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Help Jenkins Plan for the Future |
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The Library’s Strategic Planning Committee needs your input concerning library services and funding to help us plan for the future. We would appreciate it if you would take 3 to 5 minutes to fill out this 7 question survey. |
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Submitted by: Ida Weingram, Head of Outreach Services
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Yahoo Mindset Is Just Eye Candy |
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Just before Memorial Day Yahoo introduced Yahoo Mindset, which lets you use a slider bar to sort your results anywhere on a scale from "Shopping" to "Researching." The whole slider bar thingie works well on Yahoo Shopping, because you can play around with 5 or 6 concepts such as "price" or "brand." But I don’t think it works well for a general Web search for, say, constitutional law. My initial results, with the slider bar midway between Shopping and Researching, gave me good results — stuff I’d have gotten from a regular Yahoo search — from trusted sites: Legal Information Institute, FindLaw, Washlaw, etc. When I moved the slider all the way to Researching, the top 10 results were top-heavy with directory sites. Maybe this one needs to bake in the oven for a bit longer … |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Internet Librarian
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May 30, 2005
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Brown at 50: The Unfinished Legacy: A Collection of Essays |
 By Dennis W. Archer, Derrick Bell, and othersWith this timely volume, the ABA Commission on the 50th Anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education brings together attorneys who were involved in the Brown litigation, current Supreme Court justices, legal scholars, historians and social scientists to discuss the meaning of the Court's famous 1954 opinion that called for an end to segregated public schools. Library Record • Borrow it • Buy it • More Titles |
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Submitted by: Malgorzata Pawska, Web Content Coordinator
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May 27, 2005
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New Stuff From the Butler |
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Ask Jeeves — remember them? — has introduced 2 new features: Related Searches and Web Answers. Related Searches suggests terms for narrowing and/or broadening your search, and also suggests related names. It’s a neat concept, but — just like Clusty’s document clusters — can produce some weird unexpected stuff. For example, when I searched for who was the first chief justice of the u.s. supreme court, one of the "Expand Your Search" terms was Who Invented the Frisbee. Hmmm. Web Answers are compiled from the pages that Ask indexes. When I searched for the first chief justice, the answer was at the top of the results page, along with a link to See 17 more Web Answers. (One of the Web Answers said it was John Marshall. Double Hmmm. But it was from a Canadian Web site, so never mind.) Don’t confuse Web Answers with yet another Ask Jeeves feature, Smart Search, which uses hand-selected sources such as the History Channel, Internet Movie Database, Who2, etc. to answer certain types of questions, such as what is the capital of serbia. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Internet Librarian
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May 24, 2005
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Eye in the Sky |
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Last week Google announced it will rebrand its Keyhole satellite map service as Google Earth. Yesterday Bill Gates announced the upcoming availability of a competing service, MSN Virtual Earth, based on Microsoft’s TerraServer-USA. Both services will allow users to mash up the satellite images with driving directions. You’ll also be able to view imagery from an angle, and not just from directly overhead. If you want to get even closer, try Amazon’s Yellow Pages with Block View. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Internet Librarian
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May 23, 2005
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Online Support for Web Designers/Developers |
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I have always found that two heads are better than one. When you have someone to share your ideas with and bounce ideas off of you end up with better results. So what do you do when your boss comes up to you and says “We want a new Web site and we want you to design it.”? Instead of panicking, why not find an online support system? There are tons of sites where people just like you are sharing ideas and asking questions. My favorite place to visit for web support is the Web Development Forums at Developer Shed. The people on these forums love to help so much that I never have to worry about asking a stupid question … because they seem to believe the cliché: “There is no such thing as a stupid question”. You can find more online support sites on our Web Development Support Forums Research Links page. |
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Submitted by: Nicole Engard, Former Web Manager
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Creating Winning Trial Strategies and Graphics |
 By G. Christopher RitterCreating Winning Trial Strategies helps you to create compelling graphics to strengthen your case and make your courtroom presentation more persuasive. Library Record • Borrow it • Buy it • More Titles |
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Submitted by: Malgorzata Pawska, Web Content Coordinator
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May 20, 2005
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Google’s Now a Portal? |
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Not really. But yesterday they announced the beta release of a personalized homepage. Once you set up an account, you can add things like news headlines, driving directions, weather, etc. to the main Google page. If you have a Gmail account, you can add that, too. Is a personalized Google homepage worth it? Wellllllll … putting driving directions on the homepage saves me a click or two, and having Gmail there keeps me from forgetting about my account. (I use my Yahoo mail account way more, because I’ve had it for so long.) So I guess the answer is yes. And to Google’s credit, they didn’t go way overboard like Netscape or Yahoo. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Internet Librarian
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May 17, 2005
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Indexed Web Estimated to be 11.5 Billion Pages |
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A paper given at the Fourteenth International World Wide Web Conference last week estimates the indexable Web at more than 11.5 billion pages. So if you believe Google’s indexing claim of 8.1 billion pages, they index 70% of the indexed Web. Yahoo comes in at 37% and MSN at 43%. And if you apply (or misapply, depending on your point of view) the 80/20 Rule to the indexed Web, then 2.3 billion pages matter and the rest is fluff. Please keep in mind the study only considered the known, indexed Web. The Hidden Web — stuff that Google and Yahoo can’t or don’t index — may be anywhere from 3 to 500 times larger. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Internet Librarian
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May 16, 2005
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Blind Taste Test for Search Engines |
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John Battelle’s Searchblog has an interesting item about a search engine relevancy challenge. Web services company RustyBrick has built a search engine that pulls results randomly from one of the major four search engines: Ask Jeeves, Google, MSN Search, and Yahoo. Logos, identifying features, and ads are stripped from the results page. You’ll see the hits, plus a [rate this result] link for each hit. Click on one of them and you’ll see the text of the hit with a header at the top containing a scale from 1 (poor) to 5 (excellent.) Click the appropriate radio button and you’ve participated in the survey. We all know that the whole concept of relevance is elusive. It varies from person to person. But it will be interesting to see if Google’s results have "slipped" as much as many people claim. RustyBrick states that the results of the study will be posted on June 1. Update: After 5,000 rated searches, all 4 search engines are hovering around 3, which is average. |
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Submitted by: Dan Giancaterino, Internet Librarian
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