Describes an investigation of the relationship between the levels of interlinker consistency obtained among a group of full-text databases in which internodal links were inserted, and the effectiveness of searches carried out in those databases. Topics include interindexer consistency and retrieval system evaluation. (Author/LRW)

Discusses the creation of guides to resources on the Internet, focusing on the Internet environment, including its culture and etiquette, authority, publication, standards, and searching tools and processes; and the process of guide construction, including the human element, the nature of resources, intellectual property, and time. (Author/LRW)

Lays down theoretical groundwork for information retrieval (IR) that involves the combined efforts of several users, and argues that the fundamental intellectual problems of IR are the production and consumption of knowledge. Highlights include collaboration in IR, examples of collaborative information systems and services, and future research…

Focuses on manager behavior within a business environment related to the classification, storage and retrieval of electronic mail messages. Discusses bibliographic control and classification theory; characteristics of managers and personal constructs; the user-system context; and the use of technology to categorize and filter e-mail messages. The…

Presents three different statistical techniques for identifying content-bearing phrases within a natural language database. Describes results on the effectiveness of the scoring methods when applied to MEDLINE phrases, and how the three methods can be combined to improve performance. Processing results for an example document are provided.…

Outlines the theory behind the formation of language conventions, then reveals conventions evolving in the community of people writing hypertext on the Web. Demonstrates how these conventions can be used to augment and shift the meaning of already published hypertexts. Describes the system called InCommonSense, which reuses particular hypertext…

Explores the interrelation between Web publishing and information retrieval technologies and lists new approaches to Web indexing and searching. Highlights include Web directories; search engines; portalisation; Internet service providers; browser providers; meta search engines; popularity based analysis; natural language searching; links-based…

Describes the results of a transaction log analysis of a Web search engine, WebCrawler, to analyze user's queries for information retrieval. Results suggest most users do not employ advanced search features, and the linguistic structure often resembles a human-human communication model that is not always successful in human-computer communication.…

This experiment explores the effectiveness of retrieving the listing of a known-item book from the 3.6 million entry online catalog at the library of the University of Michigan using various combinations of author's name plus first and last title words. Discusses implications for the design of OPAC (online public access catalog) screens.…

Compares search effectiveness when using query-based Internet search via the Google search engine, directory-based search via Yahoo, and phrase-based query reformulation-assisted search via the Hyperindex browser by means of a controlled, user-based experimental study of undergraduates at the University of Queensland. Discusses cognitive load,…

Discusses problems when searching the Web for financial information and presents a personal agent that utilizes user profiles and user relevance feedback to search for Chinese Web financial news articles on behalf of users. Explains the development of a Chinese indexing component and describes experiments that measured the performance of the…

Describes EquiX, a search language for XML that combines querying with searching to query the data and the meta-data content of Web pages. Topics include search engines; a data model for XML documents; search query syntax; search query semantics; an algorithm for evaluating a query on a document; and indexing EquiX queries. (LRW)

Reports findings from a survey comparing the use of internal and external information services by businesspeople in Brisbane (Australia). The survey examined where and how business information is currently sourced, how often and why information is sought from any particular source, and any problems people may have in finding business information.…

Reviews the TREC (Text Retrieval Conference) program, considering the test results, the findings for information retrieval, and the lessons TREC offers for information retrieval evaluation. Topics include the ad hoc retrieval task; indexing models; document and query descriptions; search strategies; and the user's request as the dominant factor in…

Proposes the adoption of a new research paradigm that takes advantage of the digital world and may provide greater insight into how young people seek information. This involves a closer collaboration with youth as partners in constructing research and probing the different criteria of youth for determining the success of a search. (AEF)