Google Scholar, the beta Google service for searching scholarly information, crawls scholarly, web-based content--predominantly by targeting specific publishers with which Google has contractual arrangements. Open access material is crawled as well. These full-text materials, abstracts, and citations are being indexed, and citations from these…

For the last three decades, the engineering higher education and professional environments have been completely transformed by the "electronic/digital information revolution" that has included the introduction of personal computer, the development of email and world wide web, and broadband Internet connections at home. Herein the writer compares…

This handbook provides information on how Internet search engines and related software and utilities work and how to use them in order to improve search techniques. The book begins with an introduction to the Internet. Part 1 contains the following chapters that cover mining the Internet for information: "An Introduction to Search…

Explains intelligent agents, special software tools that help make the Web more interactive by helping with information retrieval. Describes major types of agents, including search agents and agents for specialized tasks including monitors and knowledge management; and lists relevant Web sites. (LRW)

Discusses subject gateway sites and commercial search engines for the Web and presents an explanation of Google's PageRank algorithm. The principle question addressed is the conditions under which a gateway site will increase the likelihood that a target page is found in search engines. (LRW)

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)

Metasearching of online current news services is a potentially useful Web application of distributed information retrieval techniques. Reports experiences in building a metasearcher designed to provide up-to-date searching over a significant number of rapidly changing current news sites, focusing on how to merge results from the search engines at…

Discussion of information literacy and education focuses on a module developed to provide instruction related to Web searching. Highlights include basic Web search strategies; Web search tools, including directories, search engines, specialized search tools, and the use of pathfinder pages; and suggested practice activities. (Author/LRW)

Discusses how to improve the quality of Internet search systems and introduces the Ghosts Consensus Method which is free from the drawbacks of digital democracy algorithms and is based on linear programming tasks. Highlights include vector space models; determining relevant documents; and enriching query terms. (LRW)

Discusses the emergence of general audience digital libraries (GADLs), a context that represents a hybrid of both traditional information retrieval, using primarily bibliographic resources provided by database vendors, and popular information retrieval such as public search systems on the Web. Reports findings of a study investigating end-user…

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…

Discussion of academic cheating and plagiarism focuses on occurrences in online courses, based on experiences at Baker College (Michigan). Highlights include tools to fight plagiarism; using search engines to detect plagiarism; digital paper mills; plagiarism detection companies; and the role of administrators and faculty. (LRW)

Describes GEM (Gateway to Educational Materials) that provides easy, fast, and free access to lesson plans, curriculum units, and other educational materials on the Internet. Discusses interaction between users and content providers; GEM versus search engines; how a GEM record is created; and the metadata used in GEM records. (LRW)

Presents a query categorization approach to automatically classifying Web query terms into broad subject categories to provide in-depth analysis of users' search interests. Describes a test on search engine logs in Taiwan that shows the approach is efficient in dealing with large numbers of queries. (Author/LRW)

Educational portals put together links to sites and resources educators would be interested in viewing. They eliminate the hours of searching that might be invested if typical search engines were used. Educational portals feature lessons, units, printable resources, creative ideas, and more. Many of these sites are free, while others are…