Searching for the needle in the haystack

Abstract

The Penn State Taxonomic Tags group, with representatives from Information Technology, Business Administration, and the Penn State Libraries, was formed to examine whether a taxonomic set of tags, systematically applied across the university's Web pages, could (a) make finding specific pages easier from among the University's greater than 500,000 Web pages, (b) simplify Web content management tasks and (c) prove useful over time as search engines continue to evolve and despite whether open source or commercial (and often, proprietary) search algorithms are employed. The University has had broad experience with several search engines, and currently holds a University-wide license for the Google Appliance. The Tags Group has developed recommendations that it believes will address issues found in the current environment and yet remain useful during and after what it expects will be the increasing adoption of Content Management Systems across Penn State University.

Effects of Web Accessibility on Search Engines and Webometrics Ranking

“…The number of disabled web users is much larger than what people think. According to Paciello (2002), 1 in 10 people around the world has a disability. He argued that web developers usually lack the awareness to develop accessible websites which results in accessibility barriers for people with disabilities.…”

Web content accessibility and its relation to Webometrics ranking and search engines optimization

“…Ranking is carried twice a year with data for more than 20,000 institutes collected in January and July. Results of each ranking round are announced one month after data is collected [42]. The methodology used for Webometrics ranking system depends on four main indicators as shown Table 1 below.…”

“…One very important ranking system is the Webometrics Ranking of World's Universities [42]. Due to universities' ranking systems, universities have become more concerned with their online performance and how to push their ranking to higher positions in order to achieve better worldwide recognition.…”

Taxonomies by the numbers

“…In recent years taxonomies have become an important factor in organizing knowledge for both the web and corporate intranets [3,4,6,8,13]. For a successful implementation of the taxonomies within any large-scale application the most important question is how to label large amounts of data with high accuracy according to the taxonomy.…”