Week 10- Reading Notes

David Hawking's Web Search Engines (part 1 & 2)
These articles gave an interesting look at how search engines function. I found the "crawling" process to be interesting and kind of tedious. There do indeed seem to be many issues with crawlers, as there are many traps, etc. I had also never considered that too many requests on a server by crawlers could be detrimental. Document partitioning was also interesting. It was nice to see another application for compression since we covered this earlier on.

Shreeves, Habing, Hagedorn, and Young's Current Developments and Future Trends
I think it's great that the initial researchers had open minds about how the Open Archives Initiative could be used and expanded their focus/audience to academia, museums, and libraries. The work to make a sheet music consortium was also quite interesting to me. It must be quite a challenge to classify musical notations into language computers can interpret.


Bergman's The Deep Web: Surfacing Hidden Value
Almost everyone has experienced a futile and frustrating web search, in which the information is superficial and unhelpful. This article touts the Bright Planet system. I found it interesting that most internet searchers are unaware of exact "deep" Web addresses to glean information from. It also surprised me that "more than half of the deep Web content resides in . . . databases." And that "a full 95% of the deep Web is publicly accessible information- not subject to fees or subscriptions." Frustrations over inadequate searches have grown, perhaps due to user sophistication, and this reality simply highlights the need for and importance of qualified librarians to help patrons search for what they need in a timely fashion.