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Daily Archives: August 19, 2005

Web Search Emphasizes The Present to the Detriment of Access to Data on the Past

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A forthcoming report from New Media & Society, Multiple Presents: How Search Engines Re-write the Past, by Iina Hellsten, Loet Leydesdorff, and Paul Wouters (available in PDF, 28 pages).

  • “Internet search engines function in a present which changes continuously. The search engines update their indices regularly, overwriting Web pages with newer ones, adding new pages to the index, and losing older ones. Some search engines can be used to search for information at the internet for specific periods of time. However, these ‘date stamps’ are not determined by the first occurrence of the pages in the Web, but by the last date at which a page was updated or a new page was added, and the search engine’s crawler updated this change in the database. This has major implications for the use of search engines in scholarly research as well as theoretical implications for the conceptions of time and temporality. We examine the interplay between the different updating frequencies by using AltaVista and Google for searches at different moments of time. Both the retrieval of the results and the structure of the retrieved information erodes over time.”

    • More Than 4 Million FOIA Requests Made in 2004

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    The Coalition of Journalists for Open Government has issued two new reports, one of which addresses overall federal agency responsiveness to FOIA requests (the overwhelming majority of which come from the public not the media), and the second which provides a review of FOIA litigation decisions during the period of 1999 through 2004. The combined… Continue Reading

    THOMAS Will Launch New Search Engine By Year’s End

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    Federal Computer Week reported that THOMAS will soon offer users a significant improvement in search capabilities with the addition of “browse navigation that can access content across different systems contained within the Thomas Web site.” [Peggy Garvin] Redesign of the site has been underway for some time now, with incremental improvements released to the public… Continue Reading