Also published in Journal of Internet Cataloging, 2(3/4), 9-28, 2000 / Ambiguities in Web search tool (more commonly known as "search engine") terminology are problematic when conducting precise, replicable research or when teaching others to use search tools. Standardized terminology would enable Web searchers to be aware of subtle differences between Web search tools and the implications of these for searching. A categorization and nomenclature for standardized classifications of different aspects of Web search tools is proposed, and advantages and disadvantages of using tools in each category are discussed.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / Medical professionals and researchers need information from reputable sources to accomplish their work. Unfortunately, the Web has a large number of documents that are irrelevant to their work, even those documents that purport to be â medically-related.â This paper describes an architecture designed to integrate advanced searching and indexing algorithms, an automatic thesaurus, or â concept space,â and Kohonen-based Self-Organizing Map (SOM) technologies to provide searchers with finegrained results. Initial results indicate that these systems provide complementary retrieval functionalities. HelpfulMed not only allows users to search Web pages and other online databases, but also allows them to build searches through the use of an automatic thesaurus and browse a graphical display of medical-related topics. Evaluation results for each of the different components are included. Our spidering algorithm outperformed both breadth-first search and PageRank spiders on a test collection of 100,000 Web pages. The automatically generated thesaurus performed as well as both MeSH and UMLSâ systems which require human mediation for currency. Lastly, a variant of the Kohonen SOM was comparable to MeSH terms in perceived cluster precision and significantly better at perceived cluster recall.

Search engines are about excitement, optimism, hope and enrichment. Search engines are also about despair and disappointment. A researcher while using search engines for resource discovery might have experienced one or the other sentiments. One may say that user satisfaction depends much upon the search strategies deployed by the user. But at the same time its also depends upon the quality of search engine used for information retrieval. Today, there are many search engines used for resource discovery. They display the results of the searches made in readily-comprehensible manner with lots of customization possibilities including refining and sorting. This paper is an attempt to analyze qualitatively and quantitatively the three most used and popular search engines for academic resource discovery: Google Scholar, Scirus and Windows Live Academic.

This text is an extract from the book Word Matters: multicultural perspectives on information societies. This book, which has been coordinated by Alain Ambrosi, Valérie Peugeot and Daniel Pimienta was released on November 5, 2005 by C & F à ditions. The text is under the Creative Commons licence, by, non commercial. Knowledge should be shared in free access... But authors and editors need an economy to keep on creating and working. If you can afford it, please buy the book on line.

Conference presentation on Library 2.0 and libraries building community initiatives currently happening in Australia.

The use of the Internet for civic engagement by the general public is becoming increasingly prevalent, yet research in this area is still sparse. More studies are particularly needed in the area of cross-cultural comparisons of online social movements or online peace movement organizations (PMOs). While it is possible that PMOs in diverse cultures differ in their collective action frames, it is unclear whether PMOs use collective action frames and, if so, how differently they are used. This paper describes a comparative study that examined websites of PMOs in Japan and Israel. Collective action frame is used as a theoretical framework to analyze seventeen websites, identifying the similarities and differences in the ways that online PMOs frame their activities. The findings indicate that these organizations employed various strategies to develop resonance, highlighting the importance of cultural resonance in framing online PMOs in different countries.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / Most existing Web search tools work only with individual users and do not help a user benefit from previous search experiences of others. In this paper, we present the Collaborative Spider, a multi-agent system designed to provide post-retrieval analysis and enable across-user collaboration in Web search and mining. This system allows the user to annotate search sessions and share them with other users. We also report a user study designed to evaluate the effectiveness of this system. Our experimental findings show that subjectsâ search performance was degraded, compared to individual search scenarios in which users had no access to previous searches, when they had access to a limited number (e.g., 1 or 2) of earlier search sessions done by other users. However, search performance improved significantly when subjects had access to more search sessions. This indicates that gain from collaboration through collaborative Web searching and analysis does not outweigh the overhead of browsing and comprehending other usersâ past searches until a certain number of shared sessions have been reached. In this paper, we also catalog and analyze several different types of user collaboration behavior observed in the context of Web mining.

Web databases, commonly known as search engines or web directories, are currently the most useful way to search the Internet. In this article, the author draws from library literature to develop a series of questions that can be used to analyze these web searching tools. Six popular web databases are analyzed using this method. Using this analysis, the author creates three categories for web databases and explores the most appropriate searches to perform with each. The work concludes with a proposal for the ideal web database.

Currently, there are two formats for graphics that are used in Web publications: GIF (officially pronounced "jif") and JPEG (also known as JPG, and pronounced "jay-peg"). Each of these standards takes a computer image and compresses it up to 100 times. Today's browsers have built-in decompressors for each format, so many Web page creators do not know which one to use. The common myth is that JPEG creates smaller files, but this is not always true. The intention of this article is to help Web page creators make an informed decision when selecting a format for each graphic in a Web publication.

The use of the Internet for civic engagement by the general public is becoming increasingly prevalent, yet research in this area is still sparse. More studies are particularly needed in the area of cross-cultural comparisons of online social movements or online peace movement organizations (PMOs). While it is possible that PMOs in diverse cultures differ in their collective action frames, it is unclear whether PMOs use collective action frames and, if so, how differently they are used. This paper describes a comparative study that examined websites of PMOs in Japan and Israel. Collective action frame is used as a theoretical framework to analyze seventeen websites, identifying the similarities and differences in the ways that online PMOs frame their activities. The findings indicate that these organizations employed various strategies to develop resonance, highlighting the importance of cultural resonance in framing online PMOs in different countries.