Using envirodaemon to search the internet for environmental information and building custom search engines

Abstract

The Internet holds vast stores of information pertaining to pollution prevention and environmental issues, and with each day more is added. Yet, as this storehouse grows, the difficulv of finding specific information increases. This article details how EnviroDaemon was built to ease the task offinding this information and knowledge base. I t automatically builds and updates a catalogof objects at preselected Internetsites thatare related to pollution prevention. Userssearch for information by submitting keywords. Searches can be restricted tosmall subsets of the indexed sites by choosing one offive search criteria, or the entire catalog can be searched. The results are returned rapidly and are embedded in several lines of text to provide context. If the text looks promising, the user can click on a hyperlink to access the full article.Since its release in March, EnviroDaemon has seen increasing use, especially following its demonstration at the National Pollution Prevention Roundtable Conference. The authors also discuss the process of building this search engine to show interested readers how to create other environmental custom search engines.