Thank you. I’m not sure that the formatting of those copies of the paper is any different from one site to the other, but it can sometimes be nice to have an alternative location for a paper – sometimes they disappear.

There are a number of new papers cited on Jeff Huang’s page, but I don’t have any copies of them yet. He does list his email address on the page, and you might want to try to contact him and introduce yourself, and let him know that you are possibly interested in using them for a school paper. I would imagine that there’s a good chance that he would be willing to share, and you might be able to ask questions about the papers as well.

But unfortunately I cannot access the papers on Dr. Huang’s page because there is no link to them. Bill do you have a copy of these papers? I found a paper on query abandonment on Dr. Efthimiadis’s pagee: http://faculty.washington.edu/efthimis/pubs/Pubs/ecir10-stamou-efthimiadis.user.inactivity.results.pdf

I’m not quite sure that I’m following you.

I came across 80legs recently too, from a post at alt search engines last Friday – 80legs has launched! Woot!.

It looks like using 80legs would give you some more control over what you are actually crawling and showing in an index than if you were to use Google custom search. Google Custom Search allows you to specify the sites that you want to crawl, and is very easy to set up. 80legs lets you specify seed sites to start with, and looks like it can go beyond those to other sites that aren’t specified, from those seed sites. Yes, it does appears to involve a lot more work, from the FAQ, but as you mention, it also looks like if offers a lot more flexibility.

That would be a great search option for Google to offer its users and easy to implement.

On a search engine side note – Have you heard about http://www.80legs.com/ – the site is a web crawler “for hire”? I saw it on Mashable.com today.

You can input the domains you want and choose options and for $2.00/ million pages and $.03 / CPU hours 80Legs will crawl the sites for you and then you can build your own custom search engine – albeit with a fair amount of your own Java programming to handle the queries and the returned data.

I just wonder how this really differs from Google Custom Search ( which is free ), where you enter your own domains to search and then easily copy-and-paste the code into your own site. I suppose having your own crawler would give you more flexibility on handling the results and the relevancy assigned to those results.

That is a very good source of synonyms and related terms that could really help searchers. I wonder if Google would consider offering something similar to searchers as a “query suggestion tool,” that could be accessed directly from a search result page for the query they typed into the search box.