Canceled because of low enrollment. Rescheduled for Thursday, October 7. This workshop
will be the same except additional material will be added on 'hidden web' resources. A new
description will be posted on or before September 10. Thank you for your patience. -
- Richard Hackathorn (dick@webfarming.com)
Sponsored By:
Description: Survey of the
popular 10-15 global search engines with an in-depth examination of Yahoo!, AltaVista,
HotBot, Northern Light, and Google. Explanation of how these services discover content,
what they index, and how frequently. Use of both the simple and advanced interfaces (field
searches, non-HTML objects). Useful start or launch pages. Emphasis on construction of
Boolean expressions and their differing interpretations. A brief look at meta-discovery
services (DogPile, Mamma), specialized discovery services (xCentral, USGovtSearch), and
personal tools (BullsEye, Copernic). 
Why Attend? Do you need to
locate information about customers, suppliers, competitors, technology and the like? Are
you trying to use the Web for this research? Do your searches generate too much junk and
too little information? Are you just plain frustrated with HotBot, AltaVista, etc? Then,
this workshop is for you! It is a MUST for the web-enabled professional.
Instructor: Dr. Richard
Hackathorn, president of WebFarming.Com. Bio.
Registration: Simple! Submit the
registration form below.
Time: Thursday, September 9,
from 8:30 am to 4:00 pm. Registration starts at 8:00 with a continental breakfast. So,
come early and get acquainted.
Place: US West Advanced
Technologies facilities in Boulder. Directions & Map
Fee: $195 which covers
materials, breakfast, and breaks. Lunch is on-your-own at the US West cafeteria. Checks
only are accepted and should be payable to Bolder Technology, Inc. Payment must be
received prior to or at the workshop registration.
Future Workshops: On roughly a
monthly basis, we plan to offer workshops on the following topics. Suggestions for your
favorite topic are welcome via email to WF
Workshops.
- Dealing with Hidden Web Content.
Hidden content is web content that is not indexed by the global discovery services, which
is probably larger than the visible Web. Focus on web databases for news, discussion
forums, patents, SEC financials, trademarks, etc. Examination of Beaucoup directory and
Lycos Searchable Reference Databases (from IntelliSeek’s Invisible Web Catalog).
- Survey of Personal Discovery Tools.
Survey of browser enhancements (Alexa, InfoSeek Express) and separate personal tools
(BullsEye, Copernic, WebCompass). Discussion of the limitations of using these tools in a
group setting.
- Acquiring Web Content. Now that
you found some good stuff, what do you do with it? Capturing links or content or both.
Dealing with non-English content. Conversion of an HTML table to Excel spreadsheet. How to
maintain content currency. Using MS-Office Web Queries. Developing manual web scrapers in
Visual Basic and Perl. Dexter from Liaison Technology.
- Working with Commercial Content Providers.
Survey of 15-20 popular vendors, with a more detailed examination of the Electric Library,
Hoover’s, and Dow Jones Interactive.
- Experiments with Hubs and Authorities.
Based on Klienberg’s work (as utilized in the IBM Clever Project), we will manually
construct virtual communities for several topics. See the June 1999 issue of Scientific
American for a good description of this technique. Discussion of the practical application
of this technique and a comparison with new Google website.
- Legal and Ethical Issues with Web
Espionage. Any information accessible on the Web by any means is fair game,
usable by anyone in any way for any purpose. Is this statement true? If your corporation
is farming the Web, then you need to understand the answer to this question.
- HyperText Analysis Techniques and Tools.
- XML For Fun and Profit.
- Information Visualization Techniques and
Tools.
- Product Reviews. The workshop
will feature one or two key products for web farming systems.
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