[topicmapmail] A blog entry...

[Murray Altheim]

Jan Algermissen wrote:
> http://www.rtodd.com/blog/archives/2005/08/the_trouble_wit.htm
> 
> Hmm....
> 
> True/False?

Not false or true, but ignorant. This guy thinks a back of book
index is simple. It's not, it's a very complicated thing, which
is why we hire experts to build them, and employ experts called
librarians to organize things like subject indices. This guy with
his Ph.D. and a blog simply doesn't understand where the real
complexity is located, and he doesn't understand why the Web was
able to succeed. The Web was possible because the network,
hardware and software technology had finally reached a stage that
enabled it (the idea that it had a single "inventor" is silly),
and it worked because it was the first time anyone had designed
a hypertext system that allowed the documents, the links, and
even the network to be broken.

And his justification, where he suggests looking at Google, also
shows an complete misunderstanding of why Google works, which has
nothing to do with any magic behind the scenes, it's because of
the network effect. Google doesn't work very well on an intranet,
for example, if that intranet community doesn't deal with terms
using the same statistical ratios as the rest of the Web. And
because Google is only a full text search engine, it doesn't work
very well at all (i.e., there is no magic) if one is trying to do
anything that requires contextualized searches (e.g., locating a
page where a common term is used in a specific context rather than
a simple frequency or proximity analysis).

But then again, there's a million blogs and a million opinions,
so this was just mine.

Murray

......................................................................
Murray Altheim                          http://www.altheim.com/murray/
Strategic and Services Development
The Open University Library
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK               .

        believe that everything is for
        you until you discover
        that you are for it
                               "The Robin and the Worm" by Don Marquis.
                               http://www.altheim.com/lit/robnworm.html