A significant trend over the last few months has been a realignment of MS and Netscape into "higher value" browsing. For example, I have just tried the "what's related" button on Netscape 4.5. I first went to http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/ectoc/echet98/ and from there I asked for related items. I got the following ORGANIC CHEMISTRY RESOURCES WORLDWIDE 2.Exorga, Inc. - Consultants in Organic Chemistry and Molecular Modeling 3.Basic reactions in organic chemistry. 4.Photochemical Reactions of Organic Compounds 5.IUPAC Nomenclature 6.Chemexper Chemical Directory 7.Unofficial Combinatorial Chemistry Website 8.Farchan Laboratories 9.Orgo-Tek 10.ChemKey Search 11.(null) 12.Search on this Topic... apart from 11, it looks fairly relevant. No 5 in particular might be useful if one wanted to check on names of compounds found in articles in the conference. In view of the relatively low reputation Internet searches have, I am reasonably impressed by the above. Working out how it was done is more interesting. Here I speculate (I have not found a description by Netscape of the process). firstly, I thought it might be based on the keywords provided as meta-data in the actual document. these were; <META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="ECTOC and ECHET98 Electronic Conferences at Chemistry Dept, Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine"> <META NAME="AUTHOR" CONTENT="Rzepa, Henry S."> <META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="Heterocyclic, Chemistry, electronic conference, ECHET98, Keynote articles, molecule database, Daylight, Oliver Kappe, Henry Rzepa, Kanemasa, Alan R. Katritzky, Kita Yasuyuki,Albert Padwa, William Pearson, Ronald Warrener, Peter Kndig, Tom Livinghouse, Johannes Froehlich"> But changing these produced no difference in the 12 relevant topics. Removing the title similarly had no effect <Title>Electronic Conference on Heterocyclic Chemistry:</title> and so I must conclude its based on a scanning of the actual body content of the document. If that is true, then what a missed opportunity! We really do need to encourage authors to insert focused and relevant metadata, and if doing so has no effect, then this will not happen!! Anyway, I would be interested if other people try the "what's related" button on the browser in a chemical content, and whether they think the result was at all helpful to them chemically. Feedback please (Oh, do Microsoft offer anything similar?) ======== PS shortly after trying this, Netscape crashed. With V4.5, I was presented with a very clever dialog which gathered information about the crash and sent it back to Netscape. I guess I trusted it in what it was sending back! Hope Netscape are not overwhelmed!! Dr Henry Rzepa, Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College, LONDON SW7 2AY; mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk; Tel (44) 171 594 5774; Fax: (44) 171 594 5804. URL: http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ chemweb: A list for Chemical Applications of the Internet. To post to list: mailto:chemweb@ic.ac.uk Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/chemweb/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@ic.ac.uk the following message; (un)subscribe chemweb List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@ic.ac.uk)