The only experiance I have had with index systems arer the ones in the back of the books and the ones that are in the public library systems. None of them fit my liking, both are long, ardous and many timnes will not eben get you what you want.

It would be nice to have a system is based on a program that uses everything about the key word to bring you info… it should then give you a small amount of info and a summary on thte resource allowing you to disregard irrelevant sources.

One thing I don’t like about Google is that it values older content. Things change so fast. Some older content is just out-of-date. Everyone finds it but nobody wants to read it.

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In my recent experience, they have setup a number of blogs where readers and employees talk. The SEO blog, for example, seems to be a great place for SEO professionals to ask Matt Cutts questions and get responses. I was also a member of of an internal AdSense Group with publishers and Google AdSense employees. This doesn’t invalidate your point, but just an FYI.

I wish Amazon or some other store would offer a complete database like you suggest, along with community comments and ratings per product. In addition, I wish there was a way to just barcode scan in your own print products to do fast inventories.

I also think we’re in the early days of a business model revolution. I suppose that’s just repeating what the pundits are saying. But, if we actually are moving into an information age, then information is the valued thing. In the future, I don’t see business succeeding by siloing information into dead trees. The information economy will require complete access to all information, which means proper search. This is already happening with Google’s semantic search algorithms, for example.

http://www.rpgseek.com

Trask, The Last Tyromancer

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I realised that it was possible that similar projects had been undertaken in the past, and was interested in your citing of specific attempts; what I considered more original thought was something you point out in your second paragraph, ie that it isn’t being done because no-one is being paid to do it. The potential as a marketing tool which could defray the costs is the original thinking, as I’ve never heard such a thing suggested in the past.

I also think that the ‘tagging’ costs would be less than those involved in producing a quality index of the type that a professional librarian would create, simply because most of the existing indexes would already be produced by tagging – that’s how every word processor I’ve ever heard of that’s capable of doing so, does it, and it’s also how windows help pages are compiled. So the extraction of a standalone index table from source documents would be relatively quick and easy. The index itself would be no more useful than the indexes are already in the existing products, but at least it would make it possible to compile them all into one place – meaning that you only had one document to consult, instead of having to check every index page seperately.

Again, thanks for contributing to the conversation. Hopefully, we can inspire some genius out there to solve the problem!

Indexing as you describe it is mechanical indexing and generally results in poor indexes as it is looking for word occurrence rather than word meaning. To take your example, “The Dreamtime”, meaning the shared mythological space of the aborigines of Australia, or Dream’s Domain, or that time during sleep when dreaming happens. Which one? Not to mention a mechanical index picking up, but not filing together, “Dreamtime, The”, “the dreamtime”,”The Dream Time”, etc. It takes human intervention to know a material and assign the correct semantic meaning to the term in use. Which is costly and that’s why good indexes are so valuable. Add in the fact of all the material printed before electronic replicas, and no, it’s not so easy to scan in pages and OCR them, not to mention the intellectual property rights that would have to negotiated, especially with companies with competitive products…

Even tagging as you describe it is a nice idea, but again, it takes time and adds to the cost. Indexing is a well established profession and is more difficult than you would think to produce a ‘useful’ guide to a work. On the scale you describe, well, it’s just not that easy.

In fact, the preponderance of electronic indexing has resulted in a glut of bad indexes to books and other materials, meaning it is adding to the volume of material you have to wade through.

There are other concepts that I have not gotten too, but rest assured that what you talk about has been done on non-rpg sources and it is expensive as all get out, Lexis-Nexis being one that comes right to mind as well as DIALOG, and even then we have to be constantly on the watch for term creep in order to keep things manageable.

For a detailed look at the scope of indexing, uses and construction, find “Indexing Books” by Nancy C. Mulvany (ISBN 9780226552767) at your library, and then give it a try on one of your non-indexed supplements.