Information Research Weblog

U.S. District Judge James Ware on Thursday set the date for the highly anticipated hearing, which is expected to determine whether the U.S. Justice Department will prevail in its fight to force Google to help it defend an anti-pornography law this fall.

The key date is 27 February.

Bernie Sloan posted an interesting list of comments on the Google vs. Bush battle on the LITA list recently. I don't think he'll mind me passing it on in this way

• Los Angeles Times
• Baltimore Sun
• Lower Hudson Journal News (NY)
• USA Today
• The Columbian (Clark County, WA)
• Chicago Sun Times
• Unofficial Google Weblog

To these we can add, from the UK

• The Guardian
• The Times

Last week's Guardian Technology supplement contained an item on the emergence of a couple of 'social bookmarking' sites in the information technology area. The article suggested that Digg and Reddit might well take over the prime spot in IT news sites from Slashdot and pointed to the differences: Slashdot contributions are subject to editorial review, while those in the other two are the result of users votes on what is interesting.

Whatever the pros and cons of that debate, there is no doubt that Digg and Reddit are wonderful places to visit if you want to waste some time, discovering interesting but probably completely useless bits of information. I think I could live without the photo essay on an Argentinian family, for example, but it is a fascinating set of pictures! And for the truly weird, try the 1990 Nintendo catalogue.

There is useful stuff, of course, but you may only come across it by chance if a sufficient number of members of the site have rated it so that it comes high on the list—I'm not going to wade through pages on the off-chance of finding something useful. For example, I discovered that Gmail is finally going to make a 'Delete' button available

I had to stop, however: I just don't have that kind of browse time available!

I've been having some odd problems with Firefox recently: I'd given up, temporarily, on version 1.5 and gone back to 1.0.7 and then, earlier today, for some unknown reason, it crashed and disappeared from the screen. I re-launched it, but it wouldn't load pages and not all of the menu buttons functioned. So... I downloaded version 1.5 to give it another try, but I kept getting the same message about being unable to load extensions because of some java problem; and the information isn't specific enough to let me know what kind of problem.

So I downloaded the Maxthon browser, which runs on the IE engine: it's got tabbed browsing and does pretty well everything that Firefox does and I think it is actually a little bit faster. However, last thing I've done is to download Firefox 1.0.7 again and install it - it now runs OK, but won't launch reply windows for my webmail system. So perhaps I'll have to become an advocate for Maxthon. Is it my imagination, or does Firefox generate a crop of problems with each new release?

There was recently a column on, I think, ZDNet in which the author said that he thought that Google's stock would go down hill in 2006, in part because 'social tagging', in the mode of del.icio.us would come to dominate the search market, and Google didn't have such a system.

There's an awful lot of hype about this, these days, but those hyping appear not to realise two things: first, 'social tagging' is an informal analogue of what Google actually does in a more systematic manner. The page rank algorithm, although secret, is known to rank pages on the basis of the extent to which they are cited by others. Sounds a lot as though the links at the top of the output are the result of a 'social' decision, doesn't it? Secondly, where do those who contribute their links to del.icio.us find the pages? My guess is that they use Google; so what is being reported is what Google finds in the first place.

And they tell me that this haphazard process of a limited number of people (against the millions who actually use the Web - and use Google for their searches) submitting their links, is going to lead to a better search system? Crazy in my opinion.

'Tagging' is also proposed as a new phenomenon. But what is it? Simply 'indexing'. Of course, the 'tagging' term is promoted by people who know nothing about indexing, have probably never heard the term and imagine that assigning a keyword or a phrase to a document is something novel. This is how fads begin! All we need is the proposal that 'social tagging' is a new 'knowledge management' technique and we'll know that it is about to die :-)

Further to my previous message on this topic, I have now attached a link to Google Scholar's citation search for each paper in the journal from Volume 1 no. 1 to Volume 9 no. 4. Check it out from the journal's top page. If you are an Information Research author and your paper doesn't have a link, it means that your paper has no citations (at least according to Google Scholar).

On 12/27/05, Tom Wilson said:

>I was quite surprised to discover that the beta version became the
>release version about a week later.

Tom, that's just not true. There were numerous beta versions, and three
"release candidate" builds that each lasted for more than a week. I was
using a 1.5 beta versions for *months*.

Part of the problem with the extensions is that the developers (of the
extensions) have moved on. All platforms (and in this case, Firefox is
a platform) go through this: people write software for the platform,
achieve some recognition and think they've found the key to riches and
fame. When the money doesn't start rolling in ("Why isn't everyone
paying me to write custom extensions? My tab-enhancer rocks, surely
everyone can see my talents!?") they come back to reality. From that
point on, the extensions that were being developed so feverishly in the
past are now maintained and updated with a lot less enthusiasm.

When the Mozilla team made some important and much needed changes to
how extensions interact with Firefox, they didn't really give the
extension authors any renewed hope for fame and riches. (Ok, I'm being
slightly sarcastic with the 'fame and riches' reference, but not
entirely.)

It wouldn't have mattered if Firefox 1.5 stayed in beta for another
year, with zero changes. Many of the developers *never* would have dug
into Mozilla's notes to find out what needs to be changed.

(There's another problem. Lots of these "open source" extensions are
only developed by a single person who's being paid by another single
individual who needed a particular feature. If that person doesn't pony
up the cash to pay for the extension to be updated for compatibility
with Firefox 1.5, then the extension will languish. This happens all
the time.)

Having said all that, could you tell me which extensions you were
missing? I'm still 'involved' with Mozilla, and may know of suitable
replacements.

Seth

I've removed Firefox 1.5 and gone back to version 1.0.7 mainly because the developers haven't caught up yet and so some 70% of the extensions don't work. There's a lot of comment on the Mozilla discussion lists about this. I think Firefox jumped the gun somewhat since it was originally announced that version 1.5 would be available some time in the early new year. I was quite surprised to discover that the beta version became the release version about a week later. I'm going to wait a few months until all of the extensions are available for such things as NetSnippets, Onfolio and EverNote. I don't use all three of these, but I'm in the process of reviewing Onfolio and not being able to use it with Firefox was becoming a pain.

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?