Web Farming Newsletter

A Web Farming workshop series starts on September 9 with a one-day treatment of Global Discovery Services: Use and Misuse. Frustrated with HotBot, AltaVista and the like? This is a MUST for you!
Sponsored by US West Advanced Technologies, it is conducted at their Boulder facilities.

Seminars on Web Farming

    Three-day seminars on Building Web Farming Systems: Methods & Tools are offered on:
    - September 15-17 in San Francisco
    - November 10-12 in Dallas
    For full details and registration, see the DCI online brochure. Sign up NOW. Space is limited. Content is awesome!

Intarka ProspectMiner

Intarka is a startup focused on using

web farming technology in various settings. Their first product is ProspectMiner that discovers and filters sales prospects using a combination of keyword searching, relevance analysis, and learning feedback. Funded by New Enterprise Associates, they have 38 employees at their San Jose and West Bengal offices. Read their white paper on ProspectMiner. It is one of the better business justifications for a topic-specific web farming application.

WF at Siebel

Siebel is following in SAP footsteps. (see the May issue.) As a major vendor of sales

automation and similar systems, Siebel offers InterActive Briefings which gathers information on company profiles, business news, subsidiaries, and affiliates from web-based sources. In addition, Siebel just signed an agreement with Dun & Bradstreet to enhance their external data.

Focused Crawling

Another IBM Almaden project is leading the way to better web farming technology. As the Best Paper Prize at the recent WWW8 Conference, this paper describes the use of custom crawling and link analysis to generate lists of topic-specific websites.

Copernic Server

Copernic has repackaged their search tool into a server for businesses wishing to offer their own specialized meta-search site. See the MetNets site as an example.

XML Extender in DB2

In the June issue, a brief mention was made about the new XML Extender in IBM DB2 UDB. Here is a longer description of the functionality supported by this extender, as it is going through beta testing.

WF for Resumes/Jobs

The management recruiting industry is hot! With a tight labor market for high tech personnel, these firms are under pressure to find the right people quickly. Guess what information resource they are using - the Web!

Searchable Public Records

Search Systems offers a directory of 982 searchable databases containing land records, court cases, licensing registrations, and much more for most of the U.S. state governments.

WF Book Review

The June issue of Enterprise Systems Journal contained a review by Prof. Elliot King at Loyola College of the book Web Farming for the Data Warehouse. He has captured the spirit, along with the content, of the book.

Globalization To The Max

A recent

book The Lexis and the Olive Tree by Thomas Friedman has created quite a stir. Regardless of your political orientation, the book contains insights into the instant global world in which we now live. Great airplane reading. And, be sure to read the Amazon.com reader reviews.

WebData Databases

ExperTelligence offers WebData, another comprehensive guide to searchable

databases. Excellent Yahoo-style organization. They specialize in "finding, categorizing and organizing online databases."

Latest Web Assessment

Ever wonder how big the Web really is? The latest assessment comes from Steve Lawrence and Lee Giles of the NEC Research Labs. Based on a random sampling of IP addresses, they estimated that there are 2.8 million active websites containing 800 million indexable webpages in 15 TB of text (only 6 TB if you strip out the HTML junk). More importantly, they estimated that the major search engines are covering only 16% of the indexable pages, with a strong bias towards popular, U.S. and commercial sites. Request the free report.