IT Milk: entry

There is active research being done at Penn State on the topic of search engines. You may not be surprised that a large university is pursuing an obvious topic like internet search, but I am amused to find it right under my nose in the College of IST.

I stumbled upon this interesting discovery totally by chance. First, I heard about the Google Online Marketing Challenge in the weekly IST2U email newsletter that David Horne of Gamma Tau Phi sends out. I’ve been discarding those emails as junk, but I skimmed through it and it’s more useful than I had thought.

Then in order to find out more information about the Google Online Marketing Challenge at PSU, I looked up more information on Dr. Jim Jansen who is organizing it. Before I go on, in the Google Search results for “Jim Jansen,” it’s odd that Professor Jansen is running a Google Adwords campaign on his own name. There is no reason to run a pay-per-click ad when a) your destination URL for the ad is already ranking #1 in the natural results for the target keyword and b) a keyword like “Jim Jansen” has no competition. He must be playing around with Adwords in preparation for the spring event.

Professor Jansen’s personal page shows that his main field of research is search engines, which is awesome. Here is an excerpt from his Recent Publications:

Jansen, B. J. (Forthcoming) Searching for digital Images on the Web, Journal of Documentation.

Jansen, B. J., Booth, D., and Spink, A. (Forthcoming) Determining the informational, navigational, and transactional intent of Web queries, Information Processing & Management.

Reddy, M. and Jansen, B. J. (Forthcoming) A model for understanding collaborative information behavior in context: A study of two healthcare teams, Information Processing & Management.

Jansen, B. J. and Spink, A. (2007) Sponsored search: Is money a motivator for providing relevant results?, IEEE Computer. 40(8), 50-55. View in PDF.

Jansen, B. J. (2007) Click fraud, IEEE Computer. 40(7), 85-86 View in PDF

Jansen, B. J. (2007) The Comparative Effectiveness of Sponsored and Non-sponsored Results for Web Ecommerce Queries. ACM Transactions on the Web. 1(1), Article 3. View in PDF.

Jansen, B. J., Spink, A., Blakely, C., and Koshman, S. (2007) Defining a session on Web search engines. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 58(6), 862-871. View in PDF.

Jansen, B. J., Spink, A., and Koshman, S. (2007) Web searcher interactions with the Dogpile.com meta-search engine. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 58(5), 744-755. View in PDF.

Check out this video where Professor Jansen talks about web queries:

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In the process, I found another IST professor who seems to be concentrating on search in his research and publications.

Take a look at both of these professors’ websites to see the impressive breadth of their research.