Are We There Yet?
Aired April 12 and 13, 1997
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This is Internet On The Air...I'm Joan Silvi. Are we there yet?
Organizing the World Wide Web...in a moment.
Funding Credit: Internet On The Air is a production of the University of Michigan
School of Information and Michigan radio, made possible by a grant from the W.K. Kellogg
Foundation.
This is Internet On The Air. The fast-paced growth of the Web makes it both exciting and
frustrating. Web sites appear one day, but can disappear the next day without warning.
Search engines can't discriminate between relevant sites and completely unrelated ones.
They only look for Web pages that contain - somewhere - the words you list. That's why
most queries result in thousands of hits...most of which have nothing to do with your area
of interest.
Librarians, computer experts and engineers are working on a standard that would make
indexing more uniform. One work group suggests embedding "headings" in every Web
page. These headings would summarize the page by subject, author, title, description and
date. Search engines then would be able to look for these keywords rather than the full
text. The result would be more relevant documents - and fewer of them. The trick will be
to create indexing systems that can accommodate a wide variety of Internet users... and
find a way to transfer data among the different versions.
Finally, efforts are being made to preserve Web sites before they disappear. Sites are
archived for use by historians...but those collecting this information still are working
on ways to catalogue sites for easier access.
To learn more about indexing Web sites, contact our Web page at www.si.umich.edu/iota. For
Internet On The Air, I'm Joan Silvi.
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Last Updated January 26, 2000
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