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Search Quality, Content Farms, and Conspiracy Theories
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by Paula J. Hane
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The blogosphere and media outlets have been abuzz lately with reports of low-quality search results from the major search engines. It started in December 2010 with a New York Times, story about an unscrupulous merchant whose bad treatment of customers and negative reviews pushed the site to prominence in Google searches. In response to the flap that arose, Google quickly addressed this with changes to its search algorithms. Since then, there have been a New York Times expose of J.C. Penney's SEO practices ("The Dirty Little Secrets of Search") and Google's subsequent changes to its algorithm, Google's assertion that Microsoft Bing was copying Google search results, Google's banning of spam from low-quality sites and so-called "content farms," and even a conspiracy theory about which company was launching a negative publicity campaign against Google. This has indeed been a wild and crazy time.
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CCC Integrates Rights Delivery Platform On Copyright.com
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Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) launched its Rights Delivery Platform, allowing "one-stop shop" access to hundreds of millions of additional rights previously available only through RightsLink installations. For the first time, customers can order reprints from Elsevier, The New York Times, Springer, Emerald Publishing Group, Economist Newspaper Ltd., the American Institute of Physics, the American Chemical Society, the American Society of Microbiology, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science directly on copyright.com.
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New Report on How the Public Perceives Community Information Systems
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The Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project released a new report titled "How the Public Perceives Community Information Systems." The report, which is built around surveys in the three communities of Philadelphia, San Jose, and Macon, Ga., found some notable and surprising insights into the importance of government transparency, broadband adoption, and the rise of social media as tools for community conversation.
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Readex to Launch Digital Edition of JPRS Reports, 1957-1994
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A digital edition of Joint Publications Research Service (JPRS) Reports, 1957-1994, will be released by Readex, a division of NewsBank, in late summer 2011. This unique new resource, which is fully searchable for the first time, will feature English translations of foreign-language monographs, reports, serials, journal articles, newspaper articles, and radio and television broadcasts from regions throughout the world. With an emphasis on communist and Third World countries, JPRS contains a wealth of hard-to-find scientific, technical, and social science materials translated from many languages. Iin fact, few libraries or institutions outside of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Library of Congress hold a complete microform edition, especially for the first 2 decades following the founding of JPRS.
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Amazon Raises the Stakes in Your Reading Experience: The Platform War Continues
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by Jill O'Neill
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In the first half of February 2011, Amazon announced an upgrade to the Kindle software, consisting of four elements. The first was the enabling of share-able public notes; Kindle owners may now choose to reveal annotations made in a Kindle edition to others in the same way users had previously been able to share highlighted passages made on a Kindle. The second item was the availability of pagination that would correlate with a specific print edition of the same work. The upgrade would also encourage star ratings of a title as soon as the reader had finished reading it and the possibility of posting both the completion status and star rating to either one's Twitter or Facebook followers. Finally, a new graphical layout for magazines and newspapers on the Kindle better displays a single issue's contents. The upgrade was applicable to third-generation Kindles devices, and the same set of capabilities was subsequently added within the week to the broad range of Kindle apps for other devices.
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