July 31, 2003

Shelf Life, No. 117 (July 31 2003) ISSN 1538-4284

Today's Shelf Life has three summaries that seem to build on a theme.

In one summary, Rita Vine, of Workingfaster.com states that researchers need a tool box of starting search places.

The next summary points to emerging subject specific search engines that specialize. The example give is CiteSeer. What's not mentioned is the software that drives CiteSeer, ResearchIndex, is available for developing new indexes. I remember Kurt battling with NEC lawyers to get a decent license for the code -- there's isn't an obvious link that makes it clear it's available but it is. (At the last JCDL there were several talks about making the extraction of metadata/features in the crawled articles more accurate.) Thus, a proliferation of ResearchIndex driven search engines leads to Rita Vine's multiplicity of rich starting places.

Finally, there's an article about how all these tools will need to implement methods for visualizing the result sets. I suspect that these tools are going to be for fee. "Most users" (in particular, the students we surveyed when developing RedLightGreen) want the Google "I feel lucky" result. They did their search, now tell them what they want to know. I have a cat who is having a biopsy for a lump on his gum -- i want a few websites about feline mouth cancers. I don't want to see a huge widget that shows the ratio of word choices like oncology
vs cancer, feline vs cat, but if i was trying to figure out the best treatment for my cat, I may very well be interested in subscribing to a resource that would help me quickly sort out the many results in the tail of the popularity distribution.


Posted by judielaine at July 31, 2003 07:38 AM | TrackBack
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