# Presentation: 820084

## Advancing Science: OSTI’s Current and Future Search Strategies

**Jeff Given**
**IT Operations Manager**
**Computer Protection Program Manager**

***Office of Scientific and Technical Information***
***U.S. Department of Energy***

**November 14****th****, 2007**

## About OSTI

- A U.S. Department of Energy program within the Office of Science
- Maintains appropriate public access to DOE research results
**A****ll collections of scientific and technical information resulting from R&D activities generated from the facilities within the national DOE complex**
- Provides stewardship for the Department’s 60-year legacy of classified and unclassified scientific and technical reports
- Maintains an electronic repository of over 4 million DOE-produced R&D records dating to 1940s

**Notes:**
Within DOE

I’m the IT guy who cares about keeping the site running, keeping the performance fast, and keeping our customers satisfied. And we’re always trying to understand our customers user experience and how we can make it better’...   

## About OSTI

- OSTI accelerates the advancement of discovery by speeding access to R&D findings.
-  Science.gov - 50 million pages of U.S. government science information from 17 US Government science organizations
-   WorldWideScience.org - 200 million+ pages of international research information from the governments of 17 countries
-  Science Accelerator - federated search of important DOE databases such as E-print Network (includes 1 million documents & 27,000 Web sites) and Information Bridge (includes over 145,000 DOE full text reports)

**Notes:**
Federal, International, DOE

I’m the IT guy who cares about keeping the site running, keeping the performance fast, and keeping our customers satisfied. And we’re always trying to understand our customers user experience and how we can make it better’...   

## Overview

- Users and Search
- Current problems with search and retrieval
- OSTI strategy for overcoming problems
- Future and current work

**Notes:**
This is what we will be covering.

## Do You Know?

- How big is the web?
- How much of the worlds information is on the web?
- How similar are the major search engines in terms of search results?
- What percentage of a typical web site’s functionality is actually used?

## Users and Search

- User Goals:
- Find authoritative and relevant information.
- Users don’t want to search, they want to get something done.
- Broad scope search engines
- Google, Yahoo, MSN (GYM)
- Narrow scope search engines
- Specialized, Topical, Vertical
-  PubMed, music.yahoo.com, Information Bridge

**Users and Search**

**Notes:**
Users main entry point is the GYM engines, however users with a specific interest area may initially visit a narrow scope engine in order to get a more authoritative, relevant set of information returned.

Narrow scope is relative – science.gov is broader then IB  (things in-between).

Many choices, ultimate decision is based on user experiences, biases, and intent.

Vertical search engine market is a rapidly increasing growth sector, mainly based on focused advertising.  

Vertical search engines exist for just about any target group you could think of including scientists, veterinarians, doctors, patients, job seekers, house hunters, recruiters, travelers and corporate purchasers, just to name a few.

## Search - Data Availability 

- The web now encompasses over 100 million web sites (and a far larger number of pages).
- The deep web (non-Googleable) has been estimated to be several magnitudes greater than the surface web.
- Only about 5% of the world’s total information is online today.
- Only 15% of DOE’s R&D information is full text searchable on the internet.

**Search - Data Availability **

**Notes:**
Some difference on the opinion of just how big the web actually is, but it is big.

Deep web = content that is typically non-Googleable/crawlable.

## User Search Statistics

- 87% of online users have gone online to research a scientific topic.
- 25% of a knowledge worker’s time is spent searching for information.

**User Search Statistics**

**Notes:**
Lots of time spent searching, previous slide shows that the data could not be available.

Not just for the research/scientific community

- The conventional wisdom is that the major search engines serve up similar results.
- Survey participants reported ~70% overlap in the top 10 results on Google and Yahoo!.
- Using the 500 most popular search terms, on average, Google and Yahoo! share only 3.8 of their top 10 results.
- ~5% of searchers go beyond page #1

**Relevancy Bias**

**Notes:**
Point – Users are missing relevant information, primarily due to relevance ranking differences between the leading search engines.

If results aren’t on the first page, the data does not get found.

- More than 95% of your customers will use less than 5% of the features and functions of your site.
- Imperative that for a site to be successful it must accommodate the typical user.

**Site Usage Statistics**

**Notes:**
Reference April Lewis from the ORNL HCI lab.

Users want a simple interface.  

**Users and Search Summary**

- Users want authoritative, relevant information fast and easy
- Search is prevalent, information users spend a significant portion of their time searching
- Not all data is online, and not all information available online is included in GYM searches
- If relevancy rankings don’t return “relevant information” on the first page – the data is not found most of the time

**Notes:**
Quick review

Looking at the landscape, our problem areas are...

- Users want authoritative, relevant information fast and easy
- Search is prevalent, information users spend a significant portion of their time searching
- Not all data is online, and not all information available online is included in GYM searches
- If relevancy rankings don’t return “relevant information” on the first page – the data is not found most of the time

**Problem Areas**

- Failure rate for desktop information seekers keeps rising(~ 30%)
- Search success inversely proportional to amount of data?

**Problem Areas**

**Notes:**
Vertical search engines address the issue of large volumes of data by only including topic specific pages in their collections.

- OSTI’s focus has been and remains to make scientific and technical information searchable and retrievable.

**OSTI’s Focus**

- Distribution of DOE content to major search engines.
- Sitemap Protocol – low development time, low maintenance, reduces amount of unnecessary repeated data requests from crawlers
- Allows for nearly 100% coverage for each content source
- ~60% of October’s traffic to Information Bridge were from Google referrals

**OSTI Strategies**

**Notes:**
Addresses issues of small percentage of total information available via dominant search entry points 
60% of information bridge traffic last month from google referals; 6% yahoo
First federal agency to expose a large collection to Google

- Enabling vertical search capabilities to authoritative, relevant Scientific and Technical Information (STI)
- Federated search - Includes authoritative, subject-matter relevant searches of Deep Web Content
- Web harvesting - Includes content harvested/crawled from authoritative, subject matter specific URLs

**OSTI Strategies**

**Notes:**
OSTI uses each strategy independently where appropriate depending on the application’s scope (vertical target), and combines where appropriate.

These capabilities are two of our core competencies, and a major focus area for OSTI.  These areas drive our main products.

- Development and maintenance of DOE STI data collections
- Information Bridge
- Energy Citations
- DOE Patent Database

**OSTI Strategies**

**Notes:**
OSTI uses each strategy independently where appropriate depending on the application’s scope (vertical target), and combines where appropriate.

- Attribution to source of data
- Makes users finding data via search engines aware of the source of data
- Users more likely to bookmark and re-visit high quality vertical search engines

**OSTI Strategies**

**Notes:**
OSTI uses each strategy independently where appropriate depending on the application’s scope (vertical target), and combines where appropriate.

- Content distribution via major search engines
- +
- Providing STI specific vertical search capabilities enabled via Federated Search and Web Harvesting
- +
- Increasing awareness of OSTI vertical search applications via attribution on search engine referrals
- =
- More users getting the most relevant results from swath of available internet

**OSTI Strategies - Overview**

**Notes:**
OSTI uses each strategy independently where appropriate depending on the application’s scope (vertical target), and combines where appropriate.

**Enabling search on non-text information **
**Numeric Data**
**Video**
**Images**
**Audio**

**Future Work – Data Types**

**Notes:**
Data types typically not searchable or retrievable, but need to become searchable and retrievable.

- 30% search failure rate tolerable for desktop, not necessarily true for mobile device searches
- Ipsos Insight's 2005 "The Face of the Web" study shows significant increases in: ownership of mobile phones, mobile surfing by mainstream users, and adoption of wireless mobile technology by adults aged 35 and older.
- Digital natives two thumb typing at incredible speeds (est. 1.5 digital natives in Japan can type at equivalent desktop speeds of 100 words / min)

**Future Work – Mobile**

**Notes:**
Poor user experience will not be able to be monetized, and likely see slow or no development.

Users will expect mobile support.

- Visualization – identification of scientific communities (publishing groups) and cross over areas in scientific research
- Social Tools
- 75% of a user’s time spent on top news sites is spent reading user comments about the story, and only 25% on the story itself
- Over 60% of web content utilized by users age 25 and under is user generated

**Future Work – Visualization & Social Tools**

**Notes:**
User generated content rapidly becoming a predominant source of information.

Another aim [of visualization] is to allow people who assemble interdisciplinary research teams to identify collaborators with knowledge of more than one of the relevant subject areas, in order to help more specialized team members communicate with each other, and to combine insights themselves from different fields to solve the problems being addressed.  While candidate team members can be found from database searches alone, graphic displays of the data can show directly how common or rare certain combinations of knowledge are, thus helping determine the feasibility or urgency of particular recruitment efforts.  

- Utilize HCI labs and testing results to optimize web sites
- Expand reach of federated search by adding additional deep web content
- Add functionality to OSTI’s federated vertical search engines
- * *CompletePlanet.com – searchable directory of Deep Web sources*

**Future Work**

**Notes:**
More data and more functionality for searching/retrieving/storing data. Personal library.

Suggest visiting completeplanet.com to get a feel for how many data sources are out there, and this is by far an incomplete list. over 70,000+ searchable databases and specialty search engines 

- Jeff Given
- Office of Scientific and Technical Information
- givenj@osti.gov
- 865.576.1146

**Contact Information**