Compares links between 76 Chinese university Web sites with ranks obtained from the NetBig lists, using a specialized Web crawler to collect data. Provides a background to the higher education system in mainland China, describes the NetBig ranking scheme, and explains Web site crawling problems encountered. (Author/LRW)

Discussion of Web search strategies focuses on a comparative study of textual and graphical summarization mechanisms applied to search engine results. Suggests that thumbnail images (graphical summaries) can increase efficiency in processing results, and that enhanced thumbnails (augmented with readable textual elements) had more consistent…

Compares the implied ontological frameworks of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting and the World Wide Web Consortium's Semantic Web. Discusses current search engine technology, semantic markup, indexing principles of special libraries and online databases, and componentization and the distinction between data and…

Provides an up-to-date survey of the capabilities of the major 16 search engines with respect to the types of information extraction tasks that would be useful in Web data mining and cybermetrics, and analyzes two sets of domain counts for internal consistency between results. (AEF)

A task-oriented, comparative evaluation between four Web retrieval systems was performed; two using query-biased summarization, and two using the standard ranked titles/abstracts approach. Results indicate that query-biased summarization techniques appear to be more useful and effective in helping users gauge document relevance than the…

Studies show that the majority of Web searchers enter extremely simple queries, so a reasonable system design approach would be to build search engines to compensate for this user characteristic. One hundred representative queries were selected from the transaction log of a major Web search service. These 100 queries were then modified using the…

Examines and compares multimedia Web searching by Excite and FAST search engine users in 2001. Highlights include audio and video queries; time spent on searches; terms per query; ranking of the most frequently used terms; and differences in Web search behaviors of U.S. and European Web users. (Author/LRW)

Explains desktop metasearch engines, which search the databases of several search engines simultaneously. Reviews two particular versions, the Copernic 2001 Pro and the BullsEye Pro 3, comparing costs, subject categories, display capabilities, and layout for presenting results. (LRW)

Results from an analysis of 1,025,010 Excite queries from 2001 are compared to similar Excite datasets from 1997 to 1999. Overall, results indicate that multimedia Web searching is undergoing major changes as Web content and searching evolves. (AEF)

Describes a study of college students that investigated Web-based search engine queries and compared relevancy ratings with expert-formulated queries. Considers the number of subject terms used and the use of Boolean operators and discuses the need for designing search engine interfaces that provide greater support in term selection and operator…

Investigates the success and information-seeking behavior of seventh-grade children and graduate students in using the Yahooligans! Web search engine/directory to find the correct answer for a fact-based search task. Analyzes and compares the overall patterns of children's and graduate students' Web traversal behaviors, including searching,…

Analyzed and compared the success and information seeking behaviors of seventh grade science students and graduate students in using the Yahooligans! Web search engine. Discusses cognitive, affective, and physical behaviors during a fact-finding task, including searching, browsing, and time to complete the task; navigational styles; and focus on…