Discussions on Informetrics of the Internet and Other Social Networks

This paper poses more problems than it solves : it investigates the new (virtual) world of Internet and the challenges that it offers for informetric analysis. The paper studies four different aspects. First of all there is the increasing problem of data gathering in the Internet. Second topic is the Internet-version of the informetric laws : are the same types of classical distributions valid or not ? Third topic deals with scientometric aspects : can the clickable buttons (hyperlinks) in Web pages replace the role of classical references in scientific papers ? It also contains a study of the WIF (Web Impact Factor) and a discussion on aging. The fourth topic discusses IR (information retrieval) aspects of search engines. It studies aspects of probabilistic IR as applied in these engines and poses the question of quantitative evaluation of IR (Web analogues of recall and precision or of Jaccard's measure, Dice's measure or cosine measure as applied to ordered sets of documents). Concrete 2 formulas are presented of ordered similarity measures that are capable of comparing ordered sets of documents.