As most members of this list know, I monitor use of search engines on
institutional Web services. I've come across two changes which are worth
mentioning.
Warwick has moved from Harvest to ht://Dig and Leeds had moved from ht://Dig
to Google's external service.
I guess Harvest is just about dead in a service provider (only 2
Universities left using it).
The change at Leeds is interesting as I'd assumed that externally hosted
search engines would be used by small colleges, departments or by projects,
especially those with limited technical expertise. Leeds Univ doesn't fit
this profile. The search engines is available at
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/search/.
The service seems very quick, and benefits from the functionality of Google.
However there are network charging issues, reliance on a third party,
loss of control over indexing policy, etc.
Any thought on this?
Brian
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Brian Kelly
UKOLN
University of Bath
BATH
BA2 7AY
Email: [log in to unmask]
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