Medical & Health Databases--Medline Happy Birthday to Medline!
Medline turns 30 years old in this month. From the NLM News in October 1971: "Each user of the service will pay for his own terminal and telephone costs. The system will be accessible by teletype, TWX, IBM 2741, and other terminals operating at 100, 148, or 300 words per minute�The institution will be required to send at least one person for training in the use of the system, and further, to provide bibliographic services to health professionals beyond their normal service responsibilities."...By 1972, the system was already expanding. Its database included 400,000 citations from 1,100 of the leading journals. The communications network began to provide toll-free telephone access in about 35 cities which all connected to NLM's new IBM 370/155 computer. Make sure to read the entire news release, fascinating and informative.
Web Search Pay-For-Placement Search Engines
Source: Wall Street Journal "Some Search Services Rethink Web Results for Cipro Seekers"
From the article, "The zooming public interest in the drug, coupled with a lack of clear-cut industry-wide standards on providing paid or free links to Web sites, has left each site scrambling to formulate a policy on Cipro searches. Some are blocking ads for stores selling Cipro without prescriptions, while others are adopting a wait-and-see policy." "Most sites allow advertisers to place ads on results pages for specific keyword searches, and it is these ads that often link to Cipro stores. Now that the FDA is crackingdown on Cipro sellers, sites are rethinking the pay-for-placement links, in some cases. Thanks to G.T. for the news tip.
Web Search--Spiders, Crawlers, and Robots Sherman and Spiders
In his SearchDay newsletter, our friend and co-author Chris Sherman, writes a great article with an impressive list of resources about web spiders, crawlers, and robots. In a nutshell, spiders are the tools that most web search engines use to gather material for their databases. A must read for those of you who want to learn about how and why search engines work.
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