recent discussion of WWW cataloging?

[Dan Lester]

On Mon, 9 Oct 1995 17:30:02 -0700 JQ Johnson said:
>knowledge librarians bring to the cataloging effort.  For example,
>Yahoo, which was originally the pre-eminient selective subject catalog
>of the web now appears to be totally fed by author submissions (you
>tell Yahoo you want it to catalog your page, and also describe the
>categories).

  Not totally true on Yahoo.  It is based on submissions, but also on
their automated analysis of net-happenings and other newsgroups,
lists, and related sources.
  Also, though you suggest the topics to index it under, they do change
some of them.  And they do not index sex pages except for commercially
supported sex pages.  This is not due to censorship, but because any
amateur sex page announced is guaranteed to die within a couple days,
due to local load or local administrative action for violation of AUPs.

>but it seems to me we're seeing a definite shift away from independent
>evaluative guides and towards automated or self-evaluative web
>indexes.

  Also, remember that smart people learn how these things work and develop
their own methods of getting what they want.  Smart page developers make
sure they use appropriate language so it will get indexed as they wish
in Lycos, for example.

>Is this impression of trends in fact correct?  Is there recent literature
>discussing trends in web search facilities?

Although it is not exactly what you describe above, but a fairly detailed
discussion of Yahoo, including information obtained directly from the
developers, you could check out the paper that I wrote about Yahoo that
is to appear in the next (December, presumably) issue of _Database_.

cyclops

  Dan Lester, Network Information Coordinator
  Albertsons Library, Boise State University, Boise, Idaho 83725 USA
  alileste at idbsu.idbsu.edu             http://cyclops.idbsu.edu/
  How can one fool make another wise?  Kansas, "No One Together," 1979