Dazzling Statistics

• 103,418,646 people on the Internet.
• 1716,863 World Wide Web sites on the Internet.

The Uncontrollable Web

• no authority control (like OBIS, OhioLink)
• no control over input (like Lexis/Nexis)

Welcome to the Electronic Cocktail Party!

• Fairly informal means of communication
• Information producers have varying levels of knowledge/expertise
• Many "conversations" going on -- no real way to ensure that you will effectively gather ALL the information on a topic
• Let the search tools be your host!

Subject Trees

• Human Intervention
• Hierarchical
  • Broadest to Narrowest
• Designed for browsing
• Great for broad topics (e.g. Buddhism)

Search Engines

• Robot-driven
• Much larger than subject trees
• Use search techniques to increase precision
• Good for narrow topics ("positron emission tomography") or terms with which you are unfamiliar ("skink")
• Search newsgroups (Alta Vista, InfoSeek, Excite)

A few new terms

• Implied Boolean (+ or -)
• Phrase searching (e.g. "Power PC")
• Case sensitivity (Polish vs. polish)

Something in-between -- Excite

• uses "fuzzy logic"

Multi-threaded or Meta Search Engines

• Search multiple engines simultaneously
• Good for really narrow or new terms ("Ramidus")
• Down side -- slower, less precise

Some tips for evaluating results

• Provenance
• Reviews
• Who's been linking to this page (InfoSeek, Webcrawler)

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