Stamp Column Archives

The Glassine Surfer Column Archive

This column originally appeared in the American Philatelic Society's monthly magazine, "The American Philatelist." Since then some of the information may be out-of-date depending on how far back you're reading.

April 1999

Net Price now 'Net Price

If bigger demand brings bigger prices, then the 'Net seems to be good news for collectors.  Last October Philatelists Online reported its sale of a US #110 for 33% over catalog value.  

After they took bids for four days over the Internet, the stamp was hammered down for $6,000 USD. If the 'Net effect increased prices for the #110 by 33%, then printed catalogs are going to use up a lot of White-Out in the 21st century.  

The centering of this brownish orange 30 cent Franklin 1875 reissue was rated as extremely fine.  It was one of only 346 copies printed on white paper with crackly gum, perfed 12 without a grill.

In the future this realized price may seem cheap considering that the USPS has no plans to print any self-adhesive 1875 stamps, and Philatelists Online, expects to grow at a rate of 10-fold a year.

Philatelists Online at
http://www.philatelists.com

Buzz: Relevancy

The Net moves in strange, mysterious ways and changes overnight, and no area moves as fast and as the Net's search engines.  

The old engines applied brute force to indexing links and answering queries, but soon tech-business minds learned how to manipulate the search results for their own benefit.  At the same time, the search engines stopped acting like librarians and morphed into savvy marketers with bookstores and a host of online services, as query relevancy suffered.

Now another generation of search engines has rushed into the void, designed to deliver relevant content, or at least point us in the right direction.  Time will tell, but the initial results are impressive.  

All search engines select and rank web pages based on each's unique secret formula, the algorithm.  Each is different, which is why different engines give different results.

In '98 Sergey Brin and Larry Page started a search engine called Google.com, a trademark variant of googol (number 10 followed by 100 zeroes), and their algorithm is called Page Rank.  

A Google search applies the query word or phrase to all the pages in the index.  Then after scooping up a few zillion, page ranking kicks in and displays the most popular pages in order.

"Popular" is measured by how many web sites are linked to the selected page, as well as what those other web sites are.  In effect sites are ranked according to a measured consensus of other sites on the 'Net, and the top results are skewed to sites that others find relevant to their topic by linking to it.

And if you do, click the "I Feel Lucky" button, and you are immediately sent to the first answer to your query.

Google at
http:///www.google.com

Direct Hit is another attempt to boost relevancy.  It's an add-on service at HotBot.  While HotBot gives you the pages to your search query, Direct Hit analyzes the responses and ranks the sites by popularity --- the sites others checked out when searching at HotBot.

Right now, Direct Hit is an add-on at the HotBot site and will soon be on LookSmart.  But this is just the tip of the iceberg.  Direct Hit's "Personalized Search" plans to merge search queries with a user's demographic data to make results more relevant to the user.

Direct Hit at
http://www.directhit.com

IdeaLab.com gave us eToys and now the GoTo.com service.  GoTo looks and feels like a search engine, but that's just the half of it.  

It takes queries and returns web sites, but charges sites a fee for ranking their site high up on the results page.  Goto is a traditional business directory where the users who seek potential referrals and businesses, pay to advertise.

GoTo.Com at
http://www.goto.com

Dogpile isn't a search engine.  It's a fast and easy multi-engine search machine.  You type your query in once, and Dogpile searches a slew of other engines.  Right now it handles queries to Yahoo!, Thunderstone, Lycos' A2Z, GoTo.com, Mining Co., Excite Guide, PlanetSearch, What U Seek, Magellan, Lycos, WebCrawler, InfoSeek, Excite and AltaVista.

Dogpile will also check non-WWW online resources.  Put in "State College," choose "weather," get the forecast and conditions.  Choose "The Web" and get sites.  Choose "Business" get public relations news of hirings and business activity.  

Dogpile at
http://www.dogpile.com/

Still stumped?  Try Metafind at the Dogpile.