Search Engines

Frank Cervone:

70% of all searches are keyword searches and they pretty much get article searches

Students don’t understand the concept of “metasearch” and federated

Federated product – good place to go for starters

students have strong expectations about how results should be displayed: relevance order – it’s the search engine model…

advanced users tend to head towards databses

If it’s not federated, it’s ignored. The hope is that people will click through to the native interface when appropriate

finding the right group of databases for subject areas is important

long lists of databases – students find them confusing and make them feel stupid

they group databases by “best bets” or the three major databases in any given topic area.

It’s critical that they work from the perspective of the patron.

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Jeff Wisniewski:

Webfeat – live since Sept 2004

majority of searches come from the quick find search on their website’s main page

They provide three access points: federated product, a-z list, and subject list

Google has set the speed standard – they get “it’s kinda slow” comments

Speed constraints – be selective – dont’ want a “earch all” when all equals 300+ databases

monitor usage stats, especially turnaways

implement a formal evaluation process

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Ying Zhang: MetaLib Implementations

spoke about her organization’s implementation of MetaLib

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Athena Hoeppner:

Usability aspects of their federated search product

Most users use the quick search feature

They believe customization would help – trying to label things differently

Metalib isn’t an ideal solution for them because of the lack of easy customization

They’d like to add lots of help features, add useful icons, and have the visual design mirror their website

CIL2006

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First, for Tom Hogan’s opening remarks:

• 2380-ish attendees this year!
• 150 speakers and moderators… wow.
• 60 exhibitors

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Keynote: Search Engine Update, Chris Sherman

Starting to see true differentiation and divergence among the major search engines:

Ask:

• Jeeves retired. first-class search engine, as good as or better than the others
• They also have Gary Price
• Many new tools. Web Answers – a natural laguage search that actually works.
• great map tool – better than google and yahoo. Even gives driving/walking directions, depending on what you want to do

Google:

• Google is: advertising company, microsoft killer, ISP, Banker, etc, etc, etc…
• Not just focused on search anymore
• Suggest, Q&A, Desktop, Video, etc – lots of options

MSN:

• still spending money to develop a search engine and a search advertising network
• You need version 3.0 with all microsoft products… so wait awhile
• Clustering (sorta like Northern Light used to do)
• Birdseye and street level imagery – nice satellite imagery

Yahoo

• Pace seems to have slowed at Yahoo
• turning into a “people mediated” search – with tagging and personalization
• Yahoo Mindset – a version of the search engine that has a slider that can be dragged towards shopping or research to personalize search results

Google and Books

• Google is probably legal
• Publishers VCR myopia factor – it will probably be better for publishers in the long run – it will help sell more books
• Publisher will control how much content is displayed – they alwo authorize Google to scan the books
• You can’t copy or print the text…
• They plan to link to Worldcat pretty soon
• Browse full text of public domain materials
• He thinks they are scanning books so Google can learn and improve search technology…
• lots of lawsuits

Google’s DoJ Request

• asked for 1 million random web addresses and records of all Google searches for one week. Other search engines complied! Yikes
• Google refused because of privacy concerns – good for them.
• 50k random URLs & 5k queries will be ultimately provided
• many problems and absurdities with thte request in the first place:
• won’t show what people are searching for…
• random URLS don’t show searches, relevance, algorhythms, etc
• also doesn’t factor in automatic queries

China and search:

• US is bashing search engines over China censorship
• But the search engiens are simply obeying the law
• The Chinese people prefer the censorship to not having search engines at all
• only a relatively few topics are censored
• savvy chinese web users know they can reach virtually any web site using a proxy

Conclusions:

• search is getting exciting again
• new tools are making content more searchable
• threats to privacy and individual liberties are subtly increasing in the US, while ironically things seem sto be improving in China

cil2006

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