Day 1 - May 14, 2007
Search Engines vs Directories
- How did Denmark originally acquire the Virgin Islands?
- What lodging facilities are available in Bar Harbor, Maine?
- Search within a browsable category: Conduct a search within any Yahoo! category by choosing the "this
category" option above the Search box. You can also try the different
options (e.g., Entire Directory or Entire Category) provided at any
Gigablast Directory category (e.g., http://dir.gigablast.com/Arts/).
- Browse categorized search results: Conduct a search at Clusty and browse the search results
clustered in categories. Healia, on
the other hand, automatically puts search results of health information into
predefined categories for easy browsing.
Concept Analysis & Boolean Searching
- Search for answers to the question "How far away from the Sun
is Saturn?" at AltaVista using its
Advanced Search option.
- Try the same request "How far away from the Sun is Saturn?" as a
Boolean expression at AltaVista
Advanced Search (Note: the Boolean operator must be in uppercase), and
examine the search results.
- Feel free to construct a compound Boolean query and try it.
- Also try the advance options at Ask
to see how those phrases (e.g., all of the words) can be used to conduct Boolean searches.
Phrase & Promixity Searching
- Do Long Island University as both a keyword search and a
phrase search at Live Search
and Exalead
respectively. Then, examine the results.
- Search for library * science at
Google to see how library and science
would appear in the results.
- Search for library science using both the NEAR and NEXT operator at Exalead.
The proximity operators must be in upper-case. Then, compare the results.
Field Searching
- Search for Long Island University at Google:
- when the phrase appears in the title
- when its url is www.liu.edu
- Get results in pdf
- Search for nanotechnology at Ask using its Advanced
Search form:
- Limit the search in English language only
- Find results updated within the past three months
Case Sensitive Searching
- Search for web and Web at Exalead and Gigablast respectively. Then,
compare the results.
Truncation
- Search for catalog and catalog* at Lycos and Exalead. Then, compare the
results.
Fuzzy Searching
- Get a map from Rand McNally
for the vicinity of 140 Londen St., Roslyn Heights, NY 11577
and see how Rand McNally automatically corrects the mistyped street
name.
- Try Internet Archive
Advanced Search and search for bookmark~. Examine how the search query
appears in the results.
Query Expasion
- Automatic Query Expansion:
- Conduct a search at Google
and click next to the search results on the links labeled as "Similar
pages". Examine the results retrieved using the query expansion
feature. Pay particular attension to the relevance of
the results.
- Do a search at
Yahoo!. Examine the results after clicking the link "More from this site"
and determine their relevance.
- Use similicio.us to find sites
similar to http://academic.live.com. Expand your query with the "similar"
link if you wish.
- Manual Query Expansion:
- Conduct a search at
Gigablast. Choose from the terms suggested by Gigablast's Giga
Bits (listed at the top of the result page) to revise the previous search query.
- Conduct a search at Google.
Click on the link labeled "Search within results" at the bottom of
the page, and type additonal term(s) in the new search box to modify
your search.
Multiple Database Searching
- Search for Beaucoup at
Mama. Be sure to select appropriate options at its Power Search
interface.
- Search for Beaucoup at
GahooYoogle. Then compare the search results.
- Try other meta-search tools and their various options.
Retrieval Strategies
- Searching
- Do a search on Web searching at AltaVista, Google or any other Internet
retrieval tool of your choice. Note down the number of results retrieved.
- Try a different search strategy on the same topic Web searching, and then use all the
available limiting techniques that you see fit for narrowing down the search.
- Examine the final results and compare them with the set
initially retrieved.
- Browsing
- Try the various browsing strategies discussed in class.
- Visit Quintura and enjoy navigating
the tag cloud.
Internet Retrieval vs. Other Retrieval Environments
- Online:
- Log onto Dialog
(http://www.dialogweb.com) and follow the instructions on the Dialog
practice sheet. Visit the Dialog Library at http://library.dialog.com/ if
you are interested in learning more about Dialog searching.
- Try to search for non-review information about Bruce
Springsteen at AltaVista using its
Advanced Search options.
- Conduct some searches at Google
Scholar (recently added the Recent Articles feature) and Live Search Academic. Also try the various
options availabe after a search at Live Search Academic.
- OPAC:
- Search
LIU's OPAC for information retrieval as title keyword.
Limit the search to C.W. Post Library Science Circulation.
- Repeat the search at Google
using similar limiting techniques where applicable.
- Try to see if you can locate relevant information for the same
topic using tools that support browsing (e.g.,
Yahoo or Quintura).
- Visit Google Book Search to learn
more about the service. Search at
Kokogiak Book Search (http://kokogiak.com/booksearch/) to compare results
from A9, Google and Live Search.
Day 3 - May 16, 2007
Results Ranking
- Try the "Results ranking" option at
Live Advanced Search by adjusting the three bars of different factors when doing
a search. Then, compare the outcomes.
- Conduct a search on superconductivity at Live Search Academic. Sort your results
by date, author and the like.
- Search for social searching at AfterVote. Use the various ranking options
provided there to rank your results. Rember to find out how your "vote"
would influence the ranking of retrieved results.
Multilingual & Cross Language Searching
- Try some searches (e.g., "New Year's Day") by limiting results
to one specific language:
- Observe how Babelplex
faithfully translates your query from one language to another.
- Visit International Yahoo!
in different countries & languages.
- Try SYSTRAN
(www.systransoft.com), the company that provides AltaVista
with the translation technology in the past to translate some
text or a URL of your choice.
- Visit Google's
Language Tools that provide translation techonology and interfaces
in more than 80 languages.
Clustering of Results
- Search for knowledge organization at Clusty
and examine the clustered results. Also try a similar tool
Gokita.
- Conduct a search at
KartOO to view the graphical presentation of results.
- Use Microsoft's SRC (Search Result Clustering) beta at http://rwsm.directtaps.net to
examine how it clusters search results on data mining.
- Try Grokker, released
on 5/9/05, to see how it clusters and visualizes (clicking the Map View tab)
results retrieved from other IR tools.
Visual Searching
- Do some virtual shopping at Like based on
visual similarity: color, shape and pattern. The similarity options are available
after a search is done, and their positions on the result page may not be fixed.
- Use
Riya to search for visual information with terms such as place or personal names.
- Perform some visual searching of Wikipedia entries at
PediaX (http://en.pediax.org).
Social/Collaborative Searching
- Search on collaborative filtering using any search
tool to learn about the topic.
- After conducting a search at LookSmart,
browse the links listed under "Pages others have viewed".
- Search results from similicio.us are
listed under "People who liked (your search term) also liked".
Personalized Searching
- Try the various filters at Advanced Search of
Dice.com to get personalized results.
- Explore the Personalize
feature at Yahoo! and set up a My Yahoo! if you wish.
- Try to personalize your Google homepage at
Personalizing iGoogle.
- Set up an alert or SDI service for yourself at Google Alerts.
More Alternative IR Techniques
- Try the "soundslike" or "spellslike" option offered at Exalead for easily misspelled terms.
- Age-Specific Tools
- Cranky for 50+
- Healia for health information for kids,
teens and seniors
- Visit Google Labs and Yahoo! Next to enjoy their technology playgrounds.
- Additional related sites:
Controlled Vocabulary Retrieval
- Perform retrieval tasks at each of the following three sites:
- Browse e-journals gathered at INFOMINE
by subjects (i.e., Library of Congress Subject Headings).
- Browse the resources organized using Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) at BULB Information Service (http://bubl.ac.uk/).
- Click on the link "Thesauri" at
Intute: Social Sciences (http://www.esrc.bris.ac.uk/), and type special
education in the search box. Explore the results displayed, especially their
broader, narrower, and related terms.
Natural Language Searching
- Search Ask for some
topics, e.g., "What is Jamestown?", "How do dams help conservation?",
"When did Web searching start?", and "Why is the sky
blue?
- Try the same questions at Hakia, and
compare the results with those from Ask.
- KartOO claims
that it also supports natural language searching. But you have to end a
search question with a question mark. Try it out.
- Visit AnswerBus to conduct some natural
language searches.
Day 4 - May 17, 2007
Meaning-Based Searching
- Metadata
- Visit Dublin Core
Metadata Initiative (http://dublincore.org/) to learn more about
Dublin Core in particular (e.g., DC Element Set) and metadata in
general.
- Semantic Web
- Read about
Semantic Web as described by Berners-Lee and his colleagues.
- Visit mSpace (http://www.mspace.fm/), a music site
that uses Semantic Web technology, for a demo.
- Question Answering (QA)
- Enter a question at BrainBoost
or Answers.com to view answers.
Compare the two QA tools.
- Try a term (not a question) at Factbites to see how it retrieves
answers from reference sources on the Internet.
- Conduct a search for some factual information (e.g., population
of Canada) at Google and get the
answer presented at the top of all the results retrieved. The same mechanism is
also supported at other major search tools such as
Yahoo! and Ask.
Multimedia IR
- Description-based approach
- Search images by keyword (e.g., "classroom") at Flickr or Picsearch.
- Search music by description (e.g., "Spring") at Napster or Y! Music.
- Search multimedia by type (e.g., image, MP3, video) at AltaVista. Click on the Images,
MP3/Audio or Video tab, and choose various multimedia
search options before typing a query.
- Search multimedia by file name extension (e.g., greatwall.gif)
at Google Image Search.
- Use Google Video Search
to locate videos of President Bush impersonation. Also try various options provided
at Google Video. Of course, YouTube, now owned
by Google, and Blinkx are exclusively for videos.
- Text-to-speech: Try AT&T's text-to-speech technology demo
at
http://public.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php.
- Content-based approach
- Search images by visual attributes (e.g., color, shape,
texture) at
PicToSeek (http://zomax.wins.uva.nl:5345/ret_user/).
- Visit PictureFinder
for locating images by using a self-drawn image/sketch as a query.
- Try xcavator.net
to see how an image search can be done just by dragging and dropping one similar to
what you would like to find.
- Search music by example (e.g., a music query) using the
MelDex System, a part of the New Zealand Digital
Library Project.
- Description-based & content-based integrated
Searching the Invisible/Deep Web
- Go to Figure 1 of Ian Smith's article at (
http://www.powerhomebiz.com/vol25/invisible.htm ) for various tools
to search the invisible Web.
- Visit Turbo10, a tool for
searching the deep net.
- Browse Invisible Web at http://www.invisibleweb.net/
to view the resources otherwise unknown. It is however becoming more commercial.
- Visit the Internet Archive at
http://www.archive.org to explore the Internet as it was then.
- Try to locate the once free meaning-based search engines Oingo
(www.oingo.com) and Simpli (www.simpli.com).
- Type in www.aj.com in the search box to find Ask's predecessor -
Ask Jeeves' interface then.
Retrieval Tools for Non-Web Materials
Lists
Try some of the following sites to see if you can find a list
related to one of your interests (e.g., cycling, gardening). Then,
compare these retrieval tools for list information.
USENET & Forums
Retrieval of Specific Types of Information
Day 5 - May 18, 2007
Evaluation of Internet Resources
- Browse and read the writings listed on the topic at
http://www.vuw.ac.nz/~agsmith/evaln/evaln.htm.
- Also read the Selection Criteria
posted at Librarians' Index to the Internet (www.lii.org).
- According to a published article (Doonan, John, and Hunt, Tim.
(1996). Cell cycle: Why don't plants get cancer? Nature, 380(6574),
481-482), plants can't get cancer. However, the results retrieved from
sites such as Google Scholar indicate the
opposite. Use the criteria you choose for evaluating Internet resources
to judge if these results are quality ones.
Evaluation of Internet Retrieval Tools