Tag Archive for 'Search engines'

Library website design, search engine crawlers and SEO

Published on April 1, 2008 in Databases and Digital library. 0 Comments

Digital libraries have tons of data, and when they don’t have the data in digital format , they have really nice and structured electronically available metadata about those data. Library catalogs we call them. They are plain ordinary databases and come in all kind of flavours.

When I joined the library behind the scenes some eight years ago, indexing of the library catalog was off limits for the search engines. That would cripple the system, at the expense of the users! Actually we were talking about Altavista and AllTheWeb in those days. Albeit, Google was around already. Times have changed though. We have taken away all kinds of no-index no-follow signs on our system and the first catalog cards are being indexed by search engines. We are just starting to use RSS and OAI as sitemaps for Google. But this is not the only approach that should be taken. The site should become optimized for the Google bots and crawlers of all kind of search engines. Although Google is by far the most important search engine at this moment.

Interesting to look back in my archives, a study was done carried out two years ago by Drunk men work here. It is not a peer reviewed study so it seems, but interesting nevertheless. In their research they compared the crawling behaviour of the Google, Yahoo! and MSN bots on a really large site that was set up as a binary search tree. Quite amazing, the Yahoo! bot showed to be the most proficient bot, having indexed most underlying pages and down to the deepest level. The Google bot followed at quite some distance and MSN came in last.

How matters have changed over the last two years. Smith and Nelson (2008) built two a large digital library websites to study crawler behaviour. They compared wide and deep linking design of the websites. It appeared that conventional wisdom held true, in that the wide design sites were indexed twice as fast. In the case of google 18 days compared to 44 days. The Yahoo! crawler failed to index the complete site. The MSN bot took more than 200 days in the wide design and failed to completely index the entire website when using the deep design.

The latest article I read which touched this subject was Jody L. DeRidder (2008) who explored the use of Google sitemaps and static browse pages (for which I have been pleading already for so long, not so much for robots as well as for our human users) and they concluded that -with a relatively small sample- static browse pages enhanced the crawling and indexing by search engines.

Having digested this all, I think we are back again to our thesaurus and classification system, and use those logical trees for entry of the crawlers into our catalog. Isn’t it nice that we indexed all our records already manually for years and that we can make use of that system as efficient highways into our catalog for the crawlers. Old systems used for new purposes.

Release the spiders!

The second part of the exercise becomes of course, design efficient catalog records that rank well in the search engine result pages. Wonder who has formally studied those matters? Any suggestions?

References
DeRidder, J. L. (2008). Googlizing a digital library. Code4Lib journal, 2. http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/43
Smith, J. A. and M. L. Nelson (2008). Site design impact on robots: An examination of search engine crawler behaviour at deep and wide websites. D-Lib Magazine, 14(3/4). http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march08/smith/03smith.html

Full feeds versus partial feeds

Published on February 29, 2008 in Information Retrieval. 1 Comment

The full feeds versus partial feeds is an old debate. Have a look at the 2.7 million Google hits for this simple query. Most of the debate however, concentrates on the presumed effects on visitors to the actual blog and -missed?- advertising revenue.

This afternoon I was having an interesting discussion with a representative from a library organization and we were discussing the theme of findability and accessibility of scientific information. My point of view was that blogging about science and scientific articles would at least increase the findability of these articles. However, this is only true when the feeds of the blog are full feeds. The discovery of very new, young or even premature information on the web should be complemented nowadays with searches on blog search engines and news search engines. These search engines are on most occasions not exactly what their name suggests. In most instances they are rss feed search engines, i.e. they only index rss feeds.

The consequences are simple. When a blog is using partial feeds only the headline is indexed by blog search engines. Have for instance a look at the Technorati results for the IAALD blog,  or from Google Blog search, or at Ask blog search. These represent the top three blog search engines at the moment. The discoverablity of content with these search engines for content from the IAALD blog is miserable, whereas it has some excellent content.

Where the discussion of full text feeds versus partial feeds so far has concentrated on arguments of pro-bloggers who are worried about their advertising revenue. For scientists, the argument of discoverablity is far more important and they should always opt for full feeds to syndicate their content as widely as possible.

It sounds strange but a lot of people have not yet realized this.

Searching for Science

Published on January 30, 2008 in Information Retrieval and Open Access. 1 Comment

Since a little while -say a year and a half or so- I teach at regular intervals a course on finding scholarly information with freely available resources on the Web. The course is titled “Searching for Science“. The course material is freely available in one of my Wikis’. The main reason for using a wiki for presenting a course like this, is that linking to examples on the Web works so much more smoothly than using a powerpoint  instead.

With regards to the course today, a small group attended. 4 researchers and 5 (mostly) international students. A nice mix. I really enjoyed it, and I think they did as well. Well at least they gave me a really positive evaluation.
During the course I spend about three quarters of the morning, say a littel over 2 hours, on general search tactics. Search engines and their commands, Web directories and the Deep Web.  During the evaluation I always get the feedback that just some plain Google commands and search tips receive the most Brownie points. What’s always interesting is an exercise where we compare the coverage of scholarly search engines plus Live Academic on retrieving a known article from an OA repository in the Netherlands. I always ask the students to do the search with the full title of an article and repeat the exercise with a sentence from the discussion part of the article. It is always interesting to see the outcome of this exercise. As usual Live Academic failed entirely. Google Scholar did reasonbaly well on both, but today Scirus and Scientific Commons only worked with the title words.  These outcomes can be different again tomorrow. It is always difficult to explain these outcomes.

Meanwhile I find some real gratification in the fact to point my students to some of the OA discussions as well, whilst covering collections of OA journals, Repositories or mentioning Open Course Ware sources.

On most occasions the participants are entirely new to some of de Science 2.0 developments. RSS? never heard off. So I introduce them to Bloglines, Netvibes and Google Reader. Show them something about scholarly blogs, social bookmarking for scientists or Digg.

We do actually have a course on Science 2.0 in the planning for somewhere in April. Needs still a lot of developing though. But it will be interesting.