Discusses relevance in search engines for the World Wide Web. Highlights include types of searches submitted; database scope; how organizations position their Web sites; link analysis; spelling errors; offering alternatives to queries; and the single-answer approach. (LRW)

Presents a new stemming algorithm based on tree structures that improves relevance in information retrieval by conflation, grouping similar words into a single term. Highlights include the normalization process used in automatic thesaurus construction; theoretical aspects; the normalization algorithm; and experiments with English and Spanish. (LRW)

Web mining is emerging in many aspects of e-learning, aiming at improving online learning and teaching processes and making them more transparent and effective. Researchers using Web mining tools and techniques are challenged to learn more about the online students' reshaping online courses and educational websites, and create tools for…

Modern composition instructors often use and teach research methods for Internet search engines and electronic databases. It is not their intent to turn back the clock. However, if they can help students connect the world of Internet searches and the university library, they can promote information literacy in its broadest sense by developing…

Objective: The purpose of this study was to identify the health topics students received information about, how students obtained health-related information, and perceived believability of those sources. Participants and Methods: Students (N = 1202) were surveyed using the National College Health Assessment (NCHA) of the American College Health…

The paper proposes a framework for building ontology-aware learning object (LO) content. Previously ontologies were exclusively employed for enriching LOs' metadata. Although such an approach is useful, as it improves retrieval of relevant LOs from LO repositories, it does not enable one to reuse components of a LO, nor to incorporate an explicit…

The HTML title tag information should identify and describe exactly what a Web page contains. This paper analyzes the "Title element" and raises a significant question: "Why is the title tag important?" Search engines base search results and page rankings on certain criteria. Among the most important criteria is the presence of the search keywords…

Due to the popularity of 3D graphics in animation and games, usage of 3D geometry deformable models increases dramatically. Despite their growing importance, these models are difficult and time consuming to build. A distance learning system for the construction of these models could greatly facilitate students to learn and practice at different…

Introduction: The goal of this study is to expand our understanding of the relationships between selected tasks, cognitive abilities and search result interfaces. The underlying objective is to understand how to select search results presentation for tasks and user contexts Method: Twenty three participants conducted four search tasks of two types…

Models of a psychological process can be difficult to discriminate experimentally because it is not easy to determine the values of the critical design variables (e.g., presentation schedule, stimulus structure) that will be most informative in differentiating them. Recent developments in sampling-based search methods in statistics make it…

Recently considerable attention has been given in the online information retrieval literature to techniques for producing a weighted output of documents in response to a request. One approach tries to maintain the form of and relationships among requests as they appear in current Boolean logic-based systems, while extending it to permit a weighted…

The single-link cluster method is used to construct a hierarchic classification for the 1400 documents in the Cranfield test collection. A variety of retrieval strategies applied to this hierarchy are evaluated in terms of effectiveness and efficiency. (Author)

The mathematical theory of measurement is used to construct a framework for the evaluation of information retrieval strategies. (Author)

Reports the results of experiments in document clustering using three well-known test collections. (Author)

This report evaluates the engineering information services provided by the University of Calgary since implementation of the COMPENDEX (tape service of Engineering Index, Inc.) service using the IBM TEXT-PAC system. Evaluation was made by a survey of the users of the Current Information Selection (CIS) service, the interaction between the system…