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WWW News November 15, 1995 |
Maricopa Center for Learning and Instruction |
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an irregular gathering of
web stuff by... Alan Levine |
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WWW News November 15, 1995 |
Maricopa Center for Learning and Instruction |
|
an irregular gathering of
web stuff by... Alan Levine |
||
We admit it. We cannot keep up. No one can (without giving up essential activities like sleeping, eating, and seeing daylight). But more importantly, with sites such as Yahoo that are categorizing/organizing over 30,000 links and some of the more wide scale search tools like SavvySearch and MetaCrawler, it is getting easier to locate what you yearn for on the 'net (for more on searches, see How do I find What I Want? in this issue). So in this and in future issues we will instead focus in more detail on specific sites or web issues.
We are even dismantling our own set of Subject-Organized Hot Links because those yahoo's are doing it much better! But.... we are rebuilding it as a more dynamic set of resources we call 451F (for 451 degrees Fahrenheidt). The object is that rather manually editing a bunch of HTML files that we pigeon-hole into subject categories, we now hove a search-form front end that searches a database of links and descriptions that you, the Internet public (yes, all 30,000,000 of you) contribute. We will review each one and add it to our burning collection only if it is of superior merit.
Goodbye to static lists hot sites. Hello to dynamic information. On-the-fly is where we go now.
We get a lot of positive response regarding the Writing HTML tutorial. In the works are some new lessons for advanced HTML. If you have used the tutorial in the past and your web pages now have their own URL, we invite you to join our Writing HTML Alumni. We have also developed a new "crash course" of HTML Blueprints that is in the growing stages.
Also, at the recent technology conference for the League of Innovation in the Community Colleges we create all of our presentation materials as web pages, using NetScape to read them locally from our laptop computer. This way, we only had to create a small paper handout with the URL for the presentation files. Brilliant, eh? Form your own opinion by viewing the presentations yourself.
We do not put a whole lot of stock in just counting hits. The true measure is the ever-rising amount of e-mail we get related to our web service.
What's coming soon? Look for some areas featuring RealAudio, we are beta testing Director Shockwave technology, exploration of new NetScape frames, more interactive forms and more powerful search engines, perhaps a few cups of Java.
Adventerous webbers are requested to try out our experimental StoryWeb-- its an old idea in a new medium.
How do you find things in all of this? bad news first... There is (and probably never will be) no one single index or tool to find everything and anything on the Internet but don't go running to the old card catalog with your hands in the air! there are some tools out there to make it a little easier. All you have to is learn to use some different techniques and be more "savvy" in your quest. Nothing can match the net for its ability to reach vital up-to-date information that is not readily available elsewhere.
In this section we will introduce you to some spiders, robots, worms, and other "creatures". For this example, let's say you and I are interested in finding out information about volcanoes- in particular, the ones which have erupted in the last two years. Our keywords are volcano and active (note that the word "active" sometimes hit on the words "interactive", "reactive", etc...). we tried this search with each tool and have linked it to the web page we got back as a result.
the big subject-oriented sites...
One approach is to go to big sites that make it their job to list web resources by
category.
This techniques is best for general "browsing" when your scope of interest is medium
to broad.
Number one on your list should be the venerable
Yahoo, the genius site of two
highly successful Stanford students. At Yahoo, and other Subject-Organized sites,
you use their system of categories to narrow in on the area of interest. Good subject-
organized sites will have a search ability. Just keep in mind that it searches only as far
as the number of "links" they have built at their site. Another good site is
TradeWave Galaxy (formerly known as EINet)
In fact, Yahoo itself maintains a list of web search sites If you do not find a search type here, try the ever-growing list maintained at Yahoo
No matter what, you will end up having to do some exploring....
So off we go to Yahoo, look under Science, then Geology and Geophysics, then Volcanology and...
There are several interesting sites such as the USGS Volcanology Resources and even urther sub-categories such as Institutes, Observatories, Organizations, and particular Volcanoes. You almost never know what you will find at Yahoo, but it is very easy to follow their directory structure. And Yahoo has their own search engine for their entire collection.
One Page-One Click Meta-Searches
A "Meta-Search" will take your keyword query and search for it by sending your request
to sveral other search engines, all in parallel. The "one-click"
approach means doing all of this work from a single interface. These are some of the
most powerful search tools around, and the results can be staggering (if you
choose keywords that are too general) and slow (if you choose to search at peak
load times)
RESULTS:
Savvy Search reported "Your query was sent to: Lycos, Web Crawler, DejaNews, EINet Galaxy, Yahoo." The results were 86 hitw- each a one line link and an indication of which source it came from. The results are ranked somehow, so that the "best" hits appeared in bigger font and bold. The top 7 were very useful as far as you can tell from the page titles:
- MTU Volcanoes Page (EINet Galaxy, Web Crawler, Lycos)
- The Electronic Volcano (Web Crawler, Lycos)
- U.K Volcanologists Group Home Page (Web Crawler, Lycos)
- The French West Indies (EINet Galaxy, Web Crawler)
- Catalogs of Active Volcanoes (Lycos)
- Update on Current Volcanic Activity (Lycos)
- The Center for the Study of Active Volcanoes (Web Crawler)
A nice feature of metacrawler is how it gives feedback as it returns the data- you first see:
Info Seek 12 references found
...
Lycos 23 references found
Opentext 12 references found
Yahoo 0 References found
RESULTS:
The final results incliude 84 references that contain the link, a description, the site where it was found, and the keywords (volcano and active_ are highlighted. The response time was excellent.
RESULTS:
The InfoMarket search page is easy to use; you can select only those databases that are relevant. Our results indicated that 1264 documents were found! and they were ranked in order of relevance. It seemed to pick up some obscure, but perhaps relevant pages. Mots of the entries after #35 seemed to be from a news group involved in trading cards- apparently "Active Volcano" is a common theme for tarot cards. Sometimes, you just do not know what you will hit with a search!
RESULTS:
This site in Switzerland was one of the early pioneers in web organizing and is home of the World Wide Web Virtual Library. The search interace is only one field. The results were slow in coming and timed out'before completing- it seemed to be traversing a geographic directory of web sites starting with the numerous Alasko sites related to the study of volcanoes.
Since these pages are just front-end tools for other sites, we did not use them for our "active volcano" search, but still provide them for reference. We find them useful when the scope of the search is a little better defined--- why search all the web sites if what you are looking for is a piece of software?
Just for fun, follow the link for People and search for yourself using the field for LookUP! Directory. I am there; are you?
All of these creatures are built up by sending out "agents" on the world wide web that follow every link possible, returning their results to a large, searchable database. For more information, take a look at Robots, Wanderers, and Spiders
We have listed them roughly in order of what we have found to be most useful ones at the top. Remember, the scope of the search is limited by the scopt of the database that it searches. No "robot" "spider" "worm" is able to walk every corner of the web, but still-- the results are impressive.
RESULTS:
What I like about Open Text's results is that you get more than just a name and a link- it returns a list of relevnt keywords and a short description, a relative "score", and the file size of the page it points to. The other great feature is the ability to conduct a search for sites that are "similar". Take a look at the first and second set of ten results.
RESULTS:
When we searched, Lycos found 13,920 documents! The results were ranked relevance and included similar spelled words (Volcanoes, volcanos). It reports date when last checked, number of links from the page, t itle, an outline (snaggged header tags), keywords, and a short text exerpt. Lycos is fast and thorough.
RESULTS:
On our search for :"active volcano", WebCrawler returned results very fast with 96 links. But it listed titles only and they were ranked by relavance. If you can guess whether the site is useful from it's title then WebCrawler is a good tool.
RESULTS:
The search for active and volcano only returned 3 sites and these had title's like Gary's Home Page" and "Happy Tours". Perhaps someone had taken a picture of themselves in front of flowing lava...
RESULTS:
The 10 results included a title, link, description, plus the size of the page it links to (this is a nice feature others search engines should include). Several of these results did not turn up in other web site searches
RESULTS:
Our results included 14 finds for active and volcano listing just the title
RESULTS:
The results listed only four sites, but they were also very relevant and ones that should appear on any other web site search for the keywords active and volcano
RESULTS:
AliWeb returned a long list of hits but not useful as it picked "active" out of words such as "interactive".
RESULTS:
The yellow pages returned several worthwhile hits for active and volcano but picked up for active from "Active lifestyles". the report includes the links, keywords, and descriptions of the sites.
RESULTS:
The Virtual Yellow pages returned no results for active and volcano
RESULTS:
This search resulted in one find, but it does have a full description.
Every issue we will highlightThis issue, at the Top of the Web is
See this page if only for the nifty graphic.
Use the web form to select the title, the sections, and choose from numerous news feed sources to link such as US News (National Public radio, TIME, ABC News,), World News (Irish Times, China News Digest, Jeruslam Post), Weather for your location, Business Reports, Arts and Enternainment, Editorials (San Francsico Chronicle, Berry's World, Steve Benson), Sports, Comics, and more. You decide the layout and the order in which the news appears. You can have it display graphics or have it just list the links.
At first this might seem like a fun but frivoulos site. Think again. Aren't we limited to the viewpoints of one newspaper in traditional format? Why cannot I have comica on my first page? Think about a future where there are thousands of news sources to choose from and we can pick (or use intelligent filters) to customize the newspaper ourselves. Negroponte's "Daily Me" is almost here.
Honorable mention
Kapi'olani Community College has a
beautiful, lean web page layout. It features low bandwidth original icons that are meaningful and pleasing. The organization is excellent as is the depth and range of content.
The Internet Connection (1993-2006) at MCLI was
Alan Levine --}
Comments once went to levine@maricopa.edu (no one is at home there)
URL: http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/webnews/951115.html