YaCy, a new distributed censorship-hardened search-engine, that’s supported by the Free Software Foundation Europe. YaCy is currently saturated with traffic, as it’s only just been announced.

“Search Needs A Shake Up” writes Oren Etzion in an op-ad article in the comments column of Nature (4th Aug 2011). The under-the-hood discovery technology has not significantly progressed, even while more-or-less helpful widgets have proliferated on search pages, and search results are transformed on-the-fly to fit almost any mobile device. Most ordinary people still want their search-engine to be like a ‘magic oracle’ — ask a natural language question, and get a one-line correct answer back. Of course, that doesn’t work — which is why Yahoo Answers and its more professional imitators are so popular for those with few search skills. The problem is, the laziness of their users makes unpaid slaves of their helpers.

But until we get that magic one question / one answer solution (Etzion outlines some research on that, but don’t hold your breath) how about just teaching people to search properly, ideally intensively and from primary school level onwards? It’s not rocket science. It’s no more difficult than learning the basics of the Highway Code by heart, or some basic smatterings of Spanish. Doing quality search should be as natural as basic literacy. Once the school-level training is bedded down, then refuse entry to university applicants who cannot pass a rigorous one-hour “search and find” test. The kids and their teachers will soon get the message.

JISC and the University of Oxford are running a one-day meeting on 20th May 2011, Digital Impacts: How to Measure and Understand the Usage and Impact of Digital Content…

“The question of how we can measure and understand the usage and impact of digital content within the education sector is becoming increasingly important. Substantial investment goes into the creation of digital resources for research, teaching and learning and, in the current economic climate, both content creators, publishers as well as funding bodies are being asked to provide evidence of the value of the resources they’ve invested in. But how do we go about defining value and impact? Which metrics should we adopt to understand usage? When is a digital resource a well used resource?”

Growing Knowledge, a new website and set of videos from the British Library on the future of online research knowledge…

“How have digital technologies changed research? What are the new challenges they pose? What role should a research library play in the 21st Century? Growing Knowledge at the British Library explores these questions with our researchers in order to inform the debate on the future of research.”

An accompanying exhibition at the British Library runs until 11th July 2011.

A neat new service, Full-text RSS Feed Builder…

“Love the ease of RSS, but hate when feeds don’t display the whole article, forcing you to click through just to read it?

Regain control by entering the URL of a feed below and clicking the submit button to receive a full-text feed URL you can use anywhere.”

Ah, now if only open arts and humanities ejournals actually had any RSS feeds… but unfortunately most don’t.

Two groups reportedly having problems with academic journals: patent researchers, and business schools.