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On 24th Sept Chris Rusbridge wrote: >> The Yahoo! subject collection now has a UK version. I haven't had chance to >> explore it yet. >> >> " Yahoo! UK and Ireland Designed to deliver the richness of the Yahoo! database >> from a uniquely British & Irish perspective." >> >> >> http://www.yahoo.co.uk > >First glance: looks interesting, but have they sized it right? Veerrrry >slow! > >Do we now have some serious competition for the eLib ANR projects? I >notice that SOSIG is one of the social sciences resources pointed to. I >wonder what sort of effect this launch has on possible exit strategies for >these services? (Could make them easier or harder at first thought!) > AT PRESENT, Yahoo! UK & Ireland does not pose a threat to EEVL, (which is also mentioned in their index, albeit at an old ULR (which nevertheless works), because: 1. As Chris poinrs out, Yahoo is very slow 2. Yahoo is very incomplete 3. Its inteface is not as user friendly as EEVL's 4. It does nothave many of the features of EEVL 5. It has only 1 line descriptions rather than useful and carefully written abstracts 6. Its classification scheme is bizarre HOWEVER Yahoo! is adding URLs at a rate of over 1500 a week, is very popular amongst searchers, has a well-known name (it was mentioned in the Daily Telegraph, which is more than EEVL has so far managed), and even has a printed magazine (Yahoo! Internet Life - for details and a not very complementary review, see the forthcoming issue of Internet Resources Newsletter). In the future, therefore, IMHO it (or other services, or yet to be developed fancy search engines) may well pose a threat to SBIGs, especially if those SBIGs concentrate only on producing directories/databases of web sites, despite the undoubdtedly higher quality of those databases. This is one reason why EEVL is currently developing beyond its main service of a searchable database of Engineering Internet resources, and why we hope to introduce various innovative new services in the not too distant future. EEVL hopes to become a real Gateway to UK Engineering networked information - a meeting place for academics and their industrial partners (or prospective partners), with customised services, with in-depth indexing, with an archive of resources, with various specialised databases, etc etc etc. Hopefully these will prove to be popular and useful, and hopefully they may assist EEVL to develop a viable exit strategy. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Roddy MacLeod Internet: [log in to unmask] Senior Faculty Librarian Phone: (0131) 451 3576 Heriot-Watt University Fax: (0131) 451 3164 Edinburgh EH14 4AS United Kingdom URL: http://www.hw.ac.uk/libWWW/libram/roddy.html ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%