The Invisible Web Weblog

The fourth issue of Webology just came out and the journal became one year old. As one of the editorial members of the journal I am personally happy because of its rapid progress over the last year. In this issue I have published the transcription of an interview with one of the senior researchers in the area of web search research. Mansourian, Y. (2005). " The Past, Present and Future of Web Search Research: An Interview with Dr. Amanda Spink ". Webology, 2 (2), Article 15. Available at: http://www.webology.ir/2005/v2n2/a15.html

I attended a very interesting seminar on Tuesday 9 August. David Hawking from CSIRO ICT Centre of Canberra, Australia came to our department to deliver a presentation for people in IS and Computer Deptartment. The seminar was about the anchor text and how useful it might be. Basically the results of his studies confirmed that the anchor text plays an important role on the retrievability of webpages which is much greater that you might imagine. With my great surprise the result of his study confirmed that anchorb text contributes more to web search effectiveness than expensive metadata does. He believed the contents of pages are good enough to show the topics of WebPages for a more relevant retrieve and the web does not need metadata that much. In particular, a little effect of metadata on the increasing the searchability of WebPages does not justify its high expenses.

Recently I delivered two presentations based on my PhD research in two conferences. The first one was in Leeds and the second one in Stockholm. The bibliographic information of these two presentations are: - Mansourian, Yazdan. (2005). Identifying effective factors on the level of information visibility for end users on the web environment, Doctoral Forum ISSI 2005 (10th International Conference of the International Society for Scientometrics and Informatics). Stockholm, Sweden, Sunday 24 July 2005. - Mansourian, Yazdan. (2005). Enhancement of Information Seeking Efficiency in the Electronic Resources. 13th Iranian Researchers Conference in Europe. The University of Leeds, Leeds, UK, Saturday 2 July 2005. [ Online ] http://www.irce.org/userFiles/477338.pdf

I used to have a nice weblog over the last two years (between August 2003 to June 2005). My old weblog looked like this and it was about my PhD research which is the Invisible Web. However, for a technical reason the server which was its host went off forever and my weblog disappeared from the web. There were more than 170 entries about the phenomenon of the Invisible Web that I had written over the last two years. I liked my weblog very much because it was my learning journal as well and I could see the progress of my research over there. In addition, it was a real hub on this topic and I made hundreds of links to the related materials. Sadly, all these useful materials disappeared now. Unfortunately, I have just backup of a few entries and the remaining left on the invisible web now. I made this weblog here temporarily to find a solution for this problem and then looking for a new permanent home for the invisible web weblog.