source file: mills2.txt Date: Thu, 14 Nov 1996 06:44:11 -0800 Subject: Microtonal Web Searching From: "Jeude, James" A piece of 'web searching' advice and a list to jumpstart your own searches ... My day job in advanced development with the world's largest business-to-business information database provider, Dun & Bradstreet, keeps me in close touch with the major players in the Internet infrastructure, including developers of search engines and electronic directories. My personal impression is that yes, indeed, many web designers -- particularly students or amateurs -- do not organize their information to make it searchable and add really awful background shades and colors. This piece of design advice from Brian Mclaren is good and cannot be repeated too often. Hooked to a high speed network this stuff is awful -- at home, it's intolerable. However, I strongly emphasize that until the Internet becomes searchable through author-provided keyword indices that are systematically defined and gathered, which is many years away, most searches to be meaningful must be combinations of important keywords and require some creative searching. I would suggest Digital's AltaVista. You can get there either through http://www.altavista.digital.com or get the "text only, advanced query" (my favorite -- death to unnecessary graphics!) at http://www.altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=aq&text=yes Choose your keywords carefully. For example, the word "microtonality" rarely shows up in that exact form in the TUNING list and cannot be a good predictor of web page content left on its own. When I select the phrase microtonal near music and tuning I receive 95 hits with a reasonable "goodness" density. Yes, many of the hits are themselves pointers to other sites (Mills college and the South East Just Intonation center get frequent mention) and yes, the search engines should do a better job on the final bit of formatting, cleansing, and de-duplicating. The phrase "Just Intonation" and music gets 198 hits, a bit of a struggle but still manageable. Finally, without filling up too much space, I'd recommend the http://www.justonic.com site for a good summary of just intonation and microtonal music, and their list of "other Just Intonation" sites. The JI Network is linked from here. My biggest complaint about the Justonic site is lack of prices and ordering information -- whatever it is they're selling sure sounds good. But that is another post for another time. Anybody used their products yet? Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Thu, 14 Nov 1996 16:12 +0100 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA08815; Thu, 14 Nov 1996 16:13:38 +0100 Received: from eartha.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA08825 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id HAA04144; Thu, 14 Nov 1996 07:13:35 -0800 Date: Thu, 14 Nov 1996 07:13:35 -0800 Message-Id: <961114150108_71670.2576_HHB71-15@CompuServe.COM> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu