Personalizing Web Search based on User Profile

OpenAIRE

Utage, Sharyu; Ahire, Vijaya

2016-01-01

Web Search engine is most widely used for information retrieval from World Wide Web. These Web Search engines help user to find most useful information. When different users Searches for same information, search engine provide same result without understanding who is submitted that query. Personalized web search it is search technique for proving useful result. This paper models preference of users as hierarchical user profiles. a framework is proposed called UPS. It generalizes profile and m...

Measuring Personalization of Web Search

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Hannak, Aniko; Sapiezynski, Piotr; Kakhki, Arash Molavi

2013-01-01

are simply unable to access information that the search engines’ algorithm decidesis irrelevant. Despitetheseconcerns, there has been little quantification of the extent of personalization in Web search today, or the user attributes that cause it. In light of this situation, we make three contributions...... as a result of searching with a logged in account and the IP address of the searching user. Our results are a first step towards understanding the extent and effects of personalization on Web search engines today....

Sexual information seeking on web search engines.

Science.gov (United States)

Spink, Amanda; Koricich, Andrew; Jansen, B J; Cole, Charles

2004-02-01

Sexual information seeking is an important element within human information behavior. Seeking sexually related information on the Internet takes many forms and channels, including chat rooms discussions, accessing Websites or searching Web search engines for sexual materials. The study of sexual Web queries provides insight into sexually-related information-seeking behavior, of value to Web users and providers alike. We qualitatively analyzed queries from logs of 1,025,910 Alta Vista and AlltheWeb.com Web user queries from 2001. We compared the differences in sexually-related Web searching between Alta Vista and AlltheWeb.com users. Differences were found in session duration, query outcomes, and search term choices. Implications of the findings for sexual information seeking are discussed.

Deep Web Search Interface Identification: A Semi-Supervised Ensemble Approach

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Hong Wang

2014-12-01

Full Text Available To surface the Deep Web, one crucial task is to predict whether a given web page has a search interface (searchable HyperText Markup Language (HTML form or not. Previous studies have focused on supervised classification with labeled examples. However, labeled data are scarce, hard to get and requires tediousmanual work, while unlabeled HTML forms are abundant and easy to obtain. In this research, we consider the plausibility of using both labeled and unlabeled data to train better models to identify search interfaces more effectively. We present a semi-supervised co-training ensemble learning approach using both neural networks and decision trees to deal with the search interface identification problem. We show that the proposed model outperforms previous methods using only labeled data. We also show that adding unlabeled data improves the effectiveness of the proposed model.

Deep Web Search Interface Identification: A Semi-Supervised Ensemble Approach

OpenAIRE

Hong Wang; Qingsong Xu; Lifeng Zhou

2014-01-01

To surface the Deep Web, one crucial task is to predict whether a given web page has a search interface (searchable HyperText Markup Language (HTML) form) or not. Previous studies have focused on supervised classification with labeled examples. However, labeled data are scarce, hard to get and requires tediousmanual work, while unlabeled HTML forms are abundant and easy to obtain. In this research, we consider the plausibility of using both labeled and unlabeled data to train better models to...

Chemical Search Web Utility

Data.gov (United States)

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency — The Chemical Search Web Utility is an intuitive web application that allows the public to easily find the chemical that they are interested in using, and which...

Tales from the Field: Search Strategies Applied in Web Searching

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Soohyung Joo

2010-08-01

Full Text Available In their web search processes users apply multiple types of search strategies, which consist of different search tactics. This paper identifies eight types of information search strategies with associated cases based on sequences of search tactics during the information search process. Thirty-one participants representing the general public were recruited for this study. Search logs and verbal protocols offered rich data for the identification of different types of search strategies. Based on the findings, the authors further discuss how to enhance web-based information retrieval (IR systems to support each type of search strategy.

Multitasking Web Searching and Implications for Design.

Science.gov (United States)

Ozmutlu, Seda; Ozmutlu, H. C.; Spink, Amanda

2003-01-01

Findings from a study of users' multitasking searches on Web search engines include: multitasking searches are a noticeable user behavior; multitasking search sessions are longer than regular search sessions in terms of queries per session and duration; both Excite and AlltheWeb.com users search for about three topics per multitasking session and…

A Novel Personalized Web Search Model

Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (English)

ZHU Zhengyu; XU Jingqiu; TIAN Yunyan; REN Xiang

2007-01-01

A novel personalized Web search model is proposed.The new system, as a middleware between a user and a Web search engine, is set up on the client machine. It can learn a user's preference implicitly and then generate the user profile automatically. When the user inputs query keywords, the system can automatically generate a few personalized expansion words by computing the term-term associations according to the current user profile, and then these words together with the query keywords are submitted to a popular search engine such as Yahoo or Google.These expansion words help to express accurately the user's search intention. The new Web search model can make a common search engine personalized, that is, the search engine can return different search results to different users who input the same keywords. The experimental results show the feasibility and applicability of the presented work.

Key word placing in Web page body text to increase visibility to search engines

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

W. T. Kritzinger

2007-11-01

Full Text Available The growth of the World Wide Web has spawned a wide variety of new information sources, which has also left users with the daunting task of determining which sources are valid. Many users rely on the Web as an information source because of the low cost of information retrieval. It is also claimed that the Web has evolved into a powerful business tool. Examples include highly popular business services such as Amazon.com and Kalahari.net. It is estimated that around 80% of users utilize search engines to locate information on the Internet. This, by implication, places emphasis on the underlying importance of Web pages being listed on search engines indices. Empirical evidence that the placement of key words in certain areas of the body text will have an influence on the Web sites' visibility to search engines could not be found in the literature. The result of two experiments indicated that key words should be concentrated towards the top, and diluted towards the bottom of a Web page to increase visibility. However, care should be taken in terms of key word density, to prevent search engine algorithms from raising the spam alarm.

Nuclear expert web search and crawler algorithm

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Reis, Thiago; Barroso, Antonio C.O.; Baptista, Benedito Filho D.

2013-01-01

In this paper we present preliminary research on web search and crawling algorithm applied specifically to nuclear-related web information. We designed a web-based nuclear-oriented expert system guided by a web crawler algorithm and a neural network able to search and retrieve nuclear-related hyper textual web information in autonomous and massive fashion. Preliminary experimental results shows a retrieval precision of 80% for web pages related to any nuclear theme and a retrieval precision of 72% for web pages related only to nuclear power theme. (author)

Nuclear expert web search and crawler algorithm

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Reis, Thiago; Barroso, Antonio C.O.; Baptista, Benedito Filho D., E-mail: thiagoreis@usp.br, E-mail: barroso@ipen.br, E-mail: bdbfilho@ipen.br [Instituto de Pesquisas Energeticas e Nucleares (IPEN/CNEN-SP), Sao Paulo, SP (Brazil)

2013-07-01

In this paper we present preliminary research on web search and crawling algorithm applied specifically to nuclear-related web information. We designed a web-based nuclear-oriented expert system guided by a web crawler algorithm and a neural network able to search and retrieve nuclear-related hyper textual web information in autonomous and massive fashion. Preliminary experimental results shows a retrieval precision of 80% for web pages related to any nuclear theme and a retrieval precision of 72% for web pages related only to nuclear power theme. (author)

FedWeb Greatest Hits: Presenting the New Test Collection for Federated Web Search

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Demeester, Thomas; Trieschnigg, Rudolf Berend; Zhou, Ke; Nguyen, Dong-Phuong; Hiemstra, Djoerd

This paper presents 'FedWeb Greatest Hits', a large new test collection for research in web information retrieval. As a combination and extension of the datasets used in the TREC Federated Web Search Track, this collection opens up new research possibilities on federated web search challenges, as

Supporting complex search tasks

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Gäde, Maria; Hall, Mark; Huurdeman, Hugo

2015-01-01

, is fragmented at best. The workshop addressed the many open research questions: What are the obvious use cases and applications of complex search? What are essential features of work tasks and search tasks to take into account? And how do these evolve over time? With a multitude of information, varying from...

Information Diversity in Web Search

Science.gov (United States)

Liu, Jiahui

2009-01-01

The web is a rich and diverse information source with incredible amounts of information about all kinds of subjects in various forms. This information source affords great opportunity to build systems that support users in their work and everyday lives. To help users explore information on the web, web search systems should find information that…

IMPROVING PERSONALIZED WEB SEARCH USING BOOKSHELF DATA STRUCTURE

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

S.K. Jayanthi

2012-10-01

Full Text Available Search engines are playing a vital role in retrieving relevant information for the web user. In this research work a user profile based web search is proposed. So the web user from different domain may receive different set of results. The main challenging work is to provide relevant results at the right level of reading difficulty. Estimating user expertise and re-ranking the results are the main aspects of this paper. The retrieved results are arranged in Bookshelf Data Structure for easy access. Better presentation of search results hence increases the usability of web search engines significantly in visual mode.

Distributed Deep Web Search

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Tjin-Kam-Jet, Kien

2013-01-01

The World Wide Web contains billions of documents (and counting); hence, it is likely that some document will contain the answer or content you are searching for. While major search engines like Bing and Google often manage to return relevant results to your query, there are plenty of situations in

The Use of Web Search Engines in Information Science Research.

Science.gov (United States)

Bar-Ilan, Judit

2004-01-01

Reviews the literature on the use of Web search engines in information science research, including: ways users interact with Web search engines; social aspects of searching; structure and dynamic nature of the Web; link analysis; other bibliometric applications; characterizing information on the Web; search engine evaluation and improvement; and…

An FMRI-compatible Symbol Search task.

Science.gov (United States)

Liebel, Spencer W; Clark, Uraina S; Xu, Xiaomeng; Riskin-Jones, Hannah H; Hawkshead, Brittany E; Schwarz, Nicolette F; Labbe, Donald; Jerskey, Beth A; Sweet, Lawrence H

2015-03-01

Our objective was to determine whether a Symbol Search paradigm developed for functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) is a reliable and valid measure of cognitive processing speed (CPS) in healthy older adults. As all older adults are expected to experience cognitive declines due to aging, and CPS is one of the domains most affected by age, establishing a reliable and valid measure of CPS that can be administered inside an MR scanner may prove invaluable in future clinical and research settings. We evaluated the reliability and construct validity of a newly developed FMRI Symbol Search task by comparing participants' performance in and outside of the scanner and to the widely used and standardized Symbol Search subtest of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS). A brief battery of neuropsychological measures was also administered to assess the convergent and discriminant validity of the FMRI Symbol Search task. The FMRI Symbol Search task demonstrated high test-retest reliability when compared to performance on the same task administered out of the scanner (r=.791; pSymbol Search (r=.717; pSymbol Search task were also observed. The FMRI Symbol Search task is a reliable and valid measure of CPS in healthy older adults and exhibits expected sensitivity to the effects of age on CPS performance.

Overview of the TREC 2014 Federated Web Search Track

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Demeester, Thomas; Trieschnigg, Rudolf Berend; Nguyen, Dong-Phuong; Zhou, Ke; Hiemstra, Djoerd

2014-01-01

The TREC Federated Web Search track facilitates research in topics related to federated web search, by providing a large realistic data collection sampled from a multitude of online search engines. The FedWeb 2013 challenges of Resource Selection and Results Merging challenges are again included in

Resource Selection for Federated Search on the Web

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Nguyen, Dong-Phuong; Demeester, Thomas; Trieschnigg, Rudolf Berend; Hiemstra, Djoerd

A publicly available dataset for federated search reflecting a real web environment has long been bsent, making it difficult for researchers to test the validity of their federated search algorithms for the web setting. We present several experiments and analyses on resource selection on the web

Adding a visualization feature to web search engines: it's time.

Science.gov (United States)

Wong, Pak Chung

2008-01-01

It's widely recognized that all Web search engines today are almost identical in presentation layout and behavior. In fact, the same presentation approach has been applied to depicting search engine results pages (SERPs) since the first Web search engine launched in 1993. In this Visualization Viewpoints article, I propose to add a visualization feature to Web search engines and suggest that the new addition can improve search engines' performance and capabilities, which in turn lead to better Web search technology.

Using the Characteristics of Documents, Users and Tasks to Predict the Situational Relevance of Health Web Documents

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Melinda Oroszlányová

2017-09-01

Full Text Available Relevance is usually estimated by search engines using document content, disregarding the user behind the search and the characteristics of the task. In this work, we look at relevance as framed in a situational context, calling it situational relevance, and analyze whether it is possible to predict it using documents, users and tasks characteristics. Using an existing dataset composed of health web documents, relevance judgments for information needs, user and task characteristics, we build a multivariate prediction model for situational relevance. Our model has an accuracy of 77.17%. Our findings provide insights into features that could improve the estimation of relevance by search engines, helping to conciliate the systemic and situational views of relevance. In a near future we will work on the automatic assessment of document, user and task characteristics.

Overview of the TREC 2013 Federated Web Search Track

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Demeester, Thomas; Trieschnigg, Rudolf Berend; Nguyen, Dong-Phuong; Hiemstra, Djoerd

2014-01-01

The TREC Federated Web Search track is intended to promote research related to federated search in a realistic web setting, and hereto provides a large data collection gathered from a series of online search engines. This overview paper discusses the results of the first edition of the track, FedWeb

Meta-Search Utilizing Evolitionary Recommendation: A Web Search Architecture Proposal

Czech Academy of Sciences Publication Activity Database

Húsek, Dušan; Keyhanipour, A.; Krömer, P.; Moshiri, B.; Owais, S.; Snášel, V.

2008-01-01

Roč. 33, - (2008), s. 189-200 ISSN 1870-4069 Institutional research plan: CEZ:AV0Z10300504 Keywords : web search * meta-search engine * intelligent re-ranking * ordered weighted averaging * Boolean search queries optimizing Subject RIV: IN - Informatics, Computer Science

Deep web search: an overview and roadmap

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Tjin-Kam-Jet, Kien; Trieschnigg, Rudolf Berend; Hiemstra, Djoerd

2011-01-01

We review the state-of-the-art in deep web search and propose a novel classification scheme to better compare deep web search systems. The current binary classification (surfacing versus virtual integration) hides a number of implicit decisions that must be made by a developer. We make these

World Wide Web Metaphors for Search Mission Data

Science.gov (United States)

Norris, Jeffrey S.; Wallick, Michael N.; Joswig, Joseph C.; Powell, Mark W.; Torres, Recaredo J.; Mittman, David S.; Abramyan, Lucy; Crockett, Thomas M.; Shams, Khawaja S.; Fox, Jason M.;

Research Proposal for Distributed Deep Web Search

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Tjin-Kam-Jet, Kien

2010-01-01

This proposal identifies two main problems related to deep web search, and proposes a step by step solution for each of them. The first problem is about searching deep web content by means of a simple free-text interface (with just one input field, instead of a complex interface with many input

Uncovering Web search strategies in South African higher education

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Surika Civilcharran

2016-11-01

Full Text Available Background: In spite of the enormous amount of information available on the Web and the fact that search engines are continuously evolving to enhance the search experience, students are nevertheless faced with the difficulty of effectively retrieving information. It is, therefore, imperative for the interaction between students and search tools to be understood and search strategies to be identified, in order to promote successful information retrieval. Objectives: This study identifies the Web search strategies used by postgraduate students and forms part of a wider study into information retrieval strategies used by postgraduate students at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN, Pietermaritzburg campus, South Africa. Method: Largely underpinned by Thatcher’s cognitive search strategies, the mixed-methods approach was utilised for this study, in which questionnaires were employed in Phase 1 and structured interviews in Phase 2. This article reports and reflects on the findings of Phase 2, which focus on identifying the Web search strategies employed by postgraduate students. The Phase 1 results were reported in Civilcharran, Hughes and Maharaj (2015. Results: Findings reveal the Web search strategies used for academic information retrieval. In spite of easy access to the invisible Web and the advent of meta-search engines, the use of Web search engines still remains the preferred search tool. The UKZN online library databases and especially the UKZN online library, Online Public Access Catalogue system, are being underutilised. Conclusion: Being ranked in the top three percent of the world’s universities, UKZN is investing in search tools that are not being used to their full potential. This evidence suggests an urgent need for students to be trained in Web searching and to have a greater exposure to a variety of search tools. This article is intended to further contribute to the design of undergraduate training programmes in order to deal

Overview of the TREC 2013 federated web search track

OpenAIRE

Demeester, Thomas; Trieschnigg, D; Nguyen, D; Hiemstra, D

2013-01-01

The TREC Federated Web Search track is intended to promote research related to federated search in a realistic web setting, and hereto provides a large data collection gathered from a series of online search engines. This overview paper discusses the results of the first edition of the track, FedWeb 2013. The focus was on basic challenges in federated search: (1) resource selection, and (2) results merging. After an overview of the provided data collection and the relevance judgments for the ...

Changes in users' Web search performance after ten years ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

The changes in users' Web search performance using search engines over ten years was investigated in this study. Matched data obtained from samples in 2000 and 2010 were used for the comparative analysis. The patterns of Web search engine use suggested a dominance in using a particular search engine. Statistical ...

A grammar checker based on web searching

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Joaquim Moré

2006-05-01

Full Text Available This paper presents an English grammar and style checker for non-native English speakers. The main characteristic of this checker is the use of an Internet search engine. As the number of web pages written in English is immense, the system hypothesises that a piece of text not found on the Web is probably badly written. The system also hypothesises that the Web will provide examples of how the content of the text segment can be expressed in a grammatically correct and idiomatic way. Thus, when the checker warns the user about the odd nature of a text segment, the Internet engine searches for contexts that can help the user decide whether he/she should correct the segment or not. By means of a search engine, the checker also suggests use of other expressions that appear on the Web more often than the expression he/she actually wrote.

How Users Search the Mobile Web: A Model for Understanding the Impact of Motivation and Context on Search Behaviors

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Dan Wu

2016-03-01

Full Text Available Purpose: This study explores how search motivation and context influence mobile Web search behaviors. Design/methodology/approach: We studied 30 experienced mobile Web users via questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, and an online diary tool that participants used to record their daily search activities. SQLite Developer was used to extract data from the users' phone logs for correlation analysis in Statistical Product and Service Solutions (SPSS. Findings: One quarter of mobile search sessions were driven by two or more search motivations. It was especially difficult to distinguish curiosity from time killing in particular user reporting. Multi-dimensional contexts and motivations influenced mobile search behaviors, and among the context dimensions, gender, place, activities they engaged in while searching, task importance, portal, and interpersonal relations (whether accompanied or alone when searching correlated with each other. Research limitations: The sample was comprised entirely of college students, so our findings may not generalize to other populations. More participants and longer experimental duration will improve the accuracy and objectivity of the research. Practical implications: Motivation analysis and search context recognition can help mobile service providers design applications and services for particular mobile contexts and usages. Originality/value: Most current research focuses on specific contexts, such as studies on place, or other contextual influences on mobile search, and lacks a systematic analysis of mobile search context. Based on analysis of the impact of mobile search motivations and search context on search behaviors, we built a multi-dimensional model of mobile search behaviors.

Semantic Search of Web Services

Science.gov (United States)

Hao, Ke

2013-01-01

This dissertation addresses semantic search of Web services using natural language processing. We first survey various existing approaches, focusing on the fact that the expensive costs of current semantic annotation frameworks result in limited use of semantic search for large scale applications. We then propose a vector space model based service…

Use of Web Search Engines and Personalisation in Information Searching for Educational Purposes

Science.gov (United States)

Salehi, Sara; Du, Jia Tina; Ashman, Helen

2018-01-01

Introduction: Students increasingly depend on Web search for educational purposes. This causes concerns among education providers as some evidence indicates that in higher education, the disadvantages of Web search and personalised information are not justified by the benefits. Method: One hundred and twenty university students were surveyed about…

Quantifying retrieval bias in Web archive search

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Samar, Thaer; Traub, Myriam C.; van Ossenbruggen, Jacco; Hardman, Lynda; de Vries, Arjen P.

2018-01-01

A Web archive usually contains multiple versions of documents crawled from the Web at different points in time. One possible way for users to access a Web archive is through full-text search systems. However, previous studies have shown that these systems can induce a bias, known as the

The Impact of User Knowledge on Web Search Satisfaction

OpenAIRE

Fadhilah M. Yamin; T. Ramayah

2011-01-01

Problem statement: Searching on the web is a tedious process as it requires knowledge and skills on what and how to search. What to search is basically, the core of the searching activity as it represents the need of the searcher. How to search is related to the knowledge on how the facilities available on the web can be utilized in order to achieve the needs. Search satisfaction is the level of measurement that describes the achievement of the searcher towards his/her information needs. Appr...

More Effective Web Search Using Bigrams and Trigrams

OpenAIRE

Peter Vamplew; Vishv Malhotra; David Johnson

2006-01-01

This paper investigates the effectiveness of quoted bigrams and trigrams as query terms to target web search. Prior research in this area has largely focused on static corpora each containing only a few million documents, and has reported mixed (usually negative) results. We investigate the bigram/trigram extraction problem and present an extraction algorithm that shows promising results when applied to real-time web search. We also present a prototype augmented search software package that c...

Raising Reliability of Web Search Tool Research through Replication and Chaos Theory

OpenAIRE

Nicholson, Scott

1999-01-01

Because the World Wide Web is a dynamic collection of information, the Web search tools (or "search engines") that index the Web are dynamic. Traditional information retrieval evaluation techniques may not provide reliable results when applied to the Web search tools. This study is the result of ten replications of the classic 1996 Ding and Marchionini Web search tool research. It explores the effects that replication can have on transforming unreliable results from one iteration into replica...

The effect of query complexity on Web searching results

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

B.J. Jansen

2000-01-01

Full Text Available This paper presents findings from a study of the effects of query structure on retrieval by Web search services. Fifteen queries were selected from the transaction log of a major Web search service in simple query form with no advanced operators (e.g., Boolean operators, phrase operators, etc. and submitted to 5 major search engines - Alta Vista, Excite, FAST Search, Infoseek, and Northern Light. The results from these queries became the baseline data. The original 15 queries were then modified using the various search operators supported by each of the 5 search engines for a total of 210 queries. Each of these 210 queries was also submitted to the applicable search service. The results obtained were then compared to the baseline results. A total of 2,768 search results were returned by the set of all queries. In general, increasing the complexity of the queries had little effect on the results with a greater than 70% overlap in results, on average. Implications for the design of Web search services and directions for future research are discussed.

The invisible Web uncovering information sources search engines can't see

CERN Document Server

Sherman, Chris

2001-01-01

Enormous expanses of the Internet are unreachable with standard web search engines. This book provides the key to finding these hidden resources by identifying how to uncover and use invisible web resources. Mapping the invisible Web, when and how to use it, assessing the validity of the information, and the future of Web searching are topics covered in detail. Only 16 percent of Net-based information can be located using a general search engine. The other 84 percent is what is referred to as the invisible Web-made up of information stored in databases. Unlike pages on the visible Web, informa

AN OVERVIEW OF SEARCHING AND DISCOVERING WEB BASED INFORMATION RESOURCES

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Cezar VASILESCU

2010-01-01

Full Text Available The Internet becomes for most of us a daily used instrument, for professional or personal reasons. We even do not remember the times when a computer and a broadband connection were luxury items. More and more people are relying on the complicated web network to find the needed information.This paper presents an overview of Internet search related issues, upon search engines and describes the parties and the basic mechanism that is embedded in a search for web based information resources. Also presents ways to increase the efficiency of web searches, through a better understanding of what search engines ignore at websites content.

Search and Hyperlinking Task at MediaEval 2012

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Eskevich, Maria; Jones, Gareth J.F.; Chen, Shu; Aly, Robin; Ordelman, Roeland J.F.; Larson, Martha

2012-01-01

The Search and Hyperlinking Task was one of the Brave New Tasks at MediaEval 2012. The Task consisted of two sub- tasks which focused on search and linking in retrieval from a collection of semi-professional video content. These tasks followed up on research carried out within the MediaEval 2011

A study of medical and health queries to web search engines.

Science.gov (United States)

Spink, Amanda; Yang, Yin; Jansen, Jim; Nykanen, Pirrko; Lorence, Daniel P; Ozmutlu, Seda; Ozmutlu, H Cenk

2004-03-01

This paper reports findings from an analysis of medical or health queries to different web search engines. We report results: (i). comparing samples of 10000 web queries taken randomly from 1.2 million query logs from the AlltheWeb.com and Excite.com commercial web search engines in 2001 for medical or health queries, (ii). comparing the 2001 findings from Excite and AlltheWeb.com users with results from a previous analysis of medical and health related queries from the Excite Web search engine for 1997 and 1999, and (iii). medical or health advice-seeking queries beginning with the word 'should'. Findings suggest: (i). a small percentage of web queries are medical or health related, (ii). the top five categories of medical or health queries were: general health, weight issues, reproductive health and puberty, pregnancy/obstetrics, and human relationships, and (iii). over time, the medical and health queries may have declined as a proportion of all web queries, as the use of specialized medical/health websites and e-commerce-related queries has increased. Findings provide insights into medical and health-related web querying and suggests some implications for the use of the general web search engines when seeking medical/health information.

Generating crop calendars with Web search data

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Van der Velde, Marijn; See, Linda; Fritz, Steffen; Khabarov, Nikolay; Obersteiner, Michael; Verheijen, Frank G A

2012-01-01

This paper demonstrates the potential of using Web search volumes for generating crop specific planting and harvesting dates in the USA integrating climatic, social and technological factors affecting crop calendars. Using Google Insights for Search, clear peaks in volume occur at times of planting and harvest at the national level, which were used to derive corn specific planting and harvesting dates at a weekly resolution. Disaggregated to state level, search volumes for corn planting generally are in agreement with planting dates from a global crop calendar dataset. However, harvest dates were less discriminatory at the state level, indicating that peaks in search volume may be blurred by broader searches on harvest as a time of cultural events. The timing of other agricultural activities such as purchase of seed and response to weed and pest infestation was also investigated. These results highlight the future potential of using Web search data to derive planting dates in countries where the data are sparse or unreliable, once sufficient search volumes are realized, as well as the potential for monitoring in real time the response of farmers to climate change over the coming decades. Other potential applications of search volume data of relevance to agronomy are also discussed. (letter)

Natural Language Search Interfaces: Health Data Needs Single-Field Variable Search

Science.gov (United States)

Smith, Sam; Sufi, Shoaib; Goble, Carole; Buchan, Iain

2016-01-01

Background Data discovery, particularly the discovery of key variables and their inter-relationships, is key to secondary data analysis, and in-turn, the evolving field of data science. Interface designers have presumed that their users are domain experts, and so they have provided complex interfaces to support these “experts.” Such interfaces hark back to a time when searches needed to be accurate first time as there was a high computational cost associated with each search. Our work is part of a governmental research initiative between the medical and social research funding bodies to improve the use of social data in medical research. Objective The cross-disciplinary nature of data science can make no assumptions regarding the domain expertise of a particular scientist, whose interests may intersect multiple domains. Here we consider the common requirement for scientists to seek archived data for secondary analysis. This has more in common with search needs of the “Google generation” than with their single-domain, single-tool forebears. Our study compares a Google-like interface with traditional ways of searching for noncomplex health data in a data archive. Methods Two user interfaces are evaluated for the same set of tasks in extracting data from surveys stored in the UK Data Archive (UKDA). One interface, Web search, is “Google-like,” enabling users to browse, search for, and view metadata about study variables, whereas the other, traditional search, has standard multioption user interface. Results Using a comprehensive set of tasks with 20 volunteers, we found that the Web search interface met data discovery needs and expectations better than the traditional search. A task × interface repeated measures analysis showed a main effect indicating that answers found through the Web search interface were more likely to be correct (F 1,19=37.3, Peffect of task (F 3,57=6.3, Pinterface (F 1,19=18.0, Peffect of task (F 2,38=4.1, P=.025, Greenhouse

Social Search: A Taxonomy of, and a User-Centred Approach to, Social Web Search

Science.gov (United States)

McDonnell, Michael; Shiri, Ali

2011-01-01

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to introduce the notion of social search as a new concept, drawing upon the patterns of web search behaviour. It aims to: define social search; present a taxonomy of social search; and propose a user-centred social search method. Design/methodology/approach: A mixed method approach was adopted to investigate…

Learning Task Knowledge from Dialog and Web Access

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Vittorio Perera

2015-06-01

Full Text Available We present KnoWDiaL, an approach for Learning and using task-relevant Knowledge from human-robot Dialog and access to the Web. KnoWDiaL assumes that there is an autonomous agent that performs tasks, as requested by humans through speech. The agent needs to “understand” the request, (i.e., to fully ground the task until it can proceed to plan for and execute it. KnoWDiaL contributes such understanding by using and updating a Knowledge Base, by dialoguing with the user, and by accessing the web. We believe that KnoWDiaL, as we present it, can be applied to general autonomous agents. However, we focus on our work with our autonomous collaborative robot, CoBot, which executes service tasks in a building, moving around and transporting objects between locations. Hence, the knowledge acquired and accessed consists of groundings of language to robot actions, and building locations, persons, and objects. KnoWDiaL handles the interpretation of voice commands, is robust regarding speech recognition errors, and is able to learn commands involving referring expressions in an open domain, (i.e., without requiring a lexicon. We present in detail the multiple components of KnoWDiaL, namely a frame-semantic parser, a probabilistic grounding model, a web-based predicate evaluator, a dialog manager, and the weighted predicate-based Knowledge Base. We illustrate the knowledge access and updates from the dialog and Web access, through detailed and complete examples. We further evaluate the correctness of the predicate instances learned into the Knowledge Base, and show the increase in dialog efficiency as a function of the number of interactions. We have extensively and successfully used KnoWDiaL in CoBot dialoguing and accessing the Web, and extract a few corresponding example sequences from captured videos.

Web Spam, Social Propaganda and the Evolution of Search Engine Rankings

Science.gov (United States)

Metaxas, Panagiotis Takis

Search Engines have greatly influenced the way we experience the web. Since the early days of the web, users have been relying on them to get informed and make decisions. When the web was relatively small, web directories were built and maintained using human experts to screen and categorize pages according to their characteristics. By the mid 1990's, however, it was apparent that the human expert model of categorizing web pages does not scale. The first search engines appeared and they have been evolving ever since, taking over the role that web directories used to play.

Research on Web Search Behavior: How Online Query Data Inform Social Psychology.

Science.gov (United States)

Lai, Kaisheng; Lee, Yan Xin; Chen, Hao; Yu, Rongjun

2017-10-01

The widespread use of web searches in daily life has allowed researchers to study people's online social and psychological behavior. Using web search data has advantages in terms of data objectivity, ecological validity, temporal resolution, and unique application value. This review integrates existing studies on web search data that have explored topics including sexual behavior, suicidal behavior, mental health, social prejudice, social inequality, public responses to policies, and other psychosocial issues. These studies are categorized as descriptive, correlational, inferential, predictive, and policy evaluation research. The integration of theory-based hypothesis testing in future web search research will result in even stronger contributions to social psychology.

Utility of Web search query data in testing theoretical assumptions about mephedrone.

Science.gov (United States)

Kapitány-Fövény, Máté; Demetrovics, Zsolt

2017-05-01

With growing access to the Internet, people who use drugs and traffickers started to obtain information about novel psychoactive substances (NPS) via online platforms. This paper aims to analyze whether a decreasing Web interest in formerly banned substances-cocaine, heroin, and MDMA-and the legislative status of mephedrone predict Web interest about this NPS. Google Trends was used to measure changes of Web interest on cocaine, heroin, MDMA, and mephedrone. Google search results for mephedrone within the same time frame were analyzed and categorized. Web interest about classic drugs found to be more persistent. Regarding geographical distribution, location of Web searches for heroin and cocaine was less centralized. Illicit status of mephedrone was a negative predictor of its Web search query rates. The connection between mephedrone-related Web search rates and legislative status of this substance was significantly mediated by ecstasy-related Web search queries, the number of documentaries, and forum/blog entries about mephedrone. The results might provide support for the hypothesis that mephedrone's popularity was highly correlated with its legal status as well as it functioned as a potential substitute for MDMA. Google Trends was found to be a useful tool for testing theoretical assumptions about NPS. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Using the open Web as an information resource and scholarly Web search engines as retrieval tools for academic and research purposes

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Filistea Naude

2010-08-01

Full Text Available This study provided insight into the significance of the open Web as an information resource and Web search engines as research tools amongst academics. The academic staff establishment of the University of South Africa (Unisa was invited to participate in a questionnaire survey and included 1188 staff members from five colleges. This study culminated in a PhD dissertation in 2008. One hundred and eighty seven respondents participated in the survey which gave a response rate of 15.7%. The results of this study show that academics have indeed accepted the open Web as a useful information resource and Web search engines as retrieval tools when seeking information for academic and research work. The majority of respondents used the open Web and Web search engines on a daily or weekly basis to source academic and research information. The main obstacles presented by using the open Web and Web search engines included lack of time to search and browse the Web, information overload, poor network speed and the slow downloading speed of webpages.

Using the open Web as an information resource and scholarly Web search engines as retrieval tools for academic and research purposes

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Filistea Naude

2010-12-01

Full Text Available This study provided insight into the significance of the open Web as an information resource and Web search engines as research tools amongst academics. The academic staff establishment of the University of South Africa (Unisa was invited to participate in a questionnaire survey and included 1188 staff members from five colleges. This study culminated in a PhD dissertation in 2008. One hundred and eighty seven respondents participated in the survey which gave a response rate of 15.7%. The results of this study show that academics have indeed accepted the open Web as a useful information resource and Web search engines as retrieval tools when seeking information for academic and research work. The majority of respondents used the open Web and Web search engines on a daily or weekly basis to source academic and research information. The main obstacles presented by using the open Web and Web search engines included lack of time to search and browse the Web, information overload, poor network speed and the slow downloading speed of webpages.

Adding a Visualization Feature to Web Search Engines: It’s Time

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Wong, Pak C.

2008-11-11

Since the first world wide web (WWW) search engine quietly entered our lives in 1994, the “information need” behind web searching has rapidly grown into a multi-billion dollar business that dominates the internet landscape, drives e-commerce traffic, propels global economy, and affects the lives of the whole human race. Today’s search engines are faster, smarter, and more powerful than those released just a few years ago. With the vast investment pouring into research and development by leading web technology providers and the intense emotion behind corporate slogans such as “win the web” or “take back the web,” I can’t help but ask why are we still using the very same “text-only” interface that was used 13 years ago to browse our search engine results pages (SERPs)? Why has the SERP interface technology lagged so far behind in the web evolution when the corresponding search technology has advanced so rapidly? In this article I explore some current SERP interface issues, suggest a simple but practical visual-based interface design approach, and argue why a visual approach can be a strong candidate for tomorrow’s SERP interface.

A review of the reporting of web searching to identify studies for Cochrane systematic reviews.

Science.gov (United States)

Briscoe, Simon

2018-03-01

The literature searches that are used to identify studies for inclusion in a systematic review should be comprehensively reported. This ensures that the literature searches are transparent and reproducible, which is important for assessing the strengths and weaknesses of a systematic review and re-running the literature searches when conducting an update review. Web searching using search engines and the websites of topically relevant organisations is sometimes used as a supplementary literature search method. Previous research has shown that the reporting of web searching in systematic reviews often lacks important details and is thus not transparent or reproducible. Useful details to report about web searching include the name of the search engine or website, the URL, the date searched, the search strategy, and the number of results. This study reviews the reporting of web searching to identify studies for Cochrane systematic reviews published in the 6-month period August 2016 to January 2017 (n = 423). Of these reviews, 61 reviews reported using web searching using a search engine or website as a literature search method. In the majority of reviews, the reporting of web searching was found to lack essential detail for ensuring transparency and reproducibility, such as the search terms. Recommendations are made on how to improve the reporting of web searching in Cochrane systematic reviews. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Discovering How Students Search a Library Web Site: A Usability Case Study.

Science.gov (United States)

Augustine, Susan; Greene, Courtney

2002-01-01

Discusses results of a usability study at the University of Illinois Chicago that investigated whether Internet search engines have influenced the way students search library Web sites. Results show students use the Web site's internal search engine rather than navigating through the pages; have difficulty interpreting library terminology; and…

Considerations for the development of task-based search engines

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Petcu, Paula; Dragusin, Radu

2013-01-01

Based on previous experience from working on a task-based search engine, we present a list of suggestions and ideas for an Information Retrieval (IR) framework that could inform the development of next generation professional search systems. The specific task that we start from is the clinicians......' information need in finding rare disease diagnostic hypotheses at the time and place where medical decisions are made. Our experience from the development of a search engine focused on supporting clinicians in completing this task has provided us valuable insights in what aspects should be considered...... by the developers of vertical search engines....

Semantic similarity measure in biomedical domain leverage web search engine.

Science.gov (United States)

Chen, Chi-Huang; Hsieh, Sheau-Ling; Weng, Yung-Ching; Chang, Wen-Yung; Lai, Feipei

2010-01-01

Semantic similarity measure plays an essential role in Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing. In this paper we propose a page-count-based semantic similarity measure and apply it in biomedical domains. Previous researches in semantic web related applications have deployed various semantic similarity measures. Despite the usefulness of the measurements in those applications, measuring semantic similarity between two terms remains a challenge task. The proposed method exploits page counts returned by the Web Search Engine. We define various similarity scores for two given terms P and Q, using the page counts for querying P, Q and P AND Q. Moreover, we propose a novel approach to compute semantic similarity using lexico-syntactic patterns with page counts. These different similarity scores are integrated adapting support vector machines, to leverage the robustness of semantic similarity measures. Experimental results on two datasets achieve correlation coefficients of 0.798 on the dataset provided by A. Hliaoutakis, 0.705 on the dataset provide by T. Pedersen with physician scores and 0.496 on the dataset provided by T. Pedersen et al. with expert scores.

Categorization of web pages - Performance enhancement to search engine

Digital Repository Service at National Institute of Oceanography (India)

Lakshminarayana, S.

of Artificial Intelligence, Volume III. Los Altos, CA.: William Kaufmann. pp 1-74. 18. Brin, S. & Page, L. (1998). The anatomy of a large scale hyper-textual web search engine. In Proceedings of the seventh World Wide Web conference, Brisbane, Australia. 19...

Web Feet Guide to Search Engines: Finding It on the Net.

Science.gov (United States)

Web Feet, 2001

2001-01-01

This guide to search engines for the World Wide Web discusses selecting the right search engine; interpreting search results; major search engines; online tutorials and guides; search engines for kids; specialized search tools for various subjects; and other specialized engines and gateways. (LRW)

Improving Web Page Retrieval using Search Context from Clicked Domain Names

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Li, R.

Search context is a crucial factor that helps to understand a user’s information need in ad-hoc Web page retrieval. A query log of a search engine contains rich information on issued queries and their corresponding clicked Web pages. The clicked data implies its relevance to the query and can be

ONTOLOGY BASED MEANINGFUL SEARCH USING SEMANTIC WEB AND NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING TECHNIQUES

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

K. Palaniammal

2013-10-01

Full Text Available The semantic web extends the current World Wide Web by adding facilities for the machine understood description of meaning. The ontology based search model is used to enhance efficiency and accuracy of information retrieval. Ontology is the core technology for the semantic web and this mechanism for representing formal and shared domain descriptions. In this paper, we proposed ontology based meaningful search using semantic web and Natural Language Processing (NLP techniques in the educational domain. First we build the educational ontology then we present the semantic search system. The search model consisting three parts which are embedding spell-check, finding synonyms using WordNet API and querying ontology using SPARQL language. The results are both sensitive to spell check and synonymous context. This paper provides more accurate results and the complete details for the selected field in a single page.

Influence of social presence on eye movements in visual search tasks.

Science.gov (United States)

Liu, Na; Yu, Ruifeng

2017-12-01

This study employed an eye-tracking technique to investigate the influence of social presence on eye movements in visual search tasks. A total of 20 male subjects performed visual search tasks in a 2 (target presence: present vs. absent) × 2 (task complexity: complex vs. simple) × 2 (social presence: alone vs. a human audience) within-subject experiment. Results indicated that the presence of an audience could evoke a social facilitation effect on response time in visual search tasks. Compared with working alone, the participants made fewer and shorter fixations, larger saccades and shorter scan path in simple search tasks and more and longer fixations, smaller saccades and longer scan path in complex search tasks when working with an audience. The saccade velocity and pupil diameter in the audience-present condition were larger than those in the working-alone condition. No significant change in target fixation number was observed between two social presence conditions. Practitioner Summary: This study employed an eye-tracking technique to examine the influence of social presence on eye movements in visual search tasks. Results clarified the variation mechanism and characteristics of oculomotor scanning induced by social presence in visual search.

Curating the Web: Building a Google Custom Search Engine for the Arts

Science.gov (United States)

Hennesy, Cody; Bowman, John

2008-01-01

Google's first foray onto the web made search simple and results relevant. With its Co-op platform, Google has taken another step toward dramatically increasing the relevancy of search results, further adapting the World Wide Web to local needs. Google Custom Search Engine, a tool on the Co-op platform, puts one in control of his or her own search…

Dynamics of a macroscopic model characterizing mutualism of search engines and web sites

Science.gov (United States)

Wang, Yuanshi; Wu, Hong

2006-05-01

We present a model to describe the mutualism relationship between search engines and web sites. In the model, search engines and web sites benefit from each other while the search engines are derived products of the web sites and cannot survive independently. Our goal is to show strategies for the search engines to survive in the internet market. From mathematical analysis of the model, we show that mutualism does not always result in survival. We show various conditions under which the search engines would tend to extinction, persist or grow explosively. Then by the conditions, we deduce a series of strategies for the search engines to survive in the internet market. We present conditions under which the initial number of consumers of the search engines has little contribution to their persistence, which is in agreement with the results in previous works. Furthermore, we show novel conditions under which the initial value plays an important role in the persistence of the search engines and deduce new strategies. We also give suggestions for the web sites to cooperate with the search engines in order to form a win-win situation.

A World Wide Web Region-Based Image Search Engine

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Kompatsiaris, Ioannis; Triantafyllou, Evangelia; Strintzis, Michael G.

2001-01-01

In this paper the development of an intelligent image content-based search engine for the World Wide Web is presented. This system will offer a new form of media representation and access of content available in WWW. Information Web Crawlers continuously traverse the Internet and collect images...

The Creative task Creator: a tool for the generation of customized, Web-based creativity tasks.

Science.gov (United States)

Pretz, Jean E; Link, John A

2008-11-01

This article presents a Web-based tool for the creation of divergent-thinking and open-ended creativity tasks. A Java program generates HTML forms with PHP scripting that run an Alternate Uses Task and/or open-ended response items. Researchers may specify their own instructions, objects, and time limits, or use default settings. Participants can also be prompted to select their best responses to the Alternate Uses Task (Silvia et al., 2008). Minimal programming knowledge is required. The program runs on any server, and responses are recorded in a standard MySQL database. Responses can be scored using the consensual assessment technique (Amabile, 1996) or Torrance's (1998) traditional scoring method. Adoption of this Web-based tool should facilitate creativity research across cultures and access to eminent creators. The Creative Task Creator may be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society's Archive of Norms, Stimuli, and Data, www.psychonomic.org/archive.

Virtual Reference Services through Web Search Engines: Study of Academic Libraries in Pakistan

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Rubia Khan

2017-03-01

Full Text Available Web search engines (WSE are powerful and popular tools in the field of information service management. This study is an attempt to examine the impact and usefulness of web search engines in providing virtual reference services (VRS within academic libraries in Pakistan. The study also attempts to investigate the relevant expertise and skills of library professionals in providing digital reference services (DRS efficiently using web search engines. Methodology used in this study is quantitative in nature. The data was collected from fifty public and private sector universities in Pakistan using a structured questionnaire. Microsoft Excel and SPSS were used for data analysis. The study concludes that web search engines are commonly used by librarians to help users (especially research scholars by providing digital reference services. The study also finds a positive correlation between use of web search engines and quality of digital reference services provided to library users. It is concluded that although search engines have increased the expectations of users and are really big competitors to a library’s reference desk, they are however not an alternative to reference service. Findings reveal that search engines pose numerous challenges for librarians and the study also attempts to bring together possible remedial measures. This study is useful for library professionals to understand the importance of search engines in providing VRS. The study also provides an intellectual comparison among different search engines, their capabilities, limitations, challenges and opportunities to provide VRS effectively in libraries.

A web search on environmental topics: what is the role of ranking?

Science.gov (United States)

Covolo, Loredana; Filisetti, Barbara; Mascaretti, Silvia; Limina, Rosa Maria; Gelatti, Umberto

2013-12-01

Although the Internet is easy to use, the mechanisms and logic behind a Web search are often unknown. Reliable information can be obtained, but it may not be visible as the Web site is not located in the first positions of search results. The possible risks of adverse health effects arising from environmental hazards are issues of increasing public interest, and therefore the information about these risks, particularly on topics for which there is no scientific evidence, is very crucial. The aim of this study was to investigate whether the presentation of information on some environmental health topics differed among various search engines, assuming that the most reliable information should come from institutional Web sites. Five search engines were used: Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Ask, and AOL. The following topics were searched in combination with the word "health": "nuclear energy," "electromagnetic waves," "air pollution," "waste," and "radon." For each topic three key words were used. The first 30 search results for each query were considered. The ranking variability among the search engines and the type of search results were analyzed for each topic and for each key word. The ranking of institutional Web sites was given particular consideration. Variable results were obtained when surfing the Internet on different environmental health topics. Multivariate logistic regression analysis showed that, when searching for radon and air pollution topics, it is more likely to find institutional Web sites in the first 10 positions compared with nuclear power (odds ratio=3.4, 95% confidence interval 2.1-5.4 and odds ratio=2.9, 95% confidence interval 1.8-4.7, respectively) and also when using Google compared with Bing (odds ratio=3.1, 95% confidence interval 1.9-5.1). The increasing use of online information could play an important role in forming opinions. Web users should become more aware of the importance of finding reliable information, and health institutions should be

Natural Language Search Interfaces: Health Data Needs Single-Field Variable Search.

Science.gov (United States)

Jay, Caroline; Harper, Simon; Dunlop, Ian; Smith, Sam; Sufi, Shoaib; Goble, Carole; Buchan, Iain

2016-01-14

Data discovery, particularly the discovery of key variables and their inter-relationships, is key to secondary data analysis, and in-turn, the evolving field of data science. Interface designers have presumed that their users are domain experts, and so they have provided complex interfaces to support these "experts." Such interfaces hark back to a time when searches needed to be accurate first time as there was a high computational cost associated with each search. Our work is part of a governmental research initiative between the medical and social research funding bodies to improve the use of social data in medical research. The cross-disciplinary nature of data science can make no assumptions regarding the domain expertise of a particular scientist, whose interests may intersect multiple domains. Here we consider the common requirement for scientists to seek archived data for secondary analysis. This has more in common with search needs of the "Google generation" than with their single-domain, single-tool forebears. Our study compares a Google-like interface with traditional ways of searching for noncomplex health data in a data archive. Two user interfaces are evaluated for the same set of tasks in extracting data from surveys stored in the UK Data Archive (UKDA). One interface, Web search, is "Google-like," enabling users to browse, search for, and view metadata about study variables, whereas the other, traditional search, has standard multioption user interface. Using a comprehensive set of tasks with 20 volunteers, we found that the Web search interface met data discovery needs and expectations better than the traditional search. A task × interface repeated measures analysis showed a main effect indicating that answers found through the Web search interface were more likely to be correct (F1,19=37.3, Pnatural language search interfaces for variable search supporting in particular: query reformulation; data browsing; faceted search; surrogates; relevance

How Google Web Search copes with very similar documents

NARCIS (Netherlands)

W. Mettrop (Wouter); P. Nieuwenhuysen; H. Smulders

2006-01-01

textabstractA significant portion of the computer files that carry documents, multimedia, programs etc. on the Web are identical or very similar to other files on the Web. How do search engines cope with this? Do they perform some kind of “deduplication”? How should users take into account that

PLAN: a web platform for automating high-throughput BLAST searches and for managing and mining results.

Science.gov (United States)

He, Ji; Dai, Xinbin; Zhao, Xuechun

2007-02-09

BLAST searches are widely used for sequence alignment. The search results are commonly adopted for various functional and comparative genomics tasks such as annotating unknown sequences, investigating gene models and comparing two sequence sets. Advances in sequencing technologies pose challenges for high-throughput analysis of large-scale sequence data. A number of programs and hardware solutions exist for efficient BLAST searching, but there is a lack of generic software solutions for mining and personalized management of the results. Systematically reviewing the results and identifying information of interest remains tedious and time-consuming. Personal BLAST Navigator (PLAN) is a versatile web platform that helps users to carry out various personalized pre- and post-BLAST tasks, including: (1) query and target sequence database management, (2) automated high-throughput BLAST searching, (3) indexing and searching of results, (4) filtering results online, (5) managing results of personal interest in favorite categories, (6) automated sequence annotation (such as NCBI NR and ontology-based annotation). PLAN integrates, by default, the Decypher hardware-based BLAST solution provided by Active Motif Inc. with a greatly improved efficiency over conventional BLAST software. BLAST results are visualized by spreadsheets and graphs and are full-text searchable. BLAST results and sequence annotations can be exported, in part or in full, in various formats including Microsoft Excel and FASTA. Sequences and BLAST results are organized in projects, the data publication levels of which are controlled by the registered project owners. In addition, all analytical functions are provided to public users without registration. PLAN has proved a valuable addition to the community for automated high-throughput BLAST searches, and, more importantly, for knowledge discovery, management and sharing based on sequence alignment results. The PLAN web interface is platform

PLAN: a web platform for automating high-throughput BLAST searches and for managing and mining results

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Zhao Xuechun

2007-02-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background BLAST searches are widely used for sequence alignment. The search results are commonly adopted for various functional and comparative genomics tasks such as annotating unknown sequences, investigating gene models and comparing two sequence sets. Advances in sequencing technologies pose challenges for high-throughput analysis of large-scale sequence data. A number of programs and hardware solutions exist for efficient BLAST searching, but there is a lack of generic software solutions for mining and personalized management of the results. Systematically reviewing the results and identifying information of interest remains tedious and time-consuming. Results Personal BLAST Navigator (PLAN is a versatile web platform that helps users to carry out various personalized pre- and post-BLAST tasks, including: (1 query and target sequence database management, (2 automated high-throughput BLAST searching, (3 indexing and searching of results, (4 filtering results online, (5 managing results of personal interest in favorite categories, (6 automated sequence annotation (such as NCBI NR and ontology-based annotation. PLAN integrates, by default, the Decypher hardware-based BLAST solution provided by Active Motif Inc. with a greatly improved efficiency over conventional BLAST software. BLAST results are visualized by spreadsheets and graphs and are full-text searchable. BLAST results and sequence annotations can be exported, in part or in full, in various formats including Microsoft Excel and FASTA. Sequences and BLAST results are organized in projects, the data publication levels of which are controlled by the registered project owners. In addition, all analytical functions are provided to public users without registration. Conclusion PLAN has proved a valuable addition to the community for automated high-throughput BLAST searches, and, more importantly, for knowledge discovery, management and sharing based on sequence alignment results

Predicting consumer behavior with Web search.

Science.gov (United States)

Goel, Sharad; Hofman, Jake M; Lahaie, Sébastien; Pennock, David M; Watts, Duncan J

2010-10-12

Recent work has demonstrated that Web search volume can "predict the present," meaning that it can be used to accurately track outcomes such as unemployment levels, auto and home sales, and disease prevalence in near real time. Here we show that what consumers are searching for online can also predict their collective future behavior days or even weeks in advance. Specifically we use search query volume to forecast the opening weekend box-office revenue for feature films, first-month sales of video games, and the rank of songs on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, finding in all cases that search counts are highly predictive of future outcomes. We also find that search counts generally boost the performance of baseline models fit on other publicly available data, where the boost varies from modest to dramatic, depending on the application in question. Finally, we reexamine previous work on tracking flu trends and show that, perhaps surprisingly, the utility of search data relative to a simple autoregressive model is modest. We conclude that in the absence of other data sources, or where small improvements in predictive performance are material, search queries provide a useful guide to the near future.

Search strategies in practice: Influence of information and task constraints.

Science.gov (United States)

Pacheco, Matheus M; Newell, Karl M

2018-01-01

The practice of a motor task has been conceptualized as a process of search through a perceptual-motor workspace. The present study investigated the influence of information and task constraints on the search strategy as reflected in the sequential relations of the outcome in a discrete movement virtual projectile task. The results showed that the relation between the changes of trial-to-trial movement outcome to performance level was dependent on the landscape of the task dynamics and the influence of inherent variability. Furthermore, the search was in a constrained parameter region of the perceptual-motor workspace that depended on the task constraints. These findings show that there is not a single function of trial-to-trial change over practice but rather that local search strategies (proportional, discontinuous, constant) adapt to the level of performance and the confluence of constraints to action. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The HMMER Web Server for Protein Sequence Similarity Search.

Science.gov (United States)

Prakash, Ananth; Jeffryes, Matt; Bateman, Alex; Finn, Robert D

2017-12-08

Protein sequence similarity search is one of the most commonly used bioinformatics methods for identifying evolutionarily related proteins. In general, sequences that are evolutionarily related share some degree of similarity, and sequence-search algorithms use this principle to identify homologs. The requirement for a fast and sensitive sequence search method led to the development of the HMMER software, which in the latest version (v3.1) uses a combination of sophisticated acceleration heuristics and mathematical and computational optimizations to enable the use of profile hidden Markov models (HMMs) for sequence analysis. The HMMER Web server provides a common platform by linking the HMMER algorithms to databases, thereby enabling the search for homologs, as well as providing sequence and functional annotation by linking external databases. This unit describes three basic protocols and two alternate protocols that explain how to use the HMMER Web server using various input formats and user defined parameters. © 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

A Measure of Search Efficiency in a Real World Search Task (PREPRINT)

Science.gov (United States)

2009-02-16

Search Task 5a. CONTRACT NUMBER N00173-08-1-G030 5b. GRANT NUMBER NRL BAA 08-09, 55-07-01 5c. PROGRAM ELEMENT NUMBER 0602782N 6. AUTHOR(S... Beck , Melissa R. Ph.D (LSU) Maura C. Lohrenz (NRL Code 7440.1) J. Gregory Trafton (NRL Code 5515) 5d. PROJECT NUMBER 08294 5e. TASK NUMBER... Beck 19b. TELEPHONE NUMBER (Include area code) (225)578-7214 Standard Form 298 (Rev. 8/98) Prescribed by ANSI Std. Z39.18 A measure of search

What Snippets Say About Pages in Federated Web Search

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Demeester, Thomas; Nguyen, Dong-Phuong; Trieschnigg, Rudolf Berend; Develder, Chris; Hiemstra, Djoerd; Hou, Yuexian; Nie, Jian-Yun; Sun, Le; Wang, Bo; Zhang, Peng

2012-01-01

What is the likelihood that a Web page is considered relevant to a query, given the relevance assessment of the corresponding snippet? Using a new federated IR test collection that contains search results from over a hundred search engines on the internet, we are able to investigate such research

A Web Search on Environmental Topics: What Is the Role of Ranking?

Science.gov (United States)

Filisetti, Barbara; Mascaretti, Silvia; Limina, Rosa Maria; Gelatti, Umberto

2013-01-01

Abstract Background: Although the Internet is easy to use, the mechanisms and logic behind a Web search are often unknown. Reliable information can be obtained, but it may not be visible as the Web site is not located in the first positions of search results. The possible risks of adverse health effects arising from environmental hazards are issues of increasing public interest, and therefore the information about these risks, particularly on topics for which there is no scientific evidence, is very crucial. The aim of this study was to investigate whether the presentation of information on some environmental health topics differed among various search engines, assuming that the most reliable information should come from institutional Web sites. Materials and Methods: Five search engines were used: Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Ask, and AOL. The following topics were searched in combination with the word “health”: “nuclear energy,” “electromagnetic waves,” “air pollution,” “waste,” and “radon.” For each topic three key words were used. The first 30 search results for each query were considered. The ranking variability among the search engines and the type of search results were analyzed for each topic and for each key word. The ranking of institutional Web sites was given particular consideration. Results: Variable results were obtained when surfing the Internet on different environmental health topics. Multivariate logistic regression analysis showed that, when searching for radon and air pollution topics, it is more likely to find institutional Web sites in the first 10 positions compared with nuclear power (odds ratio=3.4, 95% confidence interval 2.1–5.4 and odds ratio=2.9, 95% confidence interval 1.8–4.7, respectively) and also when using Google compared with Bing (odds ratio=3.1, 95% confidence interval 1.9–5.1). Conclusions: The increasing use of online information could play an important role in forming opinions. Web users should become

Search Techniques for the Web of Things: A Taxonomy and Survey

Science.gov (United States)

Zhou, Yuchao; De, Suparna; Wang, Wei; Moessner, Klaus

2016-01-01

The Web of Things aims to make physical world objects and their data accessible through standard Web technologies to enable intelligent applications and sophisticated data analytics. Due to the amount and heterogeneity of the data, it is challenging to perform data analysis directly; especially when the data is captured from a large number of distributed sources. However, the size and scope of the data can be reduced and narrowed down with search techniques, so that only the most relevant and useful data items are selected according to the application requirements. Search is fundamental to the Web of Things while challenging by nature in this context, e.g., mobility of the objects, opportunistic presence and sensing, continuous data streams with changing spatial and temporal properties, efficient indexing for historical and real time data. The research community has developed numerous techniques and methods to tackle these problems as reported by a large body of literature in the last few years. A comprehensive investigation of the current and past studies is necessary to gain a clear view of the research landscape and to identify promising future directions. This survey reviews the state-of-the-art search methods for the Web of Things, which are classified according to three different viewpoints: basic principles, data/knowledge representation, and contents being searched. Experiences and lessons learned from the existing work and some EU research projects related to Web of Things are discussed, and an outlook to the future research is presented. PMID:27128918

Semantic similarity measures in the biomedical domain by leveraging a web search engine.

Science.gov (United States)

Hsieh, Sheau-Ling; Chang, Wen-Yung; Chen, Chi-Huang; Weng, Yung-Ching

2013-07-01

Various researches in web related semantic similarity measures have been deployed. However, measuring semantic similarity between two terms remains a challenging task. The traditional ontology-based methodologies have a limitation that both concepts must be resided in the same ontology tree(s). Unfortunately, in practice, the assumption is not always applicable. On the other hand, if the corpus is sufficiently adequate, the corpus-based methodologies can overcome the limitation. Now, the web is a continuous and enormous growth corpus. Therefore, a method of estimating semantic similarity is proposed via exploiting the page counts of two biomedical concepts returned by Google AJAX web search engine. The features are extracted as the co-occurrence patterns of two given terms P and Q, by querying P, Q, as well as P AND Q, and the web search hit counts of the defined lexico-syntactic patterns. These similarity scores of different patterns are evaluated, by adapting support vector machines for classification, to leverage the robustness of semantic similarity measures. Experimental results validating against two datasets: dataset 1 provided by A. Hliaoutakis; dataset 2 provided by T. Pedersen, are presented and discussed. In dataset 1, the proposed approach achieves the best correlation coefficient (0.802) under SNOMED-CT. In dataset 2, the proposed method obtains the best correlation coefficient (SNOMED-CT: 0.705; MeSH: 0.723) with physician scores comparing with measures of other methods. However, the correlation coefficients (SNOMED-CT: 0.496; MeSH: 0.539) with coder scores received opposite outcomes. In conclusion, the semantic similarity findings of the proposed method are close to those of physicians' ratings. Furthermore, the study provides a cornerstone investigation for extracting fully relevant information from digitizing, free-text medical records in the National Taiwan University Hospital database.

The “I’m Feeling Lucky Syndrome”: Teacher-Candidates’ Knowledge of Web Searching Strategies

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Corinne Laverty

2008-06-01

Full Text Available The need for web literacy has become increasingly important with the exponential growth of learning materials on the web that are freely accessible to educators. Teachers need the skills to locate these tools and also the ability to teach their students web search strategies and evaluation of websites so they can effectively explore the web by themselves. This study examined the web searching strategies of 253 teachers-in-training using both a survey (247 participants and live screen capture with think aloud audio recording (6 participants. The results present a picture of the strategic, syntactic, and evaluative search abilities of these students that librarians and faculty can use to plan how instruction can target information skill deficits in university student populations.

Search as Learning (Dagstuhl Seminar 17092)

OpenAIRE

Collins-Thompson, Kevyn; Hansen, Preben; Hauff, Claudia

2017-01-01

This report describes the program and the results of Dagstuhl Seminar 17092 "Search as Learning", which brought together 26 researchers from diverse research backgrounds. The motivation for the seminar stems from the fact that modern Web search engines are largely engineered and optimized to fulfill lookup tasks instead of complex search tasks. The latter though are an essential component of information discovery and learning. The 3-day seminar started with four perspective talks, providing f...

Identification and Analysis of Multi-tasking Product Information Search Sessions with Query Logs

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Xiang Zhou

2016-09-01

Full Text Available Purpose: This research aims to identify product search tasks in online shopping and analyze the characteristics of consumer multi-tasking search sessions. Design/methodology/approach: The experimental dataset contains 8,949 queries of 582 users from 3,483 search sessions. A sequential comparison of the Jaccard similarity coefficient between two adjacent search queries and hierarchical clustering of queries is used to identify search tasks. Findings: (1 Users issued a similar number of queries (1.43 to 1.47 with similar lengths (7.3-7.6 characters per task in mono-tasking and multi-tasking sessions, and (2 Users spent more time on average in sessions with more tasks, but spent less time for each task when the number of tasks increased in a session. Research limitations: The task identification method that relies only on query terms does not completely reflect the complex nature of consumer shopping behavior. Practical implications: These results provide an exploratory understanding of the relationships among multiple shopping tasks, and can be useful for product recommendation and shopping task prediction. Originality/value: The originality of this research is its use of query clustering with online shopping task identification and analysis, and the analysis of product search session characteristics.

Binaural Sound Reduces Reaction Time in a Virtual Reality Search Task

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Høeg, Emil Rosenlund; Gerry, Lynda; Thomsen, Lui Albæk

2017-01-01

Salient features in a visual search task can direct attention and increase competency on these tasks. Simple cues, such as color change in a salient feature, called the "pop-out effect" can increase task solving efficiency [6]. Previous work has shown that nonspatial auditory signals temporally...... synched with a pop-out effect can improve reaction time in a visual search task, called the "pip and pop effect" [14]. This paper describes a within-group study on the effect of audiospatial attention in virtual reality given a 360-degree visual search. Three cue conditions were compared (no sound, stereo...

Search Techniques for the Web of Things: A Taxonomy and Survey

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Yuchao Zhou

2016-04-01

Full Text Available The Web of Things aims to make physical world objects and their data accessible through standard Web technologies to enable intelligent applications and sophisticated data analytics. Due to the amount and heterogeneity of the data, it is challenging to perform data analysis directly; especially when the data is captured from a large number of distributed sources. However, the size and scope of the data can be reduced and narrowed down with search techniques, so that only the most relevant and useful data items are selected according to the application requirements. Search is fundamental to the Web of Things while challenging by nature in this context, e.g., mobility of the objects, opportunistic presence and sensing, continuous data streams with changing spatial and temporal properties, efficient indexing for historical and real time data. The research community has developed numerous techniques and methods to tackle these problems as reported by a large body of literature in the last few years. A comprehensive investigation of the current and past studies is necessary to gain a clear view of the research landscape and to identify promising future directions. This survey reviews the state-of-the-art search methods for the Web of Things, which are classified according to three different viewpoints: basic principles, data/knowledge representation, and contents being searched. Experiences and lessons learned from the existing work and some EU research projects related to Web of Things are discussed, and an outlook to the future research is presented.

Minimalist instruction for learning to search the World Wide Web

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Lazonder, Adrianus W.

2001-01-01

This study examined the efficacy of minimalist instruction to develop self-regulatory skills involved in Web searching. Two versions of minimalist self-regulatory skill instruction were compared to a control group that was merely taught procedural skills to operate the search engine. Acquired skills

University of Glasgow at WebCLEF 2005

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Macdonald, C.; Plachouras, V.; He, B.

2006-01-01

We participated in the WebCLEF 2005 monolingual task. In this task, a search system aims to retrieve relevant documents from a multilingual corpus of Web documents from Web sites of European governments. Both the documents and the queries are written in a wide range of European languages......, namely content, title, and anchor text of incoming hyperlinks. We use a technique called per-field normalisation, which extends the Divergence From Randomness (DFR) framework, to normalise the term frequencies, and to combine them across the three fields. We also employ the length of the URL path of Web...

Federated Search and the Library Web Site: A Study of Association of Research Libraries Member Web Sites

Science.gov (United States)

Williams, Sarah C.

2010-01-01

The purpose of this study was to investigate how federated search engines are incorporated into the Web sites of libraries in the Association of Research Libraries. In 2009, information was gathered for each library in the Association of Research Libraries with a federated search engine. This included the name of the federated search service and…

Instructor Perceptions of Web Technology Feature and Instructional Task Fit

Science.gov (United States)

Strader, Troy J.; Reed, Diana; Suh, Inchul; Njoroge, Joyce W.

2015-01-01

In this exploratory study, university faculty (instructor) perceptions of the extent to which eight unique features of Web technology are useful for various instructional tasks are identified. Task-technology fit propositions are developed and tested using data collected from a survey of instructors in business, pharmacy, and arts/humanities. It…

Resolving person names in web people search

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Balog, K.; Azzopardi, L.; de Rijke, M.; King, I.; Baeza-Yates, R.

2009-01-01

Disambiguating person names in a set of documents (such as a set of web pages returned in response to a person name) is a key task for the presentation of results and the automatic profiling of experts. With largely unstructured documents and an unknown number of people with the same name the

Manually Classifying User Search Queries on an Academic Library Web Site

Science.gov (United States)

Chapman, Suzanne; Desai, Shevon; Hagedorn, Kat; Varnum, Ken; Mishra, Sonali; Piacentine, Julie

2013-01-01

The University of Michigan Library wanted to learn more about the kinds of searches its users were conducting through the "one search" search box on the Library Web site. Library staff conducted two investigations. A preliminary investigation in 2011 involved the manual review of the 100 most frequently occurring queries conducted…

Ontology-Driven Search and Triage: Design of a Web-Based Visual Interface for MEDLINE.

Science.gov (United States)

Demelo, Jonathan; Parsons, Paul; Sedig, Kamran

2017-02-02

Diverse users need to search health and medical literature to satisfy open-ended goals such as making evidence-based decisions and updating their knowledge. However, doing so is challenging due to at least two major difficulties: (1) articulating information needs using accurate vocabulary and (2) dealing with large document sets returned from searches. Common search interfaces such as PubMed do not provide adequate support for exploratory search tasks. Our objective was to improve support for exploratory search tasks by combining two strategies in the design of an interactive visual interface by (1) using a formal ontology to help users build domain-specific knowledge and vocabulary and (2) providing multi-stage triaging support to help mitigate the information overload problem. We developed a Web-based tool, Ontology-Driven Visual Search and Triage Interface for MEDLINE (OVERT-MED), to test our design ideas. We implemented a custom searchable index of MEDLINE, which comprises approximately 25 million document citations. We chose a popular biomedical ontology, the Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO), to test our solution to the vocabulary problem. We implemented multistage triaging support in OVERT-MED, with the aid of interactive visualization techniques, to help users deal with large document sets returned from searches. Formative evaluation suggests that the design features in OVERT-MED are helpful in addressing the two major difficulties described above. Using a formal ontology seems to help users articulate their information needs with more accurate vocabulary. In addition, multistage triaging combined with interactive visualizations shows promise in mitigating the information overload problem. Our strategies appear to be valuable in addressing the two major problems in exploratory search. Although we tested OVERT-MED with a particular ontology and document collection, we anticipate that our strategies can be transferred successfully to other contexts. �

Assessment and Comparison of Search capabilities of Web-based Meta-Search Engines: A Checklist Approach

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Alireza Isfandiyari Moghadam

2010-03-01

Full Text Available   The present investigation concerns evaluation, comparison and analysis of search options existing within web-based meta-search engines. 64 meta-search engines were identified. 19 meta-search engines that were free, accessible and compatible with the objectives of the present study were selected. An author’s constructed check list was used for data collection. Findings indicated that all meta-search engines studied used the AND operator, phrase search, number of results displayed setting, previous search query storage and help tutorials. Nevertheless, none of them demonstrated any search options for hypertext searching and displaying the size of the pages searched. 94.7% support features such as truncation, keywords in title and URL search and text summary display. The checklist used in the study could serve as a model for investigating search options in search engines, digital libraries and other internet search tools.

Search, Read and Write: An Inquiry into Web Accessibility for People with Dyslexia.

Science.gov (United States)

Berget, Gerd; Herstad, Jo; Sandnes, Frode Eika

2016-01-01

Universal design in context of digitalisation has become an integrated part of international conventions and national legislations. A goal is to make the Web accessible for people of different genders, ages, backgrounds, cultures and physical, sensory and cognitive abilities. Political demands for universally designed solutions have raised questions about how it is achieved in practice. Developers, designers and legislators have looked towards the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) for answers. WCAG 2.0 has become the de facto standard for universal design on the Web. Some of the guidelines are directed at the general population, while others are targeted at more specific user groups, such as the visually impaired or hearing impaired. Issues related to cognitive impairments such as dyslexia receive less attention, although dyslexia is prevalent in at least 5-10% of the population. Navigation and search are two common ways of using the Web. However, while navigation has received a fair amount of attention, search systems are not explicitly included, although search has become an important part of people's daily routines. This paper discusses WCAG in the context of dyslexia for the Web in general and search user interfaces specifically. Although certain guidelines address topics that affect dyslexia, WCAG does not seem to fully accommodate users with dyslexia.

A Web Service Protocol Realizing Interoperable Internet of Things Tasking Capability

Science.gov (United States)

Huang, Chih-Yuan; Wu, Cheng-Hung

2016-01-01

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an infrastructure that interconnects uniquely-identifiable devices using the Internet. By interconnecting everyday appliances, various monitoring, and physical mashup applications can be constructed to improve human’s daily life. In general, IoT devices provide two main capabilities: sensing and tasking capabilities. While the sensing capability is similar to the World-Wide Sensor Web, this research focuses on the tasking capability. However, currently, IoT devices created by different manufacturers follow different proprietary protocols and are locked in many closed ecosystems. This heterogeneity issue impedes the interconnection between IoT devices and damages the potential of the IoT. To address this issue, this research aims at proposing an interoperable solution called tasking capability description that allows users to control different IoT devices using a uniform web service interface. This paper demonstrates the contribution of the proposed solution by interconnecting different IoT devices for different applications. In addition, the proposed solution is integrated with the OGC SensorThings API standard, which is a Web service standard defined for the IoT sensing capability. Consequently, the Extended SensorThings API can realize both IoT sensing and tasking capabilities in an integrated and interoperable manner. PMID:27589759

A Web Service Protocol Realizing Interoperable Internet of Things Tasking Capability.

Science.gov (United States)

Huang, Chih-Yuan; Wu, Cheng-Hung

2016-08-31

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an infrastructure that interconnects uniquely-identifiable devices using the Internet. By interconnecting everyday appliances, various monitoring, and physical mashup applications can be constructed to improve human's daily life. In general, IoT devices provide two main capabilities: sensing and tasking capabilities. While the sensing capability is similar to the World-Wide Sensor Web, this research focuses on the tasking capability. However, currently, IoT devices created by different manufacturers follow different proprietary protocols and are locked in many closed ecosystems. This heterogeneity issue impedes the interconnection between IoT devices and damages the potential of the IoT. To address this issue, this research aims at proposing an interoperable solution called tasking capability description that allows users to control different IoT devices using a uniform web service interface. This paper demonstrates the contribution of the proposed solution by interconnecting different IoT devices for different applications. In addition, the proposed solution is integrated with the OGC SensorThings API standard, which is a Web service standard defined for the IoT sensing capability. Consequently, the Extended SensorThings API can realize both IoT sensing and tasking capabilities in an integrated and interoperable manner.

CYCLOSA: Decentralizing Private Web Search Through SGX-Based Browser Extensions

OpenAIRE

Pires, Rafael; Goltzsche, David; Mokhtar, Sonia Ben; Bouchenak, Sara; Boutet, Antoine; Felber, Pascal; Kapitza, Rüdiger; Pasin, Marcelo; Schiavoni, Valerio

2018-01-01

By regularly querying Web search engines, users (unconsciously) disclose large amounts of their personal data as part of their search queries, among which some might reveal sensitive information (e.g. health issues, sexual, political or religious preferences). Several solutions exist to allow users querying search engines while improving privacy protection. However, these solutions suffer from a number of limitations: some are subject to user re-identification attacks, while others lack scala...

A Web Browser Interface to Manage the Searching and Organizing of Information on the Web by Learners

Science.gov (United States)

Li, Liang-Yi; Chen, Gwo-Dong

2010-01-01

Information Gathering is a knowledge construction process. Web learners make a plan for their Information Gathering task based on their prior knowledge. The plan is evolved with new information encountered and their mental model is constructed through continuously assimilating and accommodating new information gathered from different Web pages. In…

Ramakrishnan: Semantics on the Web

Data.gov (United States)

National Aeronautics and Space Administration — It is becoming increasingly clear that the next generation of web search and advertising will rely on a deeper understanding of user intent and task modeling, and a...

Teaching AI Search Algorithms in a Web-Based Educational System

Science.gov (United States)

Grivokostopoulou, Foteini; Hatzilygeroudis, Ioannis

2013-01-01

In this paper, we present a way of teaching AI search algorithms in a web-based adaptive educational system. Teaching is based on interactive examples and exercises. Interactive examples, which use visualized animations to present AI search algorithms in a step-by-step way with explanations, are used to make learning more attractive. Practice…

The Impact of Task Demands on Fixation-Related Brain Potentials during Guided Search.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Anthony J Ries

Full Text Available Recording synchronous data from EEG and eye-tracking provides a unique methodological approach for measuring the sensory and cognitive processes of overt visual search. Using this approach we obtained fixation related potentials (FRPs during a guided visual search task specifically focusing on the lambda and P3 components. An outstanding question is whether the lambda and P3 FRP components are influenced by concurrent task demands. We addressed this question by obtaining simultaneous eye-movement and electroencephalographic (EEG measures during a guided visual search task while parametrically modulating working memory load using an auditory N-back task. Participants performed the guided search task alone, while ignoring binaurally presented digits, or while using the auditory information in a 0, 1, or 2-back task. The results showed increased reaction time and decreased accuracy in both the visual search and N-back tasks as a function of auditory load. Moreover, high auditory task demands increased the P3 but not the lambda latency while the amplitude of both lambda and P3 was reduced during high auditory task demands. The results show that both early and late stages of visual processing indexed by FRPs are significantly affected by concurrent task demands imposed by auditory working memory.

Efficient Top-k Locality Search for Co-located Spatial Web Objects

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Qu, Qiang; Liu, Siyuan; Yang, Bin

2014-01-01

In step with the web being used widely by mobile users, user location is becoming an essential signal in services, including local intent search. Given a large set of spatial web objects consisting of a geographical location and a textual description (e.g., online business directory entries of re...

A reverse engineering approach for automatic annotation of Web pages

NARCIS (Netherlands)

R. de Virgilio (Roberto); F. Frasincar (Flavius); W. Hop (Walter); S. Lachner (Stephan)

2013-01-01

textabstractThe Semantic Web is gaining increasing interest to fulfill the need of sharing, retrieving, and reusing information. Since Web pages are designed to be read by people, not machines, searching and reusing information on the Web is a difficult task without human participation. To this aim

The poor quality of information about laparoscopy on the World Wide Web as indexed by popular search engines.

Science.gov (United States)

Allen, J W; Finch, R J; Coleman, M G; Nathanson, L K; O'Rourke, N A; Fielding, G A

2002-01-01

This study was undertaken to determine the quality of information on the Internet regarding laparoscopy. Four popular World Wide Web search engines were used with the key word "laparoscopy." Advertisements, patient- or physician-directed information, and controversial material were noted. A total of 14,030 Web pages were found, but only 104 were unique Web sites. The majority of the sites were duplicate pages, subpages within a main Web page, or dead links. Twenty-eight of the 104 pages had a medical product for sale, 26 were patient-directed, 23 were written by a physician or group of physicians, and six represented corporations. The remaining 21 were "miscellaneous." The 46 pages containing educational material were critically reviewed. At least one of the senior authors found that 32 of the pages contained controversial or misleading statements. All of the three senior authors (LKN, NAO, GAF) independently agreed that 17 of the 46 pages contained controversial information. The World Wide Web is not a reliable source for patient or physician information about laparoscopy. Authenticating medical information on the World Wide Web is a difficult task, and no government or surgical society has taken the lead in regulating what is presented as fact on the World Wide Web.

Web corpus construction

CERN Document Server

Schafer, Roland

2013-01-01

The World Wide Web constitutes the largest existing source of texts written in a great variety of languages. A feasible and sound way of exploiting this data for linguistic research is to compile a static corpus for a given language. There are several adavantages of this approach: (i) Working with such corpora obviates the problems encountered when using Internet search engines in quantitative linguistic research (such as non-transparent ranking algorithms). (ii) Creating a corpus from web data is virtually free. (iii) The size of corpora compiled from the WWW may exceed by several orders of magnitudes the size of language resources offered elsewhere. (iv) The data is locally available to the user, and it can be linguistically post-processed and queried with the tools preferred by her/him. This book addresses the main practical tasks in the creation of web corpora up to giga-token size. Among these tasks are the sampling process (i.e., web crawling) and the usual cleanups including boilerplate removal and rem...

Clinician search behaviors may be influenced by search engine design.

Science.gov (United States)

Lau, Annie Y S; Coiera, Enrico; Zrimec, Tatjana; Compton, Paul

2010-06-30

Searching the Web for documents using information retrieval systems plays an important part in clinicians' practice of evidence-based medicine. While much research focuses on the design of methods to retrieve documents, there has been little examination of the way different search engine capabilities influence clinician search behaviors. Previous studies have shown that use of task-based search engines allows for faster searches with no loss of decision accuracy compared with resource-based engines. We hypothesized that changes in search behaviors may explain these differences. In all, 75 clinicians (44 doctors and 31 clinical nurse consultants) were randomized to use either a resource-based or a task-based version of a clinical information retrieval system to answer questions about 8 clinical scenarios in a controlled setting in a university computer laboratory. Clinicians using the resource-based system could select 1 of 6 resources, such as PubMed; clinicians using the task-based system could select 1 of 6 clinical tasks, such as diagnosis. Clinicians in both systems could reformulate search queries. System logs unobtrusively capturing clinicians' interactions with the systems were coded and analyzed for clinicians' search actions and query reformulation strategies. The most frequent search action of clinicians using the resource-based system was to explore a new resource with the same query, that is, these clinicians exhibited a "breadth-first" search behaviour. Of 1398 search actions, clinicians using the resource-based system conducted 401 (28.7%, 95% confidence interval [CI] 26.37-31.11) in this way. In contrast, the majority of clinicians using the task-based system exhibited a "depth-first" search behavior in which they reformulated query keywords while keeping to the same task profiles. Of 585 search actions conducted by clinicians using the task-based system, 379 (64.8%, 95% CI 60.83-68.55) were conducted in this way. This study provides evidence that

Using Web-Based Exploratory Tasks to Develop Intercultural Competence in a Homogeneous Cultural Environment

Science.gov (United States)

Stockwell, Esther

2016-01-01

This study adapted web-based exploratory tasks using WebQuests as a means of enabling students to understand and reflect on both the target and their own culture. Learners actively used various authentic resources selected to meet their linguistic and cognitive needs to complete the tasks. The aim of this study was to help Japanese university…

Snippet-based relevance predictions for federated web search

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Demeester, Thomas; Nguyen, Dong-Phuong; Trieschnigg, Rudolf Berend; Develder, Chris; Hiemstra, Djoerd

How well can the relevance of a page be predicted, purely based on snippets? This would be highly useful in a Federated Web Search setting where caching large amounts of result snippets is more feasible than caching entire pages. The experiments reported in this paper make use of result snippets and

A Web Search on Environmental Topics: What Is the Role of Ranking?

OpenAIRE

Covolo, Loredana; Filisetti, Barbara; Mascaretti, Silvia; Limina, Rosa Maria; Gelatti, Umberto

2013-01-01

Background: Although the Internet is easy to use, the mechanisms and logic behind a Web search are often unknown. Reliable information can be obtained, but it may not be visible as the Web site is not located in the first positions of search results. The possible risks of adverse health effects arising from environmental hazards are issues of increasing public interest, and therefore the information about these risks, particularly on topics for which there is no scientific evidence, is ver...

Mining Tasks from the Web Anchor Text Graph: MSR Notebook Paper for the TREC 2015 Tasks Track

Science.gov (United States)

2015-11-20

Mining Tasks from the Web Anchor Text Graph: MSR Notebook Paper for the TREC 2015 Tasks Track Paul N. Bennett Microsoft Research Redmond, USA pauben...anchor text graph has proven useful in the general realm of query reformulation [2], we sought to quantify the value of extracting key phrases from...anchor text in the broader setting of the task understanding track. Given a query, our approach considers a simple method for identifying a relevant

Using Heuristic Task Analysis to Create Web-Based Instructional Design Theory

Science.gov (United States)

Fiester, Herbert R.

2010-01-01

The first purpose of this study was to identify procedural and heuristic knowledge used when creating web-based instruction. The second purpose of this study was to develop suggestions for improving the Heuristic Task Analysis process, a technique for eliciting, analyzing, and representing expertise in cognitively complex tasks. Three expert…

Burden of neurological diseases in the US revealed by web searches.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ricardo Baeza-Yates

Full Text Available Analyzing the disease-related web searches of Internet users provides insight into the interests of the general population as well as the healthcare industry, which can be used to shape health care policies.We analyzed the searches related to neurological diseases and drugs used in neurology using the most popular search engines in the US, Google and Bing/Yahoo.We found that the most frequently searched diseases were common diseases such as dementia or Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD, as well as medium frequency diseases with high social impact such as Parkinson's disease, MS and ALS. The most frequently searched CNS drugs were generic drugs used for pain, followed by sleep disorders, dementia, ADHD, stroke and Parkinson's disease. Regarding the interests of the healthcare industry, ADHD, Alzheimer's disease, MS, ALS, meningitis, and hypersomnia received the higher advertising bids for neurological diseases, while painkillers and drugs for neuropathic pain, drugs for dementia or insomnia, and triptans had the highest advertising bidding prices.Web searches reflect the interest of people and the healthcare industry, and are based either on the frequency or social impact of the disease.

Dropout Rates and Response Times of an Occupation Search Tree in a Web Survey

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Tijdens Kea

2014-03-01

Full Text Available Occupation is key in socioeconomic research. As in other survey modes, most web surveys use an open-ended question for occupation, though the absence of interviewers elicits unidentifiable or aggregated responses. Unlike other modes, web surveys can use a search tree with an occupation database. They are hardly ever used, but this may change due to technical advancements. This article evaluates a three-step search tree with 1,700 occupational titles, used in the 2010 multilingual WageIndicator web survey for UK, Belgium and Netherlands (22,990 observations. Dropout rates are high; in Step 1 due to unemployed respondents judging the question not to be adequate, and in Step 3 due to search tree item length. Median response times are substantial due to search tree item length, dropout in the next step and invalid occupations ticked. Overall the validity of the occupation data is rather good, 1.7-7.5% of the respondents completing the search tree have ticked an invalid occupation.

The Little Engines That Could: Modeling the Performance of World Wide Web Search Engines

OpenAIRE

Eric T. Bradlow; David C. Schmittlein

2000-01-01

This research examines the ability of six popular Web search engines, individually and collectively, to locate Web pages containing common marketing/management phrases. We propose and validate a model for search engine performance that is able to represent key patterns of coverage and overlap among the engines. The model enables us to estimate the typical additional benefit of using multiple search engines, depending on the particular set of engines being considered. It also provides an estim...

The effects of link format and screen location on visual search of web pages.

Science.gov (United States)

Ling, Jonathan; Van Schaik, Paul

2004-06-22

Navigation of web pages is of critical importance to the usability of web-based systems such as the World Wide Web and intranets. The primary means of navigation is through the use of hyperlinks. However, few studies have examined the impact of the presentation format of these links on visual search. The present study used a two-factor mixed measures design to investigate whether there was an effect of link format (plain text, underlined, bold, or bold and underlined) upon speed and accuracy of visual search and subjective measures in both the navigation and content areas of web pages. An effect of link format on speed of visual search for both hits and correct rejections was found. This effect was observed in the navigation and the content areas. Link format did not influence accuracy in either screen location. Participants showed highest preference for links that were in bold and underlined, regardless of screen area. These results are discussed in the context of visual search processes and design recommendations are given.

Spiders and Worms and Crawlers, Oh My: Searching on the World Wide Web.

Science.gov (United States)

Eagan, Ann; Bender, Laura

Searching on the world wide web can be confusing. A myriad of search engines exist, often with little or no documentation, and many of these search engines work differently from the standard search engines people are accustomed to using. Intended for librarians, this paper defines search engines, directories, spiders, and robots, and covers basics…

Proceedings of the ECIR 2012 Workshop on Task-Based and Aggregated Search (TBAS2012)

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

2012-01-01

Task-based search aims to understand the user's current task and desired outcomes, and how this may provide useful context for the Information Retrieval (IR) process. An example of task-based search is situations where additional user information on e.g. the purpose of the search or what the user...

State-of-the-Art Review on Relevance of Genetic Algorithm to Internet Web Search

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Kehinde Agbele

2012-01-01

Full Text Available People use search engines to find information they desire with the aim that their information needs will be met. Information retrieval (IR is a field that is concerned primarily with the searching and retrieving of information in the documents and also searching the search engine, online databases, and Internet. Genetic algorithms (GAs are robust, efficient, and optimizated methods in a wide area of search problems motivated by Darwin’s principles of natural selection and survival of the fittest. This paper describes information retrieval systems (IRS components. This paper looks at how GAs can be applied in the field of IR and specifically the relevance of genetic algorithms to internet web search. Finally, from the proposals surveyed it turns out that GA is applied to diverse problem fields of internet web search.

Web Camera Based Eye Tracking to Assess Visual Memory on a Visual Paired Comparison Task

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Nicholas T. Bott

2017-06-01

Full Text Available Background: Web cameras are increasingly part of the standard hardware of most smart devices. Eye movements can often provide a noninvasive “window on the brain,” and the recording of eye movements using web cameras is a burgeoning area of research.Objective: This study investigated a novel methodology for administering a visual paired comparison (VPC decisional task using a web camera.To further assess this method, we examined the correlation between a standard eye-tracking camera automated scoring procedure [obtaining images at 60 frames per second (FPS] and a manually scored procedure using a built-in laptop web camera (obtaining images at 3 FPS.Methods: This was an observational study of 54 clinically normal older adults.Subjects completed three in-clinic visits with simultaneous recording of eye movements on a VPC decision task by a standard eye tracker camera and a built-in laptop-based web camera. Inter-rater reliability was analyzed using Siegel and Castellan's kappa formula. Pearson correlations were used to investigate the correlation between VPC performance using a standard eye tracker camera and a built-in web camera.Results: Strong associations were observed on VPC mean novelty preference score between the 60 FPS eye tracker and 3 FPS built-in web camera at each of the three visits (r = 0.88–0.92. Inter-rater agreement of web camera scoring at each time point was high (κ = 0.81–0.88. There were strong relationships on VPC mean novelty preference score between 10, 5, and 3 FPS training sets (r = 0.88–0.94. Significantly fewer data quality issues were encountered using the built-in web camera.Conclusions: Human scoring of a VPC decisional task using a built-in laptop web camera correlated strongly with automated scoring of the same task using a standard high frame rate eye tracker camera.While this method is not suitable for eye tracking paradigms requiring the collection and analysis of fine-grained metrics, such as

Job task characteristics of Australian emergency services volunteers during search and rescue operations.

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Silk, Aaron; Lenton, Gavin; Savage, Robbie; Aisbett, Brad

2018-02-01

Search and rescue operations are necessary in locating, assisting and recovering individuals lost or in distress. In Australia, land-based search and rescue roles require a range of physically demanding tasks undertaken in dynamic and challenging environments. The aim of the current research was to identify and characterise the physically demanding tasks inherent to search and rescue operation personnel within Australia. These aims were met through a subjective job task analysis approach. In total, 11 criterion tasks were identified by personnel. These tasks were the most physically demanding, frequently occurring and operationally important tasks to these specialist roles. Muscular strength was the dominant fitness component for 7 of the 11 tasks. In addition to the discrete criterion tasks, an operational scenario was established. With the tasks and operational scenario identified, objective task analysis procedures can be undertaken so that practitioners can implement evidence-based strategies, such as physical selection procedures and task-based physical training programs, commensurate with the physical demands of search and rescue job roles. Practitioner Summary: The identification of physically demanding tasks amongst specialist emergency service roles predicates health and safety strategies which can be incorporated into organisations. Knowledge of physical task parameters allows employers to mitigate injury risk through the implementation of strategies modelled on the precise physical demands of the role.

WEB-server for search of a periodicity in amino acid and nucleotide sequences

Science.gov (United States)

E Frenkel, F.; Skryabin, K. G.; Korotkov, E. V.

2017-12-01

A new web server (http://victoria.biengi.ac.ru/splinter/login.php) was designed and developed to search for periodicity in nucleotide and amino acid sequences. The web server operation is based upon a new mathematical method of searching for multiple alignments, which is founded on the position weight matrices optimization, as well as on implementation of the two-dimensional dynamic programming. This approach allows the construction of multiple alignments of the indistinctly similar amino acid and nucleotide sequences that accumulated more than 1.5 substitutions per a single amino acid or a nucleotide without performing the sequences paired comparisons. The article examines the principles of the web server operation and two examples of studying amino acid and nucleotide sequences, as well as information that could be obtained using the web server.

LigSearch: a knowledge-based web server to identify likely ligands for a protein target

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

Beer, Tjaart A. P. de; Laskowski, Roman A. [European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL–EBI), Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge CB10 1SD (United Kingdom); Duban, Mark-Eugene [Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, Illinois (United States); Chan, A. W. Edith [University College London, London WC1E 6BT (United Kingdom); Anderson, Wayne F. [Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago, Illinois (United States); Thornton, Janet M., E-mail: thornton@ebi.ac.uk [European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL–EBI), Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge CB10 1SD (United Kingdom)

2013-12-01

LigSearch is a web server for identifying ligands likely to bind to a given protein. Identifying which ligands might bind to a protein before crystallization trials could provide a significant saving in time and resources. LigSearch, a web server aimed at predicting ligands that might bind to and stabilize a given protein, has been developed. Using a protein sequence and/or structure, the system searches against a variety of databases, combining available knowledge, and provides a clustered and ranked output of possible ligands. LigSearch can be accessed at http://www.ebi.ac.uk/thornton-srv/databases/LigSearch.

Academic Users' Information Searching on Research Topics: Characteristics of Research Tasks and Search Strategies

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Du, Jia Tina; Evans, Nina

2011-01-01

This project investigated how academic users search for information on their real-life research tasks. This article presents the findings of the first of two studies. The study data were collected in the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane, Australia. Eleven PhD students' searching behaviors on personal research topics were…

Memory under pressure: secondary-task effects on contextual cueing of visual search.

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Annac, Efsun; Manginelli, Angela A; Pollmann, Stefan; Shi, Zhuanghua; Müller, Hermann J; Geyer, Thomas

2013-11-04

Repeated display configurations improve visual search. Recently, the question has arisen whether this contextual cueing effect (Chun & Jiang, 1998) is itself mediated by attention, both in terms of selectivity and processing resources deployed. While it is accepted that selective attention modulates contextual cueing (Jiang & Leung, 2005), there is an ongoing debate whether the cueing effect is affected by a secondary working memory (WM) task, specifically at which stage WM influences the cueing effect: the acquisition of configural associations (e.g., Travis, Mattingley, & Dux, 2013) versus the expression of learned associations (e.g., Manginelli, Langer, Klose, & Pollmann, 2013). The present study re-investigated this issue. Observers performed a visual search in combination with a spatial WM task. The latter was applied on either early or late search trials--so as to examine whether WM load hampers the acquisition of or retrieval from contextual memory. Additionally, the WM and search tasks were performed either temporally in parallel or in succession--so as to permit the effects of spatial WM load to be dissociated from those of executive load. The secondary WM task was found to affect cueing in late, but not early, experimental trials--though only when the search and WM tasks were performed in parallel. This pattern suggests that contextual cueing involves a spatial WM resource, with spatial WM providing a workspace linking the current search array with configural long-term memory; as a result, occupying this workspace by a secondary WM task hampers the expression of learned configural associations.

Finding people, papers, and posts: Vertical search algorithms and evaluation

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Berendsen, R.W.

2015-01-01

There is a growing diversity of information access applications. While general web search has been dominant in the past few decades, a wide variety of so-called vertical search tasks and applications have come to the fore. Vertical search is an often used term for search that targets specific

Eye Movements Reveal How Task Difficulty Moulds Visual Search

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Young, Angela H.; Hulleman, Johan

2013-01-01

In two experiments we investigated the relationship between eye movements and performance in visual search tasks of varying difficulty. Experiment 1 provided evidence that a single process is used for search among static and moving items. Moreover, we estimated the functional visual field (FVF) from the gaze coordinates and found that its size…

The Effectiveness of Web Search Engines to Index New Sites from Different Countries

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Pirkola, Ari

2009-01-01

Introduction: Investigates how effectively Web search engines index new sites from different countries. The primary interest is whether new sites are indexed equally or whether search engines are biased towards certain countries. If major search engines show biased coverage it can be considered a significant economic and political problem because…

A semantics-based method for clustering of Chinese web search results

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Zhang, Hui; Wang, Deqing; Wang, Li; Bi, Zhuming; Chen, Yong

2014-01-01

Information explosion is a critical challenge to the development of modern information systems. In particular, when the application of an information system is over the Internet, the amount of information over the web has been increasing exponentially and rapidly. Search engines, such as Google and Baidu, are essential tools for people to find the information from the Internet. Valuable information, however, is still likely submerged in the ocean of search results from those tools. By clustering the results into different groups based on subjects automatically, a search engine with the clustering feature allows users to select most relevant results quickly. In this paper, we propose an online semantics-based method to cluster Chinese web search results. First, we employ the generalised suffix tree to extract the longest common substrings (LCSs) from search snippets. Second, we use the HowNet to calculate the similarities of the words derived from the LCSs, and extract the most representative features by constructing the vocabulary chain. Third, we construct a vector of text features and calculate snippets' semantic similarities. Finally, we improve the Chameleon algorithm to cluster snippets. Extensive experimental results have shown that the proposed algorithm has outperformed over the suffix tree clustering method and other traditional clustering methods.

Index Compression and Efficient Query Processing in Large Web Search Engines

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Ding, Shuai

2013-01-01

The inverted index is the main data structure used by all the major search engines. Search engines build an inverted index on their collection to speed up query processing. As the size of the web grows, the length of the inverted list structures, which can easily grow to hundreds of MBs or even GBs for common terms (roughly linear in the size of…

What Can Pictures Tell Us About Web Pages? Improving Document Search Using Images.

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Rodriguez-Vaamonde, Sergio; Torresani, Lorenzo; Fitzgibbon, Andrew W

2015-06-01

Traditional Web search engines do not use the images in the HTML pages to find relevant documents for a given query. Instead, they typically operate by computing a measure of agreement between the keywords provided by the user and only the text portion of each page. In this paper we study whether the content of the pictures appearing in a Web page can be used to enrich the semantic description of an HTML document and consequently boost the performance of a keyword-based search engine. We present a Web-scalable system that exploits a pure text-based search engine to find an initial set of candidate documents for a given query. Then, the candidate set is reranked using visual information extracted from the images contained in the pages. The resulting system retains the computational efficiency of traditional text-based search engines with only a small additional storage cost needed to encode the visual information. We test our approach on one of the TREC Million Query Track benchmarks where we show that the exploitation of visual content yields improvement in accuracies for two distinct text-based search engines, including the system with the best reported performance on this benchmark. We further validate our approach by collecting document relevance judgements on our search results using Amazon Mechanical Turk. The results of this experiment confirm the improvement in accuracy produced by our image-based reranker over a pure text-based system.

Investigating the visual span in comparative search: the effects of task difficulty and divided attention.

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Pomplun, M; Reingold, E M; Shen, J

2001-09-01

In three experiments, participants' visual span was measured in a comparative visual search task in which they had to detect a local match or mismatch between two displays presented side by side. Experiment 1 manipulated the difficulty of the comparative visual search task by contrasting a mismatch detection task with a substantially more difficult match detection task. In Experiment 2, participants were tested in a single-task condition involving only the visual task and a dual-task condition in which they concurrently performed an auditory task. Finally, in Experiment 3, participants performed two dual-task conditions, which differed in the difficulty of the concurrent auditory task. Both the comparative search task difficulty (Experiment 1) and the divided attention manipulation (Experiments 2 and 3) produced strong effects on visual span size.

Research on the optimization strategy of web search engine based on data mining

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Chen, Ronghua

2018-04-01

With the wide application of search engines, web site information has become an important way for people to obtain information. People have found that they are growing in an increasingly explosive manner. Web site information is verydifficult to find the information they need, and now the search engine can not meet the need, so there is an urgent need for the network to provide website personalized information service, data mining technology for this new challenge is to find a breakthrough. In order to improve people's accuracy of finding information from websites, a website search engine optimization strategy based on data mining is proposed, and verified by website search engine optimization experiment. The results show that the proposed strategy improves the accuracy of the people to find information, and reduces the time for people to find information. It has an important practical value.

CWI and TU Delft at TREC 2013: Contextual Suggestion, Federated Web Search, KBA, and Web Tracks

NARCIS (Netherlands)

A. Bellogín Kouki (Alejandro); G.G. Gebremeskel (Gebre); J. He (Jiyin); J.J.P. Lin (Jimmy); A. Said (Alan); T. Samar (Thaer); A.P. de Vries (Arjen); J.B.P. Vuurens (Jeroen)

2014-01-01

htmlabstractThis paper provides an overview of the work done at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) and Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) for different tracks of TREC 2013. We participated in the Contextual Suggestion Track, the Federated Web Search Track, the Knowledge Base

SIRW: A web server for the Simple Indexing and Retrieval System that combines sequence motif searches with keyword searches.

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Ramu, Chenna

2003-07-01

SIRW (http://sirw.embl.de/) is a World Wide Web interface to the Simple Indexing and Retrieval System (SIR) that is capable of parsing and indexing various flat file databases. In addition it provides a framework for doing sequence analysis (e.g. motif pattern searches) for selected biological sequences through keyword search. SIRW is an ideal tool for the bioinformatics community for searching as well as analyzing biological sequences of interest.

Spatial Search Techniques for Mobile 3D Queries in Sensor Web Environments

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

James D. Carswell

2013-03-01

Full Text Available Developing mobile geo-information systems for sensor web applications involves technologies that can access linked geographical and semantically related Internet information. Additionally, in tomorrow’s Web 4.0 world, it is envisioned that trillions of inexpensive micro-sensors placed throughout the environment will also become available for discovery based on their unique geo-referenced IP address. Exploring these enormous volumes of disparate heterogeneous data on today’s location and orientation aware smartphones requires context-aware smart applications and services that can deal with “information overload”. 3DQ (Three Dimensional Query is our novel mobile spatial interaction (MSI prototype that acts as a next-generation base for human interaction within such geospatial sensor web environments/urban landscapes. It filters information using “Hidden Query Removal” functionality that intelligently refines the search space by calculating the geometry of a three dimensional visibility shape (Vista space at a user’s current location. This 3D shape then becomes the query “window” in a spatial database for retrieving information on only those objects visible within a user’s actual 3D field-of-view. 3DQ reduces information overload and serves to heighten situation awareness on constrained commercial off-the-shelf devices by providing visibility space searching as a mobile web service. The effects of variations in mobile spatial search techniques in terms of query speed vs. accuracy are evaluated and presented in this paper.

Web search queries can predict stock market volumes.

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Bordino, Ilaria; Battiston, Stefano; Caldarelli, Guido; Cristelli, Matthieu; Ukkonen, Antti; Weber, Ingmar

2012-01-01

We live in a computerized and networked society where many of our actions leave a digital trace and affect other people's actions. This has lead to the emergence of a new data-driven research field: mathematical methods of computer science, statistical physics and sociometry provide insights on a wide range of disciplines ranging from social science to human mobility. A recent important discovery is that search engine traffic (i.e., the number of requests submitted by users to search engines on the www) can be used to track and, in some cases, to anticipate the dynamics of social phenomena. Successful examples include unemployment levels, car and home sales, and epidemics spreading. Few recent works applied this approach to stock prices and market sentiment. However, it remains unclear if trends in financial markets can be anticipated by the collective wisdom of on-line users on the web. Here we show that daily trading volumes of stocks traded in NASDAQ-100 are correlated with daily volumes of queries related to the same stocks. In particular, query volumes anticipate in many cases peaks of trading by one day or more. Our analysis is carried out on a unique dataset of queries, submitted to an important web search engine, which enable us to investigate also the user behavior. We show that the query volume dynamics emerges from the collective but seemingly uncoordinated activity of many users. These findings contribute to the debate on the identification of early warnings of financial systemic risk, based on the activity of users of the www.

Web search queries can predict stock market volumes.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ilaria Bordino

Full Text Available We live in a computerized and networked society where many of our actions leave a digital trace and affect other people's actions. This has lead to the emergence of a new data-driven research field: mathematical methods of computer science, statistical physics and sociometry provide insights on a wide range of disciplines ranging from social science to human mobility. A recent important discovery is that search engine traffic (i.e., the number of requests submitted by users to search engines on the www can be used to track and, in some cases, to anticipate the dynamics of social phenomena. Successful examples include unemployment levels, car and home sales, and epidemics spreading. Few recent works applied this approach to stock prices and market sentiment. However, it remains unclear if trends in financial markets can be anticipated by the collective wisdom of on-line users on the web. Here we show that daily trading volumes of stocks traded in NASDAQ-100 are correlated with daily volumes of queries related to the same stocks. In particular, query volumes anticipate in many cases peaks of trading by one day or more. Our analysis is carried out on a unique dataset of queries, submitted to an important web search engine, which enable us to investigate also the user behavior. We show that the query volume dynamics emerges from the collective but seemingly uncoordinated activity of many users. These findings contribute to the debate on the identification of early warnings of financial systemic risk, based on the activity of users of the www.

Relationship between Usefulness Assessments and Perceptions of Work Task Complexity and Search Topic Specificity: An Exploratory Study

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Ingwersen, Peter; Wang, Peiling

2012-01-01

This research investigates the relations between the usefulness assessments of retrieved documents and the perceptions of task complexity and search topic specificity. Twenty-three academic researchers submitted 65 real task-based information search topics. These task topics were searched...... in an integrated document collection consisting of full text research articles in PDFs, abstracts, and bibliographic records (the iSearch Test Collection in Physics). The search results were provided to the researchers who, as task performers, made assessments of usefulness using a four-point sale (highly, fairly......, marginally, or not useful). In addition, they also assessed the perceived task complexity (highly, fairly, and routine/low) and the perceived specificity of the search topic (highly, fairly, and generic/low). It is found that highly specific topics associate with all degrees of task complexity, whereas...

Source evaluation of domain experts and novices during Web search

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Brand-Gruwel, Saskia; Kammerer, Yvonne; Van Meeuwen, Ludo; van Gog, T.

2017-01-01

Nowadays, almost everyone uses the World Wide Web (WWW) to search for information of any kind. In education, students frequently use the WWW for selecting information to accomplish assignments such as writing an essay or preparing a presentation. The evaluation of sources and information is an

Search Engine Ranking, Quality, and Content of Web Pages That Are Critical Versus Noncritical of Human Papillomavirus Vaccine.

Science.gov (United States)

Fu, Linda Y; Zook, Kathleen; Spoehr-Labutta, Zachary; Hu, Pamela; Joseph, Jill G

2016-01-01

Online information can influence attitudes toward vaccination. The aim of the present study was to provide a systematic evaluation of the search engine ranking, quality, and content of Web pages that are critical versus noncritical of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination. We identified HPV vaccine-related Web pages with the Google search engine by entering 20 terms. We then assessed each Web page for critical versus noncritical bias and for the following quality indicators: authorship disclosure, source disclosure, attribution of at least one reference, currency, exclusion of testimonial accounts, and readability level less than ninth grade. We also determined Web page comprehensiveness in terms of mention of 14 HPV vaccine-relevant topics. Twenty searches yielded 116 unique Web pages. HPV vaccine-critical Web pages comprised roughly a third of the top, top 5- and top 10-ranking Web pages. The prevalence of HPV vaccine-critical Web pages was higher for queries that included term modifiers in addition to root terms. Compared with noncritical Web pages, Web pages critical of HPV vaccine overall had a lower quality score than those with a noncritical bias (p engine queries despite being of lower quality and less comprehensive than noncritical Web pages. Copyright © 2016 Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Searching for information on the World Wide Web with a search engine: a pilot study on cognitive flexibility in younger and older users.

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Dommes, Aurelie; Chevalier, Aline; Rossetti, Marilyne

2010-04-01

This pilot study investigated the age-related differences in searching for information on the World Wide Web with a search engine. 11 older adults (6 men, 5 women; M age=59 yr., SD=2.76, range=55-65 yr.) and 12 younger adults (2 men, 10 women; M=23.7 yr., SD=1.07, range=22-25 yr.) had to conduct six searches differing in complexity, and for which a search method was or was not induced. The results showed that the younger and older participants provided with an induced search method were less flexible than the others and produced fewer new keywords. Moreover, older participants took longer than the younger adults, especially in the complex searches. The younger participants were flexible in the first request and spontaneously produced new keywords (spontaneous flexibility), whereas the older participants only produced new keywords when confronted by impasses (reactive flexibility). Aging may influence web searches, especially the nature of keywords used.

Socio-contextual Network Mining for User Assistance in Web-based Knowledge Gathering Tasks

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Rajendran, Balaji; Kombiah, Iyakutti

Web-based Knowledge Gathering (WKG) is a specialized and complex information seeking task carried out by many users on the web, for their various learning, and decision-making requirements. We construct a contextual semantic structure by observing the actions of the users involved in WKG task, in order to gain an understanding of their task and requirement. We also build a knowledge warehouse in the form of a master Semantic Link Network (SLX) that accommodates and assimilates all the contextual semantic structures. This master SLX, which is a socio-contextual network, is then mined to provide contextual inputs to the current users through their agents. We validated our approach through experiments and analyzed the benefits to the users in terms of resource explorations and the time saved. The results are positive enough to motivate us to implement in a larger scale.

A Portrait of the Audience for Instruction in Web Searching: Results of a Survey Conducted at Two Canadian Universities.

Science.gov (United States)

Tillotson, Joy

2003-01-01

Describes a survey that was conducted involving participants in the library instruction program at two Canadian universities in order to describe the characteristics of students receiving instruction in Web searching. Examines criteria for evaluating Web sites, search strategies, use of search engines, and frequency of use. Questionnaire is…

A Webometric Analysis of ISI Medical Journals Using Yahoo, AltaVista, and All the Web Search Engines

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Zohreh Zahedi

2010-12-01

Full Text Available The World Wide Web is an important information source for scholarly communications. Examining the inlinks via webometrics studies has attracted particular interests among information researchers. In this study, the number of inlinks to 69 ISI medical journals retrieved by Yahoo, AltaVista, and All The web Search Engines were examined via a comparative and Webometrics study. For data analysis, SPSS software was employed. Findings revealed that British Medical Journal website attracted the most links of all in the three search engines. There is a significant correlation between the number of External links and the ISI impact factor. The most significant correlation in the three search engines exists between external links of Yahoo and AltaVista (100% and the least correlation is found between external links of All The web & the number of pages of AltaVista (0.51. There is no significant difference between the internal links & the number of pages found by the three search engines. But in case of impact factors, significant differences are found between these three search engines. So, the study shows that journals with higher impact factor attract more links to their websites. It also indicates that the three search engines are significantly different in terms of total links, outlinks and web impact factors

Frontiers in ICT towards web 3.0

CERN Document Server

Levnajic, Zoran

2014-01-01

Life without the World Wide Web has become unthinkable, much like life without electricity or water supply. We rely on the web to check public transport schedules, buy a ticket for a concert or exchange photos with friends. However, many everyday tasks cannot be accomplished by the computer itself, since the websites are designed to be read by people, not machines. In addition, the online information is often unstructured and poorly organized, leaving the user with tedious work of searching and filtering. This book takes us to the frontiers of the emerging Web 3.0 or Semantic Web - a new gener

Exploration of Web Users' Search Interests through Automatic Subject Categorization of Query Terms.

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Pu, Hsiao-tieh; Yang, Chyan; Chuang, Shui-Lung

2001-01-01

Proposes a mechanism that carefully integrates human and machine efforts to explore Web users' search interests. The approach consists of a four-step process: extraction of core terms; construction of subject taxonomy; automatic subject categorization of query terms; and observation of users' search interests. Research findings are proved valuable…

Psychophysics in a Web browser? Comparing response times collected with JavaScript and Psychophysics Toolbox in a visual search task.

Science.gov (United States)

de Leeuw, Joshua R; Motz, Benjamin A

2016-03-01

Behavioral researchers are increasingly using Web-based software such as JavaScript to conduct response time experiments. Although there has been some research on the accuracy and reliability of response time measurements collected using JavaScript, it remains unclear how well this method performs relative to standard laboratory software in psychologically relevant experimental manipulations. Here we present results from a visual search experiment in which we measured response time distributions with both Psychophysics Toolbox (PTB) and JavaScript. We developed a methodology that allowed us to simultaneously run the visual search experiment with both systems, interleaving trials between two independent computers, thus minimizing the effects of factors other than the experimental software. The response times measured by JavaScript were approximately 25 ms longer than those measured by PTB. However, we found no reliable difference in the variability of the distributions related to the software, and both software packages were equally sensitive to changes in the response times as a result of the experimental manipulations. We concluded that JavaScript is a suitable tool for measuring response times in behavioral research.

Search Engine Optimization for Flash Best Practices for Using Flash on the Web

CERN Document Server

Perkins, Todd

2009-01-01

Search Engine Optimization for Flash dispels the myth that Flash-based websites won't show up in a web search by demonstrating exactly what you can do to make your site fully searchable -- no matter how much Flash it contains. You'll learn best practices for using HTML, CSS and JavaScript, as well as SWFObject, for building sites with Flash that will stand tall in search rankings.

FindZebra: a search engine for rare diseases.

Science.gov (United States)

Dragusin, Radu; Petcu, Paula; Lioma, Christina; Larsen, Birger; Jørgensen, Henrik L; Cox, Ingemar J; Hansen, Lars Kai; Ingwersen, Peter; Winther, Ole

2013-06-01

The web has become a primary information resource about illnesses and treatments for both medical and non-medical users. Standard web search is by far the most common interface to this information. It is therefore of interest to find out how well web search engines work for diagnostic queries and what factors contribute to successes and failures. Among diseases, rare (or orphan) diseases represent an especially challenging and thus interesting class to diagnose as each is rare, diverse in symptoms and usually has scattered resources associated with it. We design an evaluation approach for web search engines for rare disease diagnosis which includes 56 real life diagnostic cases, performance measures, information resources and guidelines for customising Google Search to this task. In addition, we introduce FindZebra, a specialized (vertical) rare disease search engine. FindZebra is powered by open source search technology and uses curated freely available online medical information. FindZebra outperforms Google Search in both default set-up and customised to the resources used by FindZebra. We extend FindZebra with specialized functionalities exploiting medical ontological information and UMLS medical concepts to demonstrate different ways of displaying the retrieved results to medical experts. Our results indicate that a specialized search engine can improve the diagnostic quality without compromising the ease of use of the currently widely popular standard web search. The proposed evaluation approach can be valuable for future development and benchmarking. The FindZebra search engine is available at http://www.findzebra.com/. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

Web-Searching to Learn: The Role of Internet Self-Efficacy in Pre-School Educators' Conceptions and Approaches

Science.gov (United States)

Kao, Chia-Pin; Chien, Hui-Min

2017-01-01

This study was conducted to explore the relationships between pre-school educators' conceptions of and approaches to learning by web-searching through Internet Self-efficacy. Based on data from 242 pre-school educators who had prior experience of participating in web-searching in Taiwan for path analyses, it was found in this study that…

Is Internet search better than structured instruction for web-based health education?

Science.gov (United States)

Finkelstein, Joseph; Bedra, McKenzie

2013-01-01

Internet provides access to vast amounts of comprehensive information regarding any health-related subject. Patients increasingly use this information for health education using a search engine to identify education materials. An alternative approach of health education via Internet is based on utilizing a verified web site which provides structured interactive education guided by adult learning theories. Comparison of these two approaches in older patients was not performed systematically. The aim of this study was to compare the efficacy of a web-based computer-assisted education (CO-ED) system versus searching the Internet for learning about hypertension. Sixty hypertensive older adults (age 45+) were randomized into control or intervention groups. The control patients spent 30 to 40 minutes searching the Internet using a search engine for information about hypertension. The intervention patients spent 30 to 40 minutes using the CO-ED system, which provided computer-assisted instruction about major hypertension topics. Analysis of pre- and post- knowledge scores indicated a significant improvement among CO-ED users (14.6%) as opposed to Internet users (2%). Additionally, patients using the CO-ED program rated their learning experience more positively than those using the Internet.

An architecture for diversity-aware search for medical web content.

Science.gov (United States)

Denecke, K

2012-01-01

The Web provides a huge source of information, also on medical and health-related issues. In particular the content of medical social media data can be diverse due to the background of an author, the source or the topic. Diversity in this context means that a document covers different aspects of a topic or a topic is described in different ways. In this paper, we introduce an approach that allows to consider the diverse aspects of a search query when providing retrieval results to a user. We introduce a system architecture for a diversity-aware search engine that allows retrieving medical information from the web. The diversity of retrieval results is assessed by calculating diversity measures that rely upon semantic information derived from a mapping to concepts of a medical terminology. Considering these measures, the result set is diversified by ranking more diverse texts higher. The methods and system architecture are implemented in a retrieval engine for medical web content. The diversity measures reflect the diversity of aspects considered in a text and its type of information content. They are used for result presentation, filtering and ranking. In a user evaluation we assess the user satisfaction with an ordering of retrieval results that considers the diversity measures. It is shown through the evaluation that diversity-aware retrieval considering diversity measures in ranking could increase the user satisfaction with retrieval results.

Analyzing Web pages visual scanpaths: between and within tasks variability.

Science.gov (United States)

Drusch, Gautier; Bastien, J M Christian

2012-01-01

In this paper, we propose a new method for comparing scanpaths in a bottom-up approach, and a test of the scanpath theory. To do so, we conducted a laboratory experiment in which 113 participants were invited to accomplish a set of tasks on two different websites. For each site, they had to perform two tasks that had to be repeated ounce. The data were analyzed using a procedure similar to the one used by Duchowski et al. [8]. The first step was to automatically identify, then label, AOIs with the mean-shift clustering procedure [19]. Then, scanpaths were compared two by two with a modified version of the string-edit method, which take into account the order of AOIs visualizations [2]. Our results show that scanpaths variability between tasks but within participants seems to be lower than the variability within task for a given participant. In other words participants seem to be more coherent when they perform different tasks, than when they repeat the same tasks. In addition, participants view more of the same AOI when they perform a different task on the same Web page than when they repeated the same task. These results are quite different from what predicts the scanpath theory.

Task Specificity and the Influence of Memory on Visual Search: Comment on Vo and Wolfe (2012)

Science.gov (United States)

Hollingworth, Andrew

2012-01-01

Recent results from Vo and Wolfe (2012b) suggest that the application of memory to visual search may be task specific: Previous experience searching for an object facilitated later search for that object, but object information acquired during a different task did not appear to transfer to search. The latter inference depended on evidence that a…

PubMed and beyond: a survey of web tools for searching biomedical literature

Science.gov (United States)

Lu, Zhiyong

2011-01-01

The past decade has witnessed the modern advances of high-throughput technology and rapid growth of research capacity in producing large-scale biological data, both of which were concomitant with an exponential growth of biomedical literature. This wealth of scholarly knowledge is of significant importance for researchers in making scientific discoveries and healthcare professionals in managing health-related matters. However, the acquisition of such information is becoming increasingly difficult due to its large volume and rapid growth. In response, the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) is continuously making changes to its PubMed Web service for improvement. Meanwhile, different entities have devoted themselves to developing Web tools for helping users quickly and efficiently search and retrieve relevant publications. These practices, together with maturity in the field of text mining, have led to an increase in the number and quality of various Web tools that provide comparable literature search service to PubMed. In this study, we review 28 such tools, highlight their respective innovations, compare them to the PubMed system and one another, and discuss directions for future development. Furthermore, we have built a website dedicated to tracking existing systems and future advances in the field of biomedical literature search. Taken together, our work serves information seekers in choosing tools for their needs and service providers and developers in keeping current in the field. Database URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/CBBresearch/Lu/search PMID:21245076

PubMed and beyond: a survey of web tools for searching biomedical literature.

Science.gov (United States)

Lu, Zhiyong

2011-01-01

The past decade has witnessed the modern advances of high-throughput technology and rapid growth of research capacity in producing large-scale biological data, both of which were concomitant with an exponential growth of biomedical literature. This wealth of scholarly knowledge is of significant importance for researchers in making scientific discoveries and healthcare professionals in managing health-related matters. However, the acquisition of such information is becoming increasingly difficult due to its large volume and rapid growth. In response, the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) is continuously making changes to its PubMed Web service for improvement. Meanwhile, different entities have devoted themselves to developing Web tools for helping users quickly and efficiently search and retrieve relevant publications. These practices, together with maturity in the field of text mining, have led to an increase in the number and quality of various Web tools that provide comparable literature search service to PubMed. In this study, we review 28 such tools, highlight their respective innovations, compare them to the PubMed system and one another, and discuss directions for future development. Furthermore, we have built a website dedicated to tracking existing systems and future advances in the field of biomedical literature search. Taken together, our work serves information seekers in choosing tools for their needs and service providers and developers in keeping current in the field. Database URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/CBBresearch/Lu/search.

Attentional reorienting triggers spatial asymmetries in a search task with cross-modal spatial cueing.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Rebecca E Paladini

Full Text Available Cross-modal spatial cueing can affect performance in a visual search task. For example, search performance improves if a visual target and an auditory cue originate from the same spatial location, and it deteriorates if they originate from different locations. Moreover, it has recently been postulated that multisensory settings, i.e., experimental settings, in which critical stimuli are concurrently presented in different sensory modalities (e.g., visual and auditory, may trigger asymmetries in visuospatial attention. Thereby, a facilitation has been observed for visual stimuli presented in the right compared to the left visual space. However, it remains unclear whether auditory cueing of attention differentially affects search performance in the left and the right hemifields in audio-visual search tasks. The present study investigated whether spatial asymmetries would occur in a search task with cross-modal spatial cueing. Participants completed a visual search task that contained no auditory cues (i.e., unimodal visual condition, spatially congruent, spatially incongruent, and spatially non-informative auditory cues. To further assess participants' accuracy in localising the auditory cues, a unimodal auditory spatial localisation task was also administered. The results demonstrated no left/right asymmetries in the unimodal visual search condition. Both an additional incongruent, as well as a spatially non-informative, auditory cue resulted in lateral asymmetries. Thereby, search times were increased for targets presented in the left compared to the right hemifield. No such spatial asymmetry was observed in the congruent condition. However, participants' performance in the congruent condition was modulated by their tone localisation accuracy. The findings of the present study demonstrate that spatial asymmetries in multisensory processing depend on the validity of the cross-modal cues, and occur under specific attentional conditions, i.e., when

REPTREE CLASSIFIER FOR IDENTIFYING LINK SPAM IN WEB SEARCH ENGINES

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

S.K. Jayanthi

2013-01-01

Full Text Available Search Engines are used for retrieving the information from the web. Most of the times, the importance is laid on top 10 results sometimes it may shrink as top 5, because of the time constraint and reliability on the search engines. Users believe that top 10 or 5 of total results are more relevant. Here comes the problem of spamdexing. It is a method to deceive the search result quality. Falsified metrics such as inserting enormous amount of keywords or links in website may take that website to the top 10 or 5 positions. This paper proposes a classifier based on the Reptree (Regression tree representative. As an initial step Link-based features such as neighbors, pagerank, truncated pagerank, trustrank and assortativity related attributes are inferred. Based on this features, tree is constructed. The tree uses the feature inference to differentiate spam sites from legitimate sites. WEBSPAM-UK-2007 dataset is taken as a base. It is preprocessed and converted into five datasets FEATA, FEATB, FEATC, FEATD and FEATE. Only link based features are taken for experiments. This paper focus on link spam alone. Finally a representative tree is created which will more precisely classify the web spam entries. Results are given. Regression tree classification seems to perform well as shown through experiments.

Web-Based Search and Plot System for Nuclear Reaction Data

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Otuka, N.; Nakagawa, T.; Fukahori, T.; Katakura, J.; Aikawa, M.; Suda, T.; Naito, K.; Korennov, S.; Arai, K.; Noto, H.; Ohnishi, A.; Kato, K.

2005-01-01

A web-based search and plot system for nuclear reaction data has been developed, covering experimental data in EXFOR format and evaluated data in ENDF format. The system is implemented for Linux OS, with Perl and MySQL used for CGI scripts and the database manager, respectively. Two prototypes for experimental and evaluated data are presented

Query transformations and their role in Web searching by the members of the general public

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Martin Whittle

2006-01-01

Full Text Available Introduction. This paper reports preliminary research in a primarily experimental study of how the general public search for information on the Web. The focus is on the query transformation patterns that characterise searching. Method. In this work, we have used transaction logs from the Excite search engine to develop methods for analysing query transformations that should aid the analysis of our ongoing experimental work. Our methods involve the use of similarity techniques to link queries with the most similar previous query in a train. The resulting query transformations are represented as a list of codes representing a whole search. Analysis. It is shown how query transformation sequences can be represented as graphical networks and some basic statistical results are shown. A correlation analysis is performed to examine the co-occurrence of Boolean and quotation mark changes with the syntactic changes. Results. A frequency analysis of the occurrence of query transformation codes is presented. The connectivity of graphs obtained from the query transformation is investigated and found to follow an exponential scaling law. The correlation analysis reveals a number of patterns that provide some interesting insights into Web searching by the general public. Conclusion. We have developed analytical methods based on query similarity that can be applied to our current experimental work with volunteer subjects. The results of these will form part of a database with the aim of developing an improved understanding of how the public search the Web.

An assessment of the visibility of MeSH-indexed medical web catalogs through search engines.

Science.gov (United States)

Zweigenbaum, P; Darmoni, S J; Grabar, N; Douyère, M; Benichou, J

2002-01-01

Manually indexed Internet health catalogs such as CliniWeb or CISMeF provide resources for retrieving high-quality health information. Users of these quality-controlled subject gateways are most often referred to them by general search engines such as Google, AltaVista, etc. This raises several questions, among which the following: what is the relative visibility of medical Internet catalogs through search engines? This study addresses this issue by measuring and comparing the visibility of six major, MeSH-indexed health catalogs through four different search engines (AltaVista, Google, Lycos, Northern Light) in two languages (English and French). Over half a million queries were sent to the search engines; for most of these search engines, according to our measures at the time the queries were sent, the most visible catalog for English MeSH terms was CliniWeb and the most visible one for French MeSH terms was CISMeF.

Agent-oriented Architecture for Task-based Information Search System

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Aroyo, Lora; de Bra, Paul M.E.; De Bra, P.; Hardman, L.

1999-01-01

The topic of the reported research discusses an agent-oriented architecture of an educational information search system AIMS - a task-based learner support system. It is implemented within the context of 'Courseware Engineering' on-line course at the Faculty of Educational Science and Technology,

Knowledge-based personalized search engine for the Web-based Human Musculoskeletal System Resources (HMSR) in biomechanics.

Science.gov (United States)

Dao, Tien Tuan; Hoang, Tuan Nha; Ta, Xuan Hien; Tho, Marie Christine Ho Ba

2013-02-01

Human musculoskeletal system resources of the human body are valuable for the learning and medical purposes. Internet-based information from conventional search engines such as Google or Yahoo cannot response to the need of useful, accurate, reliable and good-quality human musculoskeletal resources related to medical processes, pathological knowledge and practical expertise. In this present work, an advanced knowledge-based personalized search engine was developed. Our search engine was based on a client-server multi-layer multi-agent architecture and the principle of semantic web services to acquire dynamically accurate and reliable HMSR information by a semantic processing and visualization approach. A security-enhanced mechanism was applied to protect the medical information. A multi-agent crawler was implemented to develop a content-based database of HMSR information. A new semantic-based PageRank score with related mathematical formulas were also defined and implemented. As the results, semantic web service descriptions were presented in OWL, WSDL and OWL-S formats. Operational scenarios with related web-based interfaces for personal computers and mobile devices were presented and analyzed. Functional comparison between our knowledge-based search engine, a conventional search engine and a semantic search engine showed the originality and the robustness of our knowledge-based personalized search engine. In fact, our knowledge-based personalized search engine allows different users such as orthopedic patient and experts or healthcare system managers or medical students to access remotely into useful, accurate, reliable and good-quality HMSR information for their learning and medical purposes. Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Visual search in barn owls: Task difficulty and saccadic behavior.

Science.gov (United States)

Orlowski, Julius; Ben-Shahar, Ohad; Wagner, Hermann

2018-01-01

How do we find what we are looking for? A target can be in plain view, but it may be detected only after extensive search. During a search we make directed attentional deployments like saccades to segment the scene until we detect the target. Depending on difficulty, the search may be fast with few attentional deployments or slow with many, shorter deployments. Here we study visual search in barn owls by tracking their overt attentional deployments-that is, their head movements-with a camera. We conducted a low-contrast feature search, a high-contrast orientation conjunction search, and a low-contrast orientation conjunction search, each with set sizes varying from 16 to 64 items. The barn owls were able to learn all of these tasks and showed serial search behavior. In a subsequent step, we analyzed how search behavior of owls changes with search complexity. We compared the search mechanisms in these three serial searches with results from pop-out searches our group had reported earlier. Saccade amplitude shortened and fixation duration increased in difficult searches. Also, in conjunction search saccades were guided toward items with shared target features. These data suggest that during visual search, barn owls utilize mechanisms similar to those that humans use.

Changes in users' mental models of Web search engines after ten ...

African Journals Online (AJOL)

Ward's Cluster analyses including the Pseudo T² Statistical analyses were used to determine the mental model clusters for the seventeen salient design features of Web search engines at each time point. The cubic clustering criterion (CCC) and the dendogram were conducted for each sample to help determine the number ...

Evaluation of children with ADHD on the Ball-Search Field Task.

Science.gov (United States)

Rosetti, Marcos F; Ulloa, Rosa E; Vargas-Vargas, Ilse L; Reyes-Zamorano, Ernesto; Palacios-Cruz, Lino; de la Peña, Francisco; Larralde, Hernán; Hudson, Robyn

2016-01-25

Searching, defined for the purpose of the present study as the displacement of an individual to locate resources, is a fundamental behavior of all mobile organisms. In humans this behavior underlies many aspects of everyday life, involving cognitive processes such as sustained attention, memory and inhibition. We explored the performance of 36 treatment-free children diagnosed with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and 132 children from a control school sample on the ecologically based ball-search field task (BSFT), which required them to locate and collect golf balls in a large outdoor area. Children of both groups enjoyed the task and were motivated to participate in it. However, performance showed that ADHD-diagnosed subjects were significantly less efficient in their searching. We suggest that the BSFT provides a promising basis for developing more complex ecologically-derived tests that might help to better identify particular cognitive processes and impairments associated with ADHD.

Students' Evaluation Strategies in a Web Research Task: Are They Sensitive to Relevance and Reliability?

Science.gov (United States)

Rodicio, Héctor García

2015-01-01

When searching and using resources on the Web, students have to evaluate Web pages in terms of relevance and reliability. This evaluation can be done in a more or less systematic way, by either considering deep or superficial cues of relevance and reliability. The goal of this study was to examine how systematic students are when evaluating Web…

Age differences in search of web pages: the effects of link size, link number, and clutter.

Science.gov (United States)

Grahame, Michael; Laberge, Jason; Scialfa, Charles T

2004-01-01

Reaction time, eye movements, and errors were measured during visual search of Web pages to determine age-related differences in performance as a function of link size, link number, link location, and clutter. Participants (15 young adults, M = 23 years; 14 older adults, M = 57 years) searched Web pages for target links that varied from trial to trial. During one half of the trials, links were enlarged from 10-point to 12-point font. Target location was distributed among the left, center, and bottom portions of the screen. Clutter was manipulated according to the percentage of used space, including graphics and text, and the number of potentially distracting nontarget links was varied. Increased link size improved performance, whereas increased clutter and links hampered search, especially for older adults. Results also showed that links located in the left region of the page were found most easily. Actual or potential applications of this research include Web site design to increase usability, particularly for older adults.

Mining social media and web searches for disease detection.

Science.gov (United States)

Yang, Y Tony; Horneffer, Michael; DiLisio, Nicole

2013-04-28

Web-based social media is increasingly being used across different settings in the health care industry. The increased frequency in the use of the Internet via computer or mobile devices provides an opportunity for social media to be the medium through which people can be provided with valuable health information quickly and directly. While traditional methods of detection relied predominately on hierarchical or bureaucratic lines of communication, these often failed to yield timely and accurate epidemiological intelligence. New web-based platforms promise increased opportunities for a more timely and accurate spreading of information and analysis. This article aims to provide an overview and discussion of the availability of timely and accurate information. It is especially useful for the rapid identification of an outbreak of an infectious disease that is necessary to promptly and effectively develop public health responses. These web-based platforms include search queries, data mining of web and social media, process and analysis of blogs containing epidemic key words, text mining, and geographical information system data analyses. These new sources of analysis and information are intended to complement traditional sources of epidemic intelligence. Despite the attractiveness of these new approaches, further study is needed to determine the accuracy of blogger statements, as increases in public participation may not necessarily mean the information provided is more accurate.

Mining social media and web searches for disease detection

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Y. Tony Yang

2013-05-01

Full Text Available Web-based social media is increasingly being used across different settings in the health care industry. The increased frequency in the use of the Internet via computer or mobile devices provides an opportunity for social media to be the medium through which people can be provided with valuable health information quickly and directly. While traditional methods of detection relied predominately on hierarchical or bureaucratic lines of communication, these often failed to yield timely and accurate epidemiological intelligence. New web-based platforms promise increased opportunities for a more timely and accurate spreading of information and analysis. This article aims to provide an overview and discussion of the availability of timely and accurate information. It is especially useful for the rapid identification of an outbreak of an infectious disease that is necessary to promptly and effectively develop public health responses. These web-based platforms include search queries, data mining of web and social media, process and analysis of blogs containing epidemic key words, text mining, and geographical information system data analyses. These new sources of analysis and information are intended to complement traditional sources of epidemic intelligence. Despite the attractiveness of these new approaches, further study is needed to determine the accuracy of blogger statements, as increases in public participation may not necessarily mean the information provided is more accurate.

Task-Based Teaching of English-Chinese Translation under "Caliber-Oriented Education to Success" Based on Web

Science.gov (United States)

Duan, Zhongyan

This paper, under 3-using principle in the philosophy of caliber-oriented education to success (CETS), makes a tentative qualitative study on the application of task-based approach in the teaching of English-Chinese translation based on the web. Translation teaching is characterized by its practicality. Therefore, the task-based approach can be employed to guide the web-based content collection and the process of English translation teaching. In this way, the prospect for enhancing student's translation ability is quite encouraging, which has been verified by one year's teaching.

Children's Search Engines from an Information Search Process Perspective.

Science.gov (United States)

Broch, Elana

2000-01-01

Describes cognitive and affective characteristics of children and teenagers that may affect their Web searching behavior. Reviews literature on children's searching in online public access catalogs (OPACs) and using digital libraries. Profiles two Web search engines. Discusses some of the difficulties children have searching the Web, in the…

Neural correlates of context-dependent feature conjunction learning in visual search tasks.

Science.gov (United States)

Reavis, Eric A; Frank, Sebastian M; Greenlee, Mark W; Tse, Peter U

2016-06-01

Many perceptual learning experiments show that repeated exposure to a basic visual feature such as a specific orientation or spatial frequency can modify perception of that feature, and that those perceptual changes are associated with changes in neural tuning early in visual processing. Such perceptual learning effects thus exert a bottom-up influence on subsequent stimulus processing, independent of task-demands or endogenous influences (e.g., volitional attention). However, it is unclear whether such bottom-up changes in perception can occur as more complex stimuli such as conjunctions of visual features are learned. It is not known whether changes in the efficiency with which people learn to process feature conjunctions in a task (e.g., visual search) reflect true bottom-up perceptual learning versus top-down, task-related learning (e.g., learning better control of endogenous attention). Here we show that feature conjunction learning in visual search leads to bottom-up changes in stimulus processing. First, using fMRI, we demonstrate that conjunction learning in visual search has a distinct neural signature: an increase in target-evoked activity relative to distractor-evoked activity (i.e., a relative increase in target salience). Second, we demonstrate that after learning, this neural signature is still evident even when participants passively view learned stimuli while performing an unrelated, attention-demanding task. This suggests that conjunction learning results in altered bottom-up perceptual processing of the learned conjunction stimuli (i.e., a perceptual change independent of the task). We further show that the acquired change in target-evoked activity is contextually dependent on the presence of distractors, suggesting that search array Gestalts are learned. Hum Brain Mapp 37:2319-2330, 2016. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Studying different tasks of implicit learning across multiple test sessions conducted on the web

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Werner eSævland

2016-06-01

Full Text Available Implicit learning is usually studied through individual performance on a single task, with the most common tasks being Serial Reaction Time task (SRT; Nissen and Bullemer, 1987, Dynamic System Control task (DSC; (Berry and Broadbent, 1984 and artificial Grammar Learning task (AGL; (Reber, 1967. Few attempts have been made to compare performance across different implicit learning tasks within the same experiment. The current experiment was designed study the relationship between performance on the DSC Sugar factory task (Berry and Broadbent, 1984 and the Alternating Serial Reaction Time task (ASRT; (Howard and Howard, 1997. We also addressed another limitation to traditional implicit learning experiments, namely that implicit learning is usually studied in laboratory settings over a restricted time span lasting for less than an hour (Berry and Broadbent, 1984; Nissen and Bullemer, 1987; Reber, 1967. In everyday situations, implicit learning is assumed to involve a gradual accumulation of knowledge across several learning episodes over a larger time span (Norman and Price, 2012. One way to increase the ecological validity of implicit learning experiments could be to present the learning material repeatedly across shorter experimental sessions (Howard and Howard, 1997; Cleeremans and McClelland, 1991. This can most easily be done by using a web-based setup that participants can access from home. We therefore created an online web-based system for measuring implicit learning that could be administered in either single or multiple sessions. Participants (n = 66 were assigned to either a single-session or a multi-session condition. Learning and the degree of conscious awareness of the learned regularities was compared across condition (single vs. multiple sessions and tasks (DSC vs. ASRT. Results showed that learning on the two tasks was not related. However, participants in the multiple sessions condition did show greater improvements in reaction

MuZeeker - Adapting a music search engine for mobile phones

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Larsen, Jakob Eg; Halling, Søren Christian; Sigurdsson, Magnus Kristinn

2010-01-01

We describe MuZeeker, a search engine with domain knowledge based on Wikipedia. MuZeeker enables the user to refine a search in multiple steps by means of category selection. In the present version we focus on multimedia search related to music and we present two prototype search applications (web......-based and mobile) and discuss the issues involved in adapting the search engine for mobile phones. A category based filtering approach enables the user to refine a search through relevance feedback by category selection instead of typing additional text, which is hypothesized to be an advantage in the mobile Mu......Zeeker application. We report from two usability experiments using the think aloud protocol, in which N=20 participants performed tasks using MuZeeker and a customized Google search engine. In both experiments web-based and mobile user interfaces were used. The experiment shows that participants are capable...

The Dark Side of Micro-Task Marketplaces: Characterizing Fiverr and Automatically Detecting Crowdturfing

OpenAIRE

Lee, Kyumin; Webb, Steve; Ge, Hancheng

2014-01-01

As human computation on crowdsourcing systems has become popular and powerful for performing tasks, malicious users have started misusing these systems by posting malicious tasks, propagating manipulated contents, and targeting popular web services such as online social networks and search engines. Recently, these malicious users moved to Fiverr, a fast-growing micro-task marketplace, where workers can post crowdturfing tasks (i.e., astroturfing campaigns run by crowd workers) and malicious c...

Forecasting new product diffusion using both patent citation and web search traffic.

Science.gov (United States)

Lee, Won Sang; Choi, Hyo Shin; Sohn, So Young

2018-01-01

Accurate demand forecasting for new technology products is a key factor in the success of a business. We propose a way to forecasting a new product's diffusion through technology diffusion and interest diffusion. Technology diffusion and interest diffusion are measured by the volume of patent citations and web search traffic, respectively. We apply the proposed method to forecast the sales of hybrid cars and industrial robots in the US market. The results show that that technology diffusion, as represented by patent citations, can explain long-term sales for hybrid cars and industrial robots. On the other hand, interest diffusion, as represented by web search traffic, can help to improve the predictability of market sales of hybrid cars in the short-term. However, interest diffusion is difficult to explain the sales of industrial robots due to the different market characteristics. Finding indicates our proposed model can relatively well explain the diffusion of consumer goods.

Web document clustering using hyperlink structures

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

He, Xiaofeng; Zha, Hongyuan; Ding, Chris H.Q; Simon, Horst D.

2001-05-07

With the exponential growth of information on the World Wide Web there is great demand for developing efficient and effective methods for organizing and retrieving the information available. Document clustering plays an important role in information retrieval and taxonomy management for the World Wide Web and remains an interesting and challenging problem in the field of web computing. In this paper we consider document clustering methods exploring textual information hyperlink structure and co-citation relations. In particular we apply the normalized cut clustering method developed in computer vision to the task of hyperdocument clustering. We also explore some theoretical connections of the normalized-cut method to K-means method. We then experiment with normalized-cut method in the context of clustering query result sets for web search engines.

Omicseq: a web-based search engine for exploring omics datasets

Science.gov (United States)

Sun, Xiaobo; Pittard, William S.; Xu, Tianlei; Chen, Li; Zwick, Michael E.; Jiang, Xiaoqian; Wang, Fusheng

2017-01-01

Abstract The development and application of high-throughput genomics technologies has resulted in massive quantities of diverse omics data that continue to accumulate rapidly. These rich datasets offer unprecedented and exciting opportunities to address long standing questions in biomedical research. However, our ability to explore and query the content of diverse omics data is very limited. Existing dataset search tools rely almost exclusively on the metadata. A text-based query for gene name(s) does not work well on datasets wherein the vast majority of their content is numeric. To overcome this barrier, we have developed Omicseq, a novel web-based platform that facilitates the easy interrogation of omics datasets holistically to improve ‘findability’ of relevant data. The core component of Omicseq is trackRank, a novel algorithm for ranking omics datasets that fully uses the numerical content of the dataset to determine relevance to the query entity. The Omicseq system is supported by a scalable and elastic, NoSQL database that hosts a large collection of processed omics datasets. In the front end, a simple, web-based interface allows users to enter queries and instantly receive search results as a list of ranked datasets deemed to be the most relevant. Omicseq is freely available at http://www.omicseq.org. PMID:28402462

Rare disease diagnosis: A review of web search, social media and large-scale data-mining approaches.

Science.gov (United States)

Svenstrup, Dan; Jørgensen, Henrik L; Winther, Ole

2015-01-01

Physicians and the general public are increasingly using web-based tools to find answers to medical questions. The field of rare diseases is especially challenging and important as shown by the long delay and many mistakes associated with diagnoses. In this paper we review recent initiatives on the use of web search, social media and data mining in data repositories for medical diagnosis. We compare the retrieval accuracy on 56 rare disease cases with known diagnosis for the web search tools google.com, pubmed.gov, omim.org and our own search tool findzebra.com. We give a detailed description of IBM's Watson system and make a rough comparison between findzebra.com and Watson on subsets of the Doctor's dilemma dataset. The recall@10 and recall@20 (fraction of cases where the correct result appears in top 10 and top 20) for the 56 cases are found to be be 29%, 16%, 27% and 59% and 32%, 18%, 34% and 64%, respectively. Thus, FindZebra has a significantly (p mining tools and social media are some of the areas that hold promise.

A unified architecture for biomedical search engines based on semantic web technologies.

Science.gov (United States)

Jalali, Vahid; Matash Borujerdi, Mohammad Reza

2011-04-01

There is a huge growth in the volume of published biomedical research in recent years. Many medical search engines are designed and developed to address the over growing information needs of biomedical experts and curators. Significant progress has been made in utilizing the knowledge embedded in medical ontologies and controlled vocabularies to assist these engines. However, the lack of common architecture for utilized ontologies and overall retrieval process, hampers evaluating different search engines and interoperability between them under unified conditions. In this paper, a unified architecture for medical search engines is introduced. Proposed model contains standard schemas declared in semantic web languages for ontologies and documents used by search engines. Unified models for annotation and retrieval processes are other parts of introduced architecture. A sample search engine is also designed and implemented based on the proposed architecture in this paper. The search engine is evaluated using two test collections and results are reported in terms of precision vs. recall and mean average precision for different approaches used by this search engine.

Library Catalogue Users Are Influenced by Trends in Web Searching Search Strategies. A review of: Novotny, Eric. “I Don’t Think I Click: A Protocol Analysis Study of Use of a Library Online Catalog in the Internet Age.” College & Research Libraries, 65.6 (Nov. 2004: 525-37.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Susan Haigh

2006-09-01

Full Text Available Objective – To explore how Web-savvy users think about and search an online catalogue. Design – Protocol analysis study. Setting – Academic library (Pennsylvania State University Libraries. Subjects – Eighteen users (17 students, 1 faculty member of an online public access catalog, divided into two groups of nine first-time and nine experienced users. Method – The study team developed five tasks that represented a range of activities commonly performed by library users, such as searching for a specific item, identifying a library location, and requesting a copy. Seventeen students and one faculty member, divided evenly between novice and experienced searchers, were recruited to “think aloud” through the performance of the tasks. Data were gathered through audio recordings, screen capture software, and investigator notes. The time taken for each task was recorded, and investigators rated task completion as “successful,” “partially successful,” “fail,” or “search aborted.” After the searching session, participants were interviewed to clarify their actions and provide further commentary on the catalogue search. Main results – Participants in both test groups were relatively unsophisticated subject searchers. They made minimal use of Boolean operators, and tended not to repair failed searches by rethinking the search vocabulary and using synonyms. Participants did not have a strong understanding of library catalogue contents or structure and showed little curiosity in developing an understanding of how to utilize the catalogue. Novice users were impatient both in choosing search options and in evaluating their search results. They assumed search results were sorted by relevance, and thus would not typically browse past the initial screen. They quickly followed links, fearlessly tried different searches and options, and rapidly abandoned false trails. Experienced users were more effective and efficient searchers than

Utilizing mixed methods research in analyzing Iranian researchers’ informarion search behaviour in the Web and presenting current pattern

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Maryam Asadi

2015-12-01

Full Text Available Using mixed methods research design, the current study has analyzed Iranian researchers’ information searching behaviour on the Web.Then based on extracted concepts, the model of their information searching behavior was revealed. . Forty-four participants, including academic staff from universities and research centers were recruited for this study selected by purposive sampling. Data were gathered from questionnairs including ten questions and semi-structured interview. Each participant’s memos were analyzed using grounded theory methods adapted from Strauss & Corbin (1998. Results showed that the main objectives of subjects were doing a research, writing a paper, studying, doing assignments, downloading files and acquiring public information in using Web. The most important of learning about how to search and retrieve information were trial and error and get help from friends among the subjects. Information resources are identified by searching in information resources (e.g. search engines, references in papers, and search in Online database… communications facilities & tools (e.g. contact with colleagues, seminars & workshops, social networking..., and information services (e.g. RSS, Alerting, and SDI. Also, Findings indicated that searching by search engines, reviewing references, searching in online databases, and contact with colleagues and studying last issue of the electronic journals were the most important for searching. The most important strategies were using search engines and scientific tools such as Google Scholar. In addition, utilizing from simple (Quick search method was the most common among subjects. Using of topic, keywords, title of paper were most important of elements for retrieval information. Analysis of interview showed that there were nine stages in researchers’ information searching behaviour: topic selection, initiating search, formulating search query, information retrieval, access to information

The sources and popularity of online drug information: an analysis of top search engine results and web page views.

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Law, Michael R; Mintzes, Barbara; Morgan, Steven G

2011-03-01

The Internet has become a popular source of health information. However, there is little information on what drug information and which Web sites are being searched. To investigate the sources of online information about prescription drugs by assessing the most common Web sites returned in online drug searches and to assess the comparative popularity of Web pages for particular drugs. This was a cross-sectional study of search results for the most commonly dispensed drugs in the US (n=278 active ingredients) on 4 popular search engines: Bing, Google (both US and Canada), and Yahoo. We determined the number of times a Web site appeared as the first result. A linked retrospective analysis counted Wikipedia page hits for each of these drugs in 2008 and 2009. About three quarters of the first result on Google USA for both brand and generic names linked to the National Library of Medicine. In contrast, Wikipedia was the first result for approximately 80% of generic name searches on the other 3 sites. On these other sites, over two thirds of brand name searches led to industry-sponsored sites. The Wikipedia pages with the highest number of hits were mainly for opiates, benzodiazepines, antibiotics, and antidepressants. Wikipedia and the National Library of Medicine rank highly in online drug searches. Further, our results suggest that patients most often seek information on drugs with the potential for dependence, for stigmatized conditions, that have received media attention, and for episodic treatments. Quality improvement efforts should focus on these drugs.

Using the open Web as an information resource and scholarly Web search engines as retrieval tools for academic and research purposes

OpenAIRE

Filistea Naude; Chris Rensleigh; Adeline S.A. du Toit

2010-01-01

This study provided insight into the significance of the open Web as an information resource and Web search engines as research tools amongst academics. The academic staff establishment of the University of South Africa (Unisa) was invited to participate in a questionnaire survey and included 1188 staff members from five colleges. This study culminated in a PhD dissertation in 2008. One hundred and eighty seven respondents participated in the survey which gave a response rate of 15.7%. The re...

SA-Search: a web tool for protein structure mining based on a Structural Alphabet.

Science.gov (United States)

Guyon, Frédéric; Camproux, Anne-Claude; Hochez, Joëlle; Tufféry, Pierre

2004-07-01

SA-Search is a web tool that can be used to mine for protein structures and extract structural similarities. It is based on a hidden Markov model derived Structural Alphabet (SA) that allows the compression of three-dimensional (3D) protein conformations into a one-dimensional (1D) representation using a limited number of prototype conformations. Using such a representation, classical methods developed for amino acid sequences can be employed. Currently, SA-Search permits the performance of fast 3D similarity searches such as the extraction of exact words using a suffix tree approach, and the search for fuzzy words viewed as a simple 1D sequence alignment problem. SA-Search is available at http://bioserv.rpbs.jussieu.fr/cgi-bin/SA-Search.

Multi-robot Task Allocation for Search and Rescue Missions

International Nuclear Information System (INIS)

Hussein, Ahmed; Adel, Mohamed; Bakr, Mohamed; Shehata, Omar M; Khamis, Alaa

2014-01-01

Many researchers from academia and industry are attracted to investigate how to design and develop robust versatile multi-robot systems by solving a number of challenging and complex problems such as task allocation, group formation, self-organization and much more. In this study, the problem of multi-robot task allocation (MRTA) is tackled. MRTA is the problem of optimally allocating a set of tasks to a group of robots to optimize the overall system performance while being subjected to a set of constraints. A generic market-based approach is proposed in this paper to solve this problem. The efficacy of the proposed approach is quantitatively evaluated through simulation and real experimentation using heterogeneous Khepera-III mobile robots. The results from both simulation and experimentation indicate the high performance of the proposed algorithms and their applicability in search and rescue missions

Eysenbach, Tuische and Diepgen’s Evaluation of Web Searching for Identifying Unpublished Studies for Systematic Reviews: An Innovative Study Which is Still Relevant Today.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Simon Briscoe

2016-09-01

Full Text Available A Review of: Eysenbach, G., Tuische, J. & Diepgen, T.L. (2001. Evaluation of the usefulness of Internet searches to identify unpublished clinical trials for systematic reviews. Medical Informatics and the Internet in Medicine, 26(3, 203-218. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14639230110075459 Objective – To consider whether web searching is a useful method for identifying unpublished studies for inclusion in systematic reviews. Design – Retrospective web searches using the AltaVista search engine were conducted to identify unpublished studies – specifically, clinical trials – for systematic reviews which did not use a web search engine. Setting – The Department of Clinical Social Medicine, University of Heidelberg, Germany. Subjects – n/a Methods – Pilot testing of 11 web search engines was carried out to determine which could handle complex search queries. Pre-specified search requirements included the ability to handle Boolean and proximity operators, and truncation searching. A total of seven Cochrane systematic reviews were randomly selected from the Cochrane Library Issue 2, 1998, and their bibliographic database search strategies were adapted for the web search engine, AltaVista. Each adaptation combined search terms for the intervention, problem, and study type in the systematic review. Hints to planned, ongoing, or unpublished studies retrieved by the search engine, which were not cited in the systematic reviews, were followed up by visiting websites and contacting authors for further details when required. The authors of the systematic reviews were then contacted and asked to comment on the potential relevance of the identified studies. Main Results – Hints to 14 unpublished and potentially relevant studies, corresponding to 4 of the 7 randomly selected Cochrane systematic reviews, were identified. Out of the 14 studies, 2 were considered irrelevant to the corresponding systematic review by the systematic review authors. The

Pretraining Cortical Thickness Predicts Subsequent Perceptual Learning Rate in a Visual Search Task.

Science.gov (United States)

Frank, Sebastian M; Reavis, Eric A; Greenlee, Mark W; Tse, Peter U

2016-03-01

We report that preexisting individual differences in the cortical thickness of brain areas involved in a perceptual learning task predict the subsequent perceptual learning rate. Participants trained in a motion-discrimination task involving visual search for a "V"-shaped target motion trajectory among inverted "V"-shaped distractor trajectories. Motion-sensitive area MT+ (V5) was functionally identified as critical to the task: after 3 weeks of training, activity increased in MT+ during task performance, as measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging. We computed the cortical thickness of MT+ from anatomical magnetic resonance imaging volumes collected before training started, and found that it significantly predicted subsequent perceptual learning rates in the visual search task. Participants with thicker neocortex in MT+ before training learned faster than those with thinner neocortex in that area. A similar association between cortical thickness and training success was also found in posterior parietal cortex (PPC). © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.

Searching in the Context of a Task: A Review of Methods and Tools

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Ana Maguitman

2018-04-01

Full Text Available Contextual information extracted from the user task can help to better target retrieval to task-relevant content. In particular, topical context can be exploited to identify the subject of the information needs, contributing to reduce the information overload problem. A great number of methods exist to extract raw context data and contextual interaction patterns from the user task and to model this information using higher-level representations. Context can then be used as a source for automatic query generation, or as a means to refine or disambiguate user-generated queries. It can also be used to filter and rank results as well as to select domain-specific search engines with better capabilities to satisfy specific information requests. This article reviews methods that have been applied to deal with the problem of reflecting the current and long-term interests of a user in the search process. It discusses major difficulties encountered in the research area of context-based information retrieval and presents an overview of tools proposed since the mid-nineties to deal with the problem of context-based search.

Designing Effective Web Forms for Older Web Users

Science.gov (United States)

Li, Hui; Rau, Pei-Luen Patrick; Fujimura, Kaori; Gao, Qin; Wang, Lin

2012-01-01

This research aims to provide insight for web form design for older users. The effects of task complexity and information structure of web forms on older users' performance were examined. Forty-eight older participants with abundant computer and web experience were recruited. The results showed significant differences in task time and error rate…

Development of intelligent semantic search system for rubber research data in Thailand

Science.gov (United States)

Kaewboonma, Nattapong; Panawong, Jirapong; Pianhanuruk, Ekkawit; Buranarach, Marut

2017-10-01

The rubber production of Thailand increased not only by strong demand from the world market, but was also stimulated strongly through the replanting program of the Thai Government from 1961 onwards. With the continuous growth of rubber research data volume on the Web, the search for information has become a challenging task. Ontologies are used to improve the accuracy of information retrieval from the web by incorporating a degree of semantic analysis during the search. In this context, we propose an intelligent semantic search system for rubber research data in Thailand. The research methods included 1) analyzing domain knowledge, 2) ontologies development, and 3) intelligent semantic search system development to curate research data in trusted digital repositories may be shared among the wider Thailand rubber research community.

Omicseq: a web-based search engine for exploring omics datasets.

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Sun, Xiaobo; Pittard, William S; Xu, Tianlei; Chen, Li; Zwick, Michael E; Jiang, Xiaoqian; Wang, Fusheng; Qin, Zhaohui S

2017-07-03

The development and application of high-throughput genomics technologies has resulted in massive quantities of diverse omics data that continue to accumulate rapidly. These rich datasets offer unprecedented and exciting opportunities to address long standing questions in biomedical research. However, our ability to explore and query the content of diverse omics data is very limited. Existing dataset search tools rely almost exclusively on the metadata. A text-based query for gene name(s) does not work well on datasets wherein the vast majority of their content is numeric. To overcome this barrier, we have developed Omicseq, a novel web-based platform that facilitates the easy interrogation of omics datasets holistically to improve 'findability' of relevant data. The core component of Omicseq is trackRank, a novel algorithm for ranking omics datasets that fully uses the numerical content of the dataset to determine relevance to the query entity. The Omicseq system is supported by a scalable and elastic, NoSQL database that hosts a large collection of processed omics datasets. In the front end, a simple, web-based interface allows users to enter queries and instantly receive search results as a list of ranked datasets deemed to be the most relevant. Omicseq is freely available at http://www.omicseq.org. © The Author(s) 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Nucleic Acids Research.

Development and tuning of an original search engine for patent libraries in medicinal chemistry.

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Pasche, Emilie; Gobeill, Julien; Kreim, Olivier; Oezdemir-Zaech, Fatma; Vachon, Therese; Lovis, Christian; Ruch, Patrick

2014-01-01

The large increase in the size of patent collections has led to the need of efficient search strategies. But the development of advanced text-mining applications dedicated to patents of the biomedical field remains rare, in particular to address the needs of the pharmaceutical & biotech industry, which intensively uses patent libraries for competitive intelligence and drug development. We describe here the development of an advanced retrieval engine to search information in patent collections in the field of medicinal chemistry. We investigate and combine different strategies and evaluate their respective impact on the performance of the search engine applied to various search tasks, which covers the putatively most frequent search behaviours of intellectual property officers in medical chemistry: 1) a prior art search task; 2) a technical survey task; and 3) a variant of the technical survey task, sometimes called known-item search task, where a single patent is targeted. The optimal tuning of our engine resulted in a top-precision of 6.76% for the prior art search task, 23.28% for the technical survey task and 46.02% for the variant of the technical survey task. We observed that co-citation boosting was an appropriate strategy to improve prior art search tasks, while IPC classification of queries was improving retrieval effectiveness for technical survey tasks. Surprisingly, the use of the full body of the patent was always detrimental for search effectiveness. It was also observed that normalizing biomedical entities using curated dictionaries had simply no impact on the search tasks we evaluate. The search engine was finally implemented as a web-application within Novartis Pharma. The application is briefly described in the report. We have presented the development of a search engine dedicated to patent search, based on state of the art methods applied to patent corpora. We have shown that a proper tuning of the system to adapt to the various search tasks

Analysis of internal and external validity criteria for a computerized visual search task: A pilot study.

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Richard's, María M; Introzzi, Isabel; Zamora, Eliana; Vernucci, Santiago

2017-01-01

Inhibition is one of the main executive functions, because of its fundamental role in cognitive and social development. Given the importance of reliable and computerized measurements to assessment inhibitory performance, this research intends to analyze the internal and external criteria of validity of a computerized conjunction search task, to evaluate the role of perceptual inhibition. A sample of 41 children (21 females and 20 males), aged between 6 and 11 years old (M = 8.49, SD = 1.47), intentionally selected from a private management school of Mar del Plata (Argentina), middle socio-economic level were assessed. The Conjunction Search Task from the TAC Battery, Coding and Symbol Search tasks from Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children were used. Overall, results allow us to confirm that the perceptual inhibition task form TAC presents solid rates of internal and external validity that make a valid measurement instrument of this process.

GASS-WEB: a web server for identifying enzyme active sites based on genetic algorithms.

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Moraes, João P A; Pappa, Gisele L; Pires, Douglas E V; Izidoro, Sandro C

2017-07-03

Enzyme active sites are important and conserved functional regions of proteins whose identification can be an invaluable step toward protein function prediction. Most of the existing methods for this task are based on active site similarity and present limitations including performing only exact matches on template residues, template size restraints, despite not being capable of finding inter-domain active sites. To fill this gap, we proposed GASS-WEB, a user-friendly web server that uses GASS (Genetic Active Site Search), a method based on an evolutionary algorithm to search for similar active sites in proteins. GASS-WEB can be used under two different scenarios: (i) given a protein of interest, to match a set of specific active site templates; or (ii) given an active site template, looking for it in a database of protein structures. The method has shown to be very effective on a range of experiments and was able to correctly identify >90% of the catalogued active sites from the Catalytic Site Atlas. It also managed to achieve a Matthew correlation coefficient of 0.63 using the Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction (CASP 10) dataset. In our analysis, GASS was ranking fourth among 18 methods. GASS-WEB is freely available at http://gass.unifei.edu.br/. © The Author(s) 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Nucleic Acids Research.

Effect of pre-task music on sports or exercise performance.

Science.gov (United States)

Smirmaul, Bruno P

2017-01-01

Pre-task music is a very common strategy among sports competitors. However, as opposed to in-task music, the scientific evidence to support its ergogenic effects on either sports or exercise performance is limited. This brief review critically addresses the existing literature investigating the effects of pre-task music on sports and exercise performance, focusing on the methods and results of experimental studies, and offers basic and practical recommendations. In July 2015, a comprehensive literature search was performed in Web of Science, PubMed, and Google Scholar using the following key words in combination: "pre-task music," "pre-test music," "pre-exercise music," "exercise performance," "sports performance." The literature search was further expanded by both hand searching review articles on the topic and by searching the reference lists from the articles retrieved for any relevant references. Overall, a total of 15 studies in 14 articles were included. Pre-task music research has been unsystematic, methodologically limited and infrequent. Using this review as a starting point to overcome previous methodological limitations when designing future experiments may contribute to the development of pre-task music research, which is still in its infancy. Currently, there is no sufficient evidence to support the overall ergogenic effects of pre-task music on sports or exercise performance. Nonetheless, pre-task music has showed a likely ergogenic effect on shorter and predominantly anaerobic tasks such as grip strength, Wingate test, and short-duration sports or sports-like tasks, in contrast to longer and predominantly aerobic tasks.

Information Retrieval Strategies of Millennial Undergraduate Students in Web and Library Database Searches

Science.gov (United States)

Porter, Brandi

2009-01-01

Millennial students make up a large portion of undergraduate students attending colleges and universities, and they have a variety of online resources available to them to complete academically related information searches, primarily Web based and library-based online information retrieval systems. The content, ease of use, and required search…

Urban networks among Chinese cities along "the Belt and Road": A case of web search activity in cyberspace.

Science.gov (United States)

Zhang, Lu; Du, Hongru; Zhao, Yannan; Wu, Rongwei; Zhang, Xiaolei

2017-01-01

"The Belt and Road" initiative has been expected to facilitate interactions among numerous city centers. This initiative would generate a number of centers, both economic and political, which would facilitate greater interaction. To explore how information flows are merged and the specific opportunities that may be offered, Chinese cities along "the Belt and Road" are selected for a case study. Furthermore, urban networks in cyberspace have been characterized by their infrastructure orientation, which implies that there is a relative dearth of studies focusing on the investigation of urban hierarchies by capturing information flows between Chinese cities along "the Belt and Road". This paper employs Baidu, the main web search engine in China, to examine urban hierarchies. The results show that urban networks become more balanced, shifting from a polycentric to a homogenized pattern. Furthermore, cities in networks tend to have both a hierarchical system and a spatial concentration primarily in regions such as Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta region. Urban hierarchy based on web search activity does not follow the existing hierarchical system based on geospatial and economic development in all cases. Moreover, urban networks, under the framework of "the Belt and Road", show several significant corridors and more opportunities for more cities, particularly western cities. Furthermore, factors that may influence web search activity are explored. The results show that web search activity is significantly influenced by the economic gap, geographical proximity and administrative rank of the city.

Urban networks among Chinese cities along "the Belt and Road": A case of web search activity in cyberspace.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Lu Zhang

Full Text Available "The Belt and Road" initiative has been expected to facilitate interactions among numerous city centers. This initiative would generate a number of centers, both economic and political, which would facilitate greater interaction. To explore how information flows are merged and the specific opportunities that may be offered, Chinese cities along "the Belt and Road" are selected for a case study. Furthermore, urban networks in cyberspace have been characterized by their infrastructure orientation, which implies that there is a relative dearth of studies focusing on the investigation of urban hierarchies by capturing information flows between Chinese cities along "the Belt and Road". This paper employs Baidu, the main web search engine in China, to examine urban hierarchies. The results show that urban networks become more balanced, shifting from a polycentric to a homogenized pattern. Furthermore, cities in networks tend to have both a hierarchical system and a spatial concentration primarily in regions such as Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Yangtze River Delta and the Pearl River Delta region. Urban hierarchy based on web search activity does not follow the existing hierarchical system based on geospatial and economic development in all cases. Moreover, urban networks, under the framework of "the Belt and Road", show several significant corridors and more opportunities for more cities, particularly western cities. Furthermore, factors that may influence web search activity are explored. The results show that web search activity is significantly influenced by the economic gap, geographical proximity and administrative rank of the city.

Searching the Web for Earth Science Data: Semiotics to Cybernetics and Back

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Bruce R. Barkstrom

2016-06-01

Full Text Available This paper discusses a search paradigm for numerical data in Earth science that relies on the intrinsic structure of an archive's collection. Such non-textual data lies outside the normal textual basis for the Semantic Web. The paradigm tries to bypass some of the difficulties associated with keyword searches, such as semantic heterogeneity. The suggested collection structure uses a hierarchical taxonomy based on multidimensional axes of continuous variables. This structure fits the underlying 'geometry' of Earth science data better than sets of keywords in an ontology. The alternative paradigm views the search as a two-agent cooperative game that uses a dialog between the search engine and the data user. In this view, the search engine knows about the objects in the archive. It cannot read the user's mind to identify what the user needs. We assume the user has a clear idea of the search target. However he or she may not have a clear idea of the archive's contents. The paper suggests how the user interface may provide information to deal with the user's difficulties in understanding items in the dialog.

SA-Search: a web tool for protein structure mining based on a Structural Alphabet

OpenAIRE

Guyon, Frédéric; Camproux, Anne-Claude; Hochez, Joëlle; Tufféry, Pierre

2004-01-01

SA-Search is a web tool that can be used to mine for protein structures and extract structural similarities. It is based on a hidden Markov model derived Structural Alphabet (SA) that allows the compression of three-dimensional (3D) protein conformations into a one-dimensional (1D) representation using a limited number of prototype conformations. Using such a representation, classical methods developed for amino acid sequences can be employed. Currently, SA-Search permits the performance of f...

A Web-based Tool for SDSS and 2MASS Database Searches

Science.gov (United States)

Hendrickson, M. A.; Uomoto, A.; Golimowski, D. A.

We have developed a web site using HTML, Php, Python, and MySQL that extracts, processes, and displays data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and the Two-Micron All-Sky Survey (2MASS). The goal is to locate brown dwarf candidates in the SDSS database by looking at color cuts; however, this site could also be useful for targeted searches of other databases as well. MySQL databases are created from broad searches of SDSS and 2MASS data. Broad queries on the SDSS and 2MASS database servers are run weekly so that observers have the most up-to-date information from which to select candidates for observation. Observers can look at detailed information about specific objects including finding charts, images, and available spectra. In addition, updates from previous observations can be added by any collaborators; this format makes observational collaboration simple. Observers can also restrict the database search, just before or during an observing run, to select objects of special interest.

The Influence of Surface and Deep Cues on Primary and Secondary School Students' Assessment of Relevance in Web Menus

Science.gov (United States)

Rouet, Jean-Francois; Ros, Christine; Goumi, Antonine; Macedo-Rouet, Monica; Dinet, Jerome

2011-01-01

Two experiments investigated primary and secondary school students' Web menu selection strategies using simulated Web search tasks. It was hypothesized that students' selections of websites depend on their perception and integration of multiple relevance cues. More specifically, students should be able to disentangle superficial cues (e.g.,…

An Online Game Approach for Improving Students' Learning Performance in Web-Based Problem-Solving Activities

Science.gov (United States)

Hwang, Gwo-Jen; Wu, Po-Han; Chen, Chi-Chang

2012-01-01

In this paper, an online game was developed in the form of a competitive board game for conducting web-based problem-solving activities. The participants of the game determined their move by throwing a dice. Each location of the game board corresponds to a gaming task, which could be a web-based information-searching question or a mini-game; the…

Tracing agents and other automatic sampling procedures for the World Wide Web

OpenAIRE

Aguillo, Isidro F.

1999-01-01

Many of the search engines and recovery tools are not suitable to make samples of web resources for quantitative analysis. The increasing size of the web and its hypertextual nature offer opportunities for a novel approach. A new generation of recovering tools involving tracing hypertext links from selected sites are very promising. Offering capabilities to automate tasks Extracting large samples of high pertinence Ready to use in standard database formats Selecting additional resour...

Reconsidering the Rhizome: A Textual Analysis of Web Search Engines as Gatekeepers of the Internet

Science.gov (United States)

Hess, A.

Critical theorists have often drawn from Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the rhizome when discussing the potential of the Internet. While the Internet may structurally appear as a rhizome, its day-to-day usage by millions via search engines precludes experiencing the random interconnectedness and potential democratizing function. Through a textual analysis of four search engines, I argue that Web searching has grown hierarchies, or "trees," that organize data in tracts of knowledge and place users in marketing niches rather than assist in the development of new knowledge.

Illusory conjunctions and perceptual grouping in a visual search task in schizophrenia.

Science.gov (United States)

Carr, V J; Dewis, S A; Lewin, T J

1998-07-27

This report describes part of a series of experiments, conducted within the framework of feature integration theory, to determine whether patients with schizophrenia show deficits in preattentive processing. Thirty subjects with a DSM-III-R diagnosis of schizophrenia and 30 age-, gender-, and education-matched normal control subjects completed two computerized experimental tasks, a visual search task assessing the frequency of illusory conjunctions (i.e. false perceptions) under conditions of divided attention (Experiment 3) and a task which examined the effects of perceptual grouping on illusory conjunctions (Experiment 4). We also assessed current symptomatology and its relationship to task performance. Contrary to our hypotheses, schizophrenia subjects did not show higher rates of illusory conjunctions, and the influence of perceptual grouping on the frequency of illusory conjunctions was similar for schizophrenia and control subjects. Nonetheless, specific predictions from feature integration theory about the impact of different target types (Experiment 3) and perceptual groups (Experiment 4) on the likelihood of forming an illusory conjunction were strongly supported, thereby confirming the integrity of the experimental procedures. Overall, these studies revealed no firm evidence that schizophrenia is associated with a preattentive abnormality in visual search using stimuli that differ on the basis of physical characteristics.

The function of visual search and memory in sequential looking tasks

NARCIS (Netherlands)

J. Epelboim (Julie); R.M. Steinman (Robert); E. Kowler (Eileen); M. Edwards (Mark); Z. Pizlo (Zygmunt); D.W. Erkelens (Dirk Willem); H. Collewijn (Han)

1995-01-01

textabstractEye and head movements were recorded as unrestrained subjects tapped or only looked at nearby targets. Scanning patterns were the same in both tasks: subjects looked at each target before tapping it; visual search had similar speeds and gaze-shift accuracies. Looking however, took longer

Communicative task modeling and its practice on academic English learning in a web-based environment

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Chen, Jin; Cristea, A.I.; Okamoto, T.

2003-01-01

A web-based course for scholarly communicative language competence development via a distance tutoring system is presented. Particular focus is given to the description of the representation and organization of communicative tasks representing the subject matter knowledge in terms of

How happy is your web browsing? A model to quantify satisfaction of an Internet user searching for desired information

Science.gov (United States)

Banerji, Anirban; Magarkar, Aniket

2012-09-01

We feel happy when web browsing operations provide us with necessary information; otherwise, we feel bitter. How to measure this happiness (or bitterness)? How does the profile of happiness grow and decay during the course of web browsing? We propose a probabilistic framework that models the evolution of user satisfaction, on top of his/her continuous frustration at not finding the required information. It is found that the cumulative satisfaction profile of a web-searching individual can be modeled effectively as the sum of a random number of random terms, where each term is a mutually independent random variable, originating from ‘memoryless’ Poisson flow. Evolution of satisfaction over the entire time interval of a user’s browsing was modeled using auto-correlation analysis. A utilitarian marker, a magnitude of greater than unity of which describes happy web-searching operations, and an empirical limit that connects user’s satisfaction with his frustration level-are proposed too. The presence of pertinent information in the very first page of a website and magnitude of the decay parameter of user satisfaction (frustration, irritation etc.) are found to be two key aspects that dominate the web user’s psychology. The proposed model employed different combinations of decay parameter, searching time and number of helpful websites. The obtained results are found to match the results from three real-life case studies.

Lexical-Semantic Search Under Different Covert Verbal Fluency Tasks: An fMRI Study

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Yunqing Li

2017-08-01

Full Text Available Background: Verbal fluency is a measure of cognitive flexibility and word search strategies that is widely used to characterize impaired cognitive function. Despite the wealth of research on identifying and characterizing distinct aspects of verbal fluency, the anatomic and functional substrates of retrieval-related search and post-retrieval control processes still have not been fully elucidated.Methods: Twenty-one native English-speaking, healthy, right-handed, adult volunteers (mean age = 31 years; range = 21–45 years; 9 F took part in a block-design functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI study of free recall, covert word generation tasks when guided by phonemic (P, semantic-category (C, and context-based fill-in–the-blank sentence completion (S cues. General linear model (GLM, Independent Component Analysis (ICA, and psychophysiological interaction (PPI were used to further characterize the neural substrate of verbal fluency as a function of retrieval cue type.Results: Common localized activations across P, C, and S tasks occurred in the bilateral superior and left inferior frontal gyrus, left anterior cingulate cortex, bilateral supplementary motor area (SMA, and left insula. Differential task activations were centered in the occipital, temporal and parietal regions as well as the thalamus and cerebellum. The context-based fluency task, i.e., the S task, elicited higher differential brain activity in a lateralized frontal-temporal network typically engaged in complex language processing. P and C tasks elicited activation in limited pathways mainly within the left frontal regions. ICA and PPI results of the S task suggested that brain regions distributed across both hemispheres, extending beyond classical language areas, are recruited for lexical-semantic access and retrieval during sentence completion.Conclusion: Study results support the hypothesis of overlapping, as well as distinct, neural networks for covert word generation when

Tracking changes in search behaviour at a health web site.

Science.gov (United States)

Eklund, Ann-Marie

2012-01-01

Nowadays, the internet is used as a means to provide the public with official information on many different topics, including health related matters and care providers. In this work we have studied a search log from the official Swedish health web site 1177.se for patterns of search behaviour over time. To improve the analysis, we mapped the queries to UMLS semantic types and MeSH categories. Our analysis shows that, as expected, diseases and health care activities are the ones of most interest, but also a clear increased interest in geographical locations in the setting of health care providers. We also note a change over time in which kinds of diseases are of interest. Finally, we conclude that this type of analysis may be useful in studies of what health related topics matter to the public, but also for design and follow-up of public information campaigns.

Cultural differences in attention: Eye movement evidence from a comparative visual search task.

Science.gov (United States)

Alotaibi, Albandri; Underwood, Geoffrey; Smith, Alastair D

2017-10-01

Individual differences in visual attention have been linked to thinking style: analytic thinking (common in individualistic cultures) is thought to promote attention to detail and focus on the most important part of a scene, whereas holistic thinking (common in collectivist cultures) promotes attention to the global structure of a scene and the relationship between its parts. However, this theory is primarily based on relatively simple judgement tasks. We compared groups from Great Britain (an individualist culture) and Saudi Arabia (a collectivist culture) on a more complex comparative visual search task, using simple natural scenes. A higher overall number of fixations for Saudi participants, along with longer search times, indicated less efficient search behaviour than British participants. Furthermore, intra-group comparisons of scan-path for Saudi participants revealed less similarity than within the British group. Together, these findings suggest that there is a positive relationship between an analytic cognitive style and controlled attention. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

A Novel Framework for Medical Web Information Foraging Using Hybrid ACO and Tabu Search.

Science.gov (United States)

Drias, Yassine; Kechid, Samir; Pasi, Gabriella

2016-01-01

We present in this paper a novel approach based on multi-agent technology for Web information foraging. We proposed for this purpose an architecture in which we distinguish two important phases. The first one is a learning process for localizing the most relevant pages that might interest the user. This is performed on a fixed instance of the Web. The second takes into account the openness and dynamicity of the Web. It consists on an incremental learning starting from the result of the first phase and reshaping the outcomes taking into account the changes that undergoes the Web. The system was implemented using a colony of artificial ants hybridized with tabu search in order to achieve more effectiveness and efficiency. To validate our proposal, experiments were conducted on MedlinePlus, a real website dedicated for research in the domain of Health in contrast to other previous works where experiments were performed on web logs datasets. The main results are promising either for those related to strong Web regularities and for the response time, which is very short and hence complies the real time constraint.

Effect of a Body Model on Performance in a Virtual Environment Search Task

National Research Council Canada - National Science Library

Singer, Michael

1998-01-01

...) in training dismounted soldiers. This experiment investigated full body representation (generic) versus a hand linked pointer on movement performance in an office building interior during a search task...

Task relevance of emotional information affects anxiety-linked attention bias in visual search.

Science.gov (United States)

Dodd, Helen F; Vogt, Julia; Turkileri, Nilgun; Notebaert, Lies

2017-01-01

Task relevance affects emotional attention in healthy individuals. Here, we investigate whether the association between anxiety and attention bias is affected by the task relevance of emotion during an attention task. Participants completed two visual search tasks. In the emotion-irrelevant task, participants were asked to indicate whether a discrepant face in a crowd of neutral, middle-aged faces was old or young. Irrelevant to the task, target faces displayed angry, happy, or neutral expressions. In the emotion-relevant task, participants were asked to indicate whether a discrepant face in a crowd of middle-aged neutral faces was happy or angry (target faces also varied in age). Trait anxiety was not associated with attention in the emotion-relevant task. However, in the emotion-irrelevant task, trait anxiety was associated with a bias for angry over happy faces. These findings demonstrate that the task relevance of emotional information affects conclusions about the presence of an anxiety-linked attention bias. Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

A geospatial search engine for discovering multi-format geospatial data across the web

Science.gov (United States)

Christopher Bone; Alan Ager; Ken Bunzel; Lauren Tierney

2014-01-01

The volume of publically available geospatial data on the web is rapidly increasing due to advances in server-based technologies and the ease at which data can now be created. However, challenges remain with connecting individuals searching for geospatial data with servers and websites where such data exist. The objective of this paper is to present a publically...

Attentional Capture by Salient Distractors during Visual Search Is Determined by Temporal Task Demands

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Kiss, Monika; Grubert, Anna; Petersen, Anders

2012-01-01

The question whether attentional capture by salient but taskirrelevant visual stimuli is triggered in a bottom–up fashion or depends on top–down task settings is still unresolved. Strong support for bottom–up capture was obtained in the additional singleton task, in which search arrays were visible...... until response onset. Equally strong evidence for top–down control of attentional capture was obtained in spatial cueing experiments in which display durations were very brief. To demonstrate the critical role of temporal task demands on salience-driven attentional capture, we measured ERP indicators...... component that was followed by a late Pd component, suggesting that they triggered attentional capture, which was later replaced by location-specific inhibition. When search arrays were visible for only 200 msec, the distractor-elicited N2pc was eliminated and was replaced by a Pd component in the same time...

GeNemo: a search engine for web-based functional genomic data.

Science.gov (United States)

Zhang, Yongqing; Cao, Xiaoyi; Zhong, Sheng

2016-07-08

A set of new data types emerged from functional genomic assays, including ChIP-seq, DNase-seq, FAIRE-seq and others. The results are typically stored as genome-wide intensities (WIG/bigWig files) or functional genomic regions (peak/BED files). These data types present new challenges to big data science. Here, we present GeNemo, a web-based search engine for functional genomic data. GeNemo searches user-input data against online functional genomic datasets, including the entire collection of ENCODE and mouse ENCODE datasets. Unlike text-based search engines, GeNemo's searches are based on pattern matching of functional genomic regions. This distinguishes GeNemo from text or DNA sequence searches. The user can input any complete or partial functional genomic dataset, for example, a binding intensity file (bigWig) or a peak file. GeNemo reports any genomic regions, ranging from hundred bases to hundred thousand bases, from any of the online ENCODE datasets that share similar functional (binding, modification, accessibility) patterns. This is enabled by a Markov Chain Monte Carlo-based maximization process, executed on up to 24 parallel computing threads. By clicking on a search result, the user can visually compare her/his data with the found datasets and navigate the identified genomic regions. GeNemo is available at www.genemo.org. © The Author(s) 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Nucleic Acids Research.

Distributed Web-Scale Infrastructure For Crawling, Indexing And Search With Semantic Support

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Stefan Dlugolinsky

2012-01-01

Full Text Available In this paper, we describe our work in progress in the scope of web-scale informationextraction and information retrieval utilizing distributed computing. Wepresent a distributed architecture built on top of the MapReduce paradigm forinformation retrieval, information processing and intelligent search supportedby spatial capabilities. Proposed architecture is focused on crawling documentsin several different formats, information extraction, lightweight semantic annotationof the extracted information, indexing of extracted information andfinally on indexing of documents based on the geo-spatial information foundin a document. We demonstrate the architecture on two use cases, where thefirst is search in job offers retrieved from the LinkedIn portal and the second issearch in BBC news feeds and discuss several problems we had to face duringthe implementation. We also discuss spatial search applications for both casesbecause both LinkedIn job offer pages and BBC news feeds contain a lot of spatialinformation to extract and process.

Assessment of brain damage in a geriatric population through use of a visual-searching task.

Science.gov (United States)

Turbiner, M; Derman, R M

1980-04-01

This study was designed to assess the discriminative capacity of a visual-searching task for brain damage, as described by Goldstein and Kyc (1978), for 10 hospitalized male, brain-damaged patients, 10 hospitalized male schizophrenic patients, and 10 normal subjects in a control group, all of whom were approximately 65 yr. old. The derived data indicated, at a statistically significant level, that the visual-searching task was effective in successfully classifying 80% of the brain-damaged sample when compared to the schizophrenic patients and discriminating 90% of the brain-damaged patients from normal subjects.

Web 2.0 Tasks in Action: EFL Learning in the U.S. Embassy School Election Project 2012

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Joannis Kaliampos

2014-10-01

Full Text Available Exploring topics that are personally relevant and interesting to young adult English as a foreign language (EFL learners remains a core challenge in language teaching. At the same time, the advent of Web 2.0 applications has many repercussions for authentic language learning. The “U.S. Embassy School Election Project 2012” has addressed these questions by combining a close focus on the U.S. Presidential Election with an interactive project scenario. Over 1,400 students across Germany participated in this project and produced an election forecast for an assigned U.S. state based on a survey of regional news media and social network data. Their predictions were in many cases more accurate than those of major U.S. broadcasting networks. This paper discusses the general educational potential of such projects in the contexts of computer-assisted language learning (CALL, intercultural learning, and learning in a task-based project environment. The authors have applied a multimodal qualitative approach to analyze tasks and learner perceptions of tasks in the context of the election project. In a first step, the micro-perspective of the perception of web-based tasks is investigated by example of one selected task cycle and a focus group of three learners. The second part of the analysis represents a bird’s-eye view on the learner products arising out of such tasks.

Patscanui: an intuitive web interface for searching patterns in DNA and protein data

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Blin, Kai; Wohlleben, Wolfgang; Weber, Tilmann

2018-01-01

Patterns in biological sequences frequently signify interesting features in the underlying molecule. Many tools exist to search for well-known patterns. Less support is available for exploratory analysis, where no well-defined patterns are known yet. PatScanUI (https://patscan.secondarymetabolite......Patterns in biological sequences frequently signify interesting features in the underlying molecule. Many tools exist to search for well-known patterns. Less support is available for exploratory analysis, where no well-defined patterns are known yet. PatScanUI (https......://patscan.secondarymetabolites.org/) provides a highly interactive web interface to the powerful generic pattern search tool PatScan. The complex PatScan-patterns are created in a drag-and-drop aware interface allowing researchers to do rapid prototyping of the often complicated patterns useful to identifying features of interest....

Sagace: A web-based search engine for biomedical databases in Japan

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Morita Mizuki

2012-10-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background In the big data era, biomedical research continues to generate a large amount of data, and the generated information is often stored in a database and made publicly available. Although combining data from multiple databases should accelerate further studies, the current number of life sciences databases is too large to grasp features and contents of each database. Findings We have developed Sagace, a web-based search engine that enables users to retrieve information from a range of biological databases (such as gene expression profiles and proteomics data and biological resource banks (such as mouse models of disease and cell lines. With Sagace, users can search more than 300 databases in Japan. Sagace offers features tailored to biomedical research, including manually tuned ranking, a faceted navigation to refine search results, and rich snippets constructed with retrieved metadata for each database entry. Conclusions Sagace will be valuable for experts who are involved in biomedical research and drug development in both academia and industry. Sagace is freely available at http://sagace.nibio.go.jp/en/.

Myanmar Language Search Engine

OpenAIRE

Pann Yu Mon; Yoshiki Mikami

2011-01-01

With the enormous growth of the World Wide Web, search engines play a critical role in retrieving information from the borderless Web. Although many search engines are available for the major languages, but they are not much proficient for the less computerized languages including Myanmar. The main reason is that those search engines are not considering the specific features of those languages. A search engine which capable of searching the Web documents written in those languages is highly n...

Search of the Deep and Dark Web via DARPA Memex

Science.gov (United States)

Mattmann, C. A.

2015-12-01

Search has progressed through several stages due to the increasing size of the Web. Search engines first focused on text and its rate of occurrence; then focused on the notion of link analysis and citation then on interactivity and guided search; and now on the use of social media - who we interact with, what we comment on, and who we follow (and who follows us). The next stage, referred to as "deep search," requires solutions that can bring together text, images, video, importance, interactivity, and social media to solve this challenging problem. The Apache Nutch project provides an open framework for large-scale, targeted, vertical search with capabilities to support all past and potential future search engine foci. Nutch is a flexible infrastructure allowing open access to ranking; URL selection and filtering approaches, to the link graph generated from search, and Nutch has spawned entire sub communities including Apache Hadoop and Apache Tika. It addresses many current needs with the capability to support new technologies such as image and video. On the DARPA Memex project, we are creating create specific extensions to Nutch that will directly improve its overall technological superiority for search and that will directly allow us to address complex search problems including human trafficking. We are integrating state-of-the-art algorithms developed by Kitware for IARPA Aladdin combined with work by Harvard to provide image and video understanding support allowing automatic detection of people and things and massive deployment via Nutch. We are expanding Apache Tika for scene understanding, object/person detection and classification in images/video. We are delivering an interactive and visual interface for initiating Nutch crawls. The interface uses Python technologies to expose Nutch data and to provide a domain specific language for crawls. With the Bokeh visualization library the interface we are delivering simple interactive crawl visualization and

Using Open Web APIs in Teaching Web Mining

Science.gov (United States)

Chen, Hsinchun; Li, Xin; Chau, M.; Ho, Yi-Jen; Tseng, Chunju

2009-01-01

With the advent of the World Wide Web, many business applications that utilize data mining and text mining techniques to extract useful business information on the Web have evolved from Web searching to Web mining. It is important for students to acquire knowledge and hands-on experience in Web mining during their education in information systems…

Al Hirschfeld's NINA as a prototype search task for studying perceptual error in radiology

Science.gov (United States)

Nodine, Calvin F.; Kundel, Harold L.

1997-04-01

Artist Al Hirschfeld has been hiding the word NINA (his daughter's name) in line drawings of theatrical scenes that have appeared in the New York Times for over 50 years. This paper shows how Hirschfeld's search task of finding the name NINA in his drawings illustrates basic perceptual principles of detection, discrimination and decision-making commonly encountered in radiology search tasks. Hirschfeld's hiding of NINA is typically accomplished by camouflaging the letters of the name and blending them into scenic background details such as wisps of hair and folds of clothing. In a similar way, pulmonary nodules and breast lesions are camouflaged by anatomic features of the chest or breast image. Hirschfeld's hidden NINAs are sometimes missed because they are integrated into a Gestalt overview rather than differentiated from background features during focal scanning. This may be similar to overlooking an obvious nodule behind the heart in a chest x-ray image. Because it is a search game, Hirschfeld assigns a number to each drawing to indicate how many NINAs he has hidden so as not to frustrate his viewers. In the radiologists' task, the number of targets detected in a medical image is determined by combining perceptual input with probabilities generated from clinical history and viewing experience. Thus, in the absence of truth, searching for abnormalities in x-ray images creates opportunities for recognition and decision errors (e.g. false positives and false negatives). We illustrate how camouflage decreases the conspicuity of both artistic and radiographic targets, compare detection performance of radiologists with lay persons searching for NINAs, and, show similarities and differences between scanning strategies of the two groups based on eye-position data.

The effect of patient narratives on information search in a web-based breast cancer decision aid: an eye-tracking study.

Science.gov (United States)

Shaffer, Victoria A; Owens, Justin; Zikmund-Fisher, Brian J

2013-12-17

Previous research has examined the impact of patient narratives on treatment choices, but to our knowledge, no study has examined the effect of narratives on information search. Further, no research has considered the relative impact of their format (text vs video) on health care decisions in a single study. Our goal was to examine the impact of video and text-based narratives on information search in a Web-based patient decision aid for early stage breast cancer. Fifty-six women were asked to imagine that they had been diagnosed with early stage breast cancer and needed to choose between two surgical treatments (lumpectomy with radiation or mastectomy). Participants were randomly assigned to view one of four versions of a Web decision aid. Two versions of the decision aid included videos of interviews with patients and physicians or videos of interviews with physicians only. To distinguish between the effect of narratives and the effect of videos, we created two text versions of the Web decision aid by replacing the patient and physician interviews with text transcripts of the videos. Participants could freely browse the Web decision aid until they developed a treatment preference. We recorded participants' eye movements using the Tobii 1750 eye-tracking system equipped with Tobii Studio software. A priori, we defined 24 areas of interest (AOIs) in the Web decision aid. These AOIs were either separate pages of the Web decision aid or sections within a single page covering different content. We used multilevel modeling to examine the effect of narrative presence, narrative format, and their interaction on information search. There was a significant main effect of condition, P=.02; participants viewing decision aids with patient narratives spent more time searching for information than participants viewing the decision aids without narratives. The main effect of format was not significant, P=.10. However, there was a significant condition by format interaction on

HDAPD: a web tool for searching the disease-associated protein structures

Science.gov (United States)

2010-01-01

Background The protein structures of the disease-associated proteins are important for proceeding with the structure-based drug design to against a particular disease. Up until now, proteins structures are usually searched through a PDB id or some sequence information. However, in the HDAPD database presented here the protein structure of a disease-associated protein can be directly searched through the associated disease name keyed in. Description The search in HDAPD can be easily initiated by keying some key words of a disease, protein name, protein type, or PDB id. The protein sequence can be presented in FASTA format and directly copied for a BLAST search. HDAPD is also interfaced with Jmol so that users can observe and operate a protein structure with Jmol. The gene ontological data such as cellular components, molecular functions, and biological processes are provided once a hyperlink to Gene Ontology (GO) is clicked. Further, HDAPD provides a link to the KEGG map such that where the protein is placed and its relationship with other proteins in a metabolic pathway can be found from the map. The latest literatures namely titles, journals, authors, and abstracts searched from PubMed for the protein are also presented as a length controllable list. Conclusions Since the HDAPD data content can be routinely updated through a PHP-MySQL web page built, the new database presented is useful for searching the structures for some disease-associated proteins that may play important roles in the disease developing process for performing the structure-based drug design to against the diseases. PMID:20158919

Characterizing interdisciplinarity of researchers and research topics using web search engines.

Science.gov (United States)

Sayama, Hiroki; Akaishi, Jin

2012-01-01

Researchers' networks have been subject to active modeling and analysis. Earlier literature mostly focused on citation or co-authorship networks reconstructed from annotated scientific publication databases, which have several limitations. Recently, general-purpose web search engines have also been utilized to collect information about social networks. Here we reconstructed, using web search engines, a network representing the relatedness of researchers to their peers as well as to various research topics. Relatedness between researchers and research topics was characterized by visibility boost-increase of a researcher's visibility by focusing on a particular topic. It was observed that researchers who had high visibility boosts by the same research topic tended to be close to each other in their network. We calculated correlations between visibility boosts by research topics and researchers' interdisciplinarity at the individual level (diversity of topics related to the researcher) and at the social level (his/her centrality in the researchers' network). We found that visibility boosts by certain research topics were positively correlated with researchers' individual-level interdisciplinarity despite their negative correlations with the general popularity of researchers. It was also found that visibility boosts by network-related topics had positive correlations with researchers' social-level interdisciplinarity. Research topics' correlations with researchers' individual- and social-level interdisciplinarities were found to be nearly independent from each other. These findings suggest that the notion of "interdisciplinarity" of a researcher should be understood as a multi-dimensional concept that should be evaluated using multiple assessment means.

Semantically Enriching the Search System of a Music Digital Library

Science.gov (United States)

de Juan, Paloma; Iglesias, Carlos

Traditional search systems are usually based on keywords, a very simple and convenient mechanism to express a need for information. This is the most popular way of searching the Web, although it is not always an easy task to accurately summarize a natural language query in a few keywords. Working with keywords means losing the context, which is the only thing that can help us deal with ambiguity. This is the biggest problem of keyword-based systems. Semantic Web technologies seem a perfect solution to this problem, since they make it possible to represent the semantics of a given domain. In this chapter, we present three projects, Harmos, Semusici and Cantiga, whose aim is to provide access to a music digital library. We will describe two search systems, a traditional one and a semantic one, developed in the context of these projects and compare them in terms of usability and effectiveness.

Enhancing UCSF Chimera through web services.

Science.gov (United States)

Huang, Conrad C; Meng, Elaine C; Morris, John H; Pettersen, Eric F; Ferrin, Thomas E

2014-07-01

Integrating access to web services with desktop applications allows for an expanded set of application features, including performing computationally intensive tasks and convenient searches of databases. We describe how we have enhanced UCSF Chimera (http://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimera/), a program for the interactive visualization and analysis of molecular structures and related data, through the addition of several web services (http://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/webservices.html). By streamlining access to web services, including the entire job submission, monitoring and retrieval process, Chimera makes it simpler for users to focus on their science projects rather than data manipulation. Chimera uses Opal, a toolkit for wrapping scientific applications as web services, to provide scalable and transparent access to several popular software packages. We illustrate Chimera's use of web services with an example workflow that interleaves use of these services with interactive manipulation of molecular sequences and structures, and we provide an example Python program to demonstrate how easily Opal-based web services can be accessed from within an application. Web server availability: http://webservices.rbvi.ucsf.edu/opal2/dashboard?command=serviceList. © The Author(s) 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Nucleic Acids Research.

SpolSimilaritySearch - A web tool to compare and search similarities between spoligotypes of Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex.

Science.gov (United States)

Couvin, David; Zozio, Thierry; Rastogi, Nalin

2017-07-01

Spoligotyping is one of the most commonly used polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-based methods for identification and study of genetic diversity of Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC). Despite its known limitations if used alone, the methodology is particularly useful when used in combination with other methods such as mycobacterial interspersed repetitive units - variable number of tandem DNA repeats (MIRU-VNTRs). At a worldwide scale, spoligotyping has allowed identification of information on 103,856 MTBC isolates (corresponding to 98049 clustered strains plus 5807 unique isolates from 169 countries of patient origin) contained within the SITVIT2 proprietary database of the Institut Pasteur de la Guadeloupe. The SpolSimilaritySearch web-tool described herein (available at: http://www.pasteur-guadeloupe.fr:8081/SpolSimilaritySearch) incorporates a similarity search algorithm allowing users to get a complete overview of similar spoligotype patterns (with information on presence or absence of 43 spacers) in the aforementioned worldwide database. This tool allows one to analyze spread and evolutionary patterns of MTBC by comparing similar spoligotype patterns, to distinguish between widespread, specific and/or confined patterns, as well as to pinpoint patterns with large deleted blocks, which play an intriguing role in the genetic epidemiology of M. tuberculosis. Finally, the SpolSimilaritySearch tool also provides with the country distribution patterns for each queried spoligotype. Copyright © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Contingent attentional capture across multiple feature dimensions in a temporal search task.

Science.gov (United States)

Ito, Motohiro; Kawahara, Jun I

2016-01-01

The present study examined whether attention can be flexibly controlled to monitor two different feature dimensions (shape and color) in a temporal search task. Specifically, we investigated the occurrence of contingent attentional capture (i.e., interference from task-relevant distractors) and resulting set reconfiguration (i.e., enhancement of single task-relevant set). If observers can restrict searches to a specific value for each relevant feature dimension independently, the capture and reconfiguration effect should only occur when the single relevant distractor in each dimension appears. Participants identified a target letter surrounded by a non-green square or a non-square green frame. The results revealed contingent attentional capture, as target identification accuracy was lower when the distractor contained a target-defining feature than when it contained a nontarget feature. Resulting set reconfiguration was also obtained in that accuracy was superior when the current target's feature (e.g., shape) corresponded to the defining feature of the present distractor (shape) than when the current target's feature did not match the distractor's feature (color). This enhancement was not due to perceptual priming. The present study demonstrated that the principles of contingent attentional capture and resulting set reconfiguration held even when multiple target feature dimensions were monitored. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Study of Search Engine Transaction Logs Shows Little Change in How Users use Search Engines. A review of: Jansen, Bernard J., and Amanda Spink. “How Are We Searching the World Wide Web? A Comparison of Nine Search Engine Transaction Logs.” Information Processing & Management 42.1 (2006: 248‐263.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

David Hook

2006-09-01

Full Text Available Objective – To examine the interactions between users and search engines, and how they have changed over time. Design – Comparative analysis of search engine transaction logs. Setting – Nine major analyses of search engine transaction logs. Subjects – Nine web search engine studies (4 European, 5 American over a seven‐year period, covering the search engines Excite, Fireball, AltaVista, BWIE and AllTheWeb. Methods – The results from individual studies are compared by year of study for percentages of single query sessions, one term queries, operator (and, or, not, etc. usage and single result page viewing. As well, the authors group the search queries into eleven different topical categories and compare how the breakdown has changed over time. Main Results – Based on the percentage of single query sessions, it does not appear that the complexity of interactions has changed significantly for either the U.S.‐based or the European‐based search engines. As well, there was little change observed in the percentage of one‐term queries over the years of study for either the U.S.‐based or the European‐based search engines. Few users (generally less than 20% use Boolean or other operators in their queries, and these percentages have remained relatively stable. One area of noticeable change is in the percentage of users viewing only one results page, which has increased over the years of study. Based on the studies of the U.S.‐based search engines, the topical categories of ‘People, Place or Things’ and ‘Commerce, Travel, Employment or Economy’ are becoming more popular, while the categories of ‘Sex and Pornography’ and ‘Entertainment or Recreation’ are declining. Conclusions – The percentage of users viewing only one results page increased during the years of the study, while the percentages of single query sessions, oneterm sessions and operator usage remained stable. The increase in single result page viewing

Cardiac Resynchronization Therapy Online: What Patients Find when Searching the World Wide Web.

Science.gov (United States)

Modi, Minal; Laskar, Nabila; Modi, Bhavik N

2016-06-01

To objectively assess the quality of information available on the World Wide Web on cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT). Patients frequently search the internet regarding their healthcare issues. It has been shown that patients seeking information can help or hinder their healthcare outcomes depending on the quality of information consulted. On the internet, this information can be produced and published by anyone, resulting in the risk of patients accessing inaccurate and misleading information. The search term "Cardiac Resynchronisation Therapy" was entered into the three most popular search engines and the first 50 pages on each were pooled and analyzed, after excluding websites inappropriate for objective review. The "LIDA" instrument (a validated tool for assessing quality of healthcare information websites) was to generate scores on Accessibility, Reliability, and Usability. Readability was assessed using the Flesch Reading Ease Score (FRES). Of the 150 web-links, 41 sites met the eligibility criteria. The sites were assessed using the LIDA instrument and the FRES. A mean total LIDA score for all the websites assessed was 123.5 of a possible 165 (74.8%). The average Accessibility of the sites assessed was 50.1 of 60 (84.3%), on Usability 41.4 of 54 (76.6%), on Reliability 31.5 of 51 (61.7%), and 41.8 on FRES. There was a significant variability among sites and interestingly, there was no correlation between the sites' search engine ranking and their scores. This study has illustrated the variable quality of online material on the topic of CRT. Furthermore, there was also no apparent correlation between highly ranked, popular websites and their quality. Healthcare professionals should be encouraged to guide their patients toward the online material that contains reliable information. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Personalization of Rule-based Web Services.

Science.gov (United States)

Choi, Okkyung; Han, Sang Yong

2008-04-04

Nowadays Web users have clearly expressed their wishes to receive personalized services directly. Personalization is the way to tailor services directly to the immediate requirements of the user. However, the current Web Services System does not provide any features supporting this such as consideration of personalization of services and intelligent matchmaking. In this research a flexible, personalized Rule-based Web Services System to address these problems and to enable efficient search, discovery and construction across general Web documents and Semantic Web documents in a Web Services System is proposed. This system utilizes matchmaking among service requesters', service providers' and users' preferences using a Rule-based Search Method, and subsequently ranks search results. A prototype of efficient Web Services search and construction for the suggested system is developed based on the current work.

ACCOUNTING FOR USERS' INFLATED ASSESSMENTS OF ONLINE CATALOG SEARCH PERFORMANCE AND USEFULNESS: AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Charles R. Hildreth

2001-01-01

Full Text Available User-oriented approaches to information retrieval (IR system performance evaluation assign a major role to user satisfaction with search results and overall system performance. Expressed satisfaction with search results is often used as a measure of utility. Many research studies indicate that users of on-line library catalogs (OPACs and other IR systems often express satisfaction with poor search results. This phenomenon of "false positives," inflated assessments of search results and system performance, has not been adequately explained. Non-performance factors such as interface style and ease of use may have an affect on a searcher's satisfaction with search results. The research described in this report investigates this phenomenon. This paper presents the findings of an experimental study which compared users' search performance and assessments of ease of use, system usefulness, and satisfaction with search results after use of a Web OPAC or its conventional counterpart. The primary questions addressed by this research center on the influence of two experimental factors, OPAC search interface style and search task level of difficulty, on the dependent variables: actual search performance, perceptions of ease of use and system usefulness, and assessments of satisfaction with search results. The study also investigated associations between perceived ease of use, system usefulness, and satisfaction with search results. Lastly, the study looked for associations between the dependent variables and personal characteristics. No association was found between satisfaction with search results and actual search performance. Web OPAC searchers outperformed Text OPAC searchers, but search task level of difficulty is a major determinant of search success. A strong positive correlation was found between perceptions of system ease of use and assessments of search results.

Intelligent Search Optimization using Artificial Fuzzy Logics

OpenAIRE

Manral, Jai

2015-01-01

Information on the web is prodigious; searching relevant information is difficult making web users to rely on search engines for finding relevant information on the web. Search engines index and categorize web pages according to their contents using crawlers and rank them accordingly. For given user query they retrieve millions of webpages and display them to users according to web-page rank. Every search engine has their own algorithms based on certain parameters for ranking web-pages. Searc...

Web Content Search and Adaptation for IDTV: One Step Forward in the Mediamorphosis Process toward Personal-TV

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Stefano Ferretti

2007-01-01

Full Text Available We are on the threshold of a mediamorphosis that will revolutionize the way we interact with our TV sets. The combination between interactive digital TV (IDTV and the Web fosters the development of new interactive multimedia services enjoyable even through a TV screen and a remote control. Yet, several design constraints complicate the deployment of this new pattern of services. Prominent unresolved issues involve macro-problems such as collecting information on the Web based on users' preferences and appropriately presenting retrieved Web contents on the TV screen. To this aim, we propose a system able to dynamically convey contents from the Web to IDTV systems. Our system presents solutions both for personalized Web content search and automatic TV-format adaptation of retrieved documents. As we demonstrate through two case study applications, our system merges the best of IDTV and Web domains spinning the TV mediamorphosis toward the creation of the personal-TV concept.

A Taxonomic Search Engine: federating taxonomic databases using web services.

Science.gov (United States)

Page, Roderic D M

2005-03-09

The taxonomic name of an organism is a key link between different databases that store information on that organism. However, in the absence of a single, comprehensive database of organism names, individual databases lack an easy means of checking the correctness of a name. Furthermore, the same organism may have more than one name, and the same name may apply to more than one organism. The Taxonomic Search Engine (TSE) is a web application written in PHP that queries multiple taxonomic databases (ITIS, Index Fungorum, IPNI, NCBI, and uBIO) and summarises the results in a consistent format. It supports "drill-down" queries to retrieve a specific record. The TSE can optionally suggest alternative spellings the user can try. It also acts as a Life Science Identifier (LSID) authority for the source taxonomic databases, providing globally unique identifiers (and associated metadata) for each name. The Taxonomic Search Engine is available at http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/portal/ and provides a simple demonstration of the potential of the federated approach to providing access to taxonomic names.

Discovering Land Cover Web Map Services from the Deep Web with JavaScript Invocation Rules

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Dongyang Hou

2016-06-01

Full Text Available Automatic discovery of isolated land cover web map services (LCWMSs can potentially help in sharing land cover data. Currently, various search engine-based and crawler-based approaches have been developed for finding services dispersed throughout the surface web. In fact, with the prevalence of geospatial web applications, a considerable number of LCWMSs are hidden in JavaScript code, which belongs to the deep web. However, discovering LCWMSs from JavaScript code remains an open challenge. This paper aims to solve this challenge by proposing a focused deep web crawler for finding more LCWMSs from deep web JavaScript code and the surface web. First, the names of a group of JavaScript links are abstracted as initial judgements. Through name matching, these judgements are utilized to judge whether or not the fetched webpages contain predefined JavaScript links that may prompt JavaScript code to invoke WMSs. Secondly, some JavaScript invocation functions and URL formats for WMS are summarized as JavaScript invocation rules from prior knowledge of how WMSs are employed and coded in JavaScript. These invocation rules are used to identify the JavaScript code for extracting candidate WMSs through rule matching. The above two operations are incorporated into a traditional focused crawling strategy situated between the tasks of fetching webpages and parsing webpages. Thirdly, LCWMSs are selected by matching services with a set of land cover keywords. Moreover, a search engine for LCWMSs is implemented that uses the focused deep web crawler to retrieve and integrate the LCWMSs it discovers. In the first experiment, eight online geospatial web applications serve as seed URLs (Uniform Resource Locators and crawling scopes; the proposed crawler addresses only the JavaScript code in these eight applications. All 32 available WMSs hidden in JavaScript code were found using the proposed crawler, while not one WMS was discovered through the focused crawler

General vs health specialized search engine: a blind comparative evaluation of top search results.

Science.gov (United States)

Pletneva, Natalia; Ruiz de Castaneda, Rafael; Baroz, Frederic; Boyer, Celia

2014-01-01

This paper presents the results of a blind comparison of top ten search results retrieved by Google.ch (French) and Khresmoi for everyone, a health specialized search engine. Participants--students of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Geneva had to complete three tasks and select their preferred results. The majority of the participants have largely preferred Google results while Khresmoi results showed potential to compete in specific topics. The coverage of the results seems to be one of the reasons. The second being that participants do not know how to select quality and transparent health web pages. More awareness, tools and education about the matter is required for the students of Medicine to be able to efficiently distinguish trustworthy online health information.

An Exploratory Study on the Re-finding Behavior on the Web

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Hsiao-Tieh Pu

2010-06-01

Full Text Available It is common for users to relocate information previously found on the web. However, their search behaviors in initial finding and the subsequent re-finding may differ due to the dynamic nature and contextual diversity of the web. This study used experiment, observation, interview, and questionnaires to investigate the characteristics of re-finding behavior and compare users’ performance in finding and re-finding. Though not significantly different, the study participants used more search tools, combined various strategies to obtain contextual clues of finding process, utilized more complex search tactics, and had more interactions with search engines used. Findings also show that participants spent less time in re-finding than in finding, yet the cognitive loading and difficulties increased in re-finding. Participants were satisfied with the results obtained in re-finding, but they also claimed that the search performance would be better if the system offered more functions to support recall of previous search results. Participants’ satisfaction with search performance also varied by task type. Based on the findings, this study recommends that re-finding efficiency may be improved by enhancing recall functionalities in browsers and by using personal information management tools. [Article content in Chinese; Extended abstract in English

PcapDB: Search Optimized Packet Capture, Version 0.1.0.0

Energy Technology Data Exchange (ETDEWEB)

2016-11-04

PcapDB is a packet capture system designed to optimize the captured data for fast search in the typical (network incident response) use case. The technology involved in this software has been submitted via the IDEAS system and has been filed as a provisional patent. It includes the following primary components: capture: The capture component utilizes existing capture libraries to retrieve packets from network interfaces. Once retrieved the packets are passed to additional threads for sorting into flows and indexing. The sorted flows and indexes are passed to other threads so that they can be written to disk. These components are written in the C programming language. search: The search components provide a means to find relevant flows and the associated packets. A search query is parsed and represented as a search tree. Various search commands, written in C, are then used resolve this tree into a set of search results. The tree generation and search execution management components are written in python. interface: The PcapDB web interface is written in Python on the Django framework. It provides a series of pages, API's, and asynchronous tasks that allow the user to manage the capture system, perform searches, and retrieve results. Web page components are written in HTML,CSS and Javascript.

More insight into the interplay of response selection and visual attention in dual-tasks: masked visual search and response selection are performed in parallel.

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Reimer, Christina B; Schubert, Torsten

2017-09-15

Both response selection and visual attention are limited in capacity. According to the central bottleneck model, the response selection processes of two tasks in a dual-task situation are performed sequentially. In conjunction search, visual attention is required to select the items and to bind their features (e.g., color and form), which results in a serial search process. Search time increases as items are added to the search display (i.e., set size effect). When the search display is masked, visual attention deployment is restricted to a brief period of time and target detection decreases as a function of set size. Here, we investigated whether response selection and visual attention (i.e., feature binding) rely on a common or on distinct capacity limitations. In four dual-task experiments, participants completed an auditory Task 1 and a conjunction search Task 2 that were presented with an experimentally modulated temporal interval between them (Stimulus Onset Asynchrony, SOA). In Experiment 1, Task 1 was a two-choice discrimination task and the conjunction search display was not masked. In Experiment 2, the response selection difficulty in Task 1 was increased to a four-choice discrimination and the search task was the same as in Experiment 1. We applied the locus-of-slack method in both experiments to analyze conjunction search time, that is, we compared the set size effects across SOAs. Similar set size effects across SOAs (i.e., additive effects of SOA and set size) would indicate sequential processing of response selection and visual attention. However, a significantly smaller set size effect at short SOA compared to long SOA (i.e., underadditive interaction of SOA and set size) would indicate parallel processing of response selection and visual attention. In both experiments, we found underadditive interactions of SOA and set size. In Experiments 3 and 4, the conjunction search display in Task 2 was masked. Task 1 was the same as in Experiments 1 and 2

Designing learning management system interoperability in semantic web

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Anistyasari, Y.; Sarno, R.; Rochmawati, N.

2018-01-01

The extensive adoption of learning management system (LMS) has set the focus on the interoperability requirement. Interoperability is the ability of different computer systems, applications or services to communicate, share and exchange data, information, and knowledge in a precise, effective and consistent way. Semantic web technology and the use of ontologies are able to provide the required computational semantics and interoperability for the automation of tasks in LMS. The purpose of this study is to design learning management system interoperability in the semantic web which currently has not been investigated deeply. Moodle is utilized to design the interoperability. Several database tables of Moodle are enhanced and some features are added. The semantic web interoperability is provided by exploited ontology in content materials. The ontology is further utilized as a searching tool to match user’s queries and available courses. It is concluded that LMS interoperability in Semantic Web is possible to be performed.

Federated Search in the Wild: the combined power of over a hundred search engines

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Nguyen, Dong-Phuong; Demeester, Thomas; Trieschnigg, Rudolf Berend; Hiemstra, Djoerd

2012-01-01

Federated search has the potential of improving web search: the user becomes less dependent on a single search provider and parts of the deep web become available through a unified interface, leading to a wider variety in the retrieved search results. However, a publicly available dataset for

Performance on the Hamilton search task, and the influence of lateralization, in captive orange-winged Amazon parrots (Amazona amazonica).

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Cussen, Victoria A; Mench, Joy A

2014-07-01

Psittacines are generally considered to possess cognitive abilities comparable to those of primates. Most psittacine research has evaluated performance on standardized complex cognition tasks, but studies of basic cognitive processes are limited. We tested orange-winged Amazon parrots (Amazona amazonica) on a spatial foraging assessment, the Hamilton search task. This task is a standardized test used in human and non-human primate studies. It has multiple phases, which require trial and error learning, learning set breaking, and spatial memory. We investigated search strategies used to complete the task, cognitive flexibility, and long-term memory for the task. We also assessed the effects of individual strength of motor lateralization (foot preference) and sex on task performance. Almost all (92%) of the parrots acquired the task. All had significant foot preferences, with 69% preferring their left foot, and showed side preferences contralateral to their preferred limb during location selection. The parrots were able to alter their search strategies when reward contingencies changed, demonstrating cognitive flexibility. They were also able to remember the task over a 6-month period. Lateralization had a significant influence on learning set acquisition but no effect on cognitive flexibility. There were no sex differences. To our knowledge, this is the first cognitive study using this particular species and one of the few studies of cognitive abilities in any Neotropical parrot species.

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) facilitates overall visual search response times but does not interact with visual search task factors.

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Sung, Kyongje; Gordon, Barry

2018-01-01

Whether transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) affects mental functions, and how any such effects arise from its neural effects, continue to be debated. We investigated whether tDCS applied over the visual cortex (Oz) with a vertex (Cz) reference might affect response times (RTs) in a visual search task. We also examined whether any significant tDCS effects would interact with task factors (target presence, discrimination difficulty, and stimulus brightness) that are known to selectively influence one or the other of the two information processing stages posited by current models of visual search. Based on additive factor logic, we expected that the pattern of interactions involving a significant tDCS effect could help us colocalize the tDCS effect to one (or both) of the processing stages. In Experiment 1 (n = 12), anodal tDCS improved RTs significantly; cathodal tDCS produced a nonsignificant trend toward improvement. However, there were no interactions between the anodal tDCS effect and target presence or discrimination difficulty. In Experiment 2 (n = 18), we manipulated stimulus brightness along with target presence and discrimination difficulty. Anodal and cathodal tDCS both produced significant improvements in RTs. Again, the tDCS effects did not interact with any of the task factors. In Experiment 3 (n = 16), electrodes were placed at Cz and on the upper arm, to test for a possible effect of incidental stimulation of the motor regions under Cz. No effect of tDCS on RTs was found. These findings strengthen the case for tDCS having real effects on cerebral information processing. However, these effects did not clearly arise from either of the two processing stages of the visual search process. We suggest that this is because tDCS has a DIFFUSE, pervasive action across the task-relevant neuroanatomical region(s), not a discrete effect in terms of information processing stages.

SearchResultFinder: federated search made easy

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Trieschnigg, Rudolf Berend; Tjin-Kam-Jet, Kien; Hiemstra, Djoerd

Building a federated search engine based on a large number existing web search engines is a challenge: implementing the programming interface (API) for each search engine is an exacting and time-consuming job. In this demonstration we present SearchResultFinder, a browser plugin which speeds up

News trends and web search query of HIV/AIDS in Hong Kong

Science.gov (United States)

Chiu, Alice P. Y.; Lin, Qianying

2017-01-01

Background The HIV epidemic in Hong Kong has worsened in recent years, with major contributions from high-risk subgroup of men who have sex with men (MSM). Internet use is prevalent among the majority of the local population, where they sought health information online. This study examines the impacts of HIV/AIDS and MSM news coverage on web search query in Hong Kong. Methods Relevant news coverage about HIV/AIDS and MSM from January 1st, 2004 to December 31st, 2014 was obtained from the WiseNews databse. News trends were created by computing the number of relevant articles by type, topic, place of origin and sub-populations. We then obtained relevant search volumes from Google and analysed causality between news trends and Google Trends using Granger Causality test and orthogonal impulse function. Results We found that editorial news has an impact on “HIV” Google searches on HIV, with the search term popularity peaking at an average of two weeks after the news are published. Similarly, editorial news has an impact on the frequency of “AIDS” searches two weeks after. MSM-related news trends have a more fluctuating impact on “MSM” Google searches, although the time lag varies anywhere from one week later to ten weeks later. Conclusions This infodemiological study shows that there is a positive impact of news trends on the online search behavior of HIV/AIDS or MSM-related issues for up to ten weeks after. Health promotional professionals could make use of this brief time window to tailor the timing of HIV awareness campaigns and public health interventions to maximise its reach and effectiveness. PMID:28922376

INTERFACING GOOGLE SEARCH ENGINE TO CAPTURE USER WEB SEARCH BEHAVIOR

OpenAIRE

Fadhilah Mat Yamin; T. Ramayah

2013-01-01

The behaviour of the searcher when using the search engine especially during the query formulation is crucial. Search engines capture users’ activities in the search log, which is stored at the search engine server. Due to the difficulty of obtaining this search log, this paper proposed and develops an interface framework to interface a Google search engine. This interface will capture users’ queries before redirect them to Google. The analysis of the search log will show that users are utili...

The Web as Information Source: a Case Study on the Impact of Internet Search Lessons

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Chiara Ravagni

2010-09-01

Full Text Available The use of the Web by students has increased more and more and it has become the most recurring way to find quick information for educational purposes. Given the lack, in Italy, of thorough programs for the integration of Information Literacy and Internet searches in schools and universities, the adults who are now using it are almost always self-taught. Consequently, many different approaches to the medium have spread, and with them an objective difficulty in planning Internet-research courses, since everyone has his/her own way to search and a unique perception of his/her search skills. That’s why delivering a course where every participant is forced to follow the same learning path may originate feelings of frustration, unease, or boredom, thus reducing the learning potential offered by the course. This research focuses on the Internet Search side of Information Literacy and analyzes the impact of short lessons on first and second year university students in Education at the University of Bolzano, Italy. The students are either native German-speakers or native Italian-speakers, and the research focuses, in an European perspective, on the differences in their Internet-research approaches as well. The first phase consists in interviews and test (the logs of the internet sessions are recorded by a software to find out the perception of reliability of the Internet information and the way to find it by the students. The second phase is the course in itself, which focuses on Boolean operators, information retrieval theories and exercises, and evaluation of web pages. After the course the students are interviewed and tested again, to check if their approach to internet research has changed and in which way. The results can be used to plan courses on Information Literacy and Internet Search with individualized programs, or to propose methods to assess the learning in this field.

Using Virtual Reality for Task-Based Exercises in Teaching Non-Traditional Students of German

Science.gov (United States)

Libbon, Stephanie

2004-01-01

Using task-based exercises that required web searches and online activities, this course introduced non-traditional students to the sights and sounds of the German culture and language and simultaneously to computer technology. Through partner work that required negotiation of the net as well as of the language, these adult beginning German…

Experience of Developing a Meta-Semantic Search Engine

OpenAIRE

Mukhopadhyay, Debajyoti; Sharma, Manoj; Joshi, Gajanan; Pagare, Trupti; Palwe, Adarsha

2013-01-01

Thinking of todays web search scenario which is mainly keyword based, leads to the need of effective and meaningful search provided by Semantic Web. Existing search engines are vulnerable to provide relevant answers to users query due to their dependency on simple data available in web pages. On other hand, semantic search engines provide efficient and relevant results as the semantic web manages information with well defined meaning using ontology. A Meta-Search engine is a search tool that ...

Web search behavior and information needs of people with multiple sclerosis: focus group study and analysis of online postings.

Science.gov (United States)

Colombo, Cinzia; Mosconi, Paola; Confalonieri, Paolo; Baroni, Isabella; Traversa, Silvia; Hill, Sophie J; Synnot, Anneliese J; Oprandi, Nadia; Filippini, Graziella

2014-07-24

Multiple sclerosis (MS) patients and their family members increasingly seek health information on the Internet. There has been little exploration of how MS patients integrate health information with their needs, preferences, and values for decision making. The INtegrating and Deriving Evidence, Experiences, and Preferences (IN-DEEP) project is a collaboration between Italian and Australian researchers and MS patients, aimed to make high-quality evidence accessible and meaningful to MS patients and families, developing a Web-based resource of evidence-based information starting from their information needs. The objective of this study was to analyze MS patients and their family members' experience about the Web-based health information, to evaluate how they asses this information, and how they integrate health information with personal values. We organized 6 focus groups, 3 with MS patients and 3 with family members, in the Northern, Central, and Southern parts of Italy (April-June 2011). They included 40 MS patients aged between 18 and 60, diagnosed as having MS at least 3 months earlier, and 20 family members aged 18 and over, being relatives of a person with at least a 3-months MS diagnosis. The focus groups were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim (Atlas software, V 6.0). Data were analyzed from a conceptual point of view through a coding system. An online forum was hosted by the Italian MS society on its Web platform to widen the collection of information. Nine questions were posted covering searching behavior, use of Web-based information, truthfulness of Web information. At the end, posts were downloaded and transcribed. Information needs covered a comprehensive communication of diagnosis, prognosis, and adverse events of treatments, MS causes or risk factors, new drugs, practical, and lifestyle-related information. The Internet is considered useful by MS patients, however, at the beginning or in a later stage of the disease a refusal to actively search

A Taxonomic Search Engine: Federating taxonomic databases using web services

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Page Roderic DM

2005-03-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background The taxonomic name of an organism is a key link between different databases that store information on that organism. However, in the absence of a single, comprehensive database of organism names, individual databases lack an easy means of checking the correctness of a name. Furthermore, the same organism may have more than one name, and the same name may apply to more than one organism. Results The Taxonomic Search Engine (TSE is a web application written in PHP that queries multiple taxonomic databases (ITIS, Index Fungorum, IPNI, NCBI, and uBIO and summarises the results in a consistent format. It supports "drill-down" queries to retrieve a specific record. The TSE can optionally suggest alternative spellings the user can try. It also acts as a Life Science Identifier (LSID authority for the source taxonomic databases, providing globally unique identifiers (and associated metadata for each name. Conclusion The Taxonomic Search Engine is available at http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/portal/ and provides a simple demonstration of the potential of the federated approach to providing access to taxonomic names.

WebScipio: An online tool for the determination of gene structures using protein sequences

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Waack Stephan

2008-09-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Obtaining the gene structure for a given protein encoding gene is an important step in many analyses. A software suited for this task should be readily accessible, accurate, easy to handle and should provide the user with a coherent representation of the most probable gene structure. It should be rigorous enough to optimise features on the level of single bases and at the same time flexible enough to allow for cross-species searches. Results WebScipio, a web interface to the Scipio software, allows a user to obtain the corresponding coding sequence structure of a here given a query protein sequence that belongs to an already assembled eukaryotic genome. The resulting gene structure is presented in various human readable formats like a schematic representation, and a detailed alignment of the query and the target sequence highlighting any discrepancies. WebScipio can also be used to identify and characterise the gene structures of homologs in related organisms. In addition, it offers a web service for integration with other programs. Conclusion WebScipio is a tool that allows users to get a high-quality gene structure prediction from a protein query. It offers more than 250 eukaryotic genomes that can be searched and produces predictions that are close to what can be achieved by manual annotation, for in-species and cross-species searches alike. WebScipio is freely accessible at http://www.webscipio.org.

Effects of organizational scheme and labeling on task performance in product-centered and user-centered retail Web sites.

Science.gov (United States)

Resnick, Marc L; Sanchez, Julian

2004-01-01

As companies increase the quantity of information they provide through their Web sites, it is critical that content is structured with an appropriate architecture. However, resource constraints often limit the ability of companies to apply all Web design principles completely. This study quantifies the effects of two major information architecture principles in a controlled study that isolates the incremental effects of organizational scheme and labeling on user performance and satisfaction. Sixty participants with a wide range of Internet and on-line shopping experience were recruited to complete a series of shopping tasks on a prototype retail shopping Web site. User-centered labels provided a significant benefit in performance and satisfaction over labels obtained through company-centered methods. User-centered organization did not result in improved performance except when the label quality was poor. Significant interactions suggest specific guidelines for allocating resources in Web site design. Applications of this research include the design of Web sites for any commercial application, particularly E-commerce.

Visual Information and Support Surface for Postural Control in Visual Search Task.

Science.gov (United States)

Huang, Chia-Chun; Yang, Chih-Mei

2016-10-01

When standing on a reduced support surface, people increase their reliance on visual information to control posture. This assertion was tested in the current study. The effects of imposed motion and support surface on postural control during visual search were investigated. Twelve participants (aged 21 ± 1.8 years; six men and six women) stood on a reduced support surface (45% base of support). In a room that moved back and forth along the anteroposterior axis, participants performed visual search for a given letter in an article. Postural sway variability and head-room coupling were measured. The results of head-room coupling, but not postural sway, supported the assertion that people increase reliance on visual information when standing on a reduced support surface. Whether standing on a whole or reduced surface, people stabilized their posture to perform the visual search tasks. Compared to a fixed target, searching on a hand-held target showed greater head-room coupling when standing on a reduced surface. © The Author(s) 2016.

Biometric recognition via texture features of eye movement trajectories in a visual searching task.

Science.gov (United States)

Li, Chunyong; Xue, Jiguo; Quan, Cheng; Yue, Jingwei; Zhang, Chenggang

2018-01-01

Biometric recognition technology based on eye-movement dynamics has been in development for more than ten years. Different visual tasks, feature extraction and feature recognition methods are proposed to improve the performance of eye movement biometric system. However, the correct identification and verification rates, especially in long-term experiments, as well as the effects of visual tasks and eye trackers' temporal and spatial resolution are still the foremost considerations in eye movement biometrics. With a focus on these issues, we proposed a new visual searching task for eye movement data collection and a new class of eye movement features for biometric recognition. In order to demonstrate the improvement of this visual searching task being used in eye movement biometrics, three other eye movement feature extraction methods were also tested on our eye movement datasets. Compared with the original results, all three methods yielded better results as expected. In addition, the biometric performance of these four feature extraction methods was also compared using the equal error rate (EER) and Rank-1 identification rate (Rank-1 IR), and the texture features introduced in this paper were ultimately shown to offer some advantages with regard to long-term stability and robustness over time and spatial precision. Finally, the results of different combinations of these methods with a score-level fusion method indicated that multi-biometric methods perform better in most cases.

Usability Evaluation of Public Web Mapping Sites

Science.gov (United States)

Wang, C.

2014-04-01

Web mapping sites are interactive maps that are accessed via Webpages. With the rapid development of Internet and Geographic Information System (GIS) field, public web mapping sites are not foreign to people. Nowadays, people use these web mapping sites for various reasons, in that increasing maps and related map services of web mapping sites are freely available for end users. Thus, increased users of web mapping sites led to more usability studies. Usability Engineering (UE), for instance, is an approach for analyzing and improving the usability of websites through examining and evaluating an interface. In this research, UE method was employed to explore usability problems of four public web mapping sites, analyze the problems quantitatively and provide guidelines for future design based on the test results. Firstly, the development progress for usability studies were described, and simultaneously several usability evaluation methods such as Usability Engineering (UE), User-Centered Design (UCD) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) were generally introduced. Then the method and procedure of experiments for the usability test were presented in detail. In this usability evaluation experiment, four public web mapping sites (Google Maps, Bing maps, Mapquest, Yahoo Maps) were chosen as the testing websites. And 42 people, who having different GIS skills (test users or experts), gender (male or female), age and nationality, participated in this test to complete the several test tasks in different teams. The test comprised three parts: a pretest background information questionnaire, several test tasks for quantitative statistics and progress analysis, and a posttest questionnaire. The pretest and posttest questionnaires focused on gaining the verbal explanation of their actions qualitatively. And the design for test tasks targeted at gathering quantitative data for the errors and problems of the websites. Then, the results mainly from the test part were analyzed. The

From Foreground to Background: How Task-Neutral Context Influences Contextual Cueing of Visual Search

OpenAIRE

Zang, Xuelian; Geyer, Thomas; Assump??o, Leonardo; M?ller, Hermann J.; Shi, Zhuanghua

2016-01-01

Selective attention determines the effectiveness of implicit contextual learning (e.g., Jiang and Leung, 2005). Visual foreground-background segmentation, on the other hand, is a key process in the guidance of attention (Wolfe, 2003). In the present study, we examined the impact of foreground-background segmentation on contextual cueing of visual search in three experiments. A visual search display, consisting of distractor ‘L’s and a target ‘T’, was overlaid on a task-neutral cuboid on the s...

search GenBank: interactive orchestration and ad-hoc choreography of Web services in the exploration of the biomedical resources of the National Center For Biotechnology Information.

Science.gov (United States)

Mrozek, Dariusz; Małysiak-Mrozek, Bożena; Siążnik, Artur

2013-03-01

Due to the growing number of biomedical entries in data repositories of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), it is difficult to collect, manage and process all of these entries in one place by third-party software developers without significant investment in hardware and software infrastructure, its maintenance and administration. Web services allow development of software applications that integrate in one place the functionality and processing logic of distributed software components, without integrating the components themselves and without integrating the resources to which they have access. This is achieved by appropriate orchestration or choreography of available Web services and their shared functions. After the successful application of Web services in the business sector, this technology can now be used to build composite software tools that are oriented towards biomedical data processing. We have developed a new tool for efficient and dynamic data exploration in GenBank and other NCBI databases. A dedicated search GenBank system makes use of NCBI Web services and a package of Entrez Programming Utilities (eUtils) in order to provide extended searching capabilities in NCBI data repositories. In search GenBank users can use one of the three exploration paths: simple data searching based on the specified user's query, advanced data searching based on the specified user's query, and advanced data exploration with the use of macros. search GenBank orchestrates calls of particular tools available through the NCBI Web service providing requested functionality, while users interactively browse selected records in search GenBank and traverse between NCBI databases using available links. On the other hand, by building macros in the advanced data exploration mode, users create choreographies of eUtils calls, which can lead to the automatic discovery of related data in the specified databases. search GenBank extends standard capabilities of the

Face adaptation does not improve performance on search or discrimination tasks.

Science.gov (United States)

Ng, Minna; Boynton, Geoffrey M; Fine, Ione

2008-01-04

The face adaptation effect, as described by M. A. Webster and O. H. MacLin (1999), is a robust perceptual shift in the appearance of faces after a brief adaptation period. For example, prolonged exposure to Asian faces causes a Eurasian face to appear distinctly Caucasian. This adaptation effect has been documented for general configural effects, as well as for the facial properties of gender, ethnicity, expression, and identity. We began by replicating the finding that adaptation to ethnicity, gender, and a combination of both features induces selective shifts in category appearance. We then investigated whether this adaptation has perceptual consequences beyond a shift in the perceived category boundary by measuring the effects of adaptation on RSVP, spatial search, and discrimination tasks. Adaptation had no discernable effect on performance for any of these tasks.

An overview of biomedical literature search on the World Wide Web in the third millennium.

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Kumar, Prince; Goel, Roshni; Jain, Chandni; Kumar, Ashish; Parashar, Abhishek; Gond, Ajay Ratan

2012-06-01

Complete access to the existing pool of biomedical literature and the ability to "hit" upon the exact information of the relevant specialty are becoming essential elements of academic and clinical expertise. With the rapid expansion of the literature database, it is almost impossible to keep up to date with every innovation. Using the Internet, however, most people can freely access this literature at any time, from almost anywhere. This paper highlights the use of the Internet in obtaining valuable biomedical research information, which is mostly available from journals, databases, textbooks and e-journals in the form of web pages, text materials, images, and so on. The authors present an overview of web-based resources for biomedical researchers, providing information about Internet search engines (e.g., Google), web-based bibliographic databases (e.g., PubMed, IndMed) and how to use them, and other online biomedical resources that can assist clinicians in reaching well-informed clinical decisions.

Construction of web-based nutrition education contents and searching engine for usage of healthy menu of children

Science.gov (United States)

Lee, Tae-Kyong; Chung, Hea-Jung; Park, Hye-Kyung; Lee, Eun-Ju; Nam, Hye-Seon; Jung, Soon-Im; Cho, Jee-Ye; Lee, Jin-Hee; Kim, Gon; Kim, Min-Chan

2008-01-01

A diet habit, which is developed in childhood, lasts for a life time. In this sense, nutrition education and early exposure to healthy menus in childhood is important. Children these days have easy access to the internet. Thus, a web-based nutrition education program for children is an effective tool for nutrition education of children. This site provides the material of the nutrition education for children with characters which are personified nutrients. The 151 menus are stored in the site together with video script of the cooking process. The menus are classified by the criteria based on age, menu type and the ethnic origin of the menu. The site provides a search function. There are three kinds of search conditions which are key words, menu type and "between" expression of nutrients such as calorie and other nutrients. The site is developed with the operating system Windows 2003 Server, the web server ZEUS 5, development language JSP, and database management system Oracle 10 g. PMID:20126375

Intelligent Agent Based Semantic Web in Cloud Computing Environment

OpenAIRE

Mukhopadhyay, Debajyoti; Sharma, Manoj; Joshi, Gajanan; Pagare, Trupti; Palwe, Adarsha

2013-01-01

Considering today's web scenario, there is a need of effective and meaningful search over the web which is provided by Semantic Web. Existing search engines are keyword based. They are vulnerable in answering intelligent queries from the user due to the dependence of their results on information available in web pages. While semantic search engines provides efficient and relevant results as the semantic web is an extension of the current web in which information is given well defined meaning....

Exploring the academic invisible web

OpenAIRE

Lewandowski, Dirk; Mayr, Philipp

2006-01-01

Purpose: To provide a critical review of Bergman’s 2001 study on the Deep Web. In addition, we bring a new concept into the discussion, the Academic Invisible Web (AIW). We define the Academic Invisible Web as consisting of all databases and collections relevant to academia but not searchable by the general-purpose internet search engines. Indexing this part of the Invisible Web is central to scientific search engines. We provide an overview of approaches followed thus far. Design/methodol...

Sex differences in spatial memory using serial and search tasks.

Science.gov (United States)

Shah, Darshna S; Prados, Jose; Gamble, Jasmin; De Lillo, Carlo; Gibson, Claire L

2013-11-15

The present study assessed the spatial abilities of male and female human participants using different versions of the non-navigational Corsi block-tapping test (CBT) and a search task. Males performed significantly better than females on the standard manual version of the CBT; however, the standard CBT does not allow discrimination between spatial memory span and the role of spatial organisational factors (structure, path length and presence of crossings) in the sequences to recall. These organisational factors were assessed, therefore, in an experiment in which 7-block-sequences had to be recalled in a computerised version of the CBT. No sex differences in performance were observed on the computerised CBT, indicating that males do not make better use of spatial organisational principles. Accordingly, sex differences observed in the manual CBT are likely to rely upon differences in memory span between males and females. In the search task, participants could locate a goal by reference to a Euclidian space (the geometry of a virtual enclose) or to proximal non-geometric cues. Both male and female participants showed a preference for the non-geometric cues, which overshadowed learning about the geometric cues when the two sets were available simultaneously during the training stage. These results indicate that sex differences do exist in those tests which are dependent on memory span. Sex differences were absent, however, in spatial organisational skills or in the usage of Euclidian and egocentric strategies to solve problems relying on spatial ability. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

From Foreground to Background: How Task-Neutral Context Influences Contextual Cueing of Visual Search.

Science.gov (United States)

Zang, Xuelian; Geyer, Thomas; Assumpção, Leonardo; Müller, Hermann J; Shi, Zhuanghua

2016-01-01

Selective attention determines the effectiveness of implicit contextual learning (e.g., Jiang and Leung, 2005). Visual foreground-background segmentation, on the other hand, is a key process in the guidance of attention (Wolfe, 2003). In the present study, we examined the impact of foreground-background segmentation on contextual cueing of visual search in three experiments. A visual search display, consisting of distractor 'L's and a target 'T', was overlaid on a task-neutral cuboid on the same depth plane (Experiment 1), on stereoscopically separated depth planes (Experiment 2), or spread over the entire display on the same depth plane (Experiment 3). Half of the search displays contained repeated target-distractor arrangements, whereas the other half was always newly generated. The task-neutral cuboid was constant during an initial training session, but was either rotated by 90° or entirely removed in the subsequent test sessions. We found that the gains resulting from repeated presentation of display arrangements during training (i.e., contextual-cueing effects) were diminished when the cuboid was changed or removed in Experiment 1, but remained intact in Experiments 2 and 3 when the cuboid was placed in a different depth plane, or when the items were randomly spread over the whole display but not on the edges of the cuboid. These findings suggest that foreground-background segmentation occurs prior to contextual learning, and only objects/arrangements that are grouped as foreground are learned over the course of repeated visual search.

Integration of Web mining and web crawler: Relevance and State of Art

OpenAIRE

Subhendu kumar pani; Deepak Mohapatra,; Bikram Keshari Ratha

2010-01-01

This study presents the role of web crawler in web mining environment. As the growth of the World Wide Web exceeded all expectations,the research on Web mining is growing more and more.web mining research topic which combines two of the activated research areas: Data Mining and World Wide Web .So, the World Wide Web is a very advanced area for data mining research. Search engines that are based on web crawling framework also used in web mining to find theinteracted web pages. This paper discu...

Googling DNA sequences on the World Wide Web.

Science.gov (United States)

Hajibabaei, Mehrdad; Singer, Gregory A C

2009-11-10

New web-based technologies provide an excellent opportunity for sharing and accessing information and using web as a platform for interaction and collaboration. Although several specialized tools are available for analyzing DNA sequence information, conventional web-based tools have not been utilized for bioinformatics applications. We have developed a novel algorithm and implemented it for searching species-specific genomic sequences, DNA barcodes, by using popular web-based methods such as Google. We developed an alignment independent character based algorithm based on dividing a sequence library (DNA barcodes) and query sequence to words. The actual search is conducted by conventional search tools such as freely available Google Desktop Search. We implemented our algorithm in two exemplar packages. We developed pre and post-processing software to provide customized input and output services, respectively. Our analysis of all publicly available DNA barcode sequences shows a high accuracy as well as rapid results. Our method makes use of conventional web-based technologies for specialized genetic data. It provides a robust and efficient solution for sequence search on the web. The integration of our search method for large-scale sequence libraries such as DNA barcodes provides an excellent web-based tool for accessing this information and linking it to other available categories of information on the web.

Efficiently Selecting the Best Web Services

Science.gov (United States)

Goncalves, Marlene; Vidal, Maria-Esther; Regalado, Alfredo; Yacoubi Ayadi, Nadia

Emerging technologies and linking data initiatives have motivated the publication of a large number of datasets, and provide the basis for publishing Web services and tools to manage the available data. This wealth of resources opens a world of possibilities to satisfy user requests. However, Web services may have similar functionality and assess different performance; therefore, it is required to identify among the Web services that satisfy a user request, the ones with the best quality. In this paper we propose a hybrid approach that combines reasoning tasks with ranking techniques to aim at the selection of the Web services that best implement a user request. Web service functionalities are described in terms of input and output attributes annotated with existing ontologies, non-functionality is represented as Quality of Services (QoS) parameters, and user requests correspond to conjunctive queries whose sub-goals impose restrictions on the functionality and quality of the services to be selected. The ontology annotations are used in different reasoning tasks to infer service implicit properties and to augment the size of the service search space. Furthermore, QoS parameters are considered by a ranking metric to classify the services according to how well they meet a user non-functional condition. We assume that all the QoS parameters of the non-functional condition are equally important, and apply the Top-k Skyline approach to select the k services that best meet this condition. Our proposal relies on a two-fold solution which fires a deductive-based engine that performs different reasoning tasks to discover the services that satisfy the requested functionality, and an efficient implementation of the Top-k Skyline approach to compute the top-k services that meet the majority of the QoS constraints. Our Top-k Skyline solution exploits the properties of the Skyline Frequency metric and identifies the top-k services by just analyzing a subset of the services that

EPA Web Taxonomy

Data.gov (United States)

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency — EPA's Web Taxonomy is a faceted hierarchical vocabulary used to tag web pages with terms from a controlled vocabulary. Tagging enables search and discovery of EPA's...

Comparing image search behaviour in the ARRS GoldMiner search engine and a clinical PACS/RIS.

Science.gov (United States)

De-Arteaga, Maria; Eggel, Ivan; Do, Bao; Rubin, Daniel; Kahn, Charles E; Müller, Henning

2015-08-01

underrepresented, therefore RadLex was considered to be the best option for this task. The results show a surprising similarity between the usage behaviour in the two systems, but several subtle differences can also be noted. The average number of terms per query is 2.21 for GoldMiner and 2.07 for radTF, the used axes of RadLex (anatomy, pathology, findings, …) have almost the same distribution with clinical findings being the most frequent and the anatomical entity the second; also, combinations of RadLex axes are extremely similar between the two systems. Differences include a longer length of the sessions in radTF than in GoldMiner (3.4 and 1.9 queries per session on average). Several frequent search terms overlap but some strong differences exist in the details. In radTF the term "normal" is frequent, whereas in GoldMiner it is not. This makes intuitive sense, as in the literature normal cases are rarely described whereas in clinical work the comparison with normal cases is often a first step. The general similarity in many points is likely due to the fact that users of the two systems are influenced by their daily behaviour in using standard web search engines and follow this behaviour in their professional search. This means that many results and insights gained from standard web search can likely be transferred to more specialized search systems. Still, specialized log files can be used to find out more on reformulations and detailed strategies of users to find the right content. Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Estimating Maintenance Cost for Web Applications

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ion IVAN

2016-01-01

Full Text Available The current paper tackles the issue of determining a method for estimating maintenance costs for web applications. The current state of research in the field of web application maintenance is summarized and leading theories and results are highlighted. The cost of web maintenance is determined by the number of man-hours invested in maintenance tasks. Web maintenance tasks are categorized into content maintenance and technical maintenance. Research is centered on analyzing technical maintenance tasks. The research hypothesis is formulated on the assumption that the number of man-hours invested in maintenance tasks can be assessed based on the web application’s user interaction level, complexity and content update effort. Data regarding the costs of maintenance tasks is collected from 24 maintenance projects implemented by a web development company that tackles a wide area of web applications. Homogeneity and diversity of collected data is submitted for debate by presenting a sample of the data and depicting the overall size and comprehensive nature of the entire dataset. A set of metrics dedicated to estimating maintenance costs in web applications is defined based on conclusions formulated by analyzing the collected data and the theories and practices dominating the current state of research. Metrics are validated with regards to the initial research hypothesis. Research hypothesis are validated and conclusions are formulated on the topic of estimating the maintenance cost of web applications. The limits of the research process which represented the basis for the current paper are enunciated. Future research topics are submitted for debate.

Effects of display set size and its variability on the event-related potentials during a visual search task

OpenAIRE

Miyatani, Makoto; Sakata, Sumiko

1999-01-01

This study investigated the effects of display set size and its variability on the event-related potentials (ERPs) during a visual search task. In Experiment 1, subjects were required to respond if a visual display, which consisted of two, four, or six alphabets, contained one of two members of memory set. In Experiment 2, subjects detected the change of the shape of a fixation stimulus, which was surrounded by the same alphabets as in Experiment 1. In the search task (Experiment 1), the incr...

Information Interaction Criteria Among Students in Process of Task-Based Information Searching (Role of Objective Complexity and Type of Product

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Marziyeh Saeedizadeh

2016-08-01

Full Text Available Purpose:  human-information interactions must be considered in order to be able to interactively design Information Retrieval Systems (IRS. In this regard, study of users’ interactions must be based on their socio-cultural context (specifically work tasks. Accordingly, this paper aims to explore the use of information-interaction criteria among students in the information searching process according to different kinds of their work tasks.  Methodology: This research is applied qualitative method using exploratory study. The research population consisted of MSc students of Ferdowsi university of Mashhad enrolled in 2012-13  academic year. In 3 stages of sampling (random stratified, quota, and voluntary sampling, 30 cases were selected. Each of these cases searched 6 different types of simulated work tasks. Interaction criteria were extracted ? Content analysis of aloud thinking reports. Validity of tools was verified through Faculties of KIS at Ferdowsi university of Mashhad. Also,0.78  Kripendorff’s alpha ratio based on an agreement between the inter – coder indicates the Dependability  of content analysis. Findings: The findings show that in addition to ‘topic’ criteria, other interaction criteria impact on information- interaction of users, such as: ‘search results ranking’, ‘domain knowledge of user’, ‘layout’, ‘type of information resource’ and etc. based on the level of objective complexity and product of  work tasks, information-interaction criteria change. Conclusion: the users pay attention to different information-interaction criteria in process of information searching, considering to variety of work tasks (level of objective complexity and product. So, it is necessary to pay attention to work task characteristics in order to design interactive and personalized IR systems.

Informing web-based communication curricula in veterinary education: a systematic review of web-based methods used for teaching and assessing clinical communication in medical education.

Science.gov (United States)

Artemiou, Elpida; Adams, Cindy L; Toews, Lorraine; Violato, Claudio; Coe, Jason B

2014-01-01

We determined the Web-based configurations that are applied to teach medical and veterinary communication skills, evaluated their effectiveness, and suggested future educational directions for Web-based communication teaching in veterinary education. We performed a systematic search of CAB Abstracts, MEDLINE, Scopus, and ERIC limited to articles published in English between 2000 and 2012. The review focused on medical or veterinary undergraduate to clinical- or residency-level students. We selected studies for which the study population was randomized to the Web-based learning (WBL) intervention with a post-test comparison with another WBL or non-WBL method and that reported at least one empirical outcome. Two independent reviewers completed relevancy screening, data extraction, and synthesis of results using Kirkpatrick and Kirkpatrick's framework. The search retrieved 1,583 articles, and 10 met the final inclusion criteria. We identified no published articles on Web based communication platforms in veterinary medicine; however, publications summarized from human medicine demonstrated that WBL provides a potentially reliable and valid approach for teaching and assessing communication skills. Student feedback on the use of virtual patients for teaching clinical communication skills has been positive,though evidence has suggested that practice with virtual patients prompted lower relation-building responses.Empirical outcomes indicate that WBL is a viable method for expanding the approach to teaching history taking and possibly to additional tasks of the veterinary medical interview.

How to Search the Internet Archive Without Indexing It

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Kanhabua, Nattiya; Kemkes, Philipp; Nejdl, Wolfgang

2016-01-01

Significant parts of our cultural heritage are produced on the Web in recent years. While the easy accessibility to the current Web is a good baseline, optimal access to the past of the Web faces several challenges. This includes dealing with large-scale web archive collections, as well as lacking...... search results to the WayBack Machine; thus al- lowing keyword search on the Internet Archive without processing and indexing its raw content. Our system complements existing web archive search tools through a user interface, which comes close to the functionalities of modern web search engines (e...

A Survey On Various Web Template Detection And Extraction Methods

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Neethu Mary Varghese

2015-03-01

Full Text Available Abstract In todays digital world reliance on the World Wide Web as a source of information is extensive. Users increasingly rely on web based search engines to provide accurate search results on a wide range of topics that interest them. The search engines in turn parse the vast repository of web pages searching for relevant information. However majority of web portals are designed using web templates which are designed to provide consistent look and feel to end users. The presence of these templates however can influence search results leading to inaccurate results being delivered to the users. Therefore to improve the accuracy and reliability of search results identification and removal of web templates from the actual content is essential. A wide range of approaches are commonly employed to achieve this and this paper focuses on the study of the various approaches of template detection and extraction that can be applied across homogenous as well as heterogeneous web pages.

From foreground to background: how task-neutral context influences contextual cueing of visual search

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Xuelian eZang

2016-06-01

Full Text Available Selective attention determines the effectiveness of implicit contextual learning (e.g., Jiang & Leung, 2005. Visual foreground-background segmentation, on the other hand, is a key process in the guidance of attention (Wolfe, 2003. In the present study, we examined the impact of foreground-background segmentation on contextual cueing of visual search in three experiments. A visual search display, consisting of distractor ‘L’s and a target ‘T’, was overlaid on a task-neutral cuboid on the same depth plane (Experiment 1, on stereoscopically separated depth planes (Experiment 2, or spread over the entire display on the same depth plane (Experiment 3. Half of the search displays contained repeated target-distractor arrangements, whereas the other half was always newly generated. The task-neutral cuboid was constant during an initial training session, but was either rotated by 90º or entirely removed in the subsequent test sessions. We found that the gains resulting from repeated presentation of display arrangements during training (i.e., contextual-cueing effects were diminished when the cuboid was changed or removed in Experiment 1, but remained intact in Experiments 2 and 3 when the cuboid was placed in a different depth plane, or when the items were randomly spread over the whole display but not on the edges of the cuboid. These findings suggest that foreground-background segmentation occurs prior to contextual learning, and only objects/arrangements that are grouped as foreground are learned over the course of repeated visual search.

From Foreground to Background: How Task-Neutral Context Influences Contextual Cueing of Visual Search

Science.gov (United States)

Zang, Xuelian; Geyer, Thomas; Assumpção, Leonardo; Müller, Hermann J.; Shi, Zhuanghua

2016-01-01

Selective attention determines the effectiveness of implicit contextual learning (e.g., Jiang and Leung, 2005). Visual foreground-background segmentation, on the other hand, is a key process in the guidance of attention (Wolfe, 2003). In the present study, we examined the impact of foreground-background segmentation on contextual cueing of visual search in three experiments. A visual search display, consisting of distractor ‘L’s and a target ‘T’, was overlaid on a task-neutral cuboid on the same depth plane (Experiment 1), on stereoscopically separated depth planes (Experiment 2), or spread over the entire display on the same depth plane (Experiment 3). Half of the search displays contained repeated target-distractor arrangements, whereas the other half was always newly generated. The task-neutral cuboid was constant during an initial training session, but was either rotated by 90° or entirely removed in the subsequent test sessions. We found that the gains resulting from repeated presentation of display arrangements during training (i.e., contextual-cueing effects) were diminished when the cuboid was changed or removed in Experiment 1, but remained intact in Experiments 2 and 3 when the cuboid was placed in a different depth plane, or when the items were randomly spread over the whole display but not on the edges of the cuboid. These findings suggest that foreground-background segmentation occurs prior to contextual learning, and only objects/arrangements that are grouped as foreground are learned over the course of repeated visual search. PMID:27375530

VisualRank: applying PageRank to large-scale image search.

Science.gov (United States)

Jing, Yushi; Baluja, Shumeet

2008-11-01

Because of the relative ease in understanding and processing text, commercial image-search systems often rely on techniques that are largely indistinguishable from text-search. Recently, academic studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of employing image-based features to provide alternative or additional signals. However, it remains uncertain whether such techniques will generalize to a large number of popular web queries, and whether the potential improvement to search quality warrants the additional computational cost. In this work, we cast the image-ranking problem into the task of identifying "authority" nodes on an inferred visual similarity graph and propose VisualRank to analyze the visual link structures among images. The images found to be "authorities" are chosen as those that answer the image-queries well. To understand the performance of such an approach in a real system, we conducted a series of large-scale experiments based on the task of retrieving images for 2000 of the most popular products queries. Our experimental results show significant improvement, in terms of user satisfaction and relevancy, in comparison to the most recent Google Image Search results. Maintaining modest computational cost is vital to ensuring that this procedure can be used in practice; we describe the techniques required to make this system practical for large scale deployment in commercial search engines.

Developing a Data Discovery Tool for Interdisciplinary Science: Leveraging a Web-based Mapping Application and Geosemantic Searching

Science.gov (United States)

Albeke, S. E.; Perkins, D. G.; Ewers, S. L.; Ewers, B. E.; Holbrook, W. S.; Miller, S. N.

2015-12-01

The sharing of data and results is paramount for advancing scientific research. The Wyoming Center for Environmental Hydrology and Geophysics (WyCEHG) is a multidisciplinary group that is driving scientific breakthroughs to help manage water resources in the Western United States. WyCEHG is mandated by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to share their data. However, the infrastructure from which to share such diverse, complex and massive amounts of data did not exist within the University of Wyoming. We developed an innovative framework to meet the data organization, sharing, and discovery requirements of WyCEHG by integrating both open and closed source software, embedded metadata tags, semantic web technologies, and a web-mapping application. The infrastructure uses a Relational Database Management System as the foundation, providing a versatile platform to store, organize, and query myriad datasets, taking advantage of both structured and unstructured formats. Detailed metadata are fundamental to the utility of datasets. We tag data with Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI's) to specify concepts with formal descriptions (i.e. semantic ontologies), thus allowing users the ability to search metadata based on the intended context rather than conventional keyword searches. Additionally, WyCEHG data are geographically referenced. Using the ArcGIS API for Javascript, we developed a web mapping application leveraging database-linked spatial data services, providing a means to visualize and spatially query available data in an intuitive map environment. Using server-side scripting (PHP), the mapping application, in conjunction with semantic search modules, dynamically communicates with the database and file system, providing access to available datasets. Our approach provides a flexible, comprehensive infrastructure from which to store and serve WyCEHG's highly diverse research-based data. This framework has not only allowed WyCEHG to meet its data stewardship

World Wide Web-based system for the calculation of substituent parameters and substituent similarity searches.

Science.gov (United States)

Ertl, P

1998-02-01

Easy to use, interactive, and platform-independent WWW-based tools are ideal for development of chemical applications. By using the newly emerging Web technologies such as Java applets and sophisticated scripting, it is possible to deliver powerful molecular processing capabilities directly to the desk of synthetic organic chemists. In Novartis Crop Protection in Basel, a Web-based molecular modelling system has been in use since 1995. In this article two new modules of this system are presented: a program for interactive calculation of important hydrophobic, electronic, and steric properties of organic substituents, and a module for substituent similarity searches enabling the identification of bioisosteric functional groups. Various possible applications of calculated substituent parameters are also discussed, including automatic design of molecules with the desired properties and creation of targeted virtual combinatorial libraries.

FindZebra: A search engine for rare diseases

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Dragusin, Radu; Petcu, Paula; Lioma, Christina Amalia

2013-01-01

Background: The web has become a primary information resource about illnesses and treatments for both medical and non-medical users. Standard web search is by far the most common interface for such information. It is therefore of interest to find out how well web search engines work for diagnostic...... approach for web search engines for rare disease diagnosis which includes 56 real life diagnostic cases, state-of-the-art evaluation measures, and curated information resources. In addition, we introduce FindZebra, a specialized (vertical) rare disease search engine. FindZebra is powered by open source...... medical concepts to demonstrate different ways of displaying the retrieved results to medical experts. Conclusions: Our results indicate that a specialized search engine can improve the diagnostic quality without compromising the ease of use of the currently widely popular web search engines. The proposed...

SUMO: operation and maintenance management web tool for astronomical observatories

Science.gov (United States)

Mujica-Alvarez, Emma; Pérez-Calpena, Ana; García-Vargas, María. Luisa

2014-08-01

SUMO is an Operation and Maintenance Management web tool, which allows managing the operation and maintenance activities and resources required for the exploitation of a complex facility. SUMO main capabilities are: information repository, assets and stock control, tasks scheduler, executed tasks archive, configuration and anomalies control and notification and users management. The information needed to operate and maintain the system must be initially stored at the tool database. SUMO shall automatically schedule the periodical tasks and facilitates the searching and programming of the non-periodical tasks. Tasks planning can be visualized in different formats and dynamically edited to be adjusted to the available resources, anomalies, dates and other constrains that can arise during daily operation. SUMO shall provide warnings to the users notifying potential conflicts related to the required personal availability or the spare stock for the scheduled tasks. To conclude, SUMO has been designed as a tool to help during the operation management of a scientific facility, and in particular an astronomical observatory. This is done by controlling all operating parameters: personal, assets, spare and supply stocks, tasks and time constrains.

Hand movement deviations in a visual search task with cross modal cuing

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Hürol Aslan

2007-01-01

Full Text Available The purpose of this study is to demonstrate the cross-modal effects of an auditory organization on a visual search task and to investigate the influence of the level of detail in instructions describing or hinting at the associations between auditory stimuli and the possible locations of a visual target. In addition to measuring the participants’ reaction times, we paid special attention to tracking the hand movements toward the target. According to the results, the auditory stimuli unassociated with the target locations slightly –but significantly- increased the deviation of the hand movement from the path leading to the target location. The increase in the deviation depended on the degree of association between auditory stimuli and target locations, albeit not on the level of detail in the instructions about the task.

Characteristics of scientific web publications

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Thorlund Jepsen, Erik; Seiden, Piet; Ingwersen, Peter Emil Rerup

2004-01-01

were generated based on specifically selected domain topics that are searched for in three publicly accessible search engines (Google, AllTheWeb, and AltaVista). A sample of the retrieved hits was analyzed with regard to how various publication attributes correlated with the scientific quality...... of the content and whether this information could be employed to harvest, filter, and rank Web publications. The attributes analyzed were inlinks, outlinks, bibliographic references, file format, language, search engine overlap, structural position (according to site structure), and the occurrence of various...... types of metadata. As could be expected, the ranked output differs between the three search engines. Apparently, this is caused by differences in ranking algorithms rather than the databases themselves. In fact, because scientific Web content in this subject domain receives few inlinks, both Alta...

In Search of the Optimal Path: How Learners at Task Use an Online Dictionary

Science.gov (United States)

Hamel, Marie-Josee

2012-01-01

We have analyzed circa 180 navigation paths followed by six learners while they performed three language encoding tasks at the computer using an online dictionary prototype. Our hypothesis was that learners who follow an "optimal path" while navigating within the dictionary, using its search and look-up functions, would have a high chance of…

Next-Gen Search Engines

Science.gov (United States)

Gupta, Amardeep

2005-01-01

Current search engines--even the constantly surprising Google--seem unable to leap the next big barrier in search: the trillions of bytes of dynamically generated data created by individual web sites around the world, or what some researchers call the "deep web." The challenge now is not information overload, but information overlook.…

Finding Web-Based Anxiety Interventions on the World Wide Web: A Scoping Review.

Science.gov (United States)

Ashford, Miriam Thiel; Olander, Ellinor K; Ayers, Susan

2016-06-01

One relatively new and increasingly popular approach of increasing access to treatment is Web-based intervention programs. The advantage of Web-based approaches is the accessibility, affordability, and anonymity of potentially evidence-based treatment. Despite much research evidence on the effectiveness of Web-based interventions for anxiety found in the literature, little is known about what is publically available for potential consumers on the Web. Our aim was to explore what a consumer searching the Web for Web-based intervention options for anxiety-related issues might find. The objectives were to identify currently publically available Web-based intervention programs for anxiety and to synthesize and review these in terms of (1) website characteristics such as credibility and accessibility; (2) intervention program characteristics such as intervention focus, design, and presentation modes; (3) therapeutic elements employed; and (4) published evidence of efficacy. Web keyword searches were carried out on three major search engines (Google, Bing, and Yahoo-UK platforms). For each search, the first 25 hyperlinks were screened for eligible programs. Included were programs that were designed for anxiety symptoms, currently publically accessible on the Web, had an online component, a structured treatment plan, and were available in English. Data were extracted for website characteristics, program characteristics, therapeutic characteristics, as well as empirical evidence. Programs were also evaluated using a 16-point rating tool. The search resulted in 34 programs that were eligible for review. A wide variety of programs for anxiety, including specific anxiety disorders, and anxiety in combination with stress, depression, or anger were identified and based predominantly on cognitive behavioral therapy techniques. The majority of websites were rated as credible, secure, and free of advertisement. The majority required users to register and/or to pay a program access

WebVis: a hierarchical web homepage visualizer

Science.gov (United States)

Renteria, Jose C.; Lodha, Suresh K.

2000-02-01

WebVis, the Hierarchical Web Home Page Visualizer, is a tool for managing home web pages. The user can access this tool via the WWW and obtain a hierarchical visualization of one's home web pages. WebVis is a real time interactive tool that supports many different queries on the statistics of internal files such as sizes, age, and type. In addition, statistics on embedded information such as VRML files, Java applets, images and sound files can be extracted and queried. Results of these queries are visualized using color, shape and size of different nodes of the hierarchy. The visualization assists the user in a variety of task, such as quickly finding outdated information or locate large files. WebVIs is one solution to the growing web space maintenance problem. Implementation of WebVis is realized with Perl and Java. Perl pattern matching and file handling routines are used to collect and process web space linkage information and web document information. Java utilizes the collected information to produce visualization of the web space. Java also provides WebVis with real time interactivity, while running off the WWW. Some WebVis examples of home web page visualization are presented.

Searching for Suicide Information on Web Search Engines in Chinese

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Yen-Feng Lee

2017-01-01

Full Text Available Introduction: Recently, suicide prevention has been an important public health issue. However, with the growing access to information in cyberspace, the harmful information is easily accessible online. To investigate the accessibility of potentially harmful suicide-related information on the internet, we discuss the following issue about searching suicide information on the internet to draw attention to it. Methods: We use five search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, Yam, and Sina and four suicide-related search queries (suicide, how to suicide, suicide methods, and want to die in traditional Chinese in April 2016. We classified the first thirty linkages of the search results on each search engine by a psychiatric doctor into suicide prevention, pro-suicide, neutral, unrelated to suicide, or error websites. Results: Among the total 352 unique websites generated, the suicide prevention websites were the most frequent among the search results (37.8%, followed by websites unrelated to suicide (25.9% and neutral websites (23.0%. However, pro-suicide websites were still easily accessible (9.7%. Besides, compared with the USA and China, the search engine originating in Taiwan had the lowest accessibility to pro-suicide information. The results of ANOVA showed a significant difference between the groups, F = 8.772, P < 0.001. Conclusions: This study results suggest a need for further restrictions and regulations of pro-suicide information on the internet. Providing more supportive information online may be an effective plan for suicidal prevention.

Enabling task-based information prioritization via semantic web encodings

Science.gov (United States)

Michaelis, James R.

2016-05-01

Modern Soldiers rely upon accurate and actionable information technology to achieve mission objectives. While increasingly rich sensor networks for Areas of Operation (AO) can offer many directions for aiding Soldiers, limitations are imposed by current tactical edge systems on the rate that content can be transmitted. Furthermore, mission tasks will often require very specific sets of information which may easily be drowned out by other content sources. Prior research on Quality and Value of Information (QoI/VoI) has aimed to define ways to prioritize information objects based on their intrinsic attributes (QoI) and perceived value to a consumer (VoI). As part of this effort, established ranking approaches for obtaining Subject Matter Expert (SME) recommendations, such as the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) have been considered. However, limited work has been done to tie Soldier context - such as descriptions of their mission and tasks - back to intrinsic attributes of information objects. As a first step toward addressing the above challenges, this work introduces an ontology-backed approach - rooted in Semantic Web publication practices - for expressing both AHP decision hierarchies and corresponding SME feedback. Following a short discussion on related QoI/VoI research, an ontology-based data structure is introduced for supporting evaluation of Information Objects, using AHP rankings designed to facilitate information object prioritization. Consistent with alternate AHP approaches, prioritization in this approach is based on pairwise comparisons between Information Objects with respect to established criteria, as well as on pairwise comparison of the criteria to assess their relative importance. The paper concludes with a discussion of both ongoing and future work.

Functional interaction between right parietal and bilateral frontal cortices during visual search tasks revealed using functional magnetic imaging and transcranial direct current stimulation.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Amanda Ellison

Full Text Available The existence of a network of brain regions which are activated when one undertakes a difficult visual search task is well established. Two primary nodes on this network are right posterior parietal cortex (rPPC and right frontal eye fields. Both have been shown to be involved in the orientation of attention, but the contingency that the activity of one of these areas has on the other is less clear. We sought to investigate this question by using transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS to selectively decrease activity in rPPC and then asking participants to perform a visual search task whilst undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. Comparison with a condition in which sham tDCS was applied revealed that cathodal tDCS over rPPC causes a selective bilateral decrease in frontal activity when performing a visual search task. This result demonstrates for the first time that premotor regions within the frontal lobe and rPPC are not only necessary to carry out a visual search task, but that they work together to bring about normal function.

Search engines that learn from their users

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Schuth, A.G.

2016-01-01

More than half the world’s population uses web search engines, resulting in over half a billion search queries every single day. For many people web search engines are among the first resources they go to when a question arises. Moreover, search engines have for many become the most trusted route to

Open meta-search with OpenSearch: a case study

OpenAIRE

O'Riordan, Adrian P.

2007-01-01

The goal of this project was to demonstrate the possibilities of open source search engine and aggregation technology in a Web environment by building a meta-search engine which employs free open search engines and open protocols. In contrast many meta-search engines on the Internet use proprietary search systems. The search engines employed in this case study are all based on the OpenSearch protocol. OpenSearch-compliant systems support XML technologies such as RSS and Atom for aggregation a...

Design implications for task-specific search utilities for retrieval and re-engineering of code

Science.gov (United States)

Iqbal, Rahat; Grzywaczewski, Adam; Halloran, John; Doctor, Faiyaz; Iqbal, Kashif

2017-05-01

The importance of information retrieval systems is unquestionable in the modern society and both individuals as well as enterprises recognise the benefits of being able to find information effectively. Current code-focused information retrieval systems such as Google Code Search, Codeplex or Koders produce results based on specific keywords. However, these systems do not take into account developers' context such as development language, technology framework, goal of the project, project complexity and developer's domain expertise. They also impose additional cognitive burden on users in switching between different interfaces and clicking through to find the relevant code. Hence, they are not used by software developers. In this paper, we discuss how software engineers interact with information and general-purpose information retrieval systems (e.g. Google, Yahoo!) and investigate to what extent domain-specific search and recommendation utilities can be developed in order to support their work-related activities. In order to investigate this, we conducted a user study and found that software engineers followed many identifiable and repeatable work tasks and behaviours. These behaviours can be used to develop implicit relevance feedback-based systems based on the observed retention actions. Moreover, we discuss the implications for the development of task-specific search and collaborative recommendation utilities embedded with the Google standard search engine and Microsoft IntelliSense for retrieval and re-engineering of code. Based on implicit relevance feedback, we have implemented a prototype of the proposed collaborative recommendation system, which was evaluated in a controlled environment simulating the real-world situation of professional software engineers. The evaluation has achieved promising initial results on the precision and recall performance of the system.

Harvesting and Organizing Knowledge from the Web

OpenAIRE

Weikum, Gerhard

2007-01-01

Information organization and search on the {W}eb is gaining structure and context awareness and more semantic flavor, for example, in the forms of faceted search, vertical search, entity search, and {D}eep-{W}eb search. I envision another big leap forward by automatically harvesting and organizing knowledge from the {W}eb, represented in terms of explicit entities and relations as well as ontological concepts. This will be made possible by the confluence of three stron...

FirstSearch and NetFirst--Web and Dial-up Access: Plus Ca Change, Plus C'est la Meme Chose?

Science.gov (United States)

Koehler, Wallace; Mincey, Danielle

1996-01-01

Compares and evaluates the differences between OCLC's dial-up and World Wide Web FirstSearch access methods and their interfaces with the underlying databases. Also examines NetFirst, OCLC's new Internet catalog, the only Internet tracking database from a "traditional" database service. (Author/PEN)

Critical Reading of the Web

Science.gov (United States)

Griffin, Teresa; Cohen, Deb

2012-01-01

The ubiquity and familiarity of the world wide web means that students regularly turn to it as a source of information. In doing so, they "are said to rely heavily on simple search engines, such as Google to find what they want." Researchers have also investigated how students use search engines, concluding that "the young web users tended to…

Digging Deeper: The Deep Web.

Science.gov (United States)

Turner, Laura

2001-01-01

Focuses on the Deep Web, defined as Web content in searchable databases of the type that can be found only by direct query. Discusses the problems of indexing; inability to find information not indexed in the search engine's database; and metasearch engines. Describes 10 sites created to access online databases or directly search them. Lists ways…

Estimating Search Engine Index Size Variability

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Van den Bosch, Antal; Bogers, Toine; De Kunder, Maurice

2016-01-01

One of the determining factors of the quality of Web search engines is the size of their index. In addition to its influence on search result quality, the size of the indexed Web can also tell us something about which parts of the WWW are directly accessible to the everyday user. We propose a novel...... method of estimating the size of a Web search engine’s index by extrapolating from document frequencies of words observed in a large static corpus of Web pages. In addition, we provide a unique longitudinal perspective on the size of Google and Bing’s indices over a nine-year period, from March 2006...... until January 2015. We find that index size estimates of these two search engines tend to vary dramatically over time, with Google generally possessing a larger index than Bing. This result raises doubts about the reliability of previous one-off estimates of the size of the indexed Web. We find...

Product Variety, Consumer Preferences, and Web Technology: Can the Web of Data Reduce Price Competition and Increase Customer Satisfaction?

Science.gov (United States)

Hepp, Martin

E-Commerce on the basis of current Web technology has created fierce competition with a strong focus on price. Despite a huge variety of offerings and diversity in the individual preferences of consumers, current Web search fosters a very early reduction of the search space to just a few commodity makes and models. As soon as this reduction has taken place, search is reduced to flat price comparison. This is unfortunate for the manufacturers and vendors, because their individual value proposition for a particular customer may get lost in the course of communication over the Web, and it is unfortunate for the customer, because he/she may not get the most utility for the money based on her/his preference function. A key limitation is that consumers cannot search using a consolidated view on all alternative offers across the Web. In this talk, I will (1) analyze the technical effects of products and services search on the Web that cause this mismatch between supply and demand, (2) evaluate how the GoodRelations vocabulary and the current Web of Data movement can improve the situation, (3) give a brief hands-on demonstration, and (4) sketch business models for the various market participants.

One visual search, many memory searches: An eye-tracking investigation of hybrid search.

Science.gov (United States)

Drew, Trafton; Boettcher, Sage E P; Wolfe, Jeremy M

2017-09-01

Suppose you go to the supermarket with a shopping list of 10 items held in memory. Your shopping expedition can be seen as a combination of visual search and memory search. This is known as "hybrid search." There is a growing interest in understanding how hybrid search tasks are accomplished. We used eye tracking to examine how manipulating the number of possible targets (the memory set size [MSS]) changes how observers (Os) search. We found that dwell time on each distractor increased with MSS, suggesting a memory search was being executed each time a new distractor was fixated. Meanwhile, although the rate of refixation increased with MSS, it was not nearly enough to suggest a strategy that involves repeatedly searching visual space for subgroups of the target set. These data provide a clear demonstration that hybrid search tasks are carried out via a "one visual search, many memory searches" heuristic in which Os examine items in the visual array once with a very low rate of refixations. For each item selected, Os activate a memory search that produces logarithmic response time increases with increased MSS. Furthermore, the percentage of distractors fixated was strongly modulated by the MSS: More items in the MSS led to a higher percentage of fixated distractors. Searching for more potential targets appears to significantly alter how Os approach the task, ultimately resulting in more eye movements and longer response times.

Surfing the World Wide Web to Education Hot-Spots.

Science.gov (United States)

Dyrli, Odvard Egil

1995-01-01

Provides a brief explanation of Web browsers and their use, as well as technical information for those considering access to the WWW (World Wide Web). Curriculum resources and addresses to useful Web sites are included. Sidebars show sample searches using Yahoo and Lycos search engines, and a list of recommended Web resources. (JKP)

A new task format for investigating information search and organization in multiattribute decisions.

Science.gov (United States)

Ettlin, Florence; Bröder, Arndt; Henninger, Mirka

2015-06-01

In research on multiattribute decisions, information is typically preorganized in a well-structured manner (e.g., in attributes-by-options matrices). Participants can therefore conveniently identify the information needed for the decision strategy they are using. However, in everyday decision situations, we often face information that is not well-structured; that is, we not only have to search for, but we also need to organize the information. This latter aspect--subjective information organization--has so far largely been neglected in decision research. The few exceptions used crude experimental manipulations, and the assessment of subjective organization suffered from laborious methodology and a lack of objectiveness. We introduce a new task format to overcome these methodological issues, and we provide an organization index (OI) to assess subjective organization of information objectively and automatically. The OI makes it possible to assess information organization on the same scale as the strategy index (SI) typically used for assessing information search behavior. A simulation study shows that the OI has a similar distribution as the SI but that the two indices are a priori largely independent. In a validation experiment with instructed strategy use, we demonstrate the usefulness of the task to trace decision processes in multicue inference situations.

BioCarian: search engine for exploratory searches in heterogeneous biological databases.

Science.gov (United States)

Zaki, Nazar; Tennakoon, Chandana

2017-10-02

There are a large number of biological databases publicly available for scientists in the web. Also, there are many private databases generated in the course of research projects. These databases are in a wide variety of formats. Web standards have evolved in the recent times and semantic web technologies are now available to interconnect diverse and heterogeneous sources of data. Therefore, integration and querying of biological databases can be facilitated by techniques used in semantic web. Heterogeneous databases can be converted into Resource Description Format (RDF) and queried using SPARQL language. Searching for exact queries in these databases is trivial. However, exploratory searches need customized solutions, especially when multiple databases are involved. This process is cumbersome and time consuming for those without a sufficient background in computer science. In this context, a search engine facilitating exploratory searches of databases would be of great help to the scientific community. We present BioCarian, an efficient and user-friendly search engine for performing exploratory searches on biological databases. The search engine is an interface for SPARQL queries over RDF databases. We note that many of the databases can be converted to tabular form. We first convert the tabular databases to RDF. The search engine provides a graphical interface based on facets to explore the converted databases. The facet interface is more advanced than conventional facets. It allows complex queries to be constructed, and have additional features like ranking of facet values based on several criteria, visually indicating the relevance of a facet value and presenting the most important facet values when a large number of choices are available. For the advanced users, SPARQL queries can be run directly on the databases. Using this feature, users will be able to incorporate federated searches of SPARQL endpoints. We used the search engine to do an exploratory search

Lexical Access in L2 Speech Production: a controlled serial search task

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Gicele Vergine Vieira

2017-09-01

Full Text Available When it comes to lexical access in L2 speech production, working memory (WM seems to play a central role as for less automatized procedures require more WM capacity to be executed (Prebianca, 2007. With that in mind, this paper aims at claiming that bilingual lexical access qualifies as a controlled serial strategic search task susceptible to individual differences in WM capacity. Evidence in support of such claim is provided by the results of AUTHOR's (2010 study conducted so as to investigate the relationship between L2 lexical access, WMC and L2 proficiency. AUTHOR's (2010 findings indicate that bilingual lexical access entails underlying processes such as cue generation, set delimitation, serial search and monitoring, which to be carried out, require the allocation of attention. Attention is limited and, as a result, only higher spans were able to perform these underlying processes automatically.

Making Statistical Data More Easily Accessible on the Web Results of the StatSearch Case Study

CERN Document Server

Rajman, M; Boynton, I M; Fridlund, B; Fyhrlund, A; Sundgren, B; Lundquist, P; Thelander, H; Wänerskär, M

2005-01-01

In this paper we present the results of the StatSearch case study that aimed at providing an enhanced access to statistical data available on the Web. In the scope of this case study we developed a prototype of an information access tool combining a query-based search engine with semi-automated navigation techniques exploiting the hierarchical structuring of the available data. This tool enables a better control of the information retrieval, improving the quality and ease of the access to statistical information. The central part of the presented StatSearch tool consists in the design of an algorithm for automated navigation through a tree-like hierarchical document structure. The algorithm relies on the computation of query related relevance score distributions over the available database to identify the most relevant clusters in the data structure. These most relevant clusters are then proposed to the user for navigation, or, alternatively, are the support for the automated navigation process. Several appro...

Searchers' relevance judgments and criteria in evaluating Web pages in a learning style perspective

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Papaeconomou, Chariste; Zijlema, Annemarie F.; Ingwersen, Peter

2008-01-01

The paper presents the results of a case study of searcher's relevance criteria used for assessments of Web pages in a perspective of learning style. 15 test persons participated in the experiments based on two simulated work tasks that provided cover stories to trigger their information needs. Two...... learning styles were examined: Global and Sequential learners. The study applied eye-tracking for the observation of relevance hot spots on Web pages, learning style index analysis and post-search interviews to gain more in-depth information on relevance behavior. Findings reveal that with respect to use......, they are statistically insignificant. When interviewed in retrospective the resulting profiles tend to become even similar across learning styles but a shift occurs from instant assessments with content features of web pages replacing topicality judgments as predominant relevance criteria....

Web-Based Inquiry Learning: Facilitating Thoughtful Literacy with WebQuests

Science.gov (United States)

Ikpeze, Chinwe H.; Boyd, Fenice B.

2007-01-01

An action research study investigated how the multiple tasks found in WebQuests facilitate fifth-grade students' literacy skills and higher order thinking. Findings indicate that WebQuests are most successful when activities are carefully selected and systematically delivered. Implications for teaching include the necessity for adequate planning,…

An Automatic Web Service Composition Framework Using QoS-Based Web Service Ranking Algorithm.

Science.gov (United States)

Mallayya, Deivamani; Ramachandran, Baskaran; Viswanathan, Suganya

2015-01-01

Web service has become the technology of choice for service oriented computing to meet the interoperability demands in web applications. In the Internet era, the exponential addition of web services nominates the "quality of service" as essential parameter in discriminating the web services. In this paper, a user preference based web service ranking (UPWSR) algorithm is proposed to rank web services based on user preferences and QoS aspect of the web service. When the user's request cannot be fulfilled by a single atomic service, several existing services should be composed and delivered as a composition. The proposed framework allows the user to specify the local and global constraints for composite web services which improves flexibility. UPWSR algorithm identifies best fit services for each task in the user request and, by choosing the number of candidate services for each task, reduces the time to generate the composition plans. To tackle the problem of web service composition, QoS aware automatic web service composition (QAWSC) algorithm proposed in this paper is based on the QoS aspects of the web services and user preferences. The proposed framework allows user to provide feedback about the composite service which improves the reputation of the services.

Evaluating aggregated search using interleaving

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Chuklin, A.; Schuth, A.; Hofmann, K.; Serdyukov, P.; de Rijke, M.

2013-01-01

A result page of a modern web search engine is often much more complicated than a simple list of "ten blue links." In particular, a search engine may combine results from different sources (e.g., Web, News, and Images), and display these as grouped results to provide a better user experience. Such a

Ensemble learned vaccination uptake prediction using web search queries

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Hansen, Niels Dalum; Lioma, Christina; Mølbak, Kåre

2016-01-01

We present a method that uses ensemble learning to combine clinical and web-mined time-series data in order to predict future vaccination uptake. The clinical data is official vaccination registries, and the web data is query frequencies collected from Google Trends. Experiments with official...... vaccine records show that our method predicts vaccination uptake eff?ectively (4.7 Root Mean Squared Error). Whereas performance is best when combining clinical and web data, using solely web data yields comparative performance. To our knowledge, this is the ?first study to predict vaccination uptake...

Information Retrieval for Education: Making Search Engines Language Aware

Science.gov (United States)

Ott, Niels; Meurers, Detmar

2010-01-01

Search engines have been a major factor in making the web the successful and widely used information source it is today. Generally speaking, they make it possible to retrieve web pages on a topic specified by the keywords entered by the user. Yet web searching currently does not take into account which of the search results are comprehensible for…

20 Recipes for Programming MVC 3 Faster, Smarter Web Development

CERN Document Server

Munro, Jamie

2011-01-01

There's no need to reinvent the wheel every time you run into a problem with ASP.NET's Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework. This concise cookbook provides recipes to help you solve tasks many web developers encounter every day. Each recipe includes the C# code you need, along with a complete working example of how to implement the solution. Learn practical techniques for applying user authentication, providing faster page reloads, validating user data, filtering search results, and many other issues related to MVC3 development. These recipes help you: Restrict access to views with password

Promoting Your Web Site.

Science.gov (United States)

Raeder, Aggi

1997-01-01

Discussion of ways to promote sites on the World Wide Web focuses on how search engines work and how they retrieve and identify sites. Appropriate Web links for submitting new sites and for Internet marketing are included. (LRW)

An Efficient Approach for Web Indexing of Big Data through Hyperlinks in Web Crawling

Science.gov (United States)

Devi, R. Suganya; Manjula, D.; Siddharth, R. K.

2015-01-01

Web Crawling has acquired tremendous significance in recent times and it is aptly associated with the substantial development of the World Wide Web. Web Search Engines face new challenges due to the availability of vast amounts of web documents, thus making the retrieved results less applicable to the analysers. However, recently, Web Crawling solely focuses on obtaining the links of the corresponding documents. Today, there exist various algorithms and software which are used to crawl links from the web which has to be further processed for future use, thereby increasing the overload of the analyser. This paper concentrates on crawling the links and retrieving all information associated with them to facilitate easy processing for other uses. In this paper, firstly the links are crawled from the specified uniform resource locator (URL) using a modified version of Depth First Search Algorithm which allows for complete hierarchical scanning of corresponding web links. The links are then accessed via the source code and its metadata such as title, keywords, and description are extracted. This content is very essential for any type of analyser work to be carried on the Big Data obtained as a result of Web Crawling. PMID:26137592

Electronic biomedical literature search for budding researcher.

Science.gov (United States)

Thakre, Subhash B; Thakre S, Sushama S; Thakre, Amol D

2013-09-01

Search for specific and well defined literature related to subject of interest is the foremost step in research. When we are familiar with topic or subject then we can frame appropriate research question. Appropriate research question is the basis for study objectives and hypothesis. The Internet provides a quick access to an overabundance of the medical literature, in the form of primary, secondary and tertiary literature. It is accessible through journals, databases, dictionaries, textbooks, indexes, and e-journals, thereby allowing access to more varied, individualised, and systematic educational opportunities. Web search engine is a tool designed to search for information on the World Wide Web, which may be in the form of web pages, images, information, and other types of files. Search engines for internet-based search of medical literature include Google, Google scholar, Scirus, Yahoo search engine, etc., and databases include MEDLINE, PubMed, MEDLARS, etc. Several web-libraries (National library Medicine, Cochrane, Web of Science, Medical matrix, Emory libraries) have been developed as meta-sites, providing useful links to health resources globally. A researcher must keep in mind the strengths and limitations of a particular search engine/database while searching for a particular type of data. Knowledge about types of literature, levels of evidence, and detail about features of search engine as available, user interface, ease of access, reputable content, and period of time covered allow their optimal use and maximal utility in the field of medicine. Literature search is a dynamic and interactive process; there is no one way to conduct a search and there are many variables involved. It is suggested that a systematic search of literature that uses available electronic resource effectively, is more likely to produce quality research.

Standardized mappings--a framework to combine different semantic mappers into a standardized web-API.

Science.gov (United States)

Neuhaus, Philipp; Doods, Justin; Dugas, Martin

2015-01-01

Automatic coding of medical terms is an important, but highly complicated and laborious task. To compare and evaluate different strategies a framework with a standardized web-interface was created. Two UMLS mapping strategies are compared to demonstrate the interface. The framework is a Java Spring application running on a Tomcat application server. It accepts different parameters and returns results in JSON format. To demonstrate the framework, a list of medical data items was mapped by two different methods: similarity search in a large table of terminology codes versus search in a manually curated repository. These mappings were reviewed by a specialist. The evaluation shows that the framework is flexible (due to standardized interfaces like HTTP and JSON), performant and reliable. Accuracy of automatically assigned codes is limited (up to 40%). Combining different semantic mappers into a standardized Web-API is feasible. This framework can be easily enhanced due to its modular design.

IntegromeDB: an integrated system and biological search engine.

Science.gov (United States)

Baitaluk, Michael; Kozhenkov, Sergey; Dubinina, Yulia; Ponomarenko, Julia

2012-01-19

With the growth of biological data in volume and heterogeneity, web search engines become key tools for researchers. However, general-purpose search engines are not specialized for the search of biological data. Here, we present an approach at developing a biological web search engine based on the Semantic Web technologies and demonstrate its implementation for retrieving gene- and protein-centered knowledge. The engine is available at http://www.integromedb.org. The IntegromeDB search engine allows scanning data on gene regulation, gene expression, protein-protein interactions, pathways, metagenomics, mutations, diseases, and other gene- and protein-related data that are automatically retrieved from publicly available databases and web pages using biological ontologies. To perfect the resource design and usability, we welcome and encourage community feedback.

EuroGOV: Engineering a Multilingual Web Corpus

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Sigurbjörnsson, B.; Kamps, J.; de Rijke, M.

2005-01-01

EuroGOV is a multilingual web corpus that was created to serve as the document collection for WebCLEF, the CLEF 2005 web retrieval task. EuroGOV is a collection of web pages crawled from the European Union portal, European Union member state governmental web sites, and Russian government web sites.

The Role of the Medical Students’ Emotional Mood in Information Retrieval from the Web

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Marzieh Yari Zanganeh

2018-04-01

Full Text Available Background: Online information retrieval is a process the result of which is influenced by the changes in the emotional moods of the user. It seems reasonable to include emotional aspects in developing information retrieval systems in order to optimize the experience of the users. Therefore, this study aimed to identify the role of positive and negative affects in the information seeking process on the web among students of medical sciences. Methods: From the methodological perspective, the present study was an experimental and applied research. According to the nature of the experimental method, observation and questionnaire were used. The participants were the students of various fields of Medical Sciences. The research sample included 50 students of Shiraz University of Medical Sciences selected through purposeful sampling method; they regularly used World Wide Web and google engine for information retrieval in educational, Research, personal, or managerial activities. In order to collect the data, search tasks were characterized by the topic, sequence in a search process, difficulty level, and searcher’s interest (simple in a task. Face and content validity of the questionnaire were confirmed by the experts. Reliability of the questionnaire was tested by Alpha Cronbach. Cronbach’s alpha coefficient (PA=0.777, NA=0.754 showed a high rate of reliability in a PANAS questionnaire. The collected data were analyzed using SPSS, version 20.0; also, to test the research hypothesis, T-Test and pair Samples T-Test were used. The P0.05. Conclusion: Information retrieval systems in the Web should identify positive and negative affects in the information seeking process in a set of perceiving signs in human interaction with the computer. The automatic identification of the users’ affect opens new dimensions into users moderators and information retrieval systems for successful retrieval from the Web.

Extracting Macroscopic Information from Web Links.

Science.gov (United States)

Thelwall, Mike

2001-01-01

Discussion of Web-based link analysis focuses on an evaluation of Ingversen's proposed external Web Impact Factor for the original use of the Web, namely the interlinking of academic research. Studies relationships between academic hyperlinks and research activities for British universities and discusses the use of search engines for Web link…

WEB STRUCTURE MINING

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

CLAUDIA ELENA DINUCĂ

2011-01-01

Full Text Available The World Wide Web became one of the most valuable resources for information retrievals and knowledge discoveries due to the permanent increasing of the amount of data available online. Taking into consideration the web dimension, the users get easily lost in the web’s rich hyper structure. Application of data mining methods is the right solution for knowledge discovery on the Web. The knowledge extracted from the Web can be used to raise the performances for Web information retrievals, question answering and Web based data warehousing. In this paper, I provide an introduction of Web mining categories and I focus on one of these categories: the Web structure mining. Web structure mining, one of three categories of web mining for data, is a tool used to identify the relationship between Web pages linked by information or direct link connection. It offers information about how different pages are linked together to form this huge web. Web Structure Mining finds hidden basic structures and uses hyperlinks for more web applications such as web search.

Improving Web Search for Difficult Queries

Science.gov (United States)

Wang, Xuanhui

2009-01-01

Search engines have now become essential tools in all aspects of our life. Although a variety of information needs can be served very successfully, there are still a lot of queries that search engines can not answer very effectively and these queries always make users feel frustrated. Since it is quite often that users encounter such "difficult…

Survey of Techniques for Deep Web Source Selection and Surfacing the Hidden Web Content

OpenAIRE

Khushboo Khurana; M.B. Chandak

2016-01-01

Large and continuously growing dynamic web content has created new opportunities for large-scale data analysis in the recent years. There is huge amount of information that the traditional web crawlers cannot access, since they use link analysis technique by which only the surface web can be accessed. Traditional search engine crawlers require the web pages to be linked to other pages via hyperlinks causing large amount of web data to be hidden from the crawlers. Enormous data is available in...

Web の探索行動と情報評価過程の分析

OpenAIRE

種市, 淳子; 逸村, 裕; TANEICHI, Junko; ITSUMURA, Hiroshi

2005-01-01

In this study, we discussed information seeking behavior on the Web. First, the currentWeb-searching studies are reviewed from the perspective of: (1) Web-searching characteristics; (2) the process model for how users evaluate Web resources. Secondly, we investigated information seeking processes using the Web search engine and online public access catalogue (OPAC) system by undergraduate students, through an experiment and its protocol analysis. The results indicate that: (1) Web-searching p...

C-State: an interactive web app for simultaneous multi-gene visualization and comparative epigenetic pattern search.

Science.gov (United States)

Sowpati, Divya Tej; Srivastava, Surabhi; Dhawan, Jyotsna; Mishra, Rakesh K

2017-09-13

Comparative epigenomic analysis across multiple genes presents a bottleneck for bench biologists working with NGS data. Despite the development of standardized peak analysis algorithms, the identification of novel epigenetic patterns and their visualization across gene subsets remains a challenge. We developed a fast and interactive web app, C-State (Chromatin-State), to query and plot chromatin landscapes across multiple loci and cell types. C-State has an interactive, JavaScript-based graphical user interface and runs locally in modern web browsers that are pre-installed on all computers, thus eliminating the need for cumbersome data transfer, pre-processing and prior programming knowledge. C-State is unique in its ability to extract and analyze multi-gene epigenetic information. It allows for powerful GUI-based pattern searching and visualization. We include a case study to demonstrate its potential for identifying user-defined epigenetic trends in context of gene expression profiles.

What Top-Down Task Sets Do for Us: An ERP Study on the Benefits of Advance Preparation in Visual Search

Science.gov (United States)

Eimer, Martin; Kiss, Monika; Nicholas, Susan

2011-01-01

When target-defining features are specified in advance, attentional target selection in visual search is controlled by preparatory top-down task sets. We used ERP measures to study voluntary target selection in the absence of such feature-specific task sets, and to compare it to selection that is guided by advance knowledge about target features.…

Incorporating the surfing behavior of web users into PageRank

OpenAIRE

Ashyralyyev, Shatlyk

2013-01-01

Ankara : The Department of Computer Engineering and the Graduate School of Engineering and Science of Bilkent University, 2013. Thesis (Master's) -- Bilkent University, 2013. Includes bibliographical references leaves 68-73 One of the most crucial factors that determines the effectiveness of a large-scale commercial web search engine is the ranking (i.e., order) in which web search results are presented to the end user. In modern web search engines, the skeleton for the rank...

Project Assessment Skills Web Application

Science.gov (United States)

Goff, Samuel J.

2013-01-01

The purpose of this project is to utilize Ruby on Rails to create a web application that will replace a spreadsheet keeping track of training courses and tasks. The goal is to create a fast and easy to use web application that will allow users to track progress on training courses. This application will allow users to update and keep track of all of the training required of them. The training courses will be organized by group and by user, making readability easier. This will also allow group leads and administrators to get a sense of how everyone is progressing in training. Currently, updating and finding information from this spreadsheet is a long and tedious task. By upgrading to a web application, finding and updating information will be easier than ever as well as adding new training courses and tasks. Accessing this data will be much easier in that users just have to go to a website and log in with NDC credentials rather than request the relevant spreadsheet from the holder. In addition to Ruby on Rails, I will be using JavaScript, CSS, and jQuery to help add functionality and ease of use to my web application. This web application will include a number of features that will help update and track progress on training. For example, one feature will be to track progress of a whole group of users to be able to see how the group as a whole is progressing. Another feature will be to assign tasks to either a user or a group of users. All of these together will create a user friendly and functional web application.

The Effects of Preference for Information on Consumers’ Online Health Information Search Behavior

Science.gov (United States)

2013-01-01

Background Preference for information is a personality trait that affects people’s tendency to seek information in health-related situations. Prior studies have focused primarily on investigating its impact on patient-provider communication and on the implications for designing information interventions that prepare patients for medical procedures. Few studies have examined its impact on general consumers’ interactions with Web-based search engines for health information or the implications for designing more effective health information search systems. Objective This study intends to fill this gap by investigating the impact of preference for information on the search behavior of general consumers seeking health information, their perceptions of search tasks (representing information needs), and user experience with search systems. Methods Forty general consumers who had previously searched for health information online participated in the study in our usability lab. Preference for information was measured using Miller’s Monitor-Blunter Style Scale (MBSS) and the Krantz Health Opinion Survey-Information Scale (KHOS-I). Each participant completed four simulated health information search tasks: two look-up (fact-finding) and two exploratory. Their behaviors while interacting with the search systems were automatically logged and ratings of their perceptions of tasks and user experience with the systems were collected using Likert-scale questionnaires. Results The MBSS showed low reliability with the participants (Monitoring subscale: Cronbach alpha=.53; Blunting subscale: Cronbach alpha=.35). Thus, no further analyses were performed based on the scale. KHOS-I had sufficient reliability (Cronbach alpha=.77). Participants were classified into low- and high-preference groups based on their KHOS-I scores. The high-preference group submitted significantly shorter queries when completing the look-up tasks (P=.02). The high-preference group made a significantly higher

The effects of preference for information on consumers' online health information search behavior.

Science.gov (United States)

Zhang, Yan

2013-11-26

Preference for information is a personality trait that affects people's tendency to seek information in health-related situations. Prior studies have focused primarily on investigating its impact on patient-provider communication and on the implications for designing information interventions that prepare patients for medical procedures. Few studies have examined its impact on general consumers' interactions with Web-based search engines for health information or the implications for designing more effective health information search systems. This study intends to fill this gap by investigating the impact of preference for information on the search behavior of general consumers seeking health information, their perceptions of search tasks (representing information needs), and user experience with search systems. Forty general consumers who had previously searched for health information online participated in the study in our usability lab. Preference for information was measured using Miller's Monitor-Blunter Style Scale (MBSS) and the Krantz Health Opinion Survey-Information Scale (KHOS-I). Each participant completed four simulated health information search tasks: two look-up (fact-finding) and two exploratory. Their behaviors while interacting with the search systems were automatically logged and ratings of their perceptions of tasks and user experience with the systems were collected using Likert-scale questionnaires. The MBSS showed low reliability with the participants (Monitoring subscale: Cronbach alpha=.53; Blunting subscale: Cronbach alpha=.35). Thus, no further analyses were performed based on the scale. KHOS-I had sufficient reliability (Cronbach alpha=.77). Participants were classified into low- and high-preference groups based on their KHOS-I scores. The high-preference group submitted significantly shorter queries when completing the look-up tasks (P=.02). The high-preference group made a significantly higher percentage of parallel movements in query

The Search Performance Evaluation and Prediction in Exploratory Search

OpenAIRE

LIU, FEI

2016-01-01

The exploratory search for complex search tasks requires an effective search behavior model to evaluate and predict user search performance. Few studies have investigated the relationship between user search behavior and search performance in exploratory search. This research adopts a mixed approach combining search system development, user search experiment, search query log analysis, and multivariate regression analysis to resolve the knowledge gap. Through this study, it is shown that expl...

Web Service

Science.gov (United States)

... topic data in XML format. Using the Web service, software developers can build applications that utilize MedlinePlus health topic information. The service accepts keyword searches as requests and returns relevant ...

A Longitudinal Analysis of Search Engine Index Size

DEFF Research Database (Denmark)

Van den Bosch, Antal; Bogers, Toine; De Kunder, Maurice

2015-01-01

One of the determining factors of the quality of Web search engines is the size of their index. In addition to its influence on search result quality, the size of the indexed Web can also tell us something about which parts of the WWW are directly accessible to the everyday user. We propose a novel...... method of estimating the size of a Web search engine’s index by extrapolating from document frequencies of words observed in a large static corpus of Web pages. In addition, we provide a unique longitudinal perspective on the size of Google and Bing’s indexes over a nine-year period, from March 2006...... until January 2015. We find that index size estimates of these two search engines tend to vary dramatically over time, with Google generally possessing a larger index than Bing. This result raises doubts about the reliability of previous one-off estimates of the size of the indexed Web. We find...

Super: a web server to rapidly screen superposable oligopeptide fragments from the protein data bank

Science.gov (United States)

Collier, James H.; Lesk, Arthur M.; Garcia de la Banda, Maria; Konagurthu, Arun S.

2012-01-01

Searching for well-fitting 3D oligopeptide fragments within a large collection of protein structures is an important task central to many analyses involving protein structures. This article reports a new web server, Super, dedicated to the task of rapidly screening the protein data bank (PDB) to identify all fragments that superpose with a query under a prespecified threshold of root-mean-square deviation (RMSD). Super relies on efficiently computing a mathematical bound on the commonly used structural similarity measure, RMSD of superposition. This allows the server to filter out a large proportion of fragments that are unrelated to the query; >99% of the total number of fragments in some cases. For a typical query, Super scans the current PDB containing over 80 500 structures (with ∼40 million potential oligopeptide fragments to match) in under a minute. Super web server is freely accessible from: http://lcb.infotech.monash.edu.au/super. PMID:22638586

Publicizing Your Web Resources for Maximum Exposure.

Science.gov (United States)

Smith, Kerry J.

2001-01-01

Offers advice to librarians for marketing their Web sites on Internet search engines. Advises against relying solely on spiders and recommends adding metadata to the source code and delivering that information directly to the search engines. Gives an overview of metadata and typical coding for meta tags. Includes Web addresses for a number of…

Maintenance-Ready Web Application Development

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Ion IVAN

2016-01-01

Full Text Available The current paper tackles the subject of developing maintenance-ready web applications. Maintenance is presented as a core stage in a web application’s lifecycle. The concept of maintenance-ready is defined in the context of web application development. Web application maintenance tasks types are enunciated and suitable task types are identified for further analysis. The research hypothesis is formulated based on a direct link between tackling maintenance in the development stage and reducing overall maintenance costs. A live maintenance-ready web application is presented and maintenance related aspects are highlighted. The web application’s features, that render it maintenance-ready, are emphasize. The cost of designing and building the web-application to be maintenance-ready are disclosed. The savings in maintenance development effort facilitated by maintenance ready features are also disclosed. Maintenance data is collected from 40 projects implemented by a web development company. Homogeneity and diversity of collected data is evaluated. A data sample is presented and the size and comprehensive nature of the entire dataset is depicted. Research hypothesis are validated and conclusions are formulated on the topic of developing maintenance-ready web applications. The limits of the research process which represented the basis for the current paper are enunciated. Future research topics are submitted for debate.

Search 3.0: Present, Personal, Precise

Science.gov (United States)

Spivack, Nova

The next generation of Web search is already beginning to emerge. With it we will see several shifts in the way people search, and the way major search engines provide search functionality to consumers.

Search Engine Optimization

CERN Document Server

Davis, Harold

2006-01-01

SEO--short for Search Engine Optimization--is the art, craft, and science of driving web traffic to web sites. Web traffic is food, drink, and oxygen--in short, life itself--to any web-based business. Whether your web site depends on broad, general traffic, or high-quality, targeted traffic, this PDF has the tools and information you need to draw more traffic to your site. You'll learn how to effectively use PageRank (and Google itself); how to get listed, get links, and get syndicated; and much more. The field of SEO is expanding into all the possible ways of promoting web traffic. This

Where perception meets memory: a review of repetition priming in visual search tasks.

Science.gov (United States)

Kristjánsson, Arni; Campana, Gianluca

2010-01-01

What we have recently seen and attended to strongly influences how we subsequently allocate visual attention. A clear example is how repeated presentation of an object's features or location in visual search tasks facilitates subsequent detection or identification of that item, a phenomenon known as priming. Here, we review a large body of results from priming studies that suggest that a short-term implicit memory system guides our attention to recently viewed items. The nature of this memory system and the processing level at which visual priming occurs are still debated. Priming might be due to activity modulations of low-level areas coding simple stimulus characteristics or to higher level episodic memory representations of whole objects or visual scenes. Indeed, recent evidence indicates that only minor changes to the stimuli used in priming studies may alter the processing level at which priming occurs. We also review recent behavioral, neuropsychological, and neurophysiological evidence that indicates that the priming patterns are reflected in activity modulations at multiple sites along the visual pathways. We furthermore suggest that studies of priming in visual search may potentially shed important light on the nature of cortical visual representations. Our conclusion is that priming occurs at many different levels of the perceptual hierarchy, reflecting activity modulations ranging from lower to higher levels, depending on the stimulus, task, and context-in fact, the neural loci that are involved in the analysis of the stimuli for which priming effects are seen.

A Study on Information Search and Commitment Strategies on Web Environment and Internet Usage Self-Efficacy Beliefs of University Students'

Science.gov (United States)

Geçer, Aynur Kolburan

2014-01-01

This study addresses university students' information search and commitment strategies on web environment and internet usage self-efficacy beliefs in terms of such variables as gender, department, grade level and frequency of internet use; and whether there is a significant relation between these beliefs. Descriptive method was used in the study.…

A web-based approach to data imputation

KAUST Repository

Li, Zhixu; Sharaf, Mohamed Abdel Fattah; Sitbon, Laurianne; Sadiq, Shazia Wasim; Indulska, Marta; Zhou, Xiaofang

2013-01-01

principle. Moreover, WebPut extends effective Information Extraction (IE) methods for the purpose of formulating web search queries that are capable of effectively retrieving missing values with high accuracy. WebPut employs a confidence-based scheme

[Development of domain specific search engines].

Science.gov (United States)

Takai, T; Tokunaga, M; Maeda, K; Kaminuma, T

2000-01-01

As cyber space exploding in a pace that nobody has ever imagined, it becomes very important to search cyber space efficiently and effectively. One solution to this problem is search engines. Already a lot of commercial search engines have been put on the market. However these search engines respond with such cumbersome results that domain specific experts can not tolerate. Using a dedicate hardware and a commercial software called OpenText, we have tried to develop several domain specific search engines. These engines are for our institute's Web contents, drugs, chemical safety, endocrine disruptors, and emergent response for chemical hazard. These engines have been on our Web site for testing.

Performance of brain-damaged, schizophrenic, and normal subjects on a visual searching task.

Science.gov (United States)

Goldstein, G; Kyc, F

1978-06-01

Goldstein, Rennick, Welch, and Shelly (1973) reported on a visual searching task that generated 94.1% correct classifications when comparing brain-damaged and normal subjects, and 79.4% correct classifications when comparing brain-damaged and psychiatric patients. In the present study, representing a partial cross-validation with some modification of the test procedure, comparisons were made between brain-damaged and schizophrenic, and brain-damaged and normal subjects. There were 92.5% correct classifications for the brain-damaged vs normal comparison, and 82.5% correct classifications for the brain-damaged vs schizophrenic comparison.

Dual-task training effects on motor and cognitive functional abilities in individuals with stroke: a systematic review.

Science.gov (United States)

He, Ying; Yang, Lei; Zhou, Jing; Yao, Liqing; Pang, Marco Yiu Chung

2018-02-01

This systematic review aimed to examine the effects of dual-task balance and mobility training in people with stroke. An extensive electronic databases literature search was conducted using MEDLINE, PubMed, EBSCO, The Cochrane Library, Web of Science, SCOPUS, and Wiley Online Library. Randomized controlled studies that assessed the effects of dual-task training in stroke patients were included for the review (last search in December 2017). The methodological quality was evaluated using the Cochrane Collaboration recommendation, and level of evidence was determined according to the criteria described by the Oxford Center for Evidence-Based Medicine. About 13 articles involving 457 participants were included in this systematic review. All had substantial risk of bias and thus provided level IIb evidence only. Dual-task mobility training was found to induce more improvement in single-task walking function (standardized effect size = 0.14-2.24), when compared with single-task mobility training. Its effect on dual-task walking function was not consistent. Cognitive-motor balance training was effective in improving single-task balance function (standardized effect size = 0.27-1.82), but its effect on dual-task balance ability was not studied. The beneficial effect of dual-task training on cognitive function was provided by one study only and thus inconclusive. There is some evidence that dual-task training can improve single-task walking and balance function in individuals with stroke. However, any firm recommendation cannot be made due to the weak methodology of the studies reviewed.

Large-area sheet task: Advanced dendritic-web-growth development

Science.gov (United States)

Duncan, C. S.; Seidensticker, R. G.; Mchugh, J. P.; Schruben, J.

1983-01-01

Thermally generated stresses in the growing web crystal were reduced. These stresses, which if too high cause the ribbon to degenerate, were reduced by a factor of three, resulting in the demonstrated growth of high-quality web crystals to widths of 5.4 cm. This progress was brought about chiefly by the application of thermal models to the development of low-stress growth configurations. A new temperature model was developed which can analyze the thermal effects of much more complex lid and top shield configurations than was possible with the old lumped shield model. Growth experiments which supplied input data such as actual shield temperature and melt levels were used to verify the modeling results. Desirable modifications in the melt level-sensing circuitry were made in the new experimental web growth furnace, and this furnace has been used to carry out growth experiments under steady-state conditions. New growth configurations were tested in long growth runs at Westinghouse AESD which produced wider, lower stress and higher quality web crystals than designs previously used.

Professional and Regulatory Search

Science.gov (United States)

Professional and Regulatory search are designed for people who use EPA web resources to do their job. You will be searching collections where information that is not relevant to Environmental and Regulatory professionals.

The Semantic Web: opportunities and challenges for next-generation Web applications

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

2002-01-01

Full Text Available Recently there has been a growing interest in the investigation and development of the next generation web - the Semantic Web. While most of the current forms of web content are designed to be presented to humans, but are barely understandable by computers, the content of the Semantic Web is structured in a semantic way so that it is meaningful to computers as well as to humans. In this paper, we report a survey of recent research on the Semantic Web. In particular, we present the opportunities that this revolution will bring to us: web-services, agent-based distributed computing, semantics-based web search engines, and semantics-based digital libraries. We also discuss the technical and cultural challenges of realizing the Semantic Web: the development of ontologies, formal semantics of Semantic Web languages, and trust and proof models. We hope that this will shed some light on the direction of future work on this field.

OpenSearch technology for geospatial resources discovery

Science.gov (United States)

Papeschi, Fabrizio; Enrico, Boldrini; Mazzetti, Paolo

2010-05-01

In 2005, the term Web 2.0 has been coined by Tim O'Reilly to describe a quickly growing set of Web-based applications that share a common philosophy of "mutually maximizing collective intelligence and added value for each participant by formalized and dynamic information sharing". Around this same period, OpenSearch a new Web 2.0 technology, was developed. More properly, OpenSearch is a collection of technologies that allow publishing of search results in a format suitable for syndication and aggregation. It is a way for websites and search engines to publish search results in a standard and accessible format. Due to its strong impact on the way the Web is perceived by users and also due its relevance for businesses, Web 2.0 has attracted the attention of both mass media and the scientific community. This explosive growth in popularity of Web 2.0 technologies like OpenSearch, and practical applications of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) resulted in an increased interest in similarities, convergence, and a potential synergy of these two concepts. SOA is considered as the philosophy of encapsulating application logic in services with a uniformly defined interface and making these publicly available via discovery mechanisms. Service consumers may then retrieve these services, compose and use them according to their current needs. A great degree of similarity between SOA and Web 2.0 may be leading to a convergence between the two paradigms. They also expose divergent elements, such as the Web 2.0 support to the human interaction in opposition to the typical SOA machine-to-machine interaction. According to these considerations, the Geospatial Information (GI) domain, is also moving first steps towards a new approach of data publishing and discovering, in particular taking advantage of the OpenSearch technology. A specific GI niche is represented by the OGC Catalog Service for Web (CSW) that is part of the OGC Web Services (OWS) specifications suite, which provides a

Using centrality to rank web snippets

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Jijkoun, V.; de Rijke, M.; Peters, C.; Jijkoun, V.; Mandl, T.; Müller, H.; Oard, D.W.; Peñas, A.; Petras, V.; Santos, D.

2008-01-01

We describe our participation in the WebCLEF 2007 task, targeted at snippet retrieval from web data. Our system ranks snippets based on a simple similarity-based centrality, inspired by the web page ranking algorithms. We experimented with retrieval units (sentences and paragraphs) and with the

Búsqueda de Colocaciones en la Web para Sinónimos de Wordnet Búsqueda de Colocaciones en la Web para Sinónimos de Wordnet

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

M. Montes -y-Gómez

2012-02-01

Full Text Available La Web es sin lugar a dudas el repositorio de información más grande jamás construido por el ser humano. Con más de cuatro mil millones de páginas indexadas por los motores de búsqueda públicos, la Web representa el mayor y más amplio corpus textual disponible en la actualidad. Por su valor lingüístico, dado que contiene información en más de 1 500 lenguajes, este corpus está siendo usado con gran éxito en muchas tareas de procesamientodel lenguaje natural. En particular, varios métodos de minería de datos se han aplicado para extraer de la Web algunos tipos de patrones lingüísticos útiles para tareas como la traducción automática y búsqueda de respuestas. En este artículo presentamos un método que permite encontrar combinaciones de palabras significativas a los diferentes sentidos atribuibles a una palabra polisémica. Los experimentos realizados, aunque preliminares, muestran el gran potencial del método propuesto para encontrar estas colocaciones por sentido usando la Web como corpus, así como la viabilidad de la incorporación de dichas colocaciones en sistemas de desambiguación del sentido de las palabras, que pueden a su vez ser usados en sistemas de traducción automática y recuperación de información.There is no doubt that the Web is the biggest information repository ever before constructed by human beings. With more than four billion pages index-linked by the public search engines, the Web represents the biggest and the widest textual corpus available in our days. Because his high linguistic value, because contains information in more than 1500 different languages, this corpus is being used with great success in many tasks related to the natural language process. In particular, several methods of data mining have been applied to extract from the Web some types of linguistic patterns which are useful for a diversity of tasks, such as automatic translations and answer search systems. In this work we presenta

1st International Workshop on Search and Mining Terrorist Online Content and Advances in Data Science for Cyber Security and Risk on the Web

OpenAIRE

Tsikrika, T.; Vrochidis, S.; Akhgar, B.; Burnap, P.; Katos, Vasilis; Williams, M.L.

2017-01-01

The deliberate misuse of technical infrastructure (including the Web and social media) for cyber deviant and cybercriminal behaviour, ranging from the spreading of extremist and terrorism-related material to online fraud and cyber security attacks, is on the rise. This workshop aims to better understand such phenomena and develop methods for tackling them in an effective and efficient manner. The workshop brings together interdisciplinary researchers and experts in Web search, security inform...

The development of organized visual search

Science.gov (United States)

Woods, Adam J.; Goksun, Tilbe; Chatterjee, Anjan; Zelonis, Sarah; Mehta, Anika; Smith, Sabrina E.

2013-01-01

Visual search plays an important role in guiding behavior. Children have more difficulty performing conjunction search tasks than adults. The present research evaluates whether developmental differences in children's ability to organize serial visual search (i.e., search organization skills) contribute to performance limitations in a typical conjunction search task. We evaluated 134 children between the ages of 2 and 17 on separate tasks measuring search for targets defined by a conjunction of features or by distinct features. Our results demonstrated that children organize their visual search better as they get older. As children's skills at organizing visual search improve they become more accurate at locating targets with conjunction of features amongst distractors, but not for targets with distinct features. Developmental limitations in children's abilities to organize their visual search of the environment are an important component of poor conjunction search in young children. In addition, our findings provide preliminary evidence that, like other visuospatial tasks, exposure to reading may influence children's spatial orientation to the visual environment when performing a visual search. PMID:23584560

Large-area sheet task advanced dendritic web growth development

Science.gov (United States)

Duncan, C. S.; Seidensticker, R. G.; Mchugh, J. P.

1984-01-01

The thermal models used for analyzing dendritic web growth and calculating the thermal stress were reexamined to establish the validity limits imposed by the assumptions of the models. Also, the effects of thermal conduction through the gas phase were evaluated and found to be small. New growth designs, both static and dynamic, were generated using the modeling results. Residual stress effects in dendritic web were examined. In the laboratory, new techniques for the control of temperature distributions in three dimensions were developed. A new maximum undeformed web width of 5.8 cm was achieved. A 58% increase in growth velocity of 150 micrometers thickness was achieved with dynamic hardware. The area throughput goals for transient growth of 30 and 35 sq cm/min were exceeded.

The Importance of Prior Probabilities for Entry Page Search

NARCIS (Netherlands)

Kraaij, W.; Westerveld, T.H.W.; Hiemstra, Djoerd

An important class of searches on the world-wide-web has the goal to find an entry page (homepage) of an organisation. Entry page search is quite different from Ad Hoc search. Indeed a plain Ad Hoc system performs disappointingly. We explored three non-content features of web pages: page length,

Web-based surveillance of public information needs for informing preconception interventions.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Angelo D'Ambrosio

Full Text Available The risk of adverse pregnancy outcomes can be minimized through the adoption of healthy lifestyles before pregnancy by women of childbearing age. Initiatives for promotion of preconception health may be difficult to implement. Internet can be used to build tailored health interventions through identification of the public's information needs. To this aim, we developed a semi-automatic web-based system for monitoring Google searches, web pages and activity on social networks, regarding preconception health.Based on the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists guidelines and on the actual search behaviors of Italian Internet users, we defined a set of keywords targeting preconception care topics. Using these keywords, we analyzed the usage of Google search engine and identified web pages containing preconception care recommendations. We also monitored how the selected web pages were shared on social networks. We analyzed discrepancies between searched and published information and the sharing pattern of the topics.We identified 1,807 Google search queries which generated a total of 1,995,030 searches during the study period. Less than 10% of the reviewed pages contained preconception care information and in 42.8% information was consistent with ACOG guidelines. Facebook was the most used social network for sharing. Nutrition, Chronic Diseases and Infectious Diseases were the most published and searched topics. Regarding Genetic Risk and Folic Acid, a high search volume was not associated to a high web page production, while Medication pages were more frequently published than searched. Vaccinations elicited high sharing although web page production was low; this effect was quite variable in time.Our study represent a resource to prioritize communication on specific topics on the web, to address misconceptions, and to tailor interventions to specific populations.

Ocean Drilling Program: Janus Web Database

Science.gov (United States)

JANUS Database Send questions/comments about the online database Request data not available online Janus database Search the ODP/TAMU web site ODP's main web site Janus Data Model Data Migration Overview in Janus Data Types and Examples Leg 199, sunrise. Janus Web Database ODP and IODP data are stored in

Dynamic spatial coding within the dorsal frontoparietal network during a visual search task.

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Wieland H Sommer

Full Text Available To what extent are the left and right visual hemifields spatially coded in the dorsal frontoparietal attention network? In many experiments with neglect patients, the left hemisphere shows a contralateral hemifield preference, whereas the right hemisphere represents both hemifields. This pattern of spatial coding is often used to explain the right-hemispheric dominance of lesions causing hemispatial neglect. However, pathophysiological mechanisms of hemispatial neglect are controversial because recent experiments on healthy subjects produced conflicting results regarding the spatial coding of visual hemifields. We used an fMRI paradigm that allowed us to distinguish two attentional subprocesses during a visual search task. Either within the left or right hemifield subjects first attended to stationary locations (spatial orienting and then shifted their attentional focus to search for a target line. Dynamic changes in spatial coding of the left and right hemifields were observed within subregions of the dorsal front-parietal network: During stationary spatial orienting, we found the well-known spatial pattern described above, with a bilateral hemifield representation in the right hemisphere and a contralateral preference in the left hemisphere. However, during search, the right hemisphere had a contralateral preference and the left hemisphere equally represented both hemifields. This finding leads to novel perspectives regarding models of visuospatial attention and hemispatial neglect.

Duke Surgery Research Central: an open-source Web application for the improvement of compliance with research regulation.

Science.gov (United States)

Pietrobon, Ricardo; Shah, Anand; Kuo, Paul; Harker, Matthew; McCready, Mariana; Butler, Christeen; Martins, Henrique; Moorman, C T; Jacobs, Danny O

2006-07-27

Although regulatory compliance in academic research is enforced by law to ensure high quality and safety to participants, its implementation is frequently hindered by cost and logistical barriers. In order to decrease these barriers, we have developed a Web-based application, Duke Surgery Research Central (DSRC), to monitor and streamline the regulatory research process. The main objective of DSRC is to streamline regulatory research processes. The application was built using a combination of paper prototyping for system requirements and Java as the primary language for the application, in conjunction with the Model-View-Controller design model. The researcher interface was designed for simplicity so that it could be used by individuals with different computer literacy levels. Analogously, the administrator interface was designed with functionality as its primary goal. DSRC facilitates the exchange of regulatory documents between researchers and research administrators, allowing for tasks to be tracked and documents to be stored in a Web environment accessible from an Intranet. Usability was evaluated using formal usability tests and field observations. Formal usability results demonstrated that DSRC presented good speed, was easy to learn and use, had a functionality that was easily understandable, and a navigation that was intuitive. Additional features implemented upon request by initial users included: extensive variable categorization (in contrast with data capture using free text), searching capabilities to improve how research administrators could search an extensive number of researcher names, warning messages before critical tasks were performed (such as deleting a task), and confirmatory e-mails for critical tasks (such as completing a regulatory task). The current version of DSRC was shown to have excellent overall usability properties in handling research regulatory issues. It is hoped that its release as an open-source application will promote improved

Duke Surgery Research Central: an open-source Web application for the improvement of compliance with research regulation

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Martins Henrique

2006-07-01

Full Text Available Abstract Background Although regulatory compliance in academic research is enforced by law to ensure high quality and safety to participants, its implementation is frequently hindered by cost and logistical barriers. In order to decrease these barriers, we have developed a Web-based application, Duke Surgery Research Central (DSRC, to monitor and streamline the regulatory research process. Results The main objective of DSRC is to streamline regulatory research processes. The application was built using a combination of paper prototyping for system requirements and Java as the primary language for the application, in conjunction with the Model-View-Controller design model. The researcher interface was designed for simplicity so that it could be used by individuals with different computer literacy levels. Analogously, the administrator interface was designed with functionality as its primary goal. DSRC facilitates the exchange of regulatory documents between researchers and research administrators, allowing for tasks to be tracked and documents to be stored in a Web environment accessible from an Intranet. Usability was evaluated using formal usability tests and field observations. Formal usability results demonstrated that DSRC presented good speed, was easy to learn and use, had a functionality that was easily understandable, and a navigation that was intuitive. Additional features implemented upon request by initial users included: extensive variable categorization (in contrast with data capture using free text, searching capabilities to improve how research administrators could search an extensive number of researcher names, warning messages before critical tasks were performed (such as deleting a task, and confirmatory e-mails for critical tasks (such as completing a regulatory task. Conclusion The current version of DSRC was shown to have excellent overall usability properties in handling research regulatory issues. It is hoped that its

World Wide Web Usage Mining Systems and Technologies

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Wen-Chen Hu

2003-08-01

Full Text Available Web usage mining is used to discover interesting user navigation patterns and can be applied to many real-world problems, such as improving Web sites/pages, making additional topic or product recommendations, user/customer behavior studies, etc. This article provides a survey and analysis of current Web usage mining systems and technologies. A Web usage mining system performs five major tasks: i data gathering, ii data preparation, iii navigation pattern discovery, iv pattern analysis and visualization, and v pattern applications. Each task is explained in detail and its related technologies are introduced. A list of major research systems and projects concerning Web usage mining is also presented, and a summary of Web usage mining is given in the last section.

GeoSearcher: Location-Based Ranking of Search Engine Results.

Science.gov (United States)

Watters, Carolyn; Amoudi, Ghada

2003-01-01

Discussion of Web queries with geospatial dimensions focuses on an algorithm that assigns location coordinates dynamically to Web sites based on the URL. Describes a prototype search system that uses the algorithm to re-rank search engine results for queries with a geospatial dimension, thus providing an alternative ranking order for search engine…

Information search with situation-specific reward functions

Directory of Open Access Journals (Sweden)

Bjorn Meder

2012-03-01

Full Text Available can strongly conflict with the goal of obtaining information for improving payoffs. Two environments with such a conflict were identified through computer optimization. Three subsequent experiments investigated people's search behavior in these environments. Experiments 1 and 2 used a multiple-cue probabilistic category-learning task to convey environmental probabilities. In a subsequent search task subjects could query only a single feature before making a classification decision. The crucial manipulation concerned the search-task reward structure. The payoffs corresponded either to accuracy, with equal rewards associated with the two categories, or to an asymmetric payoff function, with different rewards associated with each category. In Experiment 1, in which learning-task feedback corresponded to the true category, people later preferentially searched the accuracy-maximizing feature, whether or not this would improve monetary rewards. In Experiment 2, an asymmetric reward structure was used during learning. Subjects searched the reward-maximizing feature when asymmetric payoffs were preserved in the search task. However, if search-task payoffs corresponded to accuracy, subjects preferentially searched a feature that was suboptimal for reward and accuracy alike. Importantly, this feature would have been most useful, under the learning-task payoff structure. Experiment 3 found that, if words and numbers are used to convey environmental probabilities, neither reward nor accuracy consistently predicts search. These findings emphasize the necessity of taking into account people's goals and search-and-decision processes during learning, thereby challenging current models of information search.

Neural Correlates of Changes in a Visual Search Task due to Cognitive Training in Seniors

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Nele Wild-Wall

2012-01-01

Full Text Available This study aimed to elucidate the underlying neural sources of near transfer after a multidomain cognitive training in older participants in a visual search task. Participants were randomly assigned to a social control, a no-contact control and a training group, receiving a 4-month paper-pencil and PC-based trainer guided cognitive intervention. All participants were tested in a before and after session with a conjunction visual search task. Performance and event-related potentials (ERPs suggest that the cognitive training improved feature processing of the stimuli which was expressed in an increased rate of target detection compared to the control groups. This was paralleled by enhanced amplitudes of the frontal P2 in the ERP and by higher activation in lingual and parahippocampal brain areas which are discussed to support visual feature processing. Enhanced N1 and N2 potentials in the ERP for nontarget stimuli after cognitive training additionally suggest improved attention and subsequent processing of arrays which were not immediately recognized as targets. Possible test repetition effects were confined to processes of stimulus categorisation as suggested by the P3b potential. The results show neurocognitive plasticity in aging after a broad cognitive training and allow pinpointing the functional loci of effects induced by cognitive training.

Large area sheet task: Advanced dendritic web growth development