Internet Search Service Research Articles

Trust an analyst? An investigation of conflicts of interest in an Australian investment bank

PurposeTo show how conflicts of interest and disingenuous investment research at the end of the 1990s stock market bubble occurred in Australia as well as the USA and Western Europe.Design/methodology/approachReviews the role of research analysts in major securities firms and conflicts of interest such as analyzing and evaluating a company for investment purposes, while seeking the investment banking business of the same company. Provides a case study of how an investment banking firm dealt with a provider of internet search services in both a research and an investment banking capacity. Investigates and evaluates the regulations and guidelines developed and introduced by the Australian regulatory bodies (Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) and Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC)) and the Australian Government to deal with potential conflicts of interest that could affect the objectivity and independence of analyst research.FindingsThere were examples of conflicts of interest and fraudulent stock recommendations in Australia that rivaled the worst examples in the USA and Western Europe.Originality/valueA reminder of fraudulent investment research practices during the stock market bubble and the potential for conflicts of interest between research and investment banking functions within the same firm.

Real Time Evaluation of Overseas Technology Trend Information

In the era of global competition, international competitiveness depends greatly on the prompt provision of overseas information. In the field of Science and Technology, it is very important to catch the research or technical trends of advanced countries as quickly as possible. KISTI has been providing an overseas S&T trend (tech-trend) information service since 1993. In 2002, about 16,000 tech-trend news items were selected and translated by more than 100 reporters who are domain experts residing both in Korea and abroad. This information is provided to end users via various types of services, such as push mail service, internet search service, directory service by subject, and through weekly magazines. In order to provide a satisfying service, it is important to maintain the quality of the information at a high level. For this purpose, we developed a quality management system that quickly and accurately evaluates the quality of the information. In this paper, we explain the gathering, evaluating, and distributing processes of the tech-trend information service, and also discuss the criteria that should be met for a quality management system. The score of each reporter is used to control the quality of his/her articles. We give incentives to the 3 highest rankers, and penalties to the 3 lowest rankers. In addition, we adopted a ‘3 strikes-your-out’ strategy, in which a reporter who is ranked as one of three lowest, 3 times in a row, is dismissed.

The Lumbar I/F Cage for posterior lumbar interbody fusion with the Variable Screw Placement System: 10-year results of a Food and Drug Administration clinical trial

Background context The Lumbar I/F Cage is a carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) device designed to separate the mechanical and device functions of interbody fusion. A Investigational Device Exemption (IDE) clinical study of the CFRP cage was conducted during an enrollment period from 1991 to 1993. Based on the 2-year results of this study, the cage was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in February 1999. Since then, the Lumbar I/F Cage device has become widely used in the United States. Purpose This study was designed to determine the long-term results of patients who received this device during the 1991–1993 enrollments. Study design/setting Investigators from the original study were asked to evaluate their original patients according to FDA-reviewed case report forms. Although many of the centers were unable to provide significant follow-up, two centers that enrolled almost half of the original study group provided reports on a high percentage of their original patients. This paper reviews the results in those patients. Patient sample Inclusion criteria included patients with degenerative disc disease who had at least one failed lumbar discectomy or decompression procedure at one or more levels. Outcome measures Clinical success was defined by a modified Prolo score evaluating pain, function, medication usage and economic status. Fusion success, determined by evaluation of plain radiographs, was defined by continuous bone bridging the fusion area with no lucencies. Flexion-extension X-rays were done on patients who had previous removal of pedicle screw implants. Any motion on flexion-extension films indicated pseudarthrosis. Methods All patients were contacted at their last known address. Internet search services were used to locate additional patients. Thirty-three of 43 eligible patients (77%) were evaluated, including 31 patients who reported for examination and X-ray and 2 additional patients by telephone survey and written questionnaire. Results Clinical success was achieved in 32 of 37 patients (86.5%) at 24 months and in 29 of 33 patients (87.8%) at 10 years. This included 61% excellent, 27% good, and 12% fair results. Fusion success was reported in 37 of 37 patients (100%) at 24 months and in 29 of 30 patients (96.7%) at 10 years. Patient satisfaction was reported in 31 of 33 (93.9%). Further lumbar surgery was done in 23 patients: in 18 patients for elective removal of pedicle screws and in 5 patients to extend the fusion to adjacent levels. Adjacent segment degeneration occurred in 61% of patients but was clinically significant in only 20%. Smokers had equal clinical and fusion success with nonsmokers at 24 months and 10 years and had adjacent segment degeneration in 37%, a rate significantly lower than nonsmokers at 87%. Conclusions The high rate of clinical success, fusion success, and patient satisfaction at 24 months was maintained at 10-year follow-up. Adjacent segment degeneration was common but was usually not clinically significant.

질의 로그 분석을 통한 네이버 이용자의 검색 형태 연구

이용자와 검색 서비스 시스템의 모든 검색 과정을 기록한 질의 로그는 이용자의 실제 검색 행위를 사실적으로 반영한다. 따라서, 웹 검색 이용자들의 검색 행태를 이해하기위하여 웹 검색 서비스 시스템이 생성한 질의 로그를 분석하는 방법이 널리 사용되고 있다. 본 연구는 네이버 이용자의 웹 검색 행태를 파악하기 위하여 기존의 질의 로그 분석 방법론을 보완하여 제시한다. 또한, 본 연구는 통합 검색, 디텍토리 검색, 웹 문서 검색과 같은 다양한 검색 유형에 대하여 일주일 동안 생성된 질의 로그를 분석함으로써 네이버 웹 검색 이용자들의 전반적인 검색 행태를 파악하였다. 본 연구의 결과는 보다 효과적인 웹 검색 시스템 개발과 서비스 구축에 기여할 것으로 기대된다.

Techniques for the interruption of tubal patency for female sterilisation.

Female sterilization is the most popular contraceptive method worldwide. Several techniques are described in the literature, however only few of them are commonly used and properly evaluated. To compare the different tubal occlusion techniques in terms of major and minor morbidity, failure rates (pregnancies), technical failures and difficulties and women's and surgeons' views. The Cochrane Controlled Trials Register has been searched. A search of the reference lists of identified trials was performed. An additional MEDLINE search was done using an Internet search service Pub Med. All randomized controlled trials comparing different techniques for tubal sterilization, regardless of the way of entry in the abdominal cavity or the method of anesthesia. Trials under consideration were evaluated for methodological quality and appropriateness for inclusion. Nine relevant studies were included and the results were stratified in five groups: tubal ring versus clip, modified Pomeroy versus electrocoagulation, tubal ring versus electrocoagulation, modified Pomeroy versus Filshie clip and Hulka versus Filshie clip. Results are reported as odds ratio for dichotomous outcomes and weighted mean differences for continuous outcomes. Tubal ring versus clip: Minor morbidity was higher in the ring group (Peto OR 2.15; 95% CI 1.22, 3.78). Technical difficulties were found less frequent in the clip group ( Peto OR 3.87; 95% CI 1.90, 7.89). There was no difference in failure rates between the two groups (Peto OR 0.70; 95% CI 0.28, 1.76). Pomeroy versus electrocoagulation: Women undergoing modified Pomeroy technique had higher major morbidity than with electrocoagulation technique (Peto OR 2.87; 95% CI 1.13, 7.25). Postoperative pain was more frequent in the Pomeroy group (Peto OR 3.85; 95% CI 2.91, 5.10). Tubal ring versus electrocoagulation: Post operative pain was more frequently reported in the tubal ring group. No pregnancies were reported. Pomeroy versus Filshie clip: In the trial comparing the two interventions only one pregnancy was reported in the Pomeroy group after follow-up for 24 months. No differences were found when comparing Hulka versus Filshie clip in the only study that compared these two devices (Toplis 1988). Electrocoagulation was associated with less morbidity when compared with tubal ring and other methods. However the risk of burns to the small bowel might be a serious criticism of the approach. The small sample size and the relative short period of follow-up in these studies limited the power to show clinical or statistical differences for rare outcomes such as failure rates. Aspects such as training, costs and maintenance of the equipment may be important factors in deciding which method to choose.

Supporting unified interface to wrapper generator in Integrated Information Retrieval

Given the ever-increasing scale and diversity of information and applications on the Internet, improving the technology of information retrieval is an urgent research objective. Retrieved information is either semi-structured or unstructured in format and its sources are extremely heterogeneous. In consequence, the task of efficiently gathering and extracting information from documents can be both difficult and tedious. Given this variety of sources and formats, many choose to use mediator/wrapper architecture (Y. Papakonstantinou, A. Gupta, H. Garcia-Molina, J. Ullman, A Query Translation Scheme for Rapid Implementation of Wrappers, International Conference on Deductive and Object-Oriented Databases, Singapore, 1995), but its use demands a fast means of generating efficient wrappers. In this paper, we present a design for an automatic eXtensible Markup Language (XML)-based framework with which to generate wrappers rapidly. Wrappers created with this framework support a unified interface for a meta-search information retrieval system based on the Internet Search Service using the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) standard. Greatly advantaged by the compatibility of CORBA and XML, a user can quickly and easily develop information-gathering applications, such as a meta-search engine or any other information source retrieval method. The two main things our design provides are a method of wrapper generation that is fast, simple, and efficient, and a wrapper generator that is CORBA and XML-compliant and that supports a unified interface.

Kilroy

Kilroy is an OCLC research project that is building an Internet harvester, full-text databases, and metadata databases of Internet resources. Via Kilroy, we hope to study several aspects of the changing state of Internet resources including end-user access to Internet search services, link analysis, and the automatic generation of metadata.

Surgical methods for first trimester termination of pregnancy.

Different surgical methods for termination of pregnancy have evolved over the years: Dilatation and curettage, power operated vacuum aspiration, manual vacuum aspiration (MVA) or hysterotomy. Local or general anaesthesia is used for all methods. Preabortion medical or mechanical cervical preparation may reduce the incidence of cervical or uterine injuries. To compare the safety and efficacy of different surgical methods for first trimester abortion. The Cochrane Controlled Trials Register has been searched. A search of the reference lists of identified trials was performed. An additional MEDLINE search was done using the Internet search service Pub Med. Randomised controlled trials comparing different surgical methods for first trimester abortion were eligible. Trials under consideration were evaluated for methodological quality and appropriateness for inclusion. Three trials were included, resulting in 2 comparisons: vacuum aspiration versus dilatation and curettage and flexible versus rigid vacuum aspiration cannula. Results are reported as odds ratio for dichotomous data and weighted mean differences for continuous data. There were no reports of maternal deaths and cases of uterine perforation in the trials identified. Vacuum aspiration versus dilatation and curettage: There were no statistically significant differences for excessive blood loss, blood transfusion, febrile morbidity, incomplete or repeat uterine evacuation procedure, re-hospitalisation, post operative abdominal pain or therapeutic antibiotic use. Duration of operation was statistically significantly shorter with vacuum aspiration compared to D&C in both gestational age subgroups : < 9 weeks: weighted mean difference (WMD) -1.84 minutes, 95% confidence interval (CI) [-2.542,-1.138]; =/> 9 weeks: WMD -0.600 minutes, 95% CI [-1.166,-0.034]). Flexible versus rigid vacuum aspiration cannula: There were no statistically significant differences with regard to cervical injuries, febrile morbidity, blood transfusion, therapeutic antibiotic use, or incomplete or repeat uterine evacuation procedure. The included studies do not indicate a preference of providers for one or the other method. The trials included are small and lack power to to present meaningful differences for rare outcomes between the groups. outcomes such as women's satisfaction, the need for pain relief or surgeons preference for the instrument have been inadequately addressed. No data outcomes, such as fertility after surgical abortion, are available.

Portales de internet: concepto, tipología básica y desarrollo

This paper shows the evolution of the first internet search engines, indexes and service providers towards their conversion into portals. Thesecan be grouped into three classifications: general, vertical, and corporate. Some distinguishing characteristics of portals are analyzed as well as the reasons behind their existence in internet. Also discussed are the main elements which favour their success, including: generation of contents, creation of virtual communities, promotion of user loyalty and development of e-commerce.

Image searching on the Excite Web search engine

A growing body of research is beginning to explore the information-seeking behavior of Web users. The vast majority of these studies have concentrated on the area of textual information retrieval (IR). Little research has examined how people search for non-textual information on the Internet, and few large-scale studies has investigated visual information-seeking behavior with general-purpose Web search engines. This study examined visual information needs as expressed in users’ Web image queries. The data set examined consisted of 1,025,908 sequential queries from 211,058 users of Excite, a major Internet search service. Twenty-eight terms were used to identify queries for both still and moving images, resulting in a subset of 33,149 image queries by 9855 users. We provide data on: (1) image queries – the number of queries and the number of search terms per user, (2) image search sessions – the number of queries per user, modifications made to subsequent queries in a session, and (3) image terms – their rank/frequency distribution and the most highly used search terms. On average, there were 3.36 image queries per user containing an average of 3.74 terms per query. Image queries contained a large number of unique terms. The most frequently occurring image related terms appeared less than 10% of the time, with most terms occurring only once. We contrast this to earlier work by P.G.B. Enser, Journal of Documentation 51 (2) (1995) 126–170, who examined written queries for pictorial information in a non-digital environment. Implications for the development of models for visual information retrieval, and for the design of Web search engines are discussed.

A new multi-search engine for querying data through an Internet search service on CORBA

Search engines are important but generally far from ideal tools of the World Wide Web (WWW). Many researchers therefore prefer to use meta-brokers to construct multi-search engines (MSE). However, these have no uniform programming interfaces, which makes tying them with other search engines difficult. Moreover, for an application that needs a search service capability, querying them is difficult. To reduce that difficulty, we propose in this paper an Internet search service (ISS) based on common object request broker architecture (CORBA) that follows the style of common object service specification (COSS). We design a multi-search engine based on ISS, which we term Octopus. For a system developer, because of its uniformity of interface, Octopus easily ties with any search engine. Equally, for an application programmer, the ISS offers a clear interface for application programs to search for information or mine data from the Internet. We demonstrate our approach to designing multi-search engines through ISS by tying two search engine agents, Yahoo and AltaVista, with Octopus and show how CORBA clients query them. Programmers may use this interface to construct their search engine agents or query a search engine agent in their applications.

Real life, real users, and real needs: a study and analysis of user queries on the web

We analyzed transaction logs containing 51,473 queries posed by 18,113 users of Excite, a major Internet search service. We provide data on: (i) sessions — changes in queries during a session, number of pages viewed, and use of relevance feedback; (ii) queries — the number of search terms, and the use of logic and modifiers; and (iii) terms — their rank/frequency distribution and the most highly used search terms. We then shift the focus of analysis from the query to the user to gain insight to the characteristics of the Web user. With these characteristics as a basis, we then conducted a failure analysis, identifying trends among user mistakes. We conclude with a summary of findings and a discussion of the implications of these findings.

Internet patent search service launched

Internet patent search service launched

Internet patent search service launched

Internet patent search service launched

Real life information retrieval: a study of user queries on the Web

We analyzed transaction logs of a set of 51,473 queries posed by 18,113 users of Excite, a major Internet search service. We provide data on: (i) queries --- the number of search terms, and the use of logic and modifiers, (ii) sessions --- changes in queries during a session, number of pages viewed, and use of relevance feedback, and (iii) terms --- their rank/frequency distribution and the most highly used search terms. Common mistakes are also observed. Implications are discussed.

The utility of German WWW Search Services for North American Users

Foreign Internet search services are unknown to most North American users. Focusing on German search services, Schmetzke investigates four hypotheses pertaining to the potential utility of these services for North American users interested in country‐ or language‐specific resources. He concludes that only for subject directory‐based searches are German services superior. For keyword searches, U.S.‐based Altavista is the tool of choice. No German search engine was found to be consistently superior to Altavista in the indexing of German resources, to be better equipped to limit queries to German‐language sources, and to deal more effectively with problems posed by special characters.

Lycos: design choices in an Internet search service

One of the enabling technologies of the World Wide Web, along with browsers, domain name servers, and hypertext markup language, is the search engine. Although the Web contains over 100 million pages of information, those millions of pages are useless if you cannot find the pages you need. All major Web search engines operate the same way: a gathering program explores the hyperlinked documents of the Web, foraging for Web pages to index. These pages are stockpiled by storing them in some kind of database or repository. Finally, a retrieval program takes a user query and creates a list of links to Web documents matching the words, phrases, or concepts in the query. Although the retrieval program itself is correctly called a search engine, by popular usage the term now means a database combined with a retrieval program. For example, the Lycos search engine comprises the Lycos Catalog of the Internet and the Pursuit retrieval program. This paper describes the Lycos system for collecting, storing, and retrieving information about pages on the Web. After outlining the history and precursors of the Lycos system, the paper discusses some of the design choices made in building this Web indexer and touches briefly on the economic issues involved in working with very large retrieval systems.