+ Armed Forces Medical Library Closing? (via Free Government Information)

Earlier today we noticed a post on the FGI Blog about Convera’s database no longer being available. Convera has confirmed this to be accurate (vs. the site being offline temporarily). Actually, govmine has been offline for a couple of months. Here’s a statement that Convera sent us via email:

Convera is focused on providing B2B publishers with high quality vertical search. This is our main business. Maintaining our own separate site, such as Govmine, didn’t fit with our strategy.

We first posted about govmine: The Alternative Engine when it debuted last August. Convera’s Excalibur technology “powered” govmine. Convera was targeting government professionals with the service.

Earlier this week, we posted a brief about Convera selling their RetrievalWare business to Fast Search and Transfer.
See Also: News Release from August 14, 2006.

+ Budget Optimization in Search-Based Advertising Auctions
15 pages; PDF.
Note: Three of the four authors of this paper are employed at Google.
From the abstract:

Internet search companies sell advertisement slots based on users’ search queries via an auction. While there has been a lot of attention on the auction process and its game-theoretic aspects, our focus is on the advertisers. In particular, the advertisers have to solve a complex optimization problem of how to place bids on the keywords of their interest so that they can maximize their return (the number of user clicks on their ads) for a given budget. We model the entire process and study this budget optimization problem.

This paper was published in the Proc. ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce, 2007. (via arXiv.org)

+ Yahoo Testing Alpha (Beta) Multi Search (via Search Engine Land)
Note: Gary posted a few comments on SEL and listed other services that search multiple databases simultaneously. Of course, meta or federated search has been something that continues to grow in popularity in the library world.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 5th, 2007 at 12:55 am and is filed under Access to Information, Information Industry, Libraries and Librarianship, Search News, Search Tools, Web Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.