Tuna Breath

Search by Email

I've been forwarded a news clipping from the BBC by a co-worker. "A Search Engine for the World's Poor," is the title, and it relates, "Researchers at MIT are designing a search engine geared to the needs of computer users in the world's disadvantaged countries, most of whom have only sporadic access to the Web at what are often less-than-optimal bandwidths." The clipping is about the TEK project; my co-worker suggests that we would do the same -- develop an e-mail interface to our search engines. It seems this could also be useful for complicated searches for which we haven't optimized the system. There are "data mining"-like queries i can imagine being of use to a researcher -- not RLG's primary audience of librarians, but academics who are interested in, say, the rate of new editions for classic authors. We have the data the researcher may be interested in, but we haven't optimized the system to retrieve it. By running the query in the background over some length of time and returning it by e-mail, a complicated query is possible.