Whilst new sites are continually being loaded onto computers forming
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.

Clicking on the search button in Netscape browsers, takes surfers
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,
if not particularly encouraging.

INFOSEEK RESULTS  – Search For: wildlife Arabia

First 10 of 133,092 relevant documents:

http://iucn.org/places/saudi arabia/
objectives of the NCWCD in Saudi Arabia. 63%

http://www.primate.wisc.edu/majordomo/primate-talk/
IDP update: contact [email protected]. 61%

http://www.panda.org/news/press/news-20/
WWF news release re NCWCD/Saudi Arabia’s release of oryx on 4
April 1995. 59%

http://www.he.tdl.com/~alshamsi/tour-abu-dhabi.html
Abu Dhabi tourism and Sunshine Tours. 58%

http://www.ee.gatech.edu/users/sam/schedule.html
1996 GAOC Schedule – Georgia Orienteering Club. 58%

http://205.177.10.11/publish/cd-mar.htm
Science and the Environment – CD-ROM Chapter Dir. 57%

http://www.ausart.asn.au/byard/byard-cv.html
David Byard CV Links 57%

http://people.zeelandnet.nl/pa0abm/vk0cw.htm
General Info. Heard Heard Island 56%

http://www.gurukul.ucc.american.edu/TED/GREEN.HTM
Green Case. Green Turtle loss in Arabian Gulf 56%

http://www.hunger.brown.edu/Departments/Watson-Institute/Watson/watson-boo.shtml
Watson Institute:Board of Overseers. Teymour A. Alireza Rezayat
Company Ltd. 56%

COMMENTS

This search did at least deliver up ten completely different web
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.

RELEVANCE - 5/10

 INTEREST - 3/10

 SCOPE - 3/10

YAHOO! RESULTS  – Search For: wildlife Arabia

First 10 of 66,390 relevant documents

http://www.ecssr.ac.ae/10uae.gazelle.html
Picture 24..Abu Dhabi was named after gazelle….

http://www.photonpub.co.uk/photon/planet/kodak.html
Kodak sponsorship of Arabian Wildlife Photography Competition

http://www.photonpub.co.uk/photon/planet/planet.html
Planet Publishing – Arabian Wildlife Magazine

http://www.iucn.org/places/saudi-arabia-co.html
IUCN Regional Offices – Saudi Arabia

http://www.africaonline.co.ke/AfricaOnline/rsg.html
Re-introduction News.Newsletter of the Re-introduction Specialist
Group of IUCN

http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Watson-Institute/Watson/watson-boo.shtml
Watson Istitute: Board of Overseers. Teymour A. Alireza..

http://www.rbgkew.org.uk/ssc/sscpcs.html
IUCN Plant Subcommittee…

http://www.africaonline.co.ke/AfricaOnLine/rsg/oct/contents.html
Re-introduction News.Newsletter of the Re-introduction Specialist
Group of IUCN

http://www.narc.gov.ae/coop.htm
The National Avian Research Center……

http://www.uaeinteract.com/ancient/overview.html
Archaeology. UAE Interact site.

COMMENTS

This search, powered by Digital’s powerful AltaVista search engine
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.

RELEVANCE - 7/10

 INTEREST - 6/10

 SCOPE - 6/10

EXCITE RESULTS  – Search For: wildlife Arabia

First 10 of 220,717 relevant documents

http://www.netads.com.80/netads/games/tccc
The Creative Creations Company: Roadkill 78%

http://infoboot.link.no:80/infobotdb/deliverwwwfiles/96/4/17/h2i829734010-1212-0
Gulf Wildlife: Oryx and Gazelle return to the wild 78%

http://www.saudi.net:80/message/message.html
A message from the Ambassador of Saudi Arabia. 78%

http://www.photonpub.co.uk:80/photon/planet/planet.html
Planet Publishing 77%

http://www.photonpub.co.uk:80/photon/planet/kodak.html
Kodak sponsorship of Arabian Wildlife Photography Competition
77%

http://www.photon.co.uk:80/photon/june95/arabjudges.html
Judges of Arabian Wildlife photography competition 76%

http://www.yahoo.com:80/Art/Photography/Exhibits/
Yahoo! – Arts:Visual Arts:Photography: 75%

http://hsccwww.kuniv.edu.kw:80/kuwait/war/week2.html
Week 2 of Iraqi occupation of Kuwait…oil slick 75%

http://www.wcs.org:80/zoos/prosparkwc/ppanimals/hamadryas.html
Hamadryas baboons live in harem groups 75%

http://www.netarrant.net:80/archives/02221996.arc/news/world/index.htm
Star Text World News. Milford Haven. Sea Empress leaks oil. 74%

COMMENTS

We were not really excited by EXCITE’s listing, four of the first
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
Park Wildlife Center.

RELEVANCE - 4/10

 INTEREST - 4/10

 SCOPE - 4/10

LYCOS RESULTS  – Search For: wildlife Arabia

First 10 of 17,106 relevant documents

http://www.photon.co.uk/photon/june95/arabjudges.html
Arabian Wildlife Photographer of the Year Contest….

http://www.photon.co.uk/photon/planet/planet.html
Planet Publishing….

http://www.photon.co.uk/photon/june95/arabwild.html
Arabian Widlife Photographer of the Year….

http://www.photon.co.uk/photon/planet/kodak.html
Kodak Sponsorship of Arabian Wildlife Photographer of the Year
Competition. June 1995…

http://www.peregrinefund.org/Arabia.html
Peregerine Fund has advised on establishing captive breeding facilities
for falcons…

http://www.webcom.com/tsh/ngs/cover/cov-8.html
Covers of National Geographic…

http://www.reading.ac.uk/AcaDepts/sa/AMS/mcswild.html
MSc Course in Wildlife Management…

http://www.dec.com/gnn/wic/wics/visart.32.html
Arabian Wildlife Photographer of the Year was …

http://www.gnn.com/wic/wics/visart.32.html
Arabian Wildlife Photographer of the Year was …

http://users.hunterlink.net.au/chasta/wwf.html
WWF – World Wildlife Fund…

COMMENTS

The first 4 and two of the last three from the top ten listing
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.

RELEVANCE - 2/10

 INTEREST - 3/10

 SCOPE - 2/10

GENERAL COMMENT

Use of the word “Arabia” in the searches resulted in an immediate
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
15th 1997.

NARROWING DOWN THE SEARCH

Using AltaVista once again we tried it out in a search for sites
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
listed:

http://www.med.usf.edu/NINA/park/asian/oryx.html
The Arabian Oryx, the only non-African oryx, survives for long
periods without drinking water.

http://www.aza.org/aza/ssp/araborx.html
Arabian Oryx: Description: The Arabian Oryx is a graceful white
antelope….

http://www.arab.net/photos/oryx.html
The rare Arabian oryx…

http://aztec.asu.edu/phxzoo/oryx.html
Arabian Oryx….leucoryx. Size: Height at shoulders, 40ins…

http://www.panda.org/news/press/news-20.htm
Arabian Oryx News Release. 4 April 1995. The Arabian Oryx makes
a comeback.

http://www.scz.org/asian/aoryx1.html
Arabian oryx. Click on the small picture to see a larger image.

http://www.scz.org/asian/aoryx2.html
Arabian Oryx photo by Dean Foy.

http://www.utoronto.ca/env/lib-hold/db3/files/397-M.htm
Animal Re-Introductions: The Arabian Oryx in Oman

http://mamba.bio.uci.edu/~pjbryant/global/makemark/ARABIANORYX.html
Arabian Oryx. Table of Contents. Society Conservation.

http://www.oryxpress.com/oppic.htm
Arabian Oryx. Oryx leucoryx. Photograph by Pamela Newton…

COMMENT

Whilst this is very much a mixed bunch of entries there is no
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
work.

CONCLUSION

The World Wide Web can undoubtedly deliver a huge quantity of
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
catalogued.

arabianwildlife.com ( www.arabianwildlife.com ) is probably one of the best places to begin any search for
information on Arabian wildlife and it provides links to other
sites as well as regular comments and updates from Arabia-based
naturalists.