Wlidlife Searching on the WWW

part of the internet, the task of finding relevant and up to date

web pages is somewhat reminiscent of crossing the Rub al Khali

on foot – continually diverted by mirages but only finding a real

oasis with the aid of an experienced guide, who these days is

probably using a gps navigation device. Such expeditions, whether

into the complex kingdom of the computer, or through Arabia’s

own landscape, can triumph or perish depending upon one’s companion.

The limitless reaches of both environments are no places to be

without a clear head and the tools to take you to your chosen

destination. Just as the personal qualities and knowledge of exploration

guides vary greatly, so do the methods and efficiencies of internet

search engines. Recognise this fact and you are already on the

way to making better use of the world wide web and may even discover

that elusive cyber-oasis that forms the target of your search.

to a selection of web indexing systems. Infoseek, Yahoo, Excite,

Magellan, and Lycos are standard fare. In the name of science

and out of sheer curiosity I recently put all of these to the

same test, typing in the words: “wildlife Arabia” and waiting

to see what each of them came up with. The results were interesting,

Company Ltd. 56%

sites. Each of these might merit some further exploration although

some, indeed most, clearly do not merit inclusion in the top 10

sites on Arabian wildlife. It was not particularly successful

at scoring high hits with the first site only listed at 63% relevancy

(IUCN’s Regional Offices) whilst a passing reference to wildlife

on a tourism promotion page (Abu Dhabi National Hotels Corporation)

placed it third out of 133.092 records. In general a mixed bunch

of sites leaving the web researcher with plenty of work to sort

the grain from the chaff.

delivered eight completely different web sites in the first ten

of its listing. We were interested to see two records concerning

Arabian Wildlife’s 1995 photographic competition. The fact that

these pages are tucked far inside a computer in Scotland that

carries Photon ezine is a reminder both of how intrusive computerised

indexing has become on the web, and also of how important it is

becoming for server administrators and internet publishers to

place time-guides on their on-line data. Several relatively new

sites appeared in Yahoo’s listing, including the UAE ECSSR site,

the National Avian Research Centre’s site in the UAE and the UAEinteract

site which was launched in December 1996. This does help to bolster

some confidence in the overall search which showed quite good

relevancy. The basic results, served up in the default format,

did not indicate percentage figures for appearance of the key

words.

ten records being taken up with two year old news about the Arabian

Wildlife Photographer of the Year Competition. Surely one of these

entries could have been filtered out and served up. Our disappointment

was compounded by the fact that after each entry the words [More

Like This] appeared, suggesting that the search mechanism was

indeed set up to deliver just one entry where closely similar

ones were found. In general the search did not deliver many of

the sites that we know to exist, and which we would have expected

it to come up with. On the other hand it did give us some unknown

sites such as the one relating to Hamadryas baboons at Prospect

are about the Arabian Wildlife Photographic competition – flattering

maybe but frustrating in terms of web research. The remaining

four sites deal with the Peregrine Fund, covers of National Geographic

Magazine, and M.Sc. course in Wildlife Management and the WWF.

There was no mention of any of the major regional organisations

concerned with wildlife conservation, or of the numerous events

and projects related to Arabian wildlife.

bias on sites related to Saudi Arabia. The mere existence of the

country name would have caused such sites to be registered in

the overall search. This points to one of the critical factors

concerning such web research: the need for careful selection of

key words, designed to focus as closely as possible upon the desired

subject. The fact that two separate search systems delivered up

the curriculum vita of a wildlife artist living in Australia does

call into question the efficacy of the sorting methods employed

by these systems. Highest scoring of these is definitely YAHOO

which owes its success to AltaVista’s page searching and cataloguing

system. In order to verify the search we accessed AltaVista directly,

via Digital’s home page, and repeated the search. It came up with

an identical set of ten entries; the only difference being that

it recorded the date that each of these had been last catalogued.

This informed us that out of date pages related to our own activities

were still operating in December 1996, alerting us to the need

to have these pages removed from the system. All of the entries

had been indexed during 1996 with the earliest in May and the

latest in December. Our own search was carried out on January

about the Arabian Oryx. A word count of the 10,000 or so pages

on which it found matches recorded 9,915 occurrences of the word

“oryx” and 49,099 occurrences of the word “Arabian”. Such a search

is more likely to deliver sites that are of direct relevance to

one’s area of interest. In this case the following sites were

doubt that the serious research worker, or interested student,

would soon be able to discover where the real meat exists. Such

searches do highlight how the web can be used to link people through

shared interests in particular subjects. No where is this more

pertinent than in the fields of wildlife research and conservation

information of relevance to Arabian wildlife and conservation.

Use of search engines is essential but there is considerable variation

in the degree of efficiency of these. In our own experience AltaVista

is the best and this can be accessed via Yahoo or by a number

of other avenues, including Digital’s own web site. Keep in mind

that the searches can be up to a year old and must therefore only

be used as a basic guide as to where one should look. They will

guide you to the track, after that it is up to your own efforts

to check out what seem to be the most relevant sites and to narrow

down the field. Remember that many new sites are being posted

on to the Net and it takes some time for all these to be fully

information on Arabian wildlife and it provides links to other

sites as well as regular comments and updates from Arabia-based