Björn wrote:
>  Possibly build up a list of links/pages/wiki the Find on the Web could
>  use to find what is being sought.

That wouldn't work the way you envision it.  If someone wants to search the
live web, then he should use Google or another search engine, because that
is the purpose of search engines (and they take a lot of thought and work
to build).

>  The list culd have a column with notes from users ranking the quality
>  of the info on the pages referred to. 

This is PageRank, and there's already a decent implementation out there :)  

Speaking more seriously, having J users rank pages won't help a searcher
much, because e.g. I (Joe Schmoe) might identify a page as "a great J
page, full of useful information", but it might not be on the topic or
include the kind of information you (John Doe) are seeking.  

Or, let's say that Tom Allen's Schwarzchild pages don't get a high rank
[1], because there are few people out there who know what a Schwarzschild
is, and consequently few read or rank those pages.  So those pages would
be at the end of your proposed list.  But what if now someone comes along
who is searching for Schwarzschild implementation in J?  For him, these
pages should be at the very top of the list.

Furthermore, since the J web world is so small, downloading the whole thing
and doing full text search would be pretty effective [2], and you wouldn't
even need the ranking table.  Of course, this won't scale as the J web
world grows, but as I said that's the purpose and value of dedicated
search engines.

But you do raise a good point: we need a centralized page on the J Wiki
which includes links to all know J web resources, current or historical,
precisely so that search engines can find them and index them for our
benefit.  I'm willing to maintain this page if the members of this Forum
will help me with the legwork and send me as many non-Jsoftware J-related
web links as they know about.

If we do this right, then we could include an interface to Google (et al)
in the J7 dev environment, and you'd have your embedded web search, but
someone else (Google) would do all the hard work.

-Dan

[1]  I hope Tom doesn't take offense; I just needed an example, and the
Scharzchild pages were the first thing that stuck out at me on the
RecentChanges wiki page.

[2]  Except for the whole synonym-searching/"chinese menu" problem.
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