Thursday 17 December 2009

Your Google results are about to get weirder

Persuading Google to recreate the same list of results for a search is impossible. Google continually updates its database and index with new and updated pages. Even a few minutes between repeat searches can make a significant difference. Add into this mix the fact that your search will probably be diverted to a different server from the one that gave you your initial results (Google has thousands of servers) and that the second server may have been updated at a different time with different pages. Oh, and Google may have decided to play around with the ranking algorithms and display options on this particular server as an experiment. And are you sure you have entered your search terms in exactly the same order as before, because that can make a difference as well? And we haven't even started to consider the difference of searching in Google.co.uk vs. Google.com vs. Google.ca etc.

Now we have Google personalized search, and by 'we' I mean all of us by default.

Search personalization is nothing new. In 2005 Google announced a new feature that was enabled if you were logged in with your Google account: web history and personal search (see Official Google Blog: Search gets personal http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/06/search-gets-personal.html). If you were logged in to your Google account and had your web history enabled - a record of your searches and sites that you selected from your results - future search results would be adjusted, or personalized, accordingly. And then we had (have) Google Searchwiki (see Begone Searchwiki http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2008/12/11/begone-searchwiki/). Searchwiki - you have to opt-in for it - enables you to delete results from your search results, or move a result up or down in the list depending on how relevant you think it is. Your actions are saved and remembered when you next run the search.

The new Google personalized search is different. You do not have to be signed in to a Google account and by default it is switched on.  The claim is that Google is "helping people get better search results":

"For example, since I always search for [recipes] and often click on results from epicurious.com, Google might rank epicurious.com higher on the results page the next time I look for recipes. Other times, when I'm looking for news about Cornell University's sports teams, I search for [big red]. Because I frequently click on www.cornellbigred.com, Google might show me this result first, instead of the Big Red soda company or others."

The customization is based on 180 days of search activity linked to an anonymous cookie in your browser. See the "Official Google Blog: Personalized Search for everyone" http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/personalized-search-for-everyone.html for further details.

This might sound at first to be a useful additional feature, but think it through. Let us say that in the run-up to Christmas your boss has asked you to look up recipes for chocolate desserts, cakes or puddings for the office party. When your results list comes up you repeatedly click on links for recipes or videos of how to make that extra complicated chocolate soufflé. In your regular day job's research, though, you are researching the pharmacological properties of the various compounds to be found in cocoa. Your results are now starting to come up with some very odd results, but at least they will be on the same topic. For those of us who research a wide range of subjects Google's personalized search is going to lose the plot very quickly.

There is then the question of which computer are you using? Do you always use the same computer at work or at home (we have three here)?  What are you going to see when you go to an Internet cafe? And what results will Google present you with if you are a CILIP member and use the IT facilities in the members' information centre?

Whatever PC you use for your Google search, look in the top right hand corner of the results page. You should see an option for Web History:


Click on Web History and then Disable Customisations based on search activity:


When this first went live, I found that disabling the customisation was not saved from one session to the next. Today, this now seems to have been saved from my previous search session but if you want to ensure that customisation has been disabled I would recommend that you check the setting at the start of every day.

Friday 4 December 2009

Oxford Colleges Romp

Posted on behalf of CILIP in the Thames Valley (formerly BBOD):

OXFORD COLLEGES ROMP
Wednesday 16th December 2009

A visit to New College, Magdalen and St Hilda’s College Libraries. Seasonal refreshments included!

Meet at 1.55 pm outside New College in Holywell Street just past the Holywell Music Rooms on the opposite side of the road.

The tour is free but advance booking is required as places may be limited.  Bookings to: Norman Briggs nwbriggs@pcintell.co.uk

Monday 30 November 2009

Presentations: Online Information 2009

I shall be giving three presentations this year at the Online Information conference and exhibition at Olympia, London (http://www.online-information.co.uk/). One is on Twitter in the main conference and I am also giving two free talks in the exhibition area. Details are as follows:


The ever changing landscape of search: Google is not enough (Free seminar being given as part of the Online Information 2009 exhibition)
Online Information 2009Tuesday, 1st December 2009, 11.45-12.15Theatre C, Grand Hall, Olympia, London

Twitter for Business: an essential marketing and research tool (Online Information conference presentation )
Online Information 2009Tuesday, 1st December 2009, 16:00-17:30, Track 2Olympia Conference Centre, London

Business research: Web 2.0 is not an option but a necessity (Free seminar being given as part of the Online Information 2009 exhibition)
Online Information 2009 Wednesday, 2nd December 2009, 12.00-12.30London Room, Grand Hall, Olympia, London


All three presentations will be available on Slideshare http://www.slideshare.net/karenblakeman

I shall be on the UKeiG stand (number 734) for a while over the next three days, so come and say hello if you are wondering round the exhibition.

If you are attending either the exhibition or the conference and tweeting, the conference tag is #online09

Thursday 19 November 2009

Google experiments with Image Swirl

Having made Google Image Options (including colour) and Similar Images available as part of their standard image search, Google are now playing around with Image Swirl in Google Labs. According to Google it "builds on new computer vision research to cluster similar images into representative groups in a fun, exploratory interface". In practice it is a combination of similar images and the Wonderwheel.

One of my image test searches is Edvard Munch and Swirl came back with 12 thumbnails of stacked images (12 is the standard number of stacks)


Click on a group of stacked  images and another set of images "swirl" into view in the form of the wonderwheel:



And you can keep on clicking on groups/stacks of images but still keep the "history" of your selections.


I was pleasantly surprised by the clustering or stacking of the images. I thought that by the time I had reached 'level 3' of my browsing each stack would be just different versions of the same image or images with similar colour composition. My Edvard Munch level 3 selection, however, came up with a selection of landscapes with different colours. They did, though, seem to have similar 'patterns', for examples paths or what could be interpreted as paths as a major component of the image.

Phil Bradley has also reviewed Google Swirl and comments "Bing is going to have their work cut out to try and catch up." Far too polite, Phil. I'd say "Bing, eat your heart out!"

Google Swirl looks very promising and I shall be monitoring its progress with interest.

Wednesday 18 November 2009

BL launches business essentials wiki

The British Library's Business and IP Centre has launched a wiki: Business Essentials on the Web (http://bl-business-essentials.wikispaces.com).

The wiki aims to provide business information that is aimed at entrepreneurs and SMEs. Topics covered currently include business planning, grants and finance, marketing and PR as well as industry specific pages. One of the industries listed is "Giftware" and coincidentally I was asked about this during my recent business information workshop. "Our client thinks that there is a single database that will give them all the data they need on giftware" said one of the participants. The bad news is that there does not seem to be a single source: the good news is that this wiki does list associations and web sites of organisations that are involved in the sector. So this wiki has already proved its worth to me.

Anyone can join the wiki community, edit and add a listing; a brave move but I have not yet seen any "vandalism" or spam. If there have been any inappropriate entries then BIPC have been very quick off the mark in removing them.

An excellent starting point for relevant information on setting up and running a business, and highly recommended for SMEs and startups.

Friday 13 November 2009

Bing integrates Wolfram Alpha and out of beta in UK - allegedly

Hitting my RSS feeds this morning was the announcement from Bing that their UK version is out of beta. "So what,"  I thought. "Doesn't look any different to me this morning". But looking at the announcement in full I see that there is a plethora of new services that I can now enjoy. To start with:

"When you search for Football, what kind of answers do you expect to find. Well, I guess it depends on where you are doing the asking, if you are in the UK you probably don’t want to see NFL schedules. You probably mean what we in the US call soccer. Well today, millions of searchers in the UK can rest assured that Bing knows what they are talking about. We are excited to announce today that Bing in the UK is shedding its beta tag.  We want to congratulate our pals over in the UK on a huge milestone. You can now use Bing to make faster more informed choices on a daily basis.  Oh, and the next Manchester United game is on the 21st of November at 17:30 GMT (that’s 5:30 p.m. for us Yanks), in case you were wondering."

My first reaction was that I wanted to be sick: I found this so patronising. We in the UK should be so grateful that Bing has finally realised that we have a life separate from the US and that Bing has taken the trouble to find out what we mean by football. Sorry, but I am not at all interested in football so if this is all you are offering as UK customisation then I nominate you for the #epicfail awards.

But let's not be hasty. Let's look at what else they have to offer.

"The daily Bing Homepage image and hotspots are something that now will be localized in the UK, with unique imagery and hotspots."

At last!  The photos on the home page are of landmarks and locations in the UK and not of the Galapagos islands or Mongolia. This morning we had the Angel of the North and then the Avebury stones. The 'hotspots' option is now working and if you are interested you can find out more about the subject of the photo.


"Visual Search using visual images and metadata to make search more visual and more compelling."
Pathetic! For a start there is no visual search on the home page. You have to click on the More option, which takes you to a page where it is listed. They seem to have deleted US stuff and and given us UK politicians under famous people, and Premier League Football Players and Professional UK football clubs under Sports. That is it. Where are the rugby clubs and cricket?  Oh, and under 'More' we have 'Yoga poses'. Now I wonder why that is there? Could it be anything to do with the fact that there are only pictures of photogenic girlies in interesting poses that might possibly attract a lot of visitors to the site? Surely not. How about some gorgeous male hunks in interesting poses?!

"More Instant Answers. Get quick response answers and results to searches, such as how is Liverpool doing in the Premiership or which tourist attraction should I take my in-laws to at the weekend?"

Yet more football, but I thought I would try out their own search "How is Liverpool doing in the Premiership". Bing did not come up with any easy to find information on this (I was assuming that the searcher would want to know where Liverpool is in the League Table). Google, however, had the official site of the premier league at the top of the results, which has a link to the current league table positions of all of the clubs.

Bing results


Google results



"See who or what is being chatted about real-time with a global live Twitter feed with Bing Twitter search."
#epicfail yet again I'm afraid. You have to know the URL of the Bing Twitter search because it is not listed on the UK home page or under 'More'. Do not be too disappointed because it is a waste of server space, processing time and your time: see my blog posting Twitter search in Bing and Google

"Looking for the best deals?  - There is now an integrated shopping experience with Ciao UK. With Bing you can search the Internet to find the best prices, reviews and local availability."

Bing didn't do too badly on this one. We need a new frying pan and it came up with sensible results apart from the Keith Floyd biography "Out of the Frying Pan". The best link, though, was one of the adverts for John Lewis.


"With insights from our Multimap users, Bing Maps now offers new map styles, imagery and transit integration as well as draggable routes."

In general the maps are fine. The Bird's Eye imagery, which is equivalent to Google's Satellite view, is higher resolution than Google's and sometime more up to date. The 'find a business option' is as incomplete as Google's. If you want to locate pubs, restaurants, plumbers etc in an area then go direct to Yellow Pages or Thomson Local. The directions for walking from my house to Reading railway station were sensible but it failed when I asked for Manchester Piccadilly railway station to Manchester Business School  (Google Maps had no problems). In fact, Bing Maps could not find Manchester Business School in any shape or form. As for "draggable routes" - no sign of them here.

"Bing has been built for the UK to help consumers get to key local sites and services in fewer links by including popular links, search boxes and suggestions within best match."

If you are interested in football and shopping, then that might be true. It is certainly better than the US-centric stuff but overall still nowhere near as relevant as Google's results.

Let's move on to the announcement that Bing now incorporates results from Wolframalpha. This won't take very long because I could not get it to work. I even tried the examples they give with the UK and the US versions of Bing and Wolfram Alpha is nowhere to be seen in the results. Has anyone managed to get this to work as described or has the integration not actually happened yet?

Having spent most of the morning struggling with Bing's new features, and in some cases failing to find them at all, I was beginning to wonder if I had dreamt the dozens of announcements that littered my RSS feeds. I double checked and they are definitely there. Perhaps it's a tech issue? I'm running Windows 7 on my main machine but the results are the same on Windows XP, and it makes no difference whether I run Firefox or IE. So I can only draw the conclusion that yet again Microsoft Bing has made a complete [expletives deleted] mess of everything. We could do with another half decent alternative to Google but Bing is just not in the same league.

    Friday 6 November 2009

    Top 10 Business Search Tips - 3rd November 2009

    A group of business information researchers gathered at the London Chamber of Commerce in Queen Street, London for the TFPL workshop - facilitated by yours truly - on key web business resources. The participants were from a variety of types of organisations but they all had a mission to find out what business information was available for free or on a pay-as-you-go basis. We covered not only business information sites but also how to make better use of the advanced search features of the likes of  Google and Yahoo.

    At the end of the day, the group was asked to come with a list of Top 10 Tips.

    1. Biznar http://www.biznar.com/
    A service from Deep Web Technologies that searches business databases and resources in real time. A list can be found on the Advanced Search screen. The search is not as quick as Google because Biznar has to visit each site live for each search, whereas Google searches stored copies of web pages. By default results are sorted by 'rank' but this can be changed to date, title or author. On the left hand side of the screen the results are automatically organised into folders on topics, authors, publishers, publications and dates, and you can narrow down your search by clicking on these options.

    2. Alacrawiki Spotlights http://www.alacrawiki.com/index.php?title=Alacra_Industry_Spotlights
    The Alacra Spotlights section (at the top of the menu on the left hand side of the screen)  is a good starting point for evaluated sites and information on industry sectors. Note that although it is a wiki only Alacra can edit these pages.

    3. FITA http://www.fita.org/
    Another good starting point for business information resources. Click on the Really Useful Links in the menu on the left hand side of the screen. The section on Cultural Issues was specifically mentioned.

    4. Europages http://www.europages.com/
    B2B Directory covering 1.5 million pages from 35 countries. Browse by industry sector or search by keyword. You can further limit (refine) your search by countries, activity (manufacturer/producer, wholesaler, retailer) and workforce (banded number of employees).

    5. Wayback Machine - The Internet Archive http://www.archive.org/
    For pages, sites and documents that have disappeared. Ideal for tracking down lost documents and seeing how organisations presented themselves on the Web in the past.

    6. Blogpulse trends http://www.blogpulse.com/
    Useful blog search tool that has a trends option, which shows how often your search terms have been mentioned in blog postings over time. This is useful for monitor competitors or industry intelligence to see what are the hot topics and when, and also to monitor what is being said about a product or company. Click on the peaks in the graph to see the postings.

    7. Intute http://www.intute.ac.uk/
    An excellent starting point for anyone wanting to identify good starting points and quality resources on a wide range of subjects and industries.

    8. Repeat your search terms
    Fed up with the same old results popping up again and again? Just repeat one or more of your search terms one or more times to see different pages appearing in your results list.

    9. Google 'Show options'
    A discrete link near the top of Google search results, it is not immediately obvious what it does. Click on it and a range of additional search options appear in a bar on the left hand side. See my blog posting Google new search and display options for further details.

    10. D&B UK small business centre http://www.do-business.net/sbc
    Aimed at UK small businesses, this service provides affordable reports on the performance of companies. The competitor and supplier reports costs £7.50 and the customer and partner reports £15. Payment is by credit card. There are sample reports that show what information each report contains. You can monitor up to 50 businesses for free with the D&B tracker and be notified by email when there are significant changes. (You do have to pay for the full report, though). Personal note: I used this service a couple of years ago when refurbishing my house to check up on four double glazing companies on my short list. One of the four was immediately dropped when I saw the report. A few months later it was declared bankrupt.

    Friday 30 October 2009

    Top Tips from Advanced Internet Search Strategies

    Here are the Top Tips from the participants of yesterday's workshop on advanced search (29th October 2009):

    1. Creative Commons and public domain images

    When searching for images that you can re-use on your web site, in your report or newsletters you need to be sure of what you can and can't do with them. Rather than chasing after the "owner" of the image, the following tools only have creative commons or public domain images.

    Geograph http://www.geograph.org.uk/ "aims to collect geographically representative photographs and information for every square kilometre of Great Britain and Ireland".

    Flickr Creative Commons http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/. This page lists the different Creative Commons licenses and enables you to search for images with a particular license.

    Morguefile http://www.morguefile.com/ A relatively small collection of images but good quality, high resolution.

    Most images on US government web sites are public domain. A few are not but these are clearly labelled with copyright statements. All of NASA's images are also public domain.

    Wikimedia Commons http://commons.wikimedia.org/. Be careful with this source. There are disputes over the copyright of some images, notably photographs from the National Portrait Gallery. Before using any images from this site look at the whole of image's page to see if there could be problems. For example see Charles Abbot, 1st Baron Colchester by John Hoppner.

    2. People search tools, for example LinkedIn, 123People.com, Whoozy.com

    3. Google Customised Search Engine http://www.google.com/cse/.  Create your own Google search engine that searches only the sites that you specify. Great if you are always searching the same sites day after day, or want to provide your users with a search tool covering a specific topic

    4.  "Show options" near the top of Google search results. It is not immediately obvious what it does, but click on it and a range of additional search options appear in a bar on the left hand side. See my blog posting Google new search and display options for further details.

    5.Tripleme http://www.tripleme.com/ to display results from Google, Yahoo and Bing side by side. There is also a deduplicate button .

    6. Google Squared http://www.google.com/squared/ Described as "fascinating" by one of the participants. This attempts to put information from the pages in your results list into a table. It is by no means perfect but has improved greatly since its introduction. Everyone agreed that it is "one to watch". For some examples here are a few I prepared earlier: Volcanoes, Ducks and Royal Dutch Shell (to which I have added some competitors). I have left some of the wrong and questionable data in.

    7. Geograph http://www.geograh.org.uk/ This was mentioned in number 1 but was singled out as a quick and easy way of finding Creative Commons images of locations, buildings and landmarks in the UK.

    8. Blogpulse http://www.blogpulse.com/. Singled out because of the "Trend this" option which displays graphically how often your term or terms have occurred in blog postings over time.

    9. Wolframalpha http://www.wolframalpha.com/ Despite my own clearly stated reservations about this tool, it was nominated for mathematical calculations and chemical structures. At least it shows that the participants were of independent mind and not to be swayed by my prejudices!

    10. Exalead’s Chromatik, which is part of the Exalead Labs experimental area. This enables you to search image tags by keyword and then select one or more colours that you want as major components of the image. Although Exalead does now have a colour option in its main image search it is not as sophisticated as Chromatik.

    Monday 26 October 2009

    Workshop: Advanced Internet Search Strategies 29th October

    If you have booked a place on my advanced search workshop taking place this week in London on the 29th, you should by now have received confirmation, joining instructions etc. via post, fax, or email (or all three!).  If you have not yet received anything from me contact me straight away via email, phone or fax. Details are at http://www.rba.co.uk/about/contactkb.htm

    Microsoft Academic Search - don't get your hopes up

    Microsoft Academic Search has been made a public beta.  Before you get too excited this is not Academic Live resurrected. This is a project from Microsoft Research Asia and although the help screen says "Find top scientists, conferences, and journals in a specific field" it only seems to cover computing and the Internet.

    The visual explorer is interesting - you need to install sliverlight - and the Advanced Search is reasonable, but if like me you were expecting a worthy competitor to Google Scholar you will be disappointed. But if you are interested in conferences and papers on computing and Internet technologies then give it a go.

    Friday 23 October 2009

    Twitter search in Bing and Google

    Bing and Google have both announced that they have done a deal with Twitter that enables them to offer 'real time' Twitter searches. The Bing service is live now at http://www.bing.com/Twitter/. SearchEngineWatch has an overview of the service at Bing.com/Twitter: A Visual Tour. It looks impressive but as is so often the case with Bing the reality does not live up to expectations.

    I have just returned from a conference on chemical information held in Sitges - hashtag #icic09. This should be an easy one for Bing Twitter to handle I thought. Silly me. Up came "We did not find any Twitter results or links for icic09". I tried it with and without the hashtag - still nothing.  And yet both search.twitter.com and www.twazzup.com had no problem finding tweets from the conference.

    Bing Twitter results on #icic09


    Twazzup results on #icic09


    It also appears that you cannot search on a username. I then compared the results of searches on keywords and names that I knew had been tweeted at the conference: chemspider, chemspiderman, David Walsh, semantic mediawiki, markush. Nothing! It seems that the whole conference has been boycotted by Bing Twitter. I did begin to suspect that the service is not really up and running but searching on Nick Griffin came up with plenty of results and it found a tweet from one of my Twitter network about chickpea curry that had been posted a few minutes before.

    There is something seriously wrong with Bing Twitter. Until they fix it and can present credible results I recommend that you give it a miss.

    So what of Google's offering? It isn't live yet but there is useful discussion and comments on Google Social Search Is Coming & More On Google-Twitter. The main question for us as searchers is whether or not the Twitter search will be integrated into the standard web search or made available as a separate option. Tweets are already included in the web search as I discovered when I did a search on icic09 but they are spread out amongst the results. It would make sense to have a separate search tool such as Google's Blogsearch. Another option would be to incorporate it into the side bar under "Show options" (See Google new search and display options).

    Bing have yet again snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. As for Google Twitter, we shall just have to wait and see.

    Tuesday 6 October 2009

    Presentation: Internet Search - a challenging and ever changinglandscape

    CILIP in the Thames Valley, 6th October 2009, Great Expectations, Reading

    The presentation I gave to CILIP in the Thames Valley on 6th October is now available in a number of locations. At least one of these should be accessible through your firewall!

    PowerPoint presentation - RBA web site
    Slideshare

    Authorstream
    Slideboom

    Some of the slides have annotations from my blog and new comments so make sure you check out the notes to the slides. Many of the slides are screen shots so they won't make much sense without the notes or unless you were at the live presentation.

    Monday 5 October 2009

    Google new search and display options

    Some of you may have spotted that Google has introduced some excellent new search and display options. Many of you probably have not - the link to them is very discreet, almost as though Google does not want you to find out about them. Carry out a standard Google search and to the left just above your search results you will see a "Show options" link.



    Click on 'Show options' or the plus sign and additional search and sort options will appear to the left of your search results.



    At the top of the list you can choose to limit your search to videos, blogs, forums or reviews.

    Below that are options to restrict your search to "recent results", the past hour, past 24 hours, past week, past year or to your own specific date range. Not surprisingly the past hour, 24 hours and week pull up mostly blog postings and news articles. "Recent results" seems to pick results that go back about a couple of months.

    As soon as you select any of the time options apart from the specific date range, additional options to sort by relevance or by date appear but the date option only sorts with most recent first. For some inexplicable reason sorting by date disappears if you want to specify your own range of weeks, months, or years; results are automatically sorted by relevance.

    A word of warning about Google's date sorting: the "date" of many of the web pages bears no relationship whatsoever to the real date of publication or when the content was actually written. In these cases Google is using the date and time stamp assigned to the page by the hosting web server. Most web sites have been revamped and reloaded at least once in their lifetime and some pages are dynamically created at the time of search. The dates of blog postings and news articles are a little more reliable, although there too you can find anomalies.

    If you want to quickly identify articles that fall within a specific time period you may be better off selecting the Timeline but this seems to only include articles from Google Current News and Google Archive News. Also, the list of results below the Timeline graphic does not include every year. You have to click on the bar representing the required years and only then are all the articles displayed.


    Related searches is obvious: this comes up with alternative search strategies that you might want to try. For me they would be far more useful displayed at the top of the standard search results rather than being hidden under  "Show options".

    The Wonder wheel is difficult to describe in words as it is a clustering and visualisation tool combined. Click on a link on the first wheel and a second pops up with a different set of clustered links for you to follow. Try it and see if it works for you.


    "Images from the page" adds thumbnails of images found on the page next to the text entry in your results list.

    The "More text" option gives you a larger extract from each of the pages in the results list making it easier for you to decide which are most relevant for your needs.

    And if you are fed up with seeing shopping sites in your lists or perhaps want more, Google has thought of that as well. Simply click on "Fewer shopping sites" or "More shopping sites". This works very well and reminds me of Yahoo's Mindset experiment that allowed you to move a slider bar between research and shopping to change the emphasis of the results. Sadly, Yahoo never incorporated it into its standard search and abandoned the project a while ago.


    Overall, Google has come up with a winner here. I would not want to use every option for every search so having a bar from which you can easily select and combine them is a great idea. It is a pity that Google has not made the additional options more obvious.

    Friday 2 October 2009

    Internet Search: a challenging and ever changing landscape

    CILIP in the Thames Valley evening meeting

    Date & Time: Tuesday 6th October 2009,  1800 for 1830 hrs
    Location: Great Expectations, 33 London St, Reading

    Google threatens to go hyper with its “caffeine” search. Bing is taking over Yahoo. Image search options are expanding: creative commons, colour, similar images. More specialist search tools for the “hidden web” are emerging and Web 2.0 is now an essential part of the search mix. Karen Blakeman will look at the new services that are being pushed out by the major search engines and the alternatives.

    This is a free event followed by free refreshments and networking opportunities with colleagues.

    An invitation is extended to anyone with a professional interest in the topic

    Contact: Norman Briggs, nwbriggs@pcintell.co.uk to advise attendance for catering purposes.

    Saturday 19 September 2009

    Friday 18 September 2009

    CLSIG Web 2.0 slides and screenshots

    Web 2.0 - the truth behind the hype. Evening meeting held at Hamonds LLP, Devonshire Square, London, EC2M 4YH. Speakers: Phil Duffy, Karen Blakeman

    The slides and screenshots that I showed at yesterday's CLSIG evening meeting as part of the Web 2.0 debate are now available in various places:
    PowerPoint presentation on my own RBA web site
    As usual, they are mostly screenshots so won't make much sense unless you were there to hear the discussion.

    Thursday 17 September 2009

    Autumn Workshops - London

    My autumn workshop and seminar schedule is now available at http://www.rba.co.uk/training/.  I am running 6 workshops under my own "banner" in London at InTuition House, Borough High Street. (I had good feedback about the venue from those who attended sessions earlier this year).

    There are the three "usual suspects" which always prove popular:



    I am also running a workshop on Web 2.0 and Social Media in the Workplace on 4th November.

    There are two new half day courses that have been requested by several people. Introduction to Mashups is being held on the morning of Thursday, 5th November and in the afternoon on the same days is Getting Started on Twitter.

    Full details of the workshops and booking forms can be found via the RBA Training page.

    Wednesday 16 September 2009

    Searching for images by colour

    This is not a frequently asked question on my workshops but when it is raised by one of the participants it generates a great deal of interest amongst the rest. So far I have come across three that I would recommend trying.

    The first is Exalead's Chromatik, which is part of the Exalead Labs experimental area. This enables you to search a selection of Flickr images by colour and optionally by keyword. You first select one or more colours or hues from a palette which are added to a bar below the palette. You can adjust the proportions of  the colours in the photos by moving the separators between the colours in the bar. Luminosity can be toggled between bright and dark, and saturation between colourful and grey levels. The last option in the list is to search for specific images using keywords (I assume this searches the titles, tags and descriptions associated with the Flickr images). The implication is that once you have selected your colours you can then limit your search to particular objects. In practice, if you search for colour followed by keyword, Chromatik ignores your colour choices and searches only on your keywords. If, for example, you want to search for apples of a particular colour you must first search on apples and then pick your colours.

    It pays to keep the number of colour choices to two or three, even if you require very specific colours, as this will give you a wider range of images to choose from. When the thumbnails are displayed you can hover over the best match and select "show images with same colors". Click on an image and it is displayed full size, but in order to see further information about it you have to right click and select properties. This will give you a URL for the original image on Flickr but only for the image itself. It does not take you to the "full" Flickr page for the photo, which means that  you cannot check ownership and copyright.



    The second tool is Multicolr Search Lab from IdĂ©e Inc. This uses "10 million of the most “interesting” Creative Commons images on Flickr". As with Chromatik you select colours from a palette. You can select up to ten colours and click on the same colour several times if you wish to increase its prominence in the photo. Unfortunately there is no keyword search. On the plus side, if you find an image you like simply click on the image to go straight to its page on Flickr where you can double check the copyright situation.


    And of course there is Google's image search. Carry out a search on your keywords in Google images and above the results there is an option to select a colour. There are only twelve colours from which to choose and you can only select one but it works well enough. If you want to search only Creative Commons images then carry out the first stage of your search in the Advanced Image Search screen and select the appropriate option from the Usage Rights menu.


    Tuesday 15 September 2009

    Brighton & Hove bus times on iPhone

    Nice one Brighton & Hove, and I am not being sarcastic! According to the Local Government Chronicle Brighton & Hove City Council claims to have the first iPhone bus app. It has launched a free real time bus time information app created by one its residents, Rick Thompson, and which updates automatically to show live bus times across the area's network.


    My own local bus service, Reading Buses,  is just a couple of steps away. Most of our bus stops, even over "the river" in Caversham, have displays telling you when the next 2-3 buses are due to arrive so the data obviously exists. They just need to make that data available to someone like Rick.So how about it Reading Buses?

    Friday 11 September 2009

    Google compiles industry stats for the UK - sort of

    Google has launched a new page that pulls together industry stats for the UK. Google - Internet Stats, which is biased towards information on electronic and online services and products, gathers data from third party vendors many of which are priced. A list is available at the bottom of the Internet Stats page. You can, though, submit your own "killer fact".  All submissions are vetted by Google.

    There are five categories: Technology, Macro Economic Trends, Media Landscape, Media Consumption and  Consumer Trends. Each section has further sub-categories.


    This is not the answer to a market/industry researcher's prayer. The number of statistics is very limited and the search option only searches within the browsable statistics on the landing page. Do not expect to be able to search for and find data on, for example, UK chocolate consumption! If your query falls within one of the listed categories you may be in luck.

    Exactly where Google is going with this and why they have introduced it is not clear. This is a UK-only initiative at present and there is no link to it from either the .com or .co.uk main Google search pages. Neither is it listed in Google Labs. Even the official announcement on "Google Barometer: New! Internet Stats all in one place" gives very little further information.

    Getty Images wins £2,000 over unauthorised web use of photo

    If  nothing else, this is a good example of what can happen if you fail to check the rights associated with photographs and images found on the web, and then use them for your own commercial purposes. Some people refuse to accept that just because an image is on the web does not mean that you can do what you want with it. If you do not want to pay for an image, there are plenty of sources of public domain and Creative Commons images but even then there may be conditions and some restrictions on their use (see my posting Free-to-use images might not be).

    In this particular case, a removals firm used a Getty photograph on their web site without paying for it. Getty found out about it because it uses tracking technology to detect the unauthorised use of pictures.

    You have been warned!

    Tuesday 25 August 2009

    gov.uk security stupidity nothing new

    Those of you who have been following the comments to my earlier blog posting (Please Use Firefox 2 or IE 6) or my Twitter tweets might be interested in an item I wrote for my newsletter Tales from the Terminal Room, July 2002. Entitled "Inland Revenue's Cookies Fail Crunch Test" - sorry about the awful pun - it suggests that gov.uk seems to have learned little about security over the last 7 years:

    In the UK, it is that time of year when we suddenly realise that we have only a few weeks to complete our tax forms and deliver them to the Inland Revenue. I, says she rather smugly, have already done mine but not online as the UK government continually exhorts us to do. I did have a go last year but the Web site kept crashing and after four attempts I reverted to the good old-fashioned paper form. This year I did not even consider the online route, which is just as well because the service had to be temporarily withdrawn following a security breach.

    A problem with cookies allowed users of Inland Revenue's online self-assessment tax form to see other people's tax details. An official statement explained: "The way in which the 'session cookie' identifying the user was managed meant that it could, in certain rare circumstances, be presented to another user."

    It seems that Inland Revenue's site allocated the same cookie to more than one user because they were using IP addresses to identify users. Many Internet users, and especially those accessing the Internet from home, use ISPs with dynamic IP addressing: that is the ISP allocates a different IP address to a user each time they access the Net, which means that the same IP address may be assigned to several different users in quick succession.

    The Inland Revenue said that examination of activity logs suggested that the web site had compromised the privacy of 47 of the site's 28,679 users and there were 665 for whom the possibility could not be eliminated.

    The problem has now been fixed and the site is back up and running, but I for one am not reassured.

    For the Inland Revenue's side of the story see: http://www.inlandrevenue.gov.uk/news/sa_online.htm

    Inevitably, the URL in the final sentence no longer works but you can still view a copy at http://www.archive.org/.  Copy and paste the whole URL into the Waybackmachine Take Me Back box, and on the list of results click on August 2002.  Alternatively, http://web.archive.org/web/20020804140436/http://www.inlandrevenue.gov.uk/news/sa_online.htm should take you straight there.

    Please use Firefox 2 or IE 6

    This would normally fall into the "I don't belieeeeve it" category had I not already heard of the problems endured by UK central and local government departments in trying to move on from Internet Explorer 6.

    Out of curiosity I decided to see what pittance I might receive from the state when I retire so tried the advertised http://www.thepensionservice.gov.uk/. First of all I could not just use my existing username and password for the government gateway service to use the pension forecasting service. That's fair enough. I appreciate the additional security level but then I had to wait two weeks for an activation code. This morning it arrived, I "activated" my account and attempted to log in. In a flash, a "Technical Error" page popped up with error and error ID codes, and instructions to phone them for help.

    What followed has left me stunned.

    "Are you using Firefox or Internet Explorer?" the nice lady asked.

    "Firefox"

    "Which version?"

    "3.5.2" I replied

    "If you want to use Firefox, you'll have to go back to version 2"

    A few seconds of silence followed and then I asked if I could use IE 8. No, was the answer, it had to be IE6 or possibly IE7. Google Chrome? Not compatible. Opera? She wasn't sure but if it was the latest version then no. Safari? Er..probably not. She explained that they haven't security tested the latest versions of the browsers and Chrome is definitely out.

    It is pathetic, stupid and irresponsible. We are all exhorted to keep our browsers up to date as part of our online security measures but the UK government is encouraging us to do the opposite. We are encouraged to file our tax returns online and use the government web sites to obtain information about our entitlements, but to do so we have to use browsers from the stone age. It does not fill me with confidence. Quite the opposite, I am beginning to feel seriously paranoid regarding the security of gov.uk sites.

    So have I got my pension forecast? Once I had stopped haranguing the poor lady on the help desk I was transferred to another department, my personal details were taken, and I was told my forecast would be in the post in about 10 days. So much for fast, efficient e-government!

    I am still sitting here gobsmacked and wondering if I dreamed the whole thing. I think, after all, that this has to be filed as a Victor Meldrew moment.

    Tuesday 18 August 2009

    Directionlessgov: compare Directgov search with a Google custom search

    Checking through the last year of postings on my blog I regret to say that I somehow managed to forget to cover the excellent Directionlessgov. This is an "alternative" search option for the Direct.gov.uk web site and uses Google. It has has been set up by the group that is also behind They Work For You and The Government Says.
    "We got so fed up with the general uselessness of the multi-million pound shambles otherwise known as the Direct.gov.uk portal, that we decided to build something better in under an hour. Sadly, we ran catastrophically behind schedule, but we still finished before lunch."
    Type in your search and view the results from Google on the right hand side of the screen. For comparison, and to rub salt and a hefty dose of chilli pepper into the wound, results from Directgov are displayed on the left hand side.

    A search on my own council's (Reading) recycling policies came up with the following results:


    No contest: Directionlessgov wins outright!

    For another Google custom search engine covering local government, you might also like to try LGSearch, which I covered in March 2009.

    Searching for file types made easy

    One of the Top 10 Tips that participants of my advanced search workshops regularly come up with is using file format options to focus your search. If you are looking for an expert on a topic, a conference presentation or a quick overview of a topic then seek out PowerPoint files; government and industry reports are often stored as PDFs; and substantial collections of statistics may be left in Excel format. Both Google and Yahoo have options for file type searches on their advanced search screens, but if you want a quick and easy way of searching both of these search tools for the four main file types (Word, Excel, PDF, PowerPoint), then head for DocJax.

    Simply type your search terms into the box and DocJax will pull up a list of all four file formats in Yahoo and Google that contain your terms. You can then limit your search to just one file type by clicking on one of the four logos at the top of the list.


    I have only one minor quibble with DocJax, which is that it does not deduplicate the results. Other than that, it is an excellent tool for filetype searching. Many thanks to Peter Guillaume for alerting me to the service.

    If you prefer to search Yahoo and Google separately, then try Browsys Advanced Finder. Select Files form the menu at the top of the screen, enter your search terms and click on Yahoo or Google for your preferred file type. There is no need to re-enter your search terms for each search - just click your way through the list.

    I usually berate such services for not including Bing (formerly Microsoft Live Search) in their lists because Bing does sometimes come up with unique content. Although not included in Bing's advanced search options one used to be able to simply incorporate the filetype: command followed by the file extension in the search. On testing it today, though, I discovered that the filetype command no longer works in Bing. Like the link and linkdomain commands, it has been obliterated from their search system. Another example of Bing dumbing down their search. This does not bode well for Yahoo: as part of the recent Microsoft deal, Microsoft will power Yahoo search and as a result Yahoo will lose many of its current search features. I'm afraid that rather than stealing market share from Google, Bing's current approach to search will encourage users to stay with the big G.

    Google Caffeine

    A short post prompted by Phil Bradley's posting on the proposed new hyperactive Google, nicknamed Google Caffeine. See his article for further details and background information, and if you are interested in comparing the current Google with Google Caffeine try Caffeine Compare. I have been running my searches and test searches on both over the past few days and found:

    1. No difference at all for the majority of searches.

    2. Minor and insignificant differences for a handful of searches

    3. For some business information searches, worse and an increased number of irrelevant results with Google Caffeine.

    Not much else to say other than I am not very impressed at this stage.

    Who phoned?

    Having just come back from two weeks holiday, one of my first tasks was to check the phone messages on both my land line and my mobile.A handful of callers left messages, several did not and were number 'withheld' or 'International', and a few rang without leaving a message but are known contacts in the "phone book" so their names were recorded in the log. About half of those who did not leave a message were just logged as a number and some made repeated calls.There is no point in calling most of these numbers back because you usually end up at a switchboard. Even if you do get the individual who rang they have long forgotten the purpose of their call. But I am a curious person and I like to see if I can track down the identity of mystery callers.

    I first search the various contact lists on  my computer using Copernic Desktop Search. Sometimes that throws up a long forgotten contact. A straightforward Google search on the number may also work. If those fail I run the geographic numbers through a program on my desktop called CodeLook. This will tell me the area, exchange and telecoms operator but not the identity of the owner of the number. It can be enough, though, to jog my memory about a friend, relative, or customer. The program is part of a subscription service for  members of Magenta Systems's UK Tariff Comparison web site but there is also a free online version at http://www.telecom-tariffs.co.uk/codelook.htm.

    There is one type of caller that drives me mad: the call centre. They ring repeatedly, hardly ever leave a message, and often there is no-one at the other end when you do pick up. For these numbers Whocallsme is a godsend. This is a user supplied database of UK phone numbers of:

    "telemarketers, non-profit organizations, charities, political surveyors, SCAM artists, and other companies that don't leave messages, disconnect once you answer, ignore the Do-Not-Call List regulations, and simply interrupt your day."

    On this occasion, Whocallsme identified two of the repeat callers. The first was a British Gas call centre. They repeatedly phone me trying to persuade me to change my gas supply to them (I already have my electricity supplied by them). Asking them to cease and desist has no effect whatsoever so they will now be added to the automatic "Choose to refuse" list on my land line. The second was a mobile number and turned out to be Orange. I have a four month old dispute with their billing department so that number was definitely worth pursuing and following up.

    All this might seem like a lot of effort to track down who phoned you but it can be worth it if only to identify and filter out the junk callers.

    Tuesday 28 July 2009

    University Twitter

    Liz Azyan is well known for her excellent lists of local government and councils using social media but now she has turned her attention to the UK Universities. The List of UK University Twitter Accounts as of 28th July 2009 has  56 accounts so far and as well as the name of the university it includes the 'bios'. A surprising number don't have one! In addition there is a University Twitterleague according to number of followers as of 28th July 2009. If your institution is missing from the list either email Liz at research@lizazyan.com or leave your details in the comment box to the posting.


    You might also want to check out the  List of UK Universities Fan Pages on Facebook as of 28th July 2009 sorted by number of fans. The top two, and way above the rest, are The Open University (16,913) and Oxford University (14,867). Again email Liz or leave a comment if your university is missing from the list.

    Thursday 16 July 2009

    Free-to-use images might not be

    You may have already read that Google now includes a creative commons license filter option in its Advanced Image search screen. Creative Commons is a series of licenses that can be applied to a variety of works such as images, video and PowerPoint presentations and they specify what you can and cannot do with those works. Information on the licenses can be found on the Creative Commons web site at http://www.creativecommons.org/.

    Google does not use the CC terminology but has instead generated a pull down menu with the options: labelled for reuse, labelled for commercial reuse, labelled for reuse for modification,  and labelled for commercial reuse for modification.

    There is another option at the top of the list that is the default: not filtered by license. I had to think twice about this one because my first thoughts were that this was for public domain images. It is not. The "not filtered" option is all images. I ran the license options past a few people over the past week and they all immediately assumed that the default option is for images that you can use as you want.  A couple, though, then asked how "labelled for reuse" differed from this and then they became totally confused by the whole thing. To make it worse,  the licenses as listed by Google do not cover all the possible CC license conditions, for example attribution and share alike. So once you have done your search you still have to check the full license for the image that you wish to use. Furthermore, very few people are aware that you have to cite the license and any attribution as requested by the author.

    Google says in its help files:

    “By returning these search results, Google isn’t making any representation that the linked content is actually or lawfully offered under a Creative Commons license. It’s up to you to verify the terms under which the content is made available and to make your own assessment as to whether these terms are lawfully applied to the content.”

    The accuracy and validity of the Google implied license was raised recently in The Register: The tragedy of the Creative Commons . It comments:

    "Since there's no guarantee that the licence really allows you to use the photo as claimed, then the publisher (amateur or professional) must still perform the due diligence they had to anyway. So it's safer (and quicker) not to use it at all."

    I disagree with that: I recommend using it as a first level filter but then check with the original web site regarding the details of the license. At least you won't be spending hours wading through "all rights reserved" images.

    If you do use the license filter you will notice that many of the photos come from Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo!. Yahoo! has had a Creative Commons filter on its Image Advanced Search screen for a long time but only on the US site, not the UK. A far better way of searching CC Yahoo images is to go straight into Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/.  This gives you a description of the different licenses and you can search images assigned that license. This assumes, of course, that the person who has uploaded the image is the owner of that image and there are stories that this is not always so. But how paranoid do you have to be? With respect to Flickr my approach is to take the photographer's word for it unless there are serious inconsistencies in their photostream, for example the  meta data associated with the photos suggests that they were in Armenia, New Zealand and Peru on the same day!

    So where do you go for images that really are free to use.  There is a trick you can use in Google  to pull up just public domain images. Carry out your search on the standard Image search screen and when the results come up add

    &as_rights=cc_publicdomain

    to the end of the string in your br0wser address bar, and press enter. (Thanks to Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land for this tip) . The test searches I have tried so far come up with photos from NASA, US government sites and Wikimedia Commons.  NASA is a safe bet for public domain images as are US government web pages, although there are a few exceptions but these are clearly labelled with any copyright restrictions.. A recent spat between Wikimedia Commons and the UK's National Portrait Gallery  - National Portrait Gallery bitchslaps Wikipedia: Hands off our photos! - has thrown suspicion on the validity of CC and public domain licenses attached to its photos. This appears to have been an isolated incident, though, and the high resolution images have now been removed if you are accessing the site from the UK.

    Another source of public domain images is MorgueFile, which is a small database of high resolution photos but you may have to play around with your search terms before you find exactly what you want.

    If you are looking for photos of buildings or locations in the UK then head straight for Geograph.  This aims to collect geographically representative photographs and information for every square kilometre of Great Britain and Ireland. Anyone can upload photos provided that they adhere to the guidelines and attach a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

    Geograph has saved me so much time. A few months ago I was trying to find a photo of the Great Expectations pub in Reading, Berkshire. Google, Yahoo and Live (now Bing) insisted on giving me photos of people reading a copy of  Charles Dickins's Great Expectations  while sitting in a pub in Berkshire. The image I wanted was probably somewhere in the list but I was not prepared to trawl through hundreds of results to find it. I typed in Great Expectations Reading into Geograph and I was there in a couple of seconds. Brilliant!


    If you are interested in finding out more about finding and using images head for JISC Digital Media - Still Images.

    Wednesday 15 July 2009

    Twitter Account Suspended

    Just got back from #pcw09 conference - Building Perfect Council Websites - and went to check my Twitter home page only to be told that my account has been suspended!



    It could be the large number of tweets that I did at the conference but then I tweeted at a higher rate at the UKeiG conference without any problems. Or perhaps certain government departments and local councils did not like my comments? Me, paranoid?!

    I've posted a request to Twitter asking them why I have been suspended but it could take days or even weeks to sort out.  I already feel as though I am in solitary confinement and it means I have no contact with friends or colleagues via Twitter, which is a major communications channel for me. It looks as though it is back to email (karen.blakeman@rba.co.uk), Facebook (facebook.com/karenblakeman) and LinkedIn for communications.

    Telephone? What's that?

    Sunday 12 July 2009

    Ixquick becomes Startpage

    Ixquick has changed its name to Startpage. The name and URL may have changed but the technology and way you use it is the same. Ixquick/Startpage is what is sometimes called a meta search engine, which I find misleading. It doesn't search web page or document meta-data but takes your search and runs it across several tools at once and generates a single list of results. For the Web option it covers All the Web, Ask, Bing, Cuil, EntireWeb, Exalead, Gigablast, Lycos, Open Directory, Qkport, Wikipedia and Yahoo. All are automatically searched by Startpage but you can de-select individual services if you wish. Google is conspicuous by its absence.

    The great thing about tools of this kind is that it presents you with a single list gleaned from all of the search tools in the list. The disadvantage is that you cannot always use the advanced features of the individual services, although Startpage does have a go at addressing this. On the home page the Power Search option takes you to a page where there are boxes for "at least one of the words" (OR), "all the words", "exact phrase" and "without the words". There is also an expert search link that adds options for text in the title or URL, "at this domain name" (site search), pages "with links to this domain name", and type of domain name (but only .com, .edu, .gov, .net, .org). Note that there is no filetype search. You can bring this screen up by default when you connect to Startpage by going to My Settings and selecting Expert Search as Homepage search mode.


    The site search seems to work well but the link option returns just a fraction of the true results and only displays the top 10. To find pages that link to a domain or specific page, searching direct on Yahoo or Exalead gives far better results.

    As well as Web Startpage does video search, which is powered by Blinkx.com, and allows you to restrict your search to categories such as business, news, sport and entertainment. The Pictures (image) option is disappointing and there is no information on which search engines are used to compile the results. The phone number option varies depending on the country you select but again there does not appear to any information on which telephone directories are used. Oddly, there is a "reverse" option to find a name from a telephone number even if you select the UK as a country. When you click on search, though, Startpage says the combination is not valid. Hardly surprising since reverse lookup is not available for public use in the UK.

    I don't generally use tools such as Ixquick/Startpage or Dogpile. If I want to search quickly across multiple search engines I prefer to use something like Zuula or Browsys Advanced Finder and click through the tabs for each tool one by one. There are many people who do use them, though, and Ixquick has often been named as a favourite by people on my Advanced Search workshops. It is all down to what suits you and what works for your type of searches.  From the feedback that I have had over the years Startpage is definitely worth trying.

    Google lets you turn off SearchWiki.

    At long last Google now lets you turn off SearchWiki. If you don't know what that is see my posting Begone Searchwiki. You first of all need to be logged into the Google account on which you enabled SearchWiki. Then go to Preferences and tick the SearchWiki box that says "Hide the ability to share, promote, remove, comment, or add your own results." That's the good news.

    The bad news is that if you have promoted, demoted or deleted results from a search your changes will remain in place every time you log in to your Google account and run a search. You will have to re-enable SearchWiki, run a search and at the bottom of the results page click on "See all my SearchWiki notes". From there you can undo all of your changes. Then go back into Preferences and disable SearchWiki.

    For more details see Search engine land's Google SearchWiki: You Can ‘Check Out,’ But Your Results Don’t Leave

    Friday 10 July 2009

    Bing UK Round Table Meeting

    Hashtag: #meetbing

    Twelve bloggers, including myself and Phil Bradley, were invited to the round table meeting with Microsoft Bing in London on the evening of June 29th. The aim of the event, according to the email correspondence that preceded it, was to outline Microsoft's plans for Bing in the UK and to obtain feedback and opinions from us. It wasn't so much 'round table' as around several tables. Laptops, netbooks and iphones came out at the start of the meeting and we all jostled for positions near power sockets. We were actively encouraged to tweet and blog before, during and after the event to our respective communities in order to spread the word and to elicit feedback from colleagues and friends. And we were provided with free wi-fi. This was definitely a step in the right direction and very different from similar search engine events that I have attended where you do not get through the door unless you have signed a non-disclosure agreement in blood, and you end up in a room that turns out to be a Faraday cage. So full marks to Microsoft on this aspect of the meeting.

    The plan was to have a presentation followed by a break, then another session with, I think, questions and feedback throughout. It started off according to timetable with an outline of what Microsoft is doing with Bing. As many UK searchers had already noticed the US version of Bing is very different from the one we have in the UK, which is still in beta. Microsoft wanted to "get traction" in the US first before developing the other country versions further. For example, they hope to be rolling out spell checking of queries in a few weeks.

    They then produced some statistics, one of which stated that only 1 in 4 searches delivers a successful result. I questioned where this data had come from and was told it had been collected from MSN search and the toolbar in IE. This then raised the question of how valid their data really is. It was soon after this that the programme fell apart as the questions started to flow fast and furious.

    One question was about the size of the Bing index. The Microsoft people dod not seem too sure about this but came up with a figure of approximately 10 billion pages. This surprised me as there have been several occasions when Live, Bing's predecessor, has come up with unique pages that were not in either Google's or Yahoo's index. The index may be smaller, they said, but they are concentrating on quality - although no clues as to how they are doing that - and using humans and neural networks for "training" the ranking algorithms. They believe they will provide search results as relevant to Google in the UK in a few months. One piece of jargon that went completely over my head was tweeted by @leggetter: Microsoft are using NDCG to determine their search result relevance. If like me you haven't a clue what that is, take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NDCG. In practice, people don't care about the technology behind the results they just want relevant stuff on that first page and that is what is going to convince people that Bing is worth using.

    Microsoft confirmed that they are concentrating on the consumer market, which is obvious from the "verticals" that they are promoting in the US, for example suggesting hotels, comparing airline flight prices, comparing prices for various products. When I asked if they were going to provide a proper advanced search screen, they repeated their mantra of "concentrating on the consumer market" the implication being that "consumers" don't need advanced search. I beg to differ. Google and Yahoo's main audience is the consumer market. That is where they make  their money, but they still have a decent advanced search screen. Yes, you can do advanced search on Bing such as restricting to filetype but you have to know the commands. Most people acquire their searching preferences and skills at school, university, work or in the public library. If you get stuck you ask a colleague, the librarian or someone in the information centre what to do next. They may suggest a different search tool or show you how to use the advanced search screen boxes on Google or Yahoo. Filling in boxes is far easier for many people than having to remember and type in command line prefixes. And what people learn and find useful at school or in the workplace they continue to use when they search at home.

    It was around this point in the discussion that Phil Bradley said  "Nothing new here, nothing that excites me, nothing that is innovative". And I have to agree with him. UK Bing at present is simply a rebadged version of Live.com. The Microsoft people admitted that it is not as good as it  should be but affirmed their commitment to its development long term. We shall have to wait and see. The UK team obviously passionately believes in the product but Microsoft does not have a good track record when it comes to following through on new initiatives. Academic Live was far superior to Google Scholar and its Live Books had content and advanced search features that Google Books did not. Both services were axed in May 2008.

    And finally there is the issue of censorship. Phil Bradley has repeatedly raised this with Bing directly, via his blog and on Twitter but so far has had no satisfactory response, and the Bing people at the meeting did not seem to know what is going on. For background on this see Phil's blog postings The Microsoft Bing MeetingBing: excluding results from UK version? and More on Bing removing UK content.

    Overall, I am not sure what to make of the meeting. I suspect that Bing were expecting to be able do a straightforward sales pitch with a few easy questions from a tame audience, which we most definitely were not! I must congratulate the Bing people, though, for the cool way in which they handled the meeting. There was a lot of scribbling of notes on their side and promises to look into our concerns and questions. I had received several questions and comments from friends and colleagues but there was not enough time to raise them at the meeting itself.  Apart from the ridiculously short amount of time available to us  - we had two and a half hours  - there was a mixture of web developers, web 2.0 gurus and serious web searchers (Phil Bradley and myself) at the event and most of us had long lists of questions. I would definitely attend a second meeting but it would be more productive if they had separate events for developers and searchers.

    So would I recommend Bing as a search tool? Yes, but purely because I have always included Live.com in my list of essential search engines and Live now redirects to Bing. Bing is different from Live in the way it handles results but for some of my business searches it still sometimes pulls up unique results. (I will look at Bing search results in more detail in a separate posting). Is it a Google beater? I would love to see Bing give Google a run for its money but I can't see it happening at present.

    Other blog postings on the meeting include The Microsoft Bing Meeting, Phil Leggetter - Microsoft Bing.com round table thoughts, Bing Roundtable: Where was the innovation? : David Stuart, Web Reflection: UK Bing Roundtable - Just My Opinion. Apologies if I have missed anyone.