Senior Research Associate of the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research
University of Liege
Institute of Zoology - Dept of Animal Physiology
Quai Van Beneden, 22 B-4020 Liege - Belgium
by
Tracking down relevant scientific information quickly on the Web remains an elusive quest despite the existence of several search engines. Indeed in April 2001, the publicily indexable World-Wide Web contains about 1,300,000 pages, encompassing about 10 terabytes of text data on about 3,5 million servers. In March 2003, the Web contains around 5,000,000 pages.
For more information about TESTING BIOSPELEOLOGICAL RESSOURCES ON THE WEB download Tercafs_BIOSP2003.doc
The results shown suggest that the most efficient search engine is Google for the 2 key-words " Biospéologie " and "Biospeleology ". Each search engine follows the growing of web sites.
As quoted, Google ranks the relevance
of a request using the number and source of incoming links. The
" best one " is listed at the beginning of the list.
The following results are obtained:
The use the key-words " Biospeleology " and " Biospéologie
" with different search engines scanning the Web gives some
interesting pages and links (around 2,000 for Biospeleology and
900 for Biospéologie). But these numbers are poor compared
with other requests (In 2001 : Biochemistry: 935,000; Entomology:
303,000; Cat: 8,990,900; Sex: 36,500,000 ; in 2003 : Biochemistry:
1,780,000; Entomology: 520,000; Cat: 24,300,000; Sex: 141,000,000
). As already quoted, it is partly due because both the key-words
are not systematically used by the scholars who publish papers
on cave life. This lack of relation is corroborated by the fact
that major reference index - as Current Contents - ignore Biospeleology
in their thesaurus or index. The same fact appears when the key-words
" cave dwelling " are used: 5,680 pages are listed with
Google in 2001, 10,800 in 2003. Therefore there is a lost of available
information when the key-word " Biospeleology " or "
Biospéologie " are used
Bibliography
(1) Tercafs, R. Bull. Inform. Soc. Biosp., 26, 25-28, 1998.
(2) Tercafs, Biospeleological newsletter, 3, 14-21, 2001.
SIBIOS - geoffroy@mnhn.fr
Written by Jean-Jacques Geoffroy & SIBIOS board
© SIBIOS, 20010