The Google search engine is growing in popularity and usually shines in performance ratings. This article summarizes findings from a technical paper written by Google's developers in 1998 before anyone had seen Google. Suggests that a careful reader of the paper will be rewarded with a deeper appreciation of the designers' ideas and…

Discusses business use of the Web and related search engine design issues as well as research on general and academic links before reporting on a survey of the links published by a collection of business Web sites. Results indicate around 66% of Web sites do carry external links, most of which are targeted at a specific purpose, but about 17%…

Information customization is a client-side activity designed to pick up where information filtering leaves off. This article describes a vision of information customization and chronicles the development of a proof-of-concept prototype, Cyberbrowser, for customizing information on the Web. (Author/AEF)

Reviews problems with the World Wide Web that can be attributed to human error or ineptitude, and provides suggestions for improvement. Discusses poor Web design, poor use of search engines, and poor quality control by search engines and directories. (AEF)

Co-browsing is a synchronous class of collaborative applications, which allows a group of users to surf the Web together. Such an application can be deployed in an education environment in several ways. One example of where it can be used would be in courses that are project-oriented. Students would be required to collectively research or explore…

Presents guidelines for making a Web site noticeable. Discusses submitting the URL to directories, links, and announcement lists, and sending the site over the server via FTP to search engines. Describes how to index the site with "Title,""Heading," and "Meta" tags. (AEF)

Explains the background to experimental work intended to measure aspects of the World Wide Web, which inadvertently caused two perceived security breaches on remote systems. Describes the nature of these incidents and considers why, when over 700,000 addresses were sampled, only two sites considered the activity to be an attempt to breach their…

End user searching on the Web has become the primary method of locating images for many people. This study investigates the nature of Web image queries by attempting to map them to known image classification schemes. In this study, approximately 100,000 image queries from a major Web search engine were collected in 1997, 1999, and 2001. A…

Examines the bibliometrics of the World Wide Web based on analysis of Web pages collected by the Inktomi "Web Crawler" and on the use of the DEC AltaVista search engine for cocitation analysis of a set of Earth Science related Web sites. Looks at the statistical characteristics of Web documents and their hypertext links, and the…

Compares six leading Web search engines (AltaVista, Excite, HotBot, Infoseek, Lycos, and Northern Light), looking at the breadth of their coverage, accuracy, and ease of use, and finds a clear favorite of the six. Includes tips that can improve search results. (AEF)

Coordinated index concepts are compound-index concepts that express a relationship between concepts that function as simple subject descriptors. The Condorcet Query Engine, a prototype query engine that can be run over the World Wide Web, demonstrates the feasibility of a query engine that can handle both simple and coordinated index concepts,…

Introduces an evaluative framework for metasearch engine performance and illustrates its use in two experiments. Results are used to characterize some properties of leading search engines (as of 1998). Significant interactions were observed between search engine and two other factors: time of day and Web domain. (Author/AEF)

Examines visual information needs as expressed in users' Web image queries; the data set consisted of 1,025,908 sequential queries from 211,058 users of EXCITE, a major Internet search service. Provides data on: image queries, image search sessions, and image terms. Discusses implications for the development of models for visual information…

Describes UKOLN's (United Kingdom Office for Library and Information Networking--a national center for support in network information management in the library/information communities) experimental system that allows digital object identifiers (DOIs) encoded as uniform resource names (URNs) to be resolved on behalf of Web browsers by Squid, a…

Users in this study of two Web browsers had significantly higher success with Internet Explorer than with Netscape Navigator, made a variety of errors in several tasks, and those reporting higher self-confidence had significantly higher success scores. Results confirm the expectation that affective and cognitive measures add valuable user-centered…