| Dear Internet visitor,
My intention is
to help you own a profitable Internet
Home Business.
Here is
Internet Home Business course that will help and guide
you to start off your Home Business on the Internet.
Lesson #31
THE IMPORTANCE OF
INFORMATION RETRIEVAL SCIENCE
WHAT YOU WILL
LEARN
We will now turn our
discussion to the art and science of information
retrieval. This lesson will provide an overview of the
importance of information retrieval science to your
Internet business. The next lesson will cover the
fundamentals of databases. The third lesson on this
subject will introduce you to the art and science of
searching textual information. With this foundation, we
will be prepared for advanced discussion later in the
course of many important areas of Internet marketing,
such as search engine optimization.
THE IMPORTANCE OF
INFORMATION
While it is extremely rare, sometimes
a child is born without the ability to feel pain. A
defect in the child's nervous system prevents pain
signals from reaching the brain. At first blush, this
might seem like a wonderful thing—a life without any
pain. The unfortunate reality, however, is that it is
always tragic. These children become severely injured
and die very young. Pain serves a purpose of providing
information. Pain tells you what is harmful and should
be avoided. If a child does not feel pain when he sticks
his hand in the fire, he will leave it there. If a child
does not feel pain when he jumps from a high perch, he
will keep doing it, even though bones get broken. If a
child does not feel pain when he slams his head into a
hard surface, he will never watch where he is going. If
a child does not feel pain when he backs into a sharp
object, he will not retract from it quickly enough to
prevent injury. Without the information that pain
provides, the body cannot be protected and is soon
destroyed.
I have started this lesson with this
bizarre and disturbing example to drive home a crucial
point. The very experience of being alive is the
experience of observing, processing, and responding to
information. In the tragic case of these children being
denied the information that pain provides, they cannot
survive. We all need a constant flow of information to
survive. The more accurately we observe and the more
efficiently we process and respond to information, the
more successfully we live.
Our bodies, when they work properly,
are designed to process information. The human mind is
the most powerful information processing device known to
date. However, just as we have developed tools to assist
us with physical work, we have also developed tools to
assist our minds. We developed pen and paper, the
printing press, and then computers to assist in
information processing and communication. While no
computer yet invented can do all that the human mind can
do, computers can do some things faster and better and
do assist our minds in very useful ways. Understanding
and efficient use of tools has always been the hallmark
of the successful. This is certainly no less true with
computers and networks than with any other tools.
For those of us who run our own
businesses, efficient information processing is even
more important to our successful living than for the
average person. For those of us whose businesses are
founded on the Internet, the largest information network
in history, understanding the importance of information
processing science and its tools cannot be overstated.
In Lesson 28
(https://www.sfimg.com/Training/Lesson28.sfi) of this
Internet Income Course, we discussed the importance of
running an efficient online marketing system. We
observed that a large part of being efficient was simply
a matter of paying attention. Paying attention involves
accurately observing and recording information about the
results of your various efforts. After observing and
recording, you must retrieve and process that
information accurately and in a way that has meaning to
you—a way that will help you decide your next step to a
more efficient system.
In Lesson 29
(https://www.sfimg.com/Training/Lesson29.sfi), we
discussed how we learn from our mistakes and failures.
However, if we are not accurately
observing, recording, retrieving, and processing
information, we cannot efficiently learn from our
mistakes. Unless we track our results, efficiently using
the computers and networks available to us, we are
doomed to repeat many mistakes. The success of any
business is dependent on how well that business manages
and processes information.
YOUR INTERNET MARKETING
BUSINESS
As a reader of the Internet Income
Course
(https://www.sfimg.com/Training/InternetIncome.sfi), we
assume you have undertaken your own Internet marketing
business. The Internet is the primary environment within
which your business exists. Your computer, an
information processing device, is the primary tool that
you use to run your business. Furthermore, information
is the primary vehicle that will attract people to your
business. Your customers and future teammates will find
you on the Internet using information retrieval
techniques. You will find ways to attract your prospects
on the Internet using information retrieval techniques.
Thus, automated information retrieval,
while it may seem like an overly technical, dry, and
academic subject, is doubly important to any Internet
business.
As with any business, online or off,
information processing and retrieval skills are
important to measuring the success of your various
strategies and thus improving the efficiency of your
business. Unlike traditional business, however,
understanding information retrieval skills is crucial to
promotion of an Internet-based business. Information
retrieval is what the search engines do. Information
retrieval skills are what people use to find things on
the Internet. Information retrieval is the very essence
of the Internet. To excel in this environment, you must
give some thought to how it works.
THE HISTORY OF INFORMATION
RETRIEVAL SCIENCE
The day-to-day information about the
results of our business activities is important, but we
must also draw upon the body of knowledge that others
have accumulated as well. We use computers and the
Internet for both of these purposes—to record and
process our own information and to do research on
information accumulated by others.
Whether you are aware of it in these
specific terms, you use the art and science of
information retrieval on a daily bases. Every time you
use the Internet, you are using information retrieval
tools. As the Internet becomes more sophisticated, your
understanding of these tools and strategies becomes even
more important to your efficient use of the Internet.
Long before the Internet, the science
of information retrieval has existed, in one form or
another, for quite some time. The ancient Greeks amassed
the first known world library, containing copies of all
known books of that time (later unfortunately
destroyed). It soon became apparent, however, that vast
collections had little use without some efficient way to
find what you wanted. Libraries began to catalog books
by author, title, and subject. Each book printed today
is provided an internationally accepted ISBN number.
Every book in a library is given a card catalog number.
You can search the card catalogs by author, title, or
subject. Once you locate the books you need, the books
themselves have tables of contents, and often indices or
other means to find the specific content you need within
the books.
Periodicals (newspapers and magazines)
are also sorted and categorized in the libraries and
various other places. Separate reference works have
evolved just to help find information that appears in
books and periodicals. For example, there is a
publication that provides an index to periodicals, which
is used to find information that has appeared in
magazine articles and other periodical publications.
Many devices and strategies were developed, before the
advent of computers, to help people find the specific
information they sought.
Many younger readers born into the
Internet age may have a hard time conceiving of the
process of having to frequently and physically travel to
a library to do important research. At the library, we
had to search the card catalog, as well as various other
reference indices to find the information we sought.
While most young people are still taught these offline
research skills, they are no longer as necessary as they
were before the days of personal computers and the
Internet.
The skills that are necessary today,
however, require an understanding of automated
information retrieval, especially as it is employed on
the Internet. As we will discuss in Lesson 33, the
Lexus/Nexus service was one of the first commercial
online information retrieval systems. This company built
a huge database of legal case opinions and statutes from
many jurisdictions as well as newspaper and magazine
articles from many publishers, which could be searched
by the words contained within the cases or articles.
When first offered, this service was accessed via a
modem over an ordinary phone line connection to their
mainframe computer. While very expensive at first
(upwards of $40 per minute for connect time plus over
$100 per search request), for those that knew how to use
it, this service could find information much faster and
much more efficiently than traditional offline research
techniques.
As the Internet became more popular,
many different search and retrieval techniques were
developed to help one find the computer files, wherever
they may be located geographically, needed for one's
research. Before the World Wide Web and its predecessor,
Gopher, finding information on the Internet required
logging on to each computer on the Internet, one at a
time in turn, and searching its published menu for the
information you sought. Gopher streamlined this process
somewhat by providing menus of menus. WAIS, or wide area
information search, was an Internet resource developed
to search several computers at once. The information
explosion occurred, however, with the development of the
World Wide Web and the search engines that quickly and
efficiently searched the published pages of the World
Wide Web.
There are millions of computers
throughout the world, publishing countless pages of
information on the Web today. The Search Engines find
and then retrieve the information you need from these
computers quickly and relatively efficiently. The
companies that run the search engines employ information
retrieval scientists to help develop their systems.
Thus, the more you know about automated information
retrieval science and the skills that follow from it,
the more efficiently you can find the information you
need and the more efficiently you can make your own
information available to others.
ANSWERS TO COMMON
"GETTING STARTED" QUESTIONS
Our brief and simplified study of
iInformational retrieval in the next two lessons,
believe it or not, will be directly relevant to the
common, basic questions that newbies to the business
frequently ask. Common questions by new affiliates are:
"Where do I place ads?" How do I get listed in the
Search Engines?" "How do I generate traffic to my
gateways?" "How do I track my results?" We have provided
answers to these questions already in this course, but
we will now go deeper.
For example, we have told you that you
should place ads where the prospects you seek will find
them. We have suggested that you use the search engines
to find sites that your prospects will likely also find.
We have urged you to use search words and phrases that
your potential prospects will likely use when searching
for an online opportunity or for a specific product that
you are offering. We have encouraged you to use
information to attract visitors and then use that
information to dramatize your visitor's need for the
product or service you are offering. We will now delve
deeper into how the search engines will process the
search terms that your prospects may use to determine
which pages to display to them and in what order.
Also, we have told you that you need
unique information on your Website to obtain ranking in
the search engines. It is now time to look a little
closer at the techniques available to search engines to
parse out the content of your site, evaluate it, and
make it available to those seeking information.
Understanding these techniques will help you optimize
your content for the best results.
We have also told you that you need to
record and analyze the results of your efforts. A closer
look at the applications and techniques available to you
to do that efficiently is in also certainly in order.
Delving into the science of
information retrieval is a way to obtain deeper, richer
answers to these common practical questions.
CONCLUSION
While it may seem somewhat impractical
to talk about the obvious, it does provide useful
insight to reflect on how information and information
processing plays a vital role in every aspect of our
lives. To be truly successful in business, you must take
time to reflect upon the information processing skills
that you employ in your business. To be truly successful
in an Internet-based business, you must take time to
think about the information retrieval systems that form
the foundation of the Internet. To become a true search
engine expert, you must have some understanding of the
information retrieval techniques upon which the search
engines are based.
As demonstrated by the tragic stories
of the children born without pain reception, our
survival depends upon our processing of information. We
have developed computers and the Internet to assist us
in processing larger and larger amounts of information
to enhance all aspects of our lives. Some familiarity
with the science of information retrieval that drives
these developments is well worth a little time and
effort, especially for those of us involved in Internet
businesses.
WHAT'S COMING NEXT
In our next lesson, we will discuss
the fundamentals of databases and how they can be used
to process information important to your business. The
following lesson will address information retrieval
techniques used to search text-based documents, the
process used by search engines to find and rank Websites
as a result of specific searches.
by George Little
Copyright (year) Panhandle On-Line, Inc.
License granted to Carson Services, Inc. for
distribution to SFI affiliates. No part of this work may
be republished, redistributed, or sold without written
permission of the author.
For more information on the Internet Income
Course and other works and courses by George Little, see
www.profitpropulsion.com.
For Web Hosting services specially designed for
SFI affiliates, see www.profitpropulsion.com.
>>> Back
To Course List <<<
Dear Internet friends,
We offer the most legitimate
Internet Home Business Opportunity to
help you start your own computer based
Internet home based business and earn
extra money online safely, from the
comfort of your own home!
Click here to register
and start you own Internet Home Business
and get your free
"Secrets of Internet
Millionaires" bundle...NOW!
|
