j's scratchpad

I’ve been whining a lot about the news alert services I use, so I had to chuckle when I saw a blurb for Choosing and Using a News Alert Service by Robert Berkman. It talks about how to choose a service and evaluates quite a few of them. It’s only $79.95 or free if I can get it from a library. I might just have to try to get it.

I’m skeptical of the book’s value, though. It makes me think of the situation with Super Searchers in the News: I eagerly bought the book, then realized most of the content in it is out-of-date because of how search engines change. In that book, many of the researchers rave about AltaVista. Between the time of the interviews and the book coming on the market, AltaVista’s search technology changed and many people dropped it as their primary search engine. Google had appeared on the scene and many people began using it instead. (Remember when people used AltaVista as a verb? Neither do I.)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 8th, 2004 at 5:54 pm and is filed under Search Engines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.