Letter to the Editor in The Times: A Non-Commercial Web Engine?
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Source: NY Times Letter to the Editor in The Times: A Non-Profit Web Engine?
Timothy E. Cook of Baton Rouge, LA, suggests a nonprofit general web engine in response to this opinion piece. Aside from the technical and collection development policy (targeting the crawler, keeping the database clean) issues that need to be addressed, an interesting idea. Actually, it's not a new idea. I know of many people (namely librarians) who have had similar ideas for a couple of years. Of course, many wonderful librarian- (and non-profit-) built general web directories exist like the LII, Infomine, AcademicInfo.net, and RDN. In fact, one of RDN's underlying sites, EEVL (Enhanced and Evaluated Virtual Library, engineering, computing and mathematics resources), offers a focused crawler that, "harvests information from web sites within the EEVL Internet Resource catalogue and allows the actual content of these sites to be searched (as a conventional search engine would do, but with greater subject focus)." A great idea and one that could help seed a non-profit general web engine with excellent resources.
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