Internal Revenus Service/AltaVista

[Sheryl Dwinell]

Personally, I think LiveTopics is marginally useful.  Often I find that the
additional terms are puzzling. While it is conceivable that you might find
a few extra terms to toss into your boolean search (since that's all that
happens when you select a term), the list of 'related' terms shows that
it's not quite as sophisticated as one might be lead to believe. There is
no syndetic structure akin to what a librarian is used to finding in a
thesaurus or authority file.

I did a very basic, broad search:

librar* AND pornograph* AND censor*

I clicked on livetopics and amongst the suggested terms were variations of
the words that I'd truncated (pornography, pornographic, censoring,
censorship, etc.) which seems unecessary.  I also got terms like: alt
(pulled from Usenet newsgroups, no doubt), bonehead, niteclub, forteana,
cardgame, nocem, talkshows, chaki, Exon, vtw, gorton, billwatch, safdar,
shabbir, goodlatte, bliley, pressler, eshoo, kuoppala.  There were no
library related terms offered at all.

I suppose the folks at AltaVista should at least get some credit for trying
to tackle on the biggest problems people have with their search engine,
mega search results.  
Sheryl Dwinell
Cataloger/Database Management Librarian
Memorial Library, Marquette University
P.O. Box 3141
Milwaukee, WI 53201-3141
dwinells at vms.csd.mu.edu
414-288-3542