“Our finding (…) is that almost every site’s search engine could use improvement. We also found that most organizations’ Web teams couldn’t really affect the quality of their search results – they were stuck tweaking search technologies that had already been purchased and installed. Often, the most dramatic change they could make was in the design of the search and results interfaces. In some cases, as the old saying goes, this was like putting lipstick on a pig. But cleaning things up does help users find answers to their queries.” (Jeffrey Veen – Adaptive Path)

“Your search engine can make or break your site. This report with give you the tools you need to get search working.” (Adaptive Path)

“Combining collaboration, tangibility and calmness, researchers at the University of Cambridge have harnessed the future to produce a search interface with a difference.” (Ann Light – Usability News)

“We’ve written a script in PHP that you can add to individual pages or entire websites that will automatically highlight words in your page if the user has followed a link from a search engine results page.” (Brian Suda and Matt Riggott – A List Apart)

“The mistake of building entire sites in Flash is not just an amateur’s mistake – many leading Web designers, who are paid copious amounts of money, do the same thing. Sometimes the use of Flash is the only way to achieve a specific function (e.g. Web-based games), so you need Flash for that feature – but do you need it for the whole site?” (Alan K’necht – Digital Web Magazine)

“Metasearch promises to give patrons one-stop access to the many and various resources at the heart of the library digital collection.” (Judy Luther – Library Journal) – courtesy of urlgreyhot

“Federated searching is a hot topic that seems to be gaining traction in libraries everywhere. As with many technologies that are rapidly adopted,there are some misconceptions about what it can do.” (Information Today)

“Clearly, the rate of improvement in delivering high quality search results isn’t keeping up with Moore’s Law in terms of doubling every couple of years. In fact, the ‘law of search results’ could be expressed as an inverse to the growth in the size and complexity of the data.” (Dan Farber – ZDNet)

“If you want to find information fast, you need search and retrieval technology. That is not news to people who have been interfacing with IT tools for the last decade. Even laypeople are familiar with recreational search engines, like AltaVista, used for exploring the Internet. Early on in its development, search made inroads into vertical markets like financial services and as an adjunct functionality embedded in KM and document management products.” (John Harney – KMWorld) – courtesy of elearningpost

The Hague, The Netherlands (19-20 April 2004) – Available presentations in PDF (infonortics)

“The NSW Office of Fair Trading launched its first intranet in June 2003. At the very beginning of the intranet project we recognised that unless users could find information easily the intranet would not succeed. We also understood that different people prefer to find information in different ways. To maximise the chances of searchers finding relevant information, and to provide flexibility in search options, we developed and implemented metadata driven search and browse functions. This case study describes the standards, tools and technology we used and how metadata was manipulated to retrieve information in a number of different ways.” (NSW Office of Information and Communications Technology) – courtesy of column two

“Read about how one would query to retrieve the longest word in the English language: is it ‘floccinaucinihilipilification’ (a possible answer) or possibly ‘pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis’ (a better answer?) According to Bill: These tasks will require systems that can determine what passages are saying and reason with the resulting knowledge, and they will require additional sources of knowledge and advancements in automated reasoning. An active research area devoted to question-answering is currently pursuing such goals.” (W.A. Woods – Sun Microsystems Laboratories)

“We need to embed both people and information within a system that fits how people in the organization work, that understands the workflow and when the needs for information arise. People need to use information within the context of their jobs and their environment. It’s not just the information that is vital to the organization. It’s the exchange of information, the information within the context of the people and the situation of the moment that needs to be recorded and tracked so that when people disappear, the reasons why decisions are made remain behind.” (Susan Feldman – KMWorld) – courtesy of john rhodes

“Having the right information at the right time is absolutely essential to one’s business. ‘Information is power!’ or so the saying goes. But while information is a valuable resource, overwhelming information can pose a serious problem.” (Tarchon)

“Much anecdotal evidence suggests that Google is the most popular search engine. However, such claims are rarely backed up by data. The reasons for this are manifold, including the difficulty in measuring search engine popularity and the multiple ways in which the concept can be understood. Here, I discuss the sources of confusion related to search engine popularity. It is problematic to make unfounded assumptions about general users’ search engine choices because by doing so we exclude a large number of people from our discussions about systems development and our understanding of how the average user finds information online.” (Eszter Hargittai – FirstMonday 9.3)

“To find information, a reader uses either a search engine or the reader browses through metadata. The main difference between search engines and metadata lies in the quality of the links. A search engine offers you a lot of results, yet quite a few of the results refer to unusable information. Metadata cover only a small part of the available information yet the links refer to very useful information.” (Marcel van Mackelenbergh)

“This series of essays on the construction, deployment and use of search technology (by which I mean primarily ‘full-text’ search) was written between June and December of 2003. It has fifteen installments not including this table of contents.” (Tim Bray – Ongoing)

“The burn-out of the dot-com era left a smoldering envy of those few dot-commers that managed to stay alive. Google is foremost among these. If they can continue pulling in dynamic data from more and more sites, their dominance may well continue — for access to dynamic data is indeed the key to the next big improvement in search.” (Andy Oram – O’Reilly Developer Weblogs)

“Metadata is fundamental to persons, organizations, machines, and an array of enterprises that are increasingly turning to the Web and electronic communication for disseminating and accessing information.” (Dublin Core Metadata Initiative)