At the end of every advanced search workshop that we run, the delegates vote on their 10 top search tips. The latest course was run for UKeiG (UK eInformation Group) on Friday, October 28th and was held at CILIP in London. A summary of the tips is given below but a more detailed explanation will appear in the UKeiG members newsletter eLucidate, and in the members area on the UKeiG web site.
1. Use domain/site search to limit by type of site and to search individual sites that are difficult to navigate.
2. Trovando.it for a quick way to run your search in different search tools one by one.
3. Use Yahoo for complex nested Boolean searches.
4. Think about the format that the information might be in and use the filetype options to narrow down your search.
5. "Disappearing" pages: use the search engines' cached pages for recently disappeared pages or the Wayback Machine for older pages and sites.
6. Use the Google numeric range when searching for ranges of prices, distances, weights, temperatures, years etc.
7. Don't give up! If your favourite search engine is not working, try another one or a different type of resource.
8. Graball for comparing the results from 2 search engines side by side.
9. Copernic Desktop for desktop search.
10. Yahoo Mindset to adjust the ranking of results ("shopping" versus "research")
Saturday, 29 October 2005
Monday, 17 October 2005
Business Week Top 100 Global Brands Scoreboard
Business Week have released their 2005 league table of top 100 global brands. The table ranks 100 global brands that have a value greater than $1 billion. The brands are selected according to two criteria: they have to be global in nature, deriving 20% or more of sales from outside their home country, and there also has to be publicly available marketing and financial data on which to base the valuation. The table also gives rankings for the years 2001 to 2004.
There is no change in the top 5: Coca-Cola, Microsoft, IBM, GE and Intel. Google makes a first appearance at number 38 sandwiched between Goldman Sachs and Kellogg's, and Yahoo is up two places at 58. Apple has also gone up two places to number 41. Amazon has gone down slightly from last year's 66 to 68 this year while eBay has risen 5 places to number 55.
There is no change in the top 5: Coca-Cola, Microsoft, IBM, GE and Intel. Google makes a first appearance at number 38 sandwiched between Goldman Sachs and Kellogg's, and Yahoo is up two places at 58. Apple has also gone up two places to number 41. Amazon has gone down slightly from last year's 66 to 68 this year while eBay has risen 5 places to number 55.
Monday, 10 October 2005
Email must die!
Email must die! That was the battle cry that rang out this morning at Internet Librarian International in London, with Brian Kelly leading the attack. Quote as posted on the ILI wiki by rakerman:
"Poor metadata - bad subject lines, subject lines not changed..."
"Viruses, spam, flame wars..."
"Email is where knowledge goes to die"It was an excellent presentation and I wholeheartedly agree with Brian. I'm already using RSS, blogs, Wikis and Skype which were all mentioned by him as alternatives but I have been wary of IM, one of the other options he covered. But I am now going to give it a go, especially as May Chang gave some useful pointers to multi-protocol systems in her talk before lunch.
Friday, 7 October 2005
Top 10 Business Sites
At the end of each of our Business Information on the Internet workshops we ask the delegates to compile a "Top 10 Business Sites" list. The list from the course held on 6th October is now at http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/top10/index.htm.
Yet again we failed to to narrow it down to just 10 sites so we actually have a round dozen! The new Alacrawiki site came straight in at number one with agreement from all delegates that this is an excellent starting point for industry specific information. Europages and Kompass made yet another appearance and have been joined by Kellysearch in the directories category.
Search tool Trovando is also a new entrant, enabling you to quickly run your search in several web, blog, image and reference search tools one by one.
Yet again we failed to to narrow it down to just 10 sites so we actually have a round dozen! The new Alacrawiki site came straight in at number one with agreement from all delegates that this is an excellent starting point for industry specific information. Europages and Kompass made yet another appearance and have been joined by Kellysearch in the directories category.
Search tool Trovando is also a new entrant, enabling you to quickly run your search in several web, blog, image and reference search tools one by one.
Thursday, 22 September 2005
AlacraWiki launched
Alacra has launched AlacraWiki, a guide to business information companies, publishers and databases. The Alacra Industry Spotlights in particular are extremely useful in providing reviews and commentary on industry specific web sites and the Types of Content section lists resources under headings such as mergers and acquisitions, news, people and corporate governance. There is also information on content aggregators, databases and the best business information blogs. Anyone can contribute and edit the pages, apart from the Industry Spotlights which are locked, but you have to create an account in order to do so. If you want to keep up with what's new at Alacra, they also have a blog and news feed.
Monday, 19 September 2005
Exalead one:desktop
Exalead is the latest to join the desktop search club, with its preview launch of exalead one:desktop. This has been tested for several months by a selected group of users (I was one of them), but the non-disclosure agreement forbade us to mention that the software even existed! I can't say that I have tested it exhaustively; I rarely need to use a desktop search program and Exalead's does not yet index Thunderbird email or Star/Open Office documents. Support for these applications is promised for later in the year.
If your documents are mostly Microsoft, Adobe, html or Wordperfect then exalead one:desktop is worth considering for its unique advanced search options. As well as the standard phrase searching, OR and NOT commands there is a NEAR command which searches for words within 16 words of one another, a phonetic search, approximate spelling and pattern matching. You can also have word stemming switched on by default.
When you install the program, you can specify which directories and areas of your hard disk you want it to index and you can also control when it indexes. The results are displayed with preview thumbnails for some of the formats, but you can switch this off if you prefer to view the results as text only. On the left had side of the screen, there are options that enable you to narrow down your search by folder, author, date, size and document type. This will all be very familiar to users of the Exalead's web search. For web search Exalead is the default but you can set up shortcuts to other tools.
Overall, definitely worth a try - especially for the advanced search features.
Link: http://www.exalead.com/
If your documents are mostly Microsoft, Adobe, html or Wordperfect then exalead one:desktop is worth considering for its unique advanced search options. As well as the standard phrase searching, OR and NOT commands there is a NEAR command which searches for words within 16 words of one another, a phonetic search, approximate spelling and pattern matching. You can also have word stemming switched on by default.
When you install the program, you can specify which directories and areas of your hard disk you want it to index and you can also control when it indexes. The results are displayed with preview thumbnails for some of the formats, but you can switch this off if you prefer to view the results as text only. On the left had side of the screen, there are options that enable you to narrow down your search by folder, author, date, size and document type. This will all be very familiar to users of the Exalead's web search. For web search Exalead is the default but you can set up shortcuts to other tools.
Overall, definitely worth a try - especially for the advanced search features.
Link: http://www.exalead.com/
Wednesday, 14 September 2005
Google Blog Search
Google is the first of the major web search tools to launch a dedicated Blog Search - in beta of course. It does not search the full text of the postings, only the RSS and Atom feeds generated by the blog. Older posts that were generated before Blog Search started crawling or are not in a current feed are not included. Google says that it covers "every blog that publishes a site feed (either RSS or Atom)." When I ran my test searches, it picked up several pages that are not blogs but do have RSS or Atom feeds. For many of us this is not an issue. I am often looking for feeds on a topic or industry sector and do not care whether they are generated by a blog or by some other means. There may be times, though, when one does want to limit a search to blogs so one needs to bear this in mind.
The indexing is fast. Blog Search picked up one of my postings just 22 minutes after I had published it. Results can be sorted by date or relevance.
The Advanced Search has the usual 'all the words', phrase, 'at least one of the words', and 'without the words'. Additional options include 'words in the post title', 'words in the blog title', 'at this URL', 'blogs and posts written by', limit by date and language.
You can also set up alerts. Go to the bottom of your results page and you can ask to have 10 or 100 results as an Atom or an RSS feed.
You can access Google Blog Search at http://www.google.com/blogsearch for the Google style interface, or at http://search.blogger.com/ if you prefer the Blogger style.
The indexing is fast. Blog Search picked up one of my postings just 22 minutes after I had published it. Results can be sorted by date or relevance.
The Advanced Search has the usual 'all the words', phrase, 'at least one of the words', and 'without the words'. Additional options include 'words in the post title', 'words in the blog title', 'at this URL', 'blogs and posts written by', limit by date and language.
You can also set up alerts. Go to the bottom of your results page and you can ask to have 10 or 100 results as an Atom or an RSS feed.
You can access Google Blog Search at http://www.google.com/blogsearch for the Google style interface, or at http://search.blogger.com/ if you prefer the Blogger style.
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