Internet News

On being found in Google

Keeping Yourself Out of Web And Other Databases Gary Price, SEW Blog (Oct 3) - comments on an article that blames Google again for carrying personal information about people.

"Trying to remain completely and totally private in the United States might be possible. Very difficult, but I guess possible."

Engineering Vertical

GlobalSpec, the engineering hum, was featured as Resource Shelf's Resource of the Week Oct 6. Talk about a vertical or a specialty site! "It now indexess roughly 200 million pages of technical information, including 15,500 online product catalogs and 199 million engineering & technical Web pages."

Trains and Buses in Europe

Travel Databases for Europe: Lots of Trains and Some Planes SEW Blog (Oct 17) - recommends Die Bahn for finding train and bus schedules in Europe. Describes how to use it and has other tips.

Google Print and Google Library

Google Print Press Review & Just A Bit About Search Inside the Book by Gary Price in SEW Blog (Oct 18 ) - recaps news about Google Print and Google Library and takes pains to separate the two. Google's master plan is not to display entire books online; it is to help find them - it will only show snippets.

Study of Web Searching by Youth

The development of children's Web searching skills - a non-linear model by AnnBritt Enochsson, Department for Educational Sciences Karlstad University, and The Interactive Institute, Stockholm, Sweden in Information Research (Oct 2005)

"The aim of this article is to determine the various skills necessary for seeking information on the Internet in educational settings. Throughout the article there is also an aim to present the students' perspective on possibilities and difficulties when using the Internet."

Social Bookmarking

Share and Play Tag on the New Web Playground PC Magazine (Oct 21) - reviews community bookmark sites some of which support saving pages:

+ Clipmarks - good but won't work with Firefox
+ del.icio.us - well established but said to be confusing. Receives the lowest rating.
+ Jeteye (beta) - mix of blog, wiki, community.
+ Shadows (beta) - needs setup software.
+ Yahoo! My Web 2.0 (beta) -finds it the best for social-bookmarking.

But where's Furl.net? It has saved pages, recommendations, alerts, searching.

Read the one page version.

Autonomy Interprets Web

Autonomy's Consumer Division Announces Creation of Conceptual Index of World Wide Web Press Release (Oct 25) - This would be something to see - "brings next generation retrieval features to the web, including conceptual clustering, implicit query, video search and Autonomy's unique Automatic Query Guidance (AQG). Autonomy's AQG automatically returns categories of results based on the meaning of the query, providing an easy navigation facility directing users to the results they require based on a conceptual and contextual understanding of their query." But doesn't look like this will be public - it's intended for enterprises.

Search Engine Update

What's New In Search Engines Informatin Today blog for Internet Librarian (Oct 28) - capsule account of presentation by Gary Price and Greg Notess on changes at the major search engines. Most change seems, from this summary, to have been at Yahoo - and almost none at Google.

Slides are at http://www.resourceshelf.com/ilwebsearch05.html

Google Print at Internet Librarian

Dualing Keynotes...And a Third by Marydee Ojala, Information Today blog of the Internet Librarian conference (Oct 28) - summary and comments about a discussion centered on Google Print that involved Rich Wiggins, Roy Tennant, and a Google rep - Adam Smith. Some pro and con, many reservations, much concern over copyright, some clarification (very little) about what Google is doing.

Books at the Open Library

Ready for reading books in facsimile? Internet Archive continues its good work to make public domain books easily available with OpenLibrary.org.

There are several titles ready for viewing and downloading (if you wish). This is part of the Internet Archive's digitazation project with the Open Alliance.

Have a look; read a book.

Web 2.0 and Libraries

Web 2.0: Building the New Library in Ariadne (Oct 2005). "Paul Miller explores some of the recent buzz around the concept of 'Web 2.0' and asks what it means for libraries and related organisations."

This excellent article describes Web 2.0 and possible opportunities for libraries. Web 2.0 is more than participation. It is also about repurposing content, remixing, recombining and in the words of the author, the "freeing of data"; Web 2.0 "permits the building of virtual applications".

For libraries - "Leveraging the approaches typified by Web 2.0's principles and technology offers libraries many opportunities to serve their existing audiences better, and to reach out beyond the walls and Web sites of the institution to reach potential beneficiaries where they happen to be, and in association with the task that they happen to be undertaking."

Article mentions several blogs and podcasts people can plug into to stay tuned into the Web 2.0 using the Web 2.0 way.

Checking Flights

Accessing Flight Info on the Web SEW Blog (Oct 28) Yahoo, Google, and Ask Jeeves can all give the status of flights in the US and Canada, but other sites listed in this blog entry can give much more such as FlightView which shows a map and the plane's location.

Social Bookmarking

On the Spate of Social Bookmarking Sites Traffick.com (Oct 28) - Shadows is another new social bookmarking service. Are are these "startups looking for a solution" as Cory Kleinschmidt says? I'm with Cory and add my two bits to ask how many of these can a person belong to? Once you get set up in one, why would you join and maintain another? Cory says the answer lies in a social bookmarking service connected to a browser and sees promise in Flock, a new browser. But, I'm not so sure - I'd like a service that integrates easily with several browsers.

Looksmart's Vertical Search

LookSmart(R) Unveils 161 New 'Vertical' Web Sites in 12 Categories for Consumers to Find Essential Information on the Web Business Wire via Marketwatch [reg] (Oct 28) - Reports that there are 13 vertical categories and 181 sites.

"For each vertical category, LookSmart has developed an array of niche sites. For example, LookSmart's Money web sites include: mutual funds, real estate, retirement, savings, stocks, taxes and more. Unlike many other sites, content and articles found on LookSmart's vertical search sites are freely accessible and from a wide variety of sources."

These verticals are now listed at Looksmart's main site -- http://search.looksmart.com/

I looked at the Education vertical which has topics such as "How to do research", "Intellectual Trends", "Knowledge for Parents", "The United States".

"How to research" was very "how to do it" - arrange a room, burn a CD, build a window box. The results are a mix of articles from FindArticles and web sites and, of course, advertisements. The results aren't bad but seem on the light side for content - or maybe it's some of the topics that make it seem light. Literate, a sub-topic in Intellectual Trends, is about "best films, music, art, and literature" and has a "hot topics" Chuck Close and Weezer, though to be fair there is also Marshall McLuhan (still). Looksmart also organizes the publications in FindArticles by this topic as well - Intellectual's Trends Publications.

Of course Looksmart has integrated FurlNet, an excellent tool for saving pages and urls and sharing with others, into the new scheme. Through the new Looksmart you can search "shared pages" and save individual search results page to your own space.

There are options to search only articles, the web, news, blogs, shared Furl pages or everything. It looks like Looksmart looks for all words, and will accept "" to mark words together and - to mark words to exclude. But there is no Help page and no Advanced Search. If you really want to search articles it is better to go to FindArticles at http://www.findarticles.com/.

I always liked the old Looksmart subject directory, which is still at http://www.looksmart.com/r?, but I could get to like this too. Browsing is excellent, though not necessarily elevating - there's no category for Arts and Humanities and the Science section looks incomplete. Search, although it is very basic, does seem to bring up a small set of very good and relevant articles and sites, at least for the queries I chose - atrial fibrillation, "legal research tutorials", and history of toronto.

Pamela Parker at CLickZ fills in the Looksmart's history and financial situation, which isn't good, and actions to attract advertisers - LookSmart Searches for Vertical Comeback.

Of interest: "The model of a vast array of topic-specific sites is similar to what Hills oversaw when he was COO and president of sales at About, but, in the LookSmart case, the content is brought together technologically rather than by human editors."

AOL Video adds RSS feeds

AOL Bolsters Video Offerings With New RSS Feeds Online Media Daily (Oct 27) - AOL is adding RSS feeds to its video search engine from sources such as Forbes.com, PC World, and music video aggregator Blastro.com. Article has more on AOL's Singingfish and AOL Video.

WSJ Free Nov 7 -12

Dow Jones Revives Free Online Access Campaign DM News (Oct 27)

"Dow Jones & Co. will offer free access to The Wall Street Journal Online for six days next month after a similar exercise last year generated 10,000 new paid subscriptions to the news site.

The Nov. 7-12 Open House campaign will let non-subscribers read the news and features on the site at www.wsj.com without registering. "

Academy of Television at Google Video

Google Announces Partnership for Free Viewing EContent (Oct 28) - Good news for all TV program buffs -- "Google and the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation has announced a joint effort to make the Foundation's Archive of American Television interviews available for free viewing on Google Video. This collection includes interviews with Alan Alda, Dick Wolf, Steven Bochco and other television actors, writers, producers, and directors."

Evaluating Healthline

Rita Vine shows the steps and thought process in conducting a thorough evaluation of a new search tool, in this case Healthline, a new health web search engine. The Challenge of Evaluating Health Search Tools, Sitelines (Oct 27)

There is background to this story which you can pick up in her posting. It began with the first review in Sitelines that found the content at Healthline comes from other commercially based sources and identified some glitches in navigation. Tony Gentile, VP, Product Management at HealthLine.com, responded in his blog to explain and defend. It's a good debate and Rita has invested a lot of time to conduct such a thorough review.

There is a cost to creating sites like Healthline, and a danger to cutting corners and compromising the design to launch the product. Healthline does not have the original content it claims is part of the service online yet, and the 1,100 physician specialists it says colloborated on the project were for an earlier version of Healthline and were likely nameless then too.

This isn't to say not to use Healthline - it has useful navigational features and personalized MyHealthline for saving pages and setting up alerts - but use it advisedly, noting the shortcomings that Rita has identified. Question statements such as "Healthline is the first search engine dedicated to healthcare, and the only one built by medical specialists for you." Healthline is not the only search engine dedicated to healthcare - Health on the Net (www.hon.ch), as an example, is a "health and medical information" search engine and, according to its about page, it works closely with Swiss university hospitals and has a board of medical and informatic experts, all listed.

US Internet Usage Numbers

Internet Use Up, but So Is User Concern AP via Yahoo News (Oct 27) The US Census Current Population Survey done for October 2003 shows 55% of American households had access to the Internet. A survey by PEW Internet and American Life early in 2005 indicated 68% of adults use the Internet.

"Susannah Fox, who worked on the Pew report, said age and education were the strongest predictors of whether someone uses the Internet. Young adults were the most likely to use the Internet, with a big drop-off among people 70 and older."

But people are changing their habits on line in the face of spyware and viruses.

Of interest: "A survey released this week by Consumer Reports Webwatch found that 86 percent of computer users have changed their online behavior in some way because of concerns about identity theft. A little more than half stopped giving out personal information on the Web, while 25 percent said they stopped making online purchases."

Refers to: U.S. Census Bureau: http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/computer.html

Google Business

Google's ultimate goal is knowledge Bambi Francisco, Marketwatch [free subscription] (Oct 25) - bits and pieces on what Google is up to as part of organizing the world's knowledge - and, now by the looks of it, assist in communications. Monika Henzinger, Google Research Director, is quoted from a paper she wrote, "The World Wide Web has become an important knowledge and communications resource. As more people use the Web for more tasks, it provides an increasingly representative and unprecedented in scale machine-readable sample of interests and activity in the world". This has WiFi, Google Maps, voice commands, Google Video, the Google's entry to classifieds.

Google is going way beyond portal at this point. We need a new word.

Google Scholar and Citation Analysis

Peter Jacso: Google Scholar and The Scientist Jacso gives some background to an article in the New Scientist by Jeff Perkel on the Future of Citation Analysis (available by subscription or through a library). Jacso was interviewed for the article and has more to say and show on how poorly Google Scholar matches cited and citing references.

Yahoo Trip Planner

Plan a Trip in a Single Search with Yahoo! Travel Trip Planner Yahoo Blog (Oct 26) - Yahoo Travel has a new tool for people with the travel bug. Trip Planner helps you do the research for hotels, restaurants, and entertainment and then save the file. I don't think it will cut into Fodor's business - you still need to do the research for tourist attractions, and it's not clear how to look for best prices (or if you can).

Canadians lead in online banking

Canada leads in Internet Banking: Study, Jack Kapica, Globe and Mail (Oct 26) - Report from comScore Media Metrix Canada states that "more than 13.3-million Canadians visited on-line banking sites, representing 68.9 per cent of all Internet users in the country". Not only are more Canadians doing online banking, they are reading more pages and spending more time. Forty percent (40%) of Canadians visit online banking sites. Figures for use are higher in Canada than United States, Britain, France and Germany.

Google Customized News

Google News Canada can be customized somewhat for layout and sections. As well you can create a custom section based on your keywords. Maximum is 20 sections. Customization is for your computer only since it runs on cookies but you can "share your edition" with others by sending a link - or send yourself one in order to set up on a second computer. See the Google News Customized News FAQ

Here is my customized Google News Canada page.

I just wish I could remove Google's pick of the two top stories.

Big Picture at CNet

Google's battle over library books By Elinor Mills, CNet (Oct 24) - yet another article that reviews the main issues surrounding copyright and Google Print. But this has additional interest because of CNet's visual display of related articles. It's called the "big picture' and is powered by Liveplasma.com. It shows connections between stories, topics, and companies.

Articles about Google Print

The Google Print Controversy: A Bibliography Digital Koans, Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (Oct 24) -- Collection of English-language articles about the actions of publishers and authors to block Google's Print Library project. Articles cover roughly a period of four weeks, from September 20 2005 to October 24, 2005, but there are also earlier ones showing the development of the controversy.

What is Google Base?

Something brewing at Google - a new way for people to move content online without doing the web page weblog thing - as far as I can understand. Would work nicely for classifieds and auctions too. Bloggers are tracking this and many are seeing competition for eBay and Craigslist. Watch Google Blogoscoped - Google Base was sort of live (Oct 25)

Also Gary Price provides a good summary in Google Base: It's An Early-Stage Test Project from Google.

Michael Liedtke is almost certain that this is for classified ads. Google Gives Peek at Classified Ad Service AP via Yahoo News (Oct 25)

MSN Book Search

Big announcement from MSN today that it will be working with libraries and the Open Content Alliance to digitize books. Where Google goes, everyone follows - Yahoo and MSN - but in this case they can learn from Google's mistakes.

MSN Book Search, which will come on-stream late in 2006, is "to help people find exactly what they're looking for on the Web, including the content from books, academic materials, periodicals and other print resources." MSN will start with non-copyrighted material (ie older) that is already in the public domain and available from the Open Content Alliance. Books are just the beginning. Later MSN will aim for other "offline" content.

"Microsoft will be collaborating with organizations, educational institutions and libraries throughout the world to build a rich index of information, which it believes will foster the delivery of trusted content from the best sources, not just Web pages. While MSN Book Search will begin with books, Microsoft expects the initiative to branch out to include all types of offline content."

MSN Search Announces MSN Book Search - "MSN is working with the Open Content Alliance to bring millions of publicly available print materials worldwide to the Web." Marketwatch (Oct 25)

Gary Price has more detail in Microsoft Announces MSN Book Search; Joins Open Content Alliance in the SEW blog (Oct 26)

Rainie on Use of the Internet

Information Today is blogging the Internet Librarian conference, now underway at Monterey, California. The opening keynote speech was by Lee Rainie of the Pew Internet and American Life project about how the Internet has changed our lives and continue to do so - likely dramatically. Summary of the talk was written by Don Hawkins.

Exalead's Shortcuts

Exalead Part Deux: An Intro to "Smart Bookmarks" by Gary Price, SEW Blog (Oct 25) - Exalead, the fabulous new search engine from France, allows you to add shortcuts to the home page - and these shortcuts could easily be other search engines.

The Search - Review

Google May Be Bad for You; Battelle's `The Search' Explains Why by Jonathan Thaw, Bloomberg (Sept 29) - reviews John Battelle's new book, `The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture''.

Key sentence -- " The real value of Battelle's book, though, is his analysis of the social implications of search engines, be they operated by Google, Yahoo! Inc. or Microsoft Corp."

FAST does Desktop

FAST Unveils a New Standard for Desktop Enterprise Search Business Wire via Marketwatch [subscription] (Oct 24) Fast Search & Transfer (FAST) has developed a Personal Search Platform (PSP - oh these 3-letter acronyms!) for use in companies to bring together the desktop computer, the networked resources of the enterprise, and the Web into one search sweep.

""FAST PSP will bring personalization, localization, deeper search analysis and greater access to information to every desktop - leading to increased productivity and efficiencies for users and the entire enterprise," explained Bjorn Olstad, chief technology officer of FAST. "

Firefox users Customize Google

Geniuses bowdlerize Google for Firefox users at Passing Notes (Jul 15) - took a while for this notice about Customize Google, a cool extension for Firefox, to show up - Dave lists all the reasons he likes it. It has links to other search engines, blocks spam, and makes dealing with images easier - and there are several other reasons.

Get it at http://www.customizegoogle.com/.

Flock, a new browser

Choosing the Web browser of the future Blogma from CNet (Oct 24) - A new browser called Flock seems to be getting some attention. It's more community oriented - has some RSS, does blogging, and integrates with del.ici.us for bookmarsk. It's Web 2.0!

If you are a developer and brave of heart to try the very new, you can download it from http://www.flock.com/.

Hospital Wait Times in Ontario

Ontario waiting times go on-line Globe and Mail (Oct 24) - Ontarians can check access wait times for key surgical procedures at http://www.health.gov.on.ca/. " Wait times are categorized by procedure, hospital and local health network."

Images from NYPL

Search for images at the New York Public Library Digital Gallery Pandia Search (Oct 29) - about the Digital Gallery of the New York Public Library and availability of images for free download for personal use. There are 376,000 images, all very well organized.

Pretrieve for US Public Records

Pretrieve is a metasearcher for public records in the United States. It will retrieve records about a person from public web sources starting with phone number and address but including civil and criminal records (or so it seems from the choices). Related searches will show the address on Google Maps from which one can get a satellite view - not enough to see the backyard furniture, but good enough to get a sense of location. Perhaps, more interesting is the search by address and access to information about elected officials for the area, real estate sales, political contributions, pollution, and more. Pretrieve organizes access to these many databases under tabs for Property Information, Financial, Local, Criminal, Court, Professional, Research (searching Highbeam) and Miscellaneous. However, as is usually the case with these services, you need to know a fair amount about a person before doing the search to be sure you have the right person; and the records may be incomplete - for example, not all political contributions will be on record.

See earlier review by Genie Tyburski.

Healthline Beta

A New Line on Healthcare News by Tara Breton, Newsbreaks (Oct 24) - Finds that Healthline (previously YourDoctor.com) is a web search engine for health content using "specialized medical taxonomy to crawl, index, and then rank Web pages." It's a consumer health site (rather than professional) that still needs some polishing. More content will be added over the next few months.

See earlier comments by Chris Sherman and by Rita Vine about this engine.

Inform is Good

Inform.com Is Newest News/Blog Aggregator by Denise Dayton, Newsbreaks (Oct 24) Reviews in detail Inform.com, the impressive new tool for reading news and blogs.

"There are already a number of news aggregators out there, but Inform offers several things that it says are new. The system’s differentiating technology uses a series of information structuring techniques and natural-language interpretation to autocategorize and group news stories into thousands of categories. The text of stories is shredded to isolate the important elements of each. Once the elements have been identified, one can easily connect and read news on any person, place, organization, topic, industry, or product."

Google Print and Authors

The Authors Guild v. The Google Print Library Project By Jonathan Band, LLRX.com (Oct 15) - describes Google's Print Library Project and examines the copyright claims by the Authors' Guild with a review of the legal issues. Concludes in Google's favour - " The Google Print Library Project will make it easier than ever before for users to locate the wealth of information buried in books. By limiting the search results to a few sentences before and after the search term, the program will not diminish demand for books. " - but will the court?

IMDB Power Search

Inside the Internet Movie Database by By Gary Price, SearchDay (Oct 24) - Price recommends the Power Search for the Internet Movie Database. He's right - it's awesome.

Ipselon Metasearcher

There's a new metasearch engine - Ipselon - that claims to "return results from the four leading search engines along with the Ipselon search results". Unfortunately, the announcement doesn't say what four engines or anything about Ipselon itself. Nor is there any indication at the search engine.

However, in its favour it does support clustering - though you have to ask for it through the Advanced Search page or set preferences.

Preferences page also offers "regional customization" that will add an option to search a particular country on the search page.

The nicest feature is that you can save a result and rank it; also sort saved results by the search query.

This is still in beta. It might return some odd error messages - like " Data Expired !!! Please make a fresh search". There a few kinks to work out but this might develop nicely.

Ipselon, Brand New Meta Search Engine, Breathes New Life Into an Industry PRWeb (Oct 19)

WiFi Hotspots in Canada

Browsing from coast to coast By MARK BLANCHARD, Globe and Mail (Oct 21) -- WiFi hotspots are spreading across Canada in restaurants, convention centres, train and bus stations thanks to an intercarrier arrangement among Bell Mobility, Fido, Rogers Wireless and Telus Mobility. A list of a list locations can be found on-line at http://www.canadianhotspot.ca.

Google Map Mashups

Web mapmakers set out on countless journeys By DAMON DARLIN, New York Times via Globe and Mail (Oct 21) -- About the "mash ups" that are being created on top of Google Maps to show things. Mentions Google Maps Mania (www.gmapsmania.com) - a blog by Mike Pegg in Waterloo Ontario who is trying to keep track of them.

Students thrive on rss

RSS feeds college students' diet for research By Anh Ly, Gannett News Service (Aug 1, 2005) - how students use RSS to do their research and keep abrest. Mentions Pluck and Onfolio. Makes reading RSS feeds sound easier and more productive that it actually is.

Just for Librarians

Google is warming up to librarians with the promise of a new quarterly newsletter with tips and news. This is to be delivered through Google Groups. Over 7,300 have subscribed so far - likely in the last week or two. See the Google Librarian Center.

Copyright and Trademarks

Copyrights, Trademarks and Search Engines By Grant Crowell, SearchDay (Oct 20) - debate about implications for web site owners surrounding copyright on their work (or others) and trademark clashes. Consider RSS feed from one source being input for another site and the second site gets revenue through AdSense. This gets more complicated by the day.

Sullivan on Splog

Problems With Splogs & Time-Based Searching Search Engine Watch Blog (Oct 19) - Danny Sullivan blasts out against splog - spam blogging - and predicts that all search engines, web and blog, will end up excluding all weblogs done through free services such as Google's Blogger, Yahoo 360, and MSNSpaces. It happened with the free homesteading web space at Tripod and others, and will likely happen with blogging. Blog search engines are more affected than Web search because entries are ranked by date.

Authors and Google Print

Leggo My Ego - GooglePrint and the other culture war. By Tim Wu, Slate (Oct 17) - analyzes the complaints by authors of Google's Print project.

"At stake are two different visions of what might best promote authorship in this country. One side trumpets the culture of authorial exposure, the other urges the culture of authorial control. The relevant questions, respectively, are: Do we think the law should help authors maximize their control over their work? Or are authors best served by exposure—making it easier to find their work?"

Tim Wu comes down on the side of Google Print and exposure.

Web Search Books

Searching for a Good Searching Book? by Chris Sherman, Searchday (Oct 19) - lists book reviews about web searching that have appeared in SearchDay. Doesn't include Sherman's own book - Google Power.

Maporama Travel Itineraries

MAPORAMA INTERNATIONAL UNVEILS ITS NEW ITINERARY ENGINE AND ITS EXCLUSIVE FUNCTIONALITIES (Oct 20) - Maporama, an excellent services for maps and directions, has announced a "new itinerary engine". "This new itinerary engine, automatically available on the entire base of data servers of Maporama International, is available for the totality of Maporama International’s customers and for the entire range of products and services of Maporama International." ... "The principle of the itinerary engine is simple: from a departure address and an arrival address, or from longitude/latitude coordinates, Maporama International’s servers calculate an optimized itinerary, respecting several constraints: the shortest or the more rapid itinerary, a pedestrian or car itinerary, a multimodal itinerary…"

Inside Google Scholar

Google Scholar Grows - An Update Sitelines (Oct 5) -- summarizes points made by Google Scholar's chief engineer, Anurag Acharya in Searching Scholarly Literature: A Google Scholar Perspective.

To note:

- Goal: Single place to find scholarly material.
- Make research free to all users.
- Need to normalize citations.

- 325 libraries using Google Scholar to link to their own resources.
- Google Scholar is connected to OCLC's Open WorldCat.

- Coverage: Commercial publishers but not Elsevier or ACS. Also hosting services - Ingenta, Highwire, MUSE and others. PubMed.
- Physics 12 %, Engineering 14%, Social Science 13%, Business 5%, Biology 13%, Chemistry 7%, Medical 22%.

AAP Sues Google

Publishers Sue Google Over Plans to Digitize Copyrighted Books - Google Print Library Violates Publishers' and Authors' Rights PRNewswire via Marketwatch (Oct 19) - Association of American Publishers (AAP) is going ahead with their its against Google for its scanning practices in the Google Print Library project. Among the members of the association are The McGraw-Hill Companies, Pearson Education, Penguin Group (USA), Simon & Schuster and John Wiley & Sons. According to the press release -- "As a way of accomplishing the legal use of copyrighted works in the Print Library Project, AAP proposed to Google that they utilize the well-known ISBN numbering system to identify works under copyright and secure permission from publishers and authors to scan these works. Since the inception of the ISBN system in 1967, a unique ISBN number has been placed on every book, identifying each book and linking it to a specific publisher. Google flatly rejected this reasonable proposal."

Jux2 Back for a bit

Imagine my surprise to see Jux2.com, that wonderful little metasearch engine, back online today. But it is only until the owners manage to sell it. What to Buy a Meta Search Engine? Jux2 is For Sale on eBay by Gary Price, SEW Blog (Oct 17)

eBay and Skype

Warming up to eBay - Commentary: Will Skype help drive the eBay monopoly? Bambi Francisco, Marketwatch [registration] (Oct 18) - Comments generally on the search scene and observes - "no one knows where the search wars will be fought next." Meanwhile, eBay monopolizes the online marketplace even more so with its acquisition of PayPal and now Skype Technologies (for VoIP).

Answers Corporation

GuruNet is Now Officially Answers Corporation PRNewswire via Marketwatch (Oct 18) - first Atomica, then Gurunet, and now Answers Corp - hope this name sticks.

Google Earth and Commercial Real Estate

Google Earth digs deeper Jon Ann Steinmetz, Mercury News [registration] (Oct 18) -- "Commercial real estate's largest data provider is working with Google to integrate its vast stores of building information with the Google Earth interactive satellite mapping service."

Google Print Europe

Google Opens 8 Sites in Europe, Widening Its Book Search Effort by Edward Wyatt, New York Times (Oct 18) - Google Print has opened sites for 8 European countries - France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium and Spain [print.google.nn where nn is the country code; eg print.google.fr] Users will be able to "search books provided by publishers in each country as well as English-language books in the Google library for which the company has secured local rights." Later, these sites will also have content from foreign-language books at the New York Public Library and the university libraries of Stanford, Harvard, Michigan and Oxford. European publishers who have signed on so far are Grupo Planeta and Grupo Anaya of Spain, De Boeck and Editions De L'Eclat of France and Springer Science & Business Media of Holland.

Google Print UK

Google clarifies Print differences in Europe Information World Review (Oct 18) -- Google Print will be "scanning library works that are in the public domain and pre-1900”. Library pages will link back to libraries and not have any advertising.

TVC Alert has a listed of related articles about Google Print and copyright problems - Different Approach for Google Library in U.K. (Oct 19)

Creative Commons

Generosity and Copyright - Creative Commons and Creative Commons Search Tools by Laura Gordon-Murnane, Intranet Webmaster, Bureau of National Affairs, Inc. in Searcher (July / Aug 2005) - It's not going to be easy -- " How can you help patrons identify public domain content that might come from blogs, podcasts, Web sites, and organizations? Existing copyright laws have made it more difficult to identify public domain content. " Article reviews copyright law in the US, describes the Creative Commons initiative, and has some information about searching the Creative Commons.

Yahoo blogs and podcasts

Yahoo! Debuts Two New Tools for Mining Expert Information by Paula Bernstein, Newsbreaks (Oct 17)

Describes Yahoo's "two new tools for locating information from non-mainstream sources: News Search Now with Blogs Beta (http://news.yahoo.com) and Yahoo! Podcasts Beta (http://podcasts.yahoo.com)."

Blogspam rampant

Google Draws Fire Over Blogspot Spam Blogs at Netcraft (Oct 17) - What everyone has suspected for some time - Blogger (or BlogSpot) is overrun with spam blogs. Hard to say how many there are but Technorati counted 39,000 new ones in the last 2 weeks. IceRocket has stopped indexing posts from Blogspot.com.

Travel Picks

A sampling of new travel Web sites by Darren M. Green, Chicago Tribune (registration) (Oct 16)

Picks were:

+ Budget Travel Online www.budgettravelonline.com from Frommer
+ Kayak Www.kayak.com has car-rental search.
+ Marriott Golf's "Rounds and Rooms" online golf resort and tee time reservation system
+ Offical travel guide Www.officialtravelguide.com - tends to link to "convention-and-visitor-bureau Web site for that location"
+ Google Earth for flying virtually everywhere.

Quintura in the wings

Quintura Search - Pandia Search (Oct ) Quintura promises "revolutionary web search software". Software will use dynamic clusterization and semantic maps.

Instant Answers Sketchy

Search Sites Try to Give Instant Answers by Steve Bass, PC World (OCt 24)

""Three search engines promise to serve up direct answers to so-called natural-language queries: natural-language veteran AskJeeves; GuruNet's Answers.com, a relative newcomer to Web search; and MSN Search, which recently beefed up its search results with information culled from Microsoft's Encarta encyclopedia. In our sample searches, however, the three services did much better at answering our general-information questions than they did at replying to technical, topical, or geo-specific questions."

Healthline

Curing Medical Information Disorder by Chris Sherman, SearchDay (Oct 17) - recommends Healthline - "a specialized medical search engine that offers high-quality, authoritative information that's easy to find, even if you don't speak medicalese."

Site offers a short tour of the main features. Among the best is the taxonomy that supports broadening and narrowing queries as well as browsing health channels. There are also many self-assessment tools. People who take advantage of the free registration can set up news alerts and talk with other members.

Rita Vine, whose expertise is in quality health resources, examined Healthline and found that it "offers little to rival the best quality ad-and-sponsorship-free medical content on the web through sites like Medline Plus. Healthline relies principally on content from popular pre-existing 3rd party .com sources that could be obtained from any commercial search engine." See her full posting -- Scratching Under the Surface of a "New" Health Search Engine (Oct 18)

Practices of a blog reader

For the Vox Populi: A Comparison of How Some Blog Aggregation and RSS Search Tools Work by Mary Hodder, Napsterization (July 24)

"I'm going to do this as a six part series, the first of which is below, on how services track links to blogs. The second will be on key word search, the third will cover subscription search (watchlist) performance, the fourth will look at special services and the fifth will look at spam and controls for it. The sixth will summarize and make recommendations about how to best use the services. I picked the five services I look at every day: Technorati, Feedster, Bloglines, Blogpulse and Pubsub, and so I'm familiar with them over time. I see watchlists or alerts via RSS feeds from all but Bloglines, of both URL and keyword searches, many of which are duplicate searches that allow me to also track how the services do with their searches. Note that I'm not reviewing Bloglines as a newsreader, partly because I use Netnewswire for the most part, with Bloglines as one of my backup readers, and partly because there is no comparison to the other services because they are not news readers at all."

For the Vox Populi, Part II: A Comparison of How Some Blog Aggregation and RSS Search Tools Work for Keyword Search

Interesting outline but doesn't look like parts 3 to 6 were ever written.

A few words go a long way

I Speak Search By Gord Hotchkiss, Search Engine Guide (Oct 14) - finds that in constructing search queries, "We are becoming adept at paring down complex concepts into a few well chosen words." Less than 5% of searches at Google use the Advanced Search features. But Hotchkiss thinks this does not mean searches are unsophisticated - "But I’m beginning to believe the common view is misguided. I think we’re getting quite sophisticated in the way we use search. We have learned how to make a few words go a long way. Don’t mistake short queries for a lack of sophistication. Generally, a short query matches our intent at the time. We want a broad, inclusive focus. When we’re ready to narrow the parameters, we add the words necessary. We understand that search is an iterative process."

AOL's Suitors

Suddenly relevant - Commentary: Google, AOL, Comcast gets my vote by Bambi Francisco, Marketwatch (Oct 17) - Why is Time Warner selling AOL? Why are Google, Comcast, and Yahoo interested? What other suitors will appear? Who is the best suitor? Francisco has answers to these questions and more. She thinks that the Google - Comcast combo makes sense.

"As for Comcast's role, it might be able to help Google roll out free or very low-cost WiFi across the country. Google can be the home page and the search engine. Comcast may also be able to drive AOL's defecting subscribers to a combined Comcast/AOL broadband service. AOL's Time Warner relationship would also be able to provide the exclusive movies."

There will be many articles on this before the deed is done.

News Search Engines

Meet the News Search Engines by Shari Thurow, SearchDay (Oct 18) - report on news search engines from a session at the Search Engine Strategies conference, August 8-11, 2005.

- Moreover - "12,000 handpicked, editorially-ranked online news sources from over 126 countries in 36 languages"
- Topix.net - "Topix.net differentiates its news information via categorization and zip-code level localization. News is available via its web site, partner feeds, RSS feeds, email alerts, and JavaScript iframe."
- Yahoo News - "... "Yahoo News is built on a combination of content that we host on Yahoo.""
- Google News - now has RSS and Atom output.

Inform - personal news centre

All the News That You Can Use. And More. by Bob Tedesch, New York Times (Oct 17) - News hounds will be interested in learning about Inform, a new news aggregator service. Inform identifies themes and relationships. As described - "But Inform goes further, scanning every news article from hundreds of well-known publications (and some blogs), then creating an index of important elements in the article. So as a user reads a WashingtonPost.com article about Sandra Day O'Connor, for example, Inform offers a short list of related stories about the justice and other people, places, organizations, topics, industries and products mentioned in the text." It will be supported by advertising and subscription fees for personalized files and access to archives.

Its competitor is Topix.net, which has strong connections to Gannet, Knight Ridder, and Tribune Company newspaper chains. "Inform.com says it believes the services it offers, like customized news displays and searches of postings from prominent blogs, give it a competitive advantage over Topix."

Inform is in beta. Entry page says that it works best with Internet Explorer 6.0.

Registration is free - can customize news channels, view specific news sources from Inform's collection, and flag articles to read later. Registrants are asked for country - United States, United Kingdom, or other - suggesting that Inform is geared mainly to the US and UK. I could not find any Canadian sources, not even the CBC. But I love the tool - the display, the ease of browsing, the connections to topics and names.

Book - Google Power

Google Power, unleash the full potential of the world’s most popular search engine Pandia Search (Oct 12) - Book review of Google Power by Chris Sherman. Concludes -- "In short: Chris gives you an abundance of information, more than any other search guide we have read. "

Yahoo News has Blogs

Yahoo Integrates Blog Results With News Search ResearchBuzz (Oct 11) - Yahoo has add blog results to its news search although you can also select News only. Talishain says that the "results at the moment are awful -- limited and old."

I doubt that blog results will ever be stunning unless Yahoo can be selective about which blogs and do something to improve relevance. Searchers can choose to search either news and blogs or news only - and once into the search there is no means of toggling blogs on or off. Blog results page also has images from Flickr - why? - this is "integration" taken too far.

Go Beyond Search Engines

Doing Legal, Political, and Historical Research on the Internet by John Dean, Modern Practice - FindLaw (Oct 2005) -- Dean turned to the high traffic weblog forum at Talking Points to get some leads for research he was doing. An article on The Emergence of the Progressive Blogosphere had persuaded him of the value of this new form of online community.

He also writes about using Wikipedia, an example of an "open source" encyclopedia.

Article was mentioned in TVC Alert (Oct 4).

RSS Feed Generator

Kebberfegg -- Keyword-Based RSS Feed Generator - new tool from ResearchBuzz for creating up to 36 keyword-based RSS feeds in one shot . You can choose for several types of sources - news, press releases, blogs. Kebberfegg creates the query at the various sources and you select which ones you want to add to your newsreader. Options through the html page are to add the feed to MyYahoo, Bloglines, use MultiRSS to select a reader, or get the XML url. Neat tool but will take time to create and test good queries.

Info Overload

Unplugged: Information Overload Requires a Human Solution by Paul Chin, Intranet Journal (Oct 13)

"I believe that many people suffering from information overload are allowing technology to run them rather than the other way around. More technology isn't always the answer, no matter how well written or developed. To borrow from another movie, Soylent Green: Productivity is people."

Yahoo, Open Content Alliance, and University of Toronto

Yahoo Works With 2 Academic Libraries and Other Archives on Project to Digitize Collections by Scott Carlson and Jeffrey Young, Chronicle (Oct 3) - further background and comment on Yahoo's alliance with Open Content Alliance to digitize books.

"Yahoo Inc. has teamed up with the University of California, the University of Toronto, and several archives and technology companies on a project that could potentially bring the complete texts of millions of volumes into digital form."

"... Open Content Alliance will be limited mostly to out-of-copyright works -- and to works by publishers who are willing to experiment with giving their content away online. The project will allow generous access to the materials it holds, however, in some cases even allowing users to download the full texts of books."

Of interest to Canadians -- Carole Moore, chief librarian at the University of Toronto, said that 2,000 books have been scanned already, and 1,000 are available through the Internet Archive project. "She said Toronto has coordinated with six other Canadian university libraries, as well as the Library and Archives of Canada, to select books by Canadian authors to be scanned for the project. "We're trying to contribute for everyone a certain amount of Canadian material," she said."

Finding Experts

Finding the Right Expert When All the Experts Have Been Found by Robert Ambrogi, Editor of IMS ExpertServices' BullsEye Newsletter in The Virtual Chase (Oct 2005)

Google Feed Reader

New Google Reader For Feed Reading by Chris Sherman, SEW Blog ( Oct 7 ) - "Google Reader is a browser-based application that works with virtually all popular browsers on Windows, Mac and Linux platforms."

Tara Calishain wasn't especially impressed with the reader saying it felt a "little detached", not like the community feeling in Bloglines. Could be good for people who use Blogger and GMail - otherwise stick with Bloglines or Newsgator or other heavy-duty services. Google Reader for RSS Feeds ResearchBuzz (Oct 11)

Google Blog Search

Google Does Blogs by Mary Ellen Bates, The Virtual Chase (Oct ) - reviews Google's new blog search engine - http://blogsearch.google.com/. Notes two limitations: only indexes the content in the feed and not the blog; and only dates back to March 2005.

Guide to E-Mail

The Complete Guide to E-mail by John Fried at Inc.com (Oct 2005)

"What follows is a guide to the biggest e-mail concerns, particularly security, compliance, and archiving. We'll give you tools for building an e-mail policy now, which can save headaches later, and also advice on buying the right system. There's some gearhead jargon involved, but this stuff isn't really about tech. Ultimately it's about protecting your business."

RSS Primer

Get the Latest Web News Delivered to Your Desktop "With RSS feeds, you can have articles from the Web come to you." by Scott Spanbauer --
From the November 2005 issue of PC World magazine - describes how to use IE and Firefox browsers for picking up RSS feeds and also names five RSS readers for more industry-strength reading.

For Freelance Writers

Have ideas and want to write? Or are you looking for articles? Associated Content might have the article or be your publishing venue. This is a publishing platform that supports text, video, image, voice. It is looking for writers who can provide "marketable content". Associated Content will be the judge of that - then if it makes some money, so does the writer. Browse a bit - there are some nice articles under travel, lifestyles, and technology.

Slow growth in broadband adoption

Broadband Adoption in the United States: Growing but Slowing Pew Internet and American Life (Sept 21)

From the press release - "The growth in home high-speed internet adoption, after growing quickly in the past several years, has slowed down and is poised to slow even further, according to a new report released by the Pew Internet & American Life Project."

Placeopedia

Mapping Places in Wikipedia by Chris Sherman, SearchDay (Oct 13)

Placeopedia is "a "mashup" that pinpoints geographic Wikipedia entries on Google maps. It's a simple but powerful idea that integrates two excellent sources of information, appealing to both the left and right brain."

Can be used to see what postings mention a place. Still thin.

Reviewed in ResearchBuzz -- Connect Wikipedia Articles to Meatspace with Placeopedia (Sept 21)

EliteWeb Portal

Canadian startup takes on search engine giants by Shane Schick, itbusiness.ca (Oct 11) - new search engine from Toronto-based EliteWeb.

"A Canadian startup entered the search engine industry Monday with a portal and set of services designed to provide more selective results than what users find on Yahoo! or Google." Directory is maintained by editors.

"Besides an assortment of news, weather and online communities, EliteWeb is also offering several subscription-based software tools to help small and medium businesses compete with enterprise organizations, including scheduling, recruitment, e-mail marketing and Web site development."

EliteWeb (http://www.eliteweb.cc/) may be based in Toronto, but it is targeting the US. Weather is by zip code (not postal code), top news is American. Directory is quite small. Site offers web mail, online communities, and a personal portal. It has metasearch capabilities. It is packaged fairly well, but there is no compelling reason for using this over all the other very well established portals.

Podcasting

Yahoo Gains Podcast Directory by Danny SUllivan, SEW blog (Oct ) -- Compares the new Yahoo podcast directory (with search engine) to Odeo with tags and featured channels.

Also, New PodSpider Search Engine Delivers Largest Directory of Podcasts in English, Breaks Barrier of 20,000 Podcasts PRNewswire via Marketwatch (Oct 6) -- PodSpider Portal from RapidSolution Software offers a directory to 20,000 podcasts in English categorized into 25 subject areas and 300 categories.

For background on Podcasting, see Podcasting explained, Anchordesk (Oct 5)

Video Search

Video and Podcast Search Engines by Grant Crowell, Searchday (Oct 11)

In this session at the Search Engine Strategies conference, August 8-11, 2005, several vendors spoke about their multimedia search engines: Singingfish, Google Video, Yahoo Video, Blinkx. Also mentions Yahoo's audio search and its podcast directory.

Scirus adds Theses and Dissertations

Scirus Partners with Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations EContent (Oct 11)

"Elsevier has announced a partnership between Scirus, its free science-specific search engine, and the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) to add the collection of theses and dissertations of its member institutes to Scirus. In addition to indexing the content on Scirus.com, Scirus will power a search service on the repository's site."

Start date was not given.

Dumbfind

Dumbfind is a new search engine in beta that combines the keyword search with a topical area. Users have the option to enter keywords in one box, and narrow to a topical area in a second box. Topics are free form - music, arts, history, science. For example, "sicilian vespers" has more results and is less focused than if one specifies history as the topic.

Indexed content seems to be more 'select' than other search engines, drawing from encyclopedia, educational sources, books, journals. However, it also picks up blogs.

It appears to look for ANY of the words or at least, it is not restricted to ALL of the words. Syntax is limited to only " " for words together. There is no exclude.

In looking for the new opera Dr Atomic about Robert Oppenheimer, opera oppenheimer along with music as the topic does find a very short blog entry about it. Without music, the results are nowhere on topic. Using the topic box also provides a better listing when looking specifically for dr atomic as the key phrase and opera as the topic, rather than just searchin on opera "dr atomic".

Worth watching and trying occasionally.

New Search Engine Dumbfind.com Revolutionizes Information Searches Business Wire via CBS Marketwatch (Sep 26)

"Unlike traditional search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves and Microsoft's MSN Search, Dumbfind.com uses innovative search technologies to offer a combination of traditional keyword search with the ability to prioritize results based on generalized topics. This allows users to utilize their intuition to construct highly meaningful and relevant inquiries."

Topix.net

Topix.net Gets Modular With Headlines by Pamela Parker, Clickz (Oct 5) Topix.net is offering news headlines to sites to be used as supplementary information on a topic. Topix.net also provides local and vertical news sections on Web sites such as Ask Jeeves, Info.com, America Online and CitySearch. It also operates a standalone Web site.

Bulletin Boards on the Net

Finding Treasure in Boards and Forums by Chris Sherman, Searchday (Oct 6) Bulletin boards of various forms have a long history on the Internet through Usenet and web forums. Today the primary sources for this kind of community group is through Google Groups, Yahoo Groups and MSN Groups, although there are still some "independent" boards. Article mentions search capabilities through Lycos Discussion Search and BoardTracker.

RSS Users

More Use RSS Than Have Heard Of It by Enid Burns, ClickZ Stats (Oct 11)

"A new white paper produced by Ipsos Insight for Yahoo! finds as many as 27 percent consume content via RSS through personalized start pages such as My Yahoo! and My MSN."

"Among RSS-aware users, world news and national news tie for the most accessed content at 52 percent. Entertainment (34 percent); science and tech news (32 percent); weather (31 percent); and local news (31 percent) garner significant interest. "

Also, Study: RSS Still Not Widely Adopted by Chris Sherman, SearchDay (Oct 12)

Of interest:

"Why do people like RSS? Ease of use and choice of content are top reasons. Another surprising finding was that just 7% of users liked RSS for its instant updating capability, a core benefit of the technology.

Other stats shed light on how much RSS content is being consumed. Among RSS users, the average number of feeds people subscribed to is 6.6, and on average people spent 4.1 hours per week reading feeds."

RocketInfo - RSS Search Company

RSS Offerings New Focus of Rocketinfo Business Wire via CBS Marketwatch (Oct 12)

"Rocketinfo Inc. (RKTI), announces a major strategic policy shift, and will immediately begin focusing its energies on its proprietary RSS technology, numerous RSS assets and exhaustive collection of RSS news feeds."

Rocketinfo offers a free RSS news reader.

PubSub LinkRanks

PubSub’s LinkRanks Measures Blog, RSS Feed Movement, Popularity EContent (Sep 27)

"PubSub.com, a prospective search tool for tracking what people are saying about topics, has announced the formal release of PubSub LinkRanks, a tool for tracking the popularity and influence of blogs and Web sites"

Preview Google Results

GooglePreview extension for Firefox at Pandia Search (Oct 4) - Firefox users can get previews of the web pages in results from a Google search using the Google Preview extension.

AOL Search

New Features at AOL Search by Chris Sherman, SearchDay (Oct 5) - New features at AOL Search include saved searches, snapshot answers, quick answers,

Opera 8.5 Free

In version 8.5 of the Opera browser, Opera has dropped banner ads from the free version of the browser, and reduced the cost of premium support to $29 US / year. Available for Windows, Mac, Linux and other operating system.s

Opera nixes banner ads in free version CNet News (Sept 20)

More from this press release.

At PC World, 6 % of users are using Opera, twice as many as the previous year. Opera: It's Getting More Popular, Too (Oct 11)

Back to Books

Make your own library with LibraryThing by By Lars Iselid, InternetBrus, Pandia Search (Sep 27)

"LibraryThing, which was launched in Beta in August, is a service similar to the bookmark service Del.icio.us and the photo sharing service Flickr. As you have probably guessed, LibraryThing organizes books."

Flash for Google Video

Google Video Gets Flashy Search Engine Watch blog (Sep 26) Google Video is now using Adobe Flash to show its videos. New method is seen as better viewing, more control, and faster searching.

Size Wars Meaningless

End Of Size Wars? Google Says Most Comprehensive But Drops Home Page Count by Danny Sullivan, SearchDay (Sep 27) - Google no longer shows the number of pages it indexes. Will this end the competition over size of index and the view that bigger is better? Sullivan reviews the long history of size, relevance, and comprehensiveness and shows that the numbers no longer signify much. There is no good way to measure comprehensiveness - you must assess it based on the results from your searches, keeping in mind that one engine may be better than another for a topic.

Watson 2.0 - personal research assistant

Watson 2.0 Sidebar Now Available for MSN Search Toolbar with Windows Desktop Search Users PRNewswire via CBS Marketwatch (Sep 23)

"The Watson 2.0 personal research assistant proactively brings users the information they need from the sources they choose. Since Watson understands the context of users' work, it is able to proactively find information that's relevant to what they are doing in real-time. There's no need for users to interrupt their work by typing search words or visiting separate Web sites and search boxes. Instead, Watson delivers relevant search results to users' desktops in its non-intrusive sidebar while they work in Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Outlook, and Internet Explorer."

Watson is from Intellext - http://www.intellext.com/. This is software. See the demo.

Digital Duo

New online e-magazine from PC World - Digital Duo - "an independent, irreverent video review of all things digital. Hosted by Stephen Manes and Angela Gunn."

"In each episode of PC World's Digital Duo, Stephen Manes, columnist for PC World and Forbes, teams with tech writer Angela Gunn of USAToday.com to test, talk over, and--when necessary--tear into the gadgets and gear that make up the current digital-tech landscape."

FirstGov.gov goes with Vivisimo

Vivisimo and MSN to Power FirstGov by Gary Price, SearchDay (Sep 26) In redesigning the Firstgov.gov portal, General Services Administration has contracted with Vivisimo and MSN Search to improve the search capabilities.

"Vivisimo plans to use its own crawling technology to develop focused/targeted crawls of some government (federal and local) material and then combine and cluster these with MSN results."

New service will be available February or later 2006.

Jeeves Retiring

The Butler Didn't Do It for Diller ClickZ (Sep 22) - Seems Jeeves is more of a hindrance than a help in projecting the desired image for Ask.com.

"Ask will become the hub for many of IAC's properties, like its Citysearch local search business, and its various retailing and online services businesses."

Myriad Search

Myriad Search: Meta Search Your Way by Chris Sherman, SearchDay (Sep 22) - reviews a new metasearch engine called Myriad Search that may help search engine optimizers "with competitive intelligence research on keywords". It compares results from Ask Jeeves, Google, MSN Search and Yahoo.

eSnips for web storage

A New Approach to Sharing Web Research by Mary Ellen Bates, Search Day (Sep 21) - recommends eSnips, a "free web-based file storage and sharing tool" developed by Net Snippets. Tool is good for "snipping" bits from pages and capturing screen shots. Works with IE (Firefox promised) and offers 1 GB of storage.

PR Newswire RSS Feeds

PR Newswire Launches Hundreds of Categorized RSS Feeds PR Newswire via CBS Marketwatch (Sep 22) - PR Newswire offers 125 new RSS news feeds by subject, region, and industry.

""PR Newswire was the first major commercial newswire to create RSS feeds," said Armon. "Today we have significantly increased the value of these feeds by making them available in hundreds of categories -from auto to policy, earnings to IPOs and even podcasts - and providing them in multiple languages. Visitors to our Web sites can combine our RSS feeds with their own RSS readers' settings to create even more personalized news. This is one more reason customers can be confident that we deliver their content in the formats the media and their other audiences desire, giving their news a greater chance of pickup and usage.""

Feeds are listed at http://www.prnewswire.com/rss/

Alacra for business information

Alacra Launches the Alacra Wiki EContent (Sep 20)

"Alacra, Inc., a provider of online business information solutions, has announced the launch of the Alacra Wiki, a free collaborative Web site designed to help people find sources of business information. The Alacra Wiki provides descriptions and links to in-depth business and financial databases ranging from archival news services to industry-specific directories. Alacra designed its Wiki with the objective of enabling users to educate themselves about the companies and people that drive the business information industry."

Outsell's Outlook for Information Industry

Outsell Forecasts Single Digit Growth for the Information Industry EContent (Sep 23) - summarizes findings from "FutureFacts: 2006 and Beyond, a comprehensive forecast of the trends and drivers fueling the Information Industry" by Outsell. Full report is available for download from Outsell - Future Facts.

Yahoo and the Open Content Alliance

Yahoo Alliance Plans Open Web Library Sci-Tech Today (Oct 3)

"The Open Content Alliance, a project that Yahoo is backing with several other partners, plans to provide digital versions of books, academic papers, video and audio. Much of the material will consist of copyrighted material voluntarily submitted by publishers and authors, said David Mandelbrot, Yahoo's vice-president of search content."

Gary Price at Search Day describes this in full in A New Digital Library Alliance Makes its Debut (Oct 3)

"The Internet Archive, Yahoo, Adobe Systems, The European Archive, Hewlett Packard Labs, The National Archives (UK), O'Reilly Media Inc, and the University of California are the founding members of the OCA."

See Open Content Alliance.

Further analysis by John Blossom in Open Sandbox: The Open Content Alliance Forges the Ultimate Content Collection Shore Communications (Oct 3) -- describes purpose of OCA and has some points about what OCA may mean to content producers. Finds that Google's approach to digitizing content from publishers and libraries has been bullyish.

"OCA has some of the best minds in the world working on effectively collecting and archiving content into what could prove to be an unprecedented public asset. Score a big one for Yahoo!'s growing ability to attract content players with vested interests into a common framework that makes them feel safe."

Google Print and Copyright Issues

Let Google Copy! Wired (Sep 22) -- Writers Guild of America is suing Google for "illegally copying protected works for a commercial purpose without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holders."

Also Google Print Pressures Libraries by Ben Charny, PC Magazine (Sep 23) -- "Libraries are not now a defendant in the U.S. District Court complaint against Google filed earlier Tuesday by The Author's Guild and three authors."

New RSS Reader

Active Web Reader tracks RSS feeds and tracks bookmarks. Requires Windows and IE 6. Was reviewed in the Scout Report. More about the software at http://www.deskshare.com/awr.aspx.

Guide to Enterprise Search

"Specifying and Implementing Enterprise Search" By Martin White in Freepint (Sept 29) Article is an introduction to article to an in-depth report published
by FreePint: "Enterprise Search Guidebook".

"The overall awareness of search by many managers has been limited to the experience of using Google, and other web search engines, and there seems to be little understanding of the differences between web search and intranet/enterprise search. This situation may improve now that desktop searching is rapidly increasing in performance."

Lists 10 critical success factors and names 10 web resources.

Book is reviewed in the October 13th issue - "Enterprise Search Guidebook"
reviewed by Helen Day