Web Dragons
Inside the Myths of Search Engine Technology
Published on 14. November 2006
Book
Paperback/Softback
288 pages
978-0-12-370609-6 (ISBN)
Description
Web Dragons offers a perspective on the world of Web search and the effects of search engines and information availability on the present and future world.
In the blink of an eye since the turn of the millennium, the lives of people who work with information have been utterly transformed. Everything we need to know is on the web. It's where we learn and play, shop and do business, keep up with old friends and meet new ones. Search engines make it possible for us to find the stuff we need to know. Search engines - web dragons - are the portals through which we access society's treasure trove of information. How do they stack up against librarians, the gatekeepers over centuries past? What role will libraries play in a world whose information is ruled by the web? How is the web organized? Who controls its contents, and how do they do it? How do search engines work? How can web visibility be exploited by those who want to sell us their wares? What's coming tomorrow, and can we influence it?
As we witness the dawn of a new era, this book shows readers what it will look like and how it will change their world. Whoever you are: if you care about information, this book will open your eyes and make you blink.
In the blink of an eye since the turn of the millennium, the lives of people who work with information have been utterly transformed. Everything we need to know is on the web. It's where we learn and play, shop and do business, keep up with old friends and meet new ones. Search engines make it possible for us to find the stuff we need to know. Search engines - web dragons - are the portals through which we access society's treasure trove of information. How do they stack up against librarians, the gatekeepers over centuries past? What role will libraries play in a world whose information is ruled by the web? How is the web organized? Who controls its contents, and how do they do it? How do search engines work? How can web visibility be exploited by those who want to sell us their wares? What's coming tomorrow, and can we influence it?
As we witness the dawn of a new era, this book shows readers what it will look like and how it will change their world. Whoever you are: if you care about information, this book will open your eyes and make you blink.
Reviews / Votes
"It is not a resource on how search engines work, but rather what ideas and ideals have been realized in the development of search engines, the political and human challenges they face and problems and opportunities they present to humans and to the nature of knowledge and information. The book is written in a clear, simple fashion, making it accessible to all readers. The broad swath it cuts, however, does not detract from its use as an academic course resource." --Choice, June 2007"If you've ever searched the web for information and wondered what's going on behind that query box, I recommend you read Web Dragons. It puts Internet search engines in context-part of a legacy of information access dating back thousands of years. It explains in plain language how search engines work, and points out potential pitfalls that thoughtful searchers should consider. Web Dragons is clear and engaging. Given the amount of time and trust we all invest in search engines, if you pay attention to the web I highly recommend redirecting some of that attention to this book." --Craig Nevill-Manning, Engineering Director, Google
"Search technology is changing the way people understand and interact with the world. Web Dragons takes a revealing look at the evolution of search and how it will shape the future of information technology." --Prabhakar Raghavan, Head of Yahoo! Research
"Witten, Gori and Numerico steadily bring the web into sharper and sharper focus. A daunting expanse is revealed to have structure. The structure enables the knowledgeable to navigate it to their benefit and allows the unscrupulous or careless to create pitfalls and traps. Search engines will be critical tools for most people living today. What could be more important than understanding how these technologies work and where they are going?" --Jonathan Grudin, Microsoft Research
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
San Francisco
United States
Publishing group
Elsevier Science & Technology
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Those interested in or who need information on today's fast-changing landscape of information access, who use search engines daily and may be affected by web spamming, selective access to information, or the problems of monopolistic control of information - just to name a few. Typical readers would be those in the software business, in particular in search engines, web content management, knowledge management, web advertising, and the law and ethics that surround this field; professionals in information science; librarians; and anyone that is interested in the ways in which the increasing amount of information will become accessible to us.
Illustrations
Illustrated; Illustrations
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 191 mm
Weight
590 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-12-370609-6 (9780123706096)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Ian H. Witten is a professor of computer science at the University of Waikato in New Zealand. He directs the New Zealand Digital Library research project. His research interests include information retrieval, machine learning, text compression, and programming by demonstration. He received an MA in Mathematics from Cambridge University, England; an MSc in Computer Science from the University of Calgary, Canada; and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Essex University, England. He is a fellow of the ACM and of the Royal Society of New Zealand. He has published widely on digital libraries, machine learning, text compression, hypertext, speech synthesis and signal processing, and computer typography. He has written several books, the latest being Managing Gigabytes (1999) and Data Mining (2000), both from Morgan Kaufmann. Professor Gori's research interests are in the field of artificial intelligence, with emphasis on machine learning and game playing. He is a co-author of the book "Web Dragons: Inside the myths of search engines technologies,? Morgan Kauffman (Elsevier), 2007. He was the Chairman of the Italian Chapter of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society, and the President of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence. He is in the list of top Italian scientists kept by VIAAcademy(http://www.topitalianscientists.org/top_italian_scientists.aspx). Dr. Gori is a fellow of the IEEE, ECCAI, and IAPR.
Content
PREFACE
1. SETTING THE SCENE
2. LITERATURE AND THE WEB
3. MEET THE WEB
4. HOW TO SEARCH
5. THE WEB WARS
6. WHO CONTROLS INFORMATION?
7. THE DRAGONS EVOLVE
REFERENCES
INDEX
1. SETTING THE SCENE
2. LITERATURE AND THE WEB
3. MEET THE WEB
4. HOW TO SEARCH
5. THE WEB WARS
6. WHO CONTROLS INFORMATION?
7. THE DRAGONS EVOLVE
REFERENCES
INDEX