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.

Purpose — The purpose of this chapter is to give an overview of the context of Web search and search engine related research, as well as to introduce the reader to the sections and chapters of the book.

Methodology/approach — We review literature dealing with various aspects of search engines, with special emphasis on emerging areas of Web searching, search engine evaluation going beyond traditional methods and new perspectives on Web searching.

Findings — The approaches to studying Web search engines are manifold. Given the importance of Web search engines for knowledge acquisition, research from different perspectives needs to be integrated into a more cohesive perspective.

Research limitations/implications — The chapter suggests a basis for research in the field and also introduces further research directions.

Originality/value of paper — The chapter gives a concise overview of the topics dealt within the book and also shows directions for researchers interested in Web search engines.

Purpose — We assert that researchers developing new web interaction tools should consider an array of user motives beyond query-based information retrieval. This chapter reports on two probes used to investigate user activities that go beyond search as traditionally conceived.

Design/methodology — This chapter reviews research on user experiences with search engines and general web use. It then describes the design and case study of cards and pebbles, two search engine-based probes developed to help elicit new concepts for web-based experiences.

Findings — Participants reflect on their experiences with the probes and offer ideas regarding how to incrementally shift the traditional search paradigm and conceive of the web in new ways.

Implications/value — This investigation serves as a starting point by offering criteria that should be considered when designing new ‘beyond search’ tools.

Purpose — Since a couple of years, we are confronted with the phenomenon of information overload. In particular, the web provides a rich source of a variety of information mainly in textual, i.e. unstructured form. Thus, web search faces new challenges that are how to make the user aware of the variety of content available and how to satisfy users best with such manifold content.

Methodology — This variety of content is considered as diversity, i.e. the reflection of a result set's coverage of multiple interpretations of a query. Diversification within web search aims on the one hand at adapting the ranking in a way that the top results are diverse. Increasingly important becomes on the other hand the organization and classification of content within diversification.

Findings — Various approaches to diversification are available or currently focus on research activities. They range from an adapted ranking by means of similarity measures or diversity scores to a comprehensive diversity analysis which determines topics and classifies text according to opinions etc.

Implications — Given the high diversity of web content, approaches for diversification are extremely important. Web search tries to address this problem from different perspectives. For the future, combination with image search result diversification is important. Further, benchmarks and standard data sets for evaluations need to be established to ensure comparability of results from various approaches.

Originality/value — This chapter provides an overview on diversity in web search from two directions: (a) Diversity is introduced with its notions and dimensions. (b) Methods to assess diversity within web search are presented.

Purpose — To provide an overview of recent research that examined how search engine users evaluate and select Web search results and how alternative search engine interfaces can support Web users' credibility assessment of Web search results.

Design/methodology/approach — As theoretical background, Information Foraging Theory (Pirolli, 2007; Pirolli & Card, 1999) from cognitive science and Prominence-Interpretation-Theory (Fogg, 2003) from communication and persuasion research are presented. Furthermore, a range of recent empirical research that investigated the effects of alternative SERP layouts on searchers' information quality or credibility assessments of search results are reviewed and approaches that aim at automatically classifying search results according to specific genre categories are reported.

Findings — The chapter reports on findings that Web users often rely heavily on the ranking provided by the search engines without paying much attention to the reliability or trustworthiness of the Web pages. Furthermore, the chapter outlines how alternative search engine interfaces that display search results in a format different from a list and/or provide prominent quality-related cues in the SERPs can foster searchers' credibility evaluations.

Research limitations/implications — The reported empirical studies, search engine interfaces, and Web page classification systems are not an exhaustive list.

Originality/value — The chapter provides insights for researchers, search engine developers, educators, and students on how the development and use of alternative search engine interfaces might affect Web users' search and evaluation strategies during Web search as well as their search outcomes in terms of retrieving high-quality, credible information.

Purpose — The purpose of this discussion is, first, to review the concept of truth claim and how it forms the framework for four research traditions: science, social science, law, and judgments of excellence. Then, the operational mechanisms of networks are reviewed. The discussion concludes by introducing three philosophic perspectives that might deepen the meanings nascent in the concept of “search.”

Methodology/approach — The methodology includes a historical approach to outline brief but sufficient definitions for how truth claims are built in four established research traditions. Each tradition is then analyzed with a view to testing its methods. The tests suggest a number of pathways to reframe search engine results in order to evaluate their relationship to the previously established types of truth claims.

Findings — The findings constitute an outline of the research traditions in the four areas of science, social science, law, and judgments of excellence. These are followed by a review of the current configurations of networks, their infrastructures, and their capabilities, including a brief section on the importance of search engine mechanisms. Crawling, indexing, and then ranking form the operational mechanisms that search engines employ in delivering search results. It is clear that each operation introduces logical problems. Then, the final sections outline three widely ranging philosophic perspectives on the nature of search: (1) an aesthetic theory of indexing, (2) understanding search from the psychology of learning, and (3) an exploration of the relationship between performativity and recent economic models of how data accumulates in today's world.

Research implications — It is suggested that exploration of a deeper philosophical perspective will assist library and information science (LIS) scholars to reframe Web search in ways that allow linkages to the established research traditions.

Originality/value of the paper — The idea of testing the “truth claim” as connected to traditional research methods was presented initially by Rall (2002, 2004). This area has been neglected in the literature as many Internet scholars find that the philosophy of research methodologies remains outside of their knowledge base. Overall, LIS scholars have focused on information seekers, on the politics of search engines, as well as documenting the computational problems that are present in search engine results. The consideration of how truth claims are formed and subsequently tested will allow LIS researchers to explore the linkages between their current studies and the established frameworks of scholarly research.

The history of the public library is long and rich, and continues to reflect this institution's initial mission: to respond to the needs of an evolving democratic society. From its early days as a subscription service for the middle-class, through its evolution to become an educational site for the lower-classes and new immigrants, the public library has served as a touch-stone for urban industrial society in North America (Lerner, 1998, p. 138; Shera, 1974). Over the past century, public libraries have evolved to respond to the growing needs of the communities they serve and continue to do so with recent advances in technologies (such as DVDs, electronic books, the Internet, etc.), and with a more global outlook on the ways that people seek and share information. Indeed, the public library's constituents today are exceedingly diverse, including children and adults from a broad range of socio-economic, cultural, and educational backgrounds, all of whom seek information for a variety of personal and work-related purposes. The fact that public libraries have been fulfilling patrons' information needs for well over a century is a testament to their enduring success and versatility as information providers, and also points to the overall effectiveness of public librarians as intermediaries in the provision process.