49,563 research outputs found
A three-year study on the freshness of Web search engine databases
This paper deals with one aspect of the index quality of search engines: index freshness. The purpose is to analyse the update strategies of the major Web search engines Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Live.com. We conducted a test of the
updates of 40 daily updated pages and 30 irregularly updated pages, respectively. We used data from a time span of six weeks in the years 2005, 2006, and 2007. We found that the best search engine in terms of up-to-dateness changes over the years and that none of the engines has an ideal solution for index freshness. Frequency distributions for the pages’ ages are skewed, which means that search engines do differentiate between often- and seldom-updated pages. This is confirmed by the difference between the average ages of daily updated pages and our control group of pages. Indexing patterns are often irregular, and there seems to be no clear policy regarding when to revisit Web pages. A major problem identified in our research is the delay in making crawled pages available for searching, which differs from one engine to another
Recommended from our members
Freeing up access to learning: the role for Open Educational Resources
The internet revolution of the last few years has had an impact on how we all live our lives. So it is not surprising that this is also a time of change in attitudes towards how we learn. Free access to information through computer networks has expanded, and part of that information flow are materials designed to help people learn. In addition there are many further online resources that help the learning process, even if that was not the original aim. However, there are risks in this evolution in access to information both for the end user, who can be confused by the options available to them, and to those involved in providing education, who may see their traditional role changing and becoming harder to perform. This situation provides the background for a growing movement to directly consider how education can be provided in a freer and more open way. This has been termed “Open Educational Resources” (OER). The exact definition of the term depends on interpretation, however a useful statement was provided as an outcome from an event organized by UNESCO in 2002 as:
“OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge (Atkins, Brown and Hammond, 2007, p4).”
Arguably the only difference between an online learning object and an open educational resource is the declaration that it is open. This may be true but that turns out to be a powerful difference. By being open the content can be accessed by any learner who can do so, it can be taken and run in new contexts, it can be reworked by others and adapted for local needs (with the result shared back if desired), it can be made part of shared pool of resources, it can be the shared point of reference for collaboration, and it can be the key to building policies that work in different domain
Search Engines Giving You Garbage? Put A Corc In It, Implementing The Cooperative Online Resource Catalog
This paper presents an implementation strategy for adding Internet resources to a library online catalog using OCLC\u27s Cooperative Online Resource Catalog (CORC). Areas of consideration include deciding which electronic resources to include in the online catalog and how to select them. The value and importance of pathfinders in creating electronic bibliographies and the role of library staff in updating them is introduced. Using an electronic suggestion form as a means of Internet resource collection development is another innovative method of enriching library collections. Education and training for cataloging staff on Dublin Core elements is also needed. Attention should be paid to the needs of distance learners in providing access to Internet resources. The significance of evaluating the appropriateness of Internet resources for library collections is emphasized
Artificial table testing dynamically adaptive systems
Dynamically Adaptive Systems (DAS) are systems that modify their behavior and
structure in response to changes in their surrounding environment. Critical
mission systems increasingly incorporate adaptation and response to the
environment; examples include disaster relief and space exploration systems.
These systems can be decomposed in two parts: the adaptation policy that
specifies how the system must react according to the environmental changes and
the set of possible variants to reconfigure the system. A major challenge for
testing these systems is the combinatorial explosions of variants and
envi-ronment conditions to which the system must react. In this paper we focus
on testing the adaption policy and propose a strategy for the selection of
envi-ronmental variations that can reveal faults in the policy. Artificial
Shaking Table Testing (ASTT) is a strategy inspired by shaking table testing
(STT), a technique widely used in civil engineering to evaluate building's
structural re-sistance to seismic events. ASTT makes use of artificial
earthquakes that simu-late violent changes in the environmental conditions and
stresses the system adaptation capability. We model the generation of
artificial earthquakes as a search problem in which the goal is to optimize
different types of envi-ronmental variations
Data Mining in Electronic Commerce
Modern business is rushing toward e-commerce. If the transition is done
properly, it enables better management, new services, lower transaction costs
and better customer relations. Success depends on skilled information
technologists, among whom are statisticians. This paper focuses on some of the
contributions that statisticians are making to help change the business world,
especially through the development and application of data mining methods. This
is a very large area, and the topics we cover are chosen to avoid overlap with
other papers in this special issue, as well as to respect the limitations of
our expertise. Inevitably, electronic commerce has raised and is raising fresh
research problems in a very wide range of statistical areas, and we try to
emphasize those challenges.Comment: Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/088342306000000204 in the
Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
- …