LISNews: Librarian News

A Story from The BBC reports a new study done by IBM, Compaq and Altavista, estimates that only 30% of all web pages make up a heavily interconnected core which most of the search engines index. They dubbed the core the \'giant strongly connected component\'.
They say that it can take hundreds of clicks to reach some web pages and others cannot be reached at all.
Of course this contradicts work carried out by Alberto-Laszlo Barabasi from the University of Notre Dame that suggested it took a maximum of 19 clicks to get from one side of the web to the other. You can check out the study Here. They call it the \"Bow Tie\" Theory.\"The result is the development of the \"Bow Tie\" Theory. One of the initial discoveries of this ongoing study shatters the number one myth about the Web ... in truth, the Web is less connected than previously thought. \" -- Read More

David Plotnikoff, staff writer for the San Jose Mercury News, notices that \"on the Net there is no shortage of structures to facilitate the orderly transfer of advice from the clued to the clueless. ... Every recreational pursuit from water ballet to weasel husbandry seems to command at least one Web site that\'s well-populated with professional experts and eager kibitzers of all stripes.\" -- Read More

Steve Matthews, publisher of BPubs.com, contributes this storyabout the future of vertical searching. -- Read More

This Traffick interview showcases Onepage, one amongst several \"metabrowsing\" tools. Metabrowsing is a newly-coined term for an activity that may someday gain a following: placing customized info from different websites into a single browser window. It\'s not exactly the same as a customized news page; some would say that it\'s better. Others might wonder if it\'s worth the trouble. Still others might just want to buy a couple of extra computers and leave them on all the time!

Other tools in this genre include Quickbrowse and Octopus. -- Read More