Internet News

Frankly, my dear

On the occasion of the American Film Institute's 100 Movie Quotes I am adding a category for Film. Yes - 100 quotes got a television special and many news articles. Here's the list from the AFI itself. Has a slideshow.

Summary article at the Boston Globe -- 'Frankly my dear...' named top movie quote

Health Info for Travellers

Health Information for International Travel - The "Yellow Book" - prepared by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"The Yellow Book is published every two years by CDC as a reference for those who advise international travelers of health risks. The Yellow Book is written primarily for health care providers, although others might find it useful."

You can build a custom report from the content that is online. See the very wide choice in topics at this page for Customize the Yellow Book.

MSN Syntax

ResourceShelf Plus has more examples of the improvements to syntax at MSN Search and the Advanced Search options -- MSN Search Adds New Advanced Search Syntax (Jun 22)

Search Labs and Blog

What's Cooking in Search Engine Labs by Chris Sherman, SearchDay (Jun 30) - Lists the various labs at the major search engines and blogs that discuss developments in search features. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves are here as well as CiteSeer for computer scientists in academia and, at the opposite end, Shopzilla's Robozilla for developments in shopping.

Answers.com for Mac

Answers.com Widget Available for OS X "Useful Desktop Utility Provides Instant Answers for Apple Users " - PRNewswire via Marketwatch (Jun 30)

Mac users (OS X) can get answers directly through the Answers.com widget.

"The Answers.com widget provides access to Answers.com content drawn from Wikipedia, American Heritage Dictionary, Roget's Thesaurus, Columbia University Press Encyclopedia as well as maps, company snapshots, stock prices, legal, medical, nutrition and more from other high-quality sources."

PCWorld Digital Duo

Something new to fit into one's information-gathering schedule - Digital Duo at PC World with Stephen Manes and Angela Gunn. It's a video magazine on topics somewhat related to digital or as they say at the site "independent, irreverent video review of all things digital". Last three shows have been about digital video, tips for travelling, and high-tech gear for the outdoors. Each "show" has segments - pick the ones you want. Video plays inside the browser.

A9 Improvements

A9.com Website – New Features and Changes A9 (June 23) - Even if you use A9 from time to time you may not have been aware of all the changes they made.

Most obvious improvement is the very handy set of check boxes at the top of the page to make it easier to design select columns on the fly and according to need. Options include your history and bookmarks. There is also drop down box to access other search options you might wish to add like PubMed or British Library or 200 others.

Not so noticeable is the new drag and drop for bookmarks from the search results column to the bookmarks column. Very useful.

Cool Maps

Tips & Tweaks: Maps for Fun and Business by Steve Bass, PCWorld (Jun 29) - lots on Google Maps and a few others, some with satellite views.

Google Answers

"An Insider's View of Google Answers" By David Sarokin, Freepint (Jun 30)

"In truth, Google Answers (GA) is one of Google's lesser-known, and lesser-used services. And that's a shame really, because it's one of the great tools available on the internet. " ... "Google Answers is more than a Q&A service, however. It's quite an intriguing web community in its own right."

Google Maps

Google points way to Maps' code "Move OK's sites' use of feature to create their own services" By Peter J. Howe, Boston Globe (June 30, 2005) -- Google is promoting services to help programmers create "Google mash-ups" that employ Google's mapping technology.

For example, "... a site called dynamite.co.uk used Google Maps to offer a service that can show the locations of all current traffic jams and accidents around London."

Google also offers 3D through the new Google Earth and a feature that "correlates map grids with city skylines and topographical contours."

Online Search Course

"Promoting Information and Search Skills" By Jean Bedord, Freepint (Jun 30) -- Jean Bedord teaches an online course on use of commercial databases (Dialog, Factiva, and Lexis-Nexis) through the graduate school of Library and Information Science at San Jose State University. She describes the methods (Blackboard for lecture notes and communication and WebEx for the realtime vendor presentations) and the challenges in teaching search techniques online. Comments on the aspects of search that students find most difficult - using alternate words, appreciating the variety and number of sources, logic errors vs syntax errors.

Yahoo MyWeb2.0

Yahoo introduces social search by Bambi Francisco, MarketWatch (Jun 29)

Goes some way to explain social search and Yahoo's new play in that field with MyWeb 2.0. Mainly it's tapping into social networks to get recommendations.

"For example, if someone is looking for a new computer, or plasma TV, or sporting gear, they'd typically ask a friend for a recommendation. But by aggregating those recommendations into a database, a person could search for recommendations without even speaking to a friend."

Others include Friendster (which coincidentally uses the Yahoo Search), Insider Pages (yellow pages written by friends).

Quotes David Ku, a scientist at Yahoo's search unit, as blogging, "Over time, we envision communities using My Web to build their own search engines to capture and make accessible the knowledge of their community - search engines populated with the collective experience of a group of medical researchers, a community of PHP experts, a bird watching club, or members of a structural engineering consulting firm."

For full blog entry see Search, with a little help from your friends Yahoo Search Blog (Jun 28)

I'm not so sure. Friendster didn't take off, why should Yahoo? People belong to many social networks for different purposes and interests. How are these reconciled? And what to do when you don't want your search results influenced by others?

Blinkx.tv adds podcasts and video blogs

blinkx Makes Podcasts and Video Blogs Fully Searchable for the First Time
Adding to Rich Array of News and Entertainment Sources, blinkx.tv Unveils Channels for Podcast and Video Blog Content PRNewswire via Marketwatch (Jun 29)

"In addition to offering a wealth of news and entertainment content, blinkx, the smartest thing on your computer and on the Web, has added Podcast and Video Blog channels to www.blinkx.tv, making these two sources fully searchable for the first time. Bringing thousands of hours of podcasting and video blogging to a single destination, www.blinkx.tv will find user-generated rich media by simultaneously spidering the Internet, and enabling users to upload their own content to the service."

Size of Web - 11.5 billion (est)

New Study Sizes Up the Web by Danny SUllivan, CLickz (Jun 29) - At long last, a new estimate on the size of the Web - 11.5 billion pages. Web Size Study was done by Antonio Gulli of Università di Pisa (Gulli also works with Ask Jeeves) and Alessio Signorinialso of the University of Iowa. Paper also estimates percent coverage by some search engines. Google at 69.6% surpasses Yahoo at 57.4%. But as Sullivan says "There are a ton of caveats." Estimate is for visible pages, likely includes duplicates, and uses the self-reported sizes of the search engines. But it's a figure.

Grokster Fallout

Canadians wary of Grokster case fallout by Jack Kapica, Globe and Mail (Jun 28)

Considers the fallout in Canada of the decision in the US Supreme Court that found that file-swapping companies Grokster and StreamCast Networks can be sued for use of their P2P products for downloading copyrighted music and movies.

Quotes Ottawa copyright lawyer Howard Knopf

"The irony is that the U.S. decision is based upon the assumption that the impugned software was being extensively used by end users for infringing purposes," he said Tuesday. "In Canada, that's not the case because our levy scheme, put in place at the Canadian Recording Industry Association's insistence, makes downloading from the Internet legal, as long as it's for private use and done on an audio recording medium."

For background on the Grokster decision in the US Supreme Court there is this news analysis in BusinessWeek Online -- <b>A Supreme Slap at Grokster & Co. by Lorraine Woellert (Jun 28) "The high court's ruling against the file-sharing services makes it clear that piracy won't be tolerated. But the battle is hardly over."

Topix.net comes to Canada

Just in Time for Canada Day, Topix.net Launches Canadian News Canadian Newswire (Jun 29)

Good news for Canadians - " Topix.net Expands News Aggregation Technology Outside the U.S. to Include Local News for 4,200 Canadian Cities and Towns"

"A new Canadian news page (http://topix.net/ca) uses Topix.net's NewsRank(TM) technology to create an up-to-the-minute roll-up of worldwide news aimed at Canadian users, highlighting the people, companies and events central to Canadian interests.

Local Canadian news channels on Topix.net (http://www.topix.net/ca/list)
will provide users with access to news and information about where they live, work or travel from over 500 Canadian sources, and over 10,000 sources overall. Topix.net's unique technology allows the site to target news headlines down to the postal code level for over 4,200 local Canadian communities."

Take it for a spin. The Canadian news is about Canada. There are more Canadian news sources on the front page than I have ever seen anywhere: Canada.com, Canadian Newswire, Brampton Guardian, CTV.ca, MyKawartha.com, even Pulse 24. But there are also articles from non-Canadian sources because they mention Canada in some way. Travel.independent.co.uk ran a story on top 10 drives with one of those drives in Alberta.

Note the topics listed for each result - you'll see Canadian place names.

You can search on postal code to get stories for that region. M6S3E5 pulls up Toronto just as it ought to.

Also search on city. Owen Sound had 27 results, and Medicine Hat (because of the flooding) 76.

There don't seem to be any topics that are specific to Canada. There is a list of topics in the sidebar where Canada is listed under World Main.

Advanced Search is the US form (zip code rather than postal code) but you can enter Canadian postal codes and city names. Can limit to source too if you know it. Globe and Mail is recognized as is The Toronto Star. You can take a shortcut by just entering -- ontario source:"toronto star"

ShopToIt.ca

Canadian shopping search engine readied for launch by Jack Kapica, Globe and Mail (Jun 28)

ShopToIt.ca a Calgary-based company, "aims to streamline the Canadian experience" with a product search engine that limits search results to Canadian merchants. Seventy retailers have joined including Indigo, Future Shop and Sears offering a selection of 400,000 products.

"The company is hoping for revenues of $15-million by its third year of operation, a forecast based on attracting 36 per cent of the Canadian shopping search engine traffic and 0.3 per cent of all Canadian search traffic."

It will launch on July 1. Beta version looks very functional with many product categories and parametric search within a category for products like digital cameras (price, model, megapixels, brand). Can put items on a comparison clipboard and then create a more detailed comparison. However, ShopToIt will have to get more specifications on the products to make this useful. And need more stores to make the price comparison shopping. Nonetheless, it is wonderful that there will soon be a substantial Canadian shopping search engine.

Yahoo - MyWeb 2.0

Yahoo! trials extended search by Renai LeMay, Silicon.com (Jun 29) -- MyWeb 1.0 from Yahoo was a personal search centre of bookmarks, shared folders and saved pages. MyWeb2.0 adds community in a significant way along with tagging and results ranking based on the community.

"Those with a Yahoo! login will be able to bookmark and cache copies of their favourite websites, label them in certain categories and attach comments in a structured way. Users will then be able to search among their contact's knowledge base with what Yahoo! is calling its MyRank search technology."

"Over time, we envision communities using My Web to build their own search engines to capture and make accessible the knowledge of their community," the blog waxed enthusiastically, giving the example of search engines populated by knowledge from groups of medical researchers or a bird-watching club. "

Chris Sherman gives a detailed description in Yahoo Integrates Personal & Social Search with MyWeb 2.0 [Searchday, June 29]

He makes clear that the community aspect is especially important - you need to have one to make this work. "MyWeb 2.0 is currently bi-directional, meaning you need to invite someone to share your web and they need to accept the invitation. Later, Yahoo plans to make MyWeb unidirectional, meaning you can share your personal web and allow anyone to see it."

How we scan

I Love to Search but Words Get in the Way By Gord Hotchkiss, Search Engine Guide - June 27, 2005 -- Describes what people do when scanning results:

"Based on these two studies, here's what seems to happen. The eye looks for a visual cue, generally the phrase we just searched for, in the title. Starting on the top of page on the left hand side, we start scanning down the page in an "F" pattern. While we're focused on the visual cue, our peripheral vision is open to the appearance of words that might match our semantic map. Even though we didn't search for any of these words explicitly, their appearance in the title and description has a strong implicit impact on which link we start reading. When there seems to be a match based on a quick scan including both where our eyes are fixated and the extra detail picked up by our peripheral vision, we switch to more traditional reading behavior, reading first the title and then the description from left to right. This lateral activity creates the horizontal arms of the "F"."

Google Earth

Google Earth has arrived. "Google Earth combines satellite imagery, maps and the power of Google Search to put the world’s geographic information at your fingertips." Google recommends Windows XP (won't run on Macs at all), broadband, 3D graphics card - the newer the computer the better. Application must be downloaded and installed.

Chris Sherman provides a full description in Google Earth Flies Free, SearchDay (Jun 28)

"Google Earth is a standalone application that's essentially an enhanced and upgraded version of its Keyhole 3D satellite imagery product. As Google has done with several of its past acquisitions, the company has also made the application free to all users, dropping its annual subscription fee for the basic version. Google Earth Plus with additional features will cost $20 per year."

PC Magazine has a short article by Richard Dragan along with picture in Google Earth 3.0 that has more description of what to expect in installing it and using it.

"Beyond marking individual points of interest, Google Earth gives you over 100 available geographical and business overlays to choose from, ranging from restaurants and other businesses to weather, crime statistics, and geology. In a big city like New York, these annotations can quickly become overcrowded, but the service had no trouble pointing out Italian restaurants in Manhattan, for example."

AOL Canada

AOL Canada revamping web portal by David Paddon, CP via The Star (Jun 28)

AOL Canada has revamped its site to give visitors free access to multimedia and other previously premium content. Notice says that this is for broadband users only.

"Now a standard web browser and a high-speed broadband connection from any service provider will be enough to take full advantage of the revamped aol.ca."

"Wallace [Craig Wallace, President of AOL Canada] said his goal is to move AOL Canada to the No. 2 spot in terms of Canadian visits by the end of this year and to No. 1 by the end of 2006, surpassing Sympatico.msn.ca, a joint venture of Bell Canada and Microsoft."

The new AOL Canada is quite promising. Video and audio are featured on the front page. News page does have Canadian news. Has a daily news poll on whether video lottery terminals should be banned.

However, the search engine is still the old one - doesn't have clustering from Vivisimo or extra aids.

OCLC and e-Serials

OCLC Begins Pilot Project on E-Serials Newbreaks (Jun 27) - OCLC is starting a pilot for searching e-serials held in libraries.

"The pilot will involve 20 libraries and four partners—TDNet, EBSCO, Serials Solutions, and Ex Libris. The pilot will make e-serials visible in WorldCat and will expose those records to searchers on the open Web through the Open WorldCat program. The pilot is expected to last 4 months."

US Libraries and the Net

Library Internet access better than ever Anick Jesdanun, AP via Globe and Mail (June 24)

The American Library Association has released a report on the use of the Internet in US public libraries.

+ "99.6 per cent of libraries are now connected to Internet, with all but a handful offering access to the public. That compares with 20.9 per cent in 1994 when the study was first conducted."
+ there are shortages - 70% can't cover peak periods, 16% are always short.
+ Only 42% of libraries have high speed access; 73% in urban, 34% in rural. 18% offer wireless.
+ "Only 28 per cent offer regularly scheduled classes — 16 per cent in rural areas."
+

Yahoo Web E-Mail Upgrade

Yahoo overhauls free Web e-mail service By Elinor Mills, CNET News.com (Jun 27)

"Yahoo is planning to overhaul its free Web-based e-mail service to make it work more like a desktop e-mail program ... " Beta will be limited to some test users. Expect launch "in coming months".

"Other features of the new service are the ability to quickly search e-mail headers, body text and attachments, view multiple e-mails at the same time in separate windows, and scroll through all message headers in a folder rather than one page at a time."

Yahoo Search Subscription

"Fee" Web Content Accessed by Yahoo! Search Subscriptions by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (Jun 27)

"With the beta launch of Yahoo! Search Subscriptions (http://search.yahoo.com/subscriptions) in the U.S. and the U.K., Yahoo! will enable users to simultaneously search multiple online subscription content sources and Web sources from a single search box. Initial content sources include ConsumerReports.org, IEEE, Forrester Research, the Wall Street Journal Online, the New England Journal of Medicine, TheStreet.com, and the Financial Times."

Right now no money is involved - there are no ads and Yahoo is not receiving money from the providers.

Google also has arrangements with many publishers for Google Print and for journal articles (usually for a fee from the provider). There is speculation that Google will be able to charge for content using the new Google Wallet.

Further comments by Barbara Quint about Yahoo Search Subscriptions in Varying Content Commitments from Vendors for Yahoo! Search Subscriptions

Quint interviewed the major vendors. "Conversations with the major database aggregators entering the program indicated very limited content, which is apparently designed not to experiment with reaching the world of Web users promised by Yahoo! but to avoid any threat to existing enterprise sales."

Article has details on the extent of the information being provided to Yahoo and concludes that it is very limited. But that may change.

Vertical Search

121 Communications develops vertical search engines and community portals. It has just added Vivisimo's clustering technology to display results at MacherSearch. This is a vertical search engine that crawls and indexes Jewish and Israeli web sites. See portal at http://www.machers.com/

121 Communications Selects Vivisimo Velocity to Launch MacherSearch, a Next-Generation Vertical Search Portal Business Wire via Marketwatch (Jun 27)

Google Video

Google rolls out viewer for video search site Reuters via Yahoo News (Jun 27) Google has true video now (not just the stills from television programs) but you'll need their Video player to view them. Requires Windows 2000 or higher and Firefox 1.0+ or IE 5+ browsers.

"Videos from CNET's (Nasdaq:CNET - news) GameSpot.com, Link TV, Greenpeace and UNICEF, among others, are also now available for viewing.

Google has still photos of video clips from more than 20 television stations available on its site. Partners on its project include ABC, NBC, CNN, The Weather Channel and Fox News."

Also read Google Adds Playback to Video Search by Chris Sherman, SearchDay (Jun 27)

"Google Video search looks at metadata encoded with the video. Chane said many videos were also submitted with transcripts and annotations that are time-coded, allowing playback to begin at the point where your search terms are located in clips. If your search terms appear in multiple locations, results will display thumbnail stills and snippets from those locations, as well."

More Q&A With Google Video Manager in SEW blog on June 27 - additional information from conversation Danny Sullivan had with Peter Chane, senior product manager for Google Video.

Deepy search engine

New search engine called Deepy has been reviewed by Pandia Search.

"It's built by Tajseed Solutions; a part of the Dar Al Riyadh Holding Group, which is in the market for the last 27 years and heads its operations in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia."

Does Web and Images. Has a good basic set of search options. Uses the Gigablast database. Has some neat features like search history. But display is only 5 hits per page with no option to change that. Pandia noted that it makes extensive use of javascript. Results show inside the Deepy frame. This is beta - javascript can break. Navigating back to the search results page or forward to certain results stalled badly on Firefox.

See review at Testing Deepy, A New Search Engine. (June 26)

"Deepy presents a javascript based interface that makes use of the whole browser window and more. It automatically adds new toolbars and menus to the browser interface."

Pennies for Content

Google Payment System Deals with Micropayments, says Lee Traffick (June 25) - maybe Google's payment system will get into micropayments where you pay pennies for content.

Doctors, Blogs, Search, and Google

Doctors are Blogging on Medical Searching by Rita Vine, Sitelines (June 22) - Mentions two weblogs done by doctors and picks up on some of their postings concerning search. (The California Medicine Man and Kevin MD Blog. Google, it appears is not only used by patients - doctors like it too. Rita warns about the incompleteness of the PubMed content in Google and posted comments to one of the blogs. The thread there is interesting too, especially for its link to UBC Google Scholar Blog by another medical librarian.

Technorati Boost

Technorati has a new look. It's more colourful and features most popular news, books, and movies on the front page. The most important change may be that it will pick up photos from Flickr and links from Furl and Del.Icio.Us. Search Options include search in text, link search, and tags. For example, search for the tag sla2005. There are 68 results, many from the SLA PAM Division blog, Science Library Pad, and Litinforum.

Technorati may be personalized too by setting up a Watchlist on urls and search terms and receiving results through RSS. Members can also add information to their profile to be displayed as part of general search results.

See Technorati Gets a New Look ResearchBuzz (June 22)

Answers uses Shopping.com

Answers.com Launches E-Commerce Elements Press Release (June 24) - Answers.com, the search engine that specializes in online reference, has added Shopping.com's catalog of products to its answer machine.

"Whether site visitors are seeking information on clothing, electronics, jewelry, tools, books, or items in many other consumer product categories, the new arrangement enables them to identify, research, compare, and purchase products as part of their quest for answers. To see this in action, visit www.answers.com and type in iPod, chocolate, or bracelet. "

Sometimes the results from Shopping.com show at the top of the page as with ipod, or in the side panel - barbeque

Ask a Librarian

OCLC Launches ‘Ask A Librarian’ Pilot in Open Worldcat EContent (June 24)

"OCLC has implemented a pilot project within the Open WorldCat program designed to allow Web searchers to submit questions to librarians through online reference services of OCLC member libraries. The pilot builds on the Open WorldCat program, which is designed to make records of library-owned materials in WorldCat more visible and accessible to Web users through Internet search sites."

This is old news, or a new study that identifies the same ignorance of paid search results. Icrossing, who sponsored it, provides search engine marketing services.

AOL and Google in the UK

AOL and Google reposition to rival portals By Dominic Dudley, NMA.co.uk (June 24) The United Kingdom seems well served by the big search engines.

AOL will be opening its free portal later in 2005 in the UK.

"The new AOL UK portal will build on the audience it hopes to gain from next month's Live 8 concerts, for which it has the exclusive global online streaming rights."

Google also put up a test version of its personal portal for the UK market.

Louis Monier at Google

Louis Monier On Why He's Going To Google by John Battelle (June 24) - Louis Monier was one of great search minds at Altavista when it was the best. After four years at eBay, he is moving again, this time to Google. In explaining the move he said, "So rather than chewing on variations of e-commerce for the next few years, I'm very tempted to play with radically new stuff: satellites images, machine translation, ways to extract knowledge from giant bodies of data ... who knows what else? " This might give us some hints about what Google will be doing.

Moratorium requested for Google Print

A New Page in Google's Books Fight
"The newly revealed contract with the University of Michigan is stoking publishers' fears about plans to digitize library collections ", Burt Helm, Business Week Online (June 22)

Article is meatier than most concerning Google's agreements with the libraries about digitizing the books and the publishers' concerns.

Copyright is the issue, even for material that is out of print. One presumes it will be ok to digitize material in the public domain.

"Several lawyers say digitizing the material in the first place, regardless of intent, is the problem. "There's nothing that gives Google the right to make this copy" says Laura Gasaway, an intellectual-property expert and law professor at the University of North Carolina.

While libraries are sometimes allowed to make digital copies when a copyrighted book is out of print, they aren't allowed to distribute those books digitally. As a public company, Google would have trouble justifying why it should hold onto a digital copy for itself, says Gasaway. "

For Digi-Bugs

Triscape FxFoto is another tool for digital camera users for " importing, organizing, fixing, annotating, e-mailing and printing all of your digital photos" - for free. The deluxe versions (at $29.99 or $39.99) have more creativity features and media support. Web site has a very nice tour showing the features and how to use this software to touch up photos and organize them.

Looks very enticing.

FxFoto 3.0.054 was reviewed in the Internet Scout Report (June 24)

Internet Scout Announcement

Internet Scout Project Says Goodbye to NSDL Scout Reports (June 24) Internet Scout Project announced that the June 24, 2005 of the NSDL Scout Reports for the Life Sciences and Physical Sciences will be the last. People are directed to AMSER.org for Applied Mathematics and Science Education Repository.

"We are very excited about our newest NSF National Science Digital Library-funded effort, the Applied Mathematics and Science Education Repository (AMSER), a new four-year project that will link community and technical colleges to online applied math and science resources via a Web portal and complementary services. Our goal is to make AMSER-- http://amser.org/ -- the same kind of high-quality source of information about online resources that the NSDL Scout Reports have been."

MSN Search supports intitle:

In MSN Search Gets Neural Net/RankNet Technology & (Potentially) Awesome New Search Commands, Danny Sullivan describes new search operator now available at MSN mainly for field searching.

+ inanchor: to look for words in the text of a link. Can be handy to find more relevant pages. Google has used those words for ranking results. But Sullivan couldn't make it work at MSN and neither can I.

+ intitle: finally a title search. But MSN didn't add the option to its Search Builder. How's a new person to know? Seems to have full function - will look for word or phrase in the title as in intitle:websearchguide or intitle:"resource shelf". Can OR terms also -- intitle:("resource body" OR "resource shelf").

+ inurl: look for parts of a url. For example -- intitle:msn site:searchenginewatch.com inurl:blog

+ filetype: to limit search to particular document types -- filetype:pdf site:gov.on.ca tourism. Recognizes pdf, doc, ppt, xls but not xml, rss, swf.

+ contains: a method for finding pages that link to a particular file type, most useful for finding audio and video content. For example, intitle:iraq contains:ram audio - will find pages with audio excerpts or feeds. But where's the list of recognized file types? Course, the MSN example is to search for pages that link to a wma file - Windows Media Audio.

Operators are described on this MSN Sympatico Search Help page.

Thomson Local for the UK

Planning a trip to the UK? Thomsonlocal.com might be handy. It's a local search engine for the UK: has leisure, travel, motoring, shopping.

Reviewed at NetImperative - New look for ThomsonLocal.com (June 17)

New Ranking at MSN?

MSN Search and Learning to Rank by Greg Linden, Geeking with Greg (June 21) - translates into layman's language a paper written by Microsoft's Chris Burges (and others) about using neural networks in relevance ranking - as it seems Microsoft intends to do.

Also see Danny Sullivan's comments in MSN Search Gets Neural Net/RankNet Technology & (Potentially) Awesome New Search Commands. MSN Search may have adopted new ranking algorithms to improve its search but on the search that Sullivan ran Google, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves were just as good.

Sherman Groks

Visualizing Yahoo Search Results By Chris Sherman, SearchDay (June 22) - reviews the I Grok search tool that presents Yahoo search results graphically. Sherman likes it.

"This presentation is appealing if you like visually organized results, but there are a couple of other neat features offered by I Grok that are worth exploring even if you're not a fan of categorized results."

Thorough review - worth considering if you have never tried Grokker or tried it and didn't like it.

New AOL Era

AOL takes bold step: Content's now free By Paul Davidson, USA TODAY (June 22)

"The walls guarding America Online's proprietary content quietly started to crumble this week as the company placed most of its news, sports, chats and other features on the open Internet."

AOL has begun its move to a free and open public portal along the lines of Yahoo and Google. It is inviting Web users to test the service at AOL Beta Central, a page that has links to the testing area and news and updates on progress. Test ues is at is AOL.com Beta. At present service includes search, communications, blogs, and Find-it services. To get to the start page you have to accept a license agreement for software downloads of AOL-Beta products - in case you want to test those as well.

The start page itself is very attractive and nicely organized - much better than the Netscape portal. There are tabs, a large search box, local information for your US zip code, a Find-it centre, audio and video - of course.

There will be a My AOL - "My AOL will automatically scan the Web for new articles and information on the subjects that matter most to you. You can sign up for "feeds" that deliver information on just about anything. So check in again in a few weeks to test and explore My AOL."

Very promising. It could be strong competitor to Yahoo and especially MSN. Success may depend on how well AOL deploys personalization.

Yahoo and the Extreme Searcher

Yahoo to the Max BY Chris Sherman, SearchDay (June 21) - reviews new book by Ran Hock, Yahoo to the Max - An Extreme Searcher Guide.

"Yahoo to the Max continues in the tradition of taking a careful, thoughtful look at the huge amount of content and the multitude of services and tools available at Yahoo."

New Health Searchers

Attack of the Health Portals by Brian Livingston, Datamation (June 21) - reviews three new portal sites for health saying that these "Three sites typify the new wave of health portals that are changing the way people get information about diseases, medications and treatments"

+ PatientInform.org - "joint effort of the American Cancer Society, the American Diabetes Association, and the American Heart Association." But PatientInform.org is not the starting point really. It, at present, connects only to these three health centres for research. How to Use Patient Inform

+ MammaHealth.com - claims to be "hand-picking the most relevant medical sources for credible health information and crawling deep into the content these sites provide". Really - Mamma the meta-searcher? Mainly, MammaHealth seems to be organizing the results to show a definition, about the disease, into faqs, causes, symptoms, treatment. Nicely done.

+ Answers.com - "credible job on medical topics, providing a series of articles from established reference sources." True - although there will be ads too.

Accoona Thumbs Down

Accoona is the China-backed search engine that Bill Clinton helped to launch in December 2004 (Bill Clinton helps launch search engine, MSNBC Dec 7, 2004). Accoona partners with China Daily in China (Chinadaily.com.cn) through a 20-year exclusive agreement to provide information about Chinese companies to foreign companies. However, this is a US Internet company based in New Jersey.

Accoona took its name from Disney -- "Accoona takes its name from the Swahili phrase, "accoona matata," for "no worries," popularized by Disney's film, "The Lion King.""

Its repeated claim to fame in its press releases is its artificial intelligence technology. It says it goes beyond keyword matching to look for related terms as well.

"The Search Engine with Artificial Intelligence better understands the users question through the utilization of an algorithm that restates the question and alters the verbiage based on sophisticated word permutations." (Press release)

But where does Accoona apply this AI? There are three search tabs: Web. Business, and News. It's not the Web - those results look like a Yahoo search. So must be Business and News where the results look very loose, possibly because Accoona is expanding the terms.

The Business portion is a database of some 32 million companies worldwide with contact information. It opened with 5 million of Chinese companies, reportedly the largest collection of Chinese busineses anywhere. In May 2005 it announced the addition of 14 million US companies from Dun and Bradstreet.

A search on a company name can bring up hundreds of results. Find the right one and there will be a Quick Profile - small popup with address, telephone number, business sales, and possibly a contact person. However, there are no controls for the search - not country, not industry, not even company name. Look for Zenon and you're just as likely to find Zenon as a pastry chef. Zenon Environmental will not find the world famous Canadian company for water treatment systems, but two small unrelated offices in the United States and a raft of others with either Zenon or Environmental. Furthermore, go to DNB itself and find 10 results in the US including the Zenon Environmental office in California. Results are incomplete at Accoona (don't count on all DNB being there), and there is no evident intelligence to the search facility.

The "super target your search" feature is available for the Business and News search sections. Accoona describes this as a "new interactive search experience". It seems to turn an OR search (or the Accoona's AI search) into an AND. Intranet enterprise taxonomies has 75,395 hits in News - an awfully high number that must mean Accoona looked for ANY of these words and maybe a few others of its choosing. Clicking on the term taxonomies (or any of the others) brings it down to 4. Within that set you might see a change of ranking depending on which term you click on.

Web Search supports " " for words together and - to exclude. Help page offers information on title, boolean, and site - all of which do work. Accoona doesn't say that its web search is powered by Yahoo, but the first 10 results are exactly the same for intranet enterprise taxonomies at Accoona as at Yahoo. Some differences turn up after that in part because Accoona has only about a tenth of Yahoo's total (Yahoo has 33,000, and Accoona has 3,610).

In addition, I have never seen an engine so confusing in its presentation of sponsored results. Does the SPONSOR RESULTS label in the upper right and lower right mean the whole page is sponsored, just the first and last results, what? Turns out just the results with the bullet; numbered ones are organic results.

Accoona attracted some seasoned executives in the United States. The chariman, Eckhard Pfeiffer, was a chief executive of Compaq Corp., and CEO, Stuart Kauder used to be a business development director at online advertising company DoubleClick Inc.

Accoona does some big news splashes to promote its name such as Accoona Women’s World Chess Championship in March, and "The Accoona 'Artificial Intelligence' ToolBar vs. the World Chess Champion Rustam Kasimdzhanov" in June (Accoona press release). The later was the occasion for promoting the Accoona AI ToolBar which includes a chess game.

The toolbar is Accoona's entry to desktop search along with the business, web, and news. The China Daily Press article, 'Man vs machine' chess match unveils Accoona AI toolbar suggests that these are two tools but it's clear from the website it is a single tool. There is no technical information at the site other than that Windows and IE 5.5+ are required.

People running web forums have not been happy with Accoona. There are quite a few complaints that Accoona has been spamming their sites. In Accoona - Worthless bunch of pants several forum managers reported on problems dealing with Accoona's "viral marketing" practices.

You may see examples of the kind of postings being referred to in the forums. It will likely start out with "Accoona provides a great interactive search experience to its users. The user is more involved in determining his/her search results by being able to highlight and emphasize selected keywords. " (SearchGuild)

Frankly, I don't see anything to like about this search engine. Six months have passed since the launch and still the Business Search is impoverished - incomplete, loose, no controls. A person would be better off going to DNB directly or Hoovers or any number of other business directories - even the yellow pages. The News Search delivers mainly press releases which can be found elsewhere. And the Web search is elsewhere - there is no reason to use this at all let alone instead of MSN Search, Yahoo, Google, Ask Jeeves, Exalead, Clusty - nearly any popular engine you would like to name. This company is running on hype. For more of it, go to what looks like the Accoona pre-launch site . It has more information about the company, the executive, and many of the hyperbolic press releases.

Blogs and blogs of Spam

I ran a search at Technorati to check what people were saying in their blogs about the search engine Accoona.

What I found was spam and more spam in the 525 posts. The first few entries mentioned Accoona's new toolbar and sponsorship of chess, but mainly there was an endless number of entries that had phrases like "Accoona will help you find", "Accoona is the powerful new", and the like.

Every blog I checked was a page of chopped up advertisements - like this one from Cat Health and done with Blogger.

18. Cat health urinary Live wedding-plan-videos.com Celebrex, Didrex, Acyclovir, Valtrex, Zyrtec, health, pills Cat health urinary on wedding-plan-videos.com Editor picks on cat health urinary: By: , . Best: Looking for cat ? Accoona will help you ...

Many were created through WordPress, all the same blue banner, all with repetitive entries, all spam. From the E-Commerce Business Advice Blog:

My First Online Business, Travel Plan Online.Com Self SEO, Germany - Jun 16, 2005 (Free Advertising,learning experiences) Ok, well this one is interesting because I've had mixed results from many attempts at growing my business.

Others have noticed this too. Priya Shah at eBrand360 asked Will Spam-Blogging Be The Death Of Blogs? (Mar 25)

"What are spam blogs? They are fake blogs that are created by robots in order to foster link farms, attempted search engine optimization, or drive traffic through to advertising or affiliate sites."

David Sifry at Technorati estimated that "that about 20% of the aggregate pings Technorati receives are from spam blogs. Most of this fake blog spam comes from hosted services or from specific IP addresses."

They claimed to be catching 90% of the spam blogs, but this isn't the case with the search on Accoona where spam blogs seem to make up 90% of the results.

This is a serious problem for Technorati and for web search engines.

Google Wallet as a force

Is Google becoming the Microsoft of the Internet? by Mathew Ingram, Globe and Mail (June 22) The likeness of Google to Microsoft in Ingram's words is "because it [Google or Microsoft] can move entire markets simply by expressing an interest in entering a particular field".

In this case the field is online payment where PayPal has 72 million users and $ 18 billion in payments. PayPal makes up 20% of eBay's revenue, and eBay was hoping to push that up to 50%.

"Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy noted in a research report that while PayPal is the market leader, Google was also a distant second when it entered the keyword-search advertising market -- next to Overture, which was later acquired by Yahoo -- and it is now No. 1 in that industry. And while Google's service may not go head-to-head with PayPal, Mark Mahaney of Citigroup Smith Barney said "the incremental risk" caused by Google Wallet is "that it might limit PayPal's growth as an on-line payment solution" outside of eBay. And that in turn would add fuel to concerns about the company's future growth rate."

Internet Life

Pew Internet and American Life Project has new reports on online activities and pursuits.

Use of Webcams - who would have guessed?

"One out of six American adult internet users (16%) have gone online to view another person or a place via a web cam. That translates into roughly 21 million people who have viewed material on web cams. And on any given day, about two million internet users are checking out remote places or people by using webcams."

Online sports fantasy leagues

"Eight percent of adult American internet users say they participate in sports fantasy leagues online. That represents roughly 11 million people. And on a typical day, about 2 million internet users are going online to oversee and check on their fantasy teams."

Do-it-yourself information online

"Some 55% of adult internet users have looked for "how-to," "do-it-yourself" or repair information online and roughly 1 in 20 internet users - about 7 million people -- search for help on a typical day. The prevalence of this activity is yet another example of the many ways online Americans use the internet to gather practical information for their everyday lives."

Groxis goes deep

Groxis Opens Deep Web to Business, Schools By Susan Kuchinskas, InternetNews.com (June 20)

"Groxis, a provider of search clustering and visualization technology, launched the Grokker Research Pilot designed to act as the interface between "deep Web" content, the kinds of information not indexed by regular Web crawlers. "

Also see pdf brochure about the Grokker Research Pilot.

Feed and Blog Discovery

How Search Engines Index RSS & Why It Doesn't Necessarily Matter by Danny Sullivan, SEW Blog (June 21)

Sullivan makes very clear that feeds and blogs are not the same thing and won't necessarily mean the same search tools.

People want to discover feeds in order to tap into the updates. There are feed search engines, but none, judging from his descriptions of Technorati, Bloglines, Feedster, and Yahoo's feed search, are especially strong. Of these, Bloglines and Yahoo go beyond just indexing the posts. The Web search engines by indexing the xml pages might become the means for feed discovery. (Though I hope they distinguish the feed page from the source.)

Finding blog-based news is another matter. News search engines tend not to pick up blogs. (Though Sullivan doesn't mention Findory, RocketNew, or Topix.net, all of which do get news from blogs.) Even so there are many weblogs that are not necessarily news. People are looking for ways to find topical blogs. Sullivan asks, "But where are the blog search services you'd have expected the major search engines to have rolled out by now?" Google, Yahoo, and Ask Jeeves have made vague promises but no action.

What's the user to do? Until the specialty tools are refined, we can concentrate on searching for content and using terms to pick out weblogs and identify sites with feeds.

Louvre Website Reno

The Louvre's New Masterpiece by Chris Sherman, SearchDay (June 21) - Chris says that the revamped website for Musée du Louvre is "nothing short of stunning in both design and scope".

For the virtual visitor there are thematic trails, a few virtual tours (Quicktime 5), and a resource centre (especially the Kaleidoscope for viewing visual themes) to use for learning and enjoyment. Otherwise, the website will mainly help people plan their real-world trip to the museum. Have to wonder how well this site would serve as an online guide to people equipped with mobile devices with large viewing windows could use this site as their guide - especially for the interactive floor plans!

BlinkxTV and Forbes

blinkx to Offer Search and Indexing Service for Forbes.com Video Content "Web Users Can Now Search for Forbes.com Video Content on blinkx.tv ", PRNewswire via Marketwatch [subscription] (June 20)

Blinkx has added videos with business news to blinkx.tv.

"blinkx is the only search engine that is optimized for rich media. blinkx uses voice recognition software to transcribe the content of audio and video segments, so that users can search by words or phrases to find the exact broadcast material they're looking for."

Press release also describes the Context Clustering Technology (CCT) technology blinkx uses to get past straight keyword matches.

Add Services to Mobile Use

Search vs Services, by Carlo Longino, The Feature (Jun 17)

"Google has announced a new search product for mobile-tailored content. While mobile search is getting better, services from search engine providers could be more compelling."

Compares Google and Yahoo but says search is not enough.

"While search may be the jumping off point, it's going to be key to quickly roll in all the other services users want, to reduce the barriers between the mobile and fixed Internet and deliver the same services, regardless of device or underlying network. The promise of the mobile Internet remains largely unfulfilled, for whatever reason, but users are hungry for it to be an extension of the Net they're used to, rather than a separate subset with its own content and services."

PubSub US Gov

Many eyes are on the new service from PubSub to watch what is being said about the U.S. Government through feeds. The feeds are pre-built searches on aspects of government. Steven Cohen, who now works at PubSub, described the service for the readers of ResourceShelf June 16.
"Today, PubSub reads over over 11 million weblogs, more than 50,000 internet newsgroups and all SEC (EDGAR) filings. In the coming months, we'll be adding many more streams of data, so stay tuned!"

PubSub Government Tracks Political Discussion on Blogs and Web caught Barbara Quint's eye too. [Newsbreaks (June 20)]

"Announcing the new service, Bob Wyman, chief technology officer and co-founder of PubSub Concepts, Inc., stated: “Instead of just relying on professional reporters, citizens today are playing an active role in collecting, reporting, analyzing, and disseminating news through blogs. PubSub’s prospective search is an easy way for political professionals and ordinary citizens alike to keep their ear to the ground and stay well-informed about pressing political personalities and issues.” ... "Based in New York, PubSub was founded in 2002 and continues to expand its product line for “prospective searching,” its name for the application of current awareness profiles to the expanding Web data flow."

CNN Video

Subscribers at CNN get free video with their stories at http://www.cnn.com/video/ Chase and Cadillac are the sponsors. Fortunately the ads are appealing because there is no avoiding them. There are about 14 categories - the usual World, U.S., business, sports, politics, entertainment, best of TV. Once into Video you can search or pick from lists of Picks and Top Video. Requires WIndows Media Player 9.

NewsIsFree Is Spiffier

NewisFree, a news aggregator and one of the first web-based newsreaders, has had a significant makeover. It has a fresh, more muted appearance, but has retained the tabbed access to services. There are 21,000 news sources and 44 languages - this is an international RSS centre.

The announcement stated that it has a new search technology -- "The advanced XML-based search engine SIETS allows its end users to read and search news headlines also from sites which do not provide RSS feeds. "

The news search has options to search "for relevance" (ranking on keyword matches) or title. The Advanced Search supports limits by source and language, category, popularity, and date.

At NewsIsFree you can create your own collections of sources and set up topics and tabs for them. There will be a new "power" way to browse these pages that puts controls into the top bar. One of those actions is to email or to blog selected items.

Paid members have additional capabilities through two premium services for exporting or having a portal version. Get all the extras by buying the Combo for USD 35 US/yr.

+ export an RSS feed for a search
+ add specific urls for feeds
+ add entries directly to your blog
+ news alerts

Copernic Desktop Search 1.6

Copernic has more features for its desktop search product. Now at Version 1.6 it offers browser toolbars for IE and Firefox, and there are some performance adjustments for activating and pausing the indexing. Full list of what's new is here.

Copernic Desktop Search won the 2005 World Class Award From PC World. (June 1)

T-Space in Scirus

Scirus Launches Repository Search Service "Scirus Indexes the University of Toronto’s T-Space" Press release (June 7)

" Elsevier today announced that its free science-specific search engine, Scirus, has launched Scirus Repository Search, a new service developed to support institutional repositories. T-Space, the University of Toronto’s institutional repository, is Scirus´ first collaboration. Scirus has added T-Space to its index and is also providing additional search capabilities on the T-Space website at no cost. The new initiative will make the intellectual output from the University of Toronto, the leading and most distinguished university in Canada, easier to find on both T-Space and the Scirus website."

T-Space at the University of Toronto is content "produced, submitted or sponsored" by faculty and organized by communities. Some examples are Knowledge Media Design Institute, Health Sciences, OISE/UT (Education).

Pandia Search covered the story in Search Engine News (June 19)

Newsiness Metasearch

NEWSiness.com will show seach results from Yahoo News and Google News. That's it - no extra features. However, the home page for NEWSiness has a menubar with links for many major news providers: CBS, CNN, ABC, Business Week, and in the international line, BBC and Agence France Presse - no CBC. Could be a useful meta-search tool for news sources.

[Mentioned in Researchbuzz.com]

Google Payment System

Report: Google to Start New Payment System AP via Yahoo News (June 17) - Some might say Google is losing focus. It plans to introduce an online payment system that would compete with PayPal.

"Expanding into online payments might make Google less dependent on advertising, which accounted for nearly all of its first-quarter revenue of $1.26 billion. The merchants who run auctions on eBay are major buyers of Google's ads, which appear alongside search results."

Grokker Demo

Grokker is a visual search engine. Results show as orbs with circles and squares indicating further groupings and sites. Mouse over an area to get more clues and click into it. There are some additional tools to control on date or relevance ranking. Grokker used to be software only. Now it has a demo site that uses Yahoo Search for the search engine. myGrokker is the software version which operates as a meta-search engine picking up Yahoo, MSN, Teoma and others and has features for saving maps and exporting results.

Grokker has also added a community forum and the Grokker blog. Stanford University uses Grokker for searching library collections, Library of Congress catalog and more. There's some fun to be had with You Grok puzzles too.

Problem is, while it looks cool is Grokker an efficient way to search? I find searching is slower - there is more processing time, eye must adjust to the shapes, have to move the mouse around to see what is inside the orbs, have limited text to make a decision. All in all, Grokker is work. But try it - you might prefer it, at least as a change from dreary text.

AccessMyLibrary from Thomson Gale

Thomson Gale Launches AccessMyLibrary.Com to Allow Tens of Millions of People to Access Trusted Library Information Online Marketwatch [subscription] (June 16)

"With the launch of AccessMyLibrary.com, Thomson Gale has enabled its content to be crawled and indexed by Yahoo! and Google. In doing so, Thomson Gale is not only making high-value content resources visible to a broader universe of information seekers, but is also highlighting the critical role libraries play as providers of quality information. Once desired content has been identified and made visible through the search engine's results, it becomes available through AccessMyLibrary.com if the searcher is an authorized user of a library that subscribes to that content."

Enter some keywords, get a citation and abstract, see the source - something like InfoTrac (a Gale product), look for your library - IF you are in the United States.

Thomson Gale has this to say to people outside the United States. "During this time, we are providing access to only a select number of libraries in the United States. While we offer you access to thousands of libraries across the U.S. with which we have relationships we have many more libraries to add, so check back soon. If you would like us to let you know when resources from your library are available, click here to send us an email indicating your country and local library, and we will be glad to alert you when the time is right."

Satellite Radio in Canada

Tuned in and turned on to all the sounds from the sky "With 150 channels, there's always something good playing, says SHAWNA RICHER", Globe Technology (June 17) What's so wonderful about paid satellite radio.

Canadians welcome pay-radio decision "'It's commercial-free . . . To me, this will take off like wildfire'" By Richard Bloom, Globe Technology.

Brave New Waves, The nuts and bolts of satellite radio -- "With satellite radio, currently offered in the United States by XM Satellite Radio and Sirius Satellite Radio, earth-based ground-stations beam the radio signal to several satellites in orbit above the earth, which then beam it back down to XM or Sirius digital radio receivers, terminals and portable handsets."

Blog Reader Tool

Something new for Windows IE people to try who love blogs - the Blog Navigator -- "It integrates into various blog search engines and can automatically determine RSS feeds from within properly coded websites."

Listed by Internet Scout Project.

Verity takes on Desktop too

Verity To Make Search Software Free For A Year By Thomas Claburn, TechWeb (Jun 15) "...Verity Inc., an enterprise search and analytics software company, will by the end of the week extend the free trial period for its Verity Ultraseek application from 30 days to one year ..."

Verity has made other changes too. It bought 80-20 Software Pty Ltd., a privately held Australian software company, to add a desktop search component.

"Enterprise customers want simple search options that make all information accessible, says Sue Feldman, VP at research firm IDC. "In order for search to be successful, you have to create a single point of access to all the information in the enterprise, both data and content," she says."

Exalead Refreshed and has RSS

Exalead: A Potentially Powerful New Search Engine by Mary Ellen Bates, Virtual Chase (June 2005) - has a few tips on how to use Exalead but is alarmed, as I have been, about the oldness of the content. When she wrote her article there had been no updates since December 2004. Concludes, " use the search engine to find older material, or to verify spelling, identify alternative word meanings or find authoritative material from sites that have a track record."

BUT - good news - Exalead has refreshed its database. Now when you sort results from new to old (do this through Advanced), you'll see many April 2005 dates and a few from May. It's better, but we hope that Exalead adopts a regular monthly schedule for updating the database.

New feature has appeared too - Exalead marks sites that have RSS feeds. Click on the button to get the xml page. Exalead also has a button to list only those pages with RSS feeds.

New Web Tools - SLA 2005

In New Web Tools at the SLA Conference 2005, Genie Tyburski and Gary Price presented their picks for software utilities and Web-based resources for doing research.

Genie Tyburski's Web Tools 2005 reviewed the researcher tools Onfolio.com and NetSnippets, had tools for searching RSS feeds, and looked at sources of information about criminal activity. Also showed how hacking at Google can turn up sensitive information.

Gary Price's Cool Tools had online resources for finding documents (Docuticker.com from ResourceShelf), e-book full text, MelissaData.com for lookups in the United States and the Argali phonebooks. Also showcased Yahoo! Next. Lots more.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia: An Encyclopedia of the People, by the People, for the People by Reid Goldsborough, LinkUp Digital (June 15) - Largely balanced review of Wikipedia - the people's encyclopedia - that advises users to check facts they find at this very popular online reference source. Quotes Karen Schneider who said of Wikipedia that it was “all so very Lord of the Flies".

Hand Picked Sites

Always fun to see other people's picks of useful sites especially if they are about travel or amusement or tips for using the Internet. Here is Sree Sreenivasan's list at Poynter Online - New to Me, Tracking useful sites. He keeps a blog with new items too at SreeTips.

Best of his list for me were:

30 Things You Didn't Know You Could Do on the Internet - The Web is learning new tricks every day. These surprising sites and services will help you solve problems and save time--and one might even make you a star. PCWorld (May 2005)

FlightArrivals.com with arrival and departure information for all commercial airline flights in Canada and the United States. For U.S. airports there is also airport status for weather and traffic management reports.

ShopLocal.com in the US

ShopLocal.com was also honored at the 2005 EPpy Awards as the best Internet Shopping Service. What - better than Yahoo and eBay and Shopping.com and Froogle? This I have to see. Enter a zip code (this is U.S. only) to get deals and specials in the neighbourhood. Has grocery stores, Radio Shack sales, Target, drug stores, clothing stores. Please let this replace the mountainous stacks of flyers that are delivered to American homes daily in the newspaper and in the mail.

From the company blurb: "The ShopLocal Network, consisting of ShopLocal.com and more than 200 leading media, search and shopping Web sites, provides retailers with access to a dynamic, geographically-based marketplace of ready-to-buy shoppers looking to purchase items from t-shirts to televisions, and food to furniture at a store near them. Retailers benefit from ShopLocal's DataPoint services, the most complete Web-to-store tracking information available, providing retailers with the understanding necessary to make each Web-to-store effort more successful."

ShopLocal.com Named Best Internet Shopping Service
Leading Web-to-Store Site Honored at 2005 EPpy Awards, Presented by Editor & Publisher and Mediaweek Magazines - PRNewswire via Yahoo News (June 15)

EPpy Awards 2005

2005 EPpy Award Winners Announced (June 9)

The 10th annual EPpy Awards were presented at the Interactive Media Conference and Trade Show in New Orleans, June 7 - 9. The EPpy Awards recognize the design and content of internet sites affiliated to members of the media industry - newspapers, radio, magazines, and television. Contest is described at the EPpy Awards site.

CBC.ca won in the category for Best Overall Network or Syndicated Radio-Affiliated Internet Service.

New York Times was best for Newspaper-Affiliated Internet Service over 1 million with Boston.com and Washington Post as runners up.

MSNBC was Best Overall Network TV/Cable-Affiliated Internet Service.

Slate Magazine was Best Internet News Service over 1 million and LJWorld.com the best for under 1 million.

Slate Magazine also won Best Internet Entertainment Service over 1 million. This is a magazine to watch.

Design is evaluated. WashingtonPost won Best Overall Design of an Internet Service over 1 million, with AZcentral.com, and, one of my favourites, the Seattle Times as finalists.

For use of rich media, the best was Svek's Instant Replay where Steve Svekis does game talk about the Dophins, football team in Florida. But Globe and Mail was a finalist (doesn't say for what although there are a few short videos and slide shows sprinkled about) as was NY Times Multimedia which is rich with slide shows, video and audio..

For business service over 1 million, Marketwatch received best and Bloomberg and Forbes were finalists.

Awards for previous years are listed at the EPpy Awards page.

Freeware Utilities / Tools

Ian Richards at Tech Support Alert makes his list and evaluations of 46 Best-Ever Freeware Utilities available to everyone. There are recommendations here for virus checkers, adware/spyware/scumware removers, firewall, anonymous surfing, word processor, email client, spam filter, desktop search (Yahoo or Copernic) and dozens more.

Ian also writes the monthly Support Alert. Excellent.

Yahoo Searches Subscription-based services

New Yahoo service searches subscription sites in Reuters via Yahoo News (June 15) - Yahoo says it has begun testing searching of premium services such as Lexis Nexis.

"The service, http://search.yahoo.com/subscriptions, called Yahoo! Search Subscriptions, allows users to search multiple online subscription content sources and the Web from a single search box."

Lexis Nexis isn't on the list but FT.com, Wall Street Journal, Forrester, IEEE and a few others are.

More about Yahoo Search Subscriptions.

See entry at the Outsell Now blog - Yahoo! and Subscription Partners Bring It All Together - describes what it will look like and calls it a "slam-dunk success for both Yahoo! and its partners".

Hierarchies - In or Out?

Google's War on Hierarchy, and the Death of Hierarchical Folders
by John Hiler, Microcontent blog (May 10)

Finds that hierarchical organization of information (subject trees or taxonomies) is under attack by the believers of keyword searching and in particular Google. Google, Hiler, finds is anti-hierarchical - witness the lack of folders in GMail and Google Desktop Search.

Article reviews the history of web hierarchies starting with Yahoo Directory, Looksmart and the Open Project Directory. Google's page-ranking algorithm based on linkages vastly improved relevance (at least for a time), and people left the directories in droves to use Google (tho we should remember that Altavista was a strong search engine then too). In March 2004 Google sidelined its use of ODP and, according to Hiler, killed directories.

"As Google's Director of Search Wuality put it, "We analyzed what people were using, and [directories] become less popular over time. As the web grows, directory structures get harder [for consumers] to use.""

The last is an interesting statement. I don't think directory structures get harder to use at all, and in a world of unmediated search results, some classification is an aid for providing context. However, it is true that manual classification is very labour intensive.

Hiler reviews the history of folders used for organizing email in Outlook, Hotmail and other web mail programs. And then came Google's GMail where the bins have been reduced just an inbox and an archive (tho you can add labels). You keyword search for "conversations".

Desktop is the third area. People could relate to the filing cabinet metaphor but who could find the right drawer? Desktop search from Google, MSN and others make it much easier to search across folders - in fact to ignore folders. Hiler, doesn't mention though, that you might wish to restrict the indexing to specific folders.

Article concludes -- "But Folders rarely solve the core problem that they address - and often create new ones, like forcing you to create new folders just to manage new information. Solutions like Search, Archives, Stars and Labels get more directly at the core problem... and promise that the future of information management will look very different from its past."

Yahoo has Dialpad

Yahoo! buys into net phone services firm by Elinor Mills, CNet - Yahoo has agreed to buy Dialpad for Internet telephony and will be adding new voice features to its suite of communication products.

"Yahoo has offered free PC-to-PC voice calling since 1999, but initial enthusiasm for the service faded quickly. In 2002, Yahoo pushed VoIP to the sidelines by removing a "PC phone calling" button from Messenger version 5.5 to accommodate a button for text messaging cell phones. The "PC phone calling" button, now called "Call Computer," made its return to prime real estate in the latest Yahoo Messenger version."

Sponsored Search Growing

Sponsored search to grow 47% in 2005 in Net Imperative (June 13)

"Overall, Merrill Lynch forecast that online advertising in the US would reach $12.4bn this year and $25bn by 2009. This means that sponsored search would account for 45% of all online adspend in 2005."

Use of search engines is the driver to this growth, and it has been increasing with the spread of broadband use.

Search, ECM, BI

Enterprise Search - Seek And Ye Shall (Hopefully) Find By John Edwards, CIO (June 15) Growing volumes of unstructured text in companies has boosted interest in effective search technologies. Keyword searching gives occurrences but no context. Search technologies that show related topics are in demand.

"Welcome to the new world of search technology, where results are measured not only in terms of information depth, but also by real-world relevance. "We now have the power to build a topic structure, including topics, subtopics and browsable subcategories," says Eileen Quam, information architect for the Minnesota Office of Technology in St. Paul. "People can walk their way through our information."" See this search for metadata at the Minnesota Office of Technology.

Enterprise search may demand a range of solutions and types of tools. An analyst at Forrester (Ramos), sees enterprise search merging into Enterprise Content Management or Business Intelligence. Why not both? ""Its role in ECM is to help organize and retrieve the content under management," observes Ramos. "In BI, it is the logical equivalent to data mining for text." Ramos feels that "search vendors must pick a path and strike the right deals or partnerships to move forward." "

Of interest: "Approximately 85% of Canadian Internet users conduct at least one search using the top engines each month, compared with 73% in the United States. SOURCE: COMSCORE NETWORKS"

3D Maps

Google Already Has 3D City Maps (Jun 14) Danny Sullivan has information on 3D renderings of cities that Google is involved with somewhat (not clear if it is Google or a third party). Still rumours but exciting.

SLA Toronto 2005 Conference Reviews

"Two Views of the SLA Conference, Toronto, June 2005" By Mary Hudson and Joanna Kaczmarczyk, Freepint (June 16) - Impressions of two SLA members from the UK of the conference in Toronto: keynote speakers, sessions, breakfast and evening events, and the general networking scene. Joanna Kaczmarczyk found a unifying theme in the three keynote speakers that argued for transparency and innovation.

BlinkxTV adds Premium Video

blinkx Partners With IFILM to Bring Premium Video Entertainment to blinkx.tv Users PR Newswire (June 14)

"Under the terms of the partnership, blinkx will be able to search rich media content available at IFILM (http://www.ifilm.com), a leading video-entertainment destination, offering content across a variety of channels including movies, short films, TV clips, video-game trailers, music videos, action sports as well as its celebrated Viral Videos collection."

Blog for your company

Establishing a Weblog on your Intranet - [pdf] presentation at the SLA 2005 Conference by Sabrina Pacifici and Dennis Hamilton. Pacifici blogs law and technology. Hamilton set up a weblog at KZF Design in Ohio.

Opened with many good reasons for creating a weblog such as "non-technie solution for organizing content", is a communication tool and might help with information overlad. There is a viral nature to blogging. Quote from an IBM Development group was very striking:

"“Behind the scenes, a small handful of technical innovators developed and deployed an internal blogging service that has grown in a period of just 18 months to just shy of 9,000 registered users spanning 65 countries, 3,097 individual blogs, 1,358 of which are considered active, with a total of 26,203
entries and comments -- all of which has been put together strictly through word-ofmouth promotion. And it's still just a pilot.” http://tinyurl.com/de472

Once you are persuaded of the value, the Blog Software Breakdown page will help you decide what blog software to use. The most popular are TypePad, Blogger, and Blog Journal. Presentation goes through the considerations to bear in mind - hosted vs standalone, commercial vs open source, features.

In an organization you'll want to set up some guidelines or policies for blogging practices - contributors, content, style. Yahoo, CyberJournalist, IBM and others have put their policies online. See examples in the presentation.

The two speakers outlined the facts and features about blogs - essentially that most are easy to set up, publishing requires no special skills other than writing, and dissemination is simple. One of the main advantages is that the archives are searchable.

Dennis Hamilton walked us through his experience in setting up a blog and building readership. Mainly he keeps it on topic about architecture, positive, and with some bits on employees. His main advice in creating the entries was review, review, and review again - then publish.

There was some good advice on blogging essentials - establishing responsibilities, getting buy-in, validating content, and keeping current. Some ideas on what to blog about and how to collect that information. Generally, to keep in mind that there are many styles and applications.

Touched on producing RSS feeds in order to give readers an alternative to email or to checking the web page daily.

Lastly, for those thinking about setting up a company blog there is a page listing articles about corporate blogging and further examples of blogs. Blog Without A Library has links to blogs done by many different kinds of libraries. Even CEOs are blogging -- CEO Blogs List.

Google Images

Google Increases Size of Image Database SEW Blog (June 9) - Up to 1.3 billion at least. Gary Prices suggests the number was selected to match Yahoo's. Who knows how many there really are?

Premium Google Video

Google readying Web-only video search by Stephanie Olsen, CNet.com (June 13) - Let's hope this isn't vaporware or hype for Google Video - " Google is expected to unveil a search engine for Web-only video this summer that will let people preview media clips from its Web site..."

"Longer term, Google is preparing a payment system for a premium video service that would let people pay to watch full video clips. Google is talking to several top-tier content providers, including Hollywood movie studios, to gain agreements for aggregating their video and selling premium or pay-per-view access."

Particle Tree Blog

Two discoveries: an excellent article on The Importance of RSS for Google, written by Kevin Hale for Particle Tree; and Particle Tree itself, a well presented blog about web applications.

In The Importance of RSS, Kevin Hale examines the "the state of RSS, taxonomies, advertising, and how it relates to the future of Google.” Google has been indexing rdf and xml files for over a year. Hale suspects Google is on the verge of establishing its own form of tagging of RSS feeds based on search terms. Ad Sense for RSS feeds is one reason Google has to get into this business. But that people may be turning from search to using RSS feeds is another. He says that, "An RSS feed is a blog distilled to its core essence"

"If RSS is getting face-time at the expense of search, Google has something to worry about. And it makes sense. From personal experience, I know my daily routine to keep up with the information overload doesn’t really involve searching anymore, but subscribing. Thanks to services like Del.icio.us, Technorati and Digg.com, people are spending a lot less time actively searching and more time passively reading what’s being updated in their readers. "

Lots in this article about tagging, social bookmarking, and improvements in RSS technology.

Consumer Health WebWatch

Consumer Health WebWatch Rates 20 Health Information Sites Research Conducted by: Consumer Reports WebWatch and the Health Improvement Institute (June 9) -- Summary of results says that "Of the 20 sites rated, six were given the highest rating, “Excellent”; five received a “Very Good” rating; eight were given a rating of “Good;” and one site was rated “Fair.”"

We are directed to the HealthRatings.org/ website created by Consumer Reports WebWatch for detailed ratings. Good luck - site seems to be malfunctioning when viewed in IE 6 and Firefox. There is information on the methodology and the instrument, but not the detailed reports on the 20 health websites.

Since the stated purpose is to "provide consumers with a one-stop destination to help determine whether a health Web site is credible and reliable", I presume they will fix this.

Meantime, results are given in some detail in Health-data sites put to the test. Consumer Reports WebWatch rates 6 of 20 as excellent - by Kristen Gerencher, Marketwatch [subscription]

June 22 - Can now view the detailed reviews and ratings of the 20 health sites. Pages are very fancy - all done in Flash - can't just print out a report.

Tourism New Brunswick

Tourism Web site juiced for travel rush By: Brian Eaton, IT World Canada (14 Jun 2005)

"A complete overhaul of New Brunswick’s Department of Tourism and Parks Web site is expected to attract visitors to the site – and the province."

Let's help them out - Tourism New Brunswick is at http://www.tourismnewbrunswick.ca/

Great opening paragraph -- "Incredible Natural Wonders... Sun-Soaked Beaches... a unique mosaic Culture... an unforgettable Authentic Experience... and best of all, a distinctive four-season travel destination with real value. Welcome to the Wonder of New Brunswick!".

Love the concept of "four-season travel".

The Stephen Abram Page

Stephen Abram, prolific writer and speaker about libraries, information services and technologies, has a web page through SIRSI of his articles and presentations. If you missed him at a conference this year in Canada or the U.S. you can likely pick him up here.

PubSub Gov

PubSub Unleashes a Bunch of Government-Related RSS Feeds, ResearchBuzz.com (June 3)

"PubSub has started a section of their site that provides RSS feeds on what's being said about US government official. You can get started at http://www.pubsub.com/features/government/ ."

60 Sites Presentation at SLA 2005

Genie Tyburski and Jenny Kanji delivered their popular 60 Sites in 60 Minutes as one of the last sessions at the SLA Conference 2005. Presentation was sponsored by the Legal Division. Traditionally this presentation is a mix of serious sites for research and may be somewhat related to legal interests, and the funny and zanny. Tyburski mainly plays the straight man, and Kanji digs up the weird.

The serious collection includes several that concern public records. Tyburski wondered about the flap over ChoicePoint's transgressions in not protecting records when so much personal information is easily available through government sites. She showed the Madison Wisconsin Accident Report (free); Legal Dockets Online for federal and state court case information included criminal information; and U.S. Party / Case Index (small access fee) that holds information about civil litigation on the Federal level concerning divorce, bankruptcy and other civil suits. As well there is the portal for Public Records Sources that lists professional services (for-fee subscription) and free. BRB Publications is on this list and it links to free government sites in the United States and Canada. Interestingly, Canada is listed on the same page as US Territories. Still on the public records theme, AnyBirthday.com has 135 million people in the US. Pretrieve is a kind of meta-directory / searcher to find sources of public records in the US.

Tyburski always has a few aids to help the individual deal with privacy and security. The Anti-phishing Working Group has information and utilities about phishing and offers good materials for instructors to use in Internet literacy classess. Also if you're wondering about encoded web address in an email, Hex URL Decoder will give the source. Whois.sc is an excellent site for getting information on a domain.

Computer Gripes might have the answer to your computer hardware or software problem.

Some selections illustrated the increased use of RSS for delivering updates. Edgar Index will deliver SEC filings on selected companies by RSS. HubMed can be used to deliver results from saved searches on PubMed. West Intraclip is for Westlaw account holders - use it to set up a search and get results via RSS. And of course there is Feedster, the RSS search engine.

In the world of bizarre, Reemco has some products that will astound your friends and neighbours at the next BBQ. Scrabble players will want Wordplays on their wireless mobile device for the next competition.

Useful for everyday - GasBuddy.com - check out the gas prices at stations in your area from your computer. Covers Canada and the United States.

Travel.about.com was recommended too for information about the United States. I have found it thin on content for Europe and Canada but adequate as an introduction.

The presentation site has more. Allow at least 60 minutes to browse.

Looking for intelligent search

Enough Keyword Searches. Just Answer My Question by James Fallows, New York Times (June 12). James Fallows finds - "Search engines are so powerful. And they are so pathetically weak." He describes the difficulty of determining the right keywords to find information on changes in California's spending on its schools - and of "trying to outguess the engines". How much better it would be to use something like Aquaint, a project by US federal intelligence bodies, that will handle ""advanced question answering for intelligence".

Fallows mentions two engines whose added features he does appreciate - Ask Jeeves for broadening and narrowing results and offering suggestions, and Vivisimo for categorizing, Grokker for visual presentation, and his favourite Mr Sapo "because it allows quick, easy comparisons of the results of the same search on virtually any major engine."

While I appreciate his frustration with word guessing, this would be an occasion for bringing in an information professional who knows how and where to look for statistical and specialized databases, free and for-fee. Using Google or any other general purpose search engine with or without search aids would only find some bits and pieces on this question.

In the article he also endorses Roboform for handling the myriad of usernames and passwords. And mentions that Google Map's satellite views of some places in the US are camouflaged: the vice-president's compound in Washington DC ( though not the White House,) and downtown Albany.

xxx Domain

The Net gets a virtual red-light district by Anick Jesdanun, AP via Globe and Mail (June 13)

ICANN approved xxx as the top-level domain for porn sites and contracted with ICM Registry in Florida to handle the registrations.
"As envisioned, ICM would charge $60 (U.S.) for each of up to 500,000 names it expects to register, $10 of which would go to a nonprofit organization that would, among other things, educate parents about safe surfing for children.

The nonprofit, run by representatives of adult Web sites, free-speech, privacy and child-advocacy concerns, would determine registration eligibility."

Critics wonder if it will do any good. Porn sites will likely also operate under the .com domain. The "adult entertainment" industry isn't interested in being segregated.

ODP in Trouble

More on the woes and afflictions of the Open Project Directory by Harold Davis at O'Reilly.net. In Is the Open Directory Project in Trouble? he picks up some postings from blogs that don't augur well for ODP: categories without editors, huge delays, some editors possibly taking bribes. Comments to his posting are interesting -- one placing some blame on Google for its "anti-taxonomy textmining philosophy". Why is ODP so poorly supported? Why does there seem to be no support or leadership from AOL or Netscape? The ODP taxonomy is better than Yahoo's and is an important tool for searchers.

Turning Pages

British Library and the US National Library of Medicine are making ancient texts available online through an interactive program developed by the British Library. On the Web the pages are viewed through Macromedia Shockwave.

" Turning the Pages allows visitors to virtually 'turn' the pages of manuscripts in a realistic way, using touch-screen technology and interactive animation. They can zoom in on the high- quality digitised images and read or listen to notes explaining the beauty and significance of each page. There are other features specific to the individual manuscripts. In a Leonardo da Vinci notebook, for example, a button turns the text round so visitors can read his famous 'mirror' handwriting." (Armadillo Systems)

British Library has 12 books - Sketches by da Vinci, History of England by Jane Austen, Elizabeth Blackwell's Curious Herbal with botanical illustration, images of the renaissance from the Sforza Hours ...

National Library of Medicine has three books. Conrad Gesner’s Historiae Animalium is fascinating.

British Library Direct

British Library launches Direct beta By Mark Chillingworth, Information World Review ( Jun 1)

"British Library Direct is a new online platform offering users a fresh interface for its document supply service, including extended search facilities, and positioning it for future growth." ... "BL Direct is the platform from which the national library will develop new electronic services. Already the beta version of the site acts as a central point for the research, data licence and business & intellectual property centres within the BL, bringing a range of services under one virtual roof."

British Library Direct now provides for pay-as-you-go and immediate download.

Jacso on Google Scholar and HighWire Press

In the June issue of Péter's Digital Reference Shelf, Peter Jacso re-examines Google Scholar and still finds it severely wanting; and the Highwire Press Archive which he finds does combine quality and quantity. [TIP: Read this article before end of June and Furl it. Archives at Gale are not accessible.]

With Google Scholar you get what you pay for - nothing. Jacso puts Google Scholar up against Web of Science and Scobus and the free Citeseer and eBizSearch. Notes that -- "Google Scholar has to be looked at with this background: Even in its disappointing incarnation it is an asset for those scholars whose university or research institute cannot afford WoS or Scopus. Those who just need a few good papers and Web sites might as well be satisfied with the regular Google or Yahoo search engines. Those who need a comprehensive set of papers that includes the most respected (and hence most-cited) articles, books and conference papers are advised to treat the hits — and citedness scores — in Google Scholar with much reservation."

In other words, it fails abysmally and Jasco has many more examples showing how utterly impoverished it is for search features. Google Scholar was updated in April after a 6 month hiatus. But Jacso cannot find any information on sources or update policies.

HighWire Press (HWP) is another story. It has 900,000 full text scholarly articles - free. There is a search appartus to locate journals and publishers, directory and a graphical topic map for subjects, and it employs Vivisimo's technology for an "instant index" to the search results.

EEVL Extra

EEVL Xtra is the Resource of the Week at ResourceShelf. (Jun 2)

"EEVL Xtra is an easy-to-use federated search tool that focuses on engineering, mathematics and computing resources. It is a work in progress, with more resources being added over time." The review lists the sources and provides a guide on how to use.

Press Release -- EEVL Xtra - the Hidden Web at your fingertips, for engineering, mathematics and computing.

"EEVL Xtra is a brand new, free service which can help you find articles, books, the best websites, the latest industry news, job announcements, technical reports, technical data, full text eprints, the latest research, teaching and learning resources and more, in engineering, mathematics and computing."

Getting rave reviews.

Searching Paths at Yahoo

Some tips from Michael Fagan for using syntax at Yahoo to limit a search to sites -- Puzzlepieces – yahoo site searching syntax (May 19) Especially good for showing how to specify a path to a particular folder - combine site search with inurl -- site:company.com inurl:foldername

RDN Tutorials for Adult Learning

Resource Discovery Network has introduced Tutorials for Adult & Community Learning for using the Internet for research. The colourful new page features Internet for Arts and Crafts, Digital Photography, Gardening, Health and Well Being, and Job Searching.

"These tutorials will take you on a tour of the best of the Web and help you develop your Internet search skills. The "Success Stories" offer inspiration and ideas for using the Internet in new and creative ways."

RDN has many more tutorials in fields of Social Science, Engineering, Education, Humanities, Health and Life Science.

Digital Camera Focus

News.com has special coverage on digital cameras - Zooming in on Cameras - with articles from various sources. Page is available as a RSS feed.

This month there are several from the New York Times including:

On photoblogs, there are no mundane shots (June 12) - Photoblogs are "Web sites that are part visual diary, part photo gallery, where in recent years anyone with a digital camera and Internet connection can take part. " Fotolog.net and Flickr.com are two sites.

Less cursing, better pictures: 10 suggestions including one on how to end shutter lag.

Task Force on Spam in Canada

Canadian Feds Ponder Spam Options by Enid Burns, CLickz (Jun 10)

"A Canadian task force enlisted to draft recommendations to combat spam has submitted its report to the country's Minister of Industry. The group was assembled by the Canadian government, which set up the May 2004 Anti-Spam Action Plan for Canada to evaluate existing legislation and make recommendations for revisions and new laws to reduce spam."

See Stopping Spam Creating a Stronger, Safer Internet "Report of the Task Force on Spam May 2005" - Industry Canada.

Databases in Libraries

Finding Answers Beyond Web Search By Gary Price, BetaNews (Jun 8) -promotes the specialized databases offered through libraries. Listed databases are mainly US although InfoTrac and EbscoHost will be found in some Canadian libraries.

Full Disclosure Lacking

Study: Search Engines Still Fail to Disclose Ads by Pamela Parker, Kevin Newcomb, Clickz (Jun 9) - Seems search engines aren't getting it about the value of full disclosure of paid results, whether of paid listings or paid inclusion. Consumers Union has released a fourth, and unfavourable, report on disclosure by search engines of placement and inclusion of paid results.

"A follow-up to a 2004 study examining the ways search engines identify and explain paid search results, the latest study found little improvement over last year, and concluded that none of the 15 search engines examined had satisfactorily disclosed their practices."

"Of the top search engines, AOL Search, Google, and Yahoo! Search Marketing were given good marks for disclosure, but showed minimal change over the year before. Ask Jeeves and Yahoo! Search were downgraded for making headings less visible, and removing hyperlinks to disclosure statements. MSN Search was the only major search engine to show improvement, largely because MSN discontinued its paid inclusion and content promotion programs, giving them less to disclose."

Full report at Consumer Reports WebWatch (Jun 9) - Still Searching for Disclosure - Re-evaluating How Search Engines Explain the Presence of Advertising in Search Results by Jorgen J Wouters.

Report shows that engines are downplaying the sponsored results by muting headings or labels. Ask Jeeves in particular has gone from good to poor by making disclosures harder to find and reducing visibility of headings. Yahoo similarly has toned down the headings for sponsored results, though on my machine they still seem fairly clearly marked. The main problem is that Yahoo makes no effort to mark paid inclusion, whereas in the past you could guess they were part of the top 20. Only two engines were found to have improved and both are metasearch engines: CNet's Search.com has better headings and added a disclosure statement ("about this page"); Websearch.com puts sponsored results at the top and indicates sponsored by (though very faintly).

CISTI has OpenURL

CISTI announces new OpenURL link EContent (June 10)

"The Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information has announced a new OpenURL link with TDNet, a supplier of electronic resource management solutions. This link is designed to allow access to CISTI's Document Delivery service for TDNet users. Outbound and OpenURL links to CISTI can now be activated from most online information services, link resolvers and library systems."

For further information see CISTI press release -- CISTI announces new OpenURL link with TDNet

Cymphony adds Moreover as partner

Moreover Technologies and Cymfony Announce Partnership eContent (Jun 10)

"Moreover Technologies, which offers aggregated online current awareness and blog content, and Cymfony, a provider of market intelligence and automated media analysis, have announced a partnership to deliver real-time online news and blog content from Moreover into Cymfony's Web-based media intelligence applications. The partnership is intended to provide Cymfony applications with content for to monitor and analyze online news and blog posts, providing insight to consumer discussions, perceptions and issues that could impact brand reputation."

More information on what this means to Cymphony customers at the Cymphony blog - More Content Options for Clients

MSN Search Toolbar Good

CNet gives MSN Search Toolbar an 8 out of 10 rating and says "MSN Search Toolbar with Windows Desktop Search turns your Windows 2000 and Windows XP into an Apple Mac Tiger." High praise indeed. This "is a must-have app for die-hard Microsoft fans, adding metadata desktop search and tabbed browsing to IE."

ScienceResearch.com Version 1.0 Beta

ScienceResearch.com is a new public web search engine for science developed by Deep Web Technologies. It provides access to numerous scientific journals and public science databases for a number of scientific disciplines from Astronomy to Social Sciences. There are also options for searching Directory of Open Access Journals, Science.gov, and Scientific News.

It is powered by DWT's Explorit tools which can capture information from licensed database subscriptions, structured and unstructured text, and public web. DWT is the search engine behind science.gov as well.

Deep Web will be adding an alerting service and a personal library for saving documents to be available at a nominal fee.

See press release -Deep Web Technologies Announces ScienceResearch.com(TM) Yahoo News (June 9)

The collection at first look seems wonderful but the service is lacking some important features for constraining the search and viewing the results.

A search in Scientific News for Mars landing draws results from Eureka Science News, New York Times, Science Daily, Science News Online, and Yahoo News. Of these only NYT and ScienceDaily show the dates. Not having dates on the others makes selection a stab in the dark.

You may either click on title to see the article at the source site or select several for viewing as a batch. For batch viewing, the process is to select individual results and "list marks". The list will accumulate during a search session. Display shows excerpts from the documents but there can be hiccups in arranging these on the page.

Some sources require registration and sometimes payment. For example, you'll need to log into the New York Times and be prepared to pay for older articles.

In a search on a discipline such as Computers and Technology, results are ranked by relevance and scored with stars. The display usually shows title, authors, date, journal, and small description - but not always. There is no overt syntax though " " appear to work for words together. Results can be sorted by source.

In all, ScienceResearch will be worth getting to know. This is only the first beta version and is likely to improve.

Singingfish adds sources

AOL's Singingfish Expands Video Search Engine with New Content Partnerships Business Wire (June 9)

Singingfish, the audio video search engines from AOL "will begin featuring optimized video content feeds from more than 13 new partners including: AtomFilms, Big-Boys.com, CBSNews.com, CNN, Healthology, Inc., Hollywood.com, IFILM, Like Television, ManiaTV.com, MarketWatch from Dow Jones & Company, The One Network, ROO Media and TotalVid."

Singingfish handles well over 200 million video and audio searches each month.

Ingenta Alerting

Ingenta Introduces New Service for Libraries - EContent (Jun 7) -- " Ingenta library customers can now upgrade their new issue and search alerts to include OpenURL links back to their own holdings, enabling users to link directly from an alert to the "appropriate copy" of the article's full text wherever it may reside." ... "OpenURL-enabled alerting allows libraries not only to offer patrons a current awareness program, with over 29,000 publications from a wide scope of disciplines, but also a service which is fully integrated with local full text holdings. "

UK COmparison Shoppers

Top 10 UK shopping comparison sites at Net Imperative. (June 3) - Kelkoo.co.uk is the big one in the UK with 43.8% of visits. Top search terms are UK brands. And how many comparison shopping engines does Canada have? None - though there is a rumour that a Froogle Canada is in the works.

RoboForm for Passwords

A Search Tool for Your Online Passwords By Chris Sherman, SearchDay (June 9) -- RoboForm - "A search toolbar that can be configured to use your favorite engine, and securely manages all of your online login details and passwords to boot." Gives a full review. Has a 30 day trial and costs $29.99 US.

Googling for health

More people consult Google over health By Nigel Hawkes, Health Editor, Times Online (June 6) -- "A survey of 1,000 people found that 12 per cent turn first to Google. Fewer consult family and friends, the media or medical encyclopaedias when faced with a medical problem." Of these nearly 86% believe that what they find through Google is accurate. Of interest - 52% would see a GP first. What does other 36% do?

Google Scholar Not For Clinicians

Google Scholar: A source for clinicians? by Jim Henderson, Health Sciences Library, McGill University, Montréal, Que, in Canadian Medical Association Journal (June 7, 2005) - Concludes that "Google Scholar may develop into a free, sophisticated tool, but, at least in the beta version, it is not a useful choice for clinicians." Shortcomings are less than current material - almost hit-and-miss on whether there will be recent articles; ranking by citations which tends to place older material first; partial copy of PubMed database; no access to other important medical databases. Article has a table of other search services to use: Ovid, PubMed, TRIP, HighWire, Scirus, OAIster. [Thanks to JL for article.]

Google Maps put to use

Google Maps Make Demographics Come Alive , AP via Forbes (June 8)

"As it turns out, Google charts each point on its maps by latitude and longitude - that's how Google can produce driving directions to practically anywhere in the nation. Seasoned developers have figured out how to match these points with locations from outside databases that can contain vast amounts of information - anything from police blotters to real estate listings. "

Lots of examples. For example - Housingmaps.com plots houses for sale in many major cities in North America including Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver.

Behavioural Marketing

Stepping Up Search: How Behavioral Targeting Can Enhance ROI by Scott Ferber, MediaPost (June 6) - Getting you to click on a paid listing is only the first step of a long endeavour to get you to come back. This article explains "behavioural marketing", a mining of anonymous data on what you (and others) look at when browsing sites.

"The notion behind behavioral targeting is relatively simple. Using anonymous data, it enables marketers to deliver ads to consumers based on their recent online behavior--i.e., what they recently bought (or basketed and didn't buy), where they surfed, or what they searched for. Based on this information, ads can be tailored to drive users back to the advertiser's site to complete the desired registration, purchase, or other action."

Blogpulse Trackers

Tracking Trends via the Blogosphere By Chris Sherman, SearchDay (June 7) -

BlogPulse from Intelliseek is a specialty engine for searching the contents of 11 million blogs to see the entries and track the popularity of the terms across time.

Want to track mention of Canadian political scandals? Track the Gomery Inquiry against Grewal's tapes. See Gomery vs Grewal.

Sherman also describes the Conversation Tracker - "a threaded view of the conversation graph from a link to a post or to a new article (or any URL)." Blogpulse gives the example of kryptonite with a particular blog posting as the seed. But you can do it from a topic as well - such as grewal tapes.

Searching Local

Local search targets local ad revenues Paul J. Bruemmer, Pandia (June 5)

"Newspapers and offline yellow page directories have traditionally been the mainstay of local advertising. That might be about to change as local search becomes the latest business opportunity to be exploited online. "

Some interesting figures:

+ 40 percent of search engine queries are for local businesses and services.
+ 92 percent of local searches convert to purchases later offline
+ 70 percent of U.S. households use the web to research products and services.

Also describes how easy it is for small businesses in the US to get online through Yahoo! Local .

Better Than IM

Skype - like IM but better - it does Internet phone calls for free. It's completely free if you and friend have broadband and are using Skype, but you can also call a landline phone for a very small fee - in Canada and the US about 2 US cents per minute.

This Internet Phone Call's for You Steve's guide to making cheap calls over the Internet. PC World (June 1)

Bloglines Bigger

Bloglines, the very popular online blog reader and blog centre, has 500 million blog and news feed articles and has doubled in size since January 2005.

Bloglines Tracks Half a Billion Blog Articles, Doubles Index Size in Six Months, PR Newswire (June 8)

Geek Watch

Catch this list of finds by Mathew Ingram at the Globe and Mail of new, far out inventions. If it's cool we'll find it. Entries go back one year. There is a mini-plane - two adults can lift it, mini-helicopter, several watches, wireless devices, some podcasting.

For cat lovers there is the Flo Control Project that is about image recognition. Boris Tsikanovsky outside Seattle built a cat flap door that lets only his cat into the house and only when the cat isn't carrying an animal. See the video from this page about the High Tech Cat Door.

Local Blogs

Finding Local Blogs By Jonathan Dube, PoynterONline (June 7) - tools for finding bloggers who blog from a neighbourhood near you.

+ Blogdigger - US city or zip code plu topic. For outside US enter the longitude and latitude to the Advanced form. Toronto is 43° 39' , -79° 23' -- results. But it is very limited.

+ Feedmap - use this to geo-code your blog and search for others.

+ VideoBlogger - map - handful of blogs. -

Volltextsuche Online

German publishers' Google challenge By Doreen Carvajal International Herald Tribune (June 6) - Book publishers in Germany want to do their own digitizing in a project called Volltextsuche Online.

Conquery with Firefox

Contextual Search with Firefox by Chris Sherman, SearchDay (June 6) -- About Conquery, a plugin for Firefox that lets you send a search to an engine of your choice just by highlighting words on the page and doing a right click. Has lots more. I love it too.

CBC Podcasting

CBC to offer Podcasts Globe and Mail (June 3)

"On June 6, CBC Radio 3 will introduce its podcasting service, which will offer new, half-hour radio programs for listeners' iPods, MP3 players and computers. Similar in style and content to Radio 3's regular Saturday night programming, this podcast will have only Canadian music from new and emerging artists."

Subscribe to new shows at www.cbc.ca/podcasting

Windows 2000 IE 6 forever

No IE 7 for Windows 2000, says Microsoft by Ingrid Marson, Silicon.com (June 3) - asks "what kind of silliness is this?". Microsoft has said it will support Windows 2000 until 2010 but it will not update the IE browser. If Microsoft can't, others will.

Social Networking on Decline

Five reasons social networking doesn't work by Molly Wood, CNet (JUne 2) - Seems social networking is in trouble - Friendster, as an example, is losing users. The problem might be the difficulty in raising the money, but it might also be user boredom. Molly Wood lists five problems with social networking.

Longhorn Interface

Longhorn goes beyond search By Rafe Needleman, CNet Reviews (June 1) - Advance look a the user interface for Longhorn, the next Windows operating system. Describes folders, search, tags, and visual aids and mentions that many of these are available as add-ons today.

Sees a future of -- "I'm betting that contextual and audio/visual searching can't be far behind. And at some point in the future, we'll be able to search for documents on our hard disk "about rent" without having to match search terms, or direct our system to find pictures of Grandma given just one picture of her, or find orchestral-sounding music given a sample of it. Whether Microsoft ships these tools first is an open bet; but I'd wager that this is what Google, Yahoo, Apple, and other search companies will try to do to stay ahead."

Also, the next generation of tools will have to be able to handle "digital assets" in general - on mobile devices, online services, digital media - not just the home computer.

AOL Portal

Free Internet Site: A Portal to AOL's Future? by Saul Hansell, Geraldine Fabrikant, New York Times (June 2) - AOL after a lifetime of being a paid subscription service is about to open a free portal.

The new portal will have news, sports and business and "some original programming, like music videos, and an emphasis on interests like women's fitness".

"AOL hopes to leapfrog its rivals by using the latest technology in its new portal, particularly with video. The site will begin public tests this month and should be generally available by the end of the summer. AOL will try to draw traffic to the portal from its assorted free properties, including Netscape, Mapquest, Moviefone and most important, the AOL Instant Messenger chat system. Collectively, those services are used by more than 50 million people a month who are not AOL members."

AOL had 21.2 million subscribers in January, down from 26.5 million in 2002

FirstStop Web Search

FirstStop Enhances Meta-Search Tool with "Social-Bookmarks" in EContent (May 31)

"FirstStop WebSearch, LLC has announced the addition of a "Social Bookmarks" search category within FirstStop WebSearch, its meta-search engine software product.

With a single search, users can now obtain an aggregated list of search results from popular social bookmarking systems such as LookSmart's Furl.net, CiteULike.org, and Zniff.com, a search engine for the Spurl.net. The new search category will be pre-installed in all new downloads and will be available via update for the existing users of FirstStop WebSearch."

Jux2.com Not Found

Jux2 Goes Offline in SEW blog (May 31) - Sad news indeed - Jux2.com has closed its site. The site was part of a project to show overlap of results and doesn't have funding to continue, popular as it had become as a metasearch engine. Gary Price recommends Dogpile's> new feature for showing results by engine, and Ranking Thumbshots.com.