‘Search Query Ambiguity’

14 Tuesday Jul 2009

Posted by in How to improve academic search

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An interesting-sounding new book suggests new ways of enabling better search-engine experiences, by presenting search-results differently according to the ambiguity of the search (i.e., show the results differently depending on what type of dummy the user seems to be). Search Query Ambiguity (June 2009) looks at how…

“Web search-engines currently do not guide users to construct less ambiguous (i.e., better) search queries, and do not sort results [ usefully ]. […] This book provides new methods of presenting and sorting search results based on search query ambiguity, without resorting to slow-loading and white-spaced-filled graphical methods […] three methods of information visualization and of sorting results are analysed in the environments of both single-term and multi-term search queries”

Although, as I wrote recently on this blog, this may be thinking about things the wrong way round — and may also not be practical due to the strain on back-end computational resources at the Google server farms.

We might instead use browser-embedded individual ‘search-profiles’ to silently shape the search terms and modifiers on-the-fly, in the browser, before they even hit the engine.

Review of ‘Search Engine Society’

14 Tuesday Jul 2009

Posted by in Academic search

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Online Journalism blog has just posted a long review of Search Engine Society (Oct 2008) by Alexander Halavais. It’s an examination of the power and politics of search, published by the left-wing Polity Press…

“highly linked pages are likely to attract ever more links … leads to the ‘chunky’ nature of the web — in concrete terms the dominance of websites like those of the BBC and Guardian; a quality which, Halavais argues, Google’s PageRank technology ‘calcifies’.”

“Halavais introduces the blogger as a ‘search intellectual’, upsetting existing structures of authority on the web and acting as ‘a counterweight to the hegemonic culture of the search engines’ in bringing otherwise overlooked material into the ‘circle of reputation and links that search engines tend to enforce’.”

Validating interactive new media as a research output

14 Tuesday Jul 2009

Posted by in Academic search, New media journal articles

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It’s very rare to find an academic department website where the research outputs are all websites, and not only websites but well-made websites offering full-text and rich interactive content. I only found one such department while scouring the web for JURN (it was in Nottingham in the English Midlands, actually not far from me), and was pleased to see open access websites were all that the department produced.

Producing work in this way is not going to be an option for everyone — there will be skills and talent issues, issues with copyright vs. fair use in areas such as art history, issues of the cost of some specialist tools and the training to use them, and often intractable issues of time-management if one lacks the skills and thus has to work with a volunteer student to make your website, etc.

But the biggest hurdle is no doubt persuading the university managers that you deserve the same credit for a polished and rich website as for a journal article or a book. Leonardo magazine has an article in the Feb 2009 issue on this topic, and the basic PDF is freely available…

“This paper argues for redefining evaluation criteria for faculty working in new media research and makes specific recommendations for promotion and tenure committees in U.S. universities.”

Similar thoughts on how to validate new media, from a 2009 Reference Services Review study of how undergraduates access and comprehend research. “Undergraduate research in the public domain: the evaluation of non-academic sources online”…

“…finds that authority, accuracy, currency, coverage, and objectivity (as evaluative criteria for academic resources) are not always applicable to evaluating sources in the online public domain (blogs, wikis, forums, etc). Instead, she encourages librarians to look at whether online resources are at a level of scholarship appropriate to the task, support the argument of the assignment, add value, and present legitimate information. Unfortunately, many faculty members restrict students from using internet resources, such as Google Scholar, and in the worst-case situations, prohibit the use of anything except books and journals found in the library in hardcopy format.”

Google Scholar & More

13 Monday Jul 2009

Posted by in Academic search, JURN's Google watch

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I found another recent book on Google Scholar — Google Scholar & More: New Google Applications & Tools For Libraries (Routledge, Oct 2008). It originally sold for a whopping $150.00, but Amazon has 26 used copies from $37. And, oddly, there seem to be not a single review to be freely found online, not even on the Amazon U.K. or U.S. pages for the book. So I’m not sure what all that says about the book’s usefulness, but I thought I’d mention it here for those who may be interested that it can now be had cheap on Amazon.

A bit of Bing

13 Monday Jul 2009

Posted by in Academic search, Spotted in the news

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Karen Blackeman has a long report on a recent round-table in London with the UK development team for Microsoft’s new Bing search-engine…

“Twelve bloggers, including myself and Phil Bradley, were invited to the round table meeting with Microsoft Bing in London on the evening of June 29th. … I suspect that Bing were expecting to be able do a straightforward sales pitch with a few easy questions from a tame audience, which we most definitely were not! I must congratulate the Bing people, though, for the cool way in which they handled the meeting.”

” … only 1 in 4 searches delivers a successful result [on the old MSN search] … a figure of approximately 10 billion pages [for the size of Bing] … using humans and neural networks for ‘training’ the ranking algorithms”

Face off

12 Sunday Jul 2009

Posted by in Ooops!

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Ooops. London’s taxpayer-funded National Portrait Gallery is suing an individual Wikipedia user for uploading images of Victorian paintings that have long been in the public domain. Wikimedia and the Wikipedia Foundation are refusing to back down, and take the stance that…

“faithful reproductions of two-dimensional public domain works of art are public domain, and that claims to the contrary represent an assault on the very concept of a public domain”

RefNotWorks

10 Friday Jul 2009

Posted by in Ooops!

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Ooops. Found on the blogs today…

“the opportunity to import references from Google Scholar to RefWorks has disappeared mysteriously. […] The world-wide RefWorks community has asked Google Scholar what has happened, but we are still waiting for their answer.”

A marker-pen for Web pages

07 Tuesday Jul 2009

Posted by in JURN tips and tricks

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I often see students who have a pile of hard-copy print-outs from the Web, and they’ve used a yellow or green highlighter pen to mark useful paragraphs or phrases. What if they could do the same for Web pages? There’s a Firefox addon, Wired-Marker that does just that…

Wired-Marker is a … highlighter that you use on Web pages. The highlighter, which comes in various colors and styles, is a kind of electronic bookmark that serves as a guide when you revisit a Web page. The highlighted content is automatically recorded in a scrapbook and saved. … the highlighted sections remain visible on the page when you revisit … Wired-Marker is freeware … sponsored by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology” … “You can also add notes to the bookmarked items.”

Sadly, it doesn’t yet work in Firefox 3.5, and the last supported version was Firefox 3.1b2.

   Update: now working with Firefox 3.5!