New Life for the Operations Research Resources Page?

I have previously written about my frustration handling the INFORMS OR/MS Resources Page.  I wrote:

As announced last year, it is unclear whether this resource page will continue. On one hand I started this back in 1994, so it is sad to see it go after 15 years. On the other hand, the internet has changed a lot since then. There was no Google back then, so simply finding stuff was hard to do. Now, it seems that the age of “hand edited” links is at an end (if it wasn’t so five years ago). Keeping these pages up to date is ferociously difficult. And the spammers are unrelenting (and I don’t have the heart to change software again to combat them). So, there is every possibility that these pages will go away on April 15, 2009.

Jim Orlin may well have made the suggestion to save the Resources Page.  In short, he suggests combining the strengths of the Resources Page with the strengths of Google.  We can use the URLs within the resources page to seed a specialized google search.  I have tried to do this in the past (in fact, long before google with my own crawlers) but it never worked quite right.  Google seems to have it right now.

I see a number of real advantages of this approach.  For the user, when you want OR/MS pages, they need not be lost in the long google output.  For the Resources page, if you want to show up on the search, you need to keep the URL up to date and accurate.  The searches will be better because the URLs will be verified as OR/MS relevant.  Overall, I think this is the change that could breath new life into the Resources Page.

Want to check out the search?  I’m still working on it, before I put it on the resources page, but here it is in an experimental version:

4 thoughts on “New Life for the Operations Research Resources Page?”

  1. That’s a great idea, thanks a lot, I also suggest adding volunteers (mostly grad students in OR since their work is free) so they can add to the URL list.

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