Information Research Weblog

I have posted the following to the JESSE discussion list and one or two more, so forgive me if you've already seen it.

Three years ago I commented on the extent to which Web citation was growing as a means of assessing the impact of research outputs. There was an interesting discussion and, eventually, prompted by the debate, a paper on the subject in JASIST by Vaughan and Shaw (Volume 54, Issue 14, Pages 1313 - 1322).

I'm returning to the topic because of the emergence of Scholar Google as an interesting new venture in the field of bibliographic control, and by my testing of frequently hit papers in Information Research. The results suggest that for university administrations to rely upon the Web of Science citation counts and the associated journal impact measures as a means of assessing faculty for promotion is rather flawed. The same might be said of the decisions by the Research Assessment panels of the Higher Education Funding Councils in the UK to rely upon ranked lists of journals in assessing research outputs.

I'm aware, of course, of Peter Jasco's very interesting paper on Scholar and Web of Science in Current Science, v.89, no. 9, 1537-1547 and no doubt his criticisms of Scholar will provoke some changes. However, my strategy was not affected by the system's shortcomings, since I was looking for citations of known items and I weeded out the occasional 'false drops'.

I looked at the papers in Information Research that had received 10 or more citations, according to Scholar, and the results can be seen at my Weblog.

To take one example: The effect of query complexity on Web searching results, by BJ Jansen (Information Research, Volume 6 No. 1 October 2000) was said by Scholar to have 24 citations (actually, 26 were recorded) - WoS gave it zero citations - and yet the citations found by Scholar were as follows:

Peer reviewed journals - 9 citations (4 journals, all of which are covered by WoS)

Conference papers - 8 citations

University department paper archive - 7 citations

Research group report - 1 citation

Thesis - 1 citation

The paper also had about 200 Web citations, as measured by searching on Google.com

What then, are we to regard as "impact"? It would be wise for any candidate for promotion to press the case for a wider definition than measurement by WoS citations provides. There are problems with other measures but, for example, the international impact is likely to be measured better by either Scholar or Web citation generally. Similarly, in relation to the UK's Research Assessment exercise, it would be sensible for the Higher Education Funding Councils to offer better guidance on how the impact of research outputs should be assessed.

Interesting little item on Firefox in yesterday's Economist.

In the reviews I've read about desktop search programs, Copernic seems to come out top. I ditched Google Desktop some time ago, since it seemed to consume a lot of system resources. Copernic is certainly as fast, but has the disadvantage that the only mail it can search is if you use Outlook - which I don't. However, Google's own mail search is good enough in these circumstances, although I did find it occasionally useful to have an attachment to an e-mail message pointed out to me by Google Desktop.

I've been trying both Copernic and the relatively little known Filehand and find the latter very interesting. It ouputs the results with extracts to show the context of the search terms and you can vary the amount of context you get. Consequently, it is very easy to tell whether or not the item found is the one you are looking for - not always the case with Copernic. However, Copernic is easier to use, in my experience, if you are looking for, say, an MP3 file rather than all files. I haven't quite figured out how the equivalent in Filehand works, which suggests that it is not very intuitive.

At present, however, the probability is that I shall keep Filehand on the computer - unfortunately, the originators have had to go back to full-time jobs: as they say, they couldn't develop a free desktop search program in opposition to companies with multi-million dollar research budgests. However, they keep an eye on the program and if, one of these days, someone comes up with an offer for them (how about it, Sun or an open source agency?), development will be resumed. For now, however, it is free, and worth considering.

I find air travel a complete pain—sitting for hours doing nothing, but winding up feeling dog-tired! However, occasionally one finds something in a flight magazine or a newspaper and, on a recent trip to Porto (Manchester/Frankfurt/Porto and back - almost a full day of travelling each time because there are no direct flights!) I came across a couple of items of interest.

First, in USA Today (not one I read regularly), I found an article, Needless fight threatens Google's online library in which the paper argued, rightly in my opinion, that the publishers are shooting themselves in the foot by trying to prevent Google from making bits of books available online (as I've said before). More interesting perhaps was the response from one Pat Schroeder, described as 'Former Democrat congresswoman', who is now president and chief executive of the Association of American Publishers. Sadly, this was a predictably blinkered response which could have been written by one of her aides and reflected an ignorance of the law relating to copying that is astonishing. (Incidentally, the piece appeared on 7th November, but I found it in what I assume is the European edition on the 9th.)

On the same flight, I picked up The Wall Street Journal - a newspaper that is so right-wing it ought to carry a health warning. However, the European edition for 9th November had an article comparing mapping sites and discovering that MapQuest did a better job of providing directions that either Google or Yahoo. But doesn't everyone use satnav these days? :-) (I couldn't find the article on the Website, even though the Journal is free this week. Free for a week, eh? Bid deal WSJ, one of these days you'll notice that a subscription news site generates no stories when there's so much free stuff around. Why don't you free up most of the site and make the key business stuff and the archive only accessible to subscribers?)

An interesting news item appears on the ZDNet site about an open source alternative to Google's project to digitise books.

My attention was captured by a note about a new book on Google - The Google Legacy: How Google's Internet Search is Tranforming Application Software, by Stephen E. Arnold, which is published by Infonortics.

However, my interest languished when I saw the price - $180.00 €145.00 or £98.43 at today's rate of exchange - for a password to download the .pdf file! I'd have to be mad to pay that amount for a stream of bits, particularly as I'd then have to print out 290 pages of text, at the cost of probably more than one ink cartridge!

It isn't even that the book is some kind of definitive account - it's a speculative work about Google's possible aim of becoming bigger than Microsoft through the development of Web-based services. Very interesting no doubt, but $180.00 interesting? No way! Particularly as John Battelle's recently published book on Google, which also speculates about the future, is also round about 300 pages, comes to me in hard copy for £16.99 - a veritable bargain!

From Search Engine Watch: if you want to know how many pages are indexed by Google, invent a word, ensure it doesn't exist in Google and then do a '-' search for it. I did so, inventing 'clothnekiness' and when I searched for '-clothnekiness' I was told that there were 'about' 9,560,000,000 items.

The name of Vinton Cerf is known to anyone interested in the Internet - he's often credited with its conception - so it is news when he moves to Google as their 'chief Internet evangelist'.

Google

You just know that anyone who could write:

As a company, Google has done wonderful things: it has re-architected knowledge with its search; it has taken the cooties off citizens' media with its ads on blogs.

has to be a 'media commentator and consultant'. "re-architected knowledge" for Heaven's sake - what's that supposed to mean? As for the last bit - it might was well be in Klingon. However, the rest of the article about Google is written by others and is quite interesting. It's a pity the Editor's pen didn't go far enough.

Moving files

I always read the 'Ask Jack' column in the Guardian's Online supplement - lots of useful tips. And this week he has some very useful advice on transferring files to a new PC

Skype

Vanity Fair is not the place I'd normally look for articles on technology but, in this month's issue there's a piece about Skype and it just happens to be one of the articles you can read online for free. To call it a technology article is stretching things ("Night is getting on when three Korean girls in negligée cocktail dresses slip through the crowd, carrying electric violins on their way to the aft stage.") and the writer seems to imagine himself as a cross between Hunter Thompson and Tom Wolfe - he has a style that is not easy reading but continually straining for effect.

There are all kinds of games you can play with Google, including the well-known 'Googlewhacking'. I don't know whether I've invented this one, which I discovered accidentally.

It is very simple: just hit a few keys haphazardly, for example, "l;kd" in the search box of Yahoo and see what turns up. The aim is to put in something that returns nothing - which is surprisingly difficult! That combination, for example, turned up more than one and half million hits! Even entered as a phrase, it produced almost 20,000.

The string ";we[kear'k" resulted in 34 hits, largely as a result of the existence of an author called "K. Kear". However, as a phrase, it produced zero - so it can be done. Remember, however, that they entry of symbols should be haphazard, just let your fingers do the choosing.

Thursday also brought me the latest e-mail version of Current Cites, which I recommend to you for a number of interesting items. These include reference to Walt Crawford's 'Investigating the biblioblogosphere' and related postings in various places. One of these drew attention to Google's Page Rank feature (available on its browser bar for IE and Firefox) - using this, I find that this Weblog has a Page Rank score of 6/10, which is pretty good. Information Research has a Page Rank score of 7/10, which is even better :-)

There's an interesting article on Google's strategy for world domination by one means or another on ZDNet. The fundamental point is that with such applications as Google Mail, Picasa, Desktop Search (and the new Sidebar) and Google Talk, Google appears to be copying the Microsoft strategy of creating a rich 'ecosystem' of mutually interacting applications. Worth a read.

News from ZDNet on Yahoo's new head of research - an interesting short article on where things may be going.

Meanwhile, Google is in conflict with Microsoft over hiring the head of Msoft's Chinese research centre.

Since the whole future of searching depends on having the right brains, look out for more of this.

More news about Google's laboratory experiments - take a look at Google Suggest. Pop a search term in the box and see how various possibilities are suggested in the drop down 'suggestions box'. Note how the contents of the box change rapidly as you input more characters. It's not exactly a thesaurus, more of an alphabetical index, but one that changes automatically as more information is received by the system.

I started to enter the term 'ethnomethodology' and found this list as I got to 'ethnometho-':

ethnomethodology	61,000 results
ethnomethodological	18,100 results
ethnomethodolgy	154 results
ethnomethodology definition	27,700 results
ethnomethology	75 results
ethnomethodology garfinkel	17,500 results
ethnomethodology and garfinkel	17,800 results
ethnomethodological definition	10,300
ethnomethodology garfinkle	430
ethnomethodologist	2,460

So, if I want to know what an ethnomethodologist is and what s/he does, I use the down arrow to move there and click or hit Enter. If, one the other hand, I'm interested in definitions, I have a choice.

This seems to be a pretty slick way of narrowing one's search rather quickly and, according to an item on C|Net, it is the result of using the AJAX technology. As the item points out, this means Asynchronous Javascript + XML, and it has been around a while in various guises, and:

Instead of loading a web page, at the start of the session, the browser loads an Ajax engine — written in JavaScript and usually tucked away in a hidden frame. This engine is responsible for both rendering the interface the user sees and communicating with the server on the user's behalf. The Ajax engine allows the user's interaction with the application to happen asynchronously — independent of communication with the server. So the user is never staring at a blank browser window and an hourglass icon, waiting around for the server to do something.

As Google pushes the envelope, so the competition hots up, with Yahoo releasing Mindset - a search engine with a slider to enable you to sort the output on a scale from 'shopping' to 'research'. It seems to be a trifle crude at present and perhaps they'll introduce more sliders for different characteristics, but it is worth taking a look.

This week's Computer Weekly has more items of interest than usual for me. On the front page is an item about problems with a big merger project involving the clearing house system for the banks. Accenture has been called in to try to sort out the problem, and LCH Clearnet is looking for a new IT director. A box on the page points out that 60% to 70% of similar projects fail to hit budgets and deadlines and up to 40% are total failures. You'd imagine that by now some lessons would have been learnt, wouldn't you.

Also on the front page, a short item about Tony Blair's intention to monitor the government's top twenty IT projects. Amazing—he's running the country, invading Iraq (and possibly, Iran, Syria and North Korea), sticking his finger into every ministerial pie and he still has time to do this! Perhaps he should focus.

Inside, we have an item about the Prudential insurance company's hopes of saving £26 million through an outsourcing deal with Wipro (an outfit in India), while two pages further on we have an article on how Bedfordshire County Council is in trouble with an outsourcing deal! Mmm - are Prudential's hopes optimistic, I wonder?

Also in the news: Google's new 'Mini' - an 'integrated hardware/software search appliance' for searching corporate intranets and Websites, while on another page, another article about the use of desk-top and enterprise search engines.

Next, a questioning item as to the delivery of promises about Java, and a different item on how Java is bringing benefits to British Airways. Did the editors plan these coincidental items, I wonder, or did they just happen to happen?

...and, finally, an item about early adopters of technology.

Microsoft vs. IBM is a feature of some of today's news. ZDNet has an item on the possible purchase of Red Hat's Linux by Microsoft as a strategy in its assumed battle with the Big Blue giant. It's all speculation and based on rather complicated issues (to me) of intellectual property rights in Linux, but, who knows?

The same source tells us that IBM is promoting the use of Firefox to its staff (against MSoft's Internet Explorer), making the software available for downloading from its own servers and providing an internal Help Desk. With a reported 10% of staff already using it (that's about 30,000 people, apparently!), presumably the take-up is likely to be rapid. With IBM pushing Firefox in this way, how long will it take other companies to do the same?

The Mozilla site recently announced that the latest build of Firefox has a 'new' feature - pages are locally cached so that, when the Back and Forward buttons are hit, the page is delivered instantaneously. Just one small point - Opera has had this feature for ages. And there is some doubt as to when this feature will actually get into a full release - at present it's only available on the versions downloaded from the nightly build. Firefox has had a lot of publicity recently, but I suspect that, had Opera been completely free - and free of ads. - Firefox would have been languishing.

No, I'm not suggesting that they are related, but just that there is news out about the two of them.

First, Janco Associates Inc. reports that in the business sector, Firefox now has 10% of the browser market. However, the total market share seems to be about half of that and if MSoft gets its act together in launching a new version of IE, the growth may disappear. Still, Firefox has lots of advantages in terms of customising by add-ins and 'themes', so companies may begin to adopt it, suitably customised, as company standard.

The picture from the point of view of Information Research seems to support Janco's data: this is a table of the distribution of hits over the browser used - a snapshot taken today:

1.	Internet Explorer 6.x	80.3 %
2.	Mozilla Firefox 1.x	9.1 %
3.	Internet Explorer 5.x	4.5 %
4.	Netscape 7.x	1.5 %
5.	Mozilla Firefox	1.5 %
6.	Mozilla 1.x	1.5 %
	Unknown	1.5 %
	Total	100.0 %

The news from Skype is interesting - the first announcement passed me by, since Skype appears not to have informed existing users. Skype 'Out' has been available for some time: you can call a land line from your computer - at low cost - and I use this for some international calls. Now, however, you can also have Skype 'In' - that is, you can have up to 10 telephone numbers assigned, for different countries in the world, which will allow residents of those countries to call your Skype number and get through to your VoIP phone at local phone rates. Very handy if your friends and relatives don't use computers: and also very useful if you are abroad, without a computer, and want to call home - you can call your own local number and make the international call at local rates. The service costs, of course, the princely sum of €30 a year!

From the F-Secure computer security people:

F-Secure staff has found a malicious website that utilizes a spelling error when typing the name of the popular search engine - 'Google.com'. If a user opens a malicious website, his/her computer gets hijacked - a lot of different malware gets automatically downloaded and installed: trojan droppers, trojan downloaders, backdoors, a proxy trojan and a spying trojan. Also a few adware-related files are installed.

The name of the malicious website is 'Googkle.com'. PLEASE DO NOT GO TO THIS WEBSITE! Otherwise your computer will get infected! We have reported the case to the authorities.

Today's Guardian Online has a couple of interesting items. One is on the way the Web is assisting tactical voting in the UK general election (5th May). Using a Website Tacticalvoter.net, a voter can discover whether or not tactical voting will make a difference in their constituency and then 'swop' their vote with someone else in another constituency. So - voter in constituency A (let us say a life-long Labour voter) will agree to vote Liberal Democrat in that constituency, while a partner voter (normally a Liberal Democrat voter) will vote Labour in constituency B. The whole process, of course, is designed to give the party with the best chance of getting rid of a Conservative member of parliament an opportunity to do so. As a Professor of politics has said, it's a kind of proportional representation alternative to the actual electoral system we enjoy in Britain—as well as being an interesting example of the power of the Web.

The other item is on Yahoo's MyWeb—which is actually in the Online Weblog:

My Web is a “personal search engine” that extends users’ existing Yahoo! Search experience by providing a simple way to save, recall and share online information with friends and colleagues. My Web enables users to create their own personal online archive by saving their favourite pages, search results, and search history to My Web. In addition, users can share their information with friends and colleagues via integrated tools such as email, instant messenger, and personal networking provided by Yahoo!’s new Yahoo! 360° tool

Of course, Google has something similar.

If you haven't yet switched to Firefox, reading the pages from the How Stuff Works site may provide you with some good reasons.

Readers will probably recall Terry Brooks's short note on Web services from some time back. The subject pops up again on ZDNet in a column from David Berlind on Yahoo offering APIs to its search engine, so that Web services can be built on it by third parties.

Interesting in itself, but Berlind notes that his Weblog shows a Google search:

Although it still refers to the effort as a beta program, Google has been doing this for over two years. For example, if you check out my Transparency Channel, you can see on the lower right-hand side were I have pre-executed a Google search on "media transparency" and included a results box (Google-branded, of course) right on the page. Radio Userland, the blogging solution that I'm testing for review (using my Transparency Channel as the guinea pig) comes with pre-built macros for accessing Google's search APIs via a Web services interface. All you have to do is get a license key from Google (a relatively simple process that requires getting a user ID on Google's systems) and live with the limitation of 1,000 search executions per day. Google has some pretty tight licensing terms. For example, you can't build a commercial service off the company's APIs without asking first (according to the company's FAQ)

The fun thing is that Berlind hasn't done a search for "media transparency", but for 'media AND/OR transparency', with the result that he attributes third position on the output to one 'William J. Bennett' and sixth position to his own Weblog, whereas, in fact, 'William J. Bennett' doesn't appear on the first page of the results and Berlind's Weblog is at fifth position—or, indeed, third position if one removes items two and four, which are pages within sites one and three. Those inverted commas do make a difference :-)

VoIP

It looks as though VoIP is forging ahead, with Skype announcing a PDA version (Pocket PC rather than Palm, unfortunately), and also a deal with Motorola. Motorola comment:

With over 68 million downloads of their client in the last 18 months, we believe Skype is a natural fit with our vision of simple and seamless connectivity for our consumer customers around the globe.

FireFox

It is announced that Microsoft will launch Internet Explorer 7 as a separate package, and the suggestion is that the success of Firefox has got it worried, since the plan was to keep it integrated with Windows. Molly Wood - columnist for C|Net - suggests that this will kill off FireFox. I wouldn't be too sure. MSoft's reputation for producing insecure, buggy code, which doesn't satisfy W3C standards is unlikely to make people confident about a new browser, even if it has all the goodies that FireFox brings. But FireFox may find it difficult to maintain the momentum.

The University of Sheffield server gives me data on the use of the InformationR.net site, monthly. One of the tables shows the search terms used and the table below shows the top 20 (21 actually, because the last two are tied)for four months from October 2004. The original information only shows the top 50 search strings and the percentage shown here refers to the total hits of that top 50 - not all hits.

Search term	No.	%
Environment(al) scanning +	1309	12.24
Critical success factor(s)	906	8.47
Information research +	823	7.70
Curriculum development	807	7.55
Qualitative vs.quantitative +	580	5.42
Knowledge management +	551	5.15
Norway	469	4.39
Duality	356	3.33
Resumenes	333	3.11
Conceptual model(s)	323	3.02
Research methods	287	2.68
Business environment	278	2.60
Total Quality Management	272	2.54
Action research	254	2.38
Reference Manager	199	1.86
Research journal(s)	198	1.85
Information explosion	184	1.72
Knowledge	181	1.69
British Standard(s)	139	1.30
Five personality traits +	137	1.28
Management decision making	137	1.28

A lot of the search strings suggest that users are looking for 'known items', rather than simply searching in general. For example, 'Resumenes' is the term used for the 'Abstracts in Spanish' page; 'Reference Manager' refers to one of the bibliographic software packages that has been reviewed in the journal, and 'EndNote' and 'Biblioscape' also appear; 'Information Research' and its variants (indicated in the table by +) 'ir' and 'InformationR.net', clearly suggest a search for the site or the journal. Some are more difficult to interpret - 'Environment(al) scanning' may be a general search string, or a search for papers in the special issue on that topic and, similarly, 'Curriculum development' may mean that the user was searching for one of the highly hit papers or that a more general search was intended. 'Duality' is an unusual term, but it makes sense in terms of one of the papers in the 'knowledge management' issue, while 'Five personality traits' and its variants is probably searching for Heinström's paper.

It's a subjective point, but I have the impression that these searches of the journal are rather more explicit and focussed than Web searches in general. And I guess that is to be expected—although the occasional oddity pops up, such as the 99 searches using 'Problems of the world'. I know that information scientists can do many things, but this seems to be asking a little too much!

I've been using Google Desktop - or rather it has been on my hard disc, unused since October - and I was finding that the system was slowing down. I was also getting a message immediately after booting up to the effect that virtual memory was low. The only thing that I could think of that might be having this effect was Google Desktop, so I've removed it and the problems seem to have disappeared.

When you remove the software a page pops up in your Web browser asking why you've done it and offering some options, one of which was, My system has slowed down - or words to that effect - so, obviously, Google is aware that there is a problem.

Presumably it is the continuous indexing that is the problem and I suppose that the start-up memory needed, is more than what I have can bear. I also noted that Task Manager was telling me that CPU usage was 100% - and that was before I'd launched any application.

Nice idea these desktop search devices, but perhaps the system costs are too high?

Prompted by Amir's message I took a look at the site and at others - especially GoogleRankings, where I found that in searches for 'knowledge management' the journal site ranks 104th in the top 1,000 and 224th for 'information management'; the World list of departments... ranks 126th in searches for 'information management' and the 'nonsense' paper ranks 22nd in searches for 'knowledge management'.

These are just pointless facts that will enable you to delight and baffle your friends :-) And, of course, a reminder that publishing in Information Research is sure to get you noticed :-)

A game where you predict which web pages will rank more highly on Google in the future! The output of the game will be used to build the Speculative Search Engine that ranks those web pages more highly today.

http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~amichail/spec/

Google has been much in the news as a result of its venture into the digital library - on a huge scale. Today's Observer (one of the so-called 'broadsheet' Sunday papers in the UK, for those who don't know it, and part of the Guardian family) has an article in its business section on Google's latest venture, in which John Naughton refers to Howard Reingold's seminal work on the virtual community:

Many years ago, Howard Rheingold, who was one of the first people to understand the social potential of cyberspace, posed an interesting question: 'Where is the Library of Congress, when it's on your laptop?' To most people at the time, it seemed a meaningless question. What lay behind it, however, was an attempt to think through a profound consequence of a networked society - what Frances Cairncross later dubbed 'the death of distance'.

Naughton also notes:

Once upon a time, being learned involved holding a lot of knowledge and information in one's head. Are we moving towards a world where the important thing is not what you know, but how to find it?

an idea expressed many long years ago by Dr. Johnson (as reported by James Boswell—in 1791):

Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it."

which is also a very neat definition of the difference between 'knowledge' and 'information' :-)

Google was also the subject of one of Fortune's long articles last week, too. The focus was on the share price and the probability of investors getting their return (the verdict seemed to be, 'Be cautious'), but, among other things it has some interesting stuff on the competition.

Thanks also to Gerry Mckiernan and the ASIS-L mailing list for bringing another Google item to my attention; this time in the New York Times (you'll need to register to read the article, but registration is free).

The article contains a nice story about the irreplaceability of the physical book – for some purposes:

Mr. Jimerson said, 'A scanned image will only tell you some things, and the sheer volume of records makes scanning everything difficult'. But he added that he supported Google's plan in theory. 'I recall the story of a gentleman being in a library and watching a researcher sniff books', he said. 'It turned out that the aroma of vinegar was still embedded in those that had been treated with vinegar to prevent cholera during an epidemic'.

Thanks to Gerry also for another item in the New York Times – this time on Firefox. With Pennsylvania State University telling everyone on campus to switch from Internet Explorer, it would seem that Microsoft has a little problem on its hands – one that may result in a policy switch, unless arrogance holds sway in Redmond. If there is a policy switch it would require IE to be re-written from the ground up, so Firefox may go ahead by leaps and bounds. Try it—my guess is that, if you are an IE user, you'll need less than ten minutes with the new rival (well, not so new, if you've been using it for the past couple of years in its development phase) to convince you to switch.

I've been working in Oporto for the past week with little chance to catch up on current developments, so here's my backlog:

• There's news of IBM's efforts to develop information retrieval systems for use in corporate networks, rather than on the Internet. It comes a little late to this sector, with Google Desktop and a new version of Copernic already in play. My guess is that IBM is likely to make the usual technology-led errors in producing a system, that is, greater complexity in preparing search formulations than users are likely to buy, and not enough work behind the interface to interpret relatively simple formulations. Corporate files also suffer from a very difficult problem for information retrieval, one that was described to me many years ago on a visit to Shell - a North Sea drilling platform could be identified in documents by a project code-name, by geographical coordinates, by the designation assigned once the platform was in use, such as 'Platform Alpha' or by a phrase such as, 'the project'.



• The The International Telecommunication Union has produced a press release headed, Low Cost Broadband and Internet Access Essential to Information Society with a link to Best Practice Guidelines for the Promotion of Low Cost Broadband and Internet Connectivity. This document lists some very worthy aims, but one wonders whether competition and regulation are really likely to deliver low prices. In many countries the national PTT or the dominant controller of existing wires can effectively control access to the necessary exchanges and so on; in these circumstances something stronger than 'regulation' may be needed. As for competition: well, we have that in fuel supply to the garage forecourt, but I don't see too much impact on price.



• The big news for libraries, of course, was that Google is in the process of scanning millions of books in the libraries of Harvard, Stanford and Michigan universities, in the New York Public Library, and the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Other contributions to the debate about this initiative can be found here, and here, and at the Wall Street Journal (setting aside its neocon bias for a change!)

As we might expect, Google Scholar has raised a lot of interest. There's an interesting Weblog entry from a guy who works for Ingenta on working with Google to enable content to be 'crawled'—rather 'techie' for a non-nerd like myself, but interesting nonetheless.

Search Engine Watch also has an item - a moan about the lack of documentation, so that we don't know what Google Scholar actually covers - a very necessary moan, particularly when students these days seem to believe that if they can't find something by using Google, it doesn't exist.

I haven't used 'Scholar' much yet, but I don't like the output form: for some totally irrational reason, I'm happy to put up with it for a Web search, but the format doesn't fit my conception of what output relating to the scholarly literature should look like. I'll have to take a closer look and figure out why I have this reaction.

Those folk at Google are certainly stirring things up with the launch of 'Google Scholar (Beta)' a variant of the search engine to access the scholarly literature.

According to the New York Times (you'll need to register):

The engineer who led the project, Anurag Acharya, said the company had received broad cooperation from academic, scientific and technical publishers like the Association of Computing Machinery, Nature, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Online Computer Library Center.

The new Google service, which includes a listing of scientific citations as well as ways to find materials at libraries that are not online, will not initially include the text advertisements that are shown on standard pages for Google search results.

Testing something like this is rather tricky when the coverage is unknown. However, I tried just a simple, but slightly obscure search phrase, "colliery spoil" and got a list of 146 items. Some are listed as 'CITATION', for exampe:

[CITATION] Effective passive treatment of aluminium-rich, acidic colliery spoil drainage using a compost … - Web Search
PL Younger, TP Curtis, A Jarvis, R Pennell - Cited by 10
Journal of the Chartered Institution of Water and …, 1997

Click on the 'Web search' link and, as you see, it does just that; click on the 'Cited by 10' link and you are given a list of the ten sources that have cited this item, with the same layout and more links to items that cite the cited items—one could get rather dizzy going through this lot!

Other items in the original list are links to information on the Web, although not always the complete document. For example, this link leads to an abstract in PubMed, not to the original document:

Substrate characterisation for a subsurface reactive barrier to treat colliery spoil leachate
PW Amos, PL Younger - Cited by 4
Substrate characterisation for a subsurface reactive barrier to treat colliery spoil leachate. Amos PW, Younger PL. FaberMaunsell ...
Water Research, 2003 - ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

The 146 items consisted of 35 Citation entries and 111 Web links

On 11/15/04, Tom Wilson said:

>Opera has many of the same features as FireFox (and had them
>earlier) and it does some things better; but I like the way
>FireFox does tabs better, even though its inability to stop sites
>from launching windows without the navigation bar is frustrating.

Actually, it can do that, but it's a hidden preference.

In your browser, go to this url: "about:config". (No http: or
anything, just exactly "about:config".)

At the top of the long list of preferences that it shows, there is
a textbox. Paste this into that checkbox (without the quotes):
"dom.disable_window_open".

Double click on the line that says
"dom.disable_window_open_feature.titlebar". That will change the
value from false to true. From now on, when a web page opens a new
window, it will be unable to hide the toolbar.

Seth

There's an interesting little discussion going on at ZD-Net about the open source browser, FireFox. One of the staff writers is bidding farewell to Internet Explorer and, as one or two of the discussants ask, "Why's it taken you so long?"

I've been using alternative browsers since Opera first appeared and I now use FireFox most of the time - it's something of a toss-up between these two: Opera has many of the same features as FireFox (and had them earlier) and it does some things better; but I like the way FireFox does tabs better, even though its inability to stop sites from launching windows without the navigation bar is frustrating. Also, unless you aren't bothered by ads, FireFox is free, whereas Opera costs - not a lot, but...

With Opera and FireFox in the market I just don't understand why anyone uses IE any longer, other than for those sites that seem to imagine that nothing else exists.