David Hawking's first article has made my little brain explode (this is a recurring theme in my reading notes!! brain explosion!!) I really like learning about web crawlers. I also secretly like learning about how Google and other search engines index search results. Hawkings writes that, "It is not uncommon to find that a crawler has locked up, ground to a halt, crashed, burned up an entire network traffic budget, or unintentionally inflicted a denial-of-service attack on a Web server whose operator is now very irate." This is kind of awesome. WHOA. Crawlers are totally awesome and Hawking's writings have only served to reinforce my belief of this.
In his second article, Hawking writes that "The major problem with the simple-query processor is that it returns poor results. In response to the query "the Onion" (seeking the satirical newspaper site), pages about soup and gardening would almost certainly swamp the desired result." How can we avoid this, especially in library catalogs? It seems to me we somehow need to create even smarter search engines (if that's possible?). This also reminds me of the time that I wanted to find information about a band called Condominium, and all I knew about them is that they were from Minneapolis, so I (foolishly) googled "Condominium Minneapolis" and was like, "Uh, I'm not interested in Minneapolis real estate...now what?"
WHY DOESN'T HAWKING TALK ABOUT SEARCH RELATED ADS??? I hate those. They creep me out. Why do they do that?!
The Deep Web! Bergman's article is some scary stuff!!!! Bergman writes, "Internet searchers are therefore searching only 0.03% — or one in 3,000 — of the pages available to them today." I seriously never considered that this might even be so. Because I am a dummy and foolishly trust & love google, I assumed they were able to search and find everything. Foiled!
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3 comments:
Hi Elaina,
I was also very suprised by the "deep web"...and it makes me feel good that I always had this intuitive sense that there was more to the internet than what Google was giving me. Knowing a business or organization's website is, therefore, important - just as having a person's business card can really help in a jam.
Hope Hillman is treating you well!
In response to your point about how to improve search engines so that search results have the desired context, I think that the only way to fix the issue is to improve the metadata/structure of the search engine itself. I don't know that a search engine will ever be able to decipher the human context associated with that particular search, but it's definitely something that would make queries much easier!!!
Hi,
I like your spirited comments about poor search results for queries like "the Onion." I agree this is an issue, especially in library catalogs. I absolutely love Google's new feature that suggests what you might be typing as you type it. It often leads me to keywords I wouldn't have thought of otherwise. I tried it for the Onion and for Condominium, and it didn't really help in those cases, but it is a good start.
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