Global Discovery Services:
Use and Misuse 

1. The Joy and The Frustration
• there must be a better way!
• required skill set for information professionals
2. Survey of the Popular Search Engines
• Yahoo!
• AltaVista
• HotBot
• Northern Light
• Google
• . . . a comparison
3. Crawling and Indexing
• the process of crawling
• what is crawled
• robot exclusion policy
• the invisible Web
• the process of indexing
• META keywords and other attributes
• body text
• how frequent?
4. Simple Interfaces
5. Boolean Expressions
• AND is not an OR
• fuzzy topic with a bunch of synonyms
• ddefaults and assumptions
6. Advanced interfaces
• time periods
• field searches
• whose is linking to you?
• non-HTML objects
7. Comparison of query syntax
8. Discovery Strategies
• casual information safari
• Getting Serious strategy
9. Starting or launch portals
• popular ones: Yahoo, MSN, AOL, etc.
• InfoPeople
• CEO Express
10. Meta-discovery services
• DogPile
• Mamma
11. Specialized discovery services
• xCentral
• USGovtSearch
12. Personal Tools
• BullsEye from IntelliSeek
• Copernic from Agents Technologies
13. What is next?
• Dealing with Hidden Content
• Survey of Personal Discovery Tools
• Acquiring Web Content
• Experiments with Hubs and Authorities
• Other. . .