beTech :: Evolve Already

It’s not too late to check out the New Horizons in Teaching & Research Conference taking place on Central Grounds right now. Though focused on teaching and research, this event has plenty to offer to Web-heads like yourself—the only problem may be in deciding which event to skip in order to see another.

Google’s previous set of tools for webmasters were about as thrilling as a toilet plunger. Woohoo! Sitemap tools. Sigh…

So when the new Google Webmaster Central (GWC) rolled out of beta this past Valentine's Day, it was a completely pleasant and welcome surprise to say the least. The new GWC provides some really nifty and useful services (in addition to sitemaps):

• View current Web crawl statistics and choose faster or slower crawl rates.
• View the search queries that lead to information on your site.
• Analyze your robots.txt file and test pages against it.
• Choose the preferred domain to display in the search results for your site (e.g., www.blah.edu vs. blah.edu).
• Find out more about crawling, indexing, ranking, etc. via Webmaster Help Center, Blog, and Forums.

You know the government is searching through your stuff, so search them right back with Google U.S. Government Search (usgov.google.com). Actually, this looks like a useful service for finding everything from your local water utility phone numbers to Karl Rove’s White House bio. You can also create content feeds to keep a vigilant eye on government agencies and Washington news stories.

Amazon.com’s search subsidiary, Alexa, rocked the internet indexing world today when it announced that it’s going to provide its data to anyone willing to pay a meager fee for the service. The Alexa Web Information Service promises to give everyone access to the same brute force web crawlers and search servers used by the likes of Google and Yahoo. Some in the industry think this is a huge deal. Alexa’s CEO, Bruce Gilliat, foresees the democratization of data search.

Thanks again to Erik Hatcher for his excellent overview of the Apache Lucene open source search API at beTech last Wednesday. His expertise in the field was clearly evident as he delivered a smooth presentation covering some complex subject matter and fielded numerous questions. If you’d like a deeper understanding of Lucene, check out Erik’s book Lucene in Action.

Join the beTech bunch next Wednesday afternoon as Erik Hatcher introduces Apache Lucene—a high-performance, scalable, embeddable search engine with a simple programmatic interface. Erik will discuss specific production applications using Lucene, demonstrate Lucene “in Action” on some of his projects, ponder philosophical questions such as “what is a word?”, and delve into textual analysis considerations.

Erik is co-author of the award-winning “Java Development with Ant” and “Lucene in Action” (that’s not him on the cover). He is an active committer on the Lucene project, a member of the Applied Research in Patacriticism team at the University of Virginia, and a part-time consultant specializing on Lucene projects.

Lucene—the open source search solution

• Wednesday, November 16
• 2:00pm-3:30pm
• Newcomb Hall, Commonwealth Room

The UVa chapter of the Association of Computer Machinery will be hosting representatives from Google tomorrow evening in Olsson Hall (specifics: Tuesday, Sept. 27, at 7pm in Olsson 120). ACM Chair Louse Montgomery extends an open invitation to the beTech faithful to attend this event and/or apply for local chapter membership. Get more information about ACM and this event at their site.