Answers to deep web and federated search trivia questions

Here are the answers to the trivia questions I posted a couple of week ago:

1. What is the Opaque Web? Consists of files that could be crawled and indexed but aren’t. Files might be omitted because they are beyond the crawl depth, because they are missed due to frequency of crawl, because they exceed the maximum number of viewable results, or because they have no links to them.

2. What is the Private Web? Consists of pages that are not indexed because they’re password protected or blocked from indexing by a robots.txt file.

3. What is a focused crawler? Focused crawlers are web crawlers that focus on specific subjects, typically by crawling a set of web sites hand-selected for their relevance to the subject.

4. What is a false drop? A false hit, or irrelevant search result.

5. Who coined the term “hypertext” in 1965? Ted Nelson.

6. What is a controlled vocabulary? From Wikipedia: Controlled vocabularies provide a way to organize knowledge for subsequent retrieval. They are used in subject indexing schemes, subject headings, thesauri and taxonomies. Controlled vocabulary schemes mandate the use of predefined, authorised terms that have been preselected by the designer of the vocabulary, in contrast to natural language vocabularies, where there is no restriction on the vocabulary.

7. What was particularly interesting about the Zapper metasearch engine? Zapper used Intellizap, which performed automatic source selection.

8. What is a web ring?A web ring is a set of web sites, related by subject. Sites within the ring typically link to the next and the previous site in the ring.

9. In 1945, Vannevar Bush published an essay in The Atlantic Monthly, As We May Think. In that essay he proposed the “memex.” What is the memex and what is its relevance to search? The memex is a “proto-hypertext computer system.” (See this Wikipedia article.)

10. What is Dr. Eugene Garfield most well known for in relation to federated search? Dr. Garfield did pioneering work in citation analysis.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to the RSS feed!

Tags: deep web, federated search