Saturday 29 December 2007

Chipwrapper - Search UK newspapers



Chipwrapper is a Custom Google Search Engine that searches across the UK's major national newspapers: The Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Financial Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Sun, The People, News of the World, The Scotsman, Daily Star, The Telegraph and The Times. It also searches the BBC News web site, ITN and Sky. It carries out a Google web search of these sources, not a Google News search, so although you cannot sort the results by date you do pull up older, archival material that is not included in the standard 30 days of Google News. As many of the newspapers give the date as part of the text of the stories you can often limit your search to a year and sometimes a specific month by simply including the month and year in your search. Also available are RSS feeds for the top headlines, general sport, rugby and football headlines, and a Chipwrapper browser search plugin is available for IE7 and Firefox 2.

I ran one of my standard test searches on Richard Budge the UK coal magnate, and included 2007 in the search strategy to limit the stories to the current year. It worked impressively well but the FT was conspicuous by its absence, and I knew that there had been at least two articles about him in the FT this year. I went direct to the FT site, ran a similar search and found three articles. I then did a Google Web search using my Chipwrapper strategy but added site:ft.com. Again three results. Back to Chipwrapper with some different searches, and it did pick up FT articles. Obviously there is something about my Richard Budge search that it does not like.

Comparison with Google News Archive

Of course Google News is probably the service that most people will use as the benchmark and this is where it becomes really interesting. Back to dear old Richard and a search in the Google News Archive. I went into the Advanced Search screen, entered the phrase Richard Budge, typed in 2007 for the year and selected Show Timeline. Unlike the Advanced Search in current Google News you cannot specify a country of origin for the source so I had to resign myself to the possibility of wading through a substantial number of articles. Google Archive News does, though, give you an option to home in on a specific month via the Timeline (see below).

Google Archive News Results with Timeline



It came up with 94 results, about twenty of which claimed to be from the Financial Times and dated Jan 1 2007. I clicked on a few of the links and they took me to the "Access My Library" site where I was repeatedly told that the articles had been deleted. I gave up after eight or nine, but I think we can assume that the FT has decided not to play ball. Three links with $$ signs next to them took me to Press Display but I was told that the items had been "removed from the back issues access". A minority of the links took me direct to the news source, for example The Telegraph, BBC, Doncaster Today. The articles from the Guardian, Independent and Times that had been picked up by Chipwrapper were nowhere to be seen. I can only think that like the FT they have declined Google's offer to be part of the Archive.

Conclusion

I have to confess that this is the first time I have analysed the results from Google News Archive in any depth. I was not surprised to find the FT absent but amazed that so many of the other UK daily papers were not there. Even worse, Google still has in its index links to stories that were carried by third party services, such as Access My Library and Press Display, but which have now been removed. The Timeline is still a good way of looking at major stories relating to a company or person but be aware that some of the key resources are not included.

Despite the glitch with the FT in my test search, and that there is no date sort option, Chipwrapper is a great tool for searching new and archival stories appearing in the leading UK papers. I recommend that you give it a go next time you need to research a UK story.

Note on the name Chipwrapper for non UK readers

A favourite take-away food in the UK is deep fried, battered fish with chips (mushy peas are optional but an essential component as far as I am concerned). Today, EU and Health and Safety regulations dictate that these have to be placed in grease proof paper (in practice not grease proof at all) and then wrapped in large plain sheets of off white paper. I recall that in my dim and distant youth newspaper was regarded as the superior wrapping material. Some connoisseurs claimed that the ink, which dissolved in the presence of the salt and vinegar, gave extra flavour.

Saturday 22 December 2007

PNC — The True Cost of the 12 Days of Christmas...



PNC Wealth Management and institutional investments have released their annual report The True Cost of the 12 Days of Christmas. PNC have been monitoring the cost of all the items gifted by True Love in the popular Christmas song since 1984. The 2007 Christmas Price Index showed an increase of 3.1% over 2006. The five gold rings rose by a whopping 21.5%, reflecting the general trend of increasing commodity prices in the Consumer Price Index, and geese-a-laying are up by 20%. Maids-a-milking cost 13.6% more because of an increase in the federal minimum wage. In total the cost of all Twelve Days of Christmas, including the repetitions, comes to USD 78,100.10.

Interestingly, shopping on the Internet is not cheaper mainly because of the shipping and transportation costs involved particularly when it comes to livestock. Agency fees and travel expenses probably contribute to the USD 11,283.23 for the 10 Lords-a-leaping hired via the Internet, compared with USD 4,285.06 for hiring them through more traditional channels.

What the report does not cover is how True Love might be expected to fund this annual extravaganza. Taking out a new credit card or increasing the credit limit on existing cards is going to be more difficult in the current economic climate. House prices, in the UK at least, are at best static but starting to fall so re-mortgaging is not going to be a sensible option. There is also the question of air miles and green-house gas emissions generated by this giftfest. One source estimates that the total comes to 54.4 tonnes. Perhaps True Love should play the green environmental card and not send anything this year, thereby reducing his carbon foot print and doing his bit to help combat global warming.

Friday 21 December 2007

Santa in breach of UK laws and EU directives

Santa could be spending Christmas behind bars. According to Out-Law.com, part of Pinsent Masons an international law firm who advise on IT and e-commerce, Santa's trading practices break several UK laws and fail to comply with EU directives.

Santa's crime sheet includes:

  • Failing to comply with the European Union's Waste Electric and Electronic Equipment Directive, which from this year made producers of goods responsible for their environmentally sound disposal. "Santa and the elves, as producers of electrical and electronic equipment, will have obligations in relation to goods placed on the market, together with responsibilities for financing the treatment, reprocessing and environmentally sound disposal of them," said Kirsty Isla Cooper, an environmental law specialist at Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind Out-Law.com. There is some question ats to whether or not the elves are separately responsible because The Grotto has not disclosed whether elves are employees of Claus or are independent contractors.

  • Santa's use of a sleigh drawn by nine reindeer in England, which has had outbreaks of of foot and mouth and bluetongue disease, could be a safety breach. "Claus's bringing of reindeer in and out of restriction zones could be a serious threat to the industry." say Out-Law.com. A spokeswoman for the Department for the Environment Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) told Out-Law.Com "The Bluetongue exclusion zone is still in operation and applies to reindeer. There is a 150km surveillance zone around the exclusion zone. You wouldn't be able to go in there with reindeer and leave with them alive."

  • UK employment laws broken: restrictions on the number of hours worked (it is suspected that the elves work for more than 48 hours a week all year round) and race discrimination laws (Claus's elf-focused employment practices)

  • Work at Height Regulations 2005: Santa should make sure his sleigh has guardrails to prevent a fall and a fall arrest system installed so that if he does fall he is protected.

  • Alcohol restrictions for pilots: the current UK limit is 20 milligrams per 100 millilitres of blood. One brandy would probably exceed that limit and Santa has a glass of spirits in each of the UK's 25 million households in one evening.

  • Flying height restrictions: aircraft must not fly lower than 1,000 feet in major conurbations. Santa flies well below this height as he goes from roof to roof.


Santa is also accused of possible breaches of Data Protection and Distance Selling Regulations.


Full details are at:




Looks as though they will be locking him up and throwing away the key :-(

Thursday 20 December 2007

Live link and linkdomain comands gone again

As Greg Notess and others have already noted, Live.com's link and linkdomain commands are in a mess again. After they had been disabled in their original form, they reappeared as +link: and +linkdomain: commands. I noticed last week, though, that the +linkdomain was generating some very strange results. Much as I would like to believe that I am very popular I do not honestly believe that over 500,000 people/pages/sites link to my web site! Yahoo's result of 2895 seems more realistic. Now Live's commands have gone AWOL again.

Using Live's Advanced Search screen I can still use the links option, type in the URL of the page and the syntax that it comes back with is link:http://www.rba.co.uk/. But that only gives me 7 results and two of those are internal links on my own site. So I guess it is back to using Yahoo for identifying incoming links.

Live's 'linkfromdomain:' is still working.

Thursday 13 December 2007

AlltheWeb Livesearch disappears

AlltheWeb Livesearch seems to have disappeared. Clicking on the link to Livesearch on the AlltheWeb home page or trying to go direct to http://livesearch.alltheweb.com/ causes both my Firefox and IE 7 browsers to grind to a halt and then redirects them to Yahoo. Does anyone know if Yahoo have decided to abandon it, or is it a temporary glitch?

Thursday 6 December 2007

Presentation: Tricks and Tips for Better Web Search

My Online 2007 presentation "Tricks and tips for better web search" is now available as a PowerPoint and on Slideshare.

Wednesday 5 December 2007

Searching without Google presentation available

My Online 2007 presentation on Searching without Google is now available as a PowerPoint (4 MB) and on Slideshare

Sunday 2 December 2007

Yippee! - It's Online Week!!

Well, here I am ensconced in the Kensington Hilton Holland Park, trying to get my brains together for the next four days of the annual online information jamboree at Olympia. Those of us who have done this event in full before know that by Thursday we will be feeling the strain and the fixed grins will appear on our faces at around 2.30 pm. Even so there is a feeling of excitement about 'Online' - there is always something new, something about which we can wax lyrical, something on which we can do the thumbs down, always a lot of somethings that we need to follow up, and interesting people we have met.

My 'Online' week starts off tomorrow (Monday 3rd December) with a workshop on Blogs, Wikis, RSS and other web 2.0 'stuff'. All the notes and demos have been prepared but Mondays are bad for live Internet demos. All the search engines and other web 2.0 providers have had the weekend to revamp and reload their web sites and services. Even if you get away with the morning session a UK afternoon session hits the time when the US services flick-the-switch and make you look a complete idiot if you are demoing live :-(

For the rest of the week my free exhibition seminars are:

Tuesday 4th December: Searching without Google in Theatre E at 11.45.
Thursday 6th December: Tricks and tips for better web search in Theatre E at 12.15

For the rest of the time I shall be mooching around the conference and on the UKeiG stand (number 734).

Thursday 29 November 2007

UKeiG Top Search Tips

UKeiG held yet another 'Google and Beyond' workshop on November 6th 2007, this time in London. As usual, the participants were asked to come up with a list of their Top Search Tips. Here it is!

  1. Graball http://www.graball.com/
    Search two different search engines side by side and compare results.

  2. Use 'site search' to search within a specific, individual site or to a particular type of site e.g. UK government sites. Especially useful for sites that have poor navigation or awful internal search engines. Use the site: command, for example site:gov.uk or use the Advanced Search screens of the search engines.

  3. Use file format search to limit your search to one or more file formats, for example PDF, PPT, XLS. A good way of focusing your search: many government and industry/market reports are published as PDFs, statistics in spreadsheet format, and PowerPoints are a good way of tracking down experts on a subject. Use the Advanced Search screens or the filetype: command, for example filetype:ppt

  4. Intelways http://www.intelways.com/. Type in your search once and then run it through individual search engines one by one. The search engines are grouped together by type, for example Image, News, Reference. A useful reminder of what else is out there other than Google and that perhaps you should be thinking of searching different types of information.

  5. Numeric Range Search. Available only in Google and searches for numbers within a specified range. The syntax is 1st number..2nd number. For example:TV advertising forecasts 2008..2015

    or

    toblerone 1..5 kg

  6. Alacrawiki Spotlights http://www.alacrawiki.com/. Extremely useful in providing reviews and commentary on industry specific web sites that have statistics, market research and news. Invaluable if you need to get up to speed on key resources in a sector or industry.

  7. Panoramio. http://www.panoramio.com/. Now owned by Google. A geolocation-oriented photo sharing service with uploaded photos presented as a mashup with Google Earth.

  8. Wayback Machine - http://www.archive.org/. For tracking down copies of pages or documents that have disappeared from the original web site. Type in the address of the web site or the full URL of the document, if you know it. Note: this is not guaranteed but worth a try for older documents that are unlikely to be in the search engine caches.

  9. Google Book Search . Useful for searching within books that Google has been allowed to scan, and in particular older text books.

  10. Use anything but Google! For example - in alphabetical order - Ask.com, Exalead.com, Live.com, Yahoo.com. For a day, try out other search tools to see if you can survive without Google. You may go back to Google as your first port of call but at least you will have discovered the strengths and key features of the alternatives.

  11. For current news try Google News and its alert service (it's free!). And don't forget blogs, for example Google Blogsearch, Ask- Blogs, Blogpulse, Technorati.

  12. Blogpulse trends. Click on the graph icon on the results page to see how often your search terms have been mentioned in blog postings over time. Used by many of us who monitor competitor or industry intelligence to see what are hot topics and when. Many of the 'peaks' will tie in with press announcements: it is those that don't that are really interesting. Click on the peaks in the graph to see the postings.


    Tuesday 13 November 2007

    Business Information Top Web Resources

    Another workshop - another top resources listing. This time it was Business Information Key Web Resources organised by TFPL and held on 31st October 2007. The list, which is compiled by participants at the end of the workshop, is usually limited to 10 but this time they came up with 16! As well as specific sources, they also came up with search techniques that they felt would help them target information more effectively.

    1. Site Search. Use the Advanced Search screens of search engines to limit your search to an individual site or use the site: command. Useful for tracking down information on large sites with poor navigation or internal search.

    2. File format search. As in number 1 above, use the Advanced Search to limit your search to a particular file format. For example PDF for market, industry, government reports; PPT or PDF for conference presentations; XLS for data and statistics.

    3. Think local. If you are researching a market or companies based in a particular country or region, look at the news sources, company registers, databases, and versions of search engines for that country. To change your country version of Google, click on the Language Tools options on the Google home page and go to the list of flags towards the bottom of the page.

    4. Kompass. http://www.kompass.com/. Well known company, product and service directory with world-wide coverage and detailed product codes. You can search free of charge but have to pay to view most of the information. You can opt for a subscription or the pay as you go option.

    5. EXPO 21XX - Industry, Automation, Aviation, Yachting, Fashion and Textile Online Fair. http://www.expo21xx.com/ A directory that mimics a trade exhibition in its design. Each "fair" is subdivided into halls, and each company in the hall has a "stand" with a brief description and a flag showing the country in which it is based.

    6. Blogpulse. http://www.blogpulse.com/ Useful blog search tool with a graph option (Trends) that shows how often your search terms are mentioned in blogs.

    7. Abyznewslinks http://www.abyznewslinks.com/ Lists newspapers and other news sources by country and by region within each country. There is a language code next to each newspaper and separate links to alternative language versions if they are available.

    8. Del.icio.us http://del.icio.us/ and other social bookmarking services. Good way to collaborate and share your favourite resources with others, both inside and outside your organisation.

    9. Official Statistics on the Web http://www.library.auckland.ac.nz/subjects/stats/offstats/
      Starting point for statistical sources by country, topic or subject. This service includes sources offering free and easily accessible social, economic and general data from official or similar "quotable" sources, especially those that provide both current data and time series.

    10. BvD Taste of Mint Free Directory http://www.bvdep.com/ Free directory giving basic information on companies covered by the Bureau van Dijk collection of priced services. Search by name, country or activity, and size. Information provided free of charge includes company name, town, country, activity and size.

    11. Eco5 http://www.eco5.com/. Click on the Research tab. This service is aimed at researchers in the areas of finance and economics world-wide. Resources include links to national institutions such as central banks, stock exchanges and government bodies, and to to national and international institutions.

    12. Try a different search tool. Try something other than Google: another search engine e.g. Live, Yahoo, Ask, Exalead; an evaluated listing e.g. Alacrawiki, Intute; a listing of sites by type of information e.g. news (see number 7), statistics (see number 9).

    13. Repeat your search terms one or more times to change the way results are sorted.

    14. Allwhois. http://allwhois.com/. Domain name registry that can help you track down who owns or is behind a web site.

    15. Wayback Machine. http://www.archive.org/. Use the wayback machine to track down 'lost' pages, documents or sites. Also useful for seeing how companies have marketed themselves on the web in the past.

    16. Nationmaster. http://www.nationmaster.com/. Repackages information from many different sources and enables you to compare data in a variety of ways, for example countries, a region, or an economic group such as OPEC and then a category and statistic for that category. Click on Advanced View to see all of the search options. The information is not always the most up to date, but the source is always given so you can then search the original site for the most recent data.

    Sunday 28 October 2007

    IET announces launch of Inspec Direct

    The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) has announced that Inspec Direct, a new web-based version of the Inspec database, will be available directly from the IET in January 2008. Inspec provides an index to literature in physics, electrical and electronic engineering, computer science, information technology, manufacturing, production and mechanical engineering as well as interdisciplinary areas such as materials science, oceanography, nuclear engineering, geophysics, biomedical engineering and biophysics.

    The IET press release says that the new Inspec Direct platform will feature a "user focused design" that will support all levels of scientific and technical research in the corporate, industrial, government and academic sectors. The Inspec Direct platform will be commercially available on January 1, 2008, but researchers and information professionals are invited to trial the new platform for free. For a free trial or further information about Inspec Direct, go to www.theiet.org/inspecdirect

    Telegraph Business Club

    The Daily Telegraph Business Club aims to help SMEs through weekly case studies, information, free seminars and membership discounts. Registration is free and the club has a page every Tuesday in the Business Section of the Daily Telegraph. There is quite a lot to work your way through on the home page but the main tabs and headings are Strategy, Money, People, Sales, Technology and Operations. The Advanced Search is probably the best way to track down information in the archives as it enables you to search by category, for example legislation, and type of resource. The only really negative aspect of this site for me is the irritating news ticker scrolling across the screen near the top of the page. Luckily I use Firefox as my browser so I was able to 'Remove it Permanently' with the RIP add-on. The ticker really does not add much in the way of content to the site and becomes extremely annoying after a few minutes.

    Monday 22 October 2007

    Workshop: Business Information - Key Web Resources

    I shall be leading a workshop on key business information resources on October 31st in London. The workshop is organised by TFPL and concentrates on free and pay as you go services. If you are interested in attending, details are on the TFPL web site.

    Thursday 18 October 2007

    Wordpress introduces tags

    At long last Wordpress supports tags. It has always had categories, but you have to set these up beforehand and they are only really useful as broad subject headings. They are usually displayed in a side bar on your WordPress blog, and the list becomes far too long and unusable if you treat categories as index terms or very specific, one-off tags. One of the problems I had when converting my Blogger blog plus tags to a WordPress blog with categories was the huge number of categories the conversion generated. I spent about half a day pruning the category list. Now, as well as assigning categories to a posting, WordPress lets you assign tags on the fly. I am not sure how this will affect the Blogger to WordPress conversion programs, so would be interested to hear from anyone who tries it with the new system in place.

    Tuesday 16 October 2007

    Live.com link commands are back

    Live.com's link and link domain commands have been back for a quite a while. Microsoft did not not announce their re- appearance and I have forgotten who told me that they were back online, but Paul in Arizona reminded me in a comment to my original posting regarding their departure that I had not posted about their re-emergence.

    There is one important change to the command. You have to precede both the link: and the linkdomain: commands with a plus sign. For example, to find pages that link to the UKeiG's training and meetings page you would type in:

    +link:www.ukeig.org.uk/training/

    To find pages that link to anywhere on the UKeiG web site you would type in:

    +linkdomain:www.ukeig.org.uk

    Google has a link command which is virtually useless as it lists a small fraction of the pages that link to your starting page. Yahoo has both a link and linkdomain command but my experience is that they do not list as many pages as Live.com. This suggests to me that Live's database of web pages is larger than Yahoo's.

    The link commands are extremely useful in tracking down pages or sites that are similar to one that you already have, the principle being that pages of similar content and type generally link to one another. It is also a great way of identifying links and networks between companies and organisations.

    Thursday 11 October 2007

    ILI 2007 presentation

    My ILI 2007 presentation will be going up on the ILI site soon, but meanwhile you can download a copy of the PowerPoint from my own web site at http://www.rba.co.uk/ili/ILI2007KarenBlakeman.ppt

    I have added a slide , or rather re-instated a slide that I had deleted because of time constraints, as a result of a comment from Patrick Danowski after the presentation. It is the one showing Exalead's Wikpedia search interface and tag cloud. The interesting feature of the tag cloud is that the tags/keywords are colour coded depending on whether they are people's names, companies/organisations, geographical locations etc.

    The slides are mostly screen shots so will not make much sense to those of you who were not at the presentation. I am planning to do some brief notes over the next couple of days and then possibly a full article based on the session.

    P.S. Patrick Danowski experimented with 'Twittering' ILI 2007. Go to http://twitter.com/PatrickD to see the results. Interesting approach and a good way to capture all the keywords/phrases as they are being uttered rather than trying to to do a full blog posting that may not be published for several hours. Speakers beware! :-)

    Sunday 30 September 2007

    Search engine overlap and the perils of phrase searching

    Greg Notess has posted an interesting screencast on his blog that demonstrates the importance of trying search engines other than Google. It also shows that you can miss information if you use long phrases and that you may be better off breaking down your phrase into smaller chunks.

    Earthquake alerts

    Those of us with friends and relatives in Australia, New Zealand and in other countries on the Pacific rim are well aware that earthquakes regularly hit the region. Many of them are minor but recently there have been more serious events, most of which are not picked up by the UK or European press. A Google News alert will pick up those that make the headlines in the regional press that are local to the quake, but aftershocks are not always reported. Search engine Ask has a map showing recent earthquakes and their magnitude on a map at http://www.ask.com/earthquake but there is no email or RSS alert option so you have to keep going back to the site to see the latest news. The US Geological Survey has detailed information and alerts on earthquakes at http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/. In addition there are two RSS feeds: one is for earthquakes with a magnitude greater than 2.5 (http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/catalogs/eqs1day-M2.5.xml) and the second for those with a magnitude greater than 5.0 (http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/catalogs/eqs7day-M5.xml).

    If you are a Firefox user there is an eQuake add-on at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2239 which uses the USGS data. It alerts you with the basic information (date, location, and magnitude) of each earthquake but you can specify a lower limit for the magnitude, for example 4. By default your browser will 'shake' proportional to the earthquake magnitude but you can configure the alert methods. I have only just installed it so I'm not sure how disruptive the quaking browser effect is going to be ...... and as I write this an earthquake of 4.9 has just hit the Santa Cruz Islands region! And having just spell checked this article a 6.8 quake has occurred off the west coast of the South Island of New Zealand. If nothing else this is an interesting way to demonstrate the frequency of earthquakes.

    Sunday 23 September 2007

    Tighter controls on Wikipedia edits

    I spoted this piece of news in Information World Review. It seems that the German language version of Wikipedia will restrict instant editing of articles so that trusted editors will have to pass the content before it appears online. The changes will come into effect later this year, and it has been suggested that this approach could be applied to the English language version of Wikipedia. There have been questions about the accuracy and bias of some of the articles, but I have always found that the articles in the scientific areas I research have been excellent. I have noticed, though, that some biographies have obviously been 'edited' either by the person themselves or by their PA to present the 'official' picture that they wish to portray. Wikipedia already requires users to sign in before they can edit certain pages, for example those on Tony Blair and George Bush, so this is taking the process of control a stage further.

    Friday 21 September 2007

    Telecoms blast from the past

    I am having a grand clear-out in the office and at long last have decided that my archive of telecoms software and manuals has to go. Before I sort the paper, binders, books and disks into the relevant piles for recycling I offer them free of charge to anyone who might be interested for historical reasons, research or whatever!

    The list is on http://www.rba.co.uk/telecoms.htm

    You do not have to take the whole lot - you can take an individual item. Email me at karen.blakeman@rba.co.uk if you are interested in any of them. Closing date 5th October 2007. After that date, they will be irrevocably recycled.

    Saturday 15 September 2007

    ITU-T recommendations now free of charge

    The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has made over 3000 ITU-T recommendations available free of charge following a trial of the new service. The standards are used by equipment manufacturers, telecommunication network operators and service providers throughout the world.

    According to the ITU press release:
    Mr Malcolm Johnson, Director of ITU’s Telecommunication Standardization Bureau (TSB), presented the results of the trial to the 2007 meeting of ITU’s Council. He said that not only had the experiment been a success in raising awareness of ITU-T, it would also attract new members. Most importantly, he noted, it had helped efforts to bridge the “standardization gap between countries with resources to pursue standardization issues and those without. “There has been very positive feedback from developing countries, said Johnson. “Last year exactly 500 ITU-T Recommendations had been sold to developing countries; this year, after allowing free access, they have downloaded some 300 000.

    Hat tip to Gary Price who posted the story on his Resource Shelf blog.

    Thursday 6 September 2007

    Google Reader now has search ..

    .. but not here :-(

    According to the Google Reader Blog the new search box is located directly above the reading panel to the right of the Google Reader logo. A pity I can't see it here in Firefox. According to the blog it lets you search your subscribed feeds. If you want to do a blog search outside of your feeds then get thee hence to Google Blogsearch.

    A quick check in Opera, my second browser of choice, revealed nothing. A totally blank page! I did, however, manage to spot the elusive search box in IE 7 and it seems to do what it claims.

    Wednesday 5 September 2007

    Facebook profiles to be Googled ...

    ... unless you say otherwise.

    If you have logged on to Facebook today you will have spotted the announcement that people can now search for your profile from Facebook's Welcome page and that "in a few weeks, it [your profile] may also be found through search engines like Google."

    The stuff that I have on my profile can be found on my web site and blog - in fact a lot more information can be found about me on both of those!- so I am not that worried. Those of you who are concerned about it may want to start removing any information that, in retrospect, you think was not such a good idea to divulge after all! The announcement has a link to the Search Privacy page where you can untick the public search engine box. Anyone who does discover your public search listing must register and log in to contact you via Facebook, and public search listings will only contain names and profile pictures. Hmm ... maybe it wasn't that sensible to upload that photo taken at the Online Information conference dinner last year.

    Sunday 26 August 2007

    Microsoft Tafiti

    Microsoft have released a beta search front-end to its Live Search. Called Tafiti, which means "do research" in Swahili, it is intended to help "people use the Web for research projects that span multiple search queries and sessions by helping visualize, store, and share research results". When you first log in to the site, you are greeted with a clean, Web 2.0-ish minimalist screen. A box tells you that you need to install something called Microsoft Silverlight. Once you have done that, however, the interface changes to what I can only describe as 'library retro'. A grubby, dog-eared catalogue card [oh dear!] with a search box materialises, and a group of icons representing web, books, news, images and feeds start whizzing around in the bottom left hand corner of the screen, but they do eventually settle down.

    You type your search terms on the card, which then goes off to the left hand side of the screen, and your results are listed in what looks suspiciously like a drawer from a card catalogue filing cabinet. The library theme continues with options to drag and drop items from your results lists to 'shelves' on the right hand side of the screen. These can be saved for future sessions. You can switch from the default web search to another type of resource by clicking on the icons in the bottom left hand corner. Images worked fine for me, but I found the layout of the feeds results confusing and loathed the attempt at mimicking a newspaper layout for the news items. I was expecting to see a pile of books for the book search but had no results for any of my searches. Tafiti is experimental so it is not surprising that there are some glitches.

    Default web results layout:



    There is an alternative 'tree view' for the web results, which is a complete contrast to the default interface. Several reviewers have commented on its similarity to Kartoo but at least that does not make me feel sea-sick. A revolving tree with text continually changing size and dropping in and out of focus is the last thing you want if you are feeling even slightly off-colour! There was an opaque area at the bottom of the screen with a line on it and some symbols that I could not identify. I have since discovered from Philipp Lenssen's Blogoscoped posting that it is a slider bar that is supposed to allow you to reduce the number of branches and leaves. Well, it did not work for me but perhaps that is because I am using Firefox rather than IE. Two arrow buttons toggle the rotation direction. Those did work but made me feel even more dizzy and confused.

    Tafiti tree view:



    Phil Bradley was not impressed, to put it mildly. I am in two minds about it. The idea behind Tafiti of bringing together information of different types is great. The implementation, and especially the library theme, irritated me and more importantly distracted me from the content. Ask does a far better job (see my blog posting at http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2007/06/20/ask-rolls-out-new-interface/). I was pleasantly surprised that the Silverlight plug-in worked in Firefox, but seriously annoyed that the right click menu options were disabled as was the back button, the F11 key and the scroll on my mouse.

    Overall, Tafiti is interesting and I shall be keeping an eye on it to see how it develops. When it comes to day-to-day searching, though, I much prefer the standard Live.com interface.

    AlacraSearch for industry and market sector searches

    Alacra has launched a new search tool for industry and market sector information called AlacraSearch. It uses the Google Custom Search Engines and has approximately 12,000 Alacra chosen sites in eight categories:
    • Business & Trade Publications
    • Law Firms
    • Commercial & Investment Banks
    • Consulting and Accounting Firms
    • Educational Institutions
    • Market Research Firms
    • Trade Associations
    • Venture Capital & Private Equity Firms
    The service is free and supported by advertising.

    On the main search screen you type in your key words and select a category. On the results page you can easily switch categories. For example, having run a search on 'beer UK market share' in the Business and Trade Publications category I could switch to Trade Associations or Market Research Firms. Depending on which category you choose to search, you can further refine your results by industry or geography. Having carried out my initial 'beer' search in Business & Trade, I can narrow down the publications further by selecting Food & Beverage.

    Alacra already has an industry research tool on Alacrawiki called Alacra Industry Spotlights that has a page for each industry describing the key resources for the sector. The Spotlights are ideal if you are new to a sector and need to get up to speed on the main publications. AlacraSearch complements Alacra Spotlights by enabling you to search these and other sources by keywords. I now regularly use both and find that they are an excellent way of quickly focusing on quality business sites.

    Highly recommended if you are looking for a business information search tool.


    Monday 30 July 2007

    Crossengine becomes Intelways

    Crossengine.com has now been renamed Intelways.com. It is a great way of running your search through many different types of search engines and has been very popular with participants on my search workshops. I do wish, though, they would stop fiddling with the layout and the name. It just confuses people. OK, Intelways is the company name but Crossengine is more indicative of what it does.

    Live Search Images adds face search

    First Exalead adds an option to limit your image search to faces, then Google, and now Live Search has joined the gang. In terms of ease of use, it is not as slick as Exalead's but not quite as clunky as Google's. You first of all carry out a search in Live Images and then add filter:face to your search search strategy or filter:portrait. If you want to look for black and white images you add filter:bw. At present you have to remember the commands but they say they are looking at how to make these features intuitively accessible through a drop-down menu or some other means.

    On my image test searches on Live.com I cannot honestly say it was better or worse than Exalead or Google. None of them are perfect. They do remove most of the non-people images but all three also lose relevant faces and 'portraits'.

    Friday 13 July 2007

    9 books that (probably) won't get sold

    It's Friday, so this is a bit of light relief. I picked this one up on Google Blogoscoped. I am not going to tell you what they are - you really need to go to the original posting to fully appreciate them. Personally, I would buy "Stuff the CIA doesn't want you to know" subtitled "and unfortunately didn't tell me either".

    Exalead to access scientific articles

    Exalead has announced on its blog that it has reached an agreement with the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information (INIST) that will allow Exalead to offer its public search engine users access to INIST’s database of 13 million English, French, Spanish and Italian-language scientific articles. According to the press release "Exa-searchers will soon be able to explore this rich resource using Exalead’s practical search refinement tools, like dynamically generated lists of related terms and concepts".

    As a regular user of scientific databases myself, anything that highlights good quality, reliable and consistent resources is great news. I am becoming increasingly tired of explaining to people why I have problems with Google Scholar. I will delay my final verdict on the Exalead-INIST offering, though, until I have seen it in action.

    Yahoo suggests

    Yahoo has launched Yahoo search suggestions. This feature is not entirely new as it has been available in the Firefox Yahoo! Toolbar for a while. Like the Google version it comes up with changing suggestions for search terms as you type. Unlike the Google version, it is only available on its .com interface and it does not give you an estimate of the number of results for each strategy. (See below for screen shots of the two services ). Neither is 'suggest' available on the vanilla search screens such as search.yahoo.com.

    It annoys me no end when search engines roll out and advertise features that are only available on their .com sites, especially when many of these engines automatically redirect you to your local country version. I hope that Yahoo enables this feature world-wide and soon. Meanwhile, I shall continue with my local UK version.

    Figure 1: Yahoo! Suggests for gordon brown




    Figure 2: Google Suggests for gordon brown


    Wednesday 27 June 2007

    Yahoo includes Flickr in image search

    Thomas Hawk has reported on his blog that Yahoo has integrated Flickr photos into its image search. It is an obvious move but has been a long time coming - Yahoo bought Flickr in March 2005.

    A quick check by searching on UKeiG, though, revealed that Yahoo.com image search includes Flickr but the UK and Ireland version does not.

    Monday 25 June 2007

    Chinese company information from BvD

    Bureau van Dijk Electronic Publishing (BvDEP) is to add Chinese company information to its range of products. QIN contains information on over 300,000 public and private companies in mainland China and provides three years' financial history. The information is provided by SinoRating, a division of sinosure, a credit insurer and expert on Chinese business. Additional information is from World'Vest Base, a provider of information on listed companies worldwide. As well as financial data QIN also offers textual information on companies' activities and will incorporate detailed ownership and corporate structure information as provided on BvDEP's other products.

    QIN will be available later this summer but free trials can be pre-ordered via local account managers or by contacting info@bvdep.com.

    Sunday 24 June 2007

    xRefer becomes Credo Reference

    Thanks to Peter Scott picking this up in his Library Blog.

    xRefer has just announced that it has changed its name to Credo Reference. The reason for the change? The press release says:
    “While the former name spoke to one of the many benefits of our functionality, cross-linking across content from hundreds of quality titles from dozens of the best reference publishers, commented John Dove, Credo Reference CEO, “it was far from memorable to those who might hear it for the first time. This made it hard to pass along via word-of-mouth. Our new name speaks to one of the main challenges for online reference publishing, namely how to stand out from the confusing jumble of information and misinformation that today’s online information seeker encounters.

    I agree that we will no longer have to explain to users what xRefer 'means' or how to pronounce it, but I am not sure that many will appreciate the roots of 'Credo' (Latin for 'I believe') . "Credo? Who's he - one of the hobbits?" Or imagine what a dissatisfied user might call it by changing the first vowel to one later in the alphabet!

    The new URL for the service is  http://www.credoreference.com/

    Wednesday 20 June 2007

    Ask rolls out new interface




    Ask has rolled out its new interface on both its .com and .co.uk sites. It is essentially Ask X (see my earlier posting) but Ask appear to have listened to comments on the Ask X minimalist home page. They have brought back the web, images, news and blogs tabs so you can quickly go those sections rather than having to a general search first. Video and shopping options can be added to the list or you can browse all of the categories. There is also a direct link to the Advanced Search options.

    Ask has gone for personalisation in a big way: you can choose a 'skin' from a selection of 11 (I have chosen Golden) and there is a My stuff link in the upper right hand corner. My stuff includes your recent searches (if you have chosen to record them), saved results, my folders and my tags. As you type in your search terms, Ask comes up with suggestions as you type. If you find this irritating you can easily disable it.

    The results page is very similar to Ask X. The left hand panel includes a search box together with suggestions to Narrow and Expand your search, and Related Names if you searched on a person. On the right hand side of the screen are sample results from other types of resources including video, news, images, blogs, dictionaries and encyclopaedias.



    The middle panel contains your search results. Hover over an entry in the list and an icon with green plus sign pops up. Click on this and you can save it to a folder of your choice and tag it in my "My stuff". Tags are separated by spaces and multi-term tags have to be enclosed in double quotes, for example "climate change". When you have added a page to "My stuff" the green cross change to a red tick, but the pages are not recognised if they appear in a subsequent search so you could end up saving duplicate pages.

    Overall, I like the new Ask especially the way it offers information from different types of resources on the results page. There are still some glitches that need attention: my search history does not appear to be working even though it is switched on, and it would be helpful if it recognised pages that you have already saved.

    Friday 1 June 2007

    Google image search looks for faces

    Hot on the heels of Exalead's new face recognition search option, Google has launched a similar feature. Unlike Exalead, which has a 'Face' option under 'Narrow your search', Google requires you to add &imgtype=face to the end of the URL of your results page. As Phil Bradley says in his blog "A simple button would suffice guys!". Phil also reports that, although clunky, Google's face search seems to return more and better results than Exalead's. My own experience is variable: sometimes Exalead is better, sometimes Google. Which just goes to prove that you really do need to know your way around more than one search engine.

    Tuesday 29 May 2007

    New Exalead Video Search (Beta)

    Exalead have launched a video search for the YouTube, Dailymotion, Metacafe, Kewego and IFILM web sites. There is a link to the new beta service on the Exalead home page.

    On the results page a pull-down box enables you to sort results by relevance, most recent, most rated, most viewed, or
    length. You can also use the “Narrow your search panel to refine your search by source (website) or video length. Below the “Narrow your search panel is a tag cloud showing the the tags and categories of the videos appearing in your results, allowing you to refine your search further. Each entry in the results list includes a thumbnail image of the video, a title, summary, author, duration, upload date, and a viewer score represented by stars.

    This video search option is different from the one that is offered to the right of the web search results page. The latter is the one to to go for if you want more serious, business items for example television news reports and interviews.

    Tuesday 22 May 2007

    Live videobroadcasting from INFORUM 2007, Prague

    For those of you unable to attend the Prague Inforum conference in person, live videobroadcasting of some of the sessions will be available at http://www.inforum.cz/en/videobroadcasting/.

    INFORUM 2007 keynote and guest speakers include Peter Jacso, Peter Godwin, Guus van den Brekel and Zinaida Manzuch.

    You can choose between the original commentary of the speaker and its simultaneous translation. The official languages of the conference are Czech and English.

    These sessions will be video broadcasted:

    Conference Opening
    New Technologies and Tools for Electronic Information Resources and Services
    European Digital Library and Similar Projects Worldwide
    Electronic Information -New Solutions for Traditional Approaches
    Web Search Update and World 2.0
    Managing Effective Access to E-resources
    Conference Closing

    The conference takes place on May 22nd - 24th.

    Saturday 5 May 2007

    MarketResearch.com acquires Profound

    MarketResearch.com has acquired the Thomson Business Intelligence (TBI) Market Research service, known as Profound. Thomson announced earlier this year that they wanted to sell Profound.

    According to the press release "the acquisition expands MarketResearch.com’s international reach with additional content and sales presence in Europe and North America. Profound provides a closed-platform, market research service that complements MarketResearch.com’s open-format, web-based service." It will be interesting to see what pricing model they adopt for it and how, if at all, they integrate Profound with their existing service. MarketResearch.com bought rival company MindBranch in 2005 but the two sites remain. I suspect that, given the different type of users the services have, Profound will be marketed as a separate product.

    Exalead UK and new search features

    Exalead now has a UK version of its search engine that includes an option to limit your search to UK pages only. Both Exalead.com and UK have added a Wikipedia search and options to limit your results to blogs or forums. Alternatively, you can choose to exclude those types of sites. The Wikipedia search includes a “Narrow your search" panel on the results page that lists 'tags' for categories, related terms, people, location and organizations.


    Exalead has also launched a new version of its image search with over one billion images indexed. The new 'Face' filter enables you to narrow your search results to images containing faces. It is not a hundred per cent accurate and sometimes excludes images that are of faces and includes some in which there are no faces at all, but it is close enough. Other options include size of image, wallpapers, image colour, layout and file type.

    Pipl - People Search (beta)

    Pipl claims to be the most comprehensive people search on the web. Simply type in the first and last names of the person you are looking for, geographic location if known, and Pipl goes off and searches "hidden web" resources as well as the usual Google search. I tried it on myself and it did a pretty good job. The Quick Facts presented at the top of the page were correct, and it pulled in information from blog searches, Google Groups, Linkedin, Flicker and Google Scholar. Pipl also searches electoral rolls, directories, collections of peer reviewed literature such as Scirus and Google Scholar, Hoovers and Zoominfo. A search on my husband, Chris Rhodes, was less successful and I failed to find him amongst the thousands of other Chris Rhodes out there. Google, however, came up with him in the number 1 and 2 positions in a standard web search.



    As with all of these types of search engine you still have to differentiate between different people with the same name: I do not work for the Honolulu Advertiser and neither am I the marketing director at Laura's Lean Beef Company! And the quality of the results is variable. Nevertheless, Pipl is worth adding to your bookmarks for people search.

    Technorati Tags: ,

    Tuesday 24 April 2007

    Log out of your Google account!

    Google offers so many services and personalisation that it is tempting to log in and not bother logging out. You first connect to Google via your Personalised Home Page, look at your RSS feeds in Google Reader, and then do some Blogger work. You know that you are going to be working on one of your Google Documents so no point in logging out. If, like me, you spend most of your time working at home that is no big deal. No-one else, apart from your SO or the sprogs, are going to mosey on in to your Google 'space'. (Actually - it might be a seriously big deal but we won't go into the ramifications of that).

    If you are at work, however, where everyone grabs a free terminal wherever and whenever they can, you could find yourself in deep doo-doo. Your arch rival, who is threatening to overtake you on the scrabble up the corporate greasy pole, fires up Google intending to read their own Google Mail but discovers that they can access yours instead - and everything else!. Google does not time you out - and neither does My Yahoo which has a similar set-up. As well as reading all that you have been up to over the last year or so, they could sabotage your account by enabling the search history and conducting "unsavoury" searches and .... well, it doesn't require much imagination to envisage what could happen.

    This can, though, work in reverse. Set up a blemish free Google account with search history enabled, log in, leave it and wait for people to pounce on your unoccupied PC for their lunch-time surfing. Amazing what you could discover. This occurred to me after Phil Bradley and I had given our 'De-mystifying Web 2.0' presentation at the LIS last week in Birmingham. I had logged on to my demo Google account but completely forgot to log out at the end. As I went up to the podium on a damage limitation exercise I saw one of the afternoon presenters Googling away. As soon as I was home I went in to my Google account to have a look at what he had been researching. I regret to say that it was all very boring – North Carolina State University :-(

    Better luck next time.

    Blog Bling

    Phil Bradley has already reported briefly on the double act that he and I performed at the Web 2.0 Forum at the Library and Information show in Birmingham last week. There are no Powerpoints because we made it up as we went along - OK, not strictly true. We discussed via email the areas of web 2.0 'stuff' we would each cover, and decided to adapt our presentations depending on what the other person had just mentioned. It worked! And it was great fun. Phil kicked off with his favourite Web 2.0 stuff (Pageflakes) and instead of going straight into social bookmarking I found myself talking about My Yahoo and Google's personalised home page (about which there is a warning post from me later). Towards the end, Phil waxed lyrical about all the widgets and gizmos that can add pizazz to your blog, calling them "bling for your blog". It is barely one week on from that presentation and I am already reading and hearing people call it 'Blog Bling'.

    So what is your favourite blog bling?

    Monday 16 April 2007

    Advanced Internet Search Strategies: searching beyond Google

    There are a couple of places still available on my Advanced Search Strategies course being held at Manchester Business School next week (April 25th). Further details and a booking from are available at http://www.mbs.ac.uk/programmes/courses-seminars/management-research.htm

    Saturday 7 April 2007

    ZoomInfo fails to address quality issues

    ZoomInfo has updated its business and people search engine. For those unfamiliar with the service, ZoomInfo searches and provides information on 35 million 'people' and 3.4 million companies. Unlike most conventional company and people directories, though, the information is gathered and compiled automatically by what it calls a semantic search engine. Content can be edited and corrected by the subject themselves, but you have to pay for at least a trial subscription in order to do it. ZoomInfo is free for basic information and advertiser supported. For full access you can upgrade to a ZoomExec account for USD 99 a month, and the full PowerSearch option costs from USD 3,950/year.

    I have been attempting to carry out a proper evaluation for some time on behalf of various clients, and the redesigned site encouraged me to pay for a week's trial at USD 19.99 for the ZoomExec service. I should make it clear right now, that I started this evaluation with a totally negative opinion of the service. My previous experiences of ZoomInfo in terms of quality have not been good and I regret to have to say that the upgrade has not changed my opinion.

    The home page features three tabs - company searches, people searches and job searches via content from Indeed. There is also a tag cloud representing popular keywords used in searches on ZoomInfo. Company search and people searches by name are ad-supported: searches by keywords, job titles and other criteria are part of the priced services. One always starts an evaluation such as this using standard test searches on something or someone you know. Inevitably, then, I first did a search on myself. It found 22 people, or rather profiles. These profiles are compiled from web pages found by ZoomInfo and grouped together. Some of the profiles refer to the same person (there were four for me when I looked) but it is amazing how wrong ZoomInfo can be and that it can miss so much relevant and correct information that is out on the web.

    None of my four profiles had my correct company name and the information in all cases was garbled. The most comprehensively supported profile, which was compiled from 36 web sites, has me working for TFPL. Yes, I am one of their associate trainers who they hire on a consultancy basis but I am not 'employed' by TFPL. One could argue that it is an easy enough mistake for a poor dumb computer to make, especially as I am mentioned several times on the TFPL web site. But ZoomInfo has gone further and given me a non-existent email address at TFPL plus a Glasgow telephone number. I live and work in Reading a long way from Glasgow, but even if I did work at TFPL their main office is in London. To be fair if you are prepared to drill down through the web site references you do eventually arrive at the correct information on my own web site, but then why bother with ZoomInfo? Any half decent searcher could get there far more quickly using standard search engines and find more up to date information


    If you have an account, you can set up your own public profile and consolidate existing profiles and correct them. Companies can do the same. That does not mean that the information will be any more accurate. ZoomInfo clearly states that it does not verify such information.

    For company profiles, you are supposed to be able to view a list of competitors. Not a single one of my competitors were listed. Instead I was presented with a list consisting mostly of search tools: Lycos, Infoseek, Northern Light, EEVL, News Now and so on.

    I tried searches on some of my colleagues and the results were even more difficult to fathom. The Advanced Search, where you can also include a company as well as a person's name, ignored the company name. (I may have been clicking the wrong buttons or this feature may only work for PowerSearch accounts). Since I and most of my associates are running small businesses - probably not ZoomInfo's forte - I persuaded some of my large, International corporate clients to try it out on people, companies and industries that they know. Their reactions ranged from laughter at the start, through disbelief at how wrong and out of date the data was, and finally to irritation and annoyance.

    I did look at some of the other services on offer, such as keyword searching for products and services and Job searches, but I still could not find any redeeming features that would persuade me to pay money for this service or to even use the free search. There are other sources and directories out there that are more reliable and up to date, and some of them free.

    Friday 6 April 2007

    Phil and Karen at the Library and Information Show

    Speakers and presenters - are you fed up with conference organisers hassling you for your PowerPoint slides weeks in advance? Feel threatened by final demands for the text of your presentation? Then try ConfTalk 2.0! All you need is your brain, your list of links - on a Web 2.0 service of course - and an Internet connection*. Phil Bradley and I will be demonstrating the ConfTalk 2.0 [pat. pending] technique at the Library 2.0 Forum at the NEC, Birmingham on April 18th :-)

    We are doing a double act on 'Web 2.0 for libraries - de-mystifying the technologies' and have agreed that anything we commit to .ppt or .doc will be old hat, defunct, or superceded by 5.0 as soon as we board the train for Birmingham. As the official conference blurb says "This session will take the form of a discussion and demonstration of a number of different Web 2.0 based products in order to give delegates a much clearer idea of exactly what Web 2.0 is, and how it can be used with a library/information centre environment."

    Further information and programme of the event.

    *No Internet connection provided by the organisers? No problem. Any self respecting ConfTalk 2.0 speaker will have a laptop armed with WiFi, LAN connectivity, landline dial up, 3G and GPRS as backup. (May not help, though, if the conference is held in an underground, secure bunker but, thankfully, few are.)

    Yahoo! Alpha spotted

    Amit Agarwal has reported on a new version of Yahoo! called Yahoo! Alpha at http://au.alpha.yahoo.com. It has a minimalist home page, which has become de rigueur for search engines these days, and a single search box. The results page displays the usual list of web pages and on the right hand side you can opt to view results from Flickr, Yahoo Answers, YouTube, Yahoo News, Wikipedia and Sponsored links.


    In the top right hand corner there is an option to Customise this page that enables you to remove one or more of the resources and to add your own.

    I was initially intrigued by this but found it rather slow to respond and not as slick or responsive as Askx.com, which is testing out a similar approach to searching. Missing from both Askx and Yahoo Alpha is an obvious Advanced Search link. Both are in Beta and worth watching to see how they develop.


    Sunday 1 April 2007

    The Viewing Facilities Association UK

    The UK Viewing Facilities Association (http://www.viewing.org.uk/) is a trade association representing companies which have viewing studios and services available for hire to other market researchers, (as opposed to studios which are tied to particular research companies). It sets high standards for membership such as requiring members to meet certain levels of customer satisfaction, to be members of the MRS and work to the MRS code of conduct. They must also have completed fire risk and health and safety assessments. The site contains a directory of members and is searchable by location.

    Friday 30 March 2007

    Live.com takes link commands offline

    Those of you who use the link commands in Live.com will have noticed that over the past week link: and linkdomain: have been returning blank results pages. This is not a temporary glitch but has been done on purpose by Live. According to their blog:
    " We have been seeing broad use of these features by legitimate users but unfortunately also what appears to be mass automated usage for data mining. So for now, we have made the tough call to block all queries with these operators. We are doing our best to get this back online as soon as possible in a manner that allows folks that use this functionality for real queries."

    The linkfromdomain: command, which lists all the pages that a web site links to, is still working.

    While Live makes up its mind about what to do with the commands try link and linkdomain in Yahoo. The results are not always as comprehensive as Live.com's but will probably suffice in most situations. The syntax for the Yahoo's link command is slightly different. To find pages that link to a specific page on a site it is:
    link:http://www.yoursite.com/pagename.html

    Note that you must include the 'http://'

    To find pages that link to any page on a site the syntax is similar to Live's:
    linkdomain:yoursite.com

    Google also has a link command but it displays a small fraction of the results.

    Thursday 29 March 2007

    The Association for Qualitative Research

    Alan Dickinson of Skill Zone pointed me in the direction of this site. I should declare an interest on behalf of Skill Zone in that they designed the site but what follows is my own independent assessment. If you don't want to read the full review my personal opinion is that this is a very good starting point for associations, contacts and practitioners in the field of qualitative and market research.

    Founded in the early 1980s, the Association for Qualitative Research has over a thousand members. The web site includes a directory of qualitative research practitioners and suppliers of services. The Directory is available as a handbook published as an A5 format of 500 pages and is free to anyone on request (subject to availability). The published version of the directory includes a selection of articles, reference documents, and the AQR membership list.

    There is also a section on useful contacts that lists professional associations, membership organisations and industry bodies focussing on particular aspects of research or services, both in the UK and overseas. The categories include market research, advertising organisations, marketing/direct mail and overseas associations. In addition, the site has a library of articles which are free to read, some short, some in-depth, and a glossary of terms used in market and qualitative research.

    Overall, a very good starting point for market and qualitative research in terms of understanding the industry, terminology, identifying relevant organisations, and tracking down practitioners in the field. Definitely recommended.

    Tuesday 27 March 2007

    Top 10 Search Tips from Switzerland

    Yes, it's yet another Top 10 Search Tip - this time from a group of researchers from International organisations based in Switzerland. The event was hosted by CERN in Geneva, well known for its particle accelerator but also the birth place of the World Wide Web. The group came up with the following Top 10.

    1. CrossEngine - http://www.crossengine.com/. This is fast becoming the most popular non-Google tool on my Advanced Search workshops. Dozens of different search tools are grouped under tabs by type, for example web, video, audio, images, news, blogs, reference. Type in your search terms just once and then click on each search engine in turn to run the search. It is more up to date than Trovando.it , which is a similar tool, and has a more extensive collection of resources than Turboscout. It has additional features such as file type search options for Google and Yahoo, and you can search social bookmarking and network tools such as Delicious, Furl, Squidoo, Facebook.

    2. Vivisimo - http://www.vivisimo.com/. Searches several different search engines at once, presents a de-duplicated list of results, and also organises them into folders based on their content. There is still a web search box in the upper right hand corner of the Vivisimo's home page but it tries to point you directly at Clusty, which it owns. Interestingly, the results and folders that you see when you run the same search in Vivisimo and Clusty are slightly different.

    3. Exalead - http://www.exalead.com/. A search engine developed by a French company. Some of the people working on it are ex-AltaVista, which explains their resurrection of the wild card and NEAR command. Useful for its advanced search features such as approximate and phonetic spelling. Several users have commented on its European bias and web coverage.

    4. Google Define. Unsure what a piece of jargon means or what an acronym stands for? Go to google and use the define: command. For example, define:ADSL will bring up a page of definitions from various resources on the Web. You can also search for definitions in languages opther than English (go to the bottom of the results page for the links).

    5. Phrase searching. We all know about placing phrases within double quote marks, but someone has spotted that in Google you only need the opening quotes to force a phrase search. As the person who nominated this one for the Top 10 said, it's pure laziness on our part but it works.

    6. Askx - http://www.askx.com/. This new beta version of Ask is proving to be very popular. The home page has a single search box but the results page includes news, images, blog postings and suggestions for alternative strategies alongside the web pages.

    7. Creative Commons and public domain images. If you need to quickly identify images that you can re-use and the terms and conditions of that re-use, search by Creative Commons licenses or for public domain images. Try http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/ where you can search by type of Creative Commons license, http://commons.wikimedia.org/ for Creative Commons and Public Domain, or Morguefile.com for Public Domain images.

    8. Thumbshots Ranking - http://ranking.thumbshots.com/ - for checking the overlap, or lack of it, of the major search engines for a search strategy.

    9. A9.com - http://www.a9.com. Enables you to display results from search tools of your choice side by side. Although the interfaces to many of the resources no longer work, it is still a popular tool with many people.

    10. Want to see if RSS is for you? Try the web based Google Reader at http://www.google.com/reader. Several people have commented that they have problems updating their feeds in Bloglines through their proxy server. Their experience is that Google's reader is better and more reliable in this respect.

    Sunday 25 March 2007

    Kidon Media-Link

    I was alerted to this listing by David Dunkley at the WTO. Kidon Media-Link lists 18,437 newspapers and other news sources from around the world. Newspaper, magazine, television, radio, and news agency sources are listed by country. You can also browse by language or search by media type, title and city. The results include a link to the source, a two letter code indicating the type of resource (news agency, radio, newspaper etc.), the frequency of publication, and the languages in which it is published or broadcast. A useful alternative to ABYZ News Links, which provides similar listings.


    Friday 23 March 2007

    Internet Librarian International 2007 Call for Speakers Closing Soon

    Posted on behalf of ILI.

    New Realities, Roles and Resources
    Internet Librarian International 2007
    8-9 October 2007 Copthorne Tara Hotel, London

    Call for Speakers
    Deadline: 30 March 2007
    http://www.internet-librarian.com/CallForSpeakers.shtml

    One week until deadline - submit your proposal now!

    Information Today invites proposals for presentations at Internet Librarian International 2007: New Realities, Roles and Resources, taking place at Copthorne Tara Hotel, London, UK on 8 - 9 October 2007.

    They are looking for a mix of papers for conference sessions, workshops and short tutorials with the emphasis on the practical rather than theoretical. They are seeking case studies and proposals about initiatives in your organisation, not product pitches or overviews.

    To be considered as a speaker, please submit your ideas at www.internet-librarian.com/CallForSpeakers.shtml

    Nine years after the first Internet Librarian International, it is clear that internet technologies have vastly altered our professional and personal lives. The amount and types of information available in digitised form has increased exponentially, presenting information professionals with challenges in finding, analysing, managing, customising and sharing information. The new realities of electronic research affect everything we do. New roles mean we may not call ourselves librarians and new resources change our approach to research.

    It's an exciting, exhilarating, sometimes exhausting world for internet librarians. What has worked in your work environments and what has not? Share your experiences and thoughts with your colleagues during Internet Librarian International this autumn.

    Possible topics (but don't let this limit your imagination):

    • Web search

    • Federated search

    • Digital libraries/collections

    • Social software and social networking

    • Blogs, wikis, podcasts

    • Libraries as publishers

    • Taxonomies, folksonomies

    • Evidence-based librarianship

    • Gaming in the library

    • Information policy

    • Web site usability

    • Needs assessment

    • Collaborative working

    • Text mining

    • Internet resources

    • Communicating value

    • Managing e-resources

    • Mobile technology

    • Library 2.0

    • Open access; open source

    • Distance learning, e-learning

    • Multimedia searching

    • Innovative projects

    • Incorporating new technologies Web design

    • Content management

    • Training and teaching


    The Advisory Committee will review all submissions and notification regarding acceptance will be made this summer. If your proposal is selected, the primary speaker will receive a free registration to the full conference, which includes lunches and a reception. The organisers are not responsible for speakers' travel and accommodation costs.

    Chairs
    Marydee Ojala, Editor, ONLINE, marydee@xmission.com
    David Raitt, Editor, The Electronic Library

    Monday 5 March 2007

    Top Search Tips from Aberystwyth

    Last week I was at the University of Aberystwyth running a workshop on advanced Internet search techniques and new technologies. This was a re-run of the session I did at Swansea at the beginning of the month and the Top 10 tips the Swansea participants suggested are in an earlier blog posting. This is the Top 10 from the Aberystwyth gang. There are some similarities between the two, notably serious interest in what Microsoft are doing with Live.com and in particular Academic Live, a rival to Google Scholar. There was no question about the number one in their list - Crossengine. There was unanimous agreement that this is an excellent tool for quickly running a simple search across many different types of search tools.

    1. CrossEngine - http://www.crossengine.com/. Dozens of different search tools are grouped under tabs by type, for example web, video, audio, images, news, blogs, reference. Type in your search terms just once and then click on each search engine in turn to run the search. It is similar to Trovando.it but more up to date, has additional features such as file type search options for Google and Yahoo, and search options for social bookmarking and network tools such as Delicious, Furl, Squidoo, Facebook.

    2. Link commands - link:, linkdomain:, linkfromdomain:
    Use the link: and linkdomain: commands in Live.com to find pages that link to a known page or site. Use them to find pages that are similar to your known page, or to see who is linking to your site.

    For example:

    link:www.site.co.uk/library/ will only find pages that link to the specified page on a site.

    linkdomain:site.co.uk will find pages that link to any page on the site.

    Live.com's linkfromdomain: will list all the external links from a web site. For example linkfromdomain:mysite.co.uk.

    Useful if you want a single list of sites on an evaluated portal or directory, or if you are spring-cleaning your web site and want to see what you have linked to.

    3. Allwhois - http://allwhois.com/. Use this to find out who owns the domain name of a web site - an essential part of assessing the quality of information.

    4. Wean yourself off Google. Look at alternative search tools and identify their strengths.

    5. Live.com and Academic LIve
    Live.com - http://www.live.com/. Formerly MSN search and totally revamped by Microsoft and a serious alternative to Google.
    Academic Live - http://academic.live.com/. Different coverage to Google Scholar, has a source list (Google Scholar does not) and format options for bibliographic management packages such as RefWorks and EndNote. No author search though.

    6. The Wayback Machine (Internet Archive) http://www.archive.org
    The Wayback machine periodical takes a snapshot of the web enabling you to see how a site has evolved over the years. Invaluable for tracking down "lost" pages, documents and even web sites.

    7. Google results number heads the fiction best seller list!
    The number of 'hits' that appears at the top of your Google results rarely reflects the real number of documents it has found. It tells you it has found 6,542 but only displays 103. Ignore it.

    8. Use the domain or site search for sites that have appalling navigation or dreadful site search engines, for example the European Parliament web site. One participant tried the technique on Hansard and said she had better and quicker results than using Hansard's own search. The site: command can also be used to limit your search to a type of site, for example site:gov.uk for just UK government web sites.

    9. Exalead.com http://www.exalead.com/ for its phonetic search, approximate spelling search and wild cards. Especially useful when searching on medical terminology that has alternative spellings or may have been mistyped.

    10. Change the order of your terms in your strategy.

    For example:

    chocolate production UK Switzerland Belgium

    production UK Belgium chocolate Switzerland

    give different results. The search engines rank those pages that contain your terms close to one another in the order specified near the top of the list. Change the order and you often see a significant difference in the pages at the top.

    Monday 19 February 2007

    Move from Blogger to WordPress

    I finally did it - over the weekend I moved my blog from Blogger! Although the old blog was hosted on my own web site, as is the new version, I disliked having to use the Blogger software on Google's own servers. For the majority of the time access was no problem but there have been days when availability has been zero and response times very slow. My own web hosting service is not perfect - none are - but it is more reliable and predictable than Blogger. But the deciding factor was that I wanted to play around with more gizmos, widgets and layouts. I was able to experiment with third party plugins using Blogger, in fact one had to in the early days because it lacked so many of the standard blog features such as tagging, but you have to mess around with the template code. If you want to switch to another layout/template, you lose most of your customisation.

    I contemplated Typepad and have even invested in an account but I am leaving that for experimental purposes. As I would still have to use the software and hosting on their system I would again be at the mercy of their 'down times', and there have been many of those judging from the number of 'no access' problems I see with Typepad based blogs in my RSS reader. It was Brian Kelly's new(ish) blog that encouraged me to look at WordPress. I was not too keen on hosting on WordPress.com so I decided to be brave and load the software onto my own server. Feedback from other users suggested that it would be relatively painless but I was prepared for problems right from the start. There weren't any.

    The sequence of events was as follows:

    1. Check that my hosting service has the required version of PHP and MySQL. It did.

    2. Activate and set up a MySQL database. That took about 30 seconds using my hosting service's control panel.

    3. Download the WordPress software and install on my web server. There are two sets of instructions on installation: a 5 minute quick start for experienced users and more detailed instructions if you are new to this. Being a complete novice I, of course, decided to go for the Quick Start :-) It worked!

    4. Decide on a layout and colour. I rather like Brian's three column layout so I opted for Andreas09.

    5. Play around with the sidebar content and layout, and install Sidebar widgets. Look at a few other plugins.


    That all took about 30 minutes and I was ready to start blogging in WordPress.

    Then I had to decide whether to import my Blogger content into WordPress or leave it archived in the old files. As an experiment I decided to try out the import option. The support documents and discussion forums suggested that there might be a few problems and that it might not work 100%. The only step that caused me a few difficulties was republishing my old blog onto Blogspot, a pre-requisite for the script to work. It took me a while to remember how to do it and then Blogger/Blogspot decided to go into slow motion right in the middle of the transfer. After that, the script did its job and everything, excluding the plug-in content, was transferred in about 10 minutes.

    There are only two problems with my transferred content. The first is that Blogger lets you associate a URL with the title of a posting: this is not carried over in any form and could annoy users if that is the only reference to the address of the product or service you are blogging. The second is that any links in the body of the content to previous postings in Blogger are retained. The latter is not surprising and I can live with that.

    I now have to embark on an advertising campaign to alert people to the new address, check links on my web site and in presentations. The old Blog will be left on my web site for a while and it will be interesting to see how long it takes for people to switch to the new one. It looks as though the winner for the prize for being the first to spot and link to it goes to Chris Armstrong and his info NeoGnostic blog. As I am in his home town of Aberystwyth next week, it looks as though I owe him a drink or two, or even three.