[WEB4LIB] RE: URL Promotion, Placement Purchasing

[Rhyno Art]

I agree with Theodore and Rod's postings. In addition to subject
directories, the availability of a non-commercial and reasonably
comprehensive Internet search engine would be a wonderful resource for the
library community. It would take some fairly deep pockets to fund the kind
of service that Alta Vista and HotBot provide, but there are a number of
areas that the maintainers of Internet search engines have not targeted
that could be extremely useful to libraries and the communities we serve.
Most search engines do very little with metadata beyond straight keyword
indexing, in part because experience has shown that Web authors can't
always be trusted to accurately describe their creations and sometimes
blatantly use misleading descriptions in order to increase the odds that
they will be noticed. A search engine that could fully exploit verified
metadata from a trusted source could put a premium on resources that have
been identified as particularly noteworthy by libraries. RDF, for example,
allows metadata to be digitally certified and there may be other options
for utilising the selection skills that libraries have built over centuries
of surveying the world of recorded knowledge. An Internet search engine
with Z39.50 support would allow developers to leverage years of research by
the library community into search and retrieval protocols against the 
complexities of information retrieval on the web. Escaping proprietary 
weighting algorithms and annoying banner ads alone would make this effort 
worthwhile.

art
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Art Rhyno, Systems Librarian
Leddy Library, University of Windsor
Internet: arhyno at uwindsor.ca
Tel: (519) 253-4232, EXT. 3163
FAX: (519) 973-7076
WWW: <http://www.uwindsor.ca/library/leddy/people/art.html>