Search results

Purpose — To provide a theoretical background to understand current local search engines as an aspect of specialized search, and understand the data sources and used technologies.

Design/methodology/approach — Selected local search engines are examined and compared toward their use of geographic information retrieval (GIR) technologies, data sources, available entity information, processing, and interfaces. An introduction to the field of GIR is given and its use in the selected systems is discussed.

Findings — All selected commercial local search engines utilize GIR technology in varying degrees for information preparation and presentation. It is also starting to be used in regular Web search. However, major differences can be found between the different search engines.

Research limitations/implications — This study is not exhaustive and only uses informal comparisons without definitive ranking. Due to the unavailability of hard data, informed guesses were made based on available public interfaces and literature.

Practical implications — A source of background information for understanding the results of local search engines, their provenance, and their potential.

Originality/value — An overview of GIR technology in the context of commercial search engines integrates research efforts and commercial systems and helps to understand both sides better.

Internationalization has emerged as a vital catch-up strategy for firms in emerging markets. Although external knowledge search has been widely acknowledged as an important way within the internationalization process, there appear to be opposing views as to whether local or international knowledge search contributes more for firms’ internationalization. This paper aims to integrate organizational ambidexterity and external knowledge search theory to define the concept of external knowledge search ambidexterity and empirically test the impact of the balance dimension of external knowledge search ambidexterity and combined dimension of external knowledge search ambidexterity on internationalization and the moderating effect of organizational slack and environmental munificence.

Survey.

Based on survey data of 219 Chinese manufacturing firms, the authors find that both relative balance and combined dimensions of external knowledge search ambidexterity are positively associated with internationalization. Organizational slack and environmental munificence both negatively moderate the relationship between balance dimension of external knowledge search ambidexterity and internationalization, both positively moderate the relationship between combined dimension of external knowledge search ambidexterity and internationalization.

It is essential for managers to take different external knowledge sources into consideration, so as to both maximize revenues and profits from advanced technological knowledge and foreign marketing knowledge in foreign markets and geographic proximity advantages in local market, while minimizing the risks of lacking of adaptive capacity for lacking of knowledge about international markets and cost of coordination and communication because of long geographical distance and cultural difference.

The findings help us better understand the knowledge seeking activities of emerging economy multinationals by proposing that the balance and combination of local and international knowledge search both can promote internationalization, especially on the background of China. The results also enrich the organizational ambidexterity research and extend it to external knowledge search field.

The interval multi-objective optimization problems (IMOPs) are universal and vital uncertain optimization problems. In this study, an interval multi-objective grey wolf optimization algorithm (GWO) based on fuzzy system is proposed to solve IMOPs effectively.

First, the classical genetic operators are embedded into the interval multi-objective GWO as local search strategies, which effectively balanced the global search ability and local development ability. Second, by constructing a fuzzy system, an effective local search activation mechanism is proposed to save computing resources as much as possible while ensuring the performance of the algorithm. The fuzzy system takes hypervolume, imprecision and number of iterations as inputs and outputs the activation index, local population size and maximum number of iterations. Then, the fuzzy inference rules are defined. It uses the activation index to determine whether to activate the local search process and sets the population size and the maximum number of iterations in the process.

The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm achieves optimal hypervolume results on 9 of the 10 benchmark test problems. The imprecision achieved on 8 test problems is significantly better than other algorithms. This means that the proposed algorithm has better performance than the commonly used interval multi-objective evolutionary algorithms. Moreover, through experiments show that the local search activation mechanism based on fuzzy system proposed in this study can effectively ensure that the local search is activated reasonably in the whole algorithm process, and reasonably allocate computing resources by adaptively setting the population size and maximum number of iterations in the local search process.

This study proposes an Interval multi-objective GWO, which could effectively balance the global search ability and local development ability. Then an effective local search activation mechanism is developed by using fuzzy inference system. It closely combines global optimization with local search, which improves the performance of the algorithm and saves computing resources.

This study aims to explore the impact of organizational search (local and boundary-spanning search) on business model innovation (efficiency-centered/novelty-centered business model innovation) and the moderating role of knowledge inertia between them.

The relationships are examined through data provided by a sample of Chinese firms and by multiple hierarchical regressions.

Local search has a stronger effect on efficiency-centered business model innovation, whereas boundary-spanning search plays a stronger role in novelty-centered business model innovation. Knowledge inertia strengthens the effect of local search on efficiency-centered business model innovation but weakens the effect of boundary-spanning search on efficiency-centered business model innovation and the effect of local search on novelty-centered business model innovation.

The findings enable firms’ managers to understand the subtle ways in which organizational search interacts with knowledge inertia to affect business model innovation and may help them to make knowledge management efforts to harvest the full value of organizational search.

Previous studies have not examined the effect of different organizational search on different business model innovation from knowledge management perspective. With knowledge inertia as the moderator, the results reveal the contingent impact mechanism of organizational search on business model innovation, the findings provide fresh evidence that can bridge the gap between knowledge management and business model innovation.

More enterprises adopt open innovation by breaking technological or organizational boundaries to seek internal and external knowledge when they face a fiercely competitive environment, complex market demands, and increasingly rapid technological change. In this context, a knowledge search strategy is regarded as an effective means of obtaining inside and outside resources and an important way to break the innovation bottleneck. Moreover, information technology (IT) is deemed an important asset for sourcing knowledge, whereas absorptive capacity is seen as an indispensable ability for utilizing novel knowledge. Thus, this paper aims to test the role of knowledge search in open innovation and examine the mediating effect of absorptive capacity and the moderating effect of IT capability.

Using a sample of 1,088 Chinese firms’ data collected by the World Bank in 2012, this paper employs logistic regression to test the hypotheses.

This study finds that local and boundary-spanning search strategies positively influence both product and process innovation, and absorptive capacity has a mediating role in the relationships between knowledge search and product and process innovation. Moreover, IT capability has a positive moderating effect on the relationship between local search and innovation performance; however, IT capability strengthens the relationship between boundary-spanning search and process innovation while weakens that between boundary-spanning search and product innovation.

This study explores the impact of different knowledge search behaviors on different types of innovation and probes the role of absorptive capacity and IT capability in mediating and moderating the above relationships. By drawing on knowledge-based theory and cognitive-developmental theory, this paper provides a novel perspective to explain the mechanism between knowledge search and innovation performance.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate three issues: how does an innovative search (local search and boundary-spanning search) impact firm innovation performance of latecomers; how does capability reconfiguration (capability evolution and capability substitution) mediates the relationship between innovative search and firm innovation performance; and how does the technological leapfrogging process (initial stage, following stage, synchronization stage and leading stage) moderate the relationship between capability reconfiguration and firm innovation performance.

A “resource-capability-performance” theoretical framework was developed to explore the relationships between local/boundary-spanning search, capability reconfiguration and firm innovation performance. The data were collected by sending out surveys to managers and employees in various industries in mainland China. These hypotheses were tested using structural equation models and hierarchical regressions.

The results showed that: innovative search has a direct causal relationship to capability reconfiguration; local search and boundary-spanning search are conducive to improve the innovation performance of latecomers; the impact of local search and boundary-spanning search on innovation performance is realized through the completion of mediating role of capability reconfiguration; there are differences in the path of local search and boundary-spanning search affecting the capability reconfiguration of enterprise innovation performance; and the relationship between innovative search, capability reconfiguration and enterprise innovation performance evolves with the enterprise in different stages of technological leapfrogging.

This study explores the relationship and the path of innovative search to firm innovation performance and analyzes the path difference between local search and boundary-spinning search, which enriches the research of organizational search and enterprise innovation. This paper reveals the whole path of innovative search affecting innovation performance, discusses the important role of capability reconfiguration and makes incremental contributions to dynamic capability theory. It studies the evolution of innovative search on innovation performance under the background of technological leapfrogging, which provides a new perspective for the study of organizational search and capability-based theory.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the mechanism and boundary condition of the effect of managers' negotiable fate belief (NFB) on enterprise incremental and radical innovation based on social cognition theory and social network theory.

The authors used Mplus and SPSS (Statistical Product and Service Solutions) to test the proposed model with data from 278 enterprises that have established national or municipal enterprise technology centers. In this study, questionnaires were collected through commission and field investigation.

The results indicate that managers' NFB has a significant positive impact on local and cross-border knowledge search and on the incremental and radical innovation of enterprises. Knowledge search is positively correlated with enterprise innovation and can play a mediating role between the managers' NFB and enterprise innovation. Network capability can positively moderate the relationship between managers' NFB and cross-border knowledge search but has no significant impact on the relationship between managers' NFB and local knowledge search.

Although there have been many studies of managers' cognition, little is known about how managers' NFB influences enterprise behavior and enterprise innovation. This study incorporates managers' NFB and knowledge search into the research model and examines the moderating effect of network capability between managers' NFB and knowledge search from an interactive perspective. By verifying the research model, this study offers original views on whether and how managers' NFB and knowledge search affect enterprise innovation.

Identifies the information available from searches of the Local Land Charges Register (LLCR) and the duty of local authorities to supply information and copies of relevant documents. Describes the means of obtaining further information about properties from local authorities whether by means of standard enquiry forms or separate requests for information. Considers the duty of local authorities to reply to such enquiries. Includes a summary of the different parts of the LLCR, and details of the standard enquiries covered in the new enquiry form CON 29.

This study evaluates the retrieval of New Zealand information using three local New Zealand search engines, four major global search engines and three metasearch engines. Searches for NZ topics were carried out on all the search engines, and the relative recall calculated. The local search engines did not achieve higher recall than the global search engines or metasearch engines, but no search engine achieved more than 45 percent recall. Despite the theoretical advantage of searching the databases of several individual search engines, metasearch engines did not achieve higher recall. Of relevant pages for the queries, 36 percent were outside the .nz domain. Implications for searching for geographically specific information, and for evaluation of search engines, are discussed.

This paper aims to describe the results of a usability test performed at Western Washington University to determine whether users were as successful performing common catalog‐related tasks in WorldCat Local as they are in the library's current catalog, Innovative Interfaces' WebPAC.

A usability team developed a test based on tasks commonly performed in the library catalog. They then tested 24 participants of varying levels of experience and asked each to perform 20 common catalog tasks in either the WebPAC interface currently in use or the WorldCat Local interface. The WorldCat Local interface was a test version which reflected Western Washington University's library holdings, in addition to the Orbis Cascade Alliance consortial holdings and all WorldCat holdings.

While the results found that there were tasks in which participants were more successful in WorldCat Local than in the WebPAC, they also identified common tasks in which users were far less successful in WorldCat Local than in the WebPAC.

WorldCat Local is one example of a new generation of discovery interfaces that is being considered by a number of academic institutions. This paper provides some insights into the strengths and weaknesses of the product.