Consumers who go to multiple search engines looking for the best prices or products may be spending more time than needed, says a Penn State researcher.

In a recent study, Dr. Jim Jansen discovered no significant difference in the effectiveness of five popular search engines in helping consumers find what they were looking for.

“What we learned is that there is little benefit for consumers who occasionally shop online to visit various search engines for product compa

We have all experienced the inconvenience of trying to search for something on the World Wide Web and the search engine spewing back thousands of results, none…

This concept, called “contextual search,” is improving so gradually the changes often go unnoticed, and we may soon forget what the world was like without it,…

A new study confirms what some job seekers may suspect: The more effort people put into a job search, the more likely they are to find employment even in difficult economic times.

The Georgia Institute of Technology study also reveals how certain personality traits affect job-search behavior. For example, people tend to look harder for jobs and consequently have more success if they are: Optimistic and view the job loss as an opportunity to improve their position.
Higher

A conference at the University of Sheffield is set to celebrate ten years since the first Web search engines, and will reveal some of the capabilities of search engines of the future, and the way that our use of computers will lead them to new ways of archiving and retrieving information. Presentations at the conference will include ways that we can store and search through every personal document we have ever received, and another paper will use George Washington’s letters to demonstrate a new sear

The Search and Rescue Mission Office at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., in collaboration with several government agencies, has developed…

Almost everyone who has used a major internet search engine has had the same experience: Search for “Dodge convertible” and 0.16 seconds later you have 4.3…

Researchers see how robots respond in real-world rescue operations with FEMA’s Indiana Task Force 1 An earthquake has just laid waste to a small town. Major roads are impassable, and downed trees have cut power. Worse yet, the local library collapsed during the sudden temblor, trapping a half-dozen patrons. The robots are rushed in to help locate and free the survivors. That was the scenario facing a group of 14 researchers and a crew of search-and-rescue robots as they

“Images are universal, but image search is not,” said Oren Etzioni, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington. “A person…

Engineers at Purdue University are developing a system that will enable people to search huge industry databases by sketching a part from memory, penciling in modifications to an existing part or selecting a part that has a similar shape.

“It’s like a special kind of Google that lets you search for parts based on their three-dimensional shapes,” said Karthik Ramani, a professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Purdue Research and Education Center for Information Systems in

Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) and FIZ Karlsruhe are delighted to reveal the latest innovations for Intellectual Property (IP) professionals. New STN, a…

Web users who stick to one or two search engines and learn those well will have better results for their queries than users who try the same query or various engines, a Penn State researcher says.

“There are no wholesale rules about structuring a query that will work on multiple search engines,” said Bernard J. Jansen, assistant professor of information sciences and technology (IST). “And what works on one engine, such as narrowing a query, can have the opposite effect on other search engine

Researchers at Purdue University who developed the first system capable of searching a company’s catalog of three-dimensional parts created with computer-aided design software are now providing a method to evaluate how well such systems work.

Shape-search engines could save time and millions of dollars annually by making it easier for companies to “reuse” previous designs, reducing redundancy and streamlining a company’s supply chain. The systems will enable companies to b

The engine’s innovative ranking algorithm, TableRank, also can identify tables found in frequently cited documents and weigh that factor as well in the search…

A Johns Hopkins astronomer is a member of a team briefing fellow scientists about plans to use new technology to take advantage of recent, promising ideas on…

Jason Martin, Brad Chassee and Tony Rainoldi, the founders of ArchPatent and graduates of The University of Alabama in Huntsville, have found an easy, low-cost…

Researchers at TU Darmstadt present new approaches to a problem of statistical physics. Whether bacteria in search of food or microrobots that automatically collect toxins or waste, again and again this is a problem in statistical physics that has not yet been clarified satisfactorily: how does an “agent” have to move in order to collect randomly distributed targets as skilfully as possible? Researchers at TU Darmstadt have now presented an approach in the renowned journal Proceedings of the National Academy…

Does my city have a nice, quiet beer garden with a grill? Which restaurant has spicy Asian cuisine on its menu, and which cafe dreamily delicious cakes? Who…

To enhance multilingual access to the reams of online news, project OmniPaper has tested a prototype that offers ’semantic search’ capabilities for Europe’s newspapers on the Net.

The IST project’s prototype was made available to the public in November 2003, with users able to use the semantic, or ’smart search’, for news articles from a set of almost 2000 English-language articles from UK-based The Daily Telegraph.

“Smart search means that the search

Dutch researcher Mirela Tanase has developed a new technique for finding images using search engines. Her technique is based on how the human eye recognises objects. It can increase the success rate of certain search operations for objects from 10 to 70 percent.

Tanase developed two methods for decomposing objects into parts, which are then used to search for similar objects. The first method decomposes the interior of the shape. Humans find this task easy, but a computer often