Making the best of the Web for EEs

The World Wide Web is pervasive in many people’s lives and certainly in the life of every EE. It has been spectacularly successful in a few areas—for one thing in making a bunch of people a heck of a lot of money. But, it is less than successful in some other areas.

There are said to be 179,000,000+ unique Internet users in the U.S. Search engines are the most popular sites, and there are just four primary search enginesGoogle, Live Search (MSN), Ask, and Yahoo!, plus three other secondary engines Exalead, Gigablast, and WiseNut. Numerous secondary engines repackage data from one of these. Searches bring up a lot of junk. The junk-to-what-you-are-looking-for ratio (kind of like a signal-to-noise-ratio) is pretty poor.

Engineers I have talked with often use Google to find product information. Sites such as our ICMaster and EEM (icmaster.com and eem.com) are much better at getting directly to relevant data using either a part number or a functional description and our Reference Design Directory (electronicproducts.com) and Semiconductor Applications sites (semiapps.com) are superb reference locations for EEs. But, a search engine check is often also useful. A recent poll we did of 125 EEs found that 57% start their search with a general-purpose engine. By the way, 63.4% use electronicproducts.com as part of their search.

For some reason, none of the general-purpose search engines shows the date of the items in their result list. I see this as a huge flaw. I click on a reference to find out that is was created in 1996, or whenever. Unless I’m doing some kind of history lookup, I don’t care about this reference at all. What a waste of time!

Google has an “Advanced Search” that you can put a date range into, but it really does not work at all. Surely, the date is part of the metadata for each reference, so I do not understand why Google doesn’t put that information in its summaries. Perhaps they want to protect their “list preference” income and if they showed the date, we would all want to sort by that.

The Web may also be part of the reason Americans are becoming more likely to get just surface information on complex topics. The Web fits very well to finding quick overviews. People who write for the Web are advised to cut the size of any article by 30% to 50% and one reference I found (on the Web) said that 79% of users always scan; only 16% read word-for-word. That reference also notes that reading from computer screens is 25% slower than from paper.

Despite predictions of demise libraries in the Net age, C.W. Nevius recently noted in the San Francisco Chronicle that libraries are seeing a big increase in visitors. The San Francisco main library usually has a couple of hundred people waiting at the door at 10 a.m. opening time. The American Library Association reported that the number of visitor to public libraries has increased by 61% between 1994 and 2004. Of course, part of the draw is that 99% of libraries offer free Internet access. “One thing that has been amazing to me,” says San Francisco city Librarian Luis Hererea, “is the hold on books, where you can reserve a book online. We’re going to hit a million ‘holds’ this year.”

So the Web continues to affect our livesin mostly positive ways.

Jim Harrison