The Great Google – imposing supreme challenge to the professionals

In this discussion we are going to talk about the ‘Google’. It is the search engine which is being used most extensively all around the world to explore the web. We are unable to get the accurate size of Google in terms of how much web contents it possesses but it is immense in size. Google does not search everything which is published over the Internet, even though this enveloping much higher part of the web than covered by any other search engine. The most interesting aspect of Google is that it works with the practical parts of the society by putting itself in every walk of life. For example, Google is working with Information and Library Network Centre (INFLIBNET) to make union catalogues (databases), which are being maintained by the Centre, available through the Google. This is really a fascinating way to help the society by giving access to the information which is known as invisible web. What else user wants – an easy and free access to the information. It is not only challenging the library and information science professionals alone but imposing challenge to the professionals of all spheres. It has millions of full text books giving challenge to the publishing and distributing industries, covering more than 25,000 news sources which give challenge to the media professionals, writers, translators, cartographers, Information technology professionals are also not left estranged from professional challenges to them. In true sense Google is keeping professionals on their toes by imposing supreme challenge.

Introduction:
Birth of Google started with the phrase “Having a healthy disregard for the impossible”. Sergey Brin and Larry Page In 1998 Google launched with the aim to provide some accuracy while searching with its PageRank system. In this PageRank system, Google provides higher rank to important pages and high ranked pages appear at the top of the search results.

Google has been showing its presence in all spheres of globalization. From simple searching to Google Map, Advertisements etc. it has reached to access of scholarly literature through book search, Google scholar etc. Day by day it is achieving new heights of success in each and every domain.

Indexing and Searching:
Google is not only searching billions of web pages but also providing precision value while searching. It offers flexibility by using various symbols and Boolean logic (e.g. “”, +, - OR, AND etc.) and various other techniques to get more precision value. Google indexing and searching works in very systematic order. Google has a web crawling robot called Googlebot, which finds the web-pages and hand over the retrieved information to ‘Google Indexer’. Google Indexer is a huge index database which is sorted alphabetically with each index entry storing a list of documents in which the term appears within the text and its specific location.
Google does not index common words like the, is, on, of, how, why, some punctuations and multiple spaces etc. The query analyzer of Google called ‘query processor’ which has comprises with user interface, search engine that evaluates queries and results formatter. The query processor compares the search query with index terms and recommends the related documents. With the help of PageRank system, the page containing higher rank is more likely to appear at the top in the output. It also uses machine-learning techniques with in the stored data, to improve its performance automatically. For example, the spelling correction system uses the same technique and suggests alternative spellings. It also allows using formulas for calculation and unit conversions etc. Various options for simple as well as advance searching are being provided to help users.

Comments:
Being a librarian I feel Google imposes a biggest challenge to the library professionals particularly in the area of electronic information. It is a most dynamic and vibrant search engine which is undoubtedly a leader in the world of search engines. While searching anything on the web, routinely Google comes in mind. The simple search with advance searching techniques is its beauty and searching loads of information is quite easier and user friendly, even a layman can search accurate information. Search for location, unit conversation, weather details, book search, image and video search, article search, synonyms, web-publishing, advertisements and in all domains of web-life, presence of Google can be felt easily. Earlier librarians were known as information searching experts and initially they dominated Google by rejecting it’s below standardized indexing techniques. But now Google is dominating library profession by using same indexing techniques in different databases for excellent output accuracy. For researchers and academicians it’s ‘Book Search’ and ‘Google Scholars’ are giving access to billions of books and articles. Easy access to the information and article search options giving ‘virtual library’ shape to the Google. This lets academic community using Google widely. Google has become a prominent reason which cut shorted the user’s visit in the libraries in search of information.
Suggestions:
Goolge is in true sense envisaging the picture of library without walls or a virtual library. It would be good if Google provide option to choose areas to search, like selecting several vertical areas while making search. For example if I would like to search with in the blog, video, images and book search domains only then I have to search separately in all required databases or have to use general search option. In general search it would give output from all databases collectively (like news, video, images, Google scholar, book search etc.). Therefore, user will be provided the key to select his/her databases while making any new search. Google may also come out with another new database of “open access journals/magazines” which would only covers journals/magazines available freely on the web. The same way it can also think of giving single window searching option to the institutional repositories available openly on public domains.

Endnote:
There is no exaggeration in saying ‘Google is the reflection of web-of-universe’. It is the highly used search engine of present era. We can observe creations of specialized search engines all around which are coming with specialized features. Though all these search engines needs decades to achieve the success Google has achieved. Librarians are known as techno-savvy group of professionals but they are in dilemma to approve Google as a boon or ban for the libraries in general and library profession in particular. Though the underline factor is that Google is reaching to the users and helping them to explore the web-of-universe by this it is achieving the objectives which librarians dreamed.

The world of search engines

Latest Trends in Libraries - A Discussion (Part - II)

Being an information provider, Internet always fascinates me and seems like an unexplored paradise. Internet is an ocean of web and retrieving a specific piece of information needs specialized searching techniques. Search engines, including Meta search engines and directories are the only tools to explore the web, even though the amount of invisible data (invisible web) is much higher than the indexed data. After inception search engines are doing a commendable job to minimize indivisible web.

Brief history of search engines

United States Department of Defense, in the year 1957 created the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to enhance the U S supremacy in the area of military with the use of science and technology. They established ARPANET for sharing information with networking technology in 1969 under restricted environment and in 1972 ARPANET went on public domain which led the birth of the Internet. With advent of World Wide Web (WWW) a revolution in the field of information exchange over the Internet has been experienced. Many people get confused on the meaning of the Internet and WWW.

Internet: Internet is the network of the networks where we can talk about machine (computer) and cables (nodes).

WWW: It is the content part on which one can found information in the form of documents, sound, video etc. and it always exist on the Network because www is the programme which communicates between computers connected over the net.

Once Information being started sharing globally by the people, it becomes important to retrieve the same in systematic form. Therefore, Search Engines came into the picture. Search engines works through following three major steps:

Spiders of search engines follow links on the web to request pages that are either not yet indexed or have been updated since they were last indexed.

With help of a crawler, these pages added in the index of the search engines. So while searching, users are not really searching the web but searching in the updated index of the search engines which provide the links to the main source.

User or search Interface (for users) is the 3^rd major part of a search engine.

Growth of search engines:

Archie, the first search engine was created in 1990 by Alan Emtage. It indexed computer files which was located at anonymous FTP for downloading. Just after that ‘Gopher’ search engine came to existence which indexed plain text documents

In stream first renowned search engine is World Wide Web Wanderer which was created by Matthew Gray in the year 1993. It is considered at first robot which ran monthly in the initial years to know the size of the web.

The first populated search engine was ‘Excite’ was created in the year 1993. It was the outcome of a project work of few Stanford University students and was released for general use in 1994.

In 1994, two students of Stanford University Jerry Yang and David Filo created Yahoo! by posting web pages with links to them. Their efforts were recognised all over and then they start listing of all their favorite web sites with description of the page and it become the first popular search engine directory to search the web. After receiving funds Yahoo become the prominent name in the search engines.

In the same year WebCrawler was introduced as first full-text search engine. It was again the outcome of a project work at University of Washington. Web public found this search engine as extensive tool to explore the web.

In 1994, Lycos appeared with various indexing facilities. For the year 1996, Lycos had indexed over 60 millions web pages and become largest search engine of that time.

Infoseek introduced in 1995 which was quite similar to Lycos. In the same year Alta Vista was launched. It was the first search engine which allows natural language to retrieve the information with advanced searching techniques. It also provides the searching facilities to multimedia documents, like audio, video, images etc.

Inktomi, in 1996, utilized ‘concept induction’ technology in which experience of human analysis applied to know which web site is mostly used and productive. Inktomi was purchased by Yahoo in 2003.

Ask Jeeves and Northern Light both were launched in 1997. After few months Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Stanford University launched ‘Google’ which started providing inbounds links to rank sites. Later MSN Search and Open Directory were also started. In the year 2004 GoodSearch and wikiseek and in 2006 Ask.com and Live Search came into existence.

Search engine business is quite competitive, therefore various other search engines like Kosmix and Hakia etc have started mushrooming with additional features apart from simple searching.

Institutional Repositories in India – an update

Digital Repository @ INFLIBNET Centre

This is an update to our earlier post ‘Institutional Repositories in India’, of 28th December, 2008. In which we discussed about some of the important but active institutional repositories in India.

Information and Library Network Centre (INFLIBNET) is always been a front runner for the development of academic libraries in our country. From library automation to online subscription and from manpower development to open access, Centre has been exploring new domains of Information management and dissemination to facilitate the Indian academics. Under the able and dynamic leadership of Dr. Jagdish Arora, Centre has been achieving new heights day by day. His leadership has given new ways of consortium subscription, meaningful logo to the Centre, enveloping colleges and social science institutes in the national consortium stream, permanent building to the Centre and more, this list goes on and on by which Centre has been exploring various cooperative ventures at all levels. INFLIBNET’s website which was not accessible earlier for most of the time is now one of the lively and highly visited websites by the academic world. Whole credit goes to Dr. Arora and his team of scientists who have given new hopes to achieve 2020 vision of the nation in desired time by facilitating the nation with free flow of scholarly information.

In 2003 Centre created Institutional Repository with the name as 'Dspace @ INFLIBNET' but it remained inaccessible most of the time due to some technical reasons. Recently INFLIBNET has revamped and relaunched this institutional repository with more smooth and vibrant look. It is created on Dspace (An open source software) and can be accessed at http://ir.inflibnet.ac.in:8080/jspui/. The repository is providing access to INFLIBNET’s news through ‘INFLIBNET in Press and Media’ and also giving access to ‘INFLIBNET’s Convention Proceedings’ collection which is covering articles published in all conventions (CALIBER & PLANNER) of the Centre from the year 2003 onwards.

We do hope the National Information and Library Network Centre of the country will always keep the librarianship's flag high and lead the world by setting up best examples.

Thank you for your suggestions and comments

Dear Professional Friends,

We would like to extend our sincere thanks for your personal as well as anonymous suggestions which you have sent to give a quality shape to this blog. We are trying to incorporate all your valued feedback and assure you for extending our serious as well as sincere efforts for the betterment of the 'key 2 information'. We aspire to have more suggestions and comments from you to give this web-space a more vibrant and informative shape. The professionals who wish to contribute by posting their articles, opinions and views on latest trends in library and information science on this blog are also welcomed. Please send your suggestions and comments at sureshbabal@gmail.com.

Hope to have quality discussion over professional issues.

With kind regards,

Sincerely yours,

Contributors

Latest Trends in Libraries – A Discussion (Part – I)

Since very inception libraries have been known as knowledge centres and to enhance the best possible use of these libraries is always been a biggest concern of librarians. Although, librarians are known as vibrant techno–savvy group of professionals, who have been dealing with information management. Even though, emergence of Internet has placed various challenges infront of them and others. Internet has also changed the outlook of the libraries and put them on the way to achieve virtual library concept. However, librarians have already established harmonization with the professional’s objectives and the Internet by experimenting with state of the art technology to facilitate end users.

At present, Internet has become the most important ingredient of library service system. Apart from computerization and building digital libraries Internet has become a medium to convey meanings of libraries in practicalities. Here we would like to discuss few of the points which have been given birth to new streams of librarianship. Following are the few topics which we feel are being taken by the librarians prominently. Here, a brief introduction to these areas are being given and later all these will be discussed duly.

Web 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 and 4.0: Libraries have always been the front runners to envelop web into their own system. Applications of the web 2.0 in libraries are known as library 2.0.

Web1.0 is linking of various simple web pages and accessed over very minute connectivity through radio link or other channels. In the beginning when libraries started developing their web pages used web1.0 but soon they had jumped into library2.0 to give better feel of library services.

Web2.0 brought better concept of sharing and two way interaction over the internet. In this users' perspective is prominently being taken careof. Blogs, wikis, social networking etc are the points to highlight.

Web3.0 is in visualization and a definition about web3.0 is yet to establish. This generation of Internet will full of artificial intelligence technologies. This would be possible with fully applicability of semantic web. In my opinion Web3.0 can be known as virtual library system.

Web4.0 generation accommodates limitless use of semantic web. Even the thought of web4.0 is not fully developed. Invisible web will not be there in this generation and most importantly, it will show the presence everywhere through various computer and communication technologies, like light computing etc.

Mashup Technology: In simple terms mapping of various contents from other resources at single interface is called Mashup Technology. Since various contents are available over the Internet in different formats, these scattered contents are posing a need to assemble them to give single representation. The objective of the Mashup Technology is quite similar to Portal Technology but Portal Technology is more standardized and framed as compare to Mashup Technology.

ERAMS: E-Resource Access and Management Services (ERAMS) is an important tool to analyse the use and workflows of electronic contents in electronic and digital libraries. After procuring and subscribing e-books and e-journals libraries need to evaluate their usage in the library. ERAMS support the librarians to analyse the usage and also helps for policy makers to plan properly about the subscription and optimum use of the e-resources.

Open Source and Open Access: For libraries both these terms go hand in hand. Open access is excellent idea to serve the society, whereas open sources are the tools giving dynamic ways of managing and executing the vision of open access.

Search Engines: Search engines are dominating the Internet world, presently we are observing a war of search engines over the Internet. Every search engine has its own specialities and qualities, we would try to evaluate most of the renowned search engines as user and will publish series of reports during short span of time.

Federated Search: Federated search is the simultaneous search of various online databases and resources. It is providing the base to search scattered online databases through single interface. Many online databases, portals and search engines are using federated search technique.

Dear friends, we soon will come out with the discussion on above quoted latest areas and various other important as well as informative topics related to our profession. I would like to thank all who have given their suggestions to improve the quality of this blog. If you have any suggestion or wishing to contribute on this blog, please contact at sureshbabal@gmail.com.

Does KOSMIX challenge the Google or Librarians?

The web which is so deep that no one can peep inside to find out the most desired information for oneself. And the major issue for the information seeker is to grasp the ocean of information; so many search engines and meta- search engines are providing their services but still we never fill up to our fill. At present Google dominates the mind of Internet users. Whenever any query comes in our mind, naturally our fingers start typing the website-www.google.com, and in the mean time whole ocean came in front of us, and we keep on exploring page after page but never able to satisfy the thirst of precise information. I am not here to criticize Google or any other search engines, but want to express my views or experience with KOSMIX.COM. It attracts me so much that it makes me spend my whole day to explore it, to inform about its features. Few days ago, I was searching for video lectures on my research topic which deals with learning object, tried to explore with Google web and then Google videos but did not feel satisfied with result output, but when I put learning object in search window of KOSMIX, it provided with multi- dimensional search out put, images, videos, what is happening in news about the topic, related terms and their search output, same way to further explore discussions, communities and FAQ's about the topic. More or less it provides with information from broad to specific, multidimensional and multifaceted. Here, what I had been intending from my search query few days ago, it takes me very near to my expectations.

I have got to say that it has serious potential. Fine, now let me share few of the things about KOSMIX as its uses perspective.

Search at KOSMIX is a revolutionary way to explore the web, and its strength lays in its way to present the information in classified form. It is like a hybrid library that deals with so many formats and mediums to satisfy the needs of users beyond text- only- document under one window. This must be boon for the users who wish to see different medias and sources grouped, or who are interested in a variety of different angles and interpretation of the same subject, for this approach KOSMIX can be more useful.

KOSMIX is founded by two Indians Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinaryan who graduated from IIT Madras and PhD from the Stanford University who earlier founded one of the best shopping search engines called junglee. They called KOSMIX an ‘explore engine’ instead of a search engine. It is a new search engine, which is like one stop shopping for all your web and media needs. Broadly, it categorizes information in various heads viz. Reference; Media; News & Blogs; Shopping; Web search etc. Further, it divides the information of search query in to various fields like: At a Glance; Topic Highlight; Reference; Videos; Images; Conversations; News& blogs; Related topics; People & Community; Shopping; FAQ's and so on. The official slogan of this search engine is, "The web organized for you”. Through its official notes it does not placing any challenge to Google because it is helping users to search Google in more specific manner. It provides the multimedia view to your search. KOSMIX categorization engine organizes the Internet into magazine- style topic pages, enabling people to navigate the web even if they don't know exactly what they are looking for?

From the view of librarians, which are known for their techno-savvy attitude to adopt latest technologies, it presents the picture of a catalogued web. They have always set an example to use latest tools to manage and facilitate end user. The ocean of the WWW over the Internet has been remained one of the biggest challenges for the librarians. Information literacy and federated search minimize the barrier between a piece of information on the WWW and librarians but never addressed to the satisfactory level. Librarians are still eager to answer the question of how to make precise search on the web for a particular keyword? That KOSMIX is quietly answering.

Earlier yahoo has tried with its new search engine product named ‘yahoo glue’ which is offering aggregator search to contents of You Tube, Wikipedia, Flicker and many other news sources. Furthermore online version of Encyclopedia Britannica has also been started giving output of the query in groups of different formats like result from encyclopedia, audio video, dictionaries, thesaurus, websites, and images etc on a single window. Moving a step ahead KOSMIX is not only aggregating results but also taking precision value in account while fetching the data on the screen. Undoubtedly it has put a challenge to the librarians and information managers to think ahead of whatever KOSMIX is offering.

As it display the information fully classified and categorized by its features. As catalogue and thesaurus guides the users towards related information about the topic through its see and see also entries. This provides the analytical approach towards finding information. KOSMIX is a mash up service, more like a smart portal with Google results and half dozen or more other sources of information.

It is like an Encyclopedia of single search term. As it provides background information about the topic, a user who wants to explore a new topic and intends to write an article or overview of that subject, can easily find balanced information on the every aspect without feeling the overload of information. It allows the users to select how they want to consume the information.

Another feature of this site is that you can share your search results with other persons through email.

Just try to explore the potential of this new search engine!!!

Free access to scholarly literature

Access to scholarly literature is one of the most important ingredient of knowledge driven economy. Electronic journals are the journals which are available on the Internet. Scholarly Electronic Journals had always been the jinx of commercialization and led to acceleration of price. Ever increasing cost of these journals deprived academicians and researchers of developing and under developed countries from the scholarly information.

Being a librarian, I can well understand the challenge of libraries to provide rich collection of scholarly literature with paucity of funds. One should keep oneself inform to grab the golden opportunities to enrich your knowledge banks with free and open access literature. I am feeling happy to inform you about this ocean of knowledge.

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