Anybody want to say anything about DevonAgent?

[struggle4progress]

I'm playing around with DevonAgent now. Any commemnts from anybody? What's good about it? What's not so good?

[hunter]

1. I'm not sure what I'd use it for.

Link here:

http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/devonagent/index.html

I like to think my own internet searches are pretty focused, and I've always put a lot of stock in personal contacts. A short phone call to the right person can save you hours of searching the internet.

Everyone likes to think they are asking a novel question, but few are. And everyone likes to think they have answers, but few do, even though they are quick to post those answers on the internet. The internet is extremely noisy. If in the "real world" Theodore Sturgeon is right, that "... 90% of everything is crud," then I think the percentage approaches 99% on the internet.

This has been a very big question in medicine. How do you know which medical research is accurate and relevant? How do you filter out all the noise and all the biased crud, especially the malignantly biased crud promoted by the pharmaceutical and insurance industries and others who have a financial stake in the health care system.

The Cochrane Collaboration has a good approach to filtering out the noise, and it's an approach I believe is very applicable to other avenues of research.

http://www.cochrane.org

I'm not sure if putting a meta-filter on top of google and the other search engines gets you any further down the road towards knowledge and effectiveness. If DevonAgent sorts something that is 90% crud into separate piles that are still 90% crud you really haven't accomplished anything.

Cynical as I am, it's still the kind of thing I'd enjoying playing with, even though I can imagine it as some huge complicated machine designed for the single purpose of hammering in a nail. While you are setting it up, adjusting all the dials, making sure the power levels are just right, some guy walks by with a five dollar hammer, and bam-bam-bam, the job is done.

[struggle4progress]

2. The internet is certainly a limited resource, for the purposes of detailed academic research

And I think I do reasonably well with (say) just Google for many other purposes -- with enough patience slogging through the usual webpages with deliberately misleading key words, sites that are essentially adverts, odd unanticipated results from search phrases and so on

And depending on the browser, there are certain irritations associated with that, such as the inconvenience of no tabbed browsing in IE

I've been using Firefox in recent years, but its not really adapted to extensive searching

My still-limited experience suggests Devon cuts through some of the crap: if the engine is finding 90% crud, most of it isn't making its way through -- for example, I don't need to manually wade through a bunch of advert pages