Web Farming Newsletter

Netscape/AOL started a new discovery service with a new twist or two. First, they have partnered with Google (described in the last issue). Second, they have integrated the work of the Open Directory Project (ODP). Through the efforts of 13,018 volunteer editors, 705,472 websites have been categorized into 105,733 categories with Yahoo-like descriptions (as of July 5, 1999). Impressive by any standards!
Netscape/AOL is freely licensing the ODP information to Lycos, HotBot, DogPile, and others. The ODP information is maintained with the Resource Description Framework of W3C. With all those volunteers, ODP's motto is "Humans do it better."

Seminars on Web Farming

    Three-day seminars on Web Farming are offered by DCI on the following dates. For full details, see the online brochure.
    - September 15-17 in San Francisco
    - November 10-12 in Dallas

Search Engine Showdown

The Search Engine Showdown is a new site monitoring global discovery

services, much like the Search Engine Watch. The author, Greg Notess, has done an excellent job in tracking the sizes, hits, overlaps, and dead links of the major sites. Note the Feature Chart.

Invisible Web Catalog

IntelliSeek has launched their Invisible Web Catalog, a by-product of BullsEye search tool. Lycos has licensed this catalog as a section called Reference > Searchable Databases. Must browse!

As quoted in a TechWeb article, Danny Sullivan of the Search Engine Watch said that "there is lots of information that cannot be found via ordinary search engines because it is locked up in databases."

U.S. Government Searching

One of the harder resources to search is all of the U.S. Government websites because they are so extensive and so fragmented. A new service

by Northern Light alleviates this problem. USGovsearch charges fees based on a subscription - $5 for a day pass, $30 for a month, and $250 for the year. This reminds one of the entrance fees to a national park! Remember that most content of the U.S. Government is free - if you can find it. . .

XML Support in Oracle

Oracle announces XML support for its database server. Several XML parsers for C/C++ and Java were included, along with XML utilities and server-side applet to allow Oracel8I to process queries and reply with XML documents. However, Oracle's integration with XML is lacking without data cartridge support, as compared with IBM's XML Extender.

Web Scraping in VB

Like the screen scraping programs of the 3270-era, web scraping has become quite popular. Read about an example of scraping data from Amazon.com using Visual Basic.

Ask Jeeves Flies

The IPO of Ask Jeeves (NASDAQ: ASKJ) soared over 400% to $72, giving it a market capitalization of almost two billion dollars!

For their last quarter, revenues were $1M with a loss of $5M. Previously, this low-end search service has not attracted much attention. Its approach is to research recurring questions by its staff and respond to new questions with this research. The company is targeting corporate clients (like Dell and Compaq) for their growth by licensing their technology for in-house knowledge bases.

Pretexting & Web Surfing

Recent articles about pretexting caught my attention. They dealt with an information broker who calls a company to obtain confidential information about another person by giving a false pretext. In other words, pretexting is lying about who you are and why you are obtaining the information.
Read more about this critical issue for web farmers.

Drucker Plugs Outside Info

In the latest book by Peter Drucker

entitled Management Challenges for the 21st Century, the following statement makes the case for Web Farming:
"And so is the one new area - and the most important one - in which we do not as yet have systematic and organized methods for obtaining information: information on the OUTSIDE of the enterprise. These new methods are very different in their assumptions and their origins. Each was developed independently and by different people... They aim at providing information rather than data." p. 101

KM Resource Center

The

Knowledge Management Resource Center has featured the Web Farming website.

More Domains for Infonautics

In the last issue, we noted that Infonautics, the provider of the successful Company Sleuth service, secured more domains for its future expansion. They recently added more. Guess what Infonautics will be sleuthing in the future!
- HOCKEYSLEUTH.COM
- BASEBALLSLEUTH.COM
- NASCARSLEUTH.COM
- FOOTBALLSLEUTH.COM
- SPORTSLEUTH.COM