Search

This article discusses Internet Web Information Retrieval, which has reportedly encouraged both researchers and commercial business enterprises to utilize the network. The article suggests that use of the Internet for Web Information Retrieval has been supported by theoretical results, methods, experiments, and implementations. Manuscripts in the periodical are also discussed, which were selected from all submissions to be included in this special issue. Five papers were chosen, which deal with the functionality of Web searches, Web search users, topic distillation, link analysis, and performance.

Internet connectivity is now considered to be a basic human right and in this era of information technology, more efficient ways of browsing the web are being found. The most popular search engine, Google uses its 'Page Rank Algorithm' for its searches. In this paper, we aim to find out a more efficient way of searching the web and better organising the search result based on the categories of the pages. The results of the proposed algorithm are compared with the existing Page Rank algorithms, which include the original PageRank Algorithm and a Weighted PageRank Algorithm. The results obtained in this paper have been experimentally compared with the data of the above-mentioned algorithms using comparison graphs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - This paper aims to report a number of factors that are perceived by web users as influential elements in their search procedure. The paper introduces a new conceptual measure called "web search efficacy" (hereafter WSE) to evaluate the performance of searches mainly based on users' perceptions. Design/methodology/approach - A rich dataset of a wider study was inductively re-explored to identify different categories that are perceived influential by web users on the final outcome of their searches. A selective review of the literature was carried out to discover to what extent previous research supports the findings of the current study. Findings - The analysis of the dataset led to the identification of five categories of influential factors. Within each group different factors have been recognized. Accordingly, the concept of WSE has been introduced. The five "Ss" which determine WSE are searcher's performance, search tool's performance, search strategy, search topic, and search situation. Research limitations/implications - The research body is scattered in different areas and it is difficult to carry out a comprehensive review. The WSE table, which is derived from the empirical data and was supported by previous research, can be employed for further research in various groups of web users. Originality/value - The paper contributes to the area of information seeking on the web by providing researchers with a new conceptual framework to evaluate the efficiency of each search session and identify the underlying factors on the final outcome of web searching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Extreme weather events are known to be detrimental to well-being, and there is a growing interest in anxiety connected to unfolding climate change. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the global association between information-seeking relating to climate change and mental health. Design/methodology/approach: By using Big Data from Google searches and website traffic, evidence is presented that worldwide information-seeking for climate change and mental health-related terms are highly correlated. Regression analyses account for seasonal variation that is known to influence online searches for mental health terms. Findings: There is an association between climate change and mental health-related information-seeking for the period of 2006–2020. This paper proposes causal models to account for the data, with future directions for how these could be tested. Originality/value: This is the first paper according to the author's knowledge to demonstrate a strong association between information-seeking for climate change and mental health and highlights the importance of considering mental health issues in the era of rapid climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies have shown that a noticeable percentage of Web search traffic is about social events. While traditional Web sites can only show human-edited events, in this paper, we present a novel system to automatically detect events from search log data and generate storyboards where the events are arranged chronologically. We chose image search log as the resource for event mining, as search logs can directly reflect people’s interests. To discover events from log data, we present a smooth nonnegative matrix factorization framework, which combines the information of query semantics, temporal correlations, search logs, and time continuity. Moreover, we consider the time factor to be an important element, since different events will develop in different time tendencies. In addition, to provide a media-rich and visually appealing storyboard, each event is associated with a set of representative photos arranged along a timeline. These relevant photos are automatically selected from image search results by analyzing image content features. We use celebrities as our test domain, which takes a large percentage of image search traffic. Experiments consisting of Web search traffic on 200 celebrities, for a period of six months, show very encouraging results compared with handcrafted editorial storyboards. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In web information retrieval, every single user has a unique contextual objective when searching for information on web blogs. Based on the given query, the task of the web search engine is to fetch the most related information from the collection of web blogs. In order to enhance the searching ability, efficient semantic matching models, richer training, and evaluation resources are required. The conventional keyword-based search algorithms have a minimum efficiency in knowing users' intentions compared to machine learning algorithms. Recently, neural networks are well-recognized in information retrieval due to the ability of vector representation learning. This paper proposes an adaptive fuzzy feedback recurrent neural network-based web blog searching technique which follows inverse filtering (IF) algorithm using Word2Vec representation. Initially, the user query is pre-processed, and then given to the IF for accelerating the search process. Inside the IF, the web blog content is labelled according to their blog information and stored in the hash table, and then relevant contents are extracted by TF–IDF; this result is given to the similarity estimation to obtain the similarity score. Finally, the proposed technique considers the feedback got from users and performs re-ranking by fuzzy-based RNN to achieve rich user intention satisfaction. The implementation is performed in Python, and statistical measures such as accuracy, precision, and recall are utilized for performance evaluation. The results demonstrate that the proposed technique has enhanced accuracy (94%) compared to conventional techniques, namely deep auto-encoder, deep neural networks, and artificial neural networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of information management and retrieval in production processes has been gaining in importance in recent years. In this context, the ability to search for and quickly find the small piece of information needed from the huge amount of information available has crucial importance. One category of tools devoted to such a task is represented by search engines. Satisfying the basic needs of the Web user has led to the research of new tools that aim at helping more sophisticated users (communities, companies, interest groups) with more elaborate methods. An example is the use of clustering and classification algorithms or other specific data mining techniques. In such a context, the proper use of a thematic search engine is a crucial tool in supporting and orienting many activities. Several practical and theoretical problems arise in developing such tools, and we try to face some of these in this paper, extending previous work on Web mining. Here we consider two related problems: how to select an appropriate set of keywords for a thematic engine taking into account the semantic and linguistic extensions of the search context, and how to select and rank a subset of relevant pages given a set of search keywords. Both problems are solved using the same framework, based on a graph representation of the available information and on the search of particular node subsets of such a graph. Such subsets are effectively identified by a maximum-weight clique algorithm customized ad hoc for specific problems. The methods have been developed in the framework of a funded research project for the development of new Web search tools, they have been tested on real data, and are currently being implemented in a prototypal thematic search engine. The Web mining method presented in this paper can be applied to Web-based design and manufacturing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Following the introduction of COVID-19 lockdown, studies have shown an increase in domestic violence in many countries. The aim of the study was to assess the frequency of seeking domestic violence information and support during the initial COVID-19 lockdown (March - April 2020) in Poland. Material and methods: We analysed searches for information on domestic violence on Google and the use of the domestic violence crisis helpline in the lockdown period compared to previous years. Google search terms were selected by the authors of the paper and then the frequency of searches performed in March and April 2020 and in the corresponding months of 2015-2019 were determined using the Google Trends tool. Additionally, we compared the data obtained from the national helpline Blue Line in March - April 2020 vs. the corresponding months in 2019. Results: An increase in the number of reports of domestic violence was observed in comparison to the previous year (+6.9%), with the largest increase in the number of reports by email (+77.7%). At the same time, the number of reports from persons under 18 years old was lower (-48.5%). An increase in reports of both physical and psychological violence was observed. Google Trends data showed an increase in searches for 'psychological help' and a decrease in searches for domestic violence and addiction (p < 0.05). Conclusions: The presented results highlight a potential short-term increase of domestic violence during COVID-19 lockdown periods, with growing importance of Internet-based tools for seeking help (e-mails, and web search engines to a lesser extent). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - The aim of the paper is to put forward a structured mechanism for web search evaluation. The paper seeks to point to useful scientific research and show how information practitioners can use these methods in evaluation of search on the web for their users. Design/methodology/approach - The paper puts forward an approach which utilizes traditional laboratory-based evaluation measures such as average precision/precision at N documents, augmented with diagnostic measures such as link broken, etc., which are used to show why precision measures are depressed as well as the quality of the search engines crawling mechanism. Findings - The paper shows how to use diagnostic measures in conjunction with precision in order to evaluate web search. Practical implications - The methodology presented in this paper will be useful to any information professional who regularly uses web search as part of their information seeking and needs to evaluate web search services. Originality/value - The paper argues that the use of diagnostic measures is essential in web search, as precision measures on their own do not allow a searcher to understand why search results differ between search engines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The process of searching on the World Wide Web (WWW) is increasing regularly, and users around the world also use it regularly. In WWW the size of the text corpus is constantly increasing at an exponential rate, so we need an efficient indexing algorithm that reduces both space and time during the search process. This paper proposes a new technique that utilizes Word-Based Tagging Coding compression which is implemented using Parallel Wavelet Tree, called WBTC_PWT. WBTC_PWT uses the word-based tagging coding encoding technique to reduce the space complexity of the index and uses a parallel wavelet tree which reduces the time it takes to construct indexes. This technique utilizes the features of compressed pattern matching to minimize search time complexity. In this technique, all the unique words present in the text corpus are divided into different levels according to the word frequency table and a different wavelet tree is made for each level in parallel. Compared to other existing search algorithms based on compressed text, the proposed WBTC_PWT search method is significantly faster and it reduces the chances of getting the false matching result. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are various kinds of valuable semantic information about real-world entities embedded in webpages and databases. Extracting and integrating these entity information from the Web is of great significance. Comparing to traditional information extraction problems, web entity extraction needs to solve several new challenges to fully take advantage of the unique characteristic of the Web. In this paper, we introduce our recent work on statistical extraction of structured entities, named entities, entity facts and relations from Web. We also briefly introduce iKnoweb, an interactive knowledge mining framework for entity information integration. We will use two novel web applications, Microsoft Academic Search (aka Libra) and EntityCube, as working examples. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With increasingly higher numbers of non-English language web searchers the problems of efficient handling of non-English Web documents and user queries are becoming major issues for search engines. The main aim of this review paper is to make researchers aware of the existing problems in monolingual non-English Web retrieval by providing an overview of open issues. A significant number of papers are reviewed and the research issues investigated in these studies are categorized in order to identify the research questions and solutions proposed in these papers. Further research is proposed at the end of each section. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, inspired by the emerging Web services standard and peer-to-peer technology, a new federated service providing (FSP) system paradigm has attracted increasing research interests. Many existing systems have either explicitly or implicitly followed this paradigm. Instead of exchanging files, peers in FSP systems share their computation resources in order to offer domain specific services. In this paper, we focused on the coordination problem of how to self-organize the service group structures in response to the varying service demand. We presented our solution in the form of a coordination mechanism, which includes a labor- market model, a recruiting protocol, and a policy-driven decision architecture. Peers make their service providing decisions based on their local policies, which can be added, removed, or modified by users. A general methodology is introduced in this paper to facilitate policy design. Specifically, a heuristic inspired by the Extremal Optimization technique is utilized to handle potential inconsistencies among policies. A stimulus-response mechanism was further applied to make the decision process adjustable. Experiments under five application scenarios verified our ideas and demonstrated the effectiveness of our coordination mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose — This paper aims to examine our current knowledge of how searchers perceive and react to the possibility of missing potentially important information whilst searching the web is limited. The study reported here seeks to investigate such perceptions and reactions, and to explore the extent to which Simon's "bounded rationality" theory is useful in illuminating these issues. Design/methodology/approach — Totally 37 academic staff, research staff and research students in three university departments were interviewed about their web searching. The open-ended, semi-structured interviews were inductively analysed. Emergence of the concept of "good enough" searching prompted a further analysis to explore the extent to which the data could be interpreted in terms of Simon's concepts of "bounded rationality" and "satisficing". Findings — The results indicate that the risk of missing potentially important information was a matter of concern to the interviewees. Their estimations of the likely extent and importance of missed information affected decisions by individuals as to when to stop searching — decisions based on very different criteria, which map well onto Simon's concepts. On the basis of the interview data, the authors propose tentative categorizations of perceptions of the risk of missing information including "inconsequential" "tolerable" "damaging" and "disastrous" and search strategies including "perfunctory" "minimalist" "nervous" and "extensive". It is concluded that there is at least a prima facie case for bounded rationality and satisficing being considered as potentially useful concepts in our quest better to understand aspects of human information behaviour. Research limitations/implications — Although the findings are based on a relatively small sample and an exploratory qualitative analysis, it is argued that the study raises a number of interesting questions, and has implications for both the development of theory and practice in the areas of web searching and information literacy. Originality/value — The paper focuses on an aspect of web searching which has not to date been well explored. Whilst research has done much to illuminate searchers' perceptions of what they find on the web, we know relatively little of their perceptions of, and reactions to information that they fail to find. The study reported here provides some tentative models, based on empirical evidence, of these phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors review the trends in the use of computers in the delivery and support of career guidance and counseling identified at the symposium International Perspectives on Career Development. The papers presented emphasized that 20th-century computer-based systems continue to be used, mainly delivered via the World Wide Web. These systems are enhanced through audio, video, graphics, strategies to provide needs assessment, and support by cybercounselors or expert system design. The papers also revealed a new trend: the use of elegant Web sites to store and search immense libraries of resources needed by professionals and clients and to facilitate communication and collaboration among professionals in cyberspace. Concerns, issues, and resources related to many areas, including the readiness of clients to use computer-based systems, were also raised; existing sources of guidelines are noted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the growth of the World Wide Web has conic a proliferation of online reference sources. Some of these are electronic versions of already existing paper sources, while others have no paper counterpart. Many of the best reference resources found of the Web are subscription-based, but a surprising number of quality resources are available free. The vastness of the Web makes it difficult to provide a comprehensive and exhaustive survey of all the resources that are currently available. This article attempts to identify sonic of the most significant resources across the social sciences. it includes six disciplines: anthropology, communications, history, political science, and sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Paper Analyzes The Results Of Transaction Logs At California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA) And Studies The Effects Of Implementing A Web-Based OPAC Along With Interface Changes. The Authors Find That User Success In Subject Searching Remains Problematic. A Major Increase In The Frequency Of Searches That Would Have Been More Successful In Resources Other Than The Library Catalog Is Noted Over The Time Period 2000-2002. The Authors Attribute This Increase To The Prevalence Of Web Search Engines And Suggest That Metasearching, Relevance-Ranked Results, And Relevance Feedback ("More Like This") Are Now Expected In User Searching And Should Be Integrated Into Online Catalogs As Search Options. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What makes a Web site rise to the top of a search-engine retrieval? The deluge of information and the short attention spans of users have made this question vital. The research reported in this paper aims to analyze characteristics of Web sites that may have enabled them to rise to the top of a search-engine retrieval. The author searched Google by using selected keywords-"cataloging department"-over a period of ten weeks, and then examined characteristics of the top twenty retrievals each week to determine which characteristics had the greatest influence on retrieval rank. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This guide outlines general issues in searching for studies; describes the main sources of potential studies; and discusses how to plan the search process, design, and carry out search strategies, manage references found during the search process and document and report the search process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: In an increasingly digital age, students rely heavily on web resources to access health information. However, evaluating the reliability and relevance of such information is crucial for informed decision‐making. This study examines the importance of students' health information literacy skills (HILS) as mediators, particularly their ability to utilize web resources and successfully evaluate health information. Objectives: This research investigates the mediating role of students' HILS in the relationship between their utilization of web resources and their proficiency in evaluating health information. Method: An online survey was distributed to current students at a public university in Bangladesh as part of the data collection process for this study. Using Google Forms, the authors created a structured questionnaire. The survey was distributed through Messenger groups, Facebook pages and email invitations to reach the target audience effectively. The researchers thoroughly analysed the gathered data using structural equation modelling (SEM) techniques and SmartPLS‐4 software to look for correlations between the variables. Result: The study revealed that among the 122 participants, a significant number (N = 47) accessed internet health information on an occasional basis, whereas 30 individuals reported using it infrequently. The data revealed that 58 individuals, accounting for 47.5% of the sample, possessed the necessary abilities to access and assess online health information. Additionally, 57 participants, representing 46.7% of the sample, demonstrated proficiency in conducting online health information searches. The measurement model demonstrated good convergent validity, as evidenced by composite reliability (CR) scores and Cronbach's ⍺ values over 0.700 and an average extracted variance (AVE) of 0.500. The structural model demonstrated R2 values exceeding 0.1, thus validating its dependable forecasting capability. Notable effects were seen, with f2 values of 0.335 and 0.317 for the challenges in accessing and evaluating health information (CAEHI) to health information evaluation (HIE) and CAEHI to HILS relationships, respectively. The mediation analysis found that HILS act as a mediator between types of web resources (TWRs) and HIE, with TWR having an indirect impact on HIE through HILS. Discussion: The result supports all hypotheses. Therefore, it is evident that students' HILS mediate the relationship between utilization of web resources and their proficiency in evaluating health information. Conclusion: This study's findings could significantly impact instructional practices meant to raise students' health information literacy. This initiative seeks to enable students to make informed decisions about their health by providing them with the necessary tools to analyse and evaluate health‐related information. Patient or Public Contribution: Research on health information literacy can assist patients and the general public by instructing them on how to assess trustworthy online health resources. Students gave insightful feedback that assisted in shaping the study and guaranteeing its relevancy. If they better comprehend health information literacy, patients and the general public can use web‐based resources and critically evaluate health information more accurately. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional approaches to relevance ranking typically optimize ranking models by each query separately. The traditional cluster hypothesis also does not consider the dependency between related queries. The goal of this paper is to leverage similar search intents to perform ranking consistency so that the search performance can be improved accordingly. Different from the previous supervised approach, which learns relevance by click‐through data, we propose a novel cocluster hypothesis to bridge the gap between relevance ranking and ranking consistency. A nearest‐neighbors test is also designed to measure the extent to which the cocluster hypothesis holds. Based on the hypothesis, we further propose a two‐stage unsupervised approach, in which two ranking heuristics and a cost function are developed to optimize the combination of consistency and uniqueness (or inconsistency). Extensive experiments have been conducted on a real and large‐scale search engine log. The experimental results not only verify the applicability of the proposed cocluster hypothesis but also show that our approach is effective in boosting the retrieval performance of the commercial search engine and reaches a comparable performance to the supervised approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research has shown that more and more web users utilize social annotations to manage and organize their interested resources. Therefore, with the growing popularity of social annotations, it is becoming more and more important to utilize such social annotations to achieve effective web search. However, using a statistical model, there are no previous studies that examine the relationships between queries and social annotations. Motivated by this observation, we use social annotations to re-rank search results. We intend to optimize retrieval ranking method by using the ranking strategy of integrating the query-annotation similarity into query-document similarity. Specifically, we calculate the query-annotation similarity by using a statistical language model, which in a shorter form we call simply a language model. Then the initial search results are re-ranked according to the computational weighted score of the query-document similarity score and the query-annotation similarity score. Experimental results show that the proposed method can improve the NDCG score by 8.13%. We further conduct an empirical evaluation of the method by using a query set including about 300 popular social annotations and constructed phrases. More generally, the optimized results with social annotations based on a language model can be of significant benefit to web search. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the problem of searching for social network accounts, e.g., Twitter accounts, with the rich information available on the Web, e.g., people names, attributes, and relationships to other people. For this purpose, we need to map Twitter accounts with Web entities. However, existing solutions building upon naive textual matching inevitably suffer low precision due to false positives (e.g., fake impersonator accounts) and false negatives (e.g., accounts using nicknames). To overcome these limitations, we leverage 'relational' evidences extracted from the Web corpus. We consider two types of evidence resources- First, web-scale entity relationship graphs, extracted from name co-occurrences crawled from the Web. This co-occurrence relationship can be interpreted as an 'implicit' counterpart of Twitter follower relationships. Second, web-scale relational repositories, such as Freebase with complementary strength. Using both textual and relational features obtained from these resources, we learn a ranking function aggregating these features for the accurate ordering of candidate matches. Another key contribution of this paper is to formulate confidence scoring as a separate problem from relevance ranking. A baseline approach is to use the relevance of the top match itself as the confidence score. In contrast, we train a separate classifier, using not only the top relevance score but also various statistical features extracted from the relevance scores of all candidates, and empirically validate that our approach outperforms the baseline approach. We evaluate our proposed system using real-life internet-scale entity-relationship and social network graphs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to expound on search engine limits and to offer more novel approaches to searching the web. Design/methodology/approach - Examines alternative search engines to Google. Findings - Not only does Google have competitors and augmenters, but they keep on coming. The web is a vital and fertile turf where new ideas continually lead to innovations - some good, some not. While Google continues expanding and evolving, others persistently appear on the horizon with their own slant. As always, librarians need to stay aware. Originality/value - The paper offers examples of more specialized search engines that provide a valuable alternative to Google in many areas and across all file formats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analysis of a year long usage log of Koders, the first commercially available Internet-Scale code search engine (). The usage log comprises about ten million activities from more than three million users. Analysis of the usage data shows that despite of attracting a large number of visitors, Koders has a very sparse usage and that it lacks regular usage from many of its users. When compared to Web search, search behavior in Koders showed many similar patterns. A topic modeling analysis of the usage data shows what topics users of Koders are looking for. Observations on the prevalence of these topics among the users, and observations on how search and download activities vary across topics, lead to the conclusion that users who find code search engines usable are those who already know to a high level of specificity what to look for. This paper also presents a general categorization of these topics that provides insights on the different ways code search engine users express their queries. It identifies various forms of queries in Koders's log and the kinds of results addressed by the queries. It also provides several suggestions for improvements in code search engines based on the analysis of usage, topics, and query forms. The work presented in this paper is the first of its kind that reveals several insights on the usage of an Internet-Scale code search engine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose -- The purpose of this paper is to describe the work of the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) in the US Department of Energy Office of Science and OSTI's development of the powerful search engine, WorldWideScience.org. With tools such as Science.gov and WorldWideScience.org, the patron gains access to multiple, geographically dispersed deep web databases and can search all of the constituent sources with a single query. Design/methodology/approach -- The paper is both historical and descriptive. Findings -- That WorldWideScience.org fills a unique niche in discovering scientific material in an information landscape that includes search engines such as Google and Google Scholar. Originality/value -- This is one of the few papers to describe in depth the important work being done by the US Office of Scientific and Technical Information in the field of search and discovery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to describe: a new taxonomy of metacognitive skills designed to support the study of metacognition in the context of web searching; a data collection instrument based on the taxonomy; and the results of testing the instrument on a sample of university students and staff. Design/methodology/approach - The taxonomy is based on a review of the literature, and is extended to cover web searching. This forms the basis for the design of the data collection instrument, which is tested with 405 students and staff of Sheffield University. Findings - Subjects regard the range of metacognitive skills focused on as broadly similar. However, a number of significant differences in reported metacognition usage relating to age, gender and discipline. Practical implications - These findings contribute to the long-term aims of the research which are to: develop a model of the actual and potential role of metacognition in web searching, and identify strategic "metacognitive interventions" that can be built into an intelligent information retrieval system, driven by the model, capable of enhancing retrieval effectiveness by compensating for metacognitive weaknesses on the part of the searcher. Originality/value - The value of the paper lies in: the consideration of metacognition in the context of web searching, the presentation of an extensible taxonomy of metacognitive skills, development and testing of a prototype metacognitive inventory, finding of significant differences in reported metacognition usage according to age, gender and discipline, and reflection of the implications of the results for future research into web searching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Retrieval efficiencies of paper-based references in journals and other serials containing 10 scientific names of fossil amphibians were determined for seven major search engines. Retrievals were compared to the number of references obtained covering the period 1895-2006 by a Comprehensive Search. The latter was primarily a traditional library-based search which involved intensive work from 2002-2007. Only a few references originally obtained by search engines were included. Retrieval efficiencies were calculated by comparison to the number obtained through the Comprehensive Search (assumed to be 100%). All percent retrievals were quite low (mean = 11.3%, range = 4.0-22.9%). For all seven search engines combined (duplicate references excluded), the percent retrieval was only 40.7%. There was also retrieval inefficiency and bias of the search engines in: sampling over time, the top five journals containing the most references, the top five most prolific authors, and non-English references. Consequently, all seven search engines were unsatisfactory for retrieval of references for our scientific research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The World Wide Web has become the most important information source for most of us. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee for the correctness of information on the Web. Moreover, different websites often provide conflicting information on a subject, such as different specifications for the same product. In this paper, we propose a new problem, called Veracity, i.e., conformity to truth, which studies how to find true facts from a large amount of confliOting information on many subjects that is provided by varibus websites. We design ~a general framework for the Veracity problem and invent an algorithm, called TRUTHFINDER, which utilizes the relationships between websites and their information, i.e., a website is trustworthy if itprovides many pieces of true information, anda piece of information is likely to be true if it is provided by many trustworthy websites. An iterative method is used to infer the trustworthiness of websites and the correctness of information from each other. Our experiments show that TRUTHFINDER successfully finds true facts among conflicting information and identifies trustworthy websites better than the popular search engines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - Social relations play an important role in a real community. Interaction patterns reveal relations among actors (such as persons, groups, firms), which can be merged to produce valuable information such as a network structure. This paper aims to present a new approach to extract inter-firm networks from the web for further analysis. Design/methodology/approach - In this study extraction of relations between a pair of firms is obtained by using a search engine and text processing. Because names of firms co-appear coincidentally on the web, an advanced algorithm is proposed, which is characterised by the addition of keywords ("relation keywords") to a query. The relation keywords are obtained from the web using a Jaccard coefficient. Findings - As an application, a network of 60 firms in Japan is extracted including IT, communication, broadcasting, and electronics firms from the web and comprehensive evaluations of this approach are shown. The alliance and lawsuit relations are easily obtainable from the web using the algorithm. By adding relation keywords to named pairs of firms as a query, It is possible to collect target pages from the top of web pages more precisely than by only using the named pairs as a query. Practical implications - This study proposes a new approach for extracting inter-firm networks from the web. The obtained network is useful in several ways. It is possible to find a cluster of firms and characterise a firm by its cluster. Business experts often make such inferences based on firm relations and firm groups. For that reason the firm network might enhance inferential abilities on the business domain. Also we might use obtained networks to recommend business partners based on structural advantages. The authors'' intuition is that extracting a social network might provide information that is only recognisable from the network point of view. For example, the centrality of each firm is identified only after generating a social network. Originality/value - This study is a first attempt to extract inter-firm networks from the web using a search engine. The approach is also applicable to other actors, such as famous persons, organisations or other multiple relational entities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New and innovative information technologies drive the ever-evolving library profession. From clay tablet to parchment scroll to manufactured paper to computer screen pixel, information storage, retrieval, and delivery methods continue to evolve, and each advance irrevocably affects the way libraries, and librarians, work. The Internet has forever altered information and library science, both in theory and practice, but even within this context the progression continues. Though ambiguously defined, Web 2.0 offers a new outlook and new software, presenting librarians with potentially invaluable new tools and methods. This paper discusses the creation, implementation, and maintenance of a Web 2.0 technology, the wild, as a resource tool for an academic bio- medical library. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A major impediment to accurate information retrieval from the World Wide Web is the inability of search engines to incorporate semantics in the search process. This research presents a methodology, CONQUER (CONtext-aware QUERy processing), that enhances the semantic content of Web queries using two complementary knowledge sources: lexicons and ontologies. The methodology constructs a semantic net using the original query as a seed, and refines the net with terms from the two knowledge sources. The enhanced query, represented by the refined semantic net, can be executed by search engines. This paper describes the methodology and its implementation in a prototype. An empirical evaluation shows that queries suggested by the prototype produce more relevant results than those obtained by the original queries. The research, thus, provides a successful demonstration of the use of existing knowledge sources to enhance the semantic content of Web queries. The paper concludes by identifying potential uses of such enhancements of search technology in organizational contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Predicting users' future requests in the World Wide Web can be applied effectively in many important applications, such as web search, latency reduction, and personalization systems. Such application has traditional tradeoffs between modeling complexity and prediction accuracy. In this paper, we study several hybrid models that combine different classification techniques, namely, Markov models, artificial neural networks (ANNs), and the All-Kth-Markov model, to resolve prediction using Dempster's rule. Such fusion overcomes the inability of the Markov model in predicting beyond the training data, as well as boosts the accuracy of ANN, particularly, when dealing with a large number of classes. We also employ a reduction technique, which uses domain knowledge, to reduce the number of classifiers to improve the predictive accuracy and the prediction time of ANNs. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our hybrid models by comparing our results with widely used techniques, namely, the Markov model, the All-Kth-Markov model, and association rule mining, based on a benchmark data set. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose -- Locating information on the internet is an important skill in the Information Society. Some recent studies showed that searching using non English terms is a more demanding task than searching in English. Based on these observations, this paper aims to apply the Instructional System Design (ISD) methodology to analyse, design and implement a training coarse for Greek users. This instructional approach considers the explanation of the internal search engine intelligence and inefficiencies with respect to non-English natural language as its basic structural element. Design/methodology/approach -- Based on the ISD methodology, the tasks that needed to be trained as a web searcher were identified and a six-phase instructional influence was constructed. The instructional methodology is evaluated with the aid of students in an authentic environment. Findings -- The evaluation revealed that learners who followed the structured approach and were aware of the search engines' limitations relating to the Greek language performed better in the web searching experiments. Originality/value -- The instructional methodology described can be applied in any course which aims at teaching basic web searching skills. The instructional approach presented can also be adapted to other non-English languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - This web mining paper aims at analyzing whether the number of links pointing to a web page is biased by the structure of web sites. Design/methodology/approach - By web-design mining methods, two collections of web pages are extracted and the in-links counts are determined by querying web search engines. Findings - The paper finds that the structure bias and pages on a higher hierarchical level are likely to receive more links than other pages. Research limitations/implications - The links are set by web page authors whose behaviour is not yet fully understood and which requires further research. Practical implications - The paper shows that the structure bias of in-links should be considered by link analysis measures used in search engines. Potential consequences are presented. Originality/value - The number of links toward a web page are considered to be an indicator for the quality of that page. This measure is biased and cannot be solely trusted as a knowledge source for the quality of a page. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The web is an inexhaustible reservoir of machine-readable texts in most of the world's written languages for compiling corpora or consulting directly as a 'corpus'. This paper first surveys some characteristics of the web and discusses the potential rewards and practical limitations of exploiting the web either directly as a linguistic corpus or to compile corpora. Particular attention is paid to search engines, our gateways to the web. The author then reviews several innovative applications of web data to corpus-related issues. KWiCFinder (KF), developed by the author to help realize the web's promise for language scholars and learners, is described and motivated in detail. KF, readily accessible to novices yet powerful enough for advanced researchers, conducts web searches, retrieves matching online documents, and produces an interactive keyword in context concordance of the search terms. This paper then discusses the pitfalls of 'webidence' in serious research and proposes an initial solution. Finally the author reviews the future of the web for corpus research and application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose — The objective of this paper is to characterize the changes in the rankings of the top ten results of major search engines over time and to compare the rankings between these engines. Design/methodology/approach — The papers compare rankings of the top-ten results of the search engines Google and AlltheWeb on ten identical queries over a period of three weeks. Only the top-ten results were considered, since users do not normally inspect more than the first results page returned by a search engine. The experiment was repeated twice, in October 2003 and in January 2004, in order to assess changes to the top-ten results of some of the queries during the three months interval. In order to assess the changes in the rankings, three measures were computed for each data collection point and each search engine. Findings — The findings in this paper show that the rankings of AlltheWeb were highly stable over each period, while the rankings of Google underwent constant yet minor changes, with occasional major ones. Changes over time can be explained by the dynamic nature of the web or by fluctuations in the search engines' indexes. The top-ten results of the two search engines had surprisingly low overlap. With such small overlap, the task of comparing the rankings of the two engines becomes extremely challenging. Originality/value — The paper shows that because of the abundance of information on the web, ranking search results is of extreme importance. The paper compares several measures for computing the similarity between rankings of search tools, and shows that none of the measures is fully satisfactory as a standalone measure. It also demonstrates the apparent differences in the ranking algorithms of two widely used search engines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose — The purpose of this paper is to specify user-defined relevance criteria by which people select hyperlinks and pages in web searching. Design/methodology/approach — A quantitative and qualitative analysis was undertaken of talking aloud data from nine web searches conducted about self-generated topics. Findings — Altogether 18 different criteria for selecting hyperlinks and web pages were found. The selection is constituted, by two, intertwined processes: the relevance judgment of hyperlinks, and web pages by user-defined criteria, and decision-making concerning the acceptance or rejection of hyperlinks and web pages. The study focuses on the former process. Of the individual criteria, specificity, topicality, familiarity, and variety were used most frequently in relevance judgments. The study shows that despite the high number of individual criteria used in the judgments, a few criteria such as specificity and topicality tend to dominate. Searchers were less critical in the judgment of hyperlinks than deciding whether the activated web pages should be consulted in more detail. Research limitations/implications — The study is exploratory, drawing on a relatively low number of case searches. Originality/value — The paper gives a detailed picture of the criteria used in the relevance judgments of hyperlinks and web pages. The study also discusses the specific nature of criteria used in web searching, as compared to those used in traditional online searching environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to report an empirical investigation into conceptions of the ‘invisible web’. Design/methodology/approach - This was an exploratory qualitative study based on in-depth semi-structured interviews with 15 members of academic staff from three biology-related departments at the University of Sheffield. Concepts emerged from an inductive analysis of the interview data to form a tentative model. Findings - A distinction is drawn between technical objective conceptions of the ‘invisible web’ that commonly appear in the literature, and a cognitive subjective conception based on searchers' perceptions of search failure, and a tentative model of ‘cognitive invisibility’ is presented. The relationship between objective and subjective conceptions, and implications for training, are discussed. Research limitations/implications - The research was qualitative and exploratory, designed to elicit sensitising concepts and to ‘map the territory’. It thus aims to provide a tentative model that could form the basis for more systematic study. Such research could investigate the validity of the categories in different and/or larger samples, seek further to illuminate, challenge, extend or refute the model, and address issues of generalisability. Practical implications - The paper presents a conceptual model that is intended to be a useful reference point for researchers wishing to investigate user-based aspects of search failure and the invisible web. It may also be useful to trainers and those interested in developing information literacy, in that it differentiates technical objective and cognitive subjective conceptions of ‘invisibility, and discusses the implications for helping searchers develop more effective searching capabilities. Originality/value - The paper offers an alternative cognitive subjective view of ‘web invisibility’ to that more commonly presented in the literature. It contributes to a still small body of empirical research into user-based aspects of the invisible web. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - To explore the effectiveness of large-scale consortia for disseminating local heritage via the web. To describe the creation of a large geographically based cultural heritage consortium in the South East of England and management lessons resulting from a major web site digitisation project. To encourage the improved sharing of experience amongst similar projects in the future. Design/methodology/approach - A selective literature review seeking lessons on sustainable cultural heritage collaboration is presented. The composition of a consortium set-up with public lottery funding to build a cross-domain collaborative public web site containing cultural heritage materials from many local authorities and local partners is described. Practical experiences from the first three years of collaboration are presented in a manner loosely based on the European Union Digitisation Policies Benchmarking Model. Findings - Staff in local government libraries, archives and museums have, until recently, lacked experience in major web site publishing and even in the basic digifisation of locally held heritage materials. Local governments in England have traditionally co-operated within the library or museum sectors, but not across the whole domain. New communication methods and a formally structured consortium have so far enabled the collaborative publication of a major web site allowing cross-searching of partner materials as well as access to individual sites. More importantly, staff have begun to understand how to proceed in a sustainable way to support the future development of more sophisticated digital primary and learning resources that are preserved for the future and yet accessible to many more people. Practical implications - The paper notes the importance of shared values, common objectives and a practical approach to collaborative service delivery. It also highlights the challenges in situations where operational staff have multiple responsibilities and project staff may be available only while external short-term funding lasts. It is suggested that encouraging the documentation of operational experiences and sharing skills through a large-scale formal consortium can support sustainable development. Originality/value - The consortium described hopes to form a major part of the future framework for digital cultural heritage services in the South East of England. This paper offers a rare, reflective contribution from experienced, operational service practitioners who have completed a three-five year digitisation programme offering free public access to materials that serve to support and disseminate local and regional identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper proposes a methodological approach for the performance analysis of Web-based searching applications on the Internet. It specifically investigates the behavior of the Client/Server (C/S), Remote-Evaluation (REV) and Mobile-Agent (MA) communication paradigms and describes how Petri-net models can be developed to derive performance indices which can help the designer to improve the efficiency of his distributed applications. Our purpose is that of identifying a set of models that can help to understand the environmental situations in which such paradigms should be preferred or combined in order to optimize the performances of a distributed system. In particular, we propose a modeling technique applied to an Information Retrieval application on the World Wide Web. An analytical evaluation through the solution of non-Markovian Petri-net models is provided, which allows us to identify the main parameters, as well as the way they interact, to be taken into consideration when distributed applications are to be designed. An experimental environment is also studied in order to obtain real measurements used to validate the analytical models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of organizational web sites for recruitment has become increasingly common. Despite their widespread growth, however little is known about how these web sites influence recruitment outcomes. In the current paper, we present a model that explicates how job seekers interact with and respond to web site characteristics to predict various job seeker attitudes and behaviors. We suggest that job seekers are initially affected by the facade of a web site, comprised of the web site's aesthetic and playfulness features. Coupled with system features of the web site, these initial affective reactions then influence perceptions of the usability of the web site. Perceptions of usability and affective reactions work through two key mediating constructs, job seeker search behavior and web site attitude, to ultimately predict applicant attraction. Throughout the paper we present a series of testable propositions that should serve to guide future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]