Accoona home page tabs are back!

Well, everyone's blog postings and emailed complaints to Accoona seem to have worked. Accoona has restored the web, news and business search options on its home page alongside the new 'All' option.

Yet more Google oddities

If Google is driving you mad with its erratic behaviour, take heart in that you are not the only one to suffer at the hands of this temperamental search engine. Greg Notess reports on yet more Google oddities in his blog (Super Clustering Google).

Greg ran a search on powells books with his display preferences set to 100 per page. Google only displayed the first four of about 962,000. He then changed the number to be displayed to ten, and Google gave ten results. When he switched back to display 100, the number went up to 18. He then clicked on the message at the bottom of the results screen: "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 18 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included." That gave an estimate of about 2,810,000 total hits and displayed a full 100 on his screen.

I tried the same search on Google UK and got a total number of hits of 2,290,000 but it would only display 319. Clicking on the display omitted entries option reduced the number of total hits to 1,340,000. I should point out that the total number of hits that Google says it has found is generally a work of fiction. I have never found it to be reliable unless you have refined your search extensively and are getting numbers in the region of 50 or less. Even then, results can disappear or reappear at random.

I repeated the search in Google Canada, Germany and France and got totally different but equally bizarre results. Needless to say the results totally changed when I repeated the experiment 24 hours later!

Accoona 'loses' news

Accoona is a search engine that I regularly include in my workshops and training sessions, not so much for the web search but for the news section and the SuperTarget options. Yesterday, I was horrified to discover that News is no longer there. Instead of Web, Business and News there is just a single search box. Going through my feeds this morning, I see that Phil Bradley has picked up on this as well but has explored a little further than I had. News is still there but you first have to do a search in the box on the home page. When the results page comes up, the three options reappear and you can then limit your search to web, business or news. Why they have decided to increase the number of clicks I need to make to find the information I want beats me. They won't gain any fans by doing it and will no doubt lose those who already use it for news. One look at the home page and they will assume, as I did, that the news service is no more.

Libraries@Cambridge 2006

The Powerpoint of my presentation, given at the Libraries@cambridge 2006 conference on December 13th, together with the list of resources and further reading is available at http://www.rba.co.uk/presentations/cam2006/

The topic was RSS, Blogs and Wikis: New Essential Tools for Communication and Collaboration.

Advanced Search Strategies - Top 10 Tips

Another advanced search strategies course successfully completed at Manchester Business School with the usual eclectic mix of participants, and a new top 10 tips and tricks at the end of the day. It is interesting that RSS feeds get a mention this time around, and it does seem that more people are starting to use them for news and alerts.

1. Trovando - http://www.trovando.it/. Enables you to type in your search strategy just once and run it across dozens of search tools one by one. Tools are grouped by type, for example web, blogs, audio/video.


2. Remember that each search engine is different. Each has unique search features, has different coverage and sorts yoru results in a different way.


3. Seek out evaluated subject listings and specialist tools for subjects or industries that are new to you. For example Intute (http://www.intute.ac.uk/), TechXtra (http://www.techxtra.ac.uk/), Alacrawiki (http://www.alacrawiki.com/).


4. AlltheWeb Livesearch - http://livesearch.alltheweb.com/. Starts displaying results as you type in your search so that you can quickly see when you start to go wrong. It also displays related and alternative search strategies that can help you if you are new to the subject area.


5. 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.


6. RSS feeds. More efficient than email for monitoring topics and managing search alerts. IE 7 and Outlook 2007 can both read RSS. If you would prefer to try a web based reader try Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com/), Newsgator (http://www.newsgator.com/) or Google Reader (http://www.google.com/reader)


7. Keep up to date with who is best at which type of search. For example image search, blogs and feeds. Obviously, this can quickly change so use RSS feeds to monitor announcements and blogs that assess and evaluate what the search engines are doing.


8. Make the most of the Advanced Search options to narrow down your search, for example filetype or format, site search (can be used to search individual sites or types of site such as academic or government sites).


9. Search Engine Showdown - http://www.searchengineshowdown.com/. Excellent site from Greg Notess with summaries of the major search engines, unique features and news on what they are up to.


10. You are not going mad! Pages do disappear without trace and Google does do strange things. Try another search engine or a totally different approach. Above all, trust in your abilities.

UC&R - New Ways to Communicate workshop

I am at this moment at the University College & Research Group's workshop on using RSS, blogs and wikis to communicate with your users, being held at Birmingham University in the UK. There are about 50 of us here and we are all having great fun playing with ePop. Poor 'Trevor' who is at the end of a video link is being bombarded with questions from us in the training suite. He can show us presentations, answer questions and take over our computers to help us find things (scary!). And he is on a completely different part of the campus - now we are sharing whiteboards. Brilliant session from Debbie Carter of the Univeristy of Birmingham.

The earlier part of the day was taken up with RSS, blogs and wikis. I kicked off with a general introduction to the subject and Alan Cooper from CILIP's web team talked about how Web 2.0 is being used at CILIP. Rupert Mann from Oxford University Press looked at the technology from the publisher's, and user's, point of view and had some pretty scathing things to say about other publishers's approach and attitude to RSS and blogs in particular. A memorable comment on one US university's attempt at RSS was "No fun at Harvard any more".

Jane Somerwell, University of Worcester, talked about blogging in her organisation and then we had the first of the practical sessions. I am pleased to report that we have significantly increased the membership of the blogosphere with at least a dozen having been set up in the last hour, and the number of RSSaholics in this room is beginning to reach alarming levels. "Stop reading your feeds and pay attention!!"

A fantastic day, great fun, and every one of us learned a lot.

Must stop... time to comment to some of the new blogs :-)

Online 2006 free search seminars

I am now back from a very busy week at the annual Online Information exhibition and conference in London. As well as chairing a conference session and being 'on duty' on the UKeiG stand, I gave two free exhibition seminars on search: 'Top tips and tricks for better web search' and 'What's new in search'. These are now available as Powerpoint files.

Please note that they are just Powerpoint slides and are not annotated. So unless you were present at the seminars, the significance of some of the screen shots may not be immediately obvious - in fact they may be downright obscure. Also, she compiled these using the latest Microsoft Office 2007 suite and in the conversion to the more commonly used versions of Office some of the slides may have lost something in the translation.