Information Research Weblog

Google's October newsletter points to new search developments. At Google Experimental you can try out, and give feedback on, a number of experimental features. These include atimeline presentation of results, a map view and the additional information view. There are also some keyboard shortcuts for navigating through search output and a couple of views that provide contextual navigation bars to the left or right of the search output. Of these, the timeline presentation and the keyboard shortcuts seem the most useful to me.

The website http://www.libraries.psu.edu/ebsl/searchstrategies.htm provides the reader with great tips and ideas when searching for specific information. After reading the information on the website, it actually made my new searches easier with more articles that pertained to my topics. In the first section under Vocabulary Section, it discusses how one should keep a research log. Keeping a research log will save a lot of time by just jotting down little steps for each search. This is very important when you are trying to do a research paper.

I see that the founder of Wikipedia is getting into the search business, with a project to develop a 'community organized' search engine. It'll be interesting to found out what happens, but I found the mailing list contributions pretty impenetrable. I guess the 'community' involved here consists of the open software programmers.

Sorry about the long post yesterday - my efforts to use a macro to avoid it failed and I'm still researching the problem

Jimmy Atkinson of the Online Education Database, has drawn my attention to an article he has written on Research Beyond Google. This is a list, with links, of 119 research resources, including 'deep Web' search engines, books online, general research, government literature, etc. There's an understandable US bias here, but it ought not to be too difficult to create local replicas of the list.

1. Google

The Guardian newspaper has an interesting article about Google getting into the political lobby business. With all of the threats to 'net neutrality' and related issues, this is probably not before time!

2. Firefox

Version 2.0 is due to be released at 17.00 Pacific Standard Time today - 00.00 GMT. According to the BBC News report:

The first version of Firefox was released in November 2004 and since then has steadily been chipping away at the dominance of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser.

Now it is believed to enjoy a 12-15% market share of the net browsing market globally. But, said Mike Schroepfer, vice-president of engineering at Mozilla, in some nations the share is far higher.

Mr Schroepfer said that there were about 12 big improvements in Firefox 2.0 along with thousands of minor tweaks and bug fixes.

Big changes include a phishing finder that alerts people when they stray on to a site that tries to trick them into handing over login details for a bank or other valuable service.

Another change was a spell checker that keeps an eye on every bit of text typed in almost any Firefox browser box be it in a web-based e-mail program or an add-on that lets people post blog updates directly.

Firefox 2.0 also has an improved session restoration system that will let users resurrect tabbed webpages they accidentally closed or will re-start a net session at the point before a crash.

Other changes include improvements to the web feed, search engine and add-ons manager.

My thanks to Associate Editor, Terry Brooks for drawing my attention to WebCite, a newish service that fills a major gap for electronic journal editors - the problem of the dead link. WebCite will look up a non-journal Web page that you have referenced, cache it and give you a new, permanent URL so that the page is retrieved from the cache, rather than from the original source. Many news pages and company pages disappear from the Web or are moved to undiscoverable locations and are, to all intents and purposes, 'dead'.

I am asking all authors to review their papers and, where a linked page has a probability of disappearing from the Web, to use WebCite to creat a permanent URL. This will make life much easier for readers!

The following information is going into the Instructions for Authors tonight:

WebCite  WebCite is a free service that enables you to replace URLs likely to 'die' with URLs that are permanent links to cached versions of the same page. Please use this service for any URLs that are of this character such as links to news pages, company pages, Weblogs, etc..

You can use WebCite by going to the site and clicking on:

1. 'Archive' on the navigation bar at the top of the page. Enter a URL that you wish to archive and your e-mail address. The page will be archived and you will be sent a URL to use in the reference list; or
2. 'Bookmarklet' and following the instructions for creating a JavaScript bookmarklet; or
2. 'Comb' and uploading the file you wish to have reviewed for the identification of appropriate links. (In my experience it is best to click on 'Consider all links' and then select those that you wish to have cached.) WebCite will replace all of your URLs with permanent links to the cached pages.

Use the permanent URL only in the 'live' link to the page, citing the original page URL as part of the reference, thus:

Chris. (2003, March 24). Why a search engine crawler is not at all like Lynx. Message posted to http://www.searchguild.com (Search engine optimization (SEO) forums). Retrieved 8 June, 2006 from http://www.searchguild.com/tpage283-0.html

If you roll your mouse pointer over the live link, you will see that it points to www.webcitation.org, while the original URL is given below.

Google's Book Search, which I admit to using rarely, has a new feature, which has attracted the interest of at least one discussion list - LITA-L. The feature is the capacity to identify library catalogues that hold items. The Book Search Weblog says that the library catalogue search results will be presented if it looks as though there's no record in Google. However, you can choose to search the union catalogues upon which this is based by using the advanced search page. The debate on LITA-L seems not to take account of this point and individuals berate Google for not providing library catalogue links in addition to the normal Book Search output.

Well, if librarians have a grouse about this, I guess it is their own fault: why don't more of them enter into partnership with Google by, say, using Google Search as their Website search engine? I know that a limited number of libraries do have partnerships in relation to the digitization of (mainly) out-of-print books, but the real potential of partnering with Google seems not to have been explored very widely.

This week's Guardian technology supplement has a short article by long-time commentator, Jack Schofield, on the recent AOL security lapse that enabled the identification of people using its search engine (provided by Google). Jack raises the issue of using privacy software and services to hide one's identity and provides some links. The most useful of these, at least as far as I could determine is the Electronic Privacy Information Centre which is a page of links to 'Snoop Proof Email', 'Anonymous Remailers' and a variety of other tools. This is a good spot if you want to 'snoop proof' yourself.

Having played with Microsoft's 'Academic Search' recently, it's a pity that its coverage is not as wide as Google Scholar. Coverage is currently restricted to computer science, electrical engineering, medicine and physics but, of course, the computer science coverage overlaps with information science (as does medicine, which covers health information). That's still 4,300 journals from a wide range of publishers and, unlike, Google Scholar, you can see a list of the co-operating publishers and the journals covered. Information Research isn't one of them, yet, so I suggest that you all write in and tell them to include it :-)

Unlike Google Scholar, you can view an almost full record in a panel at the side of the output list, and that record can be in normal form (called Abstract) or in BibTex, RefWorks or EndNote format - ready to be cut and pasted. Also, the search output can be sorted by Relevance, Oldest Date, Newest Date, Author, Journal or Conference.

Check out a search on "information seeking behaviour"

I thought I'd re-run a search on Google Scholar to discover the most cited papers from Information Research - here they are. In parentheses after the Scholar score I give the number of citations found in Web of Knowledge - 'not found' means that, when I ran a search on the title of the paper, WoK failed to find the paper. I also give the number of hits on the page as reported today by the page counter.

1. The nonsense of 'knowledge management'
   TD Wilson Information Research, Vol. 8 No. 1, October 2002. ...
   Hits 121,473 Cited by 72 (WoK 4)
2. The effect of query complexity on Web searching results
   BJ Jansen Information Research, Volume 6 No. 1 October 2000 The effect of query complexity on Web searching results, by Bernard J. Jansen ...
   Hits 4,370 Cited by 39 (WoK not found)
3. The duality of knowledge
   PJ Hildreth, C Kimble Information Research, Vol. 8 No. 1, October 2002. ...
   Hits 34,587 Cited by 36 (WoK 0)
4. Business use of the World Wide Web: a report on further investigations
   YJP Hooi-Im Ng, TD Wilson Information Research, Vol. 3 No. 4, April 1998. ...
   Hits 13,111 Cited by 35 (WoK 12)
5. Searching heterogeneous collections on the Web: behaviour of Excite users
   A Spink, J Bateman, BJ Jansen Information Research, Vol. 4 No. 2, October 1998. ...
   Hits 8,570 Cited by 34 (WoK not found)
6. What is this link doing here? Beginning a fine-grained process of identifying reasons for academic …
   M Thelwall Information Research, Vol. 8 No. 3, April 2003. ...
   Hits 3,424 Cited by 33 (WoK 1)
7. The Semantic Web: Opportunities and Challenges for Next-Generation Web Applications
   S Lu, M Dong, F Fotouhi Information Research, Vol. 7 No. 4, July 2002. ...
   Hits 7,319 Cited by 31 (WoK not found)
8. Electronic journals and scholarly communication: a citation and reference study
   SP Harter, HJ Kim Information Research, Vol. 2 No. 1, August 1996. ...
   Hits 5,496 Cited by 31 (WoK not found)
9. A social network study of the growth of community among distance learners
   C Haythornthwaite Information Research, Vol. 4 No. 1, July 1998. ...
   Hits 9,939 Cited by 29 (WoK not found)
10. Information exchange in virtual communities: a typology
    G Burnett Information Research, Vol. 5 No. 4, July 2000. ...
    Hits 10,470 Cited by 29 (WoK not found)

The ratio of 'hits' to Scholar cites varies enormously - from the most 'productive', which is number 6, generating one Scholar cite for every 104 hits, to the least productive, number 1, which needs 1,687 hits to generate a Scholar cite. If we remove these two from the list, as being unusual in some respect or other, the average hits to cites is 352:1 Does anyone have a student looking for a dissertation topic? - all the data are there in the search and in the hit records on the papers. It would be nice to say to authors, 'For every 'x' hits on your paper you are likely to get a citation recorded by Google Scholar', and suddenly the virtue of publishing in free, open-access journals becomes evident :-)

I've just found out about Browster an extension for Firefox and plug-in for Internet Explorer. The idea is beautifully simple: Browster associates an icon with every link on a Web page - hover on that icon and the associated Web page pops up in a Browster window. This applies, for example, to the internal links in a page as well as external links, so you can hover on the reference links in an Information Research paper and the associated reference list pops up in a Browster window - no more forwards and backwards, to and from the reference list when you want to check on a reference as you read.

This is definitely a 'must get'!

Some news out, while I've been away, about new developments at Google. Most of the goodies provided seem to me to be little more than candy for the nerds and I wouldn't dream of cluttering up my screen with them. However, one, Google Trends, is rather interesting from the point of view of the information scientist.

Trends gives you graphical information on the use of search terms and phrases and also shows the cities, regions and languages of the searcher.

Put "knowledge management" into the search box and up pops a graph showing the decline in use of this phrase as a search term, along with bar charts for the Cities, Regions and Languages. Unfortunately no scales are provided, so we have no idea of the quantities involved - is the trend starting from several million searches or 10,000?

Whatever the answer to that question may be, however, the list of Cities, etc., confirms my intuition, derived from looking at search outputs myself and also seeing papers on the subject, that the interest in km comes mainly from the Far East. Quite why that should be so, I don't know, but with the USA and the UK figuring not at all, it does make one wonder about the continuing hype on the subject.

Removing the quotation marks and using simply knowledge management, which Google's engine translates into knowledge AND management doesn't make an awful lot of difference to the output, except that news items are now recorded.

Put a comma between two search terms and you get a graph comparing the two - for example, "knowledge management", "information management". As you see, information management has also declined, but not to the same extent.

Try information management on its own and a picture emerges

of interest from India, the USA and Australia and the UK creeps on to the Regions list in 10th position.

If the other new features of Google are for the nerds, I guess that this one is candy for the information scientist :-)

I have been using Internet Explorer 7, Beta 2 for the past few days and find it a huge improvement on version 6.0 - this one could be a real Firefox killer. IE7 appears to be totally stable on my laptop in this Beta version, although we may have to wait a month or two for the final version. The new features include stuff that is old hat so far as Firefox users are concerned - tabbed browsing, for example, but the whole interface has been re-engineered to provide more screen space for Web pages. The new positions for some of the old icons takes a little getting used to and the old menu of File, Edit, View, etc. is optional rather than mandatory - I've been keeping it there as an interim measure until I figure out how to do things without it.

There are some things that IE7 does better than Firefox in terms of tabbed browsing - for one, there's a 'new tab' button beside the last tab in the row and a 'close tab' X on each tab - both of these features make it much easier to use tabs than in Firefox. Another feature (which can be provided for Firefox by an extension) is a new 'Quick Tabs' button, which brings up a page consisting of clickable images of. all pages currently open. With many tabs open, this is a Godsend.

Information Week has a feature comparing the two browsers, which concludes:

On a straight, feature-for-feature comparison, IE7 stacks up well against Firefox. If its improved security model lives up to its design specs, malware distributors will find it much more difficult to make a dishonest living, and the tabbed browsing features in the new release should make it much easier to deal with multiple pages.

The biggest hurdle that Internet Explorer has to overcome, however, is one that doesn't fit on any features chart. Its tattered reputation -- especially when it comes to security -- has created an indelible negative impression among the technically savvy users who've enthusiastically adopted Firefox so far. Even if the final release of IE7 improves mightily over the current beta, building that new and improved reputation will be an uphill climb.

That seems to me to be overstating things for Firefox - it's market share has never really it made it to a breakthrough position - the latest statistics show IE with 84.85% and Firefox with 4.23%. The key term in the second quotation of the paragraph is 'technically savvy', and, as the statistics show, the majority of Internet users are not technically savvy - they want something that 'works out of the box' and can't be bothered with themes and extensions, especially when those themes and extensions fail to work from version to version. My guess is that, when IE7 is finally released, Firefox's small market share will nosedive. It won't help that one of the key features of version 2.0, Places, will not now happen.

I've been a fan and advocate of Firefox since it was Phoenix, but I think that Microsoft has finally got its act together on this one.

Business Week online has an interesting article about the trials and tribulations of Google, from class actions by the publishers to agro from human rights activists - Google seems untroubled by all this and its profits are growing.

The Chicago Tribune has a longish article on the decision by U.S. District Judge James Ware to deny the Bush government access to search statements made by users of Google.

I see that Google's dispute with the US government rumbles on.

It's all a bit daft, really. The government is going to discover nothing from the data that is not already well reported in the literature; they are not going to discover anything about trends, since they are not getting any time-series data; and it all seems for show on their part - trying to prove to the American public that they have their concerns at heart.

Google is being equally daft: although I support their stand, it is equally evident that revealing search terms will say nothing at all about individual users. I support their stand because the next step for government will be to ask for that individual user data!

In the early days of the Web, many Internet users thought they would become sophisticated online researchers in the future, but now it seems that everyone is just doing a kind of "search lurch": Enter some words, click through a few search results, and maybe you'll find what you're looking for in a second or two... or maybe you'll just give up and move on to something else.

Four Web experts — Jakob Nielsen, Jesse James Gerrett, Gerry McGovern and Tara Calishain — weigh in:

http://www.phptr.com/articles/article.asp?p=418857&rl=1

According to Information Week

Google Upgrades Desktop Software
In moves that "amount to a new operating system," according to a Gartner analyst, the company is introducing a different way of organizing, finding, and sharing information.

Readers will be aware that I've been a Firefox advocate since it was called Phoenix, but I am now totally disenchanted. The problem? Firefox 0.7 was a pretty stable product - extensions worked and, in particular, those for add-ons such as Evernote and Folio were very useful. However, with 1.5 and now with 1.5.01, the installation of extensions appears to be a problem for lots of people. When an extension fails to instal a gnomic message appears referring one to the Javascript Console and there one finds equally, or even more, gnomic messages, such as "No chrome package registered for chrome://disabletarget/content/cusserfox.png." I'm not quite sure what the ordinary user is supposed to make of all this, but I've switched to Maxthon, which seems to work pretty well perfectly all the time, has a better pop-up blocker than Firefox and a better way of handling downloads - no blank pages popping up and then disappearing and then reappearing. So Firefox has probably not only lost a user, but also an advocate.

And, coming up on the horizon is Microsoft's Mozilla-killer, Internet Explorer 7. There's quite a lot of news in the newsletters and Weblogs about the beta release (having read the warnings from Microsoft about what the beta can do to your installation, I wouldn't touch it with a barge-pole myself, but the techie journos seem to be finding that it is a good product. Microsoft does seem to have listened to the users and to have learnt from browsers like Opera and Firefox. My betting is that, once it is released, the rest are going to find it pretty hard to keep what market share they have.

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.