communities
by allowing users to gather and rate
search information. It operates on the
assumption that in a group of 100
people, at least three will rate items
for relevance. Boxxet won't be
available to the public for another
couple of months, but free invitations
to try it out are available on their
website. The software is meant to build
communities by allowing users to gather
and rate search information. It operates
on the assumption that in a group of 100
people, at least three will rate items
for relevance. Boxxet won't be
available to the public for another
couple of months, but free invitations
to try it out are available on their
website.Conference organizer Tim
O'Reilly, who cited Boxxet in his
keynote address, says he's big on the
company because it solves a fundamental
issue with social software. "The problem
with social networks is they're
artificial -- they aren't 'your'
network," he says. "Boxxet is an
infrastructure to let you develop your
own social network."
Michael Fitzgerald, "Beyond Google:
Collective Searching A new kind of
search engine could make the act of Web
searching more sociable," MIT's
Technology Review, March 9, 2006 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/InfoTech/wtr_16526,258,p1.html
Beyond Google with Specialized Search Engines Instead of trawling through
billions of Web pages to find results, the way the big
engines do, vertical engines limit their searches to
industry-specific sites. And they usually serve up lists
of actual things -- such as houses for sale or open jobs
-- instead of links to pages where you might find them.
So you spend less time skimming through irrelevant links
to find what you want. On top of that, the sites let you
filter the results by factors such as salary, price or
location. "Often, a specialized database can take you
directly" to the most useful information and save you
time, says Gary Price, news editor of the Search Engine
Watch site. "Every useful result can't be in the first
few results from a major Web engine, and that's where
most people look."
Kevin J. Delaney, "Beyond Google: Yes, there are
other search engines. And some may even work better for
you," The Wall Street Journal, December 19, 2005;
Page R1 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113459260842822579.html?mod=todays_us_the_journal_report
Here's
a look at some common search tasks -- and a
sampling of specialized search engines that
will get you what you're looking for.
If you go to a big search engine
looking for background on a certain
topic, you'll usually get a series
of links to other pages -- which
means more surfing to get what you
want. Answers.com, formerly known as
GuruNet, cuts out the middleman by
collecting all the information and
organizing it into a Web page.
Type "Internet" into the site, for
example, and it displays a
comprehensive history and
explanation of the Internet, with
entries culled from the Computer
Desktop Encyclopedia, Columbia
University Press Encyclopedia,
Wikipedia and other sources. The top
results from Google on a recent day,
by contrast, included the sites of
Microsoft's Internet Explorer
software and an online movie
database.
"We see
ourselves as complementary to search
engines," says Bob Rosenschein,
chairman and chief executive of
Answers
Corp. in
Jerusalem, which offers the service.
Indeed, Google's results page for
some queries includes a "definition"
link that takes users to the
Answers.com results for the same
query.
Conduct U.S. Government Searches
(including sites for buying goods and services from the Feds) ---
http://www.firstgov.gov/
"Federal Web Search Upgraded:
Contractor-Run Service Boasts Answers in a Click
or Two." by Caroline E. Mayer, The Washington
Post, February 18, 2006 ---
Click Here
Need to know how
many calories are in that margarita you
drank last night?
The temperature at
the beach you hope to go to this weekend?
How many minutes
your flight will be delayed because of high
winds in Newark?
Or the winning
number in the Pennsylvania lottery?
The answers are at
a comprehensive one-stop federal Web site,
FirstGov.gov, the official gateway to
federal, state and local government Web
sites and documents.
The nearly
six-year-old Web site, which has won
innovation awards for being
consumer-friendly, has just been updated to
make it easier for consumers, businesses and
federal employees to find a mind-boggling
array of information from A (airline
complaints) to Z (Zip codes). With a click
or two of the mouse, users can download tax
forms, collect all sorts of economic trivia
or play educational online games to learn
about consumer scams and how to avoid them,
of course.
FirstGov launched a
powerful new search engine last month,
expanding the number of accessible documents
from 8 million to 40 million, including more
state and local Web sites. Perhaps equally
significant for time-constrained browsers,
the new search engine uses improved
algorithms to provide more relevant results.
With the old search
engine, for example, a search for "baseball"
brought up the Web site Afterschool.gov
because it features a picture of a boy
holding a baseball bat. With the new search
engine, that same search steers you to a
list of World Series winners. (Who knew the
government even had such information?)
Using the old
search engine, a person who typed "Social
Security" in the search box would get a link
to the Social Security Administration and
related Web sites, including the President's
Commission to Strengthen Social Security.
The same search
today turns up a list of frequently asked
questions, such as "What are the Social
Security and Medicare increases the
government has in store for 2006?" or "How
do I contact Social Security's nationwide
Toll-Free Hotline?" There is also a special
section where a browser can further refine
the field of research by choosing retirement
or disability, as well as a tab to easily
download federal forms.
Consumers in the
market for a new car can just enter a make
and model to get gas mileage and crash test
results on a single page. In the past, it
would have taken visits to two different
government Web sites (one by the
Environmental Protection Agency, the other
by the National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration) to get the data.
"All this
information is out in the government, but it
does you no good if you can't find it," said
M.J. Pizzella, associate administrator of
the General Services Administration's Office
of Citizen Services and Communications,
which oversees FirstGov.gov.
The government had
been running its own search operations -- at
an estimated annual cost of $3.2 million.
The new search engine is being operated for
$1.8 million a year under a contract with
two private companies: Microsoft Corp. and
Vivisimo Inc.
FirstGov.gov also
offers podcasts, as well as Espanol.gov for
Spanish-speaking consumers.
By presenting
frequently asked questions and special
sections to allow consumers to refine their
initial search, FirstGov is more than a
Google for government, said Larry Freed,
president of ForeSee Results, a Michigan
firm that measures customer satisfaction of
Internet sites. "It's sort of a Google-plus"
because you do not have to rely on scrolling
through pages and pages of search results to
find what you want, Freed said.
Launched in the
last days of the Clinton administration,
FirstGov was revamped in 2002 to make it
easier to use. At that time, the goal was
"three clicks to service." But under the
latest redesign, just one or two clicks may
be all that is needed.
When the site began, "customer satisfaction
was fairly low," Freed said. But the
government "has made great strides," he
said. "Is the government really building Web
sites for me? They are, and it's a win-win
for the government and consumers. Consumers
are getting more information, and the
government is lowering its cost by making it
easier to get information off the Web,"
helping reduce calls to call centers.
Jensen Comment
What I found is that the Internet makes me aware
of knowledge that I certainly would not have
stumbled upon before the days of the Internet.
Some may argue that this is like learning a
little bit about a lot of things. But I'm
currently writing a technical article invited by
a journal. The Internet has most certainly
helped me drill deeper and deeper to learn more
about an angel on the head of a pin.
Edelman, a 33-year-old associate professor,
mixes scholarship, lucrative consulting and
a digital version of the 1960s-style
activism of his family, including his aunt,
Marian Wright Edelman, the civil-rights and
children’s advocate. While he ferrets out
misdeeds on the Internet, his multiple roles
have put his own work under scrutiny.
“The Internet is what we make of it,” said
Edelman, who arrived at his Ivy League
office in jeans and sneakers this week after
commuting by bicycle through Boston’s snowy
streets. “We can shape it through diligence,
by exposing the folks who are making it less
good than it ought to be, like the
neighborhood watch, or the busybody neighbor
who yells at you when you throw your
cigarette butt on the street.”
Paid Crusades
Unlike bloggers who have long formed a
volunteer police force on the Internet,
Edelman embarks on paid crusades that raise
questions about whether he can remain
objective in his academic roles as scholar
and teacher.
In a move that elevated his profile in the
stock market and prompted a dispute about
his financial disclosures, he published a
blog on Jan. 28 that accused Internet video
and advertising purveyor Blinkx Plc of using
hidden software to inflate traffic counts.
His posting caused Blinkx shares to fall the
most in the company’s history.
Blinkx responded to Edelman’s broadside with
a statement saying the company “strongly
refutes” his assertions and conclusions.
Harvard pressed Edelman to say more about
his clients, prompting him to disclose that
they included two U.S. investors. Their
names still aren’t known.
While taking on some giants, such as Google
Inc. and Facebook Inc., Edelman has worked
for others, including Microsoft Corp. Google
has said that he’s biased and hasn’t been
forthright enough in disclosing that he’s a
paid consultant to Microsoft.
FTC Crackdown
Edelman earns more from his outside
activities than from his salary as a
professor, which isn’t unusual among
business school faculty, he said. His work
has influenced the Federal Trade Commission
and New York Attorney General’s Office,
among other regulators, in their crackdown
on companies.
“He’s part academic
and part cyber sleuth,” said
Ken Dreifach,
former chief of the Internet bureau of the
New York Attorney General’s Office, whose
prosecutors tracked Edelman’s blog posts as
they filed cases against companies using
malicious software.
Edelman is expected to come up for tenure,
academia’s guarantee of job security, at the
end of 2015. While his credentials include a
law degree and economics doctorate, both
from Harvard, his attacks on companies are
unusual at the business school, an
institution better known for case studies
celebrating successes.
Critical Letter
When he was considered for promotion to
associate professor from assistant a few
years ago, Edelman said an outside reviewer
contacted by the school wrote a critical
letter: “Ben seems not to like businesses. I
thought this was a business school.” He was
promoted anyway.
Edelman’s outside
consulting work has been encouraged by
Harvard and is helping make the Internet a
better place, said
Brian Kenny,
Harvard Business School’s chief marketing
and communications officer.
Since his Blinkx post, entitled “The Darker
Side of Blinkx,” the shares have declined 37
percent. After its initial statement
reacting on Jan. 30, the company has
declined to comment.
Edelman
initially wrote that he prepared the
research for an unnamed client.
Harvard Business School
said that
disclosure wasn’t enough under its
conflict-of-interest rules, which require
professors to disclose paid and unpaid
outside activities related to work available
to the public. Harvard asked Edelman to say
more.
Revised Disclosure
In his enhanced disclosure, Edelman said
last week he was paid by two U.S. investors
that jointly hired him. He didn’t name them,
say how much he was paid or whether they
were betting against, or shorting, the
stock.
In interviews, Edelman said his contract
prohibited him from disclosing that
information. Harvard is satisfied with his
revised disclosure, Kenny said.
We do not claim comprehensiveness in
recording challenges as research suggests
that for each challenge reported there are
as many as four or five that go unreported.
In addition, OIF has only been collecting
data about banned banned books since 1990,
so we do not have any lists of frequently
challenged books or authors before that
date.
How is the list of most challenged books
tabulated?
The Office for Intellectual
Freedom collects information from two
sources: newspapers and reports submitted by
individuals, some of whom use the
Challenge Reporting Form. All challenges
are compiled into a database. Reports of
challenges culled from newspapers across the
country are compiled in the bimonthly
Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom
(published by the ALA, $50 per year for a
digital subscription); those reports are
then compiled in the
Banned Books Week Resource Guide.
Challenges reported to the ALA by
individuals are kept confidential. In these
cases, ALA will release only the title of
the book being challenged, the state and the
type of institution (school, public
library). The name of the institution and
its town will not be disclosed.
Where can you find more information on why a
particular book was banned?
Visit your local public library and
ask your librarian.
Find or purchase the latest
Banned Books Week Resource Guide,
updated every three years, which may be
available at or through your local
public library.
E-mail the ALA Office for
Intellectual Freedom to ask about a
specific book. A staff member will reply
with any information the office has on
file. Please limit your inquiry to one
book. If you would like information on
more than one book, please consider
purchasing the Banned Books Week
Resource Guide.
If the information you need is not listed
in the links to the left, please feel free
to contact the Office for Intellectual
Freedom at (800) 545-2433, ext. 4220, or
oif@ala.org.
It’s about to get a
little easier—emphasis on “a little”—for
users without subscriptions to tap JSTOR’s
enormous digital archive of journal
articles. In the coming weeks, JSTOR will
make available the beta version of a new
program,
Register & Read,
which will give researchers read-only access
to some journal articles, no payment
required. All users have to do is to sign up
for a free “MyJSTOR” account, which will
create a virtual shelf on which to store the
desired articles.
But there are limits. Users won’t be able to
download the articles; they will be able to
access only three at a time, and there will
be a minimum viewing time frame of 14 days
per article, which means that a user can’t
consume lots of content in a short period.
Depending on the journal and the publisher,
users may have an option to pay for and
download an article if they choose.
To start, the program will feature articles
from 70 journals. Included in the beta phase
are American Anthropologist, the
American Historical Review,
Ecology, Modern Language Review,
PMLA, College English, the
Journal of Geology, the Journal
of Political Economy, Film
Quarterly, Representations,
and the American Journal of Psychology
.
The 7o journals chosen “represent
approximately 18 percent of the annual
turn-away traffic on JSTOR,” the
organization said in an announcement
previewing Register & Read. “Once we
evaluate how the beta is going, including
any impact on publishers’ sales of single
articles, and make any needed initial
adjustments to the approach, we expect to
release hundreds more journals into the
program.”
Every year, JSTOR said, it turns away almost
150 million individual attempts to gain
access to articles. “We are committed to
expanding access to scholarly content to all
those who need it,” the group said. Register
& Read is one attempt to do that.
In September 2011,
JSTOR also opened up global access to its
Early Journal Content.
According to Heidi
McGregor, a spokeswoman for the Ithaka
group, JSTOR’s parent organization, there
have been 2.35 million accesses of the Early
Journal Content from September 2011 through
December 2011. “About 50% of this usage is
coming from users we know are at
institutions that participate in JSTOR (e.g.
we recognize their IP address), and the
other 50% is not,” she said in an
e-mail. ”We absolutely consider this to be a
success. In the first four months after
launch, we are seeing over 1 million
accesses to this content by people who would
not have had access previously. This is at
the core of our mission, and we’re thrilled
with this result. The Register & Read beta
is an exciting next step that we are taking,
working closely with our publisher partners
who own this content.”
Continued in
article
Jensen Comment
Most colleges pay for library subscription
access to JSTOR by students, faculty, and staff.
As an emeritus professor at Trinity University
I've been able to access JSTOR since I retired
in 2006.
One search route
I commonly take is to first find a reference to
an article in MAAW ---
http://maaw.info/
Thank you Jim Martin for this tremendous open
sharing MAAW site.
Then most often I download the article from
JSTOR unless the publisher provides access
either for free or because I subscribe to the
journal in question. But even if I have a
current subscription to a journal such as The
Accounting Review, the publisher of TAR does
not have online archives going back nearly as
far as JSTOR. So if I want a 1971 TAR article I
will go to JSTOR. TAR only has online archives
going back to 1999. TAR commenced publishing
journal articles in 1925.
It's worthwhile
to first check the publisher's site before going
to JSTOR. For example, the free archived files
(since 1974) for the Accounting Historians
Journal are better at the AHJ site than at
the JSTOR site ---
http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/general_library/dac/files/ahj.html
IBM Corp. and Yahoo
Inc. are teaming up to offer a free
data-search tool for businesses, a quirky
move challenging Google Inc. and other
corporate-search specialists in a blossoming
market.
IBM already sells a
business-focused search product, OmniFind,
that lets organizations comb through
internal documents. This free new edition of
OmniFind will be limited in the number of
documents it can query, but it will combine
the results with Web searches powered by
Yahoo.
IBM hopes the
service, being announced Wednesday, bolsters
its overall efforts to improve its dealings
with small companies.
More broadly,
though, Yahoo and IBM expect their
partnership to shake up the field of
''enterprise search,'' in which leading
providers such as Google, Autonomy Corp. and
Norway-based FAST are seeing forays from
business software giants such as Microsoft
Corp., Oracle Corp. and SAP AG.
Google has been
dominant at the lower end of the market
selling ''search appliances'' that begin at
$2,000 and range up to $30,000. The
top-of-the-line version can comb through
500,000 documents. Not coincidentally, that
is the same limit that IBM and Yahoo have
set for their free software -- although
Google's product includes hardware that
operates the search service.
''They're going to
create a real headache for Google at that
tier,'' said Forrester Research analyst
Matthew Brown.
Of course, whatever
pain Google feels ought to be put in context
-- it gets 99 percent of its revenue from
advertising, not from selling search
appliances.
While Yahoo and IBM
may eventually expand their partnership,
Yahoo will focus on the Web-search aspect of
the equation and not venture into enterprise
search, said Eckart Walther, Yahoo's vice
president of product management for search.
That would be in keeping with Yahoo's recent
pledge to stay focused on its consumer
audience and advertising network -- a step
aimed at resolving internal strife over a
muddled strategy.
Indeed, Forrester's
Brown said it appears that Yahoo is most
interested in using the IBM deal to
strengthen its brand in corporate
environments and get people using Yahoo Web
search at work more often.
Touch User
Interface Links Podcasts To Printed Text Somatic Digital LLC said Friday
it has developed technology that lets publishers
integrate podcasts into their paper and ink content. The
tool is offered through the BookDesigner software suite.
The software tool allows publishers tie a
podcast
to a paper-based text, supplement or magazine, the
company said. The reader touches the page in a printed
book and a podcast is directed to the reader’s computer
or download to an MP3 player through Bluetooth
technology. The podcast can serve as a supplement to the
paper-based product bringing new revenue opportunities
to publishers and authors, the company said.
Laurie Sullivazn, "Touch User Interface Links Podcasts
To Printed Text," Information Week, December 16,
2005 ---
http://www.internetweek.cmp.com/showArticle.jhtml?sssdmh=dm4.161133&articleId=175004719
Question
How do you get a great Wikipedia module about yourself?
Reply from Bob Jensen on August 20, 2014
Hi David,
There are a few academic accountants written up in Wikipedia, but the
modules are generally sparse.
Then compare the Wikipedia module of Bill Beaver with that of some
Wikipedia modules that go on and on such as the Wikipedia module for Steven
Pinker ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Pinker
Especially note the cross referencing of Pinker to other parts of Wikipedia.
People are not allowed to write their own Wikipedia modules.
I think the great Wikipedia modules for people like
Steven Pinker are initially written by their publishers who consider a great
Wikipedia module of an author important to selling that author's books.
The AICPA published the book of Bob Herz. I think as a publisher the
AICPA is missing the boat by not writing a fantastic Wikipedia module for
Bob.
I think the University of Georgia's modules can be
improved upon. I would have senior faculty write their own modules and
then have the PR department launder those modules before submitting them
to Wikipedia.
This is an amazing innovation from one of the all-time geniuses of
mathematics and computing
"Computer Genius Builds Language That Lets Anyone Calculate Anything," by
Andy Kiersz, Business Insider, March 10, 2014 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/wolfram-language-demo-2014-3
Controversial
mathematician Stephen Wolfram is about to release a programming language
with the goal of being able to quickly do just about any calculation or
visualization on just about any kind of data a person could want.
Wolfram, creator
of the widely used mathematical software
Mathematica and
the "computational knowledge engine"
Wolfram|Alpha,
has announced the forthcoming release of the
Wolfram Language, the
underlying programming language powering those two pieces of software.
Jensen Comment
Increasingly professors complain that Wolfram Alpha inhibits learning in
mathematics unless assignments, quizzes, and examinations are administered in
tightly controlled conditions where students cannot gain access to Wolfram
Alpha.
The summer months saw a sharp drop in user interest
in Wolfram Alpha, the online "computational knowledge engine" that
calculates everything from planetary distances to cholesterol levels and
generates (from the topics it knows) customized charts and graphics not
available from general search engines. In the peak days after the May 15
launch, traffic soared to around 2.8 million daily visitors--but then hit a
trough of 200,000 in July, according to the company. But now, with traffic
now drifting back toward the 300,000 mark, the site is pinning its hopes
partly on a new application programming interface (API) to leverage the
online tool in websites, online publishing, desktop applications and mobile
devices. An iPhone app will be one of the early examples.
It will be interesting to see how third-parties
leverage the depth of Wolfram Alpha's knowledge in math, science, geography,
and engineering beyond the simple search-engine-like interface that now
confronts users. Right now, the engine has a ways to go to meet the goal of
its brainchild, the physicist Stephen Wolfram, to "make all systematic
knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone."
The rebound toward 300,000 visitors may reflect a
back-to-school bump, with students seeing the engine as a great tool for
doing their math and science homework, according to Schoeller Porter, who
heads up Wolfram's API program. (Indeed, the engine is throwing a homework
day event next week to promote further such use.) "We had an enormous launch
with a huge amount of interest and a lot of traffic. The traffic fell off,
and we fully expected that; it was a nice relaxation for us, and it let us
fix code and put in new features," he told me this morning. "It followed a
kind of---I won't say overhyped--but a well-hyped launch." Wolfram Alpha is
built on Mathematica--Stephen Wolfram's comprehensive repository of
mathematical and scientific formulae--and fed by datasets curated by Wolfram
Research.
Tags: Internet, search, Web 2.0, search engine, wolfram alpha
Comments
Looking the gift horse in the mouth I have a
great personal and potential professional interest in Wolfram Alpha, but
I have a significant amount of uncertainty about the commercial terms of
the yet to be determined business model that will eventually be settled
on. I'm sure many others share this concern, and it will limit adoption
of Wolfram Alpha and its API until clarified.
Everyone knows a lot about
something, whether it's quasars, quilting,
or crayons. But the converse is also true: there
are a lot of things that most people know
nothing about. And unfortunately, that doesn't
seem to stop them from sharing their opinions.
That's one lesson I took away from my recent
survey of the growing collection of social
question-and-answer websites, where members can
post questions, answer other members' questions,
and rate other members' answers to their
questions--all for free. The Wikipedia-like,
quintessentially Web 2.0
premise of these ventures--which include
Yahoo Answers,
Microsoft's
Live QnA,
AnswerBag,
Yedda,
Wondir, and Amazon's new
Askville--is
that the average citizen is an untapped well of
wisdom.
But
it takes a lot of sifting to get truly useful
information from these sites. Each boasts a core
of devoted members who leave thorough and
well-documented answers to the questions they
deem worthy. And most of the sites have systems
for rating the performance or experience of
answerers, which makes it easier to assess their
reliability, while also inspiring members to
compete with one another to give the best
answers. But not all of the Q&A sites do this
equally well; after all, the companies that run
these sites are selling advertising space, not
information.
In
an attempt to flush out the best of the bunch,
I've spent the past few days trying to identify
what unique advantages each one offers. I also
devised a diabolically difficult, two-part test.
First, I searched each site's archive for
existing answers to the question "Is there any
truth to the five-second rule?" (I meant the
rule about not eating food after it's been on
the floor for more than five seconds, not the
basketball rule about holding.)
Second, I posted the same two original questions
at each site: "Why did the Mormons settle in
Utah?" and "What is the best way to make a
grilled cheese sandwich?" The first question
called for factual, historical answers, while
the second simply invited people to share their
favorite sandwich-making methods and recipes. I
awarded each site up to three points for the
richness and originality of its features, and up
to three points for the quality of the answers
to my three questions, for a total of 12
possible points.
Features:
Launched in 2003,
AnswerBag is one of
the oldest Q&A
sites. Members get
points for asking
and answering
questions as well as
for rating other
members' questions
and answers. After
earning a certain
number of points,
members "level up"
from Beginner to
Novice, Contributor,
Wiz, Authority,
Expert, and
ultimately
Professor. Bloggers
or webmasters can
embed customized
AnswerBag "widgets"
in their own pages,
so that visitors to
a site about
restoring antiques,
for example, can ask
AnswerBag members
questions about
restoration.
Points: 1
Is
there any truth to
the five-second
rule?
All of AnswerBag's
answers about the
five-second rule
pertained to
basketball.
Points: 0
Why
did the Mormons
settle in Utah?
By press time--two
and a half days
after I posted the
question--I had
received only one
answer at AnswerBag.
Here it is, edited
for brevity (like
all the answers
quoted here): "The
church believes that
God directed Brigham
Young, Joseph
Smith's successor as
President of the
Church, to call for
the Mormons to
organize and migrate
west, beyond the
western frontier of
the United States to
start their own
community away from
traditional American
society." That's
more or less in line
with the best
answers to this
question at other
sites.
Points: 1
What
is the best way to
make a grilled
cheese sandwich?
I rated the answers
to this question
purely according to
their
mouthwateringness.
The best AnswerBag
answer, out of six:
"Grate cheddar
cheese or similiar
[sic] and then add
about a quarter of
the same amount of
Lancashire, cheshire
or similiar [sic]
crumbly white
cheese. Mix them
together with a
couple of spoonfuls
of milk until the
consistency goes
like thick cottage
cheese. Add lots of
black pepper. Spread
on lightly toasted
buttered bread and
put back under the
grill until the
cheese melts and is
golden brown.
Delish."
Points: 2
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
None of these free services is very good for accounting questions. For me,
Wondir did better with accounting questions than the other alternatives, but
none of these sites would be very helpful in answering questions about
accounting and tax rules.
Magellan is a
perl, CGI-based meta search engine, aimed at being highly evolutive. It provides
an extended query language that enables it to perform complex requests and check
the results before showing them.
Current state of scholarly cyberinfrastructure in the humanities and social
sciences
From the University of Illinois Issues in Scholarly Communication Blog
"Our Cultural Commonwealth"
The American Council of Learned Societies has just
issued a report, "Our Cultural Commonwealth," assessing the current state of
scholarly cyberinfrastructure in the humanities and social sciences and
making a series of recommendations on how it can be strengthened, enlarged
and maintained in the future.
John Unsworth, Dean and Professor, Graduate School
of Library and Information Science here at Illinois, chaired the Commission
that authored the report.
Deep links are mobile links that operate much like
hyperlinks, but instead of directing users to a web page, deep links send
them to a specific screen within a mobile application. There are three types
of deep linking technology in use today: basic deep links, deferred links,
and contextual deep links.
The Wall Street Journalincreased the billing rate for me to
$26 per month. This is reasonable considering that this thick thing is delivered
to my mailbox six days each week.
However, if I choose only the digital electronic version with no hard copy
delivery, I only save $4 per month --- which is now a bummer price, especially
for students.
Those of you who have access to your campus library electronic databases can
probably access archived WSJ articles using database subscriptions paid for by
your college or university.
The New York Times has a different free-access policy. I think you get
something like 15 articles free per month. However, for me this seems to
increase if I change Web browsers --- say from Firefox to Internet Explorer.
Please don't ask me why this works or if it is totally ethical.
Students and faculty of a college might be able to able to have
free access to NYT archives using databases subscribed toy by their college. One
such database is IfnoTrac Newstands.
Questions
How can you search for text embedded in stored images, especially books and
articles downloaded as images rather than text?
What if you could collect, in one
well-organized, searchable, private digital repository, all the notes you
create, clips from Web pages and emails you want to recall, dictated audio
memos, photos, key documents, and more?
Evernote --- http://www.evernote.com/
Perhaps the real "killer" feature of the program is that it has optical
character recognition (OCR), which allows users to search for text within stored
images. (there are free and fee options)
Features for Windows
Create
notes containing text, webclips, snapshots, to-dos, PDFs,
and more
Take photos
of everything from whiteboards to wine labels and
Evernote will make them searchable
Premium
users can attach any type of file to their notes
Looking to remember an image
you found? Or perhaps a helpful email link? Evernote makes this all
possible, and it can be used with a range of mobile devices as well. The
program works as a note-taking application as well, and everything a user
does with the program is automatically synchronized to their Evernote
account. Perhaps the real "killer" feature of the program is that it has
optical character recognition (OCR), which allows users to search for text
within stored images. This version of Evernote is compatible with
computers running Windows XP and Vista or Mac OS X 10.5 or 10.6.
What if you could collect,
in one well-organized, searchable, private digital repository, all the notes
you create, clips from Web pages and emails you want to recall, dictated
audio memos, photos, key documents, and more? And what if that repository
was constantly synchronized, so it was accessible through a Web browser and
through apps on your various computers and smart phones?
Well, such a service exists.
And it’s free. It’s called Evernote. I’ve been testing it for about a week
on a multiplicity of computers and phones, and found that it works very
well. Evernote is an excellent example of hybrid computing—using the “cloud”
online to store data and perform tasks, while still taking advantage of the
power and offline ability of local devices.
The idea behind Evernote is
to be a sort of digital file cabinet. It allows you to create “notebooks”
containing items called notes. These notes can range from text to photos to
many kinds of attached files. You can locate, group and peruse them quickly,
without having to dig through a computer’s file system. When I first
reviewed the product, back in 2005, Evernote was a Windows-only, purely
local information organizer. Now it’s a multi-platform, Internet-savvy,
synchronized place for your ideas.
You can sign up for Evernote
free at evernote.com, and use it entirely as a Web-based application,
through any of the major Web browsers. But Evernote also comes in customized
versions for a staggering array of devices: Windows and Macintosh computers,
and for all the major smart phones, including the iPhone; the BlackBerry;
phones running Google’s Android operating system; the latest Palm (PALM)
phones; and Windows Mobile phones.
This week, Evernote, which
is made by a small Silicon Valley company of the same name, is introducing a
totally revamped Windows version that brings the platform into parity with
the company’s previously more advanced Macintosh version.
I tested Evernote on two
Macs and two Windows PCs, as well as an iPhone, a Palm Pre phone and the new
Nexus One phone from Google (GOOG). I also tried free plug-ins the company
offers that make it easy to insert all or part of a Web page or email into
an Evernote note. These are available for the Internet Explorer, Firefox,
Safari and Chrome Web browsers, and for the Outlook email program. There are
also system-wide Evernote buttons, which make capturing notes quicker, for
Windows and the Mac.
I found Evernote works well
for gathering ideas for business or personal projects, hobbies, or events
you’re planning. When you see something or think of something you want to
add, you can do it from whatever computer or phone is handy, and it will
shortly appear on all of them.
Here are a few examples of
how I used Evernote. I typed notes to myself on my desktops and laptops. I
dictated a reminder to myself using the Evernote app on my iPhone. I used
the Nexus One’s camera to take a picture of a person’s business card. I also
copied text from Web pages, emails, and Word documents, and pasted them as
notes. I even attached whole files to notes.
Within a few minutes, all of
these notes were available on my personal Evernote Web site and from within
all the Evernote apps on my computers and phones. I could search through
them, email them, print them, group them with related items, or edit and
annotate them.
Every Evernote user also
gets a unique Evernote email address, and anything you email to that address
goes into your repository as a new note. You also can use Twitter to get a
note into Evernote.
The program has a few
extra-cool features. If you create a note from a photo that includes
printing, Evernote’s servers will try to figure out the words and make them
searchable. This worked well in my tests with photos of business cards. And
some smart-phone apps can save items directly into Evernote notes. One
example I tested successfully was the Associated Press news app on the
iPhone.
There are a few minor
downsides to Evernote. While there’s no overall limit to the amount of data
you can store, you can only upload 40 megabytes a month with the free
version, attach certain types of files to notes, and you are forced to view
ads. A premium version, which costs $5 a month, or $45 a year, increases the
quota to 500 megabytes monthly, removes the ads, allows attaching any file
type, and adds more features.
Also, I found the Evernote
programs and apps, while similar, differ slightly depending on the
capabilities of the platform they run on. Among the phone versions, for
instance, the iPhone app is by far the most full-featured, and is currently
the only one that can store whole notebooks offline, though the Android
version is due to get that feature soon. Finally, the Evernote plug-in
crashed Outlook on one of my Windows computers.
But, all in all, I
found Evernote to be a valuable, easy-to-use tool that simplified my work
and made good use of both the Internet and all my devices.
Jensen Comment
The video video introduction and links to a video library are at
http://www.evernote.com/about/video/
This is a product that I am probably going to install.
I am a academic volunteer in
website TestPrepPractice.net. Our website is related with various
standardized tests like GMAT, GRE, TOEFL, MCAT, LSAT, SAT and 50 other major
tests. We offer ample information through detailed articles regarding each
aspect of these tests. Our website also contains free practice tests,
customized according to the format and syllabus of the respective tests. The
content of the website is prepared by our efficient team of academic
volunteers.
In the above-mentioned page,
there are links and resources helpful for the students. We would be obliged
if you could add our website TestPrepPractice.net's free practice test page
link in the above-mentioned page. Students gathering authentic information
and practice material online shall greatly benefit from the link.
You are humbly requested to
assess the quality of free information and free practice tests offered to
students by us for different tests and then decide to place a link in your
article.
You shall agree that a link to
the following pages would be highly beneficial to students preparing for
standardized tests and for students looking for good quality test prep
information online.
Kindly, let me know if you
have any queries or concerns; I shall be glad to assist you in every way
possible. Thank you for your time and consideration.
Free pass to the "most comprehensive online research storehouse" It's a lofty ambition -- the Internet equivalent of
nonprofit public television: a user-supported resource that pays top academics
to create authoritative maps, articles, and links to third-party content related
to virtually any scholarly topic. But the vast scope of the project hasn't
stopped former high-flying Silicon Valley entrepreneur Joe Firmage from building
Digital Universe, a commercial-free storehouse of information four years in the
making.
"A Free Online Encyclopedia: Digital Universe, a nonprofit website, aims
to be the most comprehensive online research storehouse," MIT's Technology
Review, March 6, 2006 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/TR/wtr_16512,323,p1.html
Chinese-language version of Wikipedia China's biggest Internet search site, Baidu.com, has
launched a Chinese-language encyclopedia inspired by the cooperative reference
site Wikipedia, which the communist government bars China's Web surfers from
seeing. The Chinese service, which debuted in April, carries entries written by
users, but warns that it will delete content about sex, terrorism and attacks on
the communist government. Government censors blocked access last year to
Wikipedia, whose registered users have posted more than 1.1 million entries,
apparently due to concern about its references to Tibet, Taiwan and other
topics. The emergence of Baidu's encyclopedia reflects efforts by Chinese
entrepreneurs to take advantage of conditions created by the government's
efforts to simultaneously promote and control Internet use.
"Baidu, the most popular search engine in China, has launched a Chinese-language
version of Wikipedia," MIT's Technology Review, May 18, 2006 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=16896
"Co-Founder of Wikipedia Starts Spinoff With Academic Editors,"
University of Illinois Issues in Scholarly Communications blog, October
18, 2006 ---
http://www.library.uiuc.edu/blog/scholcomm/
Can scholars build a better version of Wikipedia?
Larry Sanger, a co-founder who has since become a critic of the open-source
encyclopedia, intends to find out.
This week Mr. Sanger announced the creation of the
Citizendium, an online, interactive encyclopedia that will be open to public
contributors but guided by academic editors. The site aims to give academics
more authorial control -- and a less combative environment -- than they find
on Wikipedia, which affords all users the same editing privileges, whether
they have any proven expertise or not.
The Citizendium, whose name is derived from
"citizen's compendium," will soon start a six-week pilot project to
determine many of its basic rules and operating procedures.
Mr. Sanger left Wikipedia at the end of 2002
because he felt it was too easy on vandals and too hard on scholars. There
is a lot to like about Wikipedia, he said, starting with the site's
open-source ethics and its commitment to "radical collaboration."
But in operation, he said, Wikipedia has flaws --
like its openness to anonymous contributors and its rough-and-tumble editing
process -- that have driven scholars away. With his new venture, Mr. Sanger
hopes to bring those professors back into the fold.
He plans to create for the site a "representative
democracy," in which self-appointed experts will oversee the editing and
shaping of articles. Any Web surfer, regardless of his or her credentials,
will be able to contribute to the Citizendium. But scholars with "the
qualifications typically needed for a tenure-track academic position" will
act as editors, he said, authorizing changes in articles and approving
entries they deem to be trustworthy.
A team of "constables" -- administrators who must
be more than 25 years old and hold at least a bachelor's degree, according
to the project's Web site -- will enforce the editors' dictates. "If an
editor says the article on Descartes should put his biography before his
philosophy, and someone changes that order, a constable comes in and changes
it back," said Mr. Sanger.
Of course the Wikipedia link to an unbelievable (nearly 1.5 million articles
to date) database in information (and some misinformation) is at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
"The Dangerous Side of Search Engines: Popular search engines
may lead you to rogue sites. Here's what you need to know to avoid dangerous
downloads, bogus sites, and spam," by Tom Spring, PC World via
The Washington Post, May 27, 2006 ---
Click Here
Who knew an innocent search for "screensavers"
could be so dangerous? It may actually be the riskiest word to type into
Google's search engine. Odds are, more than half of the links that Google
returns take you to Web sites loaded with either spyware or adware. You
might also face getting bombarded with spam if you register at one of those
sites with your e-mail address.
A recently released study, coauthored by McAfee and
anti-spyware activist Ben
Edelman , found that sponsored results from top
search engines AOL, Ask.com, Google, MSN, and Yahoo can often lead to Web
sites that contain spyware and scams, and are operated by people who love to
send out spam.
The
study concluded that an average of 9 percent of
sponsored results and 3 of organic search results link to questionable Web
sites. The study was based on analysis of the first five pages of search
results for each keyword tested.
According to the results of the study, the top four
most dangerous searches on Google are:
The study defined dangerous sites as those that
have one or a combination of the following characteristics: its downloads
contain spyware and/or adware; its pages contain embedded code that performs
browser exploits; the content is meant to deceive visitors in some way; it
sends out inordinate amounts of spam to e-mail accounts registered at the
site.
These results are a sobering wake-up call to Web
surfers, and they illustrate the changing nature of Internet threats today.
It used to be that most viruses and scams made their way to our PCs
via our inboxes . But thanks to security software
that's getting better at filtering out viruses, spam, and phishing attacks
from our e-mail, rogue elements are
having a difficult time booby-trapping our PCs.
"Scammers and spammers have clearly turned to
search engines to practice their trade," says Shane Keats, market strategist
for McAfee.
McAfee says that of the 1394 popular keywords it
typed into Google and AOL alone, 5 percent of the results returned links to
dangerous Web sites. Overall, MSN search results had the lowest percentage
of dangerous sites (3.9 percent) while Ask search results had the highest
percentage (6.1 percent).
Given the study's findings, it shouldn't come as a
big surprise that the company has a free tool, called McAfee SiteAdvisor,
for tackling the problems. In my tests I found it does a great job of
protecting you from the Web's dark side.
Since March McAfee has been offering a
browser plug-in that works with Mozilla Firefox
and
Microsoft Internet Explorer. SiteAdvisor puts a
little rectangular button in the bottom corner of the browser. If a site
you're visiting is safe, the SiteAdvisor button stays green. When you visit
a questionable Web site the button turns red or yellow (depending on the
risk level) and a little balloon expands with details on why SiteAdvisor has
rated the site as such.
SiteAdvisor ratings are based on threats that
include software downloads loaded with adware or spyware, malicious code
embedded in Web pages, phishing attempts and scams, and the amount of spam
that a registered user gets.
SiteAdvisor takes it a step further with Google,
MSN, and Yahoo. With these search engines, it puts a rating icon next to
individual results. This is a great safety feature and time saver, steering
you clear of dangerous sites before you make the mistake of clicking on a
link.
"Kid-Friendly Search Engines Filter Content," by Akeya Dickson, The
Washington Post, May 8, 2006 ---
Click Here
It's not unheard of these days for a child doing
online research for a school project to accidentally stumble into a porn
site or someplace else that's too dicey for a parent's comfort level.
Between e-mail filters, parental controls and
special software, there are plenty of tools meant to help parents keep their
children safe. The next target for fed-up parents: Internet search engines
such as Google and Yahoo.
The upside of the modern-day search engine -- an
index of Web sites on the Internet -- is also the downside. And when kids
research a report by tapping search words in Google or Yahoo, chances are
good that they may run across something they shouldn't see.
Christine Willig, president of Cincinnati-based
Thinkronize, said that one in four children across the country is exposed to
pornography by age 11 -- often over the Internet.
Her company's flagship product, NetTrekker, a
child-safe search engine featuring 180,000 sites that are regularly reviewed
by 400 volunteer teachers, has been in schools since 2000, including many in
Virginia, Maryland and the District.
Now, the product is being made available for home
users for $9.95 ( http://www.netrekker.com/ ).
Willig, the mother of seven, said children's
potential exposure to questionable Internet content was the primary reason
she left her job as a textbook publisher and joined the start-up Thinkronize.
"My decision to leave was driven by my own
experiences with my own children and stories I've heard from other parents
and teachers," she said.
Since then, the product has been used in 12,000
schools across the United States -- reaching an estimated 7 million
students. School administrators and parents in other countries -- including
Hong Kong, Turkey and Nigeria -- also have expressed an interest in the
product, she said.
In Pennsylvania, the search engine was adopted in
school districts across the state.
Exposure to inappropriate sites "was definitely a
huge concern with teachers," said Mary Schwander, a library media specialist
at New Hope-Solebury High School in New Hope, Pa. "Some kids did a
comparison between Google and NetTrekker and found that NetTrekker was more
favorable to use and quicker."
Willig acknowledges that offensive and
inappropriate sites have been found -- but usually by teachers and specialty
software that constantly scan the sites, not the students.
"With our tools in place, we have found porn sites,
and we have found them before users," Willig said. "There's a Martin Luther
King site that's now a hate site, really a KKK thing in disguise. There are
those things that we have to look out for with a combination of technology
and human review."
That is the main challenge constantly facing John
Stewart and Ryan Krupnik, the guys behind the family-safe search engine
RedZee. The site filters out pornographic results and delivers targeted
searches.
"Ryan and I have put a great deal of time and money
to make sure things are blocked, but we're really coming to a point where we
need the general public to help us," said Stewart. "We can't possibly catch
all of it. I would love to say we're 200 percent, but we're not."
"Please Do Not Use These Programs for Illegal Purposes:
Powerful new tools let you search for free software and music, zoom in on
landmarks and buildings, and add comments to news stories," by Steve Bass, PC
World via The Washington Post, August 21, 2007 ---
Click Here
I don't know what Google was thinking
when it allowed Google Hacks to be posted on the Google Code site. But it's
a sure bet most people won't abide by the "Please do not use this program
for illegal uses" disclaimer you'll find on thedownload site.
Google Hacks is a front-end GUI you can use as a
stand-alone app or as a browser toolbar. It performs searches you can
already do--if you know the syntax. For instance, if I wanted to search for
Dave Brubeck, I could pop the following into Google's search field:
But it's obviously a heck of a lot easier to type
into Google Hacks and choose the music category.
Google Hacks lets you search in any one of 12
categories--music, applications, video, books, lyrics, and others. But
there's a catch. The searches are indexes--Web site directories that haven't
been protected. Translation: You have to sort through lists of files and
some, if not most, could be unrelated to what you're searching for.
At the same time, you might hit the jackpot--loads
of files with just the content you're looking for. The showstopper is that
the content belongs to someone else who doesn't know how to hide it from
prying eyes. (And yes, I know, that person may have downloaded the music
illegally as well.)
BTW, credit for this masterpiece goes to Jason
Stallings, the author of Google Hacks. Jason doesn't work for Google, but
his program was released using Google'sfree code hosting service. You can
find more of Jason's code onhis Web site.
Dig This:Microsoft's entryinto the mobile phone
arena is sure to give Apple a run for the money--and promises to take the
nerd world by storm.
Microsoft's Photosynth is awesome--and addictive.
You can travel to Rome, zoom in on St. Peter's Basilica, and see
details--and I mean close, close up--that I guarantee will amaze you. (The
hardware requirements are stringent--more in a sec.) Don't believe me? Watch
this7-minute demonstration.
But wait a minute: Unless you have a heavy-duty
PC--you need Windows XP and the hardware needs to be Vista ready--save your
time. You just won't be able to use Photosynth. (My wife's out of luck;
she's been playing with Photosynth on my machine.) If you have the system
requirements, you'll also need to download a small ActiveX plug-in available
at the Photosynth site.
Photosynthis now up and running. (My friend Bill
Webb has a goodwrite-up about it.)
Google's new Hummingbird algorithm could create a
more even playing field for ‘the long tail’ of website publishers, and help
Google to rival Apple Siri in voice search, says Ovum analyst Gerry Brown.
Last week, Google announced a
brand new algorithm for its search engine, called
Hummingbird. Although Google often produces updates and enhancements (such
as the “Caffeine Update” in 2010, and “Penguin” and “Panda” since), the last
time Google introduced a brand new algorithm was 2001, so it is a big
change.
Although Google has not given away many details, it
said that Hummingbird is focused on ranking information based on a more
intelligent understanding of search requests. As Internet data volumes
explode we increasingly have to type more and more words into Google Search
to gain greater accuracy of results. Often we need to conduct multiple
searches to find the information we are looking for, which is frustrating
and time consuming.
This is because the Search results we currently
receive reflect the matching combination of key words that a search phrase
contains, rather than the true meaning of the sentence itself. Search
results produced by Hummingbird will reflect the full semantic meaning of
longer search phrases, and should in theory produce more accurate results.
For example Hummingbird will more greatly consider
question words like “how” “why”, “where” and “when” in search phrases, in
addition to content keywords. Hence Hummingbird moves the emphasis of search
from “results” to “answers”.
Google also has acknowledged that the number of
mobile and voice-based searches is increasing. Such voice searches are in
natural language, and may not therefore contain the keywords we might
finesse on a computer keyboard. These ‘on the fly’ searches are likely to
return poor results using a keyword search system.
The semantic search capabilities of Hummingbird aim
to address this need. It should be noted however that the most-used medium
for mobile voice-based search is Apple iPhone’s Siri, which uses Yelp and
WolframAlpha rather than Google for semantic search. WolframAlpha has had a
semantic search capability since 2012, so there is undoubtedly a competitive
response angle to the Hummingbird move.
The future is therefore “conversational search” or
“hot wording” as Google refers to it. By this Google means that a user can
simply voice prompt the Google search engine by saying "OK, Google". The
latter is also the voice catch-phrase used to operate the wearable Google
Glass spectacles.
In a separate move announced by Google in September
2013, the company will seek to accelerate the movement from Google keyword
search to Google semantic search. Google will encrypt all future Search
results, which means that keywords used by publishers will increasingly
produce ‘not provided’ results in Google Analytics.
This means that publishers will have less idea
where the web traffic to their website comes from. An underlying commercial
motivation maybe that Google’s premium products will continue to provide
some keyword detail, hence encouraging upgrades from free to paid-for Google
products.
If you're a serious search hound who often clicks
through to Wikipedia pages that Google digs up, then you'll love
Googlepedia. This free Firefox add-on splits your
Google page in half: On the left are your regular Web results, and on the
right (where AdWords would normally appear), you're presented with a
Wikipedia article based on Google's top result.
Of course, typing "Wikipedia"--followed by a
subject--directly into Firefox's Location Bar is just as easy, but you don't
get to scroll through Google links at the same time. And usefully,
Googlepedia also lets you expand, shrink or hide the area that an article is
viewed in.
By default, the add-on presents internal Wikipedia
links as clickable Google searches, though you can toggle this in its
preferences. You can also change the default Wikipedia language.
Articles from the open source encyclopedia appear
surprisingly soon after Google's own always-speedy results. A good thing, as
Firefox seems to take a slight performance hit for the second or so an
article takes to load.
The author has recently released an early port of
the add-on for Google's
Chrome browser, and mentions that
Safari and
Konqueror versions are planned.
The key challenge for the scholarly community, in
which I include academic publishers such as Oxford University Press, is to
work actively with Wikipedia to strengthen its role in "pre-research." We
need to build stronger links from its entries to more advanced resources
that have been created and maintained by the academy.
It is not an easy task to overcome the prejudices
against Wikipedia in academic circles, but accomplishing that will serve us
all and solidify an important new layer of knowledge in the
online-information ecosystem. Wikipedia's first decade was marked by its
meteoric rise. Let's mark its second decade by its integration into the
formal research process.
Continued in article
Casper Grathwohl is vice president and publisher of digital and
reference content for Oxford University Press.
Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, famously allows
anyone to write or revise its entries, and the history of each item is open
for anyone to review. Except for material that leaders of the effort
consider too “dangerous” to leave online.
The fine print of its stated practices notes that
in some cases, material is completely spiked from the record. Or, as the
policy reads: “a revision with libelous content, criminal threats or
copyright infringements may be removed afterwards.”
These total redactions are what a University of
Pennsylvania research team has been mining for the past year in the hopes of
shedding some light on what Wikipedia deletes forever and why. In 2010
redactions accounted for more than 56,000 of the 47.1 million revisions,
according to the research team.
The researchers, Andrew G. West and Insup Lee,
wondered what content on the enormously popular Web site could be so
troubling that Wikipedia administrators would decide to remove it forever.
“Wikipedia is at that paramount example of open-source transparency,” Mr.
Lee said. “So when you see them behaving in a nontransparent manner, you
want to see what motivates them to do this.”
Copyright infringement was the most common reason
Wikipedia stated for deleting material, Mr. West and Mr. Lee found.
The Wikimedia Foundation has been sued over
copyright and privacy issues in the past. While only 0.007 percent of page
views in 2010 to the English Wikipedia site resulted in content that was
later redacted, that’s enough to land the organization and its operators in
hot water. That’s why leaders of the encyclopedia refer to the material it
redacts as “dangerous content.”
“We’ve identified that on the surface these
copyright cases are the worst,” said Mr. Lee.
“The research goal for us is, how can we provide
some automated way to detect the problems so they can be removed
immediately?” Mr. West added. “It’s very difficult to stop people from
adding something, but we can find a way to get rid of it quickly.”
The difficulty in identifying instances of
plagiarism, the pair said, is evident in the numbers. Most “dangerous
content,” such as libel or invasions of privacy, is taken down within two
minutes, on average. But copyright-related issues stayed up for an average
of 21 days, they found.
Wikipedia’s leaders have recently increased the
number of people with the ability to permanently delete text, including
entries in the history pages. In May 2010, approximately 40 people held
these rights; now more than 1,800 people do, Mr. West and Mr. Lee said.
The larger work force has helped to reduce the
amount of dangerous content found on the site, the researchers said. But
humans alone won’t solve the problem in its entirety. Sometimes they even
introduce problems when trying to delete dangerous content and removing
beneficial revisions in the process, which the research team refers to as
“collateral damage.” This brings up the question, then, of who even gets to
make the call when something is dangerous content or not.
“For all the problems on Wikipedia,” Mr. West said,
“I feel strongly that the solutions have to be automatic in nature because
these attackers increasingly have these machines doing their bidding for
them.”
Are we witnessing the birth of a new challenger to Google?
Data from monitoring service
StatCounter suggests that
Bing,
Microsoft's new search decision engine, has
overtaken Yahoo Search as the number two search service in the U.S. and
worldwide in large part thanks to stealing market share from leader Google . . .
Are we witnessing the birth of the
first true Google challenger or is this nothing but
launch momentum
bound to fade away? Robin Wauters, "Did Bing Just Leapfrog Yahoo Search?" The Washington
Post, June 4, 2009 ---
Click Here
Jensen Comment
When I first saw the title to this article I thought it was referring to the new
Mayor of Detroit (Dave Bing). Shows what I know about Microsoft's Bing up to
now. Many of Microsoft's late entries to the market fail to compete such as when
it belatedly attempted to compete with IPOD.
In two separate, non-exclusive deals, Microsoft
will partner with Facebook and Twitter to show status updates in its search
site, Bing. Microsoft officially announced the deals at the Web 2.0 Summit
today.
While rumors of the Microsoft-Twitter deal have
been circulating for a few weeks, integrating Facebook updates is a surprise
twist, although not entirely unexpected, given
Microsoft's $240 million investment in Facebook two
years ago. Google is said to be in talks with Twitter and Facebook as well.
*(It didn't take Google long to respond. An
official blog post reveals that the company has
also signed a deal to index real-time information from Twitter).
Twitter has been gaining notice as a valuable
source of real-time information. For example, news often breaks on Twitter
before hitting major media outlets and
well
before showing up in search engines. In January
Yahoo announced TweetNews, which ranks Yahoo News
stories based on Twitter posts.
The integration seems to be a win-win situation: social networking sites
will presumably help search engines capture trending news topics more
quickly, while the search engines can offer
needed revenue streams to the social networking sites
and help solidify their legitimacy. It also makes it
harder for businesses to ignore social media: with the integration, having
Facebook and Twitter accounts can also help a company gain prominence in the
much-coveted top spots on search results.
If you've ever cleaned off a cluttered desk,
replacing messy stacks of paper with framed photos of people who really
matter, you have a rough idea of what Microsoft MSFT -0.03% did with its new
Bing search engine this week. Gone are the distracting, multicolored search
results. Gone are the lists of recently searched terms that you never looked
at anyway. Gone are the search results mingled with Facebook FB -3.39%
"likes."
What's left? A lot of white space, which creates a
calmer environment for reading and digesting information. A new middle
column, which Microsoft calls Snapshot, displays task-oriented content to
help people do things like making restaurant reservations, getting
directions or seeing movie times. And Bing's most unusual new feature is a
flush-right column called Sidebar designed to automatically surface names of
relevant Facebook friends and others around the Web who could best help you
with a specific query.
Image Here
Bing's Snapshot column helps users do things like
make a hotel reservation. Its Sidebar column, far right, shows friends who
may have answers to help with a person's current search.
The new Bing is automatically available to about
20% of users starting Tuesday. If you're not one of the 20%, you can see the
new interface and Sidebar on Bing.com/new. By June 1, all features will be
automatically available to everyone.
I've had access to this revamped Bing for the past
week, and its prospects are promising. It feels cleaner and clearer.
Sidebar's integrated social knowledge of friends linked to Bing through a
person's Facebook account—or people from Twitter and blogs who are suggested
by Bing—can turn the solitude of Web searching into a group activity. For
example, a search for Napa Valley restaurants smartly brings up the name of
a friend who recently posted a photo album from Napa, a colleague who lists
Napa Valley as his hometown as well as a well-known blogger who reviews
restaurants in that area. Sidebar maintains a neat list of your queries and
the responses, saving you the trouble of hunting through past Facebook
posts.
Compared with the way Google integrated Google+
"personal results" with regular search results—which ruffled a lot of
feathers—Sidebar is more sophisticated.
But Bing's Sidebar faces a challenge: People aren't
used to searching like this.
As fun as it is to poll people—even specifically
suggested people—in queries, we usually search alone. Many of the things I
type into Bing are quick ask-a-question-get-an-answer searches, and
Sidebar's format requires waiting for someone's response. It's possible that
it just takes time to adjust to this new way of searching, but I'm
comfortable with the Web sources that I already know and trust. (No offense,
Facebook friends.)
Additional partners, including LinkedIn, Foursquare
and Quora, will eventually be included to help with queries in Bing's
Sidebar. Some of these will work later this summer. For now, Twitter
provides the biggest source of people from around the Web who might know the
answer to your query.
Bing will continue to make improvements, according
to Stefan Weitz, senior director of Bing search. By late June or early July,
you'll be able to tag friends in queries even if Bing doesn't suggest those
people as relevant to a query. This would have helped me when I searched for
restaurants in Boston, where my foodie sister has lived for 11 years, though
she didn't automatically appear as a suggested source. Then again, when I
searched for a Mexican restaurant in Kirkland, Wash., called Cactus, a
friend who "liked" another Mexican restaurant in nearby Seattle popped up in
my Sidebar.
I didn't realize this friend had ever visited
Seattle or that he enjoyed one of Seattle's Mexican restaurants enough to
"like" it on Facebook. These helpful, serendipitous experiences may be
enough to keep people using the Bing Sidebar.
Bing's Sidebar queries currently have a clumsy way
of working with Facebook. If I query three people who are auto-suggested as
friends who might know the answer to my question, the query only shows up on
my Facebook page, not on the pages of people who were questioned. They must
visit my Facebook page to see responses, an extra step that may discourage
ongoing conversations. An Activity feed in the Bing Sidebar shows all
Facebok friends' query activity, but people look at Facebook more often.
The middle column of the rebuilt Bing, called
Snapshot, doesn't always display content. When it does, it is geared toward
helping people accomplish specific tasks, like booking a hotel room or
restaurant table. In a search for the Oval Room, a Washington, D.C.,
restaurant, Snapshot showed a map of its location, four ratings from
websites like TripAdvisor, hours of operation and a link to OpenTable for
making a reservation.
Continued in article
Binging, but not cha chaing, Fraud Updates
For nearly eight years I’ve updated (usually daily) a log
on fraud. This is like a chronological journal from which I also posted to
various sites that I maintain on fraud.
One of the best ways to search these logs is via Bing (or
Google, Yahoo, etc.). For example, suppose you are interested in Bill and Hold
fraud. You can enter the search terms [“Bob Jensen” AND “Fraud Updates” AND
“Bill and Hold”] (without the square brackets) at
http://www.bing.com/
It may seem surprising, but I’m having better results in
most cases these days using Microsoft’s Bing search engine than either Google or
Yahoo ---
http://www.bing.com/
Bing Update: When I recommended Bing I was not
aware of the following: "Bing! So That's What A Swizzle Stick Is," by Michael Arrington, Tech
Crunch via The Washington Post, October 7, 2009 ---
Click Here
Microsoft's new Bing search engine just can't seem
to stay out of the red light district, no matter how hard they try.
There's no denying it is hands down the best porn
search engine on the planet (although ChaCha is pretty good too). But Bing
also had a snafu with Google ads that showed the search engine for
"pornography" queries. Google took the blame for that one (see updates to
that post), and at least it only showed up for people actually querying the
adult term.
Now, a new controversy has popped up around a
Microsoft ad unit that scrapes a page for content and then shows relevant
Bing queries. The ads normally work fine. But last week Bing started showing
an ad unit that contained sexually explicit terms, including at least one
that I had never heard of before (the swizzle stick). Best of all, the ads
were displayed on a WonderHowTo web page showing only Home & Garden content.
You can see the queries that were self-generated by
Bing for the ad unit in the image. This isn't just R-rated run of the mill
porn stuff. This is stuff that's still illegal in some states. Particularly
that top query.
Microsoft is saying this is a bug, and they've
taken down all of these ad units on all sites until they understand what
happened. The unit is supposed to scrape only the page being viewed. In this
case, WonderHowTo has sexually explicit content on other areas of the site,
which may be triggering the ad content.
Said Microsoft's Senior Director Online Audience
Business Group Adam Sohn, who wasn't too happy with the ad: "We are very
cognizant of what we want the Bing brand to stand for, and this is not it."
My response ¿ "well, at least it's educational."
Jensen
Comment
Nevertheless Bing is a good search engine, and you can avoid the porn by not
looking for it and ignoring advertisements (that I never look at anyway in
Google or Bing or Yahoo). Google still has the huge advantage of cached
documents that can be found after they are no longer posted at their original
Websites. I assume that all the major search engines will step up controls on
the appropriateness of advertising for the general public (that includes
children using search engines).
But Cha Cha is not a major search engine and may lag in such controls. I
really don't cha cha on the dance floor or on the computer.
I’ve aimed a lot of
criticism at human powered search engine
ChaChaover the last couple of years. The service
lets users ask questions, just like a normal search engine. But instead of a
computer spitting out answers (see Google, etc.), real human beings answer
instead.
The ChaCha service was absurd in its original web
version, which has since been discontinued. The mobile version is actually
very useful, although we
questioned its scalability when it launched. New
information from the company suggests they’re keeping costs low enough to
make a business model out of it. More on that soon.
Now about this image.
Some fairly funny answers occasionally come back
from the human guides, who early on at least had to deal with a
lot of prank queries. But none of the ones we’ve
seen compare to the one to the right, which is a
Digg
favorite tonight. It describes the Eiffel Tower
sexual position (yes, you learn something new every day) in response to a
completely unrelated query about a Randy Newman show in Seattle.
I contacted the company about it and got the
following message:
I appreciate your reaching out to me regarding
this iPhone prank. We researched this as soon as it came to our
attention and our logs indicate that the answer displayed was definitely
to a question previously asked by this same user. So yes, this is a fake
as this person is misrepresenting what actually occurred. They actually
asked one question (to which the answer was sent) and then a second
question shortly thereafter and then received the answer to the first
question which, due to the way messages are threaded on an iPhone
display, the answer is appearing below a different question than the one
that was asked to spawn the answer that is displayed.
So in the end this was a bit of a trick
apparently used to misrepresent what happened in order to get some
laughs – which appears to be working as this is getting some serious
play across the Web!
Ok that sounds more than reasonable. But when I go
to the
URL in the image, it shows the question and answer
linked (see below). I understand how text messages back and forth can get
out of order, but not how the wrong answer can be linked to the wrong
question in ChaCha’s own database. I also note the
guide was on the job for one whole day before this
happened. I’ve emailed the company for further clarification.
I still recommend Bing when you’re not fully satisfied with your Google
hits. I can't say I recommend Cha Cha, but then I've never tried it.
Google is a great search engine, but it's also more
than that. Google has tons of hidden features, some of which are quite fun
and most of which are extremely useful— if you know about them. How do you
discover all these hidden features within the Google site?
See
http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=675528&rl=1
Maybe
my mind is drifting—or maybe 2 plus 2 does equal 4.
Terminator
3 has been playing recently on cable. [Don’t read further if you don’t want
to know the ending!]
At
the end of Terminator 3, we learn that Skynet (which takes over the world in the
future and tries to kill all humans) is not controlled by just one major
computer as we thought in Terminators 1 and 2, but instead, Skynet is all the
computers on earth connected together—acting as one giant computer brain.
Tonight
I was watching 60 Minutes on TV and they dedicated 30 minutes to Google. Google
is able to search all computers connected to the Internet. Recently Google
released software that will search all the computers on LANS. Now you can Google
on your cell phone, search libraries, etc. etc. etc. Now they are working on a
universal translator (Start Trek anyone?) that will automatically search and
translate any document in any language.
Is
Google Skynet? Think about it.
Glen
L. Gray, PhD, CPA Dept.
of Accounting & Information Systems College
of Business & Economics California
State University, Northridge Northridge,
CA 91330 http://www.csun.edu/~vcact00f
January 3, 2005 reply
from Bob Jensen
Hi
Glen,
I
also watched the excellent 60 Minute module. Google
is amazing in almost every aspect, including how it is managed.I think that all business policy and organization behavior students
should watch this module.It will be
interesting to see how long the company can continue to grow at an exponential
pace and maintain its long-standing motto to “Do No Evil.” These
guys really believe in that motto. Google is probably the most cautious
firm in the world about who gets hired and promoted.
There
has never been anything quite like Google in terms of management, except SAS
probably comes a little bit close.
Yes I think Google could become Skynet if it were not for the
serious policy of Google to not be a monopolist (except by default) which is the
antithesis of Microsoft Corporation.Also
there is the black cloud of Microsoft hanging over Google to pull down
Google’s Skynet even if it takes a trillion dollars.
There
were some very fascinating things that I learned from the 60 Minutes module.For one thing, Google is getting closer to scanning the documents in
alternate languages around the world and then translating each hit into a
language of choice (probably English to begin with). Secondly,
I knew that Google bought Keyhole, but I had not played in recent years with the
amazing keyhole (not Google Views) --- http://www.keyhole.com/
I
might also add that this module was followed by another module on The World’s
Most Beautiful Woman --- http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/12/29/60minutes/main663862.shtml
She’s very articulate and a pure delight in this world of sinking morality
even though her movie roles to date have been Bombay frivolous.
Bob
Jensen
CatsCradle 3.5 ---
http://www.stormdance.net/software/catscradle/overview.htm
Many websurfers enjoy going to sites that might be based
in other countries, and as such, they might very well encounter a different
language. With CatsCradle 3.5, these persons need worry no more, as this
application can be used to translate entire websites in such languages as Thai,
Chinese, Japanese, and Russian. This version is compatible with all computers
running Windows XP or 2000. (Scout Report, September 1, 2006)
Generally speaking, even those
who are most gung-ho about new ways of learning probably tend to cling to a
belief that education has, or ought to have, at least something to do with
making things lodge in the minds of students--this even though the
disparagement of the role of memory in education by professional educators
now goes back at least three generations, long before computers were ever
thought of as educational tools. That, by the way, should lessen our
astonishment, if not our dismay, at the extent to which the educational
establishment, instead of viewing these developments with alarm, is adapting
its understanding of what education is to the new realities of how the new
generation of 'netizens' actually learn (and don't learn) rather than trying
to adapt the kids to unchanging standards of scholarship and learning.
Jensen Comment
Yikes! When I'm looking for an answer to most anything I now turn first to
Wikipedia and then Google. I guess James Bowman put me in my place. However,
being retired I'm no longer corrupting the minds of students (at least not apart
from my Website and blogs ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
I would counter Bowman by saying that Stupid is as Stupid does. Stupid "does"
the following: Stupid accepts a single source for an answer. Except when
the answer seems self evident, a scholar will seek verification from other
references. However, a lot of things are "self evident" to Stupid.
There is a serious issue that sweat accompanied with answer searching aids in
the memory of what is learned ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
But must we sweat to find every answer in life? There is also the maxim that we
learn best from our mistakes. Bloggers are constantly being made aware of their
mistakes. This is one of the scholarly benefits of blogging ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm
"Google's Cloud Looms Large: How might expanding Google's
cloud-computing service alter the digital world?," by Kate Greene, MIT's
Technology Review, December 3, 2007 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/19785/?nlid=701
To know how you'll be using computers and the
Internet in the coming years, it's instructive to consider the Google
employee: most of his software and data--from pictures and videos, to
presentations and e-mails--reside on the Web. This makes the digital stuff
that's valuable to him equally accessible from his home computer, a public
Internet café, or a Web-enabled phone. It also makes damage to a hard drive
less important. Recently, Sam Schillace, the engineering director in charge
of collaborate Web applications at Google, needed to reformat a defunct hard
drive from a computer that he used for at least six hours a day.
Reformatting, which completely erases all the data from a hard drive, would
cause most people to panic, but it didn't bother Schillace. "There was
nothing on it I cared about" that he couldn't find stored on the Web, he
says.
Schillace's digital life, for the most part, exists
on the Internet; he practices what is considered by many technology experts
to be cloud computing. Google already lets people port some of their
personal data to the Internet and use its Web-based software. Google
Calendar organizes events, Picasa stores pictures, YouTube holds videos,
Gmail stores e-mails, and Google Docs houses documents, spreadsheets, and
presentations. But according to a Wall Street Journal story, the company is
expected to do more than offer scattered puffs of cloud computing: it will
launch a service next year that will let people store the contents of entire
hard drives online. Google doesn't acknowledge the existence of such a
service. In an official statement, the company says, "Storage is an
important component of making Web apps fit easily into consumers' and
business users' lives ... We're always listening to our users and looking
for ways to update and improve our Web applications, including storage
options, but we don't have anything to announce right now." Even so, many
people in the industry believe that Google will pull together its disparate
cloud-computing offerings under a larger umbrella service, and people are
eager to understand the consequences of such a project.
To be sure, Google isn't the only company invested
in online storage and cloud computing. There are other services today that
offer a significant amount of space and software in the cloud. Amazon's
Simple Storage Service, for instance, offers unlimited and inexpensive
online storage ($0.15 per gigabyte per month). AOL provides a service called
Xdrive with a capacity of 50 gigabytes for $9.95 per month (the first five
gigabytes are free). And Microsoft offers Windows Live SkyDrive, currently
with a one-gigabyte free storage limit.
But Google is better positioned than most to push
cloud computing into the mainstream, says Thomas Vander Wal, founder of
Infocloud Solutions, a cloud-computing consultancy. First, millions of
people already use Google's online services and store data on its servers
through its software. Second, Vander Wal says that the culture at Google
enables his team to more easily tie together the pieces of cloud computing
that today might seem a little scattered. He notes that Yahoo, Microsoft,
and Apple are also sitting atop huge stacks of people's personal information
and a number of online applications, but there are barriers within each
organization that could slow down the process of integrating these pieces.
"It could be," says Vander Wal, "that Google pushes the edges again where
everybody else has been stuck for a while."
Web video has transformed the way the Internet is
used, but finding the exact clip you want can be incredibly hard. And it's
no wonder, considering that sites like YouTube conduct their hunts by
looking at a clip's "contextual metadata" -- tags, video title and
description -- and thus can often be misled by false information. For
example, a homemade video about cooking might be inaccurately tagged with a
popular search word like "Obama" so as to get more traction.
This week I tested VideoSurf.com,
a site that claims to be the first to search videos by
"seeing" images that appear in these videos. The company says its technology
can analyze a clip's visual content, as well as its metadata -- especially
when searching for people. VideoSurf has analyzed and categorized more than
12 billion visual moments on the Web to understand who the most important
characters and scenes are in a video, and it uses this knowledge to sort
clips according to relevancy.
Search results on VideoSurf spread out videos in a
filmstrip-like format, distinguishing one scene from the next. Users can
choose an option to show only faces, which helps if you're looking for a
specific person in a long video or movie. And when looking at videos from
certain sources, you can select a scene from the filmstrip and jump ahead to
that scene rather than sit through the entire clip.
When it works, VideoSurf is one of those
technologies that make you wonder why someone didn't think of it sooner. The
site aggregates content from about 60 sources, including YouTube, CNN Video,
Hulu, ESPN and Comedy Central, and a sorting tool weeds out unwanted results
like the irksome slideshows that are labeled as videos. VideoSurf can find
videos on all kinds of subjects, but it really shines when it finds
well-known people.
But VideoSurf has some rough edges and doesn't
always work as it should. In its defense, the site is still in its public
beta, or trial, stage, and plans to be full-blown by early next year. Right
now, one of its best features, the ability to jump ahead to specific scenes,
works with video from only a handful of sources including YouTube, MetaCafe,
DailyMotion and Google Video. Videos from Hulu.com confusingly allow jumping
ahead only from certain screens.
Additionally, I came across a couple of videos that
were no longer available, though they were listed in search results. And a
customizable VideoSurf home page for users with accounts on the site saves
searches but not specific clips; VideoSurf plans to fix this next week by
adding a favorites page where users can store and share favorite videos with
others.
Still, I really grew to like VideoSurf's clear way
of displaying content that would be otherwise buried within videos. Rather
than trying to guess a video's contents by looking at a single
representative image, VideoSurf's filmstrip views showed me exactly what I'd
be watching. In many cases, I viewed a video I might not have otherwise
watched because its filmstrip showed shots of scenes that looked
interesting.
On the left-hand side of the search-results page,
VideoSurf users can narrow results according to Content Type, Categories and
Video Sources to see just what they're looking for -- or, often more
important, what they're not looking for. Content Type, for example, includes
slideshows, Web series, full television episodes and full movies; a search
can include only videos in a particular category (say, slideshows) or
exclude that category altogether by unmarking the box beside it.
Most search-results pages include tiled still
images at the top representing the characters in the videos. By selecting
one of these characters, users can refine search results to show only videos
with that character. For example, I typed the title of a favorite television
show, "Brothers and Sisters," into the search box and saw the names and
images of seven actors on the show at the top of the screen. I selected
Sally Field and was redirected to results of videos featuring only the
mother she plays on the show.
I used VideoSurf to search for Beyonce's "Single
Ladies" music video, and then changed the date parameters to find only
videos posted this week. This retrieved a Saturday Night Live skit in which
the pop singer spoofs her own video with help from three men in tights --
including Justin Timberlake. While the SNL skit ran, a list of related
videos appeared in a column on the right, including clips of J.T.'s past SNL
skits.
Occasionally, annotations appear on videos, but
these come from the source -- not VideoSurf. If overlaid text appears on
YouTube videos, it can be turned off using an icon in the bottom right of
the YouTube screen. Video-sharing sites that use introductory pages such as
pre-rolls before each video will still show those pages.
VideoSurf makes it easy to send specific clips of
videos to friends. I did so by selecting a Share option and adjusting slide
bars to trim the clip to start and end at scenes I preferred. Clips shared
with friends via email are sent with the VideoSurf filmstrip, giving others
the ability to also know what the video will include so that they, too, can
discern whether or not they want to watch it.
Clips can be shared on social-networking sites like
del.icio.us, MySpace and Facebook, though VideoSurf's helpful filmstrip
didn't show up on these sites like it did in emails.
I also tested an add-on for the Mozilla Firefox
browser called Greasemonkey that works with VideoSurf. When installed, this
displays VideoSurf's helpful filmstrip beneath search results from Google
Video, YouTube, Yahoo or CBS.com. Once installed, filmstrips illustrating
important scenes appear along with the normal text results for videos, and
some of the filmstrips enable jumping ahead to specific scenes. This
somewhat techie Greasemonkey extension can save people the extra step of
making a separate visit to VideoSurf.com to watch a specific clip.
VideoSurf uses smart technology that can save
people the aggravation of watching videos that aren't what they appear to
be. Since so much Web content now includes videos, a visual search tool that
can better assess videos like VideoSurf is a good idea. When this site
improves its now-flaky ability to jump ahead to specific scenes in videos,
it will be even more valuable.
How to search for academic videos
Answer First go to YouTube and search for professors or courses if you have the
names.
One Web site that opened this week,
Big Think,
hopes to be "a YouTube for ideas." The site offers
interviews with academics, authors, politicians, and other thinkers. Most of
the subjects are filmed in front of a plain white background, and the
interviews are chopped into bite-sized pieces of just a few minutes each.
The short clips could have been served up as text quotes, but Victoria R. M.
Brown, co-founder of Big Think, says video is more engaging. "People like to
learn and be informed of things by looking and watching and learning," she
says.
YouTube itself wants to be a venue for academe. In
the past few months, several colleges have signed agreements with the site
to set up official "channels." The University of California at Berkeley was
the first, and the University of Southern California, the University of New
South Wales, in Australia, and Vanderbilt University soon followed.
It remains an open question just how large the
audience for talking eggheads is, though. After all, in the early days of
television, many academics hoped to use the medium to beam courses to living
rooms, with series like CBS's Sunrise Semester. which began in 1957.
Those efforts are now a distant memory.
Things may be different now, though, since the
Internet offers a chance to connect people with the professors and topics
that most interest them.
Even YouTube was surprised by how popular the
colleges' content has been, according to Adam Hochman, a product manager at
Berkeley's Learning Systems Group. Lectures are long, after all, while most
popular YouTube videos run just a few minutes. (Lonelygirl, the diary of a
teenage girl, had episodes that finished in well under a minute. Many other
popular shorts involve cute animals or juvenile stunts). Yet some lectures
on Berkeley's channel scored 100,000 viewers each, and people were sitting
through the whole talks. "Professors in a sense are rock stars," Mr. Hochman
concludes. "We're getting as many hits as you would find with some of the
big media players."
YouTube officials insist that they weren't
surprised by the buzz, and they say that more colleges are coming forward.
"We expect that education will be a vibrant category on YouTube," said
Obadiah Greenberg, strategic partner manager at YouTube, in an e-mail
interview. "Everybody loves to learn."
To set up an official channel on YouTube, colleges
must sign an agreement with the company, though no money changes hands. That
allows the colleges to brand their section of the site, by including a logo
or school colors, and to upload longer videos than typical users are
allowed.
The company hasn't exactly made it easy to find the
academic offerings, though. Clicking on the education category shows a mix
of videos, including ones with babes posing in lingerie and others on the
lectures of Socrates. But that could change if the company begins to sign up
more colleges and pay more attention to whether videos are appearing in the
correct subject areas, says Dan Colman, director and associate dean of
Stanford University's continuing-studies program, who runs a
blog
tracking podcasts and videos made by colleges and
professors.
In many cases, the colleges were already offering
the videos they are putting on YouTube on their own Web sites, or on Apple's
iTunes U, an educational section of the iTunes Store. But college officials
say that teaming up with YouTube is greatly expanding their audiences
because so many people are poking around the service already.
'YouTube for Intellectuals' Goes Live Amy Gutmann,
president of the University of Pennsylvania, talks about the importance of
racial, socioeconomic, and religious diversity at colleges in a
video on bigthink,
a new Web site that is meant to be a YouTube for intellectuals. In addition
to featuring academics, the site includes one- to two-minute videos from
politicians, artists, and business people.
According to an
article in Monday’s New York Times, the site was
started by Peter Hopkins, a 2004 graduate of Harvard University. He said he
hopes bigthink becomes popular among college students. David Frankel, a
venture capitalist, put up most of the money for the enterprise. Lawrence H.
Summers, a former president of Harvard, has invested tens of thousands of
dollars as well.
How many videos are on YouTube at this moment?
How many new videos are added (uploaded) on average each day?
The content on both
YouTube.com and
YouTube.ca will be the same,
but the Canadian site will highlight homegrown material, said international
product manager Luis Garcia. The site becomes the 15th country-specific site,
Garcia said. ''The only thing that's different is that this is just a Canadian
lens into that content, so if a user wants to get the Canada point of view into
that global body of content, then they're able to do that,'' Garcia told
reporters at the YouTube.ca launch event Tuesday in Toronto. That means that
content uploaded by users in Canada will show up as ''top favorites'' and
''recommended content'' on the site. . . .
YouTube, which was founded in February 2005, hosts more
than 100 million video views every day with 65,000 new videos uploaded daily.
Within a year after its launch, YouTube made headlines when Google Inc. acquired
the company for US$1.65 billion worth of stock.
"Popular video-sharing site YouTube launches Canadian version," MIT's
Technology Review, November 6, 2007
http://www.technologyreview.com/Wire/19682/?nlid=653
Recall that UC Berkeley has over 300 lectures (mostly in science) on YouTube ---
http://www.youtube.com/ucberkeley
Other Open Courseware videos ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Jensen Comment
With 15 or more nations having their own YouTube videos, it will make it more
difficult to search for given topics since the videos will not be maintained in
a single archive. Hopefully, YouTube will one day have a search engine for
searching all of its archives at the same time. Of course this will not overcome
language barriers.
SpiralFrog.com, an ad-supported Web site with a terrible name that
allows visitors to download music and videos free of charge, commenced on
September 17, 2007 in the U.S. and Canada after months of "beta" testing.
At launch, the service was offering more than 800,000 tracks and 3,500 music
videos for download ---
http://www.spiralfrog.com/
This week, I tested four
video-search engines, including revamped entrant Truveo.com, a smartly
designed site that combs through Web video from all sorts of sources ranging
from YouTube to broadcasting companies. Truveo, a subsidiary of AOL, is
stepping out on its own again after spending three years in the background,
powering video search for the likes of Microsoft, Brightcove and AOL itself.
It unveiled its new site last week, though I've been playing with it for a
few weeks now.
This Web site,
www.truveo.com, operates under the idea
that users don't merely search for video by entering specific words
or phrases, like they would when starting a regular Web search.
Instead, Truveo thinks that people don't often know what they're
looking for in online video searches, and browsing through content
helps to retrieve unexpected and perhaps unintended (but welcome)
results. I found that, compared with other sites, Truveo provided
the most useful interface, which showed five times as many results
per page as the others and encouraged me to browse other clips.
In effect, Truveo combines
the browsing experience of a YouTube with the best Web-wide
video-search engine I've seen.
The other video-search sites
I tested included Google's (www.google.com/video)
and Yahoo's (www.video.yahoo.com),
as well as Blinkx.com (www.blinkx.com).
None of these three sites do much to encourage
browsing; by default they display as many as 10 results per search
on one page and display the clips in a vertical list, forcing you to
scroll down to see them all. The majority of clips watched on Truveo,
Yahoo and Blinkx direct you to an external link to play the video on
its original content provider's site -- which takes an extra step
and often involves watching an advertisement.
Searching on Google video
almost always displays only content from Google and its famously
acquired site, YouTube. The giant search company is working on
improving its search results to show a better variety of content
providers. Still, the upside here is that clips play right away in
the search window rather than through a link to the site where the
video originated. YouTube works this way because its clips are
user-generated -- either made by users and posted to the site or
copied from original host sites and posted to YouTube, saving a trip
to the original content provider's site.
Yahoo's video-searching page
looks clean and uncluttered, with a large box for entering terms or
phrases with which to conduct searches. Two options -- labeled "From
Yahoo! Video" and "From Other Sites" -- help you sort results in one
step. But the clips that I found on Yahoo video seemed less
relevant, overall, and included more repeated clips. One search for
the Discovery Channel's "Man Versus Wild" show returned seven clips,
four of which were identical.
Blinkx, a three-year-old
site, distinguishes itself with its "wall" feature -- a visually
stimulating grid of moving video thumbnails. It is like Truveo in
that it also works behind the scenes for bigger companies, including
Ask.com. Blinkx says it uses speech recognition and analysis to
understand what the video is about, while the others stick to
text-based searching. And this seemed to hold true: I rarely got
results that were completely off-base using Blinkx.
But Truveo's focus on
browsing and searching worked well. It repeatedly displayed spot-on
results when I was looking for a video about a specific subject, or
provided a variety of other videos that were similar, requiring less
overall effort on my part. Its most useful feature is the way it
shows results: by sorting clips into neatly organized buckets, or
categories, such as Featured Channels, Featured Tags and Featured
Categories. These buckets spread out on the page in a gridlike
manner, giving your eye more to see in a quick glance.
. . .
With so many videos
added to the Web each day, the search for online clips can be
fruitless and tiresome. Truveo starts users out with enough relevant
clips right away so that they can more easily find what they're
looking for. And its organizational buckets encourage browsing and,
therefore, entertainment -- one of the reasons for Web video's
popularity.
Truveo takes a
refreshing look at video search, and as long as you have the
patience to travel to sites where content originated, you'll find it
useful. It stands apart from other search engines in looks and
functionality.
Welcome to CogPrints,
an electronic archive for
self-archive papers in any area of
Psychology,
neuroscience, and
Linguistics, and many areas of
Computer Science (e.g.,
artificial intelligence,
robotics,
vison,
learning,
speech,
neural networks),
Philosophy (e.g., mind,
language,
knowledge,
science,
logic),
Biology (e.g., ethology,
behavioral ecology,
sociobiology,
behaviour genetics,
evolutionary theory),
Medicine (e.g.,
Psychiatry,
Neurology,
human genetics,
Imaging),
Anthropology (e.g.,
primatology,
cognitive ethnology,
archeology,
paleontology), as well as
any other portions of the
physical, social
and mathematical
sciences that are pertinent to the study of cognition.
The digital product
team over at NPR is always busy tinkering away and creating new ways for
people to consume the news organization's rich library of content. Their
latest innovation, called
the Infinite Player, is a stripped-down,
browser-based tool for listening to NPR content in a serendipitous, yet
personalized fashion.
If the player's
interface reminds you of Pandora, it's no accident. The team
deliberately borrowed from personalized media services like Pandora,
Flipboard and Zite when building out the Infinite Player. Its controls
are sparse, containing only a few buttons. Among them are a pair of
icons for voting stories up and down, much as one would on Pandora. In
time, the player learns what you're interested in and plays back content
accordingly.
The Infinite Player gets
its name from the fact that it plays content endlessly, or at least
until the user tells it to stop. In that sense, it's sort of like a real
radio station. The modern twist comes in its ability to deliver audio
content based on the listener's preferences.
This experience provides
more of an opportunity what the NPR team calls "distracted listening" -
that is, consuming content while doing other things and not necessarily
having to make any decisions about it (aside from voting it up or down,
if you're so inclined). This is in contrast to the type of "engaged
listening" experience that podcasts and audio clips offer.
The player, which
launched yesterday, is in beta mode and currently works only in Safari
and Chrome. Its functionality is driven by HTML5 and JavaScript, rather
than relying on Flash for playback. It doesn't appear to be optimized
for the iPad just yet, but it is a brand new feature and presumably the
team is working on cross-device compatibility. You can
give it a
shot here.
Jensen Comment
The Infinite Player is great for seeking archived NPR content, but for most
browsing needs I use Firefox. For music I'm a slacker who stays with Slacker.
". . . the crisis in the scholarly communication
system not only threatens the well being of libraries, but also it threatens
our academic faculty's ability to do world-class research. With current
technologies, we now have, for the first time in history, the tools
necessary to effect change ourselves. We must do everything in our power to
change the current scholarly communication system and promote open access to
scholarly articles."
Paul G. Haschak's webliography provides resources
to help effect this change. "Reshaping the World of Scholarly Communication
-- Open Access and the Free Online Scholarship Movement: Open Access
Statements, Proposals, Declarations, Principles, Strategies, Organizations,
Projects, Campaigns, Initiatives, and Related Items -- A Webliography" (E-JASL,
vol. 7, no. 1, spring 2006) is available online at
http://southernlibrarianship.icaap.org/content/v07n01/haschak_p01.htm
E-JASL: The Electronic Journal of Academic and
Special Librarianship [ISSN 1704-8532] is an independent, professional,
refereed electronic journal dedicated to advancing knowledge and research in
the areas of academic and special librarianship. E-JASL is published by the
Consortium for the Advancement of Academic Publication (ICAAP), Athabasca,
Canada. For more information, contact: Paul Haschak, Executive Editor, Board
President, and Founder, Linus A. Sims Memorial Library, Southeastern
Louisiana University, Hammond, LA USA;
email: phaschak@selu.edu
Web:
http://southernlibrarianship.icaap.org/
The October/November 2006 issue (vol. 3, issue 1)
of INNOVATE is devoted to open source and the "potential of open source
software and related trends to transform educational practice." Papers
include:
"Getting Open Source Software into Schools:
Strategies and Challenges" by Gary Hepburn and Jan Buley
"Looking Toward the Future: A Case Study of Open
Source Software in the Humanities" by Harvey Quamen
"Harnessing Open Technologies to Promote Open
Educational Knowledge Sharing" by Toru Iiyoshi, Cheryl Richardson, and Owen
McGrath
Innovate [ISSN 1552-3233] is a bimonthly,
peer-reviewed online periodical published by the Fischler School of
Education and Human Services at Nova Southeastern University. The journal
focuses on the creative use of information technology (IT) to enhance
educational processes in academic, commercial, and government settings.
Readers can comment on articles, share material with colleagues and friends,
and participate in open forums. For more information, contact: James L.
Morrison, Editor-in-Chief, Innovate; email:
innovate@nova.edu ; Web:
http://www.innovateonline.info/ .
Is the increasing availability of documents
diminishing our reliance on colleagues for resource information? In 2004,
Pertti Vakkari and Sanna Talja surveyed 900 faculty members and PhD students
in Finnish universities to answer the question, "How are academic status and
discipline associated with the patterning of search methods used by
university scholars for finding materials for teaching, research, and
keeping up to date in their field?" They report their findings in "Searching
for Electronic Journal Articles to Support Academic Tasks. A Case Study of
the Use of the Finnish National Electronic Library (FinELib)" (INFORMATION
RESEARCH, vol. 12 no. 1, October 2006). One interesting discovery was that,
in contradiction to earlier studies, colleagues were considered "unimportant
sources for discovering needed [electronic] materials." However, the authors
believe that, while this role for colleagues is diminishing, their role as
"discussion partners concerning matters of research is considerably more
important than their role as providers of information about literature."
Information Research [ISSN 1368-1613] is a freely
available, international, scholarly journal, dedicated to making accessible
the results of research across a wide range of information-related
disciplines. It is privately published by Professor T.D. Wilson, Professor
Emeritus of the University of Sheffield, with in-kind support from the
University and its Department of Information Studies. For more information,
contact: Tom Wilson, Department of Information Studies, University of
Sheffield, Sheffield S10 2TN, UK; tel: +44 (0)114-222-2642; fax: +44
(0)114-278-0300;
email: t.d.wilson@shef.ac.uk ;
Web:
http://informationr.net/ir/ .
At what point does the volume of historical
scholarship get in the way of our ability to make sense of history?
At The Chronicle Technology Forum on Monday, Andrew
J. Torget, director of the digital scholarship lab at the University of
Richmond, argued that we have already exceeded that point. He said that if a
person were to read one book a day for the rest of his life, he would not
even begin to approach the number of books that Google has already scanned
into its database from college libraries. There is just too much information
out there.
The current model for teaching and learning is
based on a relative scarcity of research and writing, not an excess. With
that in mind, Mr. Torget and several others have created a Web site called
History Engine to help students around the country
work together on a shared tool to make sense of history documents online.
Students generate brief essays on American history, and the History Engine
aggregates the essays and makes them navigable by tags. Call it Wikipedia
for students.
Except better. First of all, its content is
moderated by professors. Second, while Wikipedia still presents information
two-dimensionally, History Engine employs mapping technology to organize
scholarship by time period, geographic location, and themes. “When you’ve
got too much information to be able to process it all, you’re not sure how
to find meaningful patterns within it,” Mr. Torget told The Chronicle.
“The idea is to build a digital microscope that allows students to focus in
on what’s most useful and relevant for the question they’re asking.”
Also, the essays (called “episodes”) that compose
the History Engine database are short in comparison to traditional scholarly
essays—typically about 500 words. “The challenge of a digital age is that
that writing assignment hasn’t changed since the age of the typewriter,” Mr.
Torget said. “The digital medium requires us to rethink how we make those
assignments.”
While some academics might groan about the perils
of reining in scholarly commentary according to the standards of reader
patience established by Twitter and text messaging, Mr. Torget said that the
essay-length restrictions help focus students on what is most important and
relevant when writing about their research. But the larger aim of the
project is to encourage students to create and view their work in context of
a larger body of scholarship—one that accounts for a wide community of
scholars but is organized in a way that is manageable.
So far, Mr. Torget says that professors at eight
colleges have agreed to use and contribute to the History Engine in their
classes. The engine is free to any who wish to join.
This morning, if you opened your browser and went
to NYTimes.com, an amazing thing happened in the milliseconds between your
click and when the news about North Korea and James Murdoch appeared on your
screen. Data from this single visit was sent to 10 different companies,
including Microsoft and Google subsidiaries, a gaggle of traffic-logging
sites, and other, smaller ad firms. Nearly instantaneously, these companies
can log your visit, place ads tailored for your eyes specifically, and add
to the ever-growing online file about you.
There's nothing necessarily sinister about this
subterranean data exchange: this is, after all, the advertising ecosystem
that supports free online content. All the data lets advertisers tune their
ads, and the rest of the information logging lets them measure how well
things are actually working. And I do not mean to pick on The New York
Times. While visiting the Huffington Post or The Atlantic or Business
Insider, the same process happens to a greater or lesser degree. Every move
you make on the Internet is worth some tiny amount to someone, and a panoply
of companies want to make sure that no step along your Internet journey goes
unmonetized.
Even if you're generally familiar with the idea of
data collection for targeted advertising, the number and variety of these
data collectors will probably astonish you. Allow me to introduce the list
of companies that tracked my movements on the Internet in one recent 36-hour
period of standard web surfing: Acerno. Adara Media. Adblade. Adbrite. ADC
Onion. Adchemy. ADiFY. AdMeld. Adtech. Aggregate Knowledge. AlmondNet.
Aperture. AppNexus. Atlas. Audience Science.
And that's just the As. My complete list includes
105 companies, and there are dozens more than that in existence. You, too,
could compile your own list using Mozilla's tool, Collusion, which records
the companies that are capturing data about you, or more precisely, your
digital self.
While the big names -- Google, Microsoft, Facebook,
Yahoo, etc. -- show up in this catalog, the bulk of it is composed of
smaller data and advertising businesses that form a shadow web of companies
that want to help show you advertising that you're more likely to click on
and products that you're more likely to purchase.
To be clear, these companies gather data without
attaching it to your name; they use that data to show you ads you're
statistically more likely to click. That's the game, and there is
substantial money in it.
As users, we move through our Internet experiences
unaware of the churning subterranean machines powering our web pages with
their cookies and pixels trackers, their tracking code and databases. We
shop for wedding caterers and suddenly see ring ads appear on random web
pages we're visiting. We sometimes think the ads following us around the
Internet are "creepy." We sometimes feel watched. Does it matter? We don't
really know what to think.
The issues the industry raises did not exist when
Ronald Reagan was president and were only in nascent form when the Twin
Towers fell. These are phenomena of our time and while there are many
antecedent forms of advertising, never before in the history of human
existence has so much data been gathered about so many people for the sole
purpose of selling them ads.
"The best minds of my generation are thinking about
how to make people click ads," my old friend and early Facebook employee
Jeff Hammerbacher once said. "That sucks," he added. But increasingly I
think these issues -- how we move "freely" online, or more properly, how we
pay one way or another -- are actually the leading edge of a much bigger
discussion about the relationship between our digital and physical selves. I
don't mean theoretically or psychologically. I mean that the norms
established to improve how often people click ads may end up determining who
you are when viewed by a bank or a romantic partner or a retailer who sells
shoes.
Already, the web sites you visit reshape themselves
before you like a carnivorous school of fish, and this is only the
beginning. Right now, a huge chunk of what you've ever looked at on the
Internet is sitting in databases all across the world. The line separating
all that it might say about you, good or bad, is as thin as the letters of
your name. If and when that wall breaks down, the numbers may overwhelm the
name. The unconsciously created profile may mean more than the examined self
I've sought to build.
Most privacy debates have been couched in
technical. We read about how Google bypassed Safari's privacy settings,
whatever those were. Or we read the details about how Facebook tracks you
with those friendly Like buttons. Behind the details, however, are a tangle
of philosophical issues that are at the heart of the struggle between
privacy advocates and online advertising companies: What is anonymity? What
is identity? How similar are humans and machines? This essay is an attempt
to think through those questions.
The bad news is that people haven't taken control
of the data that's being collected and traded about them. The good news is
that -- in a quite literal sense -- simply thinking differently about this
advertising business can change the way that it works. After all, if you
take these companies at their word, they exist to serve users as much as to
serve their clients.
Continued in article
March 4, 2012 message from Aaron Konstam
If you are tired of Google tracking, try the
duckduckgo search engine at duckduckgo.com.
My observation is Google can't track you if you don't
log on to a Google
AP like gmail.
Search for Terms on Book Pages
The Absolutely Fantastic New Search Tool From Amazon
Google now has a new service (Google Print) for reading parts and searching
among pages of new books that is both similar to and different from the
groundbreaking Amazon free service.
DISPLAYING FIRST 50 OF 790 WORDS - Google Print, the
new search engine that allows consumers to search the content of books online,
could help touch off an important shift in the balance of power between
companies that produce books and those that sell them, publishing executives
said here on ... Google announced the introduction of the...
Google's mission is to organize the world's
information and make it universally accessible and useful. Since a lot of the
world's information isn't yet online, we're helping to get it there. Google
Print puts the content of books where you can find it most easily; right in
Google search results.
To use Google Print, just search on Google as you
normally would. For example, do a search on a subject such as "Books
about Ecuador Trekking," or search on a title like "Romeo and
Juliet." Whenever a book contains content that matches your search terms,
we'll show links to that book in your search results. Click on the book title
and you'll see the page that contains your search terms, as well as other
information about the book. You can also search for other topics within the
book. Click "Buy this Book" and you'll go straight to a bookstore
selling the book online.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does it work? What types of books are available? Can I read an entire book
online? Where does the book content come from? What can I do with a book that
I find using Google Print? Does Google keep track of the pages I'm viewing?
I'm searching for a specific book – why can't I find it? Does Google profit
when I buy a book from a Google Print page? I think I found a bug – who can
consign it to oblivion?
Google provides examples here!
You can read more about the competing Amazon book search and sample page
reading service below.
I find the Google service a bit easier to use, but I found that Amazon gave
me greater coverage of new books. Google will probably get better and
better over time. Neither service covers books that publishers have not
allowed surfers to search inside. In many instances this is a mistake on
the part of the publishing firms since finding a book by searching for a phrase
may greatly improve sales of the book.
Amazon’s ability to search through millions of
book pages to unearth any tidbit is part of a search revolution that will change
us all. Steven Levy, MANBC, November 10, 2003 --- http://www.msnbc.com/news/987697.asp?0dm=s118k
Hints from Bob Jensen
Be sure you note
the Previous Page and the Next Page options when you bring up a page of
text.
Note the option
at the top to "See all references" to your search term within a
given book (this is a wonderful search utility).
When you hit the
end of the allowed pages of reading, you might be able to find a phrase on
that last page that you can enter as a search term. I've done this and
have been able to bring up another five pages, etc. This is a
cumbersome way that one might read large portions of the book.
However, soon Amazon puts up a message that you have reached a limit of your
searches on the book and will deny you further searches. This software
is amazingly sophisticated.
The pages are
scanned pages and will sometimes show images as well as text in the original
colors. For example, search for "gnp graph" and note the
second hit to The Third World Atlas by Alan Thomas.
How It Works ---
http://snurl.com/BookSearch
A significant extension of our groundbreaking Look Inside the Book
feature, Search Inside the Book allows you to search millions of pages
to find exactly the book you want to buy. Now instead of just displaying
books whose title, author, or publisher-provided keywords that match
your search terms, your search results will surface titles based on
every word inside the book. Using Search Inside the Book is as simple as
running an Amazon.com search.
Amazon.com Inc. said
a new program that allows customers to search the contents of some books has
boosted sales growth by 9% for titles in the program above other titles that
can't be searched.
The news from the
Seattle-based Internet retailer suggests that concerns among some book
publishers that the search service might hurt sales haven't materialized.
Amazon last Thursday introduced the service, called Search Inside the Book,
which gave its customers a way to scour complete copies of 120,000 books from
190 publishers, a major advance over the searches customers were previously
limited to, such as searches by title and author name.
Some book publishers
have stayed out of the new Amazon search service because of concerns that
users can easily scan Amazon's electronic copies instead of buying the books.
In the days since the service launched though, Amazon monitored sales of
120,000 book titles that can be searched through its new service and says
growth in sales of those books significantly outpaced the growth of all other
titles on the site. Amazon said 37 additional publishers have contacted the
company since the search service launched asking to have their books included
in the program.
"It's helping
people find things they couldn't otherwise find," Steve Kessel, vice
president of Amazon's North American books, music and video group, said in an
interview. "There are people who love authors and who are finding things,
not just by the author, but about the author."
Although its
customers can search entire books with the new service, Amazon has
restrictions that limit the ability to browse entire books online. Once a user
clicks to a book page containing terms that they've search for -- "Gulf
War," for instance -- Amazon doesn't let them browse more than two pages
forward or back. Users may jump to other pages containing the terms, but the
same restrictions on browsing apply.
Search technology is
becoming an increasingly important focus for Amazon and for online shopping in
general. The company recently established a new division in Silicon Valley,
called A9, which is developing searching technology for finding products to
purchase on the Internet. (See article.) The project is getting underway at a
time when more shoppers are using search engines like Google and comparison
shopping sites like BizRate.com to locate products.
Amazon has a head
start on another big Internet company in the book search department. Google
Inc. is also talking to publishers about allowing searches of the contents of
books, according to people familiar with the matter. A Google spokesman
declined to comment.
Google's
Scholarly Search Engine and Some Publisher Ripoff Reasons Why It Has Big
Problems
"Google to Launch Scholarly
Search," The Wall Street Journal, November 18, 2004, Page A8
---
Google
Inc. today is set to introduce a service allowing computer users to search the
content of scholarly publications. The free service, called Google Scholar,
searches academic literature available on the Web or through Google's
agreements with publishers. Search results will include dissertations,
peer-reviewed papers, articles and books. To rank the results, Google will
consider such factors as where a document was published and how many other
scholarly works cite it, factors that aren't a part of its usual ranking
system for Web pages. In some cases, publishers require consumers to pay a fee
to see the full text of a document. In Google's current test version, the
service doesn't include advertisements.
Online search engine leader Google Inc. is setting
out make better sense of all the scholarly work stored on the Web.
The company's new service, unveiled late Wednesday at
http://scholar.google.com,
draws upon newly developed algorithms to list the academic research that
appears to be most relevant to a search request. Mountain View-based Google
doesn't plan to charge for the service nor use the feature to deliver
text-based ads - the primary source of its profits.
"Google has benefited a lot from scholarly
research, so this is one way we are giving back to the scholarly
community," said Anurag Acharya, a Google engineer who helped develop the
new search tools.
Although Google already had been indexing the reams
of academic research online, the company hadn't been able to separate the
scholarly content from commercial Web sites.
By focusing on the citations contained in academic
papers, Google also engineered its new system to provide a list of potentially
helpful material available at libraries and other offline sources.
The scholarly search effort continues Google's effort
to probe even deeper into content available online and offline. Just last
month, Google expanded a program that invites publishers to scan their books
into the search engine's index, enabling people to peek at the contents online
before deciding whether to buy a copy.
I did a search on
XBRL and found that Google did an excellent job of finding research on this
specialist area. I will be recommending this site to my students in future,
Roger
November 19, 2004 reply from Clifford
Budge
I have just screened
through its offerings in relation a a single topic: Cash Flow. 100 screens
full of references - must be 800 or more. It took over an hour to screen
through all the titles!
Let me give a very
rough impression of what came out of screening through the topic.
For a Google search
approach, there are very few ref's that seem to be totally irrelevant to the
title "Cash Flow".
Most of the articles
are from journals with a wide, business interest.
Many report
possibilities to implement academic studies for practical use, on topics
probably of interest to the financial markets, specific industries.
Some focus on
developing methods of forecasting cash flows - for control, or calculating
investment opportunities etc.
There are at least a
dozen articles of academic research in the area, up to 12 or so years old.
Most of them discuss theory of applying various aspects of CF in
investing/business situations.
Academics looking for
a research area in the field might well locate something with a potential for
closer consideration.
OVERALL, this topic
has probably been well-served by Google.
Clifford Budge
Macquarie University,
Sydney Australia
Email: cbudge@efs.mq.edu.au
As you may have read on AECM, I've aready used this
new Google search to assess it against my own interests in Cash Flow
Statements.
It would be wise for us "wise men" to put
Google to the test:
Could a number of readers, in different aspects of
accounting research, put the system to the test?
My own very quick test on Cash Flow research
presented a huge majority of articles from magazines without a research
focus. - Some of them considered the possible application of research
articles to business situations - which isn't the same thing, is it? - I was
mystified at the low proportion of articles from the "recognised"
research journals: perhaps someone might correlate the "hit rate"
for their topic of interest back to the journals? (I have records of
articles over the period reported that did not reach their site).
The whole job took me less the two hours! What
about some other analyses to spread our knowledge?
One of the real problems of scholarly research is
that scholarly research journals think the only way they can make money and
control copying losses is to restrict publications to hard copy. This
prevents Internet search crawlers like Google from finding key words buried
in text.
Pogo got it right."The enemy is us."In
particular our worst enemies are faculties who still insist on publication
in "elite" journals that shut out easy searches for literature via
the Internet. What is worse is
that scholarly journal publication has become a monopoly of the worst kind
(rip off pricing of libraries) that some universities and virtually all
librarians are fighting as best they can.
Ted Bergstrom, an economist at UCSB expains this
phenomena (where free entry and existence of free or cheaper non-profit
journals does not preclude monopoly profits by academic journal peddlers)
via a parable that illustrates the well known co-ordination game in the
Theory of Games. The equilibrium is a situation where everyone is worse off.
You can see the paper at http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Journals/jeprevised.pdf
. I am giving below just a snippet that explains the concept through a
parable.
Bob, we do not have to go very far to find the
effects of this. Look at AAA and how it extracts monopoly rents by
restricting knowledge, if there is much of it, in its journals.
Jagdish
_______________________________________________
The Anarchists' Annual Meeting: A Parable
This tale is intended to illustrate the workings of
coordination games, and to show that in such games, the presence of
potential competitors does not necessarily prevent monopoly pricing.
A large number of anarchists find it valuable to
attend an annual meeting of like-minded people. The meeting is more valuable
to each of them, the greater the number of other anarchists who attend. A
meeting attended by only a few is of little value to any of them. At some
time in the past, the anarchists started to gather on a particular day of
the year in one hotel in a certain city. Other hotels in this and other
cities would have served equally well for the meeting, but since each
anarchist expects the others to appear at the usual hotel, they return every
year to the same hotel on the day of the meeting.
A few years after the anarchists had established
their routine, the hotel that served as their meeting-place increased its
prices for the day of their annual meeting. Most anarchists valued the
annual meeting so highly that they continued to attend, despite the price
increase. A few decided that at the higher price, they would rather stay
home. The hotel owner observed that although attendance was slightly
reduced, the fall in attendance was less than the proportional to the price
increase and thus his revenue and his profits increased. In subsequent
years, after some experimentation, the hotel owner learned that he could
maximize his annual profit by setting a price on the anarchists' meeting day
that was much higher than that of other hotels. After setting this price,
the hotel owner proclaimed that he was offering a uniquely valuable service
to the anarchists.
The anarchists were annoyed at having to pay
tribute to the hotel owner for services no better than other hotels offered
more cheaply. Moreover, since all of the anarchists prefer larger attendance
to smaller, they were all made worse off by the fact that high prices caused
some of their number to stay home. But what else could they do? Each
anarchist was aware that he or she would be better off if they could all
meet at one of the many other hotels offering equal physical facilities at a
lower price. Given their beliefs and temperaments, the anarchists were
resistant to making and obeying centralized decisions. Lacking central
direction, the anarchists were unable to coordinate a move to another hotel.
No individual, nor even any small group of anarchists, could gain by moving
to another hotel because small meetings, however cheap, are not worth much
to any of them.
Pessimistic anarchists speculated that even if they
were somehow able to re-coordinate at a cheaper hotel, this victory would be
shortlived. The new hotel like its predecessor would raise its prices to
take advantage of the anarchists' disorderly ways. More optimistic
anarchists suggested that the problem of organizing a meeting at a new hotel
is not insurmountable, even for anarchists. Therefore, argued the optimists,
once it is demonstrated that the anarchists will move their meeting if
prices become excessive, the hotel at which they settle will moderate its
prices rather than provoke another mass defection.
The Keepers Registry (back issues of journals in large libraries) ---
http://thekeepers.org
For example search for "Accounting"
Scholarly publishing consultants Tracy Gardner and Simon Inger
recently concluded a large-scale study of how researchers navigate the
flood of digitized scholarly content.
Renew Training, the British
company they run, will sell you the complete data set for a mere £1000
(that's $1,592), or the same information in a deluxe Excel spreadsheet,
outfitted with specially designed an analytic features, for £2,500 (a
cool $3,981). Anyone whose curiosity is merely idle or penniless must
settle for the
“survey edition” of the consultants' own analysis, in PDF, which is
free.
As you would expect, it's more of an advertisement than a
report, with graphs that hint at how much data they have, and how many
kinds of it, from around the world. Gardner and Inger’s own report, “How
Readers Discover Content in Scholarly Journals,” is available in
e-book format at a reasonable price – so I sprang for a copy and
have culled some of their findings for this week’s column.
The key word here being some, because even the consultants’
non-exhaustive crunching of the numbers is pretty overwhelming. Between
May and July of this year, they collected responses from more than
19,000 interview subjects spanning the populated world. The questions
covered various situations in which someone might go looking for
scholarly articles in a digital format and the considerable range of
ways of going about it. Two-thirds of respondents were from academic
institutions – with a large majority (three out of four) identifying
themselves as researchers.
Roughly two-thirds of the respondents were from North America and
Europe, and the interview itself was conducted in English. But enough
participants came from the medical, corporate, and government sectors,
and from countries in Africa, Oceania, and South America, to make the
study something other than a report on Anglo-American academe. In
addition, Gardner and Inger conducted a similar survey in 2008 (albeit
with a much smaller harvest of data, from around 400 respondents). They
also draw on a study they conducted in 2005 as consultants for another
group.
The trends, then. The range and size of digitally
published scholarship keep growing, and a number of tools or approaches
have developed for accessing material. Researchers rely on university
library sites, abstracting and indexing (A&I) services, compilations of
links assembled by learned societies or research teams, social networks,
and search engines both general (Yahoo) and focused (Google Scholar).
You might bookmark a favorite journal, or sign up for an e-mail alert
when the table of contents for a new issue is out, or use the journal
publisher’s website to find an article.
The survey questions cover three research “behaviors” common across
the disciplines: (1) following up a citation, (2) browsing in the core
journals in a given field, and (3) looking for articles on a specific
subject. As indicated, quite a few ways of carrying out these tasks are
now available. Some approaches are better-developed in one field than
another. The survey shows that researchers in the life sciences use the
National Institutes of Health's bibliographical database
PubMed “almost
exclusively,” while the e-mailed table-of-contents (ToC) notifications
for chemistry journals are rich enough in information for their readers
to find them valuable.
And ease of access to sorting-and-channeling methods varies from one
part of the world to the next. A researcher in a poor country is likely
to use the search feature on a publisher’s website (bookmarked for just
that purpose) for the simple reason that doing so is free – while
someone working in a major research library may have access to numerous
bibliographical tools so well-integrated into the digital catalog that
users barely notice them as such.
North American researchers “are most likely to use an academic search
engine or the library web pages if they have a citation,” the reports
notes, “whilst Europeans are more likely to go the journal’s homepage.”
Humanities scholars “rely much more on library web pages and especially
aggregated collections of journals” than do researchers in the life
sciences.
Comments made by social scientists reveal that they use “a much more
varied list of resources” for following up citations, including one
respondent who relied on “my husband’s library because mine is so bad.”
When browsing around the journals in their field, researchers in the
field of education “are greater users of academic search engines and of
web pages maintained by key research groups” than are people working in
other areas. “Social scientists appear to use journal aggregations less
than those in the humanities for reading the latest articles.” And all
of them rank “library web pages and journal aggregations more highly”
than do people in medicine and the physical and life sciences. One
respondent indicated that it wasn’t really necessary to look through
recent issues of journals in mathematics because “nowadays virtually all
leading research in math is uploaded to
arXiv.”
Specialized bibliographical databases “are still the most popular
resource” for someone trying to read up on a particular topic, “and
allowing for a margin of error [this preference] shows no significant
change over time.” The web pages compiled by scholarly societies and
research groups “have both shown a slight upward trend” in that regard,
“which may be due to changes in publisher marketing strategies resulting
in readers becoming more familiar publisher and society brands.”
Scholarly publishing consultants Tracy Gardner and Simon Inger
recently concluded a large-scale study of how researchers navigate the
flood of digitized scholarly content.
Renew Training, the British
company they run, will sell you the complete data set for a mere £1000
(that's $1,592), or the same information in a deluxe Excel spreadsheet,
outfitted with specially designed an analytic features, for £2,500 (a
cool $3,981). Anyone whose curiosity is merely idle or penniless must
settle for the
“survey edition” of the consultants' own analysis, in PDF, which is
free.
As you would expect, it's more of an advertisement than a
report, with graphs that hint at how much data they have, and how many
kinds of it, from around the world. Gardner and Inger’s own report, “How
Readers Discover Content in Scholarly Journals,” is available in
e-book format at a reasonable price – so I sprang for a copy and
have culled some of their findings for this week’s column.
The key word here being some, because even the consultants’
non-exhaustive crunching of the numbers is pretty overwhelming. Between
May and July of this year, they collected responses from more than
19,000 interview subjects spanning the populated world. The questions
covered various situations in which someone might go looking for
scholarly articles in a digital format and the considerable range of
ways of going about it. Two-thirds of respondents were from academic
institutions – with a large majority (three out of four) identifying
themselves as researchers.
Roughly two-thirds of the respondents were from North America and
Europe, and the interview itself was conducted in English. But enough
participants came from the medical, corporate, and government sectors,
and from countries in Africa, Oceania, and South America, to make the
study something other than a report on Anglo-American academe. In
addition, Gardner and Inger conducted a similar survey in 2008 (albeit
with a much smaller harvest of data, from around 400 respondents). They
also draw on a study they conducted in 2005 as consultants for another
group.
The trends, then. The range and size of digitally
published scholarship keep growing, and a number of tools or approaches
have developed for accessing material. Researchers rely on university
library sites, abstracting and indexing (A&I) services, compilations of
links assembled by learned societies or research teams, social networks,
and search engines both general (Yahoo) and focused (Google Scholar).
You might bookmark a favorite journal, or sign up for an e-mail alert
when the table of contents for a new issue is out, or use the journal
publisher’s website to find an article.
The survey questions cover three research “behaviors” common across
the disciplines: (1) following up a citation, (2) browsing in the core
journals in a given field, and (3) looking for articles on a specific
subject. As indicated, quite a few ways of carrying out these tasks are
now available. Some approaches are better-developed in one field than
another. The survey shows that researchers in the life sciences use the
National Institutes of Health's bibliographical database
PubMed “almost
exclusively,” while the e-mailed table-of-contents (ToC) notifications
for chemistry journals are rich enough in information for their readers
to find them valuable.
And ease of access to sorting-and-channeling methods varies from one
part of the world to the next. A researcher in a poor country is likely
to use the search feature on a publisher’s website (bookmarked for just
that purpose) for the simple reason that doing so is free – while
someone working in a major research library may have access to numerous
bibliographical tools so well-integrated into the digital catalog that
users barely notice them as such.
North American researchers “are most likely to use an academic search
engine or the library web pages if they have a citation,” the reports
notes, “whilst Europeans are more likely to go the journal’s homepage.”
Humanities scholars “rely much more on library web pages and especially
aggregated collections of journals” than do researchers in the life
sciences.
Comments made by social scientists reveal that they use “a much more
varied list of resources” for following up citations, including one
respondent who relied on “my husband’s library because mine is so bad.”
When browsing around the journals in their field, researchers in the
field of education “are greater users of academic search engines and of
web pages maintained by key research groups” than are people working in
other areas. “Social scientists appear to use journal aggregations less
than those in the humanities for reading the latest articles.” And all
of them rank “library web pages and journal aggregations more highly”
than do people in medicine and the physical and life sciences. One
respondent indicated that it wasn’t really necessary to look through
recent issues of journals in mathematics because “nowadays virtually all
leading research in math is uploaded to
arXiv.”
Specialized bibliographical databases “are still the most popular
resource” for someone trying to read up on a particular topic, “and
allowing for a margin of error [this preference] shows no significant
change over time.” The web pages compiled by scholarly societies and
research groups “have both shown a slight upward trend” in that regard,
“which may be due to changes in publisher marketing strategies resulting
in readers becoming more familiar publisher and society brands.”
Scholarly publishing consultants Tracy Gardner and Simon Inger
recently concluded a large-scale study of how researchers navigate the
flood of digitized scholarly content.
Renew Training, the British
company they run, will sell you the complete data set for a mere £1000
(that's $1,592), or the same information in a deluxe Excel spreadsheet,
outfitted with specially designed an analytic features, for £2,500 (a
cool $3,981). Anyone whose curiosity is merely idle or penniless must
settle for the
“survey edition” of the consultants' own analysis, in PDF, which is
free.
Scholarly publishing consultants Tracy Gardner and Simon Inger
recently concluded a large-scale study of how researchers navigate the flood
of digitized scholarly content.Renew Training, the
British company they run, will sell you the complete data set for a mere
£1000 (that's $1,592), or the same information in a deluxe Excel
spreadsheet, outfitted with specially designed an analytic features, for
£2,500 (a cool $3,981). Anyone whose curiosity is merely idle or penniless
must settle for the“survey edition”of the
consultants' own analysis, in PDF, which is free.
As you
would expect, it's more of an advertisement than a report, with graphs that
hint at how much data they have, and how many kinds of it, from around the
world. Gardner and Inger’s own report, “How Readers Discover Content in
Scholarly Journals,” is available ine-book formatat a
reasonable price – so I sprang for a copy and have culled some of their
findings for this week’s column.
The key word here being some, because even the consultants’
non-exhaustive crunching of the numbers is pretty overwhelming. Between May
and July of this year, they collected responses from more than 19,000
interview subjects spanning the populated world. The questions covered
various situations in which someone might go looking for scholarly articles
in a digital format and the considerable range of ways of going about it.
Two-thirds of respondents were from academic institutions – with a large
majority (three out of four) identifying themselves as researchers.
Roughly two-thirds of the respondents were from North America and Europe,
and the interview itself was conducted in English. But enough participants
came from the medical, corporate, and government sectors, and from countries
in Africa, Oceania, and South America, to make the study something other
than a report on Anglo-American academe. In addition, Gardner and Inger
conducted a similar survey in 2008 (albeit with a much smaller harvest of
data, from around 400 respondents). They also draw on a study they conducted
in 2005 as consultants for another group.
The trends, then.
The range and size of digitally published scholarship keep growing, and a
number of tools or approaches have developed for accessing material.
Researchers rely on university library sites, abstracting and indexing (A&I)
services, compilations of links assembled by learned societies or research
teams, social networks, and search engines both general (Yahoo) and focused
(Google Scholar). You might bookmark a favorite journal, or sign up for an
e-mail alert when the table of contents for a new issue is out, or use the
journal publisher’s website to find an article.
The
survey questions cover three research “behaviors” common across the
disciplines: (1) following up a citation, (2) browsing in the core journals
in a given field, and (3) looking for articles on a specific subject. As
indicated, quite a few ways of carrying out these tasks are now available.
Some approaches are better-developed in one field than another. The survey
shows that researchers in the life sciences use the National Institutes of
Health's bibliographical databasePubMed
“almost exclusively,” while the e-mailed table-of-contents (ToC)
notifications for chemistry journals are rich enough in information for
their readers to find them valuable.
And ease of access to sorting-and-channeling methods varies from one part of
the world to the next. A researcher in a poor country is likely to use the
search feature on a publisher’s website (bookmarked for just that purpose)
for the simple reason that doing so is free – while someone working in a
major research library may have access to numerous bibliographical tools so
well-integrated into the digital catalog that users barely notice them as
such.
North American researchers “are most likely to use an academic search engine
or the library web pages if they have a citation,” the reports notes,
“whilst Europeans are more likely to go the journal’s homepage.” Humanities
scholars “rely much more on library web pages and especially aggregated
collections of journals” than do researchers in the life sciences.
Comments made by social scientists reveal that they use “a much more varied
list of resources” for following up citations, including one respondent who
relied on “my husband’s library because mine is so bad.”
When
browsing around the journals in their field, researchers in the field of
education “are greater users of academic search engines and of web pages
maintained by key research groups” than are people working in other areas.
“Social scientists appear to use journal aggregations less than those in the
humanities for reading the latest articles.” And all of them rank “library
web pages and journal aggregations more highly” than do people in medicine
and the physical and life sciences. One respondent indicated that it wasn’t
really necessary to look through recent issues of journals in mathematics
because “nowadays virtually all leading research in math is uploaded toarXiv.”
Specialized bibliographical databases “are still the most popular resource”
for someone trying to read up on a particular topic, “and allowing for a
margin of error [this preference] shows no significant change over time.”
The web pages compiled by scholarly societies and research groups “have both
shown a slight upward trend” in that regard, “which may be due to changes in
publisher marketing strategies resulting in readers becoming more familiar
publisher and society brands.”
The rise of academic search engines is a new factor -- and while there are
others, such as Microsoft Academic Search, the bar graphs show Google
Scholar looming over all competitors like a skyscraper over huts. And that’s
not even counting the general-purpose Google search engine, which remains a
standard tool for academic researchers.
One interesting point that the authors extract from the comments of
participants is that many scholars remain unclear on the difference between
a search engine and, say, a specialized bibliographical database.
Unfortunately the survey seems not to have included information on
respondents’ ages, though it would be interesting to know if that is a
factor in recognizing such distinctions.
As I said,
the e-book version is reasonably priced, and well within reach of anyone
intrigued by this column's aerial survey. The publishers and information
managers who can afford the full-dress, all-the-data version, which will
allow comparison between the research preferences of Malaysian physicists
and German historians, and so forth, will be able to extract from it
information on how better to engineer access to their content by the
specific research constituencies using it.
How It Works ---
http://snurl.com/BookSearch
A significant extension of our groundbreaking Look Inside the Book
feature, Search Inside the Book allows you to search millions of pages
to find exactly the book you want to buy. Now instead of just displaying
books whose title, author, or publisher-provided keywords that match
your search terms, your search results will surface titles based on
every word inside the book. Using Search Inside the Book is as simple as
running an Amazon.com search.
At what point does the volume of historical
scholarship get in the way of our ability to make sense of history?
At The Chronicle Technology Forum on Monday,
Andrew J. Torget, director of the digital scholarship lab at the
University of Richmond, argued that we have already exceeded that point.
He said that if a person were to read one book a day for the rest of his
life, he would not even begin to approach the number of books that
Google has already scanned into its database from college libraries.
There is just too much information out there.
The current model for teaching and learning is
based on a relative scarcity of research and writing, not an excess.
With that in mind, Mr. Torget and several others have created a Web site
called
History Engine to help students around the
country work together on a shared tool to make sense of history
documents online. Students generate brief essays on American history,
and the History Engine aggregates the essays and makes them navigable by
tags. Call it Wikipedia for students.
Except better. First of all, its content is
moderated by professors. Second, while Wikipedia still presents
information two-dimensionally, History Engine employs mapping technology
to organize scholarship by time period, geographic location, and themes.
“When you’ve got too much information to be able to process it all,
you’re not sure how to find meaningful patterns within it,” Mr. Torget
told The Chronicle. “The idea is to build a digital microscope
that allows students to focus in on what’s most useful and relevant for
the question they’re asking.”
Also, the essays (called “episodes”) that
compose the History Engine database are short in comparison to
traditional scholarly essays—typically about 500 words. “The challenge
of a digital age is that that writing assignment hasn’t changed since
the age of the typewriter,” Mr. Torget said. “The digital medium
requires us to rethink how we make those assignments.”
While some academics might groan about the
perils of reining in scholarly commentary according to the standards of
reader patience established by Twitter and text messaging, Mr. Torget
said that the essay-length restrictions help focus students on what is
most important and relevant when writing about their research. But the
larger aim of the project is to encourage students to create and view
their work in context of a larger body of scholarship—one that accounts
for a wide community of scholars but is organized in a way that is
manageable.
So far, Mr. Torget says that professors at
eight colleges have agreed to use and contribute to the History Engine
in their classes. The engine is free to any who wish to join.
CiteBase
Citebase is a trial service that allows researchers
to search across free, full-text research literature
ePrint archives, with results ranked according to
criteria such as citation impact.
Gateway to ePrints
A listing of ePrint servers and open access
repository search tools.
Google Scholar
A search tool for scholarly citations and abstracts,
many of which link to full text articles, book
chapters, working papers and other forms of
scholarly publishing. It includes content from many
open access journals and repositories.
OAIster
A search tool for cross-archive searching of more
than 540 separate digital collections and archives,
including arXiv, CiteBase, ANU ePrints, ePrintsUQ,
and others.
Scirus
A search tool for online journals and Web sites in
the sciences.
Social scientists and business scholars often use SSRN (not free) ---
http://www.ssrn.com/
If you have access to a college library, most colleges generally have
paid subscriptions to enormous scholarly literature databases that are not
available freely online. Serious scholars obtain access to these vast
literature databases.
MIT's Video Lecture Search
Engine: Watch the video at ---
http://web.sls.csail.mit.edu/lectures/
Researchers at MIT have released a video and audio search tool that solves one
of the most challenging problems in the field: how to break up a lengthy
academic lecture into manageable chunks, pinpoint the location of keywords, and
direct the user to them. Announced last month, the MIT
Lecture Browser website gives the general public
detailed access to more than 200 lectures publicly available though the
university's
OpenCourseWareinitiative. The search engine
leverages decades' worth of speech-recognition research at MIT and other
institutions to
convert
audio
into text and make it searchable.
Kate Greene, MIT's Technology Review, November 26, 2007 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19747/?nlid=686&a=f
Once again, the Lecture Browser link (with video) is at
http://web.sls.csail.mit.edu/lectures/
Bob Jensen's search helpers are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm
"What is the most underused research technique among lawyers?"
Answer in an email from Brian Garner on February 26, 2013
ANSWER: Undoubtedly it's Google Books.
It's possible to perform extremely literal
searches -- word-for-word and character-for-character searches -- on
Google Books, and to have at your fingertips the entire corpus of major
university libraries' holdings. This means that you can scour all the
legal treatises at Chicago, Stanford, Oxford, Columbia, and other major
institutions in minutes -- and without ever leaving your chair.
For example, let's say you wanted to learn the
history of whether statutes can be repealed by disuse. You could first
go to the main Google Books site and type in terms such as repeal
statute disuse. A quick scan of the results would lead you to the term
desuetude. You could then scroll to the bottom of the page and click on
"advanced search," where you'd find powerful options for refining your
search. By crafting different searches using the terms desuetude,
statute, repeal, disuse, American law, etc., you would find sources
discussing desuetude in Scots, Roman, English, and American law. And as
with any research project, the more you delve into the sources, the more
nuances you'll discover. (By the way, for a full discussion of the
desuetude canon and its standing in current law, see Antonin Scalia &
Bryan A. Garner, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts 336-39
[2012]).
As with any electronic search, the quality of
the results will depend on your research skills. But instead of paying
for a legal-research service, as lawyers so commonly do, you have a
compilation of answers in treatises with just a few strokes of your
keyboard -- and best of all: at no charge.
Granted, for a full-text reading, Google Books
is most useful when you're researching historical matters found in works
in the public domain (any book published before 1923 is not protected by
copyright laws and has passed into the public domain). But even for
books still in copyright, it can take you to sources you can purchase or
consult in a library. An especially useful feature of Google Books is
the advanced-search criterion by publication date. For example, you
might ask for books published only from 1976 to 2000.
Mind you, Google Books shouldn't be your sole
source for legal research. But you'll be surprised at how handy it can
be. So don't let this valuable research tool go untapped. Lawyers
everywhere ought to be using Google Books in addition to Westlaw,
LexisNexis, and other electronic-search services.
I spent time in California
interviewing graduate students about their
work processes. Something that stood out to me was how science and
engineering students typically looked for people (rather than subject
headings) during the information gathering stage. The objective was to
find researchers working in particular areas and then mine their
websites for additional papers. That’s exactly the approach that
Scholrly hopes
to improve upon.
I first came across
Scholrly about
a year ago when a friend of a friend liked them on Facebook. I explored
and this is what I found:
“Scholrly aims to give its users, from the
garage inventor to the tenured professor, a single stop for finding
research connections and insights faster than ever before.”
I spoke with co-founder
Corbin Pon
last August and followed their development. Over
the past year they’ve worked with faculty at Georgia Tech’s College of
Computing to build out the idea. And in early June they’ll open up their
software to beta testers.
People What’s most interesting to me is
Scholrly’s people-centric
emphasis. When you search with a keyword you not only get relevant
citations but relevant people as well. The goal is to let users search
for people and to figure out who is important within the subject
context. And not only that, but what else have those people worked on,
who have they worked with, and other related connections.
The idea sparked during a conversation with a
physician at Emory who expressed frustration at not being able to find
people with the skill set he needed. He assumed that researchers at
nearby Georgia Tech probably had the expertise, but he wasn’t sure how
to identify or contact them.
This led the co-founders to thinking about how
researchers are connected bibliographically and how they could also be
connected through an online tool. They mapped different knowledge
networks and built a search engine around the data with the objective of
making the people part much more accessible.
When searching Scholrly the results are
returned on two separate panels: publications & authors. While the
author component isn’t too radically different, in fact many databases
provide author lists/limiters in the results, Scholrly places a great
emphasis on this feature. Author profiles will include career
information, affiliations, publication listings, common co-authors, top
publishing venues, and impact metrics. Authors are also able to claim
their profile, similarly to how twitter verifies celebrity identities,
and then edit/upload additional information.
Ontological Neighborhoods
Corbin often talks about scholarly neighborhoods:
“When we talk about neighborhoods, we know
that there are communities of related research that are not always
easy to see and explore. These researchers are reading and
contributing to work from all different fields. In one project,
someone might be contributing to their own self-defined field, and
in another project, there could of experts for all sorts of fields.
Scholrly connects papers and researchers based on the citation graph
and co-authorship right at this moment, and we are developing other
techniques of finding similarities. This makes it easier to identify
titles and faces that appear in clusters regardless of their self
described field and shows series of related papers that might
suggest long term projects worth investigating. This idea of
neighborhoods, we feel, better describes the structure of research
than strict collections that classify work from the top-down.”
And the team doesn’t view academics are their
only audience. One of their goals is to make research materials more
accessible to people who don’t have access to big libraries or Fortune
500 budgets. “We really want to change the way that people find research
materials” But listening to Corbin talk you realize it’s not just search
behavior that he hopes will change, but the entire way people think
about and approach their research process.
Oh and Google Scholar? “Our goal is to compete
with Google Scholar, or replace it.”
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
When I searched for "Accounting" on June 1, 2012 there were four categories,
including Accounting Issues and Accounting Theory. However, there were no
hits available under those categories. It's probably too early to try this
search engine for accounting topics.
Milwaukee —
Digital natives? The idea that students are superengaged finders of
online learning materials once struck Glenda Morgan, e-learning
strategist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as “a
load of hooey.” Students, she figured, probably stick with the
textbooks and other content they’re assigned in class.
Not quite. The
preliminary results of a multiyear study of undergraduates’ online
study habits, presented by Ms. Morgan at a conference on blended
learning here this week, show that most students shop around for
digital texts and videos beyond the boundaries of what professors
assign them in class.
It’s nothing
new to hear that students
supplement their studies with other
universities’ online lecture videos. But Ms. Morgan’s
research—backed by the National Science Foundation, based on 14
focus-group interviews at a range of colleges, and buttressed by a
large online survey going on now—paints a broader picture of how
they’re finding content, where they’re getting it, and why they’re
using it.
Ms. Morgan borrows
the phrase “free-range learning” to describe students’ behavior, and
she finds that they generally shop around for content in places
educators would endorse. Students seem most favorably inclined to
materials from other universities. They mention lecture videos from
Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology far more than
the widely publicized Khan Academy, she says. If they’re on a
pre-med or health-science track, they prefer recognized “brands”
like the Mayo Clinic. Students often seek this outside content due
to dissatisfaction with their own professors, Ms. Morgan says.
The study should be
welcome news for government agencies, universities, and others in
the business of publishing online libraries of educational
content—although students tend to access these sources from the
“side door,” like via a Google search for a very specific piece of
information.
But the study also
highlights the challenge facing professors and librarians. Students
report relying on friends to get help and share resources, Ms.
Morgan says, whereas their responses suggest “much less of a role”
for “conventional authority figures.”
They “don’t want to
ask librarians or tutors in the study center or stuff like that,”
she says. “It’s more the informal networks that they’re using.”
Ms. Morgan confesses
to some concerns about her own data. She wonders how much students
are “telling me what I want to hear.” She also worries that she’s
tapping into a disproportionate slice of successful students.
In death, as in life, people don't always leave
their papers in order. Letters, manuscripts, and other pieces of evidence
wind up scattered among different archives, leading researchers on a paper
chase as they try to hunt down what they need for their work.
"It can be hugely frustrating—especially when you
make a journey cross-country to an archive, and then discover the piece you
really wanted must be somewhere else (or, God forbid, rotting away in a
landfill)," says Robert Townsend, deputy director of the American Historical
Association, in an e-mail interview. Chasing after distributed historical
records is so common that "any historian who has not suffered from that
problem can't be working very hard," he wrote.
The Internet has made the hunt easier, as more
archives post finding aids for their collections online. "Scholars have at
least gotten to the point where they can search over the Internet for these
materials," says Daniel V. Pitti, the associate director of the Institute
for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, or IATH, at the University of
Virginia. But what he calls "hunting and gathering" persists for
document-seekers, who "a priori have to have some idea, some hunch, of where
to go, because the access systems are distinct and not integrated any way."
Now imagine a central clearinghouse for those
records, an online hub researchers could consult to find archival materials.
That vision drives a project of Mr. Pitti's called
the Social Networks and Archival Context Project, or SNAC. It's a
collaboration between researchers and developers at IATH, the University of
California at Berkeley's School of Information, and the California Digital
Library. The project recently finished its pilot stage with the help of a
grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Another grant, from
the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will support the project through another
two years as it adds millions more records and begins beta testing with
researchers.
Some people have already found the prototype, which
is up and running although not yet widely promoted. The site allows visitors
to search for the names of individuals, corporate entities, or families to
find "archival context records" for them.
"So if I'm interested in a particular person," Mr.
Pitti says, "I can find where all the records are that would be required to
understand them." For instance, a search for Robert Oppenheimer turns up a
link to a collection of the physicist's papers housed at the Library of
Congress, plus links to other collections in which he is referenced, a
biographical timeline, and a list of occupations and subjects related to his
life and work.
A researcher can explore a person's social and
cultural environment with SNAC's radial-graph feature. It creates a web,
which can be manipulated, of a subject's connections as revealed in archival
records. The radial graph of Oppenheimer's network, for instance, includes
George Kennan, Linus Pauling, Bertrand Russell, and Albert Schweitzer, among
many other names represented as nodes on the graph.
Not yet fully developed, the radial-graph feature
supports one of the project's main goals: to visualize the social networks
within which archival records were created. "What you're trying to do is put
together the puzzle, the fabric of someone's life, the people that
influenced them and the people they influenced," Mr. Pitti says. "One could
certainly, in an analog context, piece this together, but it would take
years and years of work. What we're demonstrating is that we can go out
there and gather all that information and present it to you, which would
liberate scholars." Connecting archival data can reveal patterns of
association hidden in disparate collections.
Data Quality Important
To work well, SNAC requires good data. Its first
phase drew on thousands of finding aids—encoded with a standard known as
Encoded Archival Description, or EAD—from the Library of Congress, the
Northwest Digital Archives, the Online Archive of California, and Virginia
Heritage. A newer standard for encoding archival information, referred to as
EAC-CPF, for Encoded Archival Context-Corporate Bodies, Persons, and
Families, was then applied to those records, making them easier to find and
connect.
Archives are idiosyncratic, and it's not always
easy to tell whether a name refers to a particular individual or to
different people with identical or similar names. One of Mr. Pitti's main
collaborators is Ray R. Larson, a professor in the School of Information at
the University of California at Berkeley. He concentrates on what Mr. Pitti
calls the "matching and merging" required to winnow out duplicate names,
find variants of the same name, and so on. To do that Mr. Larson has tested
several approaches, including machine learning, in which a computer is
programmed to recognize, for example, common variations in spelling.
The job is about to get much tougher, though,
because SNAC is about to get much bigger. As part of the second phase of the
project, supported by the Mellon grant, 13 state and regional archival
consortia and more than 35 university and national repositories in the
United States, Britain, and France will contribute records. The British
Library "is giving me 300,000 names associated with their manuscript
collections," going back to before the Christian era, says Mr. Pitti.
The project will also ingest as many as 2 million
standardized bibliographic records, in the widely used MARC format, from the
online OCLC collaboration in which libraries exchange research and
cataloging information. OCLC has its own centralized archival search
function, called ArchiveGrid; Mr. Pitti describes it as complementary to
SNAC. Unlike SNAC, though, "ArchiveGrid does not foreground the
biographical-historical data, nor does it reveal the social networks that
interrelate the archival resources," he says.
How would you have written the encyclopedia entry
about last week's news that the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which was first
published in 1768, has stopped putting out a printed version? The media
naturally focused on this fact alone—the loss of the printed volume. The
more interesting story is whether Britannica can survive online.
Those of us who grew up with the leather volumes
tend toward nostalgia. In the pre-digital era, Britannica was the definitive
way to impart and search information. The surprise is that for many people
Britannica remains a key way to find authoritative knowledge online at a
time when Wikipedia is a top-10 website.
In the peak year of 1990, 120,000 sets of the
printed Britannica were sold; only 8,000 sets of the 2010 edition have been
sold. Yet a company representative says 500,000 subscribers pay some $70 a
year for unlimited access to its website. This means that despite the free
alternative of Wikipedia, more people pay to access Britannica online
annually than paid for the print version in any year. The company estimates
that "tens of millions of people around the world" also have access to the
online version through their library, school or college.
This is remarkable considering the great success of
Wikipedia, which covers many more topics—in English, four million versus the
Britannica's fewer than 100,000—by letting anyone post or update entries,
with mostly volunteer editors vetting the results. Britannica hopes there is
a place for a brand that claims to be authoritative instead of
crowd-sourced.
Britannica has 100 full-time editors who have
worked with contributors over the years such as Albert Einstein, Milton
Friedman and Alfred Hitchcock (who replied "98.6" when asked by Britannica
to list his degrees on its contributor information form). Britannica's
marketing division says, "There's no such thing as a bad question—but there
are bad answers." In 2008, company president Jorge Cauz told the New Yorker,
"Wikipedia is to Britannica as 'American Idol' is to the Juilliard School."
(This quote appears in the Wikipedia entry on Mr. Cauz.)
An anecdotal comparison of Britannica and Wikipedia
shows the value of the premium source, but also the generally high quality
of the crowd-sourced edition. The Britannica entry on itself comes to 30
pages when printed out, while Wikipedia has 23 pages; Britannica covers
Wikipedia in three pages while Wikipedia has 39 pages on itself. The
Wikipedia entry on the solar system, at 23 pages, is twice as long as the
Britannica version. Evolution has a 61-page entry in the Britannica, by a
University of California scholar, while Wikipedia has 44 pages, including an
exhaustive 288 footnotes.
Still, length is not always the best indicator of
value. Britannica has a well-crafted, six-page entry on economist Friedrich
Hayek, for example, compared with a 15-page Wikipedia entry that includes
random anecdotes alongside more serious analysis, reflecting the group
wiki-effort based on consensus rather than a unified approach to a topic.
On the other hand, if you're more interested in
actress Salma Hayek, Britannica has less than one page ("known for her
sultry good looks and intelligence"), compared with Wikipedia's 11 pages,
which include exhaustive detail on her films, TV appearances and charitable
work. If you're interested in the foot ailment Morton's Neuroma, Wikipedia
has a more complete entry than the Mayo Clinic's, and Britannica has none.
The Wikimedia Foundation that oversees Wikipedia
has its own worries. Its strategic plan, posted online, says its biggest
risk is the declining number of volunteer editors. Many entries include
cautions that the reliability of information hasn't been confirmed.
"Declining participation is by far the most serious problem facing the
Wikimedia projects," the group says. "The success of the projects is
entirely dependent upon a thriving, healthy editing community."
Another related issue: "Risk of editorial scandal
can't be mitigated; there is an inherent level of risk that we cannot
sidestep." This is especially true as Wikipedia adds new languages and
countries, including many that censor results. It's not clear that the
volunteer model is sustainable, though few would have imagined that
Wikipedia could grow to have a goal for this year of serving one billion
online readers with 50 million articles in some 280 languages.
Britannica remains a profitable business,
especially after dropping its print version, but to survive it will have to
be the most accurate source—and make the case that authoritative sources
matter. For Wikipedia, the challenge is whether volunteers can sustain what
has become the world's largest compendium of facts and sometimes knowledge.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Hurried scholars should begin with Wikipedia and then do a fact check in
the online Britannica. However, this can be disappointing since there are
millions of topics covered in Wikipedia that are not covered in
Britannica, particularly biographies of contemporary people. Of course
serious scholars should also dig much deeper than what can be found in
encyclopedias. Hopefully, such scholars will also contribute their findings to
both Wikipedia and Britannca. This includes language translations.
Question
What is Amazon's search site that it expects to eventually be better than Google?
The web is easy to use, but using it well is not
easy. We are inventing new ways to take search one step farther and make it
more effective. We provide a unique set of powerful features to find
information, organize it, and remember it—all in one place. A9.com is a
powerful search engine, using web search and image search results enhanced by
Google, Search Inside the Book™ results from Amazon.com, reference results
from GuruNet, movies results from IMDb, and more.
A9.com remembers your information. You can keep your
own notes about any web page and search them; it is a new way to store and
organize your bookmarks; it even recommends new sites and favorite old sites
specifically for you to visit. With the A9 Toolbar all your web browsing
history will be stored, allowing you (and only you!) to retrieve it at any
time and even search it; it will tell you if you have any new search results,
or the last time you visited a page.
I don't think A9.com will be the search engine of choice for some time to
come. It also has a long ways to go in terms of luring advertising
revenue.
Compfight describes its purpose as "a search engine
tailored for visual inspiration." It is a bit different than other
mainstream photo search engines, and visitors can get started by clicking on
the "Show me what compfight can do" link. Compfight returns grids of images
organized by license type, text tags, and those that are "safe" for all
audiences. Visitors can also sign up for their Twitter feed and also send
them feedback. Compfight is compatible with all operating systems.
Features of the Amazing Google
Did you know that Google will calculate equations?
In addition to providing easy access to more than 4
billion web pages, Google has many special features to help you to find
exactly what you're looking for. Click the title of a specific feature to
learn more about it.
A man in Southern California is irate over the
results of “Googling” his name. Mark Maughan, certified public accountant of
the Brown & Maughan firm, believes the search results for “Mark Maughan”
contained “alarming, false, misleading and injurious results.”
Maughan discovered that Google’s results
about him and his company made false claims that, according to NBC4News,
“the search results falsely represent that plaintiffs Maughan and/or Brown
& Maughan have been disciplined for gross negligence, for failing to timely
submit a client's claim for refund of overpayment of taxes, and for practicing
as a CPA without a permit.”
Plaintiff attorney John A. Girardi believes that Google’s PageRank system is
what caused this misinformation. In the suit, Giradi states that Google PageRank
“reformats information obtained from accurate sources, resulting in changing
of the context in which information is presented.”
While it’s true that Google results pages alter the context of information,
PageRank does not actually determine search result descriptions.
The attorney stated that a literal reprint would be suitable, but that the
reformat gives misinformation. He is asking that Google discontinue using
PageRank. Girardi is asking for unspecified monetary damages, as well.
Also named in the lawsuit are Yahoo, AOL, and Time Warner.
Google Will Generate a Map to An Address From a Telephone Number
As I see the new Google service (see
below), its main attraction to me is in finding a quick map when I know a
person's home or a business phone number. Often I have a phone number but
do not have an address. Even if I have an address, it takes more time to
bring up a mapping service (like Mapquest) and then type in an address.
Google has implemented an address/map
service. If you type a phone number in the format (210)555-5555 you will
then be given the address and links to a map of where this phone number is
located. Scary! But this type of service has been available from
some other services for years (although not necessarily with the quick map
service).
It works for home phones and most
business phones. It will give you an address and map for some business
phone numbers but not others. It did not work for the main
Trinity
University
phone number (210)999-7701. It also does not work for my office phone or
my cell phone. It also does not work for unlisted numbers.
The phone numbers are not
extremely up to date. When I type in a phone number (210)653-5055 that I
cancelled in June, it still brings up my former address where I no longer live.
My wife and I had got a new phone number in New Hampshire in June. It does
not find our NH address, but other services like Switchboard
are also not up to date in terms of "new" listings.
Note that if you have online documents
with your phone number on them (e.g., a resume), Google will also find those
documents like it does with any other search term.
The empire of Google Inc. is officially going interplanetary. Working with researchers from NASA at Arizona State
University, the search engine has compiled images of Mars on a map
Web site, making it possible to view the dunes, canyons
and craters of the red planet as easily as the cul-de-sacs and cityscapes of
Earth. Infrared images at http://mars.google.comeven pull up things normally invisible to the naked
eye. Having mapped the Earth and the relatively nearby moon, Google said seeking
out farther-flung planetary conquests is a natural progression.
"Need to Find Your Way on Mars? Google It," by Yuki Noguchi, The Washington
Post, March 14, 2006 ---
Click Here
Google added historic map overlays to its free interactive online globe of
the world to provide views of how places have changed with time.
"Google Earth maps history," PhysOrg, November 14, 2006 ---
http://physorg.com/news82706337.html
Google recently published its Web Services interface
at http://www.google.com/apis (tech explanation). We've built an email
interface to Google. Actually, the folks in Marketing built it, which says a
lot about the simplicity of Web services. Just email google@capeclear.com
and put the text of your query in the "Subject" line. You'll receive
your search results via email.
It's not going to take the world by storm, but maybe
it'll kick start some thought processes on the power of Web Services. It might
be useful for PDAs, mobile phones, offline laptop users, and generally people
who have infrequent, low quality access to the Internet. Some people may find
it easier to use email rather than launch a browser, or maybe you could just
use it to remind yourself to do something on the Internet...
There are some interesting queries that you can do on
google, that transfer nicely to CapeMail. One trick is to do the query "
site:www.capeclear.com ceo " to find out Cape Clear's CEO. Send this
query to CapeMail - and find out who our CEO is...
International: Are your French, Dutch, Russian or
outside the general '.com' arena? To see sites in just your region, append the
text "site:.XX" to the end of your subject query, where XX is your
domain of interest. For example to see all occurences of CapeClear in Denmark
do the following query: CapeClear site:.dk, for a similar query on French
Websites try this
Shortcut: More useful is the following idea: Store
this link on your desktop. (How?: hover over this link, right mouse
click->'Copy Shortcut', then on your Windows desktop, right mouse
click->'Paste Shortcut'). A handy shortcut for CapeMail access.
Discuss CapeMail in the CapeScience forum or email ed@capeclear.com
and check out our sister offering CapeSpeller
We do not claim comprehensiveness in recording challenges as research
suggests that for each challenge reported there are as many as four or
five that go unreported. In addition, OIF has only been collecting data
about banned banned books since 1990, so we do not have any lists of
frequently challenged books or authors before that date.
How is the list of
most challenged books tabulated?
The Office for Intellectual Freedom collects information from two
sources: newspapers and reports submitted by individuals, some of whom use
the
Challenge Reporting Form. All challenges are compiled into a database.
Reports of challenges culled from newspapers across the country are compiled
in the bimonthly
Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom (published by the ALA, $50 per year
for a digital subscription); those reports are then compiled in the
Banned Books Week Resource Guide. Challenges reported to the ALA by
individuals are kept confidential. In these cases, ALA will release only the
title of the book being challenged, the state and the type of institution
(school, public library). The name of the institution and its town will not
be disclosed.
Where can you find
more information on why a particular book was banned?
Visit your local public library and ask your librarian.
Find or purchase the latest
Banned Books Week Resource Guide, updated every three years, which
may be available at or through your local public library.
E-mail the ALA
Office for Intellectual Freedom to ask about a specific book. A staff
member will reply with any information the office has on file. Please
limit your inquiry to one book. If you would like information on more
than one book, please consider purchasing the Banned Books Week Resource
Guide.
If the information you need is not listed in the links to the left,
please feel free to contact the Office for Intellectual Freedom at (800)
545-2433, ext. 4220, or oif@ala.org.
Google has become so huge, that
learning about what you can do and/or remembering to use what you once learned
how to do something is as complex as running a Microsoft Office product. How
many of us know and or use all of the features in MS Word? How many of us know
and use all of the features in Excel such as Goal Seek, Solver, Pivoting, and 3D
graphing? How many of us know how to use the new exotic features of PowerPoint?
There are books, videos, and online
tutorials that will illustrate how to use MS Office features.
Although I have not yet found online
video tutorials on Google features, there are now books that you can buy such as
How to Do Everything With Google by Fritz Schneider Nancy Blachman Eric
Fredricksen (McGraw-Hill, 2004) --- http://books.mcgraw-hill.com/cgi-bin/pbg/0072231742.html
A
drawback of books and tutorials for Google vis-a-vis MS Office products is that
Google seems to add new features monthly whereas Microsoft adds new features at
a slower pace.
Barry Rice tells us how to search for PowerPoint and other file types
July 15, 2007 message from Barry Rice
[brice@LOYOLA.EDU]
I just read in PC Magazine that
you can Google by file type by entering in the search box
"filetype: filetype and search term"
e.g., entering the following in the search
box returns 374,000 hits [quotes left out to minimize confusion]:
filetype:ppt accounting
I get 27,800 links to PowerPoint files when
I search for:
filetype:ppt accounting auditing
I get 969 links to PowerPoint files when I
search for:
filetype:ppt accounting derivatives
I get 15 links to PowerPoint files when I
search for the following, a couple of which, amazingly, are not Bob:
When I typed the phrase "filetype:ppt
accounting derivatives" (without quote marks) into the
"Advanced Search" box it would not work properly. The phrase must be typed
in the "All the words" search box to work properly. This makes sense since
in retrospect --- Dahh!
When I typed the phrase "filetype:ppt
accounting derivatives AND Jensen" (without quote marks) into
the "All the words" search box I got some but not all of my PowerPoint files
on derivatives that are listed at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/Calgary/CD/JensenPowerPoint/
When I typed the phrase "filetype:ppt
"accounting derivatives" AND Jensen" without the outer quote marks it
reduced the number of hits, but it also missed more of my PowerPoint files
on this topic.
When I typed the phrase "filetype:ppt
accounting derivatives AND Jensen" I did find some of my Excel workbooks on
this topic but not all Excel workbooks under the following URL ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/Calgary/CD/
My conclusion is that if you want your PowerPoint ppt files or other file
types like xls on some topic like "accounting derivatives" it is best to be
very careful to use that phrase in the title or in a listing of key words
for each PowerPoint file.
When I typed the phrase "filetype:ppt
accounting "FAS 157" AND Jensen" (without the outer quote mark) I find my
most recent PowerPoint file on FAS 157 ---
Click Here
Google
Inc. announced a low-cost hardware and software package
that small- and medium-size organizations can use for searching their own Web
sites and other information.
The Internet search company is selling
the $4,995 Google Mini, which includes a computer server and software,
exclusively through its online store. Organizations can use the Google Mini to
let staff search for shared documents and information on internal Web sites
and permit the public to search their external Web sites.
Google says it has over 800 customers
for the Google Search Appliance, a more powerful but similar product. The
Google Search Appliance, with a minimum price tag of $32,000, represented less
than 2% of Google's $2.2 billion in revenue during the first nine months of
2004.
Question
What can you do to prevent being taken on eBay?
(Word of Caution: Never open an email message that pretends to be from Pay-Pal)
Two brothers have published a book of "true tales of
treachery, lies and fraud" from eBay. "Dawn of the eBay Deadbeats" contains
stories written by eBay buyers and sellers. From stories of disappointing
purchases to out-and-out fraud, the book is a manual of what can go wrong when
buying and selling on auction sites. Brothers Stephen and Edward Klink co-wrote
the book, illustrated by Clay Butler. The idea for the book sprung from a
website Stephen Klink had created. A New Jersey police office, he founded
eBayersThatSuck.com - a site that aims to help people avoid auction scams -
after he himself was ripped off online.
Ina Steiner, "Dawn of the eBay Deadbeats: New Book Uncovers Online Auction
Treachery," AuctionBytes.com, December 28, 2005 ---
http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y05/m12/i28/s01
Imagine buying vintage Spiderman
comics for $16,000 and receiving instead, a box of printer paper or
losing a whopping $27,000 in purchasing a big rig that didn't exist in
the first place. These are just many of the online auction fraud horror
stories that brothers Edward and Steve Klink compiled from their eBay
watchdog Web site eBayersThatSuck.com (E.T.S.).
In their book "Dawn of the eBay Deadbeats," some
70 strange-but-true stories were collected and retold with the help of
illustrator Clay Butler.
The December 2005 publishing of the book comes just in time as the
online auction giant has been criticized by consumer groups, most
recently by the U.K. magazine "Computing Which?" for its passive and
sometimes delayed approach in handling fraud reports.
At any given time, the site has 78 million listings, and 6 million new
listings are added each day.
And while, eBay maintains that less than .01 percent of all listings end
in a confirmed case of fraud, that could mean that of the 1.9 billion
listings reported by eBay in 2005, that 190,000 cases were confirmed
frauds in the last year.
Currently there are almost 900 horror stories from eBay fraud victims
are on the E.T.S. site whose motto is "Winning the war on deadbeats."
And already the brothers are working on the next volume of horror
stories, encouraging victims who want to get their tales to be told to
get into contact with them.
United Press International spoke with Edward Klink about the recent
book, their watchdog
Web site, and the current state of eBay.
"We had collected hundreds of stories
on the Web site
and figured it was time to take these stories to a wider audience and
let the victims have their say," Edward Klink said. "Plus with our
combined backgrounds, Steve is a police officer and I'm a
business writer,
we felt we were ideally suited to get the job done."
Fraud on eBay can take on many forms including items paid for that vary
from the description in the sale, unpaid items, and spoof eBay or
Pay-Pal e-mails.
And like the many victims on their site, the brothers too have
encountered the problem of auction fraud.
In 2003, Steve, a New Jersey police officer, won a set of "new"
speakers, only to find that it looked as if they were "gnawed on by a
wild animal."
"The seller said they weren't that way when mailed, and eBay said there
was nothing they could do," Klink said. "Annoyed that he was stuck with
the merchandise and given no recourse, Steve started
www.ebayersthatsuck.com and stories began pouring in from around the
world."
And the site has received a positive response since it's been up and
running.
"People love it," Klink said. "On eBay, their official boards are
closely monitored and talk about problems and scams and eBay's failings
are not generally tolerated. So E.T.S. gives them an outlet. When it
first came out Ebayersthatsuck.com was featured on Courttv.com and
newspapers as far away as South Africa."
According to Klink, while eBay has what could be considered --"the
ultimate
business model" -- of collecting fees and
delegating the marketing, selling, packaging, shipping, and
customer service
to eBay users, it's very easy for these same users to fall victim to
fraud.
"I think consumers let their guard down when they are sitting at home
and surfing the Web with their coffee," he said. "If a stranger offered
them a $1,400 antique vase on the street they'd most likely walk away,
but when that same vase is on
the Internet for some reason the reaction is
more, 'Say, now that looks interesting.'"
And have the brothers seen any improvements in eBay's handling of the
fraud issue?
"eBay says it is a tiny fraction of all auctions," Klink said, "but the
hundreds of people who told us their stories hate being in that tiny
group and never thought they would be. Lots of fraud is underreported,
too. EBay encourages users to settle it among themselves, and if they
can't, then they are directed to pay $20.00 to have SquareTrade, a third
party, mediate the dispute. But it's not often a scammer shows up for
mediation!"
. . .
"We want people on eBay to have a good buying and
selling experience - transparent, well-lit, and safe," the spokesperson
said. "Fraud on all levels is something we take seriously."
The company also has a team dedicated to working
with law enforcement rather it be educating them on fraudulent cases and
working proactively taking information on specific cases to them or
cooperating with investigations.
"We would invite anyone to visit the site and read
more," said the spokesperson, who also emphasized that the no. 1 issue for
online shoppers is to pay safely using Pay-Pal or a credit card than any
other form of payment.
In many cases, consumers are able to get their
money back, Pay-Pal offers up to $1,000 back with buyer protection and
credit card programs usually have a pay back program in cases of fraud. In
many cases, Pay-Pal offers a way for consumers to make purchases without
providing personal information and at the same time protecting money.
"Dawn of the eBay Deadbeats" ($12.95) is
available on Amazon, eBay, and in select bookstores.
Click Fraud Gets Smarter
Internet ad-traffic scams could be ripping off as much as $1 billion annually.
Are Web companies like Google doing enough to foil them?
"Click Fraud Gets Smarter," by Burt Helm, Business Week, February 27,
2006 ---
Click Here
Internet ad-traffic scams could be ripping off
as much as $1 billion annually. Are Web companies like Google doing enough
to foil them?
Web consultant Greg Boser has an ingenious method
for sending loads of traffic to clients' Internet sites. Last month he
began using a software program known as a clickbot to create the impression
that users from around the world were visiting sites by way of ads
strategically placed alongside Google search results. The trouble is, all
the clicks are fake. And because Google charges advertisers on a per-click
basis, the extra traffic could mean sky-high bills for Boser's clients.
But Boser's no fraudster. He cleared the procedure
with clients beforehand and plans to reimburse any resulting charges.
What's he up to? Boser wants to get to the bottom of a blight that's
creating growing concern for online advertisers and threatens to wreak havoc
across the Internet: click fraud.
BILLION-DOLLAR QUESTION. The practice can
wildly skew statistics on the popularity of an ad, drain marketing budgets,
and enrich the scam artists behind it. While click fraud isn't new, the
methods for carrying it out--take Boser's clickbot software--are getting
increasingly sophisticated. And some advertisers, analysts and consultants
question whether Web companies such as Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO) are
doing enough to nip click fraud in the bud. "No one has any idea how much
of this is actually going on," says Boser. "So we're going to see how well
[the search engines] actually try to protect advertisers."
One of Boser's biggest challenges is putting a
finger on exactly how widespread the practice is. Some search consultants
say click fraud accounts for upwards of 20% of all traffic, and may generate
more than $1 billion in dubious sales a year. Others say those stats vastly
overstate the problem.
Now, one of the biggest players in fraud detection
aims to end the guessing. Fair Isaac (FIC), which analyzes 85% of U.S.
credit card transactions, in partnership with Web search consultancy
Alchemist Media, will unveil plans at this week's Search Engine Strategies
Conference for what it says is the most rigorous study ever of click fraud.
Fair Issac will invite companies to submit traffic data that can be mined
for aberrations that may signify fraud. "We've seen indications that the
overall losses due to click fraud could equal more than $1 billion [a
year]--larger than the total magnitude of credit card fraud in the U.S.,"
says Kandathil Jacob, Fair Issac's director of product marketing. "It's
certainly worth our effort to look at it."
MORE CLICKS, MORE DOLLARS. A rising number
of companies would agree. The percentage of advertisers listing click fraud
as a "serious" problem tripled in 2005, to 16%, according to a survey by the
Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization. Advertisers have filed
at least two class-action suits saying Google, Yahoo, and other search
engines ought to be more up-front about methods for combating the practice.
Google says the suits are meritless. Yahoo declines to comment.
And in January, Standard & Poor's equity analyst
Scott Kessler downgraded Google stock in part because he considers click
fraud a "notable risk" (see BW Online, 1/17/06, "S&P Downgrades Google to
Sell"). Among his concerns: the prospect of false clicks may sour companies
from placing ads on Google. He too says Google needs to be more forthcoming
on the issue. "No one has any idea as to what Google assesses [as] its own
percentage of clicks that are generated by fraud, no idea what that process
consists of, and all the things that are being done to battle it," he says.
Researchers from the Carlos III University of
Madrid (UCM3) have completed the development of the first search engine
designed to search for information from the financial and stock market
sector based on semantic technology, which enables one to make more accurate
thematic searches adapted to the needs of each user.
Unlike conventional search engines, SONAR -so named
by its creators- enables the user to perform structured searches which are
not based solely on concordance with a series of key words. This corporate
financial search engine based on semantic technology, as described on the
project website (www.proyecto-sonar.org), was developed by researchers from
the UC3M in partnership with the University of Murcia, el Instituto de
Empresa (the Business Institute) and the company Indra. According to its
creators, it has two main advantages. First, its effectiveness in a concrete
domain- that of finance- which is closely defined and has very precise
vocabulary. According to Juan Miguel Gómez Berbís, from the Computer
Department of the UC3M “This verticality distinguishes SONAR from other more
generic search engines, such as Google or Bing” Second, its capacity to
establish relations between news, share valuations and prices via logical
reasoning.
The first prototype works by making use of semantic
web elements. Basically, the system collects data from both public
information sources (Internet) and private, corporate ones (Intranet), adds
them to a repository of semantically recorded data (labelled and structured)
and allows intelligent access to this data. To achieve this, the platform
incorporates an inference engine, a mechanism capable of performing
reasoning tasks on the recorded information, as well as a natural language
processor, which helps the user to perform the search in the simplest way
possible. In this way the results obtained are matched to requests,
eliminating ambiguities in polysemic terms, for example in searches carried
out by users on stored data. “SONAR enables us to establish relations
between different sources of information and discover and expand our
knowledge, while at the same time it allows us to classify them so that
users can get much more benefit from the experience”
Potential users
This search tool is designed for both private
investors and large financial concerns. Its creators anticipate that it will
be a very useful tool for analysts and stockbrokers. “It will be especially
useful to the finance departments of banks and saving banks or to add to an
existing search engine added value over its competitors” Gómez Berbís points
out. And the search for accurate, reliable, relevant information in this
business area has become a key factor in a domain where speed and quality of
data are critical factors with an exceptional impact on business processes.
According to the researchers, this project aims to
respond to a need from the financial sector, that is, the analysis of a
large volume of information in order to take decisions. In this way, the
execution of this project will allow the financial community to have access
to a set of intelligent systems for the aggregated search of information in
the financial domain and enable them to improve procedures for integrating
company information and processes. Researchers are currently incorporating
new functions into the search tool and also receiving requests to adapt it
to other domains, such as transport and biotechnology. In any case, the
project is constantly evolving in order to enhance accuracy and reliability.
“In SONAR2 we are working on two Intelligent Decision Support Systems for
Financial Investments, one based on Fundamental Analysis and the other on
Technical Chartist Analysis, which assists the work of the trader and
average investor”, reveals professor Gómez Berbis.
SONAR is a research project carried out by the
UC3m’s SoftLab group, directed by professors Juan Miguel Gómez Berbís and
Ángel García Crespo. It is an intelligent, financial search engine and is
part of the Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade’s AVANZA I+D Program.
The University of Murcia and the Instituto de Empresa (Business Institute)
have also collaborated in this project, together with Indra.
The mantra of the information age has been “The
more information the better!” But what happens when we search the web and
get so much information that we can’t sort through it, let alone evaluate
it? Enter the semantic web, or Web 3.0. Among other things, the semantic web
makes information more meaningful to people by making it more understandable
to machines.
Consider a simple example. If you want to know my
mailing address, currently you need to go to my web page and root around
until you find it. That’s because the current coding system used to build
web pages, largely HTML, displays information without identifying it in any
meaningful way. That is, my address is not coded as “an address,” it is
simply presented as a series of characters on the screen. Contrast this with
a database about your friends that contains a specific column called
“mailing address.” Even if your database included millions of entries,
locating my address is easy.
Web 3.0 makes the leap from “display only” to
meaningful information by tagging information with descriptors like “mailing
address.” Further, it allows users to find relationships between tagged
information using inference rules and data organizational tools called
“ontologies” that provide logic and structure to the information embedded in
web pages. As a result, machines can do a lot of the information grunt work
currently required of humans. When it comes to a web search, for example,
the semantic web makes a reasonable pass at collating, synthesizing, and
cross-referencing the results for you. It does this by employing software
agents that can locate and combine information from many sources to build
meaningful information collages. Simply tell your agent the focus of your
interest—whether a person, subject, activity, question, or whatever—and set
it to roam the web, finding and distilling information and exchanging
information with other agents.
Ultimately, the goal of Web 3.0 is, in a phrase,
data integration.1 Because the semantic web understands the concept of a
mailing address, it can relate my address to other web-defined concepts like
walking distance, postal rates, climate, or driving directions to the
nearest airport. Thus, if I ask my agent to help me prepare for a trip to
the Bahamas, it can make assumptions about the clothes and flights I need,
and so on. Because I live in Alaska, it might tell me to order clothing
online soon because it takes longer to get here. It may even tell me the
names of friends (who have made themselves semantically available) who have
visited the Bahamas.
While some websites currently understand my address
as an address, this understanding is not shared with other websites. That
is, there is no universal definition for “address” that any website could
use to talk to my web page about addresses. It is the use of common
definitions, inference rules, and ontologies that will turn the web from a
series of information containers into an ecosystem in which the parts of the
web are interrelated.
Web 3.0 in Education The implications for education
are profound. Let’s consider three areas of impact: knowledge construction,
personal learning network maintenance, and personal educational
administration.
Knowledge Construction Imagine you are a student
researching a topic, like global warming. You might begin by searching
Wikipedia, but inevitably you turn to searching the vast information
storehouses of the entire web using a tool like Google.2
Currently, Googling the term “global warming”
returns a gazillion hits, many of which link to complex data resources that
link to other resources and so on. Unless the topic is supremely important
to you, you won’t explore much beyond the first 10 to 20 hits returned in a
Google search. The presumption of knowledge in this approach to information
gathering and evaluation is faulty, if not potentially dangerous in its
limitations.
One vision of a well-developed semantic web
includes a search feature that would return a multimedia report rather than
a list of hits. The report would draw from many sources, including websites,
articles from scientific repositories, chapters in textbooks, blog dialogue,
speeches posted on YouTube, information stored on cell phones, gaming
scenarios played out in virtual realities—anything appropriate that is
accessible by the rules of Web 3.0. The report would consist of short
sections that coalesce around knowledge areas that emerged naturally from
your research, with keywords identified and listed conveniently off to one
side as links.
The information in the report would be compared,
contrasted, and collated in a basic way, presenting points of agreement and
disagreement, and perhaps associating these with political positions or
contrasting research. Because the web knows something about you, it also
alerts you to local lectures on related topics, books you might want to
read, TV programs available through your cable service, blog discussions you
might find relevant, and even local groups you can contact that are also
focused on this issue. Unlike a standard report, what you receive changes as
the available information changes, and you might have wiki-like access to
add to or edit it. And because you told your agent that this topic is a high
priority, your cell phone will beep when a significant development occurs.
After all, the semantic web will be highly inclusive, providing a common
language for many kinds of media and technologies, including cell phones.
The net result, ideally, is that you spend less time searching and sifting
and more time absorbing, thinking, and participating.
Personal Learning Network Maintenance Each one of
us sits at the hub of a personal learning network (PLN) that connects us to
our interests. Unfortunately, much of our time is spent finding useful
information rather than interacting with it and thinking about it. We troll
blogs, search the web, wade through long podcasts, and converse with friends
in the hopes of finding something we can use. Some services, like iGoogle,
make a modest attempt to streamline this process by allowing us to
automatically log into web services we have selected, like news services or
various podcasting sources. But we still need to pick through that day’s
offerings to determine whether they contain anything relevant to our
interests. This approach to collecting information is at best clumsy and
inefficient, and it can lead to inaccuracies simply because we run out of
the time or motivation to do a thorough job.
Under Web 3.0, PLNs are built primarily around
subjects, not services. Personal learning agents identify relevant
information from any source that is semantically accessible and provide an
information synthesis tailored to our personal learning objective. The
result is similar to the one described in the “global warming” search
example, but applied to an educational goal. Again, the objective is to
spend less time searching for information and more time trying to
understand, critically assess, and creatively expand it. The semantic web
makes it possible for the web to become an effective and focused information
resource that can be tailored for specific content area objectives.
Personal Educational Administration Most of us use
a multi-source approach to resource gathering. If we want to develop a
wardrobe, feed ourselves, or stock a tool shop or music library, we go to
several providers to do so, including local stores, online vendors, garage
sales, eBay, and even friends. Currently, it is very difficult to use this
multi-source approach in obtaining an education and particularly in earning
a degree. Educational institutions tend to be stand-alone entities that
don’t facilitate working with each other.
There is no question that economics and turf drive
the lack of inter-institutional cooperation. However, even if these
impediments were to disappear, crafting a multi-institutional education from
a student perspective would still be logistically very difficult because
schools and other education providers for the most part do not share common
languages in describing course or degree requirements. Transfer students can
bear witness to how difficult it can be to do something as basic as transfer
credit for Philosophy 101 from one institution to another.
The Semantic Web has the potential to challenge
this kind of institution-centeredness in the same way that distance learning
technologies challenged place-centric education. At some point, institutions
will describe courses and degrees semantically, probably just to help their
own internal functioning, but with the secondary effect of making many of
the components of education at least somewhat comparable across
institutions. It is a short leap from that point to students being able to
identify comparable coursework and experiences from several educational
providers and, in the process, even meet the graduation requirements of yet
another. Smart schools will get ahead of this and figure out just what the
inevitable institutional inter-connectedness will mean for them.
The Inevitability of the Semantic Web Is the
Semantic Web inevitable? Absolutely. I don’t make this assertion based on
advanced technological knowledge, which I most assuredly do not possess.
Rather I make it because I have come to respect what Michael Dertouzos
called “the ancient human in each of us” as a primary force in the evolution
of our tools.3 As ancient human beings, we want to connect, share ideas,
maintain relationships, understand the world around us, and sustain
ourselves physically and emotionally regardless of—and sometimes
despite—technological advancement. Those in the 1980s who told me e-mail
would never catch on ignored the ancient human, as did those who told me
just a few years ago that the world would come to see blogging as
superfluous.
Remember, 15 years ago the web was science fiction
to most. Today it is taken for granted. Eventually, we will take the
Semantic Web for granted as well. Our thirst to make sense of the
information available to us and to broaden and deepen our relationships with
the world and each other will most certainly urge us on through whatever
complex and challenging development period awaits us. The ancient human will
see to it.
Continued in article
FactSpotter and AskOnce from Xerox
Question
What is so special about the new FactSpotter semantics-based search engine from
Xerox?
Xerox Rolls Out Semantics-Based Search Xerox Corp. says its new search engine based on semantics will analyze the
meaning behind questions and documents to help researchers find information more
quickly. Developing the search engine is similar to understanding how brains
process information, said Frederique Segond, manager of parsing and semantics
research at Xerox Research Center Europe in Grenoble, France. "Many words can be
different things at the same time. The context makes the difference," she said.
"The tricky things here are not the words together but how are they linked." For
example, common searches using keywords "Lincoln" and "vice president" likely
won't reveal President Abraham Lincoln's first vice president. A semantic search
should yield the answer: Hannibal Hamlin. Segond, whose background is in math
and linguistics, said Stamford-based Xerox has been working on the project for
four years. FactSpotter was introduced in Grenoble on Wednesday and will launch
next year, initially to help lawyers and corporate litigation departments plow
through thousands of pages of legal documents. Xerox expects the technology to
eventually be used in health care, manufacturing and financial services. Xerox's
technology is part of a growing field in which researchers are trying to adapt
to a computer the complex workings of the brain.
Stephen Singer, PhysOrg, June 21, 2007 ---
http://physorg.com/news101560663.html
The Older AskOnce Search Engine from Xerox
Stuck in a search rut? Online search engines aren't your only option. AskOnce
from Xerox (www.xerox.com) aims to refine searching by allowing access to all
the information available to you via a single query. The program's simple and
advanced searches scour the Internet, your intranets, DocuShare (Xerox's
Web-based storage space), tech magazines and specific databases. The simpie
search resembles a typical search engine but accesses mare information. The
advanced search is less intuitive but more robust-- offering tools such as
scheduled searches. For finding documents buried in your network, AskOnce is
handy, but its online capabilities fall short of a good Web meta-search engine.
The price for 50-user licenses starts at $7,000 (street).
Liane Gouthro, "Search Me - AskOnce from Xerox - search service,"
LookSmart, Sept, 2001 ---
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0DTI/is_9_29/ai_79756063
Question
How can you locate students who fail to show up for class, children who seem to
have disappeared, and untrustworthy husbands?
With an upgrade to its mobile maps, Google Inc.
hopes to prove it can track people on the go as effectively as it searches
for information on the Internet.
The new software released Wednesday will enable
people with mobile phones and other wireless devices to automatically share
their whereabouts with family and friends.
The feature, dubbed "Latitude," expands upon a
tool introduced in 2007 to allow mobile phone users to check their own
location on a Google map with the press of a button.
"This adds a social flavor to Google maps and
makes it more fun," said Steve Lee, a Google product manager.
It could also raise privacy concerns, but Google
is doing its best to avoid a backlash by requiring each user to manually
turn on the tracking software and making it easy to turn off or limit access
to the service.
Google also is promising not to retain any
information about its users' movements. Only the last location picked up by
the tracking service will be stored on Google's computers, Lee said.
The software plots a user's location -- marked
by a personal picture on Google's map -- by relying on cell phone towers,
global positioning systems or a Wi-Fi connection to deduce their location.
The system can follow people's travels in the United States and 26 other
countries.
It's left up to each user to decide who can
monitor their location.
The social mapping approach is similar to a
service already offered by Loopt Inc., a 3-year-old company located near
Google's Mountain View headquarters.
Loopt's service is compatible with more than 100
types of mobile phones.
To start out, Google Latitude will work on
Research In Motion Ltd.'s BlackBerry and devices running on Symbian software
or Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Mobile. It will also operate on some T-Mobile
phones running on Google's Android software and eventually will work on
Apple Inc.'s iPhone and iTouch.
To widen the software's appeal, Google is
offering a version that can be installed on personal computers as well.
The PC access is designed for people who don't
have a mobile phone but still may want to keep tabs on their children or
someone else special, Lee said. People using the PC version can also be
watched if they are connected to the Internet through Wi-Fi.
Google can plot a person's location within a few
yards if it's using GPS, or might be off by several miles if it's relying on
transmission from cell phone towers. People who don't want to be precise
about their whereabouts can choose to display just the city instead of a
specific neighborhood.
There are no current plans to sell any
advertising alongside Google's tracking service, although analysts believe
knowing a person's location eventually will unleash new marketing
opportunities. Google has been investing heavily in the mobile market during
the past two years in an attempt to make its services more useful to people
when they're away from their office or home computers.
How much of a difference can better search tools make for an e-commerce
site? Wal-Mart is betting on a 10% -15% improvement in sales following the
launch of its new Polaris search engine on Walmart.com, developed by its @WalmartLabs
division.
Location, Location, Location
In the business of retail, it's all about location,
That's true for which aisle in the grocery store you display the milk, and
its even true for ecommerce sites, which rely on product placement on pages
and better search tools to make the difference between a sale and no sale.
The $487.94 question is: will a better search
engine bring more sales for
Walmart.com?
The new semantic search engine is based on
technology from a number of
@WalmartLabs
acquisitions, including social media startup Kosmix,
which was acquired by Wal-Mart in April 2011.
Kosmix' Semantic Web platform, called the
Social
Genome, organized social media data with
algorithms that score social media content and help deliver results for
shoppers that are more in line with what the customer wants.
This varies from the usual method of determining a
customer's potential likes and dislikes: mining transaction data. For
example, if you buy a pink flamingo from the home and garden division, then
you might be tagged as someone who likes kitschy lawn decorations.
That's all well and good, unless you were buying
that lawn ornament as a gag gift for your neighbor down the street.
Retailers that are mining your transaction data will send you the
coupons for garden gnomes, not your neighbor.
The idea behind semantic search is that by
expanding a search engine's knowledge to include social media content, the
search engine can better determine the context of what you're looking for.
This form of social discovery, coupled with better query parsing and synonym
mining, should deliver a more tightly focused set of results to a customer.
Are Semantics Enough?
Looking at Walmart.com in isolation, it's a
no-brainer that a more efficient search engine that can deliver a wider
range of choices around a simple search term will up the odds of completing
a sale.
The key here is how Polaris works with global
Internet search. If consumers are running their searches for goods from
search engines like Google or Bing, or using comparison sites like
BizRate or
PriceGrabber
to get started, it is not yet clear how well the new
Polaris technology will interact with Internet-based queries. If the
semantic search advantage is lost, then Wal-Mart's Polaris advantage will be
moot, and the company will have to compete not on search results but on
price, availability and delivery - just like everyone else.
Availability and delivery are advantages that
Wal-Mart has been able to hold against Amazon, even through the odd price
wars that occastionally break out over certain hot items. Some shoppers seem
to be willing to pay a little more if they know they can go down to the
store today and pick up an item they've ordered online.
Wal-Mart's focus on improving its edge in ecommerce
could be seen as sandbagging before the coming Amazon flood. Because once
Wal-Mart and Amazon share a more level playing field on availability (at
least in the U.S.), price becomes a bigger comparison point for shoppers
again.
This could be a problem for Wal-Mart, which has 2.2
million employees to keep paid versus Amazon's 69,100, not to mention the
upkeep of Wal-Mart's store locations. With less overhead, Amazon could be
more nimble than Wal-Mart in selling goods for lower prices over the
long-term.
Jensen Comment
If price is the "ultimate decider," then Amazon may have an edge as long as
Wal-Mart does not have a used-item service comparable to Amazon's tremendous and
vast network of used item vendors where items are shipped by those vendors
directly to customers and Amazon guarantees both delivery and product
satisfaction. I doubt that Wal-Mart will ever compete in terms of price on
things like books and DVDs (including software) where most of us do not care if
a book saving 95% if the price is a used copy. For example, I was recently able
to obtain a virgin installation disk of FrontPage 2003 from somebody who
apparently saves up these new (albeit old) editions that larger software vendors
(including Microsoft) no longer sell.
But the above article is interesting from the standpoint of the future of
semantic searching.
As a global resource built from the spare time of
millions of volunteers, Wikipedia may be the epitome of Web 2.0. But the
Wikimedia Foundation,
a nonprofit organization that runs Wikipedia, among other projects, is now
thinking about how to make it a linchpin of Web 3.0, or the semantic Web.
That means making some of the data on Wikipedia's
15 million (and counting) articles understandable to computers as well as
humans. This would allow software to know, for example, that the numbers
shown in one of the columns in
this table listing U.S. presidents are dates. That
could, in turn, allow applications that draw on Wikipedia to automatically
generate historical timelines or answer the kind of general knowledge
questions that would usually entail a person finding and reading a relevant
entry on the site.
At the
2010 Semantic Technology
conference in San Francisco last month, the foundation's deputy director,
Erik
Möller, and colleague
Trevor Parscal,
a user-experience developer for Wikimedia, showed some first steps taken by
the foundation to explore how more semantic structure might be added to
Wikipedia. They also appealed to the semantic Web community to help develop
ways to make Wikipedia's knowledge more accessible to computers and
software.
"Semantic information already exists in Wikipedia,
and people are already building on it," says Möller. "Unfortunately, we're
not really helping, and they have to use extensive processing to do so."
One example is
DBPedia,
a semantic database built using software collect data
from the site's pages, and maintained by the Free University of Berlin and
the University of Leipzig, both in Germany. Another is
Freebase,
a for-profit knowledge database, much of which was
also sourced by scraping Wikipedia. Freebase is the data source used by
question-answering search engine
PowerSet, which was acquired by Microsoft to be
part of its Bing search engine
The New LinkedIn Platform Shows Facebook How It's Done A social network showdown is coming. LinkedIn, which
aims to track your business and professional connections, has rolled out a new
developer platform and already the majority of the web press is comparing
LinkedIn's efforts Facebook's platform. It's a fair comparison, but there's one
key difference between the two — LinkedIn's platform is actually useful. Where
Facebook’s platform provides a proprietary programming language for developers
to build applications that run inside the site (so you can send you friends a
fresh pair of virtual diapers or whatever), LinkedIn has created a platform in
the sense of what the word used to mean — a way of mixing, mashing, repurposing
and sharing your data. Think Flickr, not Facebook. The LinkedIn platform, known
as the LinkedIn Intelligent Application Platform, consists of two parts, a way
for developers to build application that run inside your LinkedIn account (via
OpenSocial) and the far more useful and interesting part — ways to pull your
LinkedIn data out and use it elsewhere . . . As an example of the second half of
LinkedIn’s new platform, the company has announced a partnership with
Business Weekwhich will see LinkedIn data pulled
into the Business Week site. For instance, if you land on a Business Week
article about IBM, the site will then look at your LinkedIn profile (assuming
you’ve given it permission to do so) and highlight the people you know at IBM.
Call it six degrees of Business Week, but it does something Facebook has yet to
do — it connects your data with the larger web.With Beacon having recently
blown up in Facebook’s face— something that’s
become a trend for the site,
violate privacy,
weather user backlash, violate privacy,
weather user backlash, violate privacy, weather
user backlash — LinkedIn’s new platform couldn’t come at a better time. Frankly,
it reminds us of the good old days when the data you stored on websites was
actually yours and you could pull it out and do interesting things with it. Scott Gilbertson, Wired News, December 10, 2007 ---
http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/12/the-new-linkedi.html
As a global resource built from the spare time of
millions of volunteers, Wikipedia may be the epitome of Web 2.0. But the
Wikimedia Foundation,
a nonprofit organization that runs Wikipedia, among other projects, is now
thinking about how to make it a linchpin of Web 3.0, or the semantic Web.
That means making some of the data on Wikipedia's
15 million (and counting) articles understandable to computers as well as
humans. This would allow software to know, for example, that the numbers
shown in one of the columns in
this table listing U.S. presidents are dates. That
could, in turn, allow applications that draw on Wikipedia to automatically
generate historical timelines or answer the kind of general knowledge
questions that would usually entail a person finding and reading a relevant
entry on the site.
At the
2010 Semantic Technology
conference in San Francisco last month, the foundation's deputy director,
Erik
Möller, and colleague
Trevor Parscal,
a user-experience developer for Wikimedia, showed some first steps taken by
the foundation to explore how more semantic structure might be added to
Wikipedia. They also appealed to the semantic Web community to help develop
ways to make Wikipedia's knowledge more accessible to computers and
software.
"Semantic information already exists in Wikipedia,
and people are already building on it," says Möller. "Unfortunately, we're
not really helping, and they have to use extensive processing to do so."
One example is
DBPedia,
a semantic database built using software collect data
from the site's pages, and maintained by the Free University of Berlin and
the University of Leipzig, both in Germany. Another is
Freebase,
a for-profit knowledge database, much of which was
also sourced by scraping Wikipedia. Freebase is the data source used by
question-answering search engine
PowerSet, which was acquired by Microsoft to be
part of its Bing search engine
Even if you have a great idea for a
new search engine, it's far from easy to get it off the ground. For one
thing, the best engineering talent resides at big-name companies. Even more
significantly, according to some estimates, it costs hundreds of millions of
dollars to buy and maintain the servers needed to index the Web in its
entirety.
However, Yahoo recently released a
resource that may offer hope to search innovators and entrepreneurs. Called
Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS), it allows programmers to make use of
Yahoo's index of the Web--billions of pages that are continually
updated--thereby removing perhaps the biggest barrier to search
innovation. By
opening its index to thousands of independent programmers and entrepreneurs,
Yahoo hopes that BOSS will kick-start projects that it lacks the time,
money, and resources to invent itself.
Prabhakar
Raghavan, head of Yahoo Research and a consulting
professor at Stanford University, says this might include better ways of
searching videos or images, tools that use social networks to rank
search results, or a
semantic search engine that tries to understand the contents of Web pages,
rather than just a collection of keywords and links.
"We're trying to break down the
barriers to innovation," says Raghavan, although he admits that BOSS is far
from an altruistic venture. If a new search-engine tool built using Yahoo's
index becomes popular and potentially profitable, Yahoo reserves the right
to place ads next to its results.
So far, no BOSS-powered site has
become that successful. But a number of startups are beginning to build
their services on top of BOSS, and Semantic Web companies, in particular,
are benefiting from the platform. These companies are developing software to
process concepts and meanings in order to better organize information on the
Web.
For instance,
Hakia,
a company based in New York, began building a semantic
search engine in 2004. Its algorithms use a database of concepts--people,
places, objects, and more--to "understand" concepts in documents. Hakia also
creates maps linking together different documents, such as Web pages, based
on these concepts in order to understand their relevance to one another.
Riza Berkan, CEO of the company, says that focusing on the meaning of pages,
instead of simply on the links between them, could serve up more relevant
search results and help people find content that they didn't even know they
were looking for.
A rising tide of companies are tapping Semantic Web technologies to
unearth hard-to-find connections between disparate pieces of online data
"Social Networks: Execs Use Them Too Networking technology gives companies a
new set of tools for recruiting and customer service—but privacy questions
remain," by Rachael King, Business Week, September 11, 2007 ---
Click Here
Encover Chief
Executive Officer Chip Overstreet was on the hunt for a new
vice-president for sales. He had homed in on a promising
candidate and dispensed with the glowing but unsurprising
remarks from references. Now it was time to dig for any
dirt. So he logged on to LinkedIn, an online business
network. "I did 11 back-door checks on this guy and found
people he had worked with at five of his last six
companies," says Overstreet, whose firm sells and manages
service contracts for manufacturers. "It was incredibly
powerful."
So
powerful, in fact, that more than a dozen sites like
LinkedIn have cropped up in recent years. They're responding
to a growing impulse among Web users to build ties,
communities, and networks online, fueling the popularity of
sites like News Corp.'s (NWS)
MySpace (see BusinessWeek.com,
12/12/05
"The MySpace Generation"). As of
April, the 10 biggest social-networking sites, including
MySpace, reached a combined unique audience of 68.8 million
users, drawing in 45% of active Web users, according to
Nielsen/NetRatings.
Of course,
corporations and smaller businesses haven't embraced online
business networks with nearly the same abandon as teens and
college students who have flocked to social sites. Yet
companies are steadily overcoming reservations and using the
sites and related technology to craft potentially powerful
business tools.
PASSIVE SEARCH.
Recruiters at Microsoft (MSFT)
and Starbucks (SBUX),
for instance, troll online networks
such as LinkedIn for potential job candidates. Goldman Sachs
(GS)
and Deloitte run their own online alumni networks for hiring
back former workers and strengthening bonds with
alumni-cum-possible clients. Boston Consulting Group and law
firm Duane Morris deploy enterprise software that tracks
employee communications to uncover useful connections in
other companies. And companies such as Intuit (INTU)
and MINI USA have created customer
networks to build brand loyalty.
Early
adopters notwithstanding, many companies are leery of online
networks. Executives don't have time to field the possible
influx of requests from acquaintances on business networks.
Employees may be dismayed to learn their workplace uses
e-mail monitoring software to help sales associates' target
pitches. Companies considering building online communities
for advertising, branding, or marketing will need to cede
some degree of control over content.
None of
those concerns are holding back Carmen Hudson, manager of
enterprise staffing at Starbucks, who says she swears by
LinkedIn. "It's one of the best things for finding mid-level
executives," she says.
The Holy
Grail in recruiting is finding so-called passive candidates,
people who are happy and productive working for other
companies. LinkedIn, with its 6.7 million members, is a
virtual Rolodex of these types. Hudson says she has hired
three or four people this year as a result of connections
through LinkedIn. "We've started asking our hiring managers
to sign up on LinkedIn and help introduce us to their
contacts," she says. "People have concerns about privacy,
but once we explain how we use it and how careful we would
be with their contacts, they're usually willing to do it."
BOOMERANGS.
Headhunters
and human-resources departments are taking note. "LinkedIn
is a tremendous tool for recruiters," says Bill Vick, the
author of LinkedIn for Recruiting. So are sites
such as Ryze, Spoke, OpenBc, and Ecademy
Continued in article
"Taming the World Wide Web A rising tide of companies are tapping Semantic
Web technologies to unearth hard-to-find connections between disparate pieces of
online data," by Rachael King, Business Week, April 9, 2007 ---
Click Here
When Eli Lilly
scientists try to develop a new drug, they face a Herculean
task. They must sift through vast quantities of information
such as data from lab experiments, results from past
clinical trials, and gene research, much of it stored in
disparate, unconnected databases and software programs. Then
they've got to find relationships among those pieces of
data. The enormity of the challenge helps explain why it
takes an average of 15 years and $1.2 billion to get a new
drug to market.
Eli
Lilly (LLY)
has vowed to bring down those costs.
"We have set the goal of reducing our average cost of R&D
per new drug by fully one-third, about $400 million, over
the next five years," Lilly Chairman and Chief Executive
Officer Sidney Taurel told the American Chamber of Commerce
in Japan last August.
As part of
its cost-cutting campaign, the drugmaker is experimenting
with new technologies designed to make it easier for
scientists to unearth and correlate scattered, unrelated
morsels of online data. Outfitted with this set of tools,
researchers can make smarter decisions earlier in the
research phase—where scientists screen thousands of chemical
compounds to see which ones best treat symptoms of a given
disease. If all goes according to plan, the company will get
new pharmaceuticals to patients sooner, and at less cost.
Found in Space
Those tools
are the stuff of the Semantic Web, a method of tagging
online information so it can be better understood in
relation to other data—even if it's tucked away in some
faraway corporate database or software program. Today's
prominent search tools are adept at quickly identifying and
serving up reams of online information, though not at
showing how it all fits together. "When you get down to it,
you have to know whatever keyword the person used, or you're
never going to find it," says Dave McComb, president of
consulting firm Semantic Arts.
Researchers in a growing number of industries are sampling
Semantic Web knowhow. Citigroup (C)
is evaluating the tools to help
traders, bankers, and analysts better mine the wealth of
financial data available on the Web. Kodak (EK)
is investigating whether the
technologies can help consumers more easily sort digital
photo collections. NASA is testing ways to correlate
scientific data and maps so scientists can more efficiently
carry out planetary exploration simulation activities.
The Semantic
Web is in many ways in its infancy, but its potential to
transform how businesses and individuals correlate
information is huge, analysts say. The market for the
broader family of products and services that encompasses the
Semantic Web could surge to more than $50 billion in 2010
from $2.2 billion in 2006, according to a 2006 report by
Mills Davis at consulting firm Project10X.
Data Worth a Thousand Pictures
While
other analysts say it will take longer for the market to
reach $50 billion, most agree that the impact of the
Semantic Web will be wide-ranging. The Project10X study
found that semantic tools are being developed by more than
190 companies, including Adobe (ADBE),
AT&T (T),
Google (GOOG),
Hewlett-Packard (HPQ),
Oracle (ORCL),
and Sony (SNE).
Among the
enthusiasts is Patrick Cosgrove, director of Kodak's
Photographic Sciences & Technology Center, who is, not
surprisingly, also a photo aficionado. He boasts more than
50,000 digital snapshots in his personal collection. Each
year he creates a calendar for his family that requires him
to wade through the year's photos, looking for the right
image for each month. It's a laborious task, but he and his
colleagues aim to make it easier.
One project
involves taking data captured when a digital photo is taken,
such as date, time, and even GPS coordinates, and using it
to help consumers find specific images—say a photo of mom at
last year's Memorial Day picnic at the beach. Right now,
much of that detail, such as GPS coordinates, is expressed
as raw data. But Semantic Web technologies could help Kodak
translate that information into something more useful, such
as what specific GPS coordinates mean—whether it's
Yellowstone National Park or Grandma's house up the street.
Continued in article
A new natural-language system
is based on 30 years of research at PARC.
"Building a Better Search Engine," by Michael Reisman, MIT's
Technology Review, July 27, 2007 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/19109/?a=f
Powerset, Inc.,
based in San Francisco, is on the verge of offering an innovative
natural-language search engine, based on linguistic research at the
Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). The
engine does more than merely accept queries asked in the form of a question.
The company claims that the engine finds the best answer by considering the
meaning and context of the question and related Web pages.
"Powerset extracts deep concepts and relationships from the texts, and the
users query and match them efficiently to deliver a better search," Powerset
CEO Barney Pell says.
Even though attempts have been made at natural-language search for decades,
Powerset says that its system is different because it has solved some of the
fundamental technological problems that have existed with this kind of
search. It has done so by developing a product that is deep, computationally
advanced, and still economically viable.
Pell says that it's difficult to pinpoint one particular technological
breakthrough, but he believes that Powerset's superiority lies in the three
decades of hard work by
scientists at PARC. (PARC licensed much of its
natural-language search technology to Powerset in February.) There was not
one piece of technology that solved the problem, Pell says, but instead, it
was the unification of many theories and fragments that pulled the project
together.
"After 30 years, it's finally reached a point where it can be brought into
the world," he says.
A key component of the search engine is a deep natural-language processing
system that extracts the relationships between words; the system was
developed from PARC's Xerox Linguistic
Environment (XLE) platform. The framework that
this platform is based on, called Lexical Functional Grammar, enabled the
team to write different grammar engines that help the search engine
understand text. This includes a robust, broad-coverage grammar engine
written by PARC. Pell also claims that the engine is better than others at
dealing with ambiguity and determining the real meaning of a question or a
sentence on a Web page. All these innovations make the system more
adaptable, he says, so that it can extract deep relationships from text.
Continued in Article
Online Networking Site for Scientists Debuts BiomedExperts.com, a
social-networking Web site for health-care and life-science experts, was
unveiled today at the American Library Association’s midwinter meeting, in
Philadelphia. The site includes profiles of more than 1.4 million biomedical
experts in 120 countries. Researchers can gain access to the site for free and
search for colleagues based on their areas of expertise, where they live, or
other variables. The site also allows scientists to share data and analyses, and
view summaries of their colleagues' research papers. The site is a collaboration
between Collexis Holdings Inc., a Dutch software company, and Dell, a computer
manufacturer.
Andrea L. Foster, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 11, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2656&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) is a
multi-disciplinary search engine to scholarly internet resources, created by
Bielefeld University Library in Bielefeld, Germany. It is based on search
technology provided by Fast Search & Transfer (FAST), a Norwegian company.
It harvests OAI metadata from scientific digital repositories that implement
the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), and
are indexed using FAST's software. In addition to OAI metadata, the library
indexes selected web sites and local data collections, all of which can be
searched via a single search interface.
It allows those who use the search engine to search
metadata, when available, as well as conducting full text searches. It
contrasts with commercial search engines in multiple ways, including in the
types and kinds of resources it searches and the information it offers about
the results it finds. Where available, bibliographic data is provided, and
the results may be sorted by multiple fields, such as by author or year of
publication.
Sci-Hub Home Page --- https://sci-hub.io/
For example, enter the search term "Accounting" and then
be very patient until 10 pages of hits appears on the screen.
There’s a battle raging over whether academic
research should be free, and it’s overflowing into the dark web.
Most modern scholarly work remains locked behind
paywalls, and unless your computer is on the network of a university with an
expensive subscription, you have to pay a fee, often around 30 dollars, to
access each paper.
Many scholars say this system makes publishers
rich—Elsevier, a company that controls access to more than 2,000 journals,
has a market capitalization about equal to that of Delta Airlines—but does
not benefit the academics that conducted the research, or the public at
large. Others worry that free academic journals would have a hard time
upholding the rigorous standards and peer reviews that the most prestigious
paid journals are famous for.
Some years ago, a university student in Kazakhstan
took it upon herself to set free the vast trove of paywalled academic
research. That student, Alexandra Elbakyan, developed Sci-Hub, an online
tool that allows users to easily download paywalled papers for free.
. . .
But the investigation that took down the Silk Road
took up countless government resources. It’s unlikely the new Sci-Hub
website would attract the same amount of negative attention, so the website
is likely safe behind the many layers of encryption that protect sites on
the dark web.
University presses have become aware in recent
weeks that unauthorized copies of hundreds and, in some cases, thousands of
their books are available on pirate websites, and officials are still
struggling with how to respond.
Several press leaders said they wanted to be sure
any stance they take against piracy isn’t perceived as an attack on the
open-access movement, which is gaining popularity among some academics and
librarians. It also appears that few, if any, presses have formally notified
their authors that digital copies of their books are available free on an
illicit website.
"Many of these books are our best sellers," said
Dean J. Smith, director of Cornell University Press. "This is really painful
to a university press."
The unauthorized copies are available through a
site called Library Genesis, which also offers more than a million popular
books from commercial publishers.
The site appears to be a sister site to Sci-Hub, an
unauthorized collection of scholarly-journal articles
created by Alexandra Elbakyan, a graduate student in
Kazakhstan. While the workings of the two sites aren’t exactly clear,
several press directors said they believed Sci-Hub is the tool that also
powers the Library Genesis database.
Both sites were ordered shut down last year as a
result of a lawsuit filed by a commercial journal publisher, Elsevier.
Other versions of the sites, which feature
instructions in both Russian and English, subsequently reappeared under
slightly different web addresses. A kind of manifesto posted on the sites
argues that the information in the articles and books should be free from
commercial restraints.
A Dawning Awareness
The Cornell press publishes about 100 new books a
year. Nearly 500 of its titles were listed on the Library Genesis site as of
Monday. The site also listed more than 800 books from the Johns Hopkins
University Press, nearly 2,000 from Harvard University Press, and more than
4,800 from MIT Press.
The New Education Landscape
The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Re:Learning
project provides stories and analysis about this change moment for learning.
•Sign up for our weekly newsletter •Join the discussion on Facebook •Listen
to the podcast
More than 17,000 items from the biggest of all
university presses, Oxford University Press, are on the site (including a
book by this reporter), but it could not be immediately determined if that
count also tallies some of the 380 journals it publishes.
New search tool from Google: Putting order into the wild west of the
blogosphere
It's
tough to make money in a chaotic environment, and things don't get more
rough-and-tumble then in today's blogosphere. The universe of blogs has
everything from little Johnny's web diary to serious journalism and
corporate marketing. Nevertheless, there's money to be made, and Google
is taking the first step to finding that pot of gold. The Mountain View,
Calif., company has launched a
blog-search toolthat looks to bring order
to the unruly blogosphere. Experts say some blogs, such as those doing
credible work in journalism and commentary, are beginning to show
commercial potential. The problem, however, is to find and categorize
them, which is something Google does better than anyone.
InternetWeek Newsletter, September 15, 2005
Also see
http://www.internetweek.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleId=170703264
I fit into the category of an original NWAL blogger category meaning that I'm
a Nerd Without A Life blogger. Now of course there are millions of bloggers who
also have a life. I'm still stuck in the NWAL category.
The WSJ blogiversary highlights the impact of some of selected blogs.
Christopher Cox, Chairman of the SEC, recommends searching for blogs at
Google and Blogdigger ---
http://www.blogdigger.com/index.html
He points out that Sun Microsystems CEO Jack Schwartz in his own blog challenged
the SEC to consider blogs as a means of corporate sharing of public information.
Christopher Cox, a strong advocate of
XBRL,
gives a high recommendation to the following XBRL blog:
For fast financial reporting, a recommended blog is Hitachi America, Ltd XBRL
Business Blog ---
http://www.hitachixbrl.com/
One of the great bloggers is one of the all time great CEOs is Jack Bogle
who founded what is probably the most ethical mutual fund businesses in the
world called
Vanguard. He maintains his own blog (without a ghost blogger) called The
Bogle eBlog ---
http://johncbogle.com/wordpress/
Tom Wolfe (popular novelist) grew "weary of narcisstic shrieks and
baseless information."
Xiao Qiang, the founder of Chna Digital Times, recomments the
following blogs:
ZonaEuropa for global news with a focus on China ---
http://www.zonaeuropa.com/weblog.htm
Howard Rheingold's tech commentaries on the social revolution at
http://www.smartmobs.com/
DoNews from Keso (in Chinese) ---
http://blog.donews.com/keso
(Search engines like Google will translate pages into English)
For Newspapers and Magazines I highly recommend
Drudge Links ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/DrudgeLinks.htm
In particular I track Reason Magazine, The Nation, The New
Yorker, Sydney Morning Herald, Sky, Slate, BBC, Jewish World Review, and
The Economist
For financial news I like The Wall Street
Journal and the Business sub-section of The New York Times
Much more of my news and commentaries comes from online newsletters such as
MIT's Technology Review, AccountingWeb, SmartPros, Opinion Journal, The
Irascible Professor, T.H.E. Journal, and more too numerous too mention.
And I also get a great deal of information from
various listservs and private messages that people just send to me, many of whom
I've never met.
Better, More Accurate Image
Search
By modifying a common type of machine-learning technique, researchers have found
a better way to identify pictures," by Kate Greene, MIT's Technology
Review, April 9, 2007 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/18501/
HooRay for
Google! Down With Yahoo!
Yahoo is expanding a program that
lets advertisers pay to ensure that their sites are included in its search
results.
Is this new Yahoo policy an abuse of
advertising? I don't seem to mind the tiny advertising boxes that appear
on many Google searches, because I know they are advertisements, and they are
not obtrusive. But I can't say that I go along with the following
new policy of Yahoo. It's just one step away of
the highly abusive policy of listing all advertiser sites before listing the
most relevant sites in a search outcome. That is really abusive in what I
call CFO --- Crap First Out.
The
new Yahoo policy is CAO --- Crap Always Out
The
most abusive in what I call CFO --- Crap First Out.
You may or
may not like Google's search results. You may disagree with its search methods.
But with Google, the search results you see are strictly those that its search
methodology yields. By contrast, at major competitors like Yahoo
and Microsoft's
MSN, the first search results you see are there, at least in part, because
companies paid to place them there.
Walter Mossberg (see below)
Microsoft and Ask Jeeves are dropping paid-inclusion links from their search
engines, a move that's winning praise. Yahoo is the last major search engine
that champions paid inclusion, but for how much longer?
"Paid Inclusion Losing Charm?" by Chris Ulbrich, Wired News,
July 5, 2004 --- http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,64092,00.html?tw=newsletter_topstories_html
"Say Cheerio to Jeeves," by Arik Hesseldahl, Business Week,
February 27, 2006 ---
Click Here
AskJeeves' signature butler, borrowed from
novelist P.G. Wodehouse, is being dropped, as the search site switches names
to Ask.com and revamps its format
After nearly a decade as the search engine with a
human face, AskJeeves.com is dumping the cheerful visage of the butler that
has graced its pages. Starting on Feb. 27, the site will become known
simply as Ask.com.
The character had been used under an agreement
reached in 2000 with the estate of the late British novelist, P.G.
Wodehouse, who penned a series of novels involving the adventures of the
butler Jeeves and his master Bertie Wooster. When initially launched,
AskJeeves.com allowed users to phrase their search terms as questions, such
as "What is the capital of Ohio?" or "How many cups are in a gallon?"
Those days are over, says Daniel Read,
vice-president for consumer products at the new Ask.Com, which for nearly a
year has been part of IAC Search & Media, a unit of IAC/Interactive (IACI),
Barry Diller's $5.7 billion (2005 sales) Internet concern: "The old name
hearkened back to what we were five to seven years ago and not what we are
now. And while we found there were some customers who were loyal to the
AskJeeves name, most of our users were ambivalent about it." IAC paid $1.85
billion for the site, which first launched in 1996.
PHASED OUT. The question approach worked
for a few years, and initially the company found a business building
customer-support Web sites that would allow customers to ask questions on
the Web. The business model changed when in 2001, AskJeeves acquired
Teoma.com itself once dubbed a "Google-killer," and built the Teoma search
technology into the AskJeeves site. Starting on Feb. 27, Teoma.com will
redirect users to Ask.com.
Jeeve's "retirement" hasn't been much of a secret.
Diller has been quoted several times over the last year as saying that the
character would be phased out.
"Lycos Europe's Survival Instincts," by Jack Ewing, Business Week,
February 24, 2006 ---
Click Here
The Web outfit is relying on a new, more
focused, search engine and cost cuts to deliver growth. Does it stand a
chance against Google?
By most conventional financial measures, Lycos
Europe should probably not exist. The Internet portal, search engine, and
Web services provider, part owned by German media giant Bertelsmann and
Spanish telco Telefónica (TEF), has had
only two profitable quarters in its six-year history. It's competing in a
business dominated by Google (GOOG) and Yahoo! (YHOO). And it must cope
with the European market, where economies of scale are undercut by the need
to offer content tailored to national tastes and languages.
Yet on Feb. 22, Lycos Europe Chief Executive
Christoph Mohn stood bravely before a handful of reporters and analysts and
explained why he believes the company will finally be profitable in 2006.
"In a couple of years people will see that we're one of the few global
players," said Mohn, while standing before a laptop at a Frankfurt hotel
conference room and paging through a PowerPoint presentation on the
company's 2005 results. Lycos' loss narrowed to $24 million on sales of
$149 million last year, vs. a loss of $54 million in 2004.
Somebody believes Mohn. Shares of Lycos Europe,
which is a separate company from US.-based Lycos, rose more than 60% last
year. True, the recent price of 1.07 euros ($1.27) was still a long way
from the 2000 Internet bubble price of more than 23 euros. And the shares
fell sharply after the 2005 results were announced. But long after most
highfliers from those days have been forgotten, Lycos still employs almost
700 people, primarily in Gütersloh,
Germany, and offers services in eight European countries, plus the former
Soviet republic of Armenia. It's also the largest chat service in Europe,
with 5 million users.
WORLD AT YOUR FINGERTIPS. Mohn is clearly
true believer No. 1. With an enthusiasm that recalls the Internet euphoria
of a few years ago, he describes the new technologies that he argues will
someday allow Lycos to earn a decent return. The newest service, just
introduced in Germany and currently being rolled out across Europe, is a
search engine called Lycos iQ that's supposed to give more focused results
than Google does.
Users can type in a question, which other users
answer. Users rank answers the same way that eBay (EBAY) users rate sellers
of goods. The idea is to build a database of questions and answers, with
the best answers rising to the top of the list. (It works: This writer
asked for advice on the best places to cross-country ski around Frankfurt,
and within a few minutes received an e-mail with a link to a Web site
devoted to the topic.) "Lycos allows you to tap into the knowledge of the
whole population," Mohn said in an interview.
Will that be enough to compete against the huge
resources of Google? "I don't think [Lycos Europe has] a chance, to be
honest," says Hellen K. Omwando, an analyst at Forrester Research in
Amsterdam. "Look at Yahoo and MSN--even they can't manage to siphon away
Google users."
"ONE OF THE SURVIVORS." Omwando praises
Lycos' cost-cutting measures, which included eliminating more than 200 jobs
last year. She also has kudos for some of Lycos' business-to-business
services, such as software that allows small businesses to easily set up
online shops. But Omwando says the individual assets don't add up to
long-term growth. "Lycos is one of those players waiting to be sold," she
says.
Truckloads of ink and gigabytes of
Internet space are being devoted these days to discussing the merits of Google,
the Web's leading search engine. Most of these articles aren't focusing on how
Google functions for its users but on its value as an investment in light of
the company's announcement last week that it is going public.
I don't give stock tips, and I have no
idea whether investing in Google is a good idea. But I want to focus for a few
moments here on why Google's stock offering is a big deal in the first place:
It's because the company has created a service that works brilliantly for
consumers.
Google's initial success was built on
its breakthrough search technology, which produced more useful search results,
much more quickly, than anyone else. Some analysts believe that edge is waning
or is gone. I still think Google is the best, but in any case, there's another
secret to Google's success: honesty.
Of all the major search engines, Google
is the only one that's truly, scrupulously honest. It's the only one that
doesn't rig its search results in some manner to make money.
You may or may not like Google's search
results. You may disagree with its search methods. But with Google, the search
results you see are strictly those that its search methodology yields. By
contrast, at major competitors like Yahoo
and Microsoft's
MSN, the first search results you see are there, at least in part, because
companies paid to place them there.
Google makes money in a traditional way
that users understand. It sells ads. These ads are clearly labeled and easily
distinguished from the real, unbiased search results. They are triggered by
whatever search term a user enters, and they run down the side of the page
and, occasionally, across the top. The ones across the top are shaded in
color, just to make extra sure nobody confuses them with search results.
This separation of advertising and
editorial content is the same one that has been used for a couple of hundred
years in newspapers and magazines. People get the distinction.
Approach Means Surfers Won't Be Able to Tell
Which Sites Made Payments to Be Included
Yahoo
Inc., the nation's second largest search engine, is aggressively expanding a
program that lets advertisers pay to ensure that their sites are included in
search results.
Yahoo executives say the payments won't
improve a site's ranking on the list of results that appear after a search.
But at the same time, Yahoo acknowledged that there will be no distinguishing
marks to alert Web surfers that a company had paid to be included.
Yahoo's new approach is expected to
begin Tuesday. The Sunnyvale, Calif., Internet company has already been using
a similar approach on its shopping-oriented Web pages, but it's now expanding
the program to its entire site.
The move is likely to add fuel to the
growing battle between Yahoo and its main rival, Google Inc., which has
surpassed Yahoo to become the nation's most popular search site.
Google (www.google.com),
of Mountain View, Calif., says it doesn't let advertisers pay to be included
in its traditional search results. Google does allow advertisers to pay for
promotions that appear alongside search results, but these are clearly labeled
as "sponsored links." Google executives say their users favor this
neutral, technology-driven approach. (Yahoo also continues to have a separate
"sponsored" section for advertisers.)
Google co-founder Larry Page said Google separates
and labels advertising, much the way newspapers distinguish between news
stories and advertising. He questioned whether Yahoo would prevent advertisers
from influencing search rankings, as well as results. "It's really tricky
when people start putting things in the search results," he said.
The problem for Yahoo users is that they won't be
able to tell which results are paid for and which aren't. Currently, search
results are divided into two parts: For example, type in "dog
walkers" and hit "return." At the top of the page that then
pops up -- and also in the right-hand column -- are "sponsored"
links, listing dog walkers or related businesses that paid for the premium
position. Below that are what until now have been unsponsored findings listed
under the heading, "Top 20 Web Results."
Under the new system, that second layer of findings
will include both paid and unpaid links. But there is no way to find out if a
specific company that comes up has paid or not. Yahoo will include only a
general disclosure about the new program, on a separate page. (To read it, Web
surfers must click on the phrase "What's this?")
If Web site operators want to be included in the new
program, they must pay an annual subscription fee of $49 to list one Internet
address and $29 each for their next nine addresses. On top of that, companies
must pay Yahoo a fee for each person that clicks on their search listing.
The move comes two weeks after Yahoo dropped search
technology from Google in favor of its own technology. Google is the
top-ranked site that Internet users visit when conducting Web searches. About
35% of all Web searches in the U.S. are conducted on Google's sites, while 28%
of them are done on Yahoo's sites, according to comScore Media Metrix, a unit
of comScore Networks Inc., a market-research firm.
Analysts say Yahoo's move may arouse suspicions among
computer users that the search results, and rankings, are being influenced by
advertisers. It's a "trust issue," said Charlene Li, an analyst at
market-research firm Forrester Research Inc. "Is this really the most
relevant result or not?"
Yahoo says the program helps users by delivering
information that its own or other search technology might miss. "Our goal
is to deliver the highest quality search results," said Tim Cadogan,
Yahoo's vice president of search. "We're going to gain users," he
says, because "we're delivering better results."
Under Yahoo's "content acquisition
program," advertisers pay to have their sites surveyed by Yahoo software
that "crawls" the Web periodically, looking for new or updated Web
pages.
Forrester's Ms. Li said she thinks consumers
ultimately will accept the program, because they will come to understand
Yahoo's policy of including advertisers in searches, but not allowing
advertising to influence search rankings. (Do
you really think this constraint will remain?)
Search Engine Watch 2003 Award Winners, Part 1
ClickZ's sister site, Search Engine Watch, released its annual list of
outstanding Web search services for 2003. Your favorites are among them, but
there were also surprises and controversial predictions for the coming year. http://nl.internet.com/ct.html?rtr=on&s=1,pvi,1,ctxf,667h,3zob,3pvb
They named it after the biggest number they could imagine. But it wasn't
big enough. On the eve of a very public stock offering, here's everything you
ever wanted to know about Google. A Wired Magazine special report --- http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.03/google.html
February 25, 2004 reply from Jim
Borden
Bob,
Here is another good article on Google from Fast
Company (April 2003):
Search Engines 101 --- http://www.searchengines.com/
This website provides some broad categories for searching. It also
provides a tutorial on how search engines work and how to improve your
searches.
How do search engines work? Search engines help people find relevant
information on the Internet. Major search engines have huge databases of web
sites that surfers can search by typing in some text. Learn more about search
engines and effective searching here.
Search engines send out spiders or robots, which
follow links from web sites and index all pages they come across. Each
search engine has its own formula for indexing pages; some index the whole
site, while others index only the main page.
Search engines decide the amount of weight that
will be placed on various factors that influence results. Some want link
popularity to be the most important criterion, while others prefer meta
tags. Search engines use a combination of factors to devise their
formulas.
Directories - a whole different ballgame Often confused with search engines, directories are completely
different. Unlike search engines, directories use "human
indexing;" people review and index links. Directories
have rigid guidelines that sites must meet before being added to their
index. Therefore, they have a smaller, but cleaner index.
Yahoo!,
LookSmart, MSN,
Go and others are
directories. Factors that influence search engine rankings are irrelevant to
directory rankings. Since people review sites, more attention is placed on
the quality of a site: its functionality, content and design. Directories
strive to categorize sites accurately and often correct categories suggested
by a site's webmaster.
You can learn
more about directories here.
Hybrid search engines: The new generation Hybrid search engines combine a directory and a search engine to give
their visitors the most relevant and complete results. The Top 10 search
engines/directories today are hybrid. Yahoo!, for example, is a directory,
which uses results from Google (a search engine) for its secondary results.
At the same time, Google uses Open Directory
Project's directory to supplement its own search engine. Other search
engines work the same way. Learn more about search
engine partnerships here.
Your mission, if you choose to accept it
As someone trying to achieve higher rankings, it's your goal to learn more
about influencing
factors and how each engine uses them. After completing your research,
you will have a better understanding of search engines and directories. You
will also have a better understanding of what it takes to achieve a Top 20
ranking on major search engines.
This section offers detailed explanations of
factors used by search engines and directories, as well as tips for their
implementation.
An Overview
Search engines and directories
Search
engines use robots
Directories
use people
Top
search engines have both robots and people
Different
factors are used for search engines than for directories
FindSame is an entirely new kind of search engine that
looks for content, not keywords. You submit an entire document, and FindSame
returns a list of Web pages that contain any fragment of that document longer
than about one line of text. Enter a URL or paste some text in one of the boxes
below, or upload a file. Then click the "search" button and FindSame
will show you where on the Web any piece of the text at that URL appears.
Search engine for education sites --- http://www.searchedu.com/
My gosh, there were 421 hits for "Bob Jensen," 52 hits for
"FAS 133," and 109 hits for "SFAS 133! I am truly
impressed.
Over 20 million university and education pages
indexed and ranked in order of popularity.
Search for finance and investor news.
TheLion.com http://www.thelion.com/
This is a search engine focused on financial and investment news.
Hoover's, Inc. has acquired Powerize, Inc. and is
pleased to welcome you to the benefits of Hoover's Online. Your favorite
Powerize search features are now available to you in this Archived News
section. Questions? View
our FAQ.
Research Links. Language Translators, etc. --- http://sls-partnership.com/Research_Links.htm
(Links to research, dictionary, thesaurus, dictionaries, thesauri, references,
glossaries, online, language translators, researchers, technical, financial,
medical, engineering, multi-lingual, bilingual --- Japanese and English)
My favorite search engine today is Google.com.
Google consistently produces results that are on target with the
context of my Internet searches, which puts the tools heads above the other
search engines. Here's what Iconocast recently had to say about
Google:
"With the entrance of Google, which greatly
improves search effectiveness and which was recently anointed by Yahoo! as the
Net's definitive search technology, the search-engine game once again looks
promising [we particularly like the "I'm feeling lucky" button].
Google claims to have cataloged 1.06 billion Web pages, no mean feat."
Source: 2000 ICONOCAST http://www.iconocast.com
IFACnet, the global, multilingual search engine developed by the International
Federation of Accountants (IFAC), has expanded its resources to address the
needs of small and medium accounting practices (SMPs), in addition to
professional accountants in business. IFACnet enables SMPs to easily locate
information on a wide range of technical, marketing, human resource and other
matters, including such topics as succession planning, managing a small firm,
staff recruitment and retention, and promoting firm services.
IFACnet has also added
three new features to help accountants worldwide stay current on technical,
professional and marketplace issues and to make the search engine more user
friendly. These include a "Latest News" page with links to a variety of
business, management and accounting media and other websites; a search box that
enables users to search IFACnet directly from their Internet browser; and a
"What's News" section to inform visitors of new IFACnet features and content.
"There are many high quality resources
available from within IFAC as well as through collaboration with our members
that can help the global accountancy community carry out their professional
responsibilities," states Ian Ball, IFAC Chief Executive Officer. "IFACnet's
customised search features provide an efficient means to give professional
accountants, including SMPs and professional accountants in business, in
every part of the world, access to these timely and relevant resources."
Launched in October 2006, IFACnet provides one-stop access to free, high
quality guidance, management tools and articles developed by professional
accountancy bodies from around the world. Since its launch, IFACnet has
attracted nearly 42,000 individuals from more than 190 countries worldwide.
Currently, IFAC and twenty-three of its members (see attachment) provide
IFACnet with access to information from their websites. In the coming
months, new content will continue to be added to IFACnet as it expands the
number of participating organisations.
IFACnet can be accessed free-of-charge at
http://www.ifacnet.com and on the websites of
participating organisations.
IFAC is the worldwide organisation for the accountancy profession dedicated
to serving the public interest by strengthening the profession and
contributing to the development of strong international economies. IFAC is
comprised of 155 members and associates in 118 countries, representing more
than 2.5 million accountants in public practice, education, government
service, industry and commerce. Through its independent standard-setting
boards, IFAC sets ethics, auditing and assurance, education, and public
sector accounting standards. It also issues guidance to encourage high
quality performance by professional accountants in business.
Several add-ins are available, and are a necessity
to be able to search the files most of us work with.
I've tried it on a workstation, and unlike the
Google product it will index and search large files - I was able to find a
phrase in page 388 of a 37.6 MB PDF file with it. There is even some control
over which folders are included in the search indexes.
The only recommendation may be that it is free,
however. As you might expect it steers you towards using more Microsoft
products, although you can turn some of those features off.
The X1 search tool has it beat in being useful,
though. The default view when searching lets you specify several
characteristics simultaneously including filename, type, date/time, path and
size. At the same time you can search for words or other information within
the files that are indexed. You can set limits on what folders are indexed,
and the size of the files that are indexed as well.
If your files are organized into folders, no matter
what criteria you use, you can narrow the search to folders at any level in
the directory tree. When searching for common words that helps immensely in
preventing an overwhelming list of results.
The MSN new toolbar's Windows Desktop Search feature is better than
Google's Desktop Search toolbar Windows won't have integrated desktop search until the
fall of 2006, and IE won't have built-in tabbed browsing until this summer. But
Microsoft has just released a free product that adds both features to Windows
computers. These add-on versions of desktop search and tabbed browsing aren't as
good as their built-in counterparts, but they get the basic job done.
Microsoft's new, free utility goes by the ridiculously long name of MSN Search
Toolbar With Windows Desktop Search, and it can be downloaded at http://toolbar.msn.com/. When you download the toolbar, it adds a
new row of icons and drop-down menus to the IE browser. Many of these are aimed
at driving users to other MSN products, like its Hotmail email service. But you
can also use the toolbar to turn on tabbed browsing and to perform desktop
searches . . . The MSN toolbar's Windows Desktop Search feature is better. It
beats the most popular add-in desktop search product for Windows, Google Desktop
Search, but it's slower and more cumbersome than the integrated search in
Apple's new operating system.
Walter Mossberg, " Free Microsoft Stopgap Offers Tabbed Browsing And Desktop
Searching," The Wall Street Journal, June 16, 2005 ---
http://ptech.wsj.com/ptech.html
Search Inside a Given Computer (Google's Web Desktop Search)
The glitch, which could permit an attacker to
secretly search the contents of a personal computer via the Internet, is what
computer scientists call a composition flaw - a security weakness that emerges
when separate components interact. "When you put them together, out jumps a
security flaw," said Dan Wallach, an assistant professor of computer
science at Rice in Houston, who, with two graduate students, Seth Fogarty and
Seth Nielson, discovered the flaw last month. "These are subtle problems,
and it takes a lot of experience to ferret out this kind of flaw,"
Professor Wallach said.
John Markoff, "Rice University Computer Scientists Find a Flaw in Google's
New Desktop Search Program," The New York Times, December 20, 2004
--- http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/20/technology/20flaw.html
The glitch only applies to the Web Desktop search tool for internal documents. It
does not apply to other Google search tools.
Google's newly released desktop search application
creates profound security and privacy risks for any companies with public
access PCs, security experts have warned.
"In a shared environment people can use this
powerful Google search tool to deeply mine data from public access
terminals," John McIntosh, managing consultant with IT and security
consultancy Heulyn, told vnunet.com.
"Firms need to be aware of ways in which this
type of software is used and what impact it may have. Credit card details can
be easily unearthed, together with other personal data.
"This can easily lead to identity theft and this
is clearly a fast-growing problem. There is no skill needed to do it, and it
makes it very easy to gain access to potentially sensitive data."
Unveiled last week in a beta test version, the free Google
Desktop search application is designed to enable users to search local
email, files, web history and chat details.
In spite of all the concerns, I think I am going to download the beta
version.
Google Desktop Search is how our brains would work if
we had photographic memories. It's a desktop search application that provides
full text search over your email, computer files, chats, and the web pages
you've viewed. By making your computer searchable, Google Desktop Search puts
your information easily within your reach and frees you from having to
manually organize your files, emails, and bookmarks.
After downloading Google Desktop Search, you can
search your personal items as easily as you search the Internet using Google.
Unlike traditional computer search software that updates once a day, Google
Desktop Search updates continually for most file types, so that when you
receive a new email in Outlook, for example, you can search for it within
seconds. The index of searchable information created by Desktop Search is
stored on your own computer.
In addition to basic search, Google Desktop Search
introduces new ways to access relevant and timely information. When you view a
web page in Internet Explorer, Google Desktop Search "caches" or
stores its content so that you can later look at that same version of the
page, even if its live content has changed or you're offline. Google Desktop
Search organizes email search results into conversations, so that all email
messages in the same thread are grouped into a single search result.
We're currently working to fine tune our algorithms
and to add more capabilities to Google Desktop Search, including the ability
to search for more types of information on your computer. Your opinions and
feedback can help us with this process. What types of files or other
information would you like to be able to search? What new features would be
helpful? Please contact us and let us know.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does Google Desktop Search do? Why is this
useful? Where do I go to do a Desktop Search? What are the system requirements
for running Google Desktop Search? How long will the download take? How easy
is it to install? After installing, how soon can I search my computer? Will
Google Desktop Search affect my computer's performance? What about my privacy?
Does Google Desktop Search share my content with anyone? How come Google
Desktop Search doesn't search all my communications and files? Is Google
Desktop Search available in languages other than English? How do I uninstall?
Yahoo's Desktop Search (for searching text in files within a single
computer) information is at http://desktop.yahoo.com/
Toolbar now lets users navigate the Web without using
URLs.
Scarlet Pruitt, IDG News Service Thursday, July 15,
2004 In its constant quest to court Web surfers, Google added a new feature to
its toolbar this week that allows users to navigate the Web by typing in a
name instead of a URL.
With the new Browse By Name
feature, users of the Google's Toolbar can, for example, type "Grand
Canyon" into their Internet Explorer browser window and land on the Grand
Canyon homepage without having to type the somewhat cumbersome www.nps.gov/grca/
URL for the national park.
If users type in name that isn't
specific or well recognized, the toolbar automatically performs a Google
search on the subject, giving users a choice of destinations to choose from,
the company says.
Typing "bicycles" in
the browser window, for instance, brought up a litany of bicycle-related
search results. Google says that the tool is aimed at helping users save time
when browsing the Web.
Using the browser window as a
convenient search bar may not always be the approach when searching for
general terms, however, because the most specific or obvious destinations tend
to appear first. Typing "apple" takes users directly to Apple
Computer's homepage, for instance, and does not bring up results on the fruit.
Automatic Updates
Google's
Toolbar automatically updates to include new features without users having
to install new versions, though as of Thursday, not all users had received the
update.
A spokesperson for the company in
London says that it would take a few days for the update to be delivered to
all toolbar users, and recommends that users hungry for the new feature
uninstall their toolbar and reinstall the updated version for Google's site.
The new Browse By Name feature is
available in 12 languages, including French, Russian, German, Italian,
Chinese, and Japanese, Google says.
The toolbar update is just the
latest tool introduced by the Mountain View, California, search company, which
has been rolling out new products and services at a clipped rate over the last
year, as it prepares for a much
anticipated IPO.
Audio, Video, Movie, and Television Show Dialog Search Services from Google and Yahoo
LocateTV will search over 3 million TV listings across all channels in your
area
Type in the name of a TV show, movie, or actor
Locate TV will find channels and times in your locale http://www.locatetv.com/
YouTube added a cool feature for videos with closed
captions: you can now click on the "transcript" button to expand the entire
listing. If you click on a line, YouTube will show the excerpt from the
video corresponding to the text. If you use your browser's find feature, you
can even search inside the video. Here's an
an example of video that includes a transcript.
Web video has transformed the way the Internet is
used, but finding the exact clip you want can be incredibly hard. And it's
no wonder, considering that sites like YouTube conduct their hunts by
looking at a clip's "contextual metadata" -- tags, video title and
description -- and thus can often be misled by false information. For
example, a homemade video about cooking might be inaccurately tagged with a
popular search word like "Obama" so as to get more traction.
This week I tested VideoSurf.com,
a site that claims to be the first to search videos by
"seeing" images that appear in these videos. The company says its technology
can analyze a clip's visual content, as well as its metadata -- especially
when searching for people. VideoSurf has analyzed and categorized more than
12 billion visual moments on the Web to understand who the most important
characters and scenes are in a video, and it uses this knowledge to sort
clips according to relevancy.
Search results on VideoSurf spread out videos in a
filmstrip-like format, distinguishing one scene from the next. Users can
choose an option to show only faces, which helps if you're looking for a
specific person in a long video or movie. And when looking at videos from
certain sources, you can select a scene from the filmstrip and jump ahead to
that scene rather than sit through the entire clip.
When it works, VideoSurf is one of those
technologies that make you wonder why someone didn't think of it sooner. The
site aggregates content from about 60 sources, including YouTube, CNN Video,
Hulu, ESPN and Comedy Central, and a sorting tool weeds out unwanted results
like the irksome slideshows that are labeled as videos. VideoSurf can find
videos on all kinds of subjects, but it really shines when it finds
well-known people.
But VideoSurf has some rough edges and doesn't
always work as it should. In its defense, the site is still in its public
beta, or trial, stage, and plans to be full-blown by early next year. Right
now, one of its best features, the ability to jump ahead to specific scenes,
works with video from only a handful of sources including YouTube, MetaCafe,
DailyMotion and Google Video. Videos from Hulu.com confusingly allow jumping
ahead only from certain screens.
Additionally, I came across a couple of videos that
were no longer available, though they were listed in search results. And a
customizable VideoSurf home page for users with accounts on the site saves
searches but not specific clips; VideoSurf plans to fix this next week by
adding a favorites page where users can store and share favorite videos with
others.
Still, I really grew to like VideoSurf's clear way
of displaying content that would be otherwise buried within videos. Rather
than trying to guess a video's contents by looking at a single
representative image, VideoSurf's filmstrip views showed me exactly what I'd
be watching. In many cases, I viewed a video I might not have otherwise
watched because its filmstrip showed shots of scenes that looked
interesting.
On the left-hand side of the search-results page,
VideoSurf users can narrow results according to Content Type, Categories and
Video Sources to see just what they're looking for -- or, often more
important, what they're not looking for. Content Type, for example, includes
slideshows, Web series, full television episodes and full movies; a search
can include only videos in a particular category (say, slideshows) or
exclude that category altogether by unmarking the box beside it.
Most search-results pages include tiled still
images at the top representing the characters in the videos. By selecting
one of these characters, users can refine search results to show only videos
with that character. For example, I typed the title of a favorite television
show, "Brothers and Sisters," into the search box and saw the names and
images of seven actors on the show at the top of the screen. I selected
Sally Field and was redirected to results of videos featuring only the
mother she plays on the show.
I used VideoSurf to search for Beyonce's "Single
Ladies" music video, and then changed the date parameters to find only
videos posted this week. This retrieved a Saturday Night Live skit in which
the pop singer spoofs her own video with help from three men in tights --
including Justin Timberlake. While the SNL skit ran, a list of related
videos appeared in a column on the right, including clips of J.T.'s past SNL
skits.
Occasionally, annotations appear on videos, but
these come from the source -- not VideoSurf. If overlaid text appears on
YouTube videos, it can be turned off using an icon in the bottom right of
the YouTube screen. Video-sharing sites that use introductory pages such as
pre-rolls before each video will still show those pages.
VideoSurf makes it easy to send specific clips of
videos to friends. I did so by selecting a Share option and adjusting slide
bars to trim the clip to start and end at scenes I preferred. Clips shared
with friends via email are sent with the VideoSurf filmstrip, giving others
the ability to also know what the video will include so that they, too, can
discern whether or not they want to watch it.
Clips can be shared on social-networking sites like
del.icio.us, MySpace and Facebook, though VideoSurf's helpful filmstrip
didn't show up on these sites like it did in emails.
I also tested an add-on for the Mozilla Firefox
browser called Greasemonkey that works with VideoSurf. When installed, this
displays VideoSurf's helpful filmstrip beneath search results from Google
Video, YouTube, Yahoo or CBS.com. Once installed, filmstrips illustrating
important scenes appear along with the normal text results for videos, and
some of the filmstrips enable jumping ahead to specific scenes. This
somewhat techie Greasemonkey extension can save people the extra step of
making a separate visit to VideoSurf.com to watch a specific clip.
VideoSurf uses smart technology that can save
people the aggravation of watching videos that aren't what they appear to
be. Since so much Web content now includes videos, a visual search tool that
can better assess videos like VideoSurf is a good idea. When this site
improves its now-flaky ability to jump ahead to specific scenes in videos,
it will be even more valuable.
Cuil has demonstrated very well, it doesn't help you to look through the
entire haystack
if it gets dumped on your head, and all you can see is a bunch of hay out there
---
http://www.cuil.com/info/
Boasting big plans, startup search engine Cuil
(pronounced "cool") launched on Monday. The company sold itself on having
indexed more pages than Google, ranking based on context rather than on
popularity, and displaying results organized by concept within a beautiful
user interface. There was just one problem: when the search engine launched,
it didn't work very well.
Cuil's site was down intermittently throughout the
day on Monday, and even when the site was up, it sometimes returned no
results for common queries, or failed to produce the most relevant or
up-to-date results. For example, as of Wednesday morning, searching Cuil for
its own name returns nothing on the first results page that is related to
the engine itself, in spite of the buckets of press it got this week.
"I've seen these sorts of things for all sorts of
startups that get launched," says search-engine expert Danny Sullivan, who
runs Search Engine Land. "You have issues with how it's displaying results;
you have spam showing; you have a lot of duplicate results." But Cuil wasn't
supposed to suffer from the common problems that all sorts of startups
encounter. Its founders have impressive credentials: Anna Patterson and
Russell Power both had major roles in building Google's large search index,
and Tom Costello researched search architecture and relevance methods for
Stanford University and IBM. On top of the company's talent, Cuil raised a
reported $33 million in venture capital. "In many ways, Cuil was the
exception," Sullivan says. "They were one of the few people or companies out
there where you would say, 'Well, all right, I'd be dubious about anyone
else, but if anyone's going to have a chance, you should have a chance.' But
they didn't deliver, and I think that makes it even harder now for startups
to come along."
One of Cuil's main selling points is the size of
its index. Claiming to have indexed 120 billion Web pages, which it states
is three times more than any other search engine, the company says, "Size
matters because many people use the Internet to find information that is of
interest to them, even if it's not popular." But Sullivan notes that
relevance may be the most important quality of search. "When you come into
the idea of size, that starts getting into the question of obscure search,"
he says. "The needle-in-the-haystack search sounds so very compelling--the
idea that if you don't have a lot of pages, you can't search through the
entire haystack. But, as Cuil has demonstrated very well, it doesn't help
you to look through the entire haystack if it gets dumped on your head, and
all you can see is a bunch of hay out there."
Investor
Azeem Azhar,
who incubated the startup search engine
True Knowledge,
notes that while it's useful to have a large base of knowledge, sometimes
the sample that's selected matters more. "There are certain things that
people expect to have, and there are certain facts that are more useful than
others," he says. True Knowledge, which aims at the subset of searchers who
are looking for answers to direct questions, is currently working on
building up a database of relevant facts that can be used to answer
questions such as, "Who was president when Barack Obama was a teenager?" The
company hopes that by focusing on facts of broad interest, such as those
relating to famous people and places, it will be useful to people even as it
solicits responses for them by way of rounding out its database. When a user
asks a question that the system can't answer, it returns, "If there are any
answers, I couldn't find any"; invites the user to add to the database; and
points to traditional search results.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
I'm still upset that Cuil adds its own pictures to hits that have nothing
whatsoever to do with the author or the documents. Jagdish is probably correct
in saying that Cuil scans part of the document and tries to link a photo from
its own archives that might possibly relate to content of the document. In this
respect Cuil is doing a poor job picking relevant photographs. If I were a
fundamentalist Christian or Muslim, I'd really be upset when Cuil added a
bikini-clad porn star or an aardvark to my serious document about my religion.
As for me I have a sense of humor, but I still contend that adding such useless
pictures is a waste of bandwidth.
The theory is probably that, relative to text, a picture is worth a thousand
words. But the wrong picture on a search hit relates to the wrong thousand
words. And when it comes to searching, trying to search through a million
photographs is certainly not as efficient as trying to search through a billion
words for needles called "key words" or "search phrases." One can't search
through a million pictures for such a thing as "FAS 133." It's pretty difficult
to even sort a million faces for those with big noses. In Internet Explorer when
I have a search page outcome listing 20 hits, I can quickly search the text on
the page by hitting Edit, Find and typing in a search word. I cannot search the
attached pictures for FAS 133. I suppose I could try to scan by eyesight for big
noses. But what would this have to do with my search for FAS 133?
The only real answer to searching for needles in haystacks is indexing in a
way that certain words in different terminologies (e.g., "cash" versus "money"
versus "currency") or certain pictures (e.g., pictures with mountains) are given
useful index magnets. More importantly, a good index system allows you to search
for derivative financial instruments without getting millions of unwanted hits
about mathematics derivatives or chemical derivatives.
TR: Which
research has the most people and
funding?
PN: The two biggest
projects are machine translation and
the speech project. Translation and
speech went all the way from one or
two people working on them to, now,
live systems.
TR:
Like the Google Labs project called
GOOG-411
[a free service that lets people
search for local businesses by
voice, over the phone]. Tell me more
about it.
PN: I think it's
the only major [phone-based
business-search] service of its kind
that has no human fallback. It's 100
percent automated, and there seems
to be a good response to it. In
general, it looks like things are
moving more toward the mobile
market, and we thought it was
important to deal with the market
where you might not have access to a
keyboard or might not want to type
in search queries.
TR:
And speech recognition can also be
important for video search, isn't
it?
Blinkx and
Everyzing
are two examples of startups that
are using the technology to search
inside video. Is Google working on
something similar?
PN: Right now,
people aren't searching for video
much. If they are, they have a very
specific thing in mind like "Coke"
and "Mentos." People don't search
for things like "Show me the speech
where so-and-so talks about this
aspect of Middle East history." But
all of that information is there,
and with speech recognition, we can
access it.
We wanted speech technology that
could serve as an interface for
phones and also index audio text.
After looking at the existing
technology, we decided to build our
own. We thought that, having the
data and computational resources
that we do, we could help advance
the field. Currently, we are up to
state-of-the-art with what we built
on our own, and we have the
computational infrastructure to
improve further. As we get more data
from more interaction with users and
from uploaded videos, our systems
will improve because the data trains
the algorithms over time.
"Video Searching by Sight and Script: Researchers have designed
an automated system to identify characters in television shows, paving the way
for better video search," by Brendan Borrell, MIT's Technology Review,
October 11, 2006 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=17604&ch=infotech
Google's acquisition this week of YouTube.com has
raised hopes that searching for video is going to improve. More than 65,000
videos are uploaded to YouTube each day, according to the website. With all
that content, finding the right clip can be difficult.
Now researchers have developed a system that uses a
combination of face recognition, close-captioning information, and original
television scripts to automatically name the faces on that appear on screen,
making episodes of the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer searchable.
"We basically see this work as one of the first
steps in getting automated descriptions of what's happening in a video,"
says Mark Everingham, a computer scientist now at the University of Leeds
(formerly of the University of Oxford), who presented his research at the
British Machine Vision Conference in September.
Currently, video searches offered by AOL Video,
Google, and YouTube do not search the content of a video itself, but instead
rely primarily on "metadata," or text descriptions, written by users to
develop a searchable index of Web-based media content.
Users frequently (and illegally) upload bits and
pieces of their favorite sitcoms to video-sharing sites such as YouTube. For
instance, a recent search for "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" turned up nearly
2,000 clips on YouTube, many of them viewed thousands of times. Most of
these clips are less than five minutes and the descriptions are vague. One
titled "A new day has come," for instance, is described by a user thusly:
"It mostly contains Buffy and Spike. It shows how Spike was there for Buffy
until he died and she felt alone afterward."
Everingham says previous work in video search has
used data from subtitles to find videos, but he's not aware of anyone using
his method, which combines--in the technical tour de force--subtitles and
script annotation. The script tells you "what is said and who said it" and
subtitles tell you "what time something is said," he explains. Everingham's
software combines those two sources of information with powerful tools
previously developed to track faces and identify speakers without the need
for user input.
What made the Buffy project such a challenge,
Everingham says, is that in film and television, the person speaking is not
always in the shot. The star, Buffy, may be speaking off-screen or facing
away from the camera, for instance, and the camera will be showing you the
listener's reactions. Other times, there may be multiple actors on the
screen or the actor's face is not directly facing the camera. All of these
ambiguities are easy for humans to interpret, but difficult for
computers--at least until now. Everingham says their multimodal system is
accurate up to 80 percent of the time.
A single episode of
Buffy can have up to 20,000 instances of detected faces, but most of
these instances arise from multiple frames of a single character in any
given shot. The software tracks key "landmarks" on actor's faces--nostrils,
pupils, and eyes, for instance--and if one of them overlaps with the next
frame, the two faces are considered part of a single track. If these
landmarks are unclear, though, the software uses a description of clothing
to unite two "broken" face tracks. Finally, the software also watches
actors' lips to identify who's speaking or if the speaker is off screen.
Ultimately, the system produces a detailed, play-by-play annotation of the
video.
"The general idea is
that you want to get more information without having people capture it,"
says Alex Berg at the
Computer Vision Group at University of California,
Berkeley. "If you want to find a particular scene with a character, you have
to first find the scenes that contain that character." He says that
Everingham's research will pave the way for more complex searches of
television programming.
Computer scientist Josef
Sivic at Oxford's
Visual Geometry
Group, who contributed to the Buffy
project, says that in the future it will be possible to search for
high-level concepts like "Buffy and Spike walking toward the camera
hand-in-hand" or all outdoor scenes that contain Buffy.
Timothy Tuttle, vice
president of AOL Video, says, "It seems like over the next five to ten
years, more and more people will choose what to watch on their own schedule
and they will view content on demand." He also notes that the barrier to
adapting technologies like Everingham's may no longer be technical, but
legal.
These legal barriers
have been coming down with print media because companies have reaped the
financial benefits of searchable content--Google's Book Scan and Amazon's
search programs have been shown to
boost book sales over the last two years.
Video on the Web is all the
rage now, the subject of an endless stream of articles and speculation that
it's the next big thing. And there's some evidence to back that up. Apple
Computer Inc. sold 12 million video clips at $1.99 each from its popular
iTunes Music Store in just a few months. Google has made a splash with a
similar video download store. According to AccuStream iMedia Research, about
18 billion video streams were online in 2005 and that number is expected to
grow by more than 30% in 2006.
But how do you find the
video clips you'd like to see, or download? Normal search engines like
Google's can sometimes point you to video clips, but they aren't optimized
for that task.
So, this week, we dived into
the world of online videos, looking for the best ways to find clips. We were
impressed by how much material is out there -- much of it free. We used
about 10 different video searching/hosting sites to find videos related to
TV shows, including "Grey's Anatomy," Hollywood actors, like Matthew
McConaughey, and musicians, like Brad Paisley. We also searched for news
videos, ads and amateur videos. We even looked for a famous "Saturday Night
Live" mock music video, and its imitators.
Our
results: AOL Video Search, Yahoo Video Search, and Blinkx TV earned our
appreciation because each searches the entire Internet for material, and
does a decent job.
Google Video and iTunes also perform video searches, but they search only
among the material they host on their own servers, and which they offer for
sale, or for free downloading. They don't search across the entire Web.
Sites like YouTube.com and GoFish.com have sprung up as central download
sites for all sorts of video clips, some by amateurs and some by pros. But
they, too, search only the material they offer themselves.
The
technology for searching the actual spoken words in a video exists, but is
in its infancy. So, most video searches are done by looking for words in a
video's title text, or in descriptions or other information embedded in a
video file in the form of "metadata" or "tags" -- kind of like the embedded
title, artist and album information in a music file. Some TV shows stored on
the Web also contain closed captioning data, and that can be searched in
some cases.
AOL Video Search (www.aol.com/video)
uses the search engines of two smaller, yet powerful,
companies that it owns:
Truveo.com and
Singingfish.com. As you use AOL Video Search, your
past search topics are saved in a left-hand column and videos can be saved
into a special AOL playlist. An adult content filter is used on AOL's
server, meaning users can't turn the filter on or off.
Using
AOL, we found and watched the "Saturday Night Live" mock music video called
"Lazy Sunday," set in New York, and its West Coast response, "Lazy Monday,"
set in Los Angeles.
Yahoo Video Search (http://video.search.yahoo.com)
can display results in a visually attractive grid of
images from each video clip. Unlike AOL, which displays advertisements on
its search start and results page, Yahoo doesn't show ads on either page --
though ads will display if they're linked to videos from outside sources. A
SafeSearch filter can be used for blocking adult material as you search
videos.
Using
Yahoo's video search, we turned up clips of a forgettable 1998 appearance
Walt made in an East Coast vs. West Coast computer trivia contest held in
Boston. Not only was his East Coast team crushed, but they wore puffy
colonial shirts while being crushed.
Blinkx TV (www.Blinkx.tv)
uses a simple interface and makes searching easy -- an
empty box placed on the left of the screen with a collage of 100 tiny clip
images playing on the right. After results are returned, you can adjust a
horizontal slider between "date" or "relevance," depending on your
preference. Our results weren't always as accurate with Blinkx as they were
with other video-search sites -- one search returned spreadsheets rather
than videos -- but we liked how the results page played animated clips of
each video in the same window. Blinkx offers a prominent filtering button to
hide adult results.
Google Video (http://video.google.com),
which is still in its beta (or prerelease) version,
also offers video searching through free videos -- but allows you to search
only through material that Google hosts, or streams from its servers. This
site eliminates ads -- including Google's word-only ads -- entirely, which
is refreshing.
Google and Yahoo are introducing services that will
let users search through television programs based on words spoken on the air.
The services will look for keywords in the closed captioning information that
is encoded in many programs, mainly as an aid to deaf viewers.
Google's service, scheduled to be introduced January
25, does not actually permit people to watch the video on their computers.
Instead, it presents them with short excerpts of program transcripts with text
matching their search queries and a single image from the program. Google
records TV programs for use in the service.
Google's vice president for product management,
Jonathan Rosenberg, said offering still images was somewhat limited but was a
first step toward a broader service.
"The long-term business model is complicated and
will evolve over time," Mr. Rosenberg said. Eventually, Google may offer
video programming on its site or direct people to video on other Web sites.
But for now, the issues relating to the rights and business interests of
program owners are very complex, he said.
A Google spokesman, Nate Tyler, said the service
would include "most of the major networks," including ABC, PBS, Fox
News and C-Span. Mr. Rosenberg said Google did not think it needed the
permission of network and program owners to include them in the index but
would remove any program or network if the owner requests it. He declined to
discuss any business arrangements between the program owners and Google.
Brian Lamb, the chief executive of C-Span, said he
met with representatives of Google and approved of their service but no money
changed hands between the two organizations.
Yahoo introduced a test version of a different sort
of video search last year, available from a section of its site, that lets
users comb through video clips from various Web sites.
Today, Yahoo will move the video search to its home
page. In the next few weeks, it will introduce the ability to search the
closed-captioning text for programs from some networks, including Bloomberg
and the BBC. Unlike the Google service, Yahoo's offering will let users watch
60-second video clips.
David Ives, the chief executive of TV Eyes, which is
providing that part of Yahoo's service, said some broadcasters were paying to
have their programs included in the search. In other cases, he said, the
broadcaster and TV Eyes will split revenue from advertisements placed next to
the video clips.
Yahoo Inc. plans to release today (February 3)
a service designed to make it easier to conduct Web searches, its latest sally
in the heated battle with Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. to make search
results more relevant for individual users.
The service, dubbed "Y!Q," uses keywords
automatically extracted from Web pages to conduct Web searches and also to
find related content on Yahoo's own Web sites. The search companies have long
complained about the difficulty of delivering exactly the search results users
want since the average search query a user enters is just a few words long.
Yahoo's new service, which it plans to release on its site for test services (
http://www.next.yahoo.com/
), partly addresses that problem by creating a list of search keywords itself
based on the text a user is looking at.
. . .
If an individual is reading a news article on Yahoo's
site about plans for changing Social Security, for example, clicking on a button
marked "Search Related Info" generates links to several Web sites
discussing the same topic. In that case, the service extracts a string of
keywords including "President Bush" and "Social Security"
from the original article and uses them as the basis for the new search. The
service works on sites other than Yahoo's own and allows users to add or exclude
search terms from those generated automatically.
StumbleUpon is an intelligent browsing tool for
sharing and discovering great websites. As you click
Stumble!,
you'll get high-quality pages matched to your personal
preferences. These pages have been explicitly recommended (rated
I like it) by friends and other SU members with
similar interests. Rating these sites shares them with your friends and
peers – you will automatically 'stumble upon' each others favorites sites.
In effect,
StumbleUpon's members collectively share the best
sites on the web. You can share any site by simply
clicking I like it. This passes the page on to
friends and like-minded people – letting them "stumble upon" all the great
sites you discover.
Selecting Your Interests
After you join you will be asked to select topics which are of interest to
you. Nearly 500 topics are available and you can select as many as you wish
to help determine your preferences in web content. The more interests you
select, the better StumbleUpon will be able to determine which sites you
will like best. This lets StumbleUpon provide you with sites rated highly by
other members with similar interests. You can also add, remove or modify
your interests at any time.
Jensen Comment: I found this site a little confusing to use, but I
think I got the hang of it. Now I find it quite useful for finding good
sites. Many of the hits are commercial sites. It does clutter your
browser window with yet another toolbar, although if you click on the View
option in your browser you can choose to hide this and other browser toolbars.
KartOO is a metasearch engine
with visual display interfaces. When you click on OK, KartOO launches the query
to a set of search engines, gathers the results, compiles them and represents
them in a series of interactive maps through a proprietary algorithm KartOO Searching ---
http://www.kartoo.com/ Jensen Comment: As the name StumbleUpon suggests in the module above,
StumbleUpon more or less randomly brings up "good" sites under a give topic
area. Another search engine called KartOO brings up "good" sites a little
less randomly due to the ability to fine tune with subtopics.
For example, enter "Accounting" and note the many subtopics. This is a
very good search site when you want to drill down to details on a topic.
Try it again with "Accounting Education." However, I find StumbleUpon a
bit more imaginative in terms of interesting and varying sites.
Speegle: Listen to Your Search Outcomes
Human eyes can scan a page is a fraction of the time it takes to hear the
page read aloud. I can't for the life of me see much advantage to having a
search page read aloud except for blind people or for other people who are
focusing on other things such as driving a car. You can choose a male or
female voice without a heavy Scottish accent. See http://www.speegle.co.uk/
It's fun to try this out. I did so using the search term Enron and
found some interesting outcomes that I had not found on other search
engines. Hence I might use Speegle more as a visual search
engine.
A Scottish firm is looking to attract web surfers with
a search engine that reads out results. Called Speegle, it has the look and feel
of a normal search engine, with the added feature of being able to read out the
results.
Scottish speech technology firm CEC Systems launched
the site in November.
But experts have questioned whether talking search
engines are of any real benefit to people with visual impairments.
'A bit robotic'
The Edinburgh-based firm CEC has married speech
technology with ever-popular internet search.
The ability to search is becoming increasingly
crucial to surfers baffled by the huge amount of information available on the
web.
Continued in the article
Cell Phone Search Engines
From The Washington Post on October 13, 2005
Three search engines now allow cell phone users
to text-message queries from their cell phones. Which of the following is not
one of the three?
Also you can enter a phone number into major search engines
like Google to get a name and address
People who visit www.intelius.com
can enter a person's name to get a cell phone number, or do the reverse by
entering a number to get the subscriber's name. Each search costs $15. They can
also download a raft of personal information about the subscriber. This was a
feature on ABC evening news, August 14, 2007.
"Free Cell Phone Number Search - How To Find Free Cell Phone Numbers," ---
Click Here
The freebies are not really very worthwhile relative to the fee-based services.
Jensen Comment
This will be terribly frustrating if telemarketers and crank callers begin to
use up your allotted free minutes of cell phone time each month.
You may enter your cell phone numbers into the "Do Not Call" registry the
same as you probably did for your landline phone ---
https://www.donotcall.gov/default.aspx
However, telemarketers are not supposed to call cell phones with automatic
dialers ---
https://www.donotcall.gov/default.aspx
This is no protection, however, from crank callers or telemarketers who take the
trouble to dial in your cell phone number. Of course, being in the "Do Not Call"
registry does not protect you from telemarketing charitable organizations that
are typically the biggest nuisance these days. Also the "Do Not Call Register"
provides no guarantee that you will not get calls from commercial telemarketers,
especially those who fly by night.
It might just pay to get the cell phone numbers of your state Senators and
local Congressional representative and call them late at night at home on their
supposedly "personal" cell phones. Better yet, call their children and ask them
to tell their parents how you got their phone numbers.
Note that if you've never given a cell phone number out to any organization
other than your phone company, Intelius may not have your cell phone number in
its dastardly database. You should make your children aware of this. Even
emergency calls to 911 may result in Intelius getting your cell phone number
according to the fine print in my Verizon Wireless contract.
To my knowledge there's no unlisted phone service for cell phones like the
one that you can pay for monthly on your landline number
Using Google to "define" versus define: words
Question:
How can you troll the Web for the definition of a word?
Answer:
Go to Google --- http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en
In either the "Type all the words" box or the "With the exact
phrase" box, type the word "define" with the quotation marks,
then a space, and the word or phrase you want defined. At the top of all
the search hits, you will get the definition you were seeking plus a link to
additional definitions.
For example, type "define"
love
Interestingly, Google suggests typing
"define" carcooning
However, Google cannot seem to find a definition of that word (which
appears to mean customizing one's car for travel comfort).
Note
that you get a different result in Google when you use “define” with
quotation marks versus define: with a colon.
It does not matter whether you are in Google’s main page or in Google’s
Advanced Page.
Baffled by
bling-bling? Perplexed by prairie-dogging? Confused by carcooning? Google can
help.
The search engine
powerhouse has introduced a glossary feature to troll the Web for definitions.
The Mountain View, Calif., company says its particularly well-suited for slang
and newer terms such as "search engine," that are likely to appear
online before they do in print.
The technology was
developed by Google Labs, a unit dedicated to new technology, and has been in
testing for 18 months. International versions will be introduced in coming
months.
"(A search
command) emerges from testing when we feel it's ready for prime time," a
Google spokesman told internetnews.com. "Certainly, the quality
and reliability have to be there."
Users type the word
"define," then a space, and the word or phrase they want defined
into the Google.com search pane. If Google has seen a definition on the Web,
it retrieves and display it on a results page. The commands "what
is" and "definition" also work.
Results are
highlighted as "Web Definition" followed by the text of the
Web-generated definition. If Google finds several entries, users are presented
with a link to a complete list.
Google still has a
deal with dictionary.com to provide its content. On the results page, users
can click on the word they entered in the blue results bar and access the
dictionary.com definition.
Of course, rival
search engines routinely include definitions as part of their results. And
there are other sites specializing in slang and new terms, including Urban
Dictionary, which allows users to submit their own words, and Word Spy, which
compiles and defines words and phrases popping up in the media.
Earlier this year,
Word Spy ran
afoul of Google's intellectual property lawyers who wanted to be sure when
people "use 'Google,' they are referring to the services our company
provides and not to Internet searching in general."
Lawyers weren't as
upset with the definition as they were the lack of mention of the corporate
entity. Word Spy's editor modified the entry by inserting trademark
information, which satisfied Google.
GOOGLE expands services for the following:
area codes, product codes,
flight information,
vehicle identification numbers
U.S. Postal Service tracking numbers.
"Google Expands Search
Features," by Mylene Mangalindan, The Wall Street Journal, January
13, 2004 ---
Google Inc. expanded the types of
information that Internet users can search for on its Web site to include such
things as area codes, product codes, flight information, vehicle
identification numbers and U.S. Postal Service tracking numbers.
The closely held Web-search technology
company introduced the new features to its Web site Monday. Google (www.google.com)
sees its mission as connecting Internet users to the world's information,
which it hopes to organize and make more accessible.
The Mountain View, Calif., company,
which is the leading destination for Internet users on the Web for search, has
been in the news lately because it is expected to sell shares to the public
this year, according to people familiar with the situation. Many bigger public
companies such as Yahoo
Inc. and Microsoft
Corp. have also made it clear that they intend to challenge the start-up in
search technology.
Google's announcement Monday introduces
several new innovations. Computer users, for example, can type in an area code
in the search query bar and the top result will show a map of that geographic
area. Users can also plug in a vehicle identification number into the search
query box to get a link for a Web page with more information about the year,
make and model of a specific type of car.
Google goes local Search giant to tap into huge local advertising
market," by Stephanie Olsen, MSNBC News, March 17, 2004 --- http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4547867/
Internet darling Google is taking search to the
streets, helping Web surfers find cafes, parks or even Wi-Fi hot spots in
their area.
On Wednesday, the Web search company unveiled Google
Local, which has been tested in the company's research and development lab for
the last 8 months. Type a keyword along with an address or city name into the
search box at Google.com or at its newly designated site, Local.google.com ( http://www.local.google.com/
), to find maps, locally relevant Web sites and listings from businesses in
the area.
"A lot of times when people are looking for
something, they want to do it on a local level...This is a core search
promise," said Marissa Mayer, Google's director of consumer Web products,
who helped build the service with a team of engineers from Google's New York
office.
Prime real estate Mountain View, Calif.-based Google
is giving prominence to local search at a time when it's one of the most hyped
areas of development in the industry. Financial analysts and industry
executives say geographically targeted search listings are prime real estate
for local advertising, an estimated $12 billion annual business in the United
States. In 2004, less than $50 million of that market will go toward ads
related to local Net searches, but over time, the dollars will find their way
to the virtual world, analysts say.
It will be "worth a lot more online. That is,
merchants will pay more," said Safa Rashtchy, Piper Jaffray's Internet
analyst. "Integration of that with search will make it very convenient
for searchers and extremely useful for local merchants."
For now, search engines including Google, Yahoo, Ask
Jeeves, MSN and CitySearch are working to perfect local search for consumers.
Google's chief rival, Yahoo, recently improved
visitors' chances of finding local restaurants, ATMs, shops and bus routes
through its map service. With its new SmartView feature, Yahoo now
incorporates points of interests like restaurants into local maps, allowing
Web surfers to refine what they're looking for (for example, Italian or Indian
food) and see where a particular spot is located in the neighborhood.
Google, which fields about 200 million queries a day,
said its local service improves people's access to relevant information, its
long-time mission. Using the local service, people will find business
addresses, phone numbers and "one-click" driving directions to
places of interest.
To deliver the results, Google draws on business
listings provided by third-party companies. It also uses technology to collect
and analyze data on the physical location of a Web page and then matches that
data to specified queries and their designated addresses.
For now, Google will not display local advertisements
on the service, but it plans to do so in the future. However, the company
currently sells advertisers the ability to target people by region on the main
Web site. Google makes money by letting advertisers bid for placement on
results pages for related search terms. Ads appear adjacent to or atop search
results.
Google Catalogs - catalogs.google.com
Search and browse mail-order catalogs online. More...
Google Groups - groups.google.com
Post and read comments in Usenet discussion forums. More...
Google Image Search - images.google.com
The most comprehensive image search on the web with 425 million images.
More...
"A Research Paper
Introduces Better Google Image-Search Technology," by Hurley
Goodall, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 28, 2008 ---
Click Here
Google
unveiled a prototype algorithm at a conference in Beijing last
week that will add precision to the search engine’s image-search
technology, The New York Times says.
Two
Google researchers presented a paper describing the prototype,
which is called VisualRank. It uses image-recognition technology
to help rank the relevance of images found in a search.
Currently, Google Image Search results are ranked using the text
around the image on the page. The new method will use the visual
characteristics of the image itself, and rank search results by
comparing similarities among them.
Google Labs - labs.google.com
Prototypes and projects in development by Google engineers, including: Google
Viewer - Google WebQuotes - Google Glossary - Google Sets - Voice Search -
Keyboard Shortcuts. More...
Google News - news.google.com Search and browse 4,500 continuously updated
news sources. More...
Google Special Searches - www.google.com/options/specialsearches.html
Narrow your search to a specific topic, such as BSD, Apple, and Microsoft.
Google Browser Buttons - www.google.com/options/buttons.html
Access Google's search technology by adding our buttons to your browser's
personal toolbar.
Google in Your Language - services.google.com/tc/Welcome.html
Volunteer to translate Google's help information and search interface into
your favorite language.
Google Toolbar - toolbar.google.com
Take the power of Google with you by adding the toolbar to your IE browser.
More...
Google Translate Tool - www.google.com/language _tools
Translate text or entire web pages.
Google Web APIs - www.google.com/apis/
A tool for software developers to automatically query Google. More
Google makes a lot of money from its services to advertisers and other
business firms:
Google sorts billions
of bits of information for its users. Here are some little-known bits of
information about Google:
Google's name is a
play on the word googol, which refers to the number 1 followed by
one hundred zeroes. The word was coined by the nine-year-old nephew of
mathematician Edward Kasner.
Google receives more
than 200 million search queries a day, more than half of which come
from outside the United States. Peak traffic hours to google.com are
between 6 a.m. and noon PST, when more than 2,000 search queries are
answered a second.
Google started as
a research project at Stanford University, created by Ph.D.
candidates Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were 24 years old and 23
years old respectively (a combined 47 years old)..
Google's index of
web pages is the largest in the world, comprising more than 3 billion
web pages, and which if printed, would result in a stack of paper 130
miles high. Google searches this immense collection of web pages often in
less than half a second.
Google receives
daily search requests from all over the world, including places as
far away as Antarctica and Ghana.
Users can restrict
their searches for content in 35 non-English languages, including
Chinese, Greek, Icelandic, Hebrew, Hungarian and Estonian. To date, no
requests have been received from beyond the earth's orbit, but Google is
working on a Klingon interface just in case.
Google has a
world-class staff of more than 1000 employees known as Googlers.
The company headquarters is called the Googleplex.
Google translates
more than 3 billion HTML web pages into a display format for WAP and i-mode
phones and wireless handheld devices, and has made it possible to
enter a search using only one phone pad keystroke per letter, instead of
multiple keystrokes.
Google Groups
comprises more than 800 million Usenet messages, which is the world's
largest collection of messages or the equivalent of more than a terabyte
of human conversation.
The basis of
Google's search technology is called PageRank™, and assigns an
"importance" value to each page on the web and gives it a rank
to determine how useful it is. However, that's not why it's called
PageRank. It's actually named after Google co-founder Larry Page.
Googlers are
multifaceted.
One operations manager, who keeps the Google network in good health is a
former neurosurgeon. One software engineer is a former rocket scientist,
while another's first job title at Google was the Spiderman. And the
company's chef formerly prepared meals for members of The Grateful Dead
and funkmeister George Clinton.
3 billion web
pages translates to approximately 3 trillion words in Google’s
index. If a person averages about 1 page per minute, it would take 6,000
years to read the Google index. If this person reads on an 8-hour daily
schedule, it would take 18,000 years. Want weekends off? Add another 2,000
years.
What a lot of folks do not know about is the commercial Google Search
Appliance --- http://www.google.com/appliance/features.html
Among other things this allows management to track employee searches and track
incoming data when the outside world seeks employee Web pages.
Universities are now using this (by paying $28,000 or more per year) to track
information about searches of university Web servers. See the following
reference:
"Universities Discover a New Use for Google:
Finding Out What People Want," by Dan Carnevale, The Chronicle of Higher
Education, October 24, 2003, Page A37.
New tutorial detailing 20 ways to get more out of
Google.
Find out how to search with a date range (which avoids all those dead dot-com
pages cluttering up the web) and what intext means.
"20 Great Google Tips," by Tara Calishain, PC Magazine, October
28, 2003 --- http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,1306756,00.asp
Google offers several services that give you a head
start in focusing your search. Google Groups (http://groups.google.com)
indexes literally millions of messages from decades of discussion on Usenet.
Google even helps you with your shopping via two tools: Froogle (http://froogle.google.com),
which indexes products from online stores, and Google Catalogs (http://catalogs.google.com),
which features products from more 6,000 paper catalogs in a searchable
index. And this only scratches the surface. You can get a complete list of
Google's tools and services at www.google.com/options/index.html.
You're probably used to using Google in your
browser. But have you ever thought of using Google outside your browser?
Google Alert (www.googlealert.com)
monitors your search terms and e-mails you information about new additions
to Google's Web index. (Google Alert is not affiliated with Google; it uses
Google's Web services API to perform its searches.) If you're more
interested in news stories than general Web content, check out the beta
version of Google News Alerts (www.google.com/newsalerts).
This service (which is affiliated with Google) will monitor up to 50 news
queries per e-mail address and send you information about news stories that
match your query. (Hint: Use the intitle: and source: syntax elements with
Google News to limit the number of alerts you get.)
Google on the telephone? Yup. This service is
brought to you by the folks at Google Labs (http://labs.google.com),
a place for experimental Google ideas and features (which may come and go,
so what's there at this writing might not be there when you decide to check
it out). With Google Voice Search (http://labs1.google.com/gvs.html),
you dial the Voice Search phone number, speak your keywords, and then click
on the indicated link. Every time you say a new search term, the results
page will refresh with your new query (you must have JavaScript enabled for
this to work). Remember, this service is still in an experimental phase, so
don't expect 100 percent success.
In 2002, Google released the Google API
(application programming interface), a way for programmers to access
Google's search engine results without violating the Google Terms of
Service. A lot of people have created useful (and occasionally not-so-useful
but interesting) applications not available from Google itself, such as
Google Alert. For many applications, you'll need an API key, which is
available free from www.google.com/apis.
See the figures for two more examples, and visit www.pcmag.com/solutions
for more.
Thanks to its many different search properties,
Google goes far beyond a regular search engine. Give the tricks in this
article a try. You'll be amazed at how many different ways Google can
improve your Internet searching.
Daterange: (start date–end date). You can
restrict your searches to pages that were indexed within a certain time
period. Daterange: searches by when Google indexed a page, not when the page
itself was created. This operator can help you ensure that results will have
fresh content (by using recent dates), or you can use it to avoid a topic's
current-news blizzard and concentrate only on older results. Daterange: is
actually more useful if you go elsewhere to take advantage of it, because
daterange: requires Julian dates, not standard Gregorian dates. You can find
converters on the Web (such as http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/JulianDate.html),
but an easier way is to do a Google daterange: search by filling in a form
at www.researchbuzz.com/toolbox/goofresh.shtml
or www.faganfinder.com/engines/google.shtml.
If one special syntax element is good, two must be better, right? Sometimes.
Though some operators can't be mixed (you can't use the link: operator with
anything else) many can be, quickly narrowing your results to a less
overwhelming number.
More Google API Applications
Staggernation.com offers three tools based on the
Google API. The Google API Web Search by Host (GAWSH) lists the Web hosts of
the results for a given query (www.staggernation.com/gawsh/).
When you click on the triangle next to each host, you get a list of results
for that host. The Google API Relation Browsing Outliner (GARBO) is a little
more complicated: You enter a URL and choose whether you want pages that
related to the URL or linked to the URL (www.staggernation.com/garbo/).
Click on the triangle next to an URL to get a list of pages linked or
related to that particular URL. CapeMail
is an e-mail search application that allows you to send an e-mail to google@capeclear.com
with the text of your query in the subject line and get the first ten
results for that query back. Maybe it's not something you'd do every day,
but if your cell phone does e-mail and doesn't do Web browsing, this is a
very handy address to know.
April 7, 2003 from Wired News
Rolling out a souped-up search engine Monday, Yahoo makes a bid to supplant its
business partner, Google, as the most popular place to find things on the
Internet. The company says its search engine will be more useful and simpler to
use than Google --- http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,58368,00.html
According to the industry newsletter, Google handles
an average of 112 million searches a day and Yahoo handles about 42 million.
Most of Yahoo's results are generated by Google's software.
With its success, Google has introduced other
services, such as news and shopping pages, that traverse Yahoo's turf.
To lessen its dependence on Google, Yahoo last month
bought search engine specialist Inktomi for $279.5 million. Yahoo plans to
incorporate Inktomi's tools in to its search engine by year's end.
Success also has thrust privately held Google into
the cross-hairs of Microsoft, which last week said it would improve its online
search prowess.
Ask Eric Schmidt,
chief executive of Google, when Silicon Valley and the technology industry
will return to robust growth. All he knows is it won't be in the immediate
future, and he makes a persuasive case.
That's the big
picture. But Schmidt's smaller picture, Google itself, is one of those grand
exceptions that proves the valley's longstanding rule -- that technological
innovation continues no matter what the larger economy is doing.
I caught up with him
at the annual Agenda conference, a gathering that has been a staple of the
tech elite's autumn schedule. This year's gathering, a drastically downsized
affair, reflected overall industry trends.
A grim, confused mood
prevailed here, and the momentary pleasure of Tuesday's market surge was
doused by Intel's disappointing earnings report after the market's close. Few
people here seemed willing even to speculate on when technology spending would
rebound.
Schmidt isn't
predicting any immediate boosts.
Is the current gloom
overdone? That depends, Schmidt says, on ``whether you think we are at a
bottom.'' Are we? ``We're nearing one.''
Not Google, which has
become one of the Internet's essential services. A couple of years ago, when I
spoke publicly, I started asking people in the audience who was not using
Google as their primary search engine. It has been a long time since more than
several people in any crowd raised their hands.
One smart idea has
followed another at the Mountain View company. Recently, Google created a
news-oriented search, culling and ranking news stories from a variety of
sources. Google works in teams of three people, and one of those teams created
Google News (http://news.google.com),
which is rapidly becoming one of my online addictions.
Innovation happens no
matter what markets do, Schmidt says, a common refrain. ``Innovation comes
from universities,'' he says, ``and it's producing enormous step-ups in
wireless, chip design, Linux and information mining,'' among other areas. But
most of the innovations he sees tend to be interesting technologies without a
persuasive business case.
Google gets its share
-- its pick, really -- of smart university graduates, Schmidt says. The
company is doing cool projects. It's probably at the beginning, not the end,
of its serious growth.
Google doesn't give
out the precise numbers, but Schmidt says it has been profitable since March
2001. Its principal business is what he calls a ``positive surprise'' -- the
effectiveness of the little advertisements that appear on the pages showing
the result of users' searches.
