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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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Organizations Support Free Online Access to CRS Reports
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More than 30 organizations concerned with government openness and accountability, including ALA, ARL, and SLA, sent a letter to the U.S. Librarian of Congress, James H. Billington, urging him to appoint a director of the Congressional Research Service (CRS) who will work with Congress to provide online free public access to the unclassified, nonconfidential, taxpayer-funded reports produced by CRS.
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Reuters Powers New Services for Science, Legal, Tax, and Accounting Pros
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Thomson Reuters is launching a suite of news products designed for the information needs of professionals in the legal, tax and accounting, and science markets. It will combine Reuters news with the content of products such as Westlaw and Checkpoint.
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Two University Press Ebook Initiatives Announce Merger
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Project MUSE Editions (PME) and the University Press e-book Consortium (UPeC) joined forces. The result of this merger—the University Press Content Consortium (UPCC)—will launch Jan. 1, 2012. The partnership allows ebooks from an anticipated 60 to 70 university presses and nonprofit scholarly presses—representing as many as 30,000 frontlist and backlist titles—to be discovered and searched in an integrated environment with content from nearly 500 journals currently on MUSE.
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Cengage Learning Introduces New ‘MindTap’ Personal Learning Experience
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by Paula J. Hane
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MindTap is a new personalized program of digital products and services that engages students with interactivity while also offering students and instructors choice in content, platform, devices, and learning tools. Cengage Learning, a provider of learning and research solutions for the academic, professional, and library markets, introduced the new service at the recent TED conference, which showcases the best in technology and "ideas worth spreading." Cengage claims MindTap goes beyond ebooks, digital supplements, course delivery platforms, or learning management systems (LMS); it is the first in a new category that Cengage calls Personal Learning Experiences (PLEs).
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Dialog Delivers More Data and Features
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by Marydee Ojala
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When ProQuest decided to create a new platform for its Dialog subsidiary, it spent 2 years on development, consulted more than 6,000 subscribers, and planned for a gradual roll-out rather than a total, jarring, all at once makeover. The new platform launched in August 2010 with 14 pharmaceutical and biomedical databases included. For a full account of the initial launch, see "The New ProQuest Dialog and What's Next" by Amelia Kassel in the January 2011 issue of Searcher.
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