Open Location

S ome people speak of the "signal-to-noise" ratio of !nforma-tion on the Web. I usually call it a "noise-to-signal ratio-since it often seems that the noise is winning easily Still, there is "signal" available, and we have to find it iftheWeb is to be useful for us. One place to start "filtering" material is with sites containing pointers to other sites that meet our interests and needs. My first two columns (Dec 96 and Mar 97) were devoted to lists that I hoped would provide just such a starting place for readers interested in organizations and courses related to this publication. You probably have bookmarked your own favorite list of sites that you visit regularly, that contain information that is more "signal" than "noise" for you. But what if we want to find information on a new or different topic? For this, the usual choice is to look through the search engines. These sites are well-known and well-visited, but are they useful to someone looking for material in our area of interest? For this column, I decided to compare several of them. The obvious place to start was with the phrase "computers and society" or the search terms +computers +society. The first of these searches is (usually) for the complete phrase; the second, for the keywords in any order (together or separate). Since the various engines differ in their cataloging and search strategies, it was not Surprising that the results were quite different for each. Yahoo! • for "computers and society," found one document (Lorrie Cranor's course at Washington Univ. St. Louis). • for +computers +society, found 183 documents. Alta ½sta • for "computers and society," found 200 documents. By the fourth page of results, listed sites were mostly irrelevant. • for +computers +society, found 100,000 documents. Embarassingly, the first page listed an outdated site that had been a student prototype project for this publication. In~bseek • for "computers and society," found 1,106 documents, of which this publication's site was number 4. Lycos • shows no difference between the "..." and +...+ searches, but listed C&S third of the 40,048 documents it found. Excite • found 1310 documents; also offers a "more like this..." feature to expand the search. Vc~b Crawler • found 76 documents matching "computers and society." When I looked for "computers ethics and society" (my own course title), it found 13 matches, one of which was my …