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Monday, March 21, 2005
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Amazon's "Open" search results.
Building off of Alane's call over at It's All Good to "peer outside the garden walls" of the library world, I stumbled over to the O'Reilly "Emerging Technology Conference" to see what happened. After doing so, I began to beat myself around the neck and head for wimping out on asking my boss to attend this conference as I was not sure how I would adequately explain how all of this is related to libraries.
Lots of interesting content - especially some of the announcements at the conference, such as this - Amazon Calls for Open Search Results:
"The first results of Amazon's OpenSearch effort have begun to take shape on its A9.com search engine. The site includes over 35 searches from other sites, including the New York Times and photo site Flickr, which can appear as columns alongside normal Web searches.
To fulfill its OpenSearch vision, A9.com has built an extension to the RSS 2.0 standard. The initiative is comprised of XML-based search results, XML files that identify and describe a search engine, and OpenSearch aggregators such as A9.com that support the standard.
"We want this to do for search what RSS has done for content," said Bezos."
It seems like if anyone can drive this sort of stuff, it is either Amazon or Google.
With local search becoming a bigger and bigger player, how could we integrate library holding's into the local search function of A9? Better yet, how can we show Amazon or Google it is worth their while to make sure that library holdings get included in their searches? [TechnoBiblio]
7:17:16 AM 
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Computers in Libraries 2005 weblogs. Durst writes "Covering the conference live, Information Today's staff have posted a blog here. Other comments about the conference have been found at CBS' Marketwatch Internet Daily. Rochelle adds: There are links to other official blogs at the top of the Info Today blog. And, Blake gave his LISNews presentation this afternoon. Maybe he'll post it after he gets back." [LISNews.com]
7:15:57 AM
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Sunday, March 20, 2005
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Thoughts on Google Scholar and OpenURL.
Google Scholar has recently been experimenting with providing links to the OpenURL resolvers of different libraries. Currently, they are doing this by allowing users to set a preference of selecting up to three different OpenURL resolver links. While I think this is a very interesting and useful experiment, I am also concerned about the role of the library when it is used only as a routing point to a primary resource.
Let me explain my thoughts a bit. I think that libraries need to be working a lot more closely with the likes of Google and other mainstream information providers - I really do. There is a lot of value added by having libraries and commercial providers collaborate and share approaches. But I also think that if we, as a library community, aren't careful about our approach, the commercial provider community will take our added-value and subsume it without sharing back. This is tricky; our primary mission is to provide free access to information. But do we provide free services to commercial interests, especially commercial interests who are in some respects overlapping our own service space?
Right now, libraries are freely providing OpenURL resolver services to Google Scholar. This is a big win for Google Scholar, because it strengthens its position as a primary provider of quality scholarly information, even if in reality it is libraries who are providing a lot of the full-text resources. If Google Scholar becomes competively advantaged by taking advantage of the resources that libraries pay dearly for, shouldn't libraries in return be compensated in some way? Are we obligated to freely provide resolution services to Google in the same way we provide them to our patrons? I don't think so - in fact, I think we are obligated to be compensated for providing a valuable service. Perhaps this can be accomplished through a 'click-through' fee, a business model which is extremely familiar to Google.
Google Scholar is the start of a paradigm shift in how scholarly information will be found and accessed. If the library community wants to have a role in this shift, we need to stop thinking just within the library community and start acting as players in the information business. [The Digital Librarian]
8:44:02 AM
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R.I.P 2005 - Federated Search.
2005 is the year that will be remembered (in the library world) as the year federated searching became obsolete. Google Scholar is already proving that a harvested, centralized search approach is more useful to information seekers than any federated search approach. At least one colleague I've talked to agrees with me - the only real reason for the federated searching is if you cannot harvest the data and index it locally for searching. Federated searching has too many problems which cannot be easily addressed - lack of speed and difficulty in consistantly ranking results are just two off of the top of my head.
So, here's a question: If Google can work with venders so that they can harvest and index their data, why can't libraries? It should be affordable from a technology perpective - the most expensive cost will actually be development and planning time, not hardware. But this cost is minimal in the context of libraries no longer being relevant providers of scholarly information. If Google becomes a better provider of scholarly articles and information than a typical university library, then we're going to struggle to justify not only our budgets, but our role in the academic process. We may end up not being facilitators of access to information, but instead playing a much smaller role which fences us back into the traditional, and shrinking, physical library space. [The Digital Librarian]
8:43:27 AM
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Beyond the Federated Search.
In a previous post, I stated that 2005 is the year where federated searching loses its steam. Google Scholar is an example of a tool, which by combining the power of metadata harvesting with a local, indexed search, and tying the results to a registry of OpenURL providers, provides a much better user experience than any federated search tool I've encountered.
So, why is Google able to do this, and do it in a relatively short time span, while libraries haven't? An arguement could be made that Google has a greater amount of resources at its disposal, and because it is Google, can work out agreements with database providers which allow for the harvesting of their metadata (and full text) for the purpose of providing search results (but at this time, not the full-text directly). Most likely, there is at least some truth to this arguement. But I don't believe all of the credit goes to Google; a lot of the credit also goes to the Library community for being passive in its approach towards information providers. We now rent our information instead of buying it; we subscribe to journals and databases without assurance that, if we eventually cancel a subscription, we will retain access to the information for the years to which we duly paid. We accept these terms, and because we do, our technology and our services are limited by them.
So, what should we do? We should seek to emulate what Google is doing; not necessarily try to emulate Google Scholar (though we could and have done worse), but seek to work out agreements where we are allowed a copy of the data to which we are providing access. If the folks at Google can work out terms which were acceptable to content providers, I'm sure libraries can as well. Maybe, just maybe, if librarians, who are quite good at organizing and working with indexed information, could start to play with the databases, indexes, and metadata provided by our major information vendors, then perhaps we can start to explore new access tools which are users actually want to adopt and use. Otherwise, instead of being second (after google) in the information search food chain our users consume, we may start to drop to third (after Google Scholar), or worse... [The Digital Librarian]
8:43:00 AM
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Friday, March 18, 2005
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Wednesday, March 09, 2005
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PubSub. Welcome to PubSub. I'm really liking this. Pubsub matches your requests/interests against new information as it appears in real time. It tracks over 8 million sources on your behalf. You can create very simple searches - just a word or two in fact (though oddly it defaults to OR rather than AND), but it does have excellent Boolean capability, including nested logic. You can also limit searches to various fields, such as your keywords in the title. You can also limit to press releases, SEC/EDGAR filings, newsgroup posts and, strangely enough, airport delays and earthquakes.
Results can be returned to you in a variety of ways; if you wish, you can just go back to the site, which remembers who you are, or you can download a sidebar for IE or Firefox for example.
It's completely free and you don't even have to register to use it. [Phil Bradley's Blog]
12:30:38 PM
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Brainboost Answer Engine. Brainboost is a natural language search engine - just type in your question and see what you get. Overall, I was pretty impressed, and I asked it some difficult questions, which it managed fairly well, such as:
What is the population of London? (Though it assumed I meant London UK, not London in Canada)
Where is London? (Gave me various good answers, mixed in with a few locations of hotels in London)
Why did the South lose the Civil War? (Wasn't too hot on that one, but linked accurately to websites)
Who is Phil Bradley? (Pulled the answer straight from DMOZ)
What's the best search engine (That one did confuse it rather a lot)
Is Google better than Yahoo? (Wasn't too bad on this one).
Definately worth trying out. [Phil Bradley's Blog]
12:30:16 PM
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Tuesday, February 01, 2005
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Google lead in search is narrowing. Anonymous Patron writes "Google lead in search is narrowing is a New York Times you can read at IHT.com. They say so far, the fruits of thousands of computer scientists' labor have not seemed to shake Google from its perch at the top of the search market. Hardly a week passes without an announcement heralding an Internet search innovation by one of the big sites - Google, Yahoo or Microsoft, which is testing the search engine that it will soon promote on its MSN service. Even the smaller players, like Acoona.com and A9, the search engine run by Amazon.com, are trying to get in on the act. . ." [LISNews.com]
6:32:15 AM
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Monday, January 31, 2005
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Web Site Acessibility.
Although I am no web designer, I do know that a couple things are important in good design and accessibility is one of them. A good discussion of accessiblity can be found here, "Accessibility From The Ground Up" from Digital Web Magazine.
As the author Matt May starts out:
"Yes, Web accessibility is growing up. Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 was released over five years ago, in May 1999. This year, the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative will release Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. WCAG is the international standard for Web accessibility, and the latest version contains plenty of guidance on how to produce modern, usable, and (dare I say it?) attractive Web sites."
In addition, the numerous comments on the article break down some of the challenges of trying to provide accessibility and the various audiences.
Thanks to KB for the pointer. [TechnoBiblio]
7:34:45 AM
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Thursday, January 27, 2005
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Next Evolution of Search Engines will Think with You. search-engines-web.com sent along Seeking Better Web Searches from Scientific American. New search engines are improving the quality of results by delving deeper into the storehouse of materials available online, by sorting and presenting those results better, and by tracking your long-term interests so that they can refine their handling of new information requests. In the future, search engines will broaden content horizons as well, doing more than simply processing keyword queries typed into a text box. They will be able to automatically take into account your location--letting your wireless PDA, for instance, pinpoint the nearest restaurant when you are traveling. New systems will also find just the right picture faster by matching your sketches to similar shapes. They will even be able to name that half-remembered tune if you hum a few bars. So what will this do to the SEO folks? [LISNews.com]
5:10:01 PM
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Wednesday, January 26, 2005
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Wednesday, May 19, 2004
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Skeptical view of Google indexing. Rita Vine, Just Because It's Indexed Doesn't Mean You'll Find It, SiteLines, May 12, 2004. Vine, a librarian who specializes in web searching, finds problems with what many see as an advance towards accessing open content, the indexing of various databases in Google. She uses the example of PubMed and shows how a search in Google will be quite different from one in PubMed. The writer points out the detrimental effect of Google's page-ranking algorithm in this context:
In this example, I searched the keywords asthma children in Google. The result is a large results list. The sites in the first pages of results aren't particularly bad: Google weights certain domains, like cdc.gov, and medlineplus.gov more heavily and as a result the search results aren't completely overwhelmed by .com medical sites. But where are the results from PubMed? A search of the first ten pages of the asthma children search above reveals no PubMed citations. Why? Because these individual PubMed citations are hardly ever linked by other web pages, and as a result they receive a low PageRank in Google. The net effect? The low-ranked PubMed results sink to the bottom of Google's search results list for practically any medical topic. Vine explains further limitations to Google searching compared with PubMed, especially with respect to truncation and PubMed's ability to match keywords with like MeSH headings. While a tool that searches multiple databases is highly desirable, Vine remarks, it isn't useful if it doesn't search content effectively. [Open Access News]
7:42:09 AM
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Friday, May 14, 2004
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Google searches Ingenta ejournals. Google is on a roll in acquiring rights to offer free full-text searching of priced online journals. It started indexing metadata for Ingenta journal articles in February and added full-text indexing in March. As Ingenta's Google-visibility rose, its usage rose dramatically. For example, Ingenta had 5.4 million Google-referred users in April alone. Today Ingenta announced that Google had finished its full-text index of existing Ingenta titles. From today's press release: "Although the crawler is authorized for full text access, all other users are subject to the usual Ingenta.com access control checks. If a Google user follows a search result that refers to text in the article itself, they will be presented with the abstract page on Ingenta.com and will either be authenticated for full text subscriber access by virtue of their IP address or username and password, or will be offered pay-per-view. 'We are extremely pleased to be working with Google to enhance the visibility of publishers' content,' commented Kirsty Meddings, Ingenta Senior Product Manager. 'Ingenta publishers already benefit from the widest third party distribution network within the industry, and now we are able to broadcast the availability of this key scholarly content to the huge global audience of Google searchers.'" [Open Access News]
8:09:34 AM
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Tuesday, May 04, 2004
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More on the CrossRef-Google collaboration. Barbara Quint, CrossRef Search Uses Google to Provide Full-Text Access, Information Today, May 3, 2004. Excerpt: "CrossRef, a 300-member publisher trade association, has announced a pilot project called CrossRef Search that will enable users to search the full text of scholarly journal articles, conference proceedings, and other sources from nine leading publishers. Google will supply the search technologies and CrossRef the reference links to publisher Web sites....[The nine] initial publishers produce some 1,100 journals, according to [CrossRef executive director Ed] Pentz....The initial pilot will last throughout 2004. CrossRef plans to gather feedback from scientists, scholars, and librarians through e-mail forms and formal evaluations using external consultants....There are only two rules for joining the pilot program, according to Pentz. 'The publisher has to have all their content indexed through the way Google indexes and make the search box available to everyone at no charge.'...CrossRef has put no requirements on access issues. Each publisher can apply its own economic model, even if it does not include a pay-per-view option. Nor, during the initial phase, were there any mechanisms for guiding users to library holdings to which they might have ?appropriate copy? access. End-users, therefore, might find themselves reading abstracts for material they can find no way to access. Pentz believes that most of the nine initial participants offer some form of pay-per-view as do two-thirds of CrossRef?s members." [Open Access News]
8:16:38 AM
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CrossRef-Google offer free searching of full-text research articles. CrossRef and Google have announced a partnership that allows Google to search the full texts of peer-reviewed research articles. The service is free of charge and includes current and back issues from participating publishers. From today's press release: "CrossRef Search is available to all users, free of charge, on the websites of participating publishers, and encompasses current journal issues as well as back files. The results are delivered from the regular Google index but filter out everything except the participating publishers' content, and will link to the content on publishers' websites via DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) or regular URLs. CrossRef itself doesn't host any content or perform searches - CrossRef works behind the scenes with Google to facilitate the crawling of content on publishers' sites and sets the policies and guidelines governing publisher participation in the initiative. As well as enabling CrossRef Search, the partnership with Google also means that full-text content from the publishers is also referenced by the main Google.com index in its more general searches." Participating publishers so far include the American Physical Society, the ACM, Blackwell, Institute of Physics, Nature Publishing Group, Oxford, and Wiley. [Open Access News]
8:16:19 AM
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Saturday, April 24, 2004
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Followup to Internet flaw discovery. Steffers writes "CNET reports that the threat to the stability of the internet may not be as great as first reported. "The actual threat to the Internet is really small right now," [Paul] Watson said. "You could have isolated attacks against small networks, but they would most likely be able to recover quickly." They report that there is software that can fix the flaw." [LISNews.com]
8:52:16 AM
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Thursday, April 22, 2004
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Serious flaw discovered in the Internet. Steffers writes "Yahoo! reports that security experts and ISPs have been quietly working for months to seal a serious flaw in the Internet. The flaw takes advantage of weaknesses in the TCP and could be used to bring large-scale instability to the Internet." [LISNews.com]
7:51:52 AM
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Thursday, April 15, 2004
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More on the Google-DSpace venture. Donald MacLeod, Google launches research archive project, The Guardian, April 13, 2004. Excerpt: "The world's most popular search engine has turned its attention to the problem of digging out scholarly gems from the mass of material thrown up by its internet searches....Cranfield University, which does most of its research geared to business and industry, was one of the universities to use the DSpace model, but wanted to make its research better known. As Simon Bevan, the university's systems information manager, commented today: 'You can make papers available electronically, but are people going to find them? Because everybody uses Google, papers are suddenly far more accessible and usable and retrievable.' He added: 'It is a means for us to spread the word about Cranfield, for business to buy into our work and find out what we do.' " [Open Access News]
8:43:50 AM
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© Copyright 2005 VTLS .
Last update: 3/21/2005; 12:05:46 PM.
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