"Smart browsing" using Netscape

16 Jul 1998

      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;

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/ 

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