Yahoo Directory - Retired!

Reposted from Search Engine Land. Click here for full story.

For some, it may seem like there has always been Google, and it’s always been the main way people have found things on the web. But before Google, there was the Yahoo Directory and its hand-compiled list of websites, organized into topics. Now, the venerable Yahoo Directory is closing.
Yahoo shared the news today, a short paragraph that’s part of announcing two other closures, under a headline of “Progress Report: Continued Product Focus.” That sure fails to give the Yahoo Directory its proper due. From Yahoo’s post:

Yahoo was started nearly 20 years ago as a directory of websites that helped users explore the Internet. While we are still committed to connecting users with the information they’re passionate about, our business has evolved and at the end of 2014 (December 31), we will retire the Yahoo Directory. Advertisers will be upgraded to a new service; more details to be communicated directly.

It’s about as terrible a send-off as Yahoo gave AltaVista, another pioneering search resource that Yahoo closed last year. AltaVista got a single sentence to cover its coming death.

I get that companies might not want to celebrate the closure of products. But there had to be something less shameful than the way Yahoo announced the coming closure of the directory from which Yahoo literally takes its name.

When Yahoo Ruled The Web

When Yahoo began in 1994, the most common way people found websites was to browse through lists, where sites were often organized into topics.
Founders Jerry Yang and David Filo quickly realized their own list needed a better name than “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web.” They settled on Yahoo! (with exclamation mark). That stood for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle” — a reference to organizing sites in a hierarchical order.
Yahoo quickly became the most popular search engine on the web. By search engine, I mean the generic term of any service that helps you locate information, rather than the more technical one of a service that locates information by “crawling” pages automatically and allowing you to keyword search to find any pages that match your keywords.
The distinction is important, because it lead to Yahoo’s eventual downturn as a search resource and directly to the coming closure of the Yahoo Directory that was announced today.
A “directory” relies on humans to review websites, summarize them with short descriptions and organize them into a categories. When Yahoo started, this system was effective, because there weren’t that many pages on the web (relatively speaking) and automated search technology to organize websites wasn’t very good.
That contributed in a big way to Yahoo’s popularity over traditional search engines like InfoSeek or Excite that used automation. Yahoo had better relevance. You could find what you were looking for.

Google: The Yahoo Directory Killer

I don’t have time at the moment to do an extended timeline of the decline of the Yahoo Directory (as well as Yahoo as a search resource), but I’ll hit the highpoints of what led to the Yahoo Directory’s low point today.
First, Google. Google came along in 1998 and quickly proved that you could have search results generated by automation, rather than through human effort, and have better relevancy.
With Yahoo, it was as if you were searching for books in a library using an old-fashioned card catalog system, where all you knew about a book was 25 words or so describing it.
With Google, it was as if you could search through every page of every book in the library. You didn’t miss that needle in a haystack. And importantly, unlike previous search engines that used automation, you didn’t find that the “noise” of looking through all those pages drowned out the important relevancy “signal.” Google’s search algorithm was better than others.
Indeed, Google’s search algorithm was so good that in 2000, Yahoo partnered up with Google. Yahoo had long partnered with crawler-based search engines, so that if there were no matches from its own directory, the crawler search engine provided some “backup” answers. Google became Yahoo’s fourth partner: Open Text was the first, AltaVista the second and Inktomi the third.
By 2002, Yahoo realized that Google’s search results were so good that it made a dramatic shift and presented those as the main listings to searchers at Yahoo. That was effectively the start of the Yahoo Directory’s long, slow-death. If you knew where the directory was, you could search it directly. And category links from the directory were also inserted alongside Google listings when relevant. But it was pretty much an afterthought, forgotten, dethroned.
Indeed, in 2003, Yahoo completed the purchase of Inktomi, so it could have its own crawler-based listings. That led to the eventual end of its deal with Google. But by then, for Google, it didn’t matter. Google had long eclipsed Yahoo as the most popular search engine out there. Eventually, Yahoo even abandoned its own search technology and outsourced to Microsoft for it.

Department of Library and Information Studies - DLIS UWI, Mona Jamaica Summer workshops

ALA 2014 State of America's Libraries

On April 13, the American Library Association released its report on the 2014 State of America's Libraries during National Library Week, April 13–19, detailing library trends of the past year. Its findings include:

• More than 90% of the respondents in an independent national survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project said that libraries are important to the community.
• School libraries continue to feel the combined pressures of recession-driven financial tightening and federal neglect, according to the survey, and school libraries in some districts and some states still face elimination or deprofessionalization of their programs.
• 96% of Americans agree that public libraries are important because they provide tech resources and access to materials, and the same number find libraries valuable because they promote literacy and a love of reading.
• More than 90% of traditional public schools have a school library, but public schools continue to struggle with the impact of funding cuts and reductions in professional staffing.

The ALA is on the forefront of efforts to shore up support for school libraries.

On another front, Banned Books Week, sponsored by the ALA and other organizations, highlights the benefits of free access to information and the perils of censorship by spotlighting the actual or attempted banning of books.

A perennial highlight of Banned Books Week is the Top Ten List of Frequently Challenged Books, compiled annually by the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF). The OIF collects reports on book challenges from librarians, teachers, concerned individuals, and press reports. A challenge is defined as a formal written complaint filed with a library or school requesting that a book or other material be restricted or removed because of its content or appropriateness. In 2013, the OIF received hundreds of reports on attempts to remove or restrict materials from school curricula and library bookshelves.

The most challenged books of the year were:

1. The Captain Underpants series, by Dav Pilkey
2. The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison
3. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie
4. Fifty Shades of Grey, by E. L. James
5. The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins
6. A Bad Boy Can Be Good for a Girl, by Tanya Lee Stone
7. Looking for Alaska, by John Green
8. The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky
9. Bless Me Ultima, by Rudolfo Anaya
10. The Bone series, by Jeff Smith

Libraries witnessed a number of developments in 2013 in the area of ebooks and copyright issues. Ebooks continue to make gains among reading Americans, according to another Pew Research Center survey, but few readers have completely replaced print with digital editions—and the advent of digital reading brings with it a continuing tangle of legal issues involving
publishers and libraries.

“Print remains the foundation of Americans’ reading habits,” the Pew researchers found. Most people who read ebooks also read print books, they reported, and only 4% of readers described themselves as “ebook only.” After years of conflict between publishers and libraries, 2013 ended with all the major US publishers participating in the library ebook market, though important challenges, such as availability and prices, remain.

In November 2013, after eight years of litigation, a federal court upheld the fair use doctrine when it dismissed Authors Guild v. Google, et al., a case that questioned the legality of Google’s searchable database of more than 20 million books. In his decision, the judge referenced an amicus brief coauthored by the ALA that enumerated the public benefits of Google Book Search. The Authors Guild has filed an appeal.

Other key trends detailed in the 2014 State of America’s Libraries report:

• More and more public libraries are turning to the use of web technologies, including websites, online account access, blogs, rich site summary (RSS) feeds, catalog search boxes, sharing interfaces, Facebook, and Twitter.
• The economic downturn is continuing at most institutions of higher learning, and academic librarians are working to transform programs and services by repurposing space and redeploying staff in the digital resources environment.
• President Obama signed a $1.1 trillion spending bill in January that will fund the federal government through September and partially restore funding to the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA)—the primary source of annual funding for libraries in the federal budget—that were dramatically cut in the 2013 fiscal year under sequestration.

The full text of the 2014 State of America’s Libraries report is available on the ALA website. It is also available as an American Libraries digital supplement.

How the Internet Has Grown in the Last 25 years - Pew report

The World Wide Web turned 25 on March 12, 2014. In honor of the milestone,  Pew  conducted a  new national survey  and provided data to confirm the incredible spread and impact of the internet:

Adoption: 87% of American adults now use the internet, with near-saturation usage among those living in households earning $75,000 or more (99%), young adults ages 18-29 (97%), and those with college degrees (97%). Fully 68% of adults connect to the internet with mobile devices like smartphones or tablet computers.

The adoption of related technologies has also been extraordinary: Over the course of Pew Research Center polling, adult ownership of cell phones has risen from 53% in our first survey in 2000 to 90% now. Ownership of smartphones has grown from 35% when we first asked in 2011 to 58% now.

Impact: Asked for their overall judgment about the impact of the internet, toting up all the pluses and minuses of connected life, the public’s verdict is overwhelmingly positive:

90% of internet users say the internet has been a good thing for them personally and only 6% say it has been a bad thing, while 3% volunteer that it has been some of both

76% of internet users say the internet has been a good thing for society, while 15% say it has been a bad thing and 8% say it has been equally good and bad.

Read more: http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/02/27/summary-of-findings-3/

Publishing Opportunities in New UWI Open Access Refereed Journal - Caribbean Library Journal

Kudos to my Caribbean colleagues for succesfully publishing the inaugural issue of the Caribbean Library Journal -  an online open access peer reviewed journal published by the University Libraries at the University of the West Indies. As stated in the first ( December 2013) issue "this medium provides a forum for information professionals in the Caribbean and those who work with Caribbean materials globally to discuss their work, share ideas and experiences."

 

This stellar effort to give Caribbean information professionals an avenue to document and promote their publishing and creative capabilities is reflected in the topics covered in this issue:

 

• Exploring the Use of Text Messaging to Enhance Reference Services at The University of the West Indies Library, Mona Campus, Karlene Nelson
• Library Orientation at The Alma Jordan Library: The Way Forward, Tamara Brathwaite, Arlene Dolabaille
•  Information Literacy through E-Learning: A Case Study of IL Training to Undergraduates at The University of the West Indies (Mona),  Verna George, Karlene P. Robinson
•  Towards Academic Library Support for Entrepreneurship: A Blueprint for Reinventing our Role,  Martha Ingrid Preddie

 

 The CLJ is an annual publication and contributors are invited to submit "new scholarly works such as academic essays, book reviews and research reports". The Editors are also interested in publications which incorporate Web 2.0 tools, videos and other innovative pieces.

 

With the growing popularity of the 'open access movement' this Journal provides yeoman service to 'all information professionals' in making its content openly accessible and embracing the principle that "making research freely available to the public supports greater global exchange of knowledge".

Click here to access the current issue

IT News in Review - 2013

ITI ( Information Today, Inc.) Brandi Scardilli provides an overview of newsworthy trends, events, and topics publishde in the newsletter NewsBreak for 2013. Chick here for full posting.

News in Review 

Ebooks were a hot topic yet again this year, and NewsBreaks analyzed a variety of news, from SAGE Publications’ statistics etextbook to Amazon’s patent for used digital content. Other articles in the Ebook Trends 2013 series include “The Transformation Accelerates,” “The New World of Ebook Publishing,” and “What’s Trending in Ebooks.”

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) became more popular than ever in 2013, with NewsBreaks issuing a primer (“The Wild West of MOOCs”) as well as an exploration of their impact on education (“Google Gives MOOC Development a Major Push”).

Two information companies went through major changes this year: OCLC appointed a new leader (“Skip Prichard Named OCLC President and CEO”), and EBSCO Publishing merged with EBSCO Information Services for improved product integration.

While ebooks and MOOCs continue to generate conversation in the industry, these three topics dominated NewsBreaks in 2013:

OA: It seemed the OA announcements were never-ending this year, with new initiatives and opinions coming in regularly. NewsBreaks reported on the debuts of eLife and the Open Library of Humanities. Approaches to OA were covered from the university (“OA Rules at the University of California”) and government (“Obama Administration Advances Open Data Policy”) perspectives. NewsBreaks also celebrated Open Access Week and chronicled the U.S. government’s policies about research (“U.S. Takes Huge Step Forward in Opening Access to Publicly Funded Research”; “Dialogue Over Public Access to Scholarly Publications Continues in the U.S. ”).

Acquisitions: In 2013, businesses both large and small made headlines as they joined the ranks of other companies. NewsBreaks highlighted Elsevier’s acquisitions of Knovel and Mendeley, ProQuest’s acquisition of EBL (Ebook Library) and its makeover of Dialog, Amazon’s acquisition of social reading site Goodreads and Jeff Bezos’ purchase of The Washington Post, and Nielsen’s acquisition of two Bowker product units.

Legal Issues: When it came to lawsuits, NewsBreaks was on the case. The big news to follow this year was the ebook price-fixing trial that pitted Apple against the Department of Justice. Five NewsBreaks articles reported on the trial as it happened and offered analysis once it ended (“Apple Ebook Price-Fixing Trial Underway”; “Apple Gambles on Winning Ebook Antitrust Suit”; “Apple Ebook Dealings Violated Antitrust Law ”; “DOJ Proposes Injunction on Apple Ebook Practices ”; “Federal Court Restricts Apple’s Ebook Deals”). Other legal issues in 2013 included Cengage Learning’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing and the Associated Press’ lawsuit against Meltwater, an online news aggregator.