Knowledge Leadership Associates » Information Resources

Secure searching with DuckDuckGo!

Peter G. Underwood — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 08:23:55 +0000

Many search engines, including Google, track and record searches, including search terms used and the location and IP address from which the search originates. Potentially, it would be possible to identify an individual from such information. The data is used, supposedly, to assist in monitoring search quality and, also, to provide a profile of recent searches so that targeted advertising information can be displayed on subsequent search pages. This approach, benign though it is claimed to be, is disturbing, to say the least, and could constitute a serious security risk to a company that is searching for strategically-important information.

So, if you are not happy to be monitored, try a new search engine, DuckDuckGo. The site provides a comprehensive list of special features and searches offered by the engine and also explains its privacy policy. Searches are quick and the results exclude “scraper” sites and those offering advertising of dubious relevance to the search being conducted. The usual range of search features are available, including phrase searching and the so-called !bang syntax, which allows one to force the engine to conduct a search on a particular site for a specific type of medium — !i “Knowledge Leadership Associates” will, for example, find images on the KLA website through an interface with the Google search engine.

Secure searching with DuckDuckGo! is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

The nuisance of “web spam”

Peter G. Underwood — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 11:42:23 +0000

“Web spam” constitutes a serious threat to the integrity of search results from some search engines; it is also known as “spamdexing”, “search spam” and “search engine spam”. By including many terms that are popular as keywords — but may not bear any relationship to the contents of a web site — and other techniques, search engine optimizers hope to promote their web site to a prime position in the rankings of search results. This obscures and contaminates the results with many irrelevant sites. The development in the 1990s of “link farms ” or “content farms” constitutes a further threat: these consist of little material but many links to each other in an attempt to fool search engine algorithms into rating such sites highly because of link density. Some search engine companies have recognised the dangers and implemented specific checks for “web spam” and the filtering-out of offending sites. A recently-developed search engine, Blekko (http://blekko.com/), which was launched on 1 November 2010, is adopting a strict policy of suppressing results from some twenty “link farms” to ensure that its search results are uncontaminated. Blekko also uses human intervention to locate reputable sites and improve the precision of a search. The idea of “slashtags” is a key development by Blekko: these are simple words such as “/science” or “/sports” that can be added to the end of a search query to offer improved results for that topic. The slashtags can be subject areas but may also represent matters of opinion; so, adding /reviews allows a particular slant on a search focussing on the arts. Blekko will also add slashtags automatically when it becomes evident that you wish to focus on an aspect of a particular topic. The company has also launched the “Spam Clock” (http://www.spamclock.com/) as an indication (non-scientific, they stress) of the volume of web spam that threatens good searching.

The nuisance of “web spam” is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

Are e-texts acceptable?

Peter G. Underwood — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 07:29:16 +0000

A survey by the Book Industry Study Group (the U.S. book industry’s leading trade association for policy, standards and research) has revealed that students prefer their textbooks in conventional print-on-paper form rather than as e-texts: nearly 75% of the study respondents preferred print. The reasons included aesthetics, permanence and re-sale value. Some 12%, however, preferred e-texts because of portability and lower cost of acquisition; the ready availability of supplementary material, such as online quizzes, was also a predisposing factor.

Stephen Abram, in his blog at Stephen’s Lighthouse, comments that the results need to be interpreted with care because the survey was conducted in 2010 before the arrival in the market of affordable e-readers, including tablets and i-phone applications. Also, he contends that students may have adopted a two-factor view of the survey questions (either print OR etext) and that a use model that combines e-texts with books is a more likely future.

Abram also states that, “It is very difficult to survey people about the difference in the behaviours between a known condition (print textbooks) and an imaginary state (e-textbooks that the survey shows has only been a factor for small percentage of the survey population). People find it extremely difficult to imagine a future state”. Whatever one’s view, the results of the survey affirm that the market response is worth watching.

Are e-texts acceptable? is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

Google “bias” survey — start of a flame war?

Peter G. Underwood — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 11:58:53 +0000

Danny Goodman may have stirred up a hornet’s nest with his criticism of a survey conducted by Benjamin Edelman and Benjamin Lockwood. This attempted to measure bias in the organic search results of Google and to a lesser extent Yahoo, Bing, AOL, and Ask; the conclusion is that each search engine offers results that linking to pages using its own services more often. Moreover, Google’s algorithmic search results link to Google’s own services more than three times as often as other search engines link to services provided by Google services. This can mean that, for selected keywords, biased results promote the interests of search engine companies rather than those of searchers.

In his SearchEngineWatch blog of 21 January 2011, Goodman provides a critique of the conclusions drawn from the survey, its approach and the results and concludes that the survey is, itself, biased. In the subsequent correspondence — which can be read by scrolling through to the end of the blog — Edelman responds and Goodman replies. Inconclusive? Well, yes, but certainly thought-provoking!

Google “bias” survey — start of a flame war? is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

Wikipedia — ten years old!

Peter G. Underwood — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 07:08:18 +0000

It has certainly courted notoriety since its implementation and has also received its share of plaudits. On 15 January 2001, Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales began a new project with the words “Hello, world.” Their next entry was “Humor me. Go there and add a little article. It will take all of five or ten minutes.” Since then, Wikipedia has become the go-to online reference source for many seeking facts. Wikipedia has grown to be the fifth-most popular online destination in the world, and it draws in 410 million unique visitors a month. Recently, growth of new and discrete entries on the site has slowed significantly but this may be expected due to the fact that with 17 million articles, quite a bit of knowledge has been covered over the past decade. Andrew Lih, who wrote the book The Wikipedia Revolution, commented that it will be integral for the Wikimedia Foundation to reach out to large cultural institutions in the coming years in order to provide the site with new, high-quality material.

The Scout Report has assembled an interesting list of collection of comment about the development of Wikipedia. Daniel Terdiman writes on the history of Wikipedia in a CNET News article for 14 January 2011. In The Guardian, Clay Shirky writes an article on the enduring popularity of Wikipedia. The Economist considers the future of Wikipedia, whilst Casper Grathwohl, the vice president and publisher of digital and reference content for Oxford University Press, considers the longer perspective of the impact of Wikipedia on reference works. A short graphic presentation narrated by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales considers Wikipedia’s past, present, and future. Finally, here is a Wikipedia entry on Wikipedia.

Adapted from The Scout Report, Copyright Internet Scout Project 1994-2011. http://scout.wisc.edu/

Wikipedia — ten years old! is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

Published Guide to free e-books

chrisarmstrong — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 14:52:50 +0000

The UK eInformation Group (UKeiG) – a special interest group of CILIP – has just published The 2011 Guide to Free or Nearly-Free e-Books – a 177-page annotated guide by Chris Armstrong (a KLA trainer). The guide lists over 230 sites offering either single titles or collections of titles, search engines and gateways for e-books. Each site has been reviewed so that users can form a clear impression of what it offers, as well as its strengths and weaknesses before visiting the URL. The directory is indexed by subject and title.

A full description of the Guide and a link to purchase can be found at http://www.ukeig.org.uk/content/publications.

Published Guide to free e-books is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

The year of searching

Peter G. Underwood — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 04:56:58 +0000

Thom Craver has provided an interesting review of the year 2010 from the perspective of search engine development: The year in search: a re-cap of the biggest changes and a look ahead (SearchEngineWatch 6 January 2011). He comments on the changes introduced in Google and its competitors and suggests that 2011 may well be dominated by a contest between Yahoo and Google for market dominance. What is particularly interesting (but, perhaps, unsurprising) is the extent to which changes and development are driven almost exclusively by marketing rather than considerations of achieving better search results — all of which serves to confirm the need to consider choice of search engines in terms of search performance within particular search domains.

The year of searching is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

The Web: getting deeper and more invisible

Peter G. Underwood — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 04:36:16 +0000

On 3 November 2010, Gabe Elliott published a very useful account of the development of the World Wide Web in his regular Web column, The Internet Vision, and commented on the increasing “invisibility” of many important sources to general search engines, such as Google. His article, “The un-Googled Deep Web”, comments that “Estimates based on extrapolations from a study done at University of California, Berkeley speculate that the deep Web consists of about 91,000 terabytes. By contrast, the surface Web (which is easily reached by search engines) is only about 167 terabytes; the Library of Congress, in 1997, was estimated to have 3,000 terabytes”. On the Knowledge Leadership Associates Internet Information Retrieval and Web 2.0 Tools & Techniques (KL-IIRW) course, discussion and demonstration of the Deep, or invisible, Web is an important component. Elliott also discusses various services, such as the Subject Based Information Gateway, Intute, and specialized search engines that facilitate exploration of the Deep Web.

The Web: getting deeper and more invisible is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

Google Books: how does it work?

Peter G. Underwood — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 08:00:17 +0000

Alexis Madrigal, writing in the The Atlantic (1 November 2010), outlines how the searching algorithm used for Google Books has recently been improved. The article indicates that the algorithm is somewhat different from that used for Google’s web search and is being “tweaked” as the design team gains more experience in the kind of searching that is used to locate titles of books. Google’s web search makes extensive use of the Page Rank process, whereby full account is taken of the number of pages linking to a site when assessing its likely relevance. This, however, does not happen with the digitized copies of books that Google has stored, so some experimentation was necessary in order to develop a set of some one hundred predictive indicators of “title” relevance, such as how often the title is searched for on the web, recent book sales, the number of libraries that hold the title, and how often an older book has been reprinted. The result was released as “Rich Results” and commenced on 1 November 2010. Why not try it now?

Google Books: how does it work? is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

Displaying and linking search results

Peter G. Underwood — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 13:49:19 +0000

Pearltrees (http://www.pearltrees.com) offers an attractive way of mapping sites and creating links between sites that you use. A “pearl” is a web site that you have discovered and found to be useful; a “pearltree” is a collection of such sites. Having created a “pearltree”, it can be shared with others, thus providing a quick and convenient way of conveying the results of a search. It is simple to use: the main benefits become available by registering and opening a free account. Phil Bradley, an Internet consultant who writes a monthly column for Library and information update (the official journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals <http://www.cilip.org.uk/update>), has created a web tutorial illustrating the use of Pearltrees — < http://bit.ly/cL6Wjh >. In it, he shows how to set up an account, build and share a “pearltree”. This approach to sharing of web resources is typical of a social networking approach to information use and one that has great potential benefits for all types of library and information service.

Displaying and linking search results is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates