FROM: rmonagha@smu.edu (Robert Monaghan)
SUBJECT: problems with searches or why FAQs etc Re: 'classic" FAQ
DATE: 25 Feb 2001 15:30:55 -0600
ORGANIZATION: Southern Methodist University
NEWSGROUPS: rec.photo.equipment.medium-format


yes, an interesting issue I've struggled with too - the problems include:

folks drop their sites, lose interest and delete files and photos
etc. some even graduate (;-) and so their sites are lost, links broken etc
so we potentially lose the accumulated organized FAQs (e.g., with help
from Doug Pibel I recovered the "lost" Yashica FAQ by Chris Mullen and
archived it on my site)...

companies buy and sell services like egroups (to Yahoo) and DejaNews (to
Google) and so on; there is no guarantee that some executive will decide
that 6 months of dejanews is "enough" and drop the rest off line etc. or
that the original services will not be dropped or heavily modified/changed
with volumes in the gigabytes per day, and more growth coming, USENET is
just one costly service to maintain and archive for modest ad income...

when mailing lists like Topica's Cameramakers switch services to Yahoo,
their archives may be lost, as has happened with Bronysaurus and other
lists...

the "haystack to needles ratio" varys a lot; you might get a literal
million hits on the topic of filters, and give up after looking at the
first 300 listed hits when the ones you want are farther back in the pile

"thread drift" means lots of threads change topics without changing the
headers, so you can't go by titles for contents of many messages etc.

repeated quotations mean that you might get a string of dozens of hits,
each of which is the same basic message requoted in the reply saying "me
too", not too useful

finally, not everything is on USENET; I spend some hours every month
posting tables of info from various books (I buy 3 to 5+ photobooks/week
from mostly used bookstores) and other sources - this last week info on
linhof early models not on the net (per inquiries by emailer) or Stephen
Gandy's site, and a table of 1956 TLRs in my mf/tlr.html pages, and a
table of early 6x6cm slide projectors etc. This info all adds up over time
to create a unique resource merging hard to find resources with postings
etc...

in short, I suspect the problems will increasingly become the inability to
find what we want from the current "dumb" search programs, or the fact
that what we want isn't on the WWW - yet...

solutions welcome ;-) grins bobm
-- 
* Robert Monaghan POB752182 Dallas Tx 75275-2182 rmonagha@mail.smu.edu      *
* Third Party 35mm Lenses: http://www.smu.edu/~rmonagha/third/index.html    *
* Medium Format Cameras: http://www.smu.edu/~rmonagha/mf/index.html megasite*