November 30, 2005
Wikipedia Hacks
Ten Wikipedia Hacks - Steve Rubel at MicroPersuasion (Nov 19) has 10 tricks (hacks) for getting more out of Wikipedia, which he says is his favourite reference source. Placopedia , a Google Maps mashup that connects Wikipedia articles with their locations, is one of these.
Firefox 1.5
Firefox Upgrades its Browser "The company releases the latest version of the No. 2 browser, second only to Microsoft's Internet Explorer." Red Herring (November 29, 2005) - mainly it promises to be faster and to be easier to update.
"The group said the upgrade offers features like automated product update, improvements in pop-up blocking, and faster navigation with better back- and forward-button performance."
iPureSearch - new metasearcher
iPureSearch.com is a new metasearch engine from the UK that maximizes use of rollovers in its effort to have you "search like you surf".
It's interesting to use:
+ 28 channels
+ highlight text and click on channel to run a search from search results
+ has a quick look
+ claims to not include sponsored listings
+ metasearch on the movie channel is good - picks up from a variety of sources.
But it doesn't:
+ show the source search engine
+ cluster results.
New Engine Lets You 'Search Like You Surf' PrNewswire via Marketwatch (Nov 29)
November 29, 2005
LLRX Competitive Intelligence
Competitive Intelligence - A Selective Resource Guide, LLRX (Nov 2005)
"Donna Cavallini and Sabrina I. Pacifici's revised and updated guide includes core, reliable free and fee-based resources in areas that include: search engines; business info sites and databases; TV and radio news transcripts; legislative monitoring and tracking; identification of company legal representation; benchmarking; and e-news sources."
SuperPages Adds User Reviews
SuperPages Gears Up for Holiday Shoppers By Susan Kuchinskas, InternetNews.com (Nov 1) ..."Verizon SuperPages.com introduced User Reviews, a feature that brings a community element to business listings. Consumers can rate any business among the 18 million-plus business profiles, ..."
LOC - World Digital LIbrary
Library of Congress plans world digital library $3 million donation from Google kicks off fund-raising effort Reuters via MSNBC (Nov 22)
“The World Digital Library is an attempt to go beyond Europe and the Americas ... into cultures where the majority of the world is,” Billington told Reuters in a telephone interview.
"Librarian of Congress James Billington said he is looking to attract further private funding to develop bilingual projects, featuring millions of unique objects, with libraries in China, India, the Muslim world and other nations."
Future for Find.com
Scientigo and Find SVP Partner for Enhanced Find.com EContent (Nov 29)
"The new Find.com service will leverage Scientigo's Tigo intelligent search technology to exploit niches in the search arena, starting with personalized local, mobile, and product search. This acquisition is the latest in a series of purchases, partnerships, alliances, and technology licenses between Scientigo and providers in specific vertical industries, including intelligent search, intelligent document recognition, and intelligent enterprise content management. "
Find.com welcome page says there will be a new product in 2006. Meantime use the old one at http://www.find.com/home/home.aspx
FAST looking for partners
Fast Search & Transfer sets out strategy to beat Google "Enterprise search vendor says partnerships with publishers will deliver one-stop desktop search" By Mark Chillingworth, Information World, 21 Nov 2005 -- "Launching its Personal Search Platform (PSP), Fast said it hoped package deals from publishers like Elsevier would provide users with a one-stop-shop for scientific information, web and desktop search."
Amazon Wikis
Amazon adds product wikis, tagging, by Greg Linden, Geeking with Greg (Nov 26) Amazon will use Wikis to involve customers more and attract more reviews. But, as Greg writes - ".. I'm not sure these particular efforts are likely to bear fruit. Wikipedia fights off spam and crap by having a couple thousand dedicated volunteer editors who track recent changes closely and revert bad content changes quickly. Amazon will not have that for their ProductWikis."
Shopping Search Engines
Shopping Search Week 2005 by Chris Sherman, SearchDay (Nov 29) - "Annual roundup of new developments in the shopping and comparison search arena." Includes market share data. Shopping.com leads in the U.S. with 18.38%. BizRate has 17.35% and Yahoo SHopping doesn't do badly with $14.38%.
What's New in Shopping Search 2005 (Nov 30) Updates on:
+ AOL InStore Shopping - "shopping buddy" for your AOL Messenger on handheld.
+ Froogle
+ MSN Shopping - has feeds from eBay, PriceGrabber and Shopping.com
+ NexTag
+ PriceGrabber
+ Shopping.com - bought by eBay
+ Shopzilla
+ Yahoo Shopping - 100 million product offerings.
New Players in Shopping and Comparison Search (Dec 1) - people are researching online and buying offline. One of the new services that helps is Become.com which has price and comparison capabilities and web searching for shopping-related information.
Others mentioned in the article: Brilliant Shopper, BuySafeShopping - protection against fraud at eBay, Smarter.com, and ViewScore .
Unified Root TLDs
New Net address system does away with .com By: James Niccolai
IDG News Serivce (Paris Bureau) (29 Nov 2005)
Will it work? Will the world drop the use of .com and other tlds for Unified Root's DNS system? Is this partly a shot at the U.S.-centric ICANN?
"A Dutch company [UnifiedRoot S & M BV] has launched a new Internet addressing service that does away with the most common top-level domains (TLDs), such as .com and .edu, and allows organizations and individuals to register Internet addresses that end with the name of their business, or virtually any other word they choose. "
November 28, 2005
Dipsie goes deep
A search engine to find what others can't by Elinor Mills, CNet News (Nov 22)
"Start-up Dipsie is set to launch a beta of a new hosted service on Tuesday. The product, called Dcloak, is designed to show Web surfers the content in databases and on Web sites that is invisible to general search engines."
But this product is for webmasters to use to make their pages visible.
CPC Rising
Keyword Prices Rise in Q3; Ranking Positions Drop by Christine Blank, DMNews (Nov 23)
" Cost per click rose from $27 on average in July to $30 in September, according to Performics' Third Quarter Search Trend Report, which tracks search marketing campaigns.
In addition, cost per keyword increased from $20 to $26 from July to September because of the "natural growth of search," said Cam Balzer, director of search strategy at Performics. "Campaigns are getting bigger and growing across the board." "
MapQuest Challenged
Competitors Challenge Mapquest by Catherine Tsai, AP via Globe and Mail (Nov 28) MapQuest, owned by AOL, get 71% of the online map users, but Yahoo Maps and Google Maps are gaining and MSN Maps has entered the fray. People like to enhance the map of which there were several applications this year.
"Jonathan Mendez, a 24-year-old software engineer, wanted to help people affected by Hurricane Katrina, he used maps and satellite photos from Google. He and a friend created scipionus.com, where people could tag Google maps with messages on how friends and neighborhoods were doing after the storm."
"MSN Virtual Earth from Microsoft Corp. was teaming with MSNBC to offer maps with before-and-after aerial images of the Gulf Coast clear enough to make out front porches and power lines."
And there is also A9 with street-level views of the place.
MapQuest has added local search and will be adding satellite views.
More Powerful Web Mail In The Wings
New Web Mail: More Polished, Powerful by Ryan Singel, PC World (Nov 24) - "Microsoft, Yahoo, and Zimbra betas Preview Web mail's new desktop-like interface." - expect great new performance and features with desktop-style web mail services.
Updates to online maps
Online maps slow to catch up with Big Dig changes - Some sites ignore or bypass project By Mac Daniel, Boston Globe, October 29, 2005 -- Drivers in Boston aren't seeing the changes brought about by the Big Dig highway project on their online maps. Tele Atlas who supplies Mapquest, Google Maps, and Yahoo, says they update their maps in Boston every 90 days but Google Maps said they update every 18 months.
According to Doug Richardson, the executive director for the Association of American Geographers in the U.S., "Nationwide, about one in 50 computer-generated directions goes wayward".
"The problem could be the way online maps are made, assigning latitude-longitude coordinates to an address to find a destination. The process, called geocoding, relies heavily on satellite-based Global Positioning Systems, which tend to lose their signal deep inside the Big Dig's tunnels."
Wisdom of the Crowds - Not
Big idea - the wisdom of crowds James Harkin, The Guardian (Oct 29) Do wikis represent the "wisdom of crowds" as described by James Surowiecki in the book of the same name? In particular, does Wikipedia succeed at being a better reference tool because of the involvement of many? The author thinks not -- "Rather like the ranking of results on Google, Wikipedia is best seen as a global memory bank or conversation - an imperfect stream of consciousness which is constantly updating itself and making fruitful connections, but which is also susceptible to rumour and jitteriness, partisanship and old-fashioned rigging. Immerse yourself in the wisdom of these lonely crowds by all means, but rely on it at your peril."
Cool Canada
Cool Canada puts Canada first - first in inventions, in interesting people, fascinating people. This is a project of Collections Canada.
"This site uses digitized collection material from Library and Archives Canada to highlight lots of fascinating people, places, inventions, achievements and events that make Canada cool. Project themes include Incredible Inventions, Canadian Giants, Interesting People, Fascinating Places and Amazing Events and Phenomena. Some of the unique materials that have been digitized include UFO documents, patents of invention, documentary artworks and photographs."
How about the light bulb? Thomas Edison? No. Henry Woodward and Matthew Evans in Toronto took out the patent in 1875 - and sold it to Edison later.
Downside of social bookmarking
Socially Acceptable Behavior ACM Queue vol. 3, no. 9 - November 2005 by Charlene O'Hanlon, ACM Queue -- As social bookmarking becomes more widely adopted on the public Web will it become polluted with junk? Will it be the target of advertisers, as this article predicts?
IBM Adopts Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking is picking up steam fast. More articles are appearing about how to use this INSIDE an enterprise. ACM Queue has a 5-part article on Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise
[ACM Queue vol. 3, no. 9 - November 2005 by David Millen, Jonathan Feinberg, and Bernard Kerr, IBM ]
Delicious and MyWeb2.0 are the two main examples today. These might be used internally. However, IBM developed its own called DogEar.
Good article for its description of social bookmarking systems and the potential for enhancing search within an organization.
Of interest: "Although we have just begun to get feedback on the dogear social bookmarking service, it shows great potential. A significant group of very active early users have already begun to generate excitement about the application through informal communication mechanisms. Indeed, there are already more than 100 mentions of the dogear application in the enterprise blogs. We have already seen a handful of dogear extensions by other members of the organization, which will only serve to increase the benefits of the application. We are excited by the potential for using the dogear application to improve information sharing, expertise location, and support of communities of interest within the enterprise."
Science.gov 3.0 uses metadata
Science.gov 3.0 has improved its search facility with changes to query input and use of metadata to rank results.
Query input now ANDs terms, uses " " for phrases, and supports nesting of terms.
Metadata such as title, author, date, abstract and other keyword identifiers is used in ranking results.
Science.gov goes 3.0 By Joab Jackson, Government Computer News (Nov 21)
"Introduced in 2002, Science.gov offers the public a unified search service for governmental scientific information. It searches across 30 databases and 1,800 Web sites. "
Biz Wiki for Learning Business Research
Ohio University Libraries are using the wiki format to assemble a collection of business information at Biz Wiki. It will contain articles about "business reference books, databases, websites, and other research guides" that are mainly available through the Ohio University community. However, non-Ohio people will still benefit from the articles about the resources - why and how to use them. Browse A to Z to get the fastest view of articles available.
Mentioned in ResourceShelf Professional Reading Shelf (Nov 23)
ArchiveGrid from RLG
Archivegrid.org is a truly amazing new project by RLG to provide access to archives around the world for family histories, political papers, and historical records.
"Scholars searching ArchiveGrid can learn about the many items in each of these collections, contact archives to arrange a visit to examine materials, and order copies."
Doors aren't open yet. Early version for testing will be available in January 2006 and public use in March 2006. For now you can scan the topics. Many subject headings on the main page relate to the United States, and there is some English / United Kingdom. Canada shows up in some subjects in the second layer.
Get Ready for a New Free Database from RLG , ResourceShelf (Nov 24)
Browsers in 2006
Browser Face-Off - Internet Explorer finally receives an overhaul that helps it match its rivals' features--but Firefox and Opera aren't standing still, by Erik Larkin, PC World (Nov 28) -- Compares Internet Explorer 7 Beta 1, Firefox 1.5 Release Candidate 1, and Opera 9 Preview 1. Final versions of these are expected in 2006. When that happens, IE will probably be fairly competitive to Firefox (even with automatic updates) and the outstanding Opera (free version no longer has ads). Market share still shows as 81% for Internet Explorer for "Americans" and 14% for Firefox. People looking for even more integrated function might turn to Flock, still in early beta, which ties in Delicious bookmarks and blog editing.
Sounds like the consumer will benefit - a better IE, Firefox even easier to use, and Opera with widgets and better handling of sites written for IE..
Customize Google on Firefox
Pandia Search recommends new extension for Firefox called Customize Google that lets you customize the way Google present results. I use this extension too and like it.
November 27, 2005
Library Wiki
Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki
"Welcome to Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki. This wiki was created to be a one-stop-shop for great ideas for all types of librarians. All over the world, librarians are developing successful programs and doing innovative things with technology that no one outside of their library knows about. There are lots of great blogs out there sharing information about the profession, but there is no one place where all of this information is collected and organized."
Great Tools
The I Want To list by Phil Bradley has suggestions on resources or tools to use to collaborate, create networks, save research, use RSS and Wikis, and many other things that come up. Follow the I Want To blog.
eBrary for online research
A (Non-controversial) Alternative to Google Print by Gary Price, SearchDay (Nov 21) -- eBrary - better than Google Books and Amazon -- " lets you search and read over 20,000 in-copyright books for free. You pay only to print and copy text."
Don't leave home without it
Flash Drives Make Any Computer Personal by Brian Bergstein, AP Via Globe and Mail. (Nov
The little thumb USB drives are one of the best inventions ever. And now there is Migo Software that puts your desktop software on the USB drive to be used anywhere.
"With a gigabyte of flash memory now available for less than $100, these inexpensive digital storehouses can hold not just important data but also entire software programs. The information they carry can be encrypted and accessed speedily, a benefit of faster microprocessors."
"Plug a Migo-enabled device into a computer and enter your password, and a secure session launches in which you can send and receive e-mail and work on documents, with the background desktop and icons from your own PC rather than the ones on the host computer."
November 25, 2005
Froogle and Google Base
Google’s Vertical Search Strategy - Hitchhiker's Guide to 650 has some interesting comments about how Froogle has been built using other vertical search players. To this, Google will add GoogleBase. It's very likely that the small players will join the pen. Shopping online could be significantly different in a year.
Treat Yourself to Alice in Wonderland
Did you love Alice in Wonderland? Lewis Carroll's manuscript in his handwriting and with illustrations can be viewed online, page by page, at the British Library's online library. Lewis Carroll's Alice. Have your computer read to you by clicking on the Audio button, and follow along just as you may have done as a child. You can also see the text in print, and magnify parts of the page. This e-book is done in Shockwave and is a complete pleasure to view - brilliant. Treat yourself. Find a half-hour, find your favourite section in the book, and sit back to be read to.
If you'd like to download the book, English Grammar 4U Online has links to Project Gutenberg for copies and also offers some exercises. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
U.S. Use of Internet in response to Hurricanes
Many went on-line for hurricane news AP via Globe and Mail (Nov 24)
"More than half of U.S. Internet users went on-line for news and information about hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the vast majority having visited the websites of traditional news organizations such as CNN and MSNBC, a study has found."
+ 14% went to non-US sources such as BBC.
+ 75% used website of major US news organization
+ 54 % - alternative source
+ 9% made donations online
See 13 million Americans made donations online after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Pew Internet and American Life (No v 24)
November 24, 2005
More Firefox Extensions
Firefox Extensions - Part 4 by Bill Webb at Lockergnome (Nov 24) - recommends Google Toolbar, Tab Mix Plus, Bloglines Toolkit, and Fasterfox.
People's News Site Coming
Craigslist plans to make news by Frank Barnako, Marketwatch (Nov 23)
Craig Newmark, the creator of Craigslist , the wildly popular online service for classifieds, will be taking on news stories next where the readers are the editors.
"Newmark said his news project will involve Web technology to let readers decide which news stories are the most important. "
November 23, 2005
GoFish at Ask.com
Ask Jeeves and GoFish Sign Content Licensing Agreement - Leading Search Provider Chooses GoFish for Multimedia-Related Content MarketWire via Marketwatch (Nov 22) - Ask.com picks up GoFish for multimedia content.
CBC on AOL Canada
CBC hooks up with AOL in Web deal - AOL to sell ad space for broadcaster - by Grant Robertson, Globe and Mail (Nov 22)
"AOL Canada Inc. has forged a partnership with CBC that will see the on-line giant sell advertising for the broadcaster's website and tap into its vast pool of video content."
November 22, 2005
Archive IT
Archive-It - another Internet Archive project from Brewster Kahle.
From about us: ""The Internet Archive's new subscription service, Archive-it, allows any user to create, manage and search their own web archive through a web interface without any technical expertise required. Archive-it can be used to archive an institution's own web site, or build collections of up to one hundred web sites."
There are a handful of collections there at present, but they are international - US, French, Canadian, and something about anarchism too.
As a search tool, it will need some search options other than to be able to select a collection.
Vertical Search for B2B
VerticalSearch.com Announces Vertical Search Engine EContent (Nov 23) "VerticalSearch.com LLC, has announced the launch of its beta B2B vertical search engine. This vertical search engine enables users to search for B2B information on a range of topics including health, transportation, agriculture, construction, telecommunications, and more."
Six Reasons to Like Tags
Tara Calishain comes out in favour of tagging - love it. Why I Love Tagging in Research Buzz (Nov 3) There are six good reasons. Concludes - "Tagging is not perfect. Absolutely not. Tagging is not the only searching method. I believe it is complementary to other searching methods, like full-text searching. Tagging is not invulnerable to spammers, though there are aspects of it that make it easier to avoid spammers. "
Google Book Search
ResearchBuzz had some search tips for the old Google Print. Presumably they will work for the new Google Book.
Google Announces Large Influx of Public Domain Works into Google Print (Nov 3)
Search Engine Standings
Top search engines in October 2005: Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Ask ZDNet (Nov 21)
No surprise - ComScore's statistics for October 2005 show Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask as the top four engines by number of users in the US. Google has 75 million to Yahoo's 68. Interestingly MSN, at nearly 49.7 million, is just ahead of Ask.com at 43.7 million.
There is also something called MySpace. Search in the 7th spot (8 million users) that I've never heard of. MYSpace.com turns out to be a "place for friends" with a whole raft of personal services - blogs, mail, groups, events, calendars, music, classified - a portal for the young.
LC subject headings are magic words
Amazing, Magic Searches! By Becky Kornegay, Heidi Buchanan, & Hiddy Morgan, LIbrary Journal (November 1, 2005)
"Subdivisions combine the precision of the cataloger with the freewheeling style of a Googler"
Who, but librarians, would know that the Library of Congress subject headings and subdivisions could be used as powerful search terms in Web searches? These three librarians at Hunter Library, Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, NC, have developed a starter list of 25 sub-divisions from LC that cover many of the topics that come up.
"Subdivisions perform magic in a library catalog, allowing librarians to finesse their keyword searches in ways that astonish amateurs. They replace the sometimes disparate strings of keywords searchers use to express the nuances of their questions. Sometimes they identify the format of a book’s content: diaries, longitudinal studies, pictorial works. They put spin on a subject—psychological aspects, for example. At their most powerful, they can define and specify relationships between topics. For instance, if you wanted to find a book about how librarians are viewed by the public, you would use librarians–public opinion. If you wanted to find books about the views of librarians, you would use librarians–attitudes. Who knew?"
Finesse is the operative word in web searching, and terms used in these subdivisions can help in arriving at better keywords that take into consideration types of studies, formats, and subject aspects.
US World Digital Library
Library of Congress plans world digital library Reuters (Nov 22)
"The U.S. Library of Congress is kicking off a campaign on Tuesday to work with other nation's libraries to build a World Digital Library, starting with a $3 million donation from Google Inc.." World Digital Library's aim is to collect or create digital materials related to "global cultures". Google's involvement is ".. to work with the Library of Congress on developing standards for indexing the digital collections and by providing computer equipment."
Full article in World Digital Library Project Announced, Backed By Library Of Congress & Google by Danny Sullivan and Gary Price, SearchDay.
Of interest -- "After the initial plan is in place, the Library of Congress will work to seek international partners and hopes the UNESCO organization itself will become part of the WDL, Lamolinara said."
Article notes that there are already many digitization projects underway in the USA and Europe (not to mention the Canadian ones). Some coordination among them would be good to prevent duplication and, one would hope, share experiences.
No comment on how the rest of world lfeels about the Library of Congress taking on a global project.
Map to do your shopping
Google Unveils Tool to Map Shopping Trips by Michael Liedtke, AP via Yahoo News (Nov 22)
Do this before you go to the mall to do your holiday shopping. [Only in the USA.]
"The feature, to be unveiled Tuesday at Google's Froogle shopping site, will pinpoint the merchants selling a specific item within a designated ZIP code. Besides displaying a map showing all the local stores carrying the merchandise, Froogle also will list price differences."
Froogle will be getting this information - eventually, it hopes - from Google Base where merchants are invited to upload their lists of inventory (and presumably keep them uptodate). For now a "contractor" is collecting the information
Intriguing idea but I wouldn't trust it to be right.
Danny Sullivan has further detail in Froogle Offers Local Shopping Feature, SEW Blog, in which he describes how this is different from Local Search (local shows stores, Froogle shows goods). He also mentions other shopping tools in the US that let you search by location for products. Apparently, you can also order a book from Amazon online and arrange to pick it up at a bricks-and-mortar store.
All this just in time for the holidays.
November 21, 2005
Update on Books Online
Books Online: The Fee versus Free Battle Begins by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (Nov 21) - Follows the players - Amazon, Google, Microsoft and a bit about Random House.
+ The Amazon program included "half the books Amazon sold in the U.S. last year have full-text versions with Amazon’s Search Inside program." Amazon offers its Search-Inside in the U.K., Germany, France, Canada, and Japan.
+ Amazon introduced Amazon Shorts - digital only
+ Random House will use "online booksellers, search engines, entertainment portals, and other appropriate vendors as outlets for online viewing of its content on a pay-per-page-view basis."
+ Google Book (books.google.com) is only books - can browse public domain and do some minimal searching of copyrighted.
+ MSN Book Search will start with public domain books.
Yahoo and Social Media
The Flickrization of Yahoo "How the founders of a hot young photo-sharing site are helping to change the focus of the search engine giant -- and turning its fight with Google into a battle of man vs. machine."
By Erick Schonfeld, Business 2.0, December 2005 Issue
Yahoo, since it acquired Flickr, has been expanding its "social media" - travel, shopping, MyWeb2.0 for personal search - getting reviews, involving people, adding members. It's all in the expectation that this will give Yahoo the edge over Google. For web searching, success will depend on whether "social search", ie following what others have found before you, will prove to be the faster and better.
Wikipedia examined by experts
Can you trust Wikipedia? Elvira van Noort | Johannesburg, South Africa - several subject experts looked at Wikipedia entries about South Africa for their areas of expertise and evaluated those entries on a scale of 1 to 10. Wikipedia did very well on sports, less so on government and history, and very poorly for "media in South Africa".
Search No. 2
Study: Search claims solid No. 2 spot by Anick Jesdanun, AP via BusinessWeek Online (Nov 20) Using the Internet for searching for information is second only to email. Email is used by 77% of the "sampled population" and 44 % do a search.
"Until recently, search and news have been running neck-and-neck for the No. 2 spot among Internet tasks, said Lee Rainie, the project's director. But search had a dramatic jump over the past year to widen the gap over news, used by 46 percent of the Internet's daily population."
See the memo by Pew Internet and American Life - Search engine use shoots up in the past year and edges towards email as the primary internet application.
November 18, 2005
The Great Debate about the Perfect Search
On Library Card Catalogs, OPACs, The Perfect Search & Teaching Searchers by Gary Price, SEW Blog (Oct 5)
This seems to be a riff on a piece by Danny Sullivan on - More On Query Refinement, The Human Scale Problem & Creating The Search Dialog that compared searching a card catalog with a full-index of all the books and argued for algorithm search by keyword. Ask Jeeves is part of this because it changed from the Knowledge Base of the old Jeeves to the algo search of the new Jeeves (who also tries to deliver Smart Answers). Supposedly the problem with directories and pre-selected sites is scalability. Gary Price disagrees.
"First, while the human-edited model might have scalability issues, it doesn't mean that these types of tools (for example, general web directories) from non-commercial organizations are now, no less valuable to many searchers."
And Price follows up with defence of catalogs, and more generally, being able to find and use specialty databases.
It's a great debate: using a universal search engine vs being selective (ie being sufficiently info literate to seek out the specialty sites.)
Price says, "Sure, the power searcher will have the skills to create a great search strategy from the outset and then refine as needed using the right tools. However, to this point, the typical open web searcher doesn't do anything like this and likely doesn't even know that have some of the tools to do it. Who is going to show them?"
Read the debate and all the links to supporting materials.
Women searching for recipes
Holidays Cook Up Traffic to Recipe Sites by Enid Burns, Clickz (Nov 18) - People, as they get ready for US Thanksgiving, are using search engines to find recipes almost half of the time (48%), and for the rest they use the big recipe sites --
"Most searchers went to the Food Network (22.24 percent) site to get recipes for Thanksgiving. Other recipe hounds followed links to Kraftfoods.com (9.42 percent), Allrecipes.com (9.12 percent), and Cooks.com (3.48 percent)."
It's no surprise that women are doing most of the searching, but why are 41% over 55? What are younger women doing - leaving it to their mothers and grandmothers? Why do older women want the recipes - are they tired of their old recipes?
"Recipe seekers are typically women. They made up sixty-one percent of traffic sent to food and beverage sites in the second week of November. Forty-one percent of food and beverage site visitors are likely to be over 55."
My Yahoo Canada
Yahoo Canada has greatly improved the MyYahoo page. Changes are described at http://ca.my.yahoo.com/s/about/new.html. Essentially these are much better colours and layout, more content, and a separate Finance page.
However, I would like to be able to remove the animated banner advertisement.
Would also like to see the personal page integrated with the My Web 2.0, or vice versa.
Google Books
Google Print is now Google Books - http://books.google.com/. There is a Help page. Google Print, although it started with some magazines, became mainly about accessing books from publishers or libraries. It would be good if Google could help us separate library collections from publishers' lists.
Longer report at SEW Blog - Google Print is Renamed Google Book Search
Dot Ca Growing
Canadians carve out their own domain by Garth Buchholz, Globe and Mail (Nov 17)
Some figures on domains:
- .com worldwide 45 million
- .com in Canada 1.3 million
- .ca - 603,000 and growing
"A study conducted for CIRA by The Strategic Counsel in 2001 reported that, if given a choice, 71 per cent of Canadian would prefer to visit a dot-ca site. When all respondents were asked if they would most prefer to register a dot-ca domain name or a dot-com domain name, they were five times more likely to say they prefer dot-ca than to say they prefer dot-com (51 per cent against 10 per cent)."
Ask Jeeves view of Web 2.0
Ask Jeeves Search & Web 2.0 - CNET Japan Search Conference, Search Engine Journal (Nov 18) -- Daniel Read, VP Consumer Products at Ask Jeeves, talked about Web 2.0 at the CNET Japan Innovation Conference.
"What is web 2.0? Web 2.0 is a work in progress which is a transtition of the architecture of the web and its applications. Such variables of the transition are blogs, wikis, AJAX, Google AdSense. 2.0 is taking search beyond the initial ten blue links such as more data, meta data and tagging, blogging is a revolution in micropublishing, advertising driven services, search verticals emerging and expanding quickly (local maps for example). Mashups are an important part of Web 2.0, expanding or improving upon existing products."
Loren Baker, the editor and note-taker, listed several "new generation ideas" as well as technologies that Ask Jeeves says they are following or have adopted. Ask Jeeves views Teoma (its search engine) to be based on a view of the web as a "social network".
November 17, 2005
Blinkx adds University Channel
Blinkx includes audio content from universities - Net Imperative (Nov 16)
"Search engine blinkx has formed agreements with several universities and an educational content partnership with the University Channel, to make hundreds of hours of academic audio content."
Select University Channel from the left side panel to search only it (means de-selecting the others.)
Related - blinkx Offers Gateway to Riches of History of Culture with Searchable Content from the Smithsonian, blinkx (Nov 18)
To see what Blinkx has collected, select the University Channel (as above) and search on smithsonian.
Internet Control
US wins right to keep internet control after warning of censorship risks , by Rupert Cornwall, The Independent (UK) (NOv 17)
"The US government has won its battle to retain control of the internet, under a compromise worked out ahead of this week's United Nations summit on the information society, which leaves the current addressing and traffic direction system intact."
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), which reports to the US Department for Commerce, keeps its job of day-to-day management. Earlier this ICANN delayed approval of the .xxx domain for pornographic material under pressure from the US Government.
Also - US Retains Internet Control "The fight was over before the opening bell as delegates at the WSIS summit throw in the towel on Internet politics." Red Herring (Nov 16)
Search Rankings Dance
Organic Search Rankings on the Move, or Pink Hats Meet Green Hats by Andrew Goodman, Traffick (Nov 16) -- about changes in the ranking algorithms that are happening at Google and Yahoo. Google's this year is called Jagger, and Yahoo's is Weather Report. These changes are usually done to block spam, but can mean serious dislocation for businesses that had "optimized" their pages for keywords. Goodman sees a connection at Yahoo in the reordering to Yahoo's practice of selling "paid inclusion" - ie to pay to be included in the "organic" results; and at Google and Yahoo, to encourage businesses to buy sponsored listings.
"Assuming there is another loud outcry, you can expect Jagger to be watered down some in a month or two. But it will have achieved two intended effects: removing spam and reminding business owners to buy advertising on the search engines."
"This brings up another twist: with Yahoo! Search, it seems more likely that you'll continue to be able to pay for inclusion (as you can now) in the organic rankings to avoid, in essence, being "Jaggerized." "
Goodman also mentions Yahoo's Mindset, where the searcher can adjust the relevance ranking towards shopping or towards research.
Furl tricks
10 Cool Things to Do with Furl by Amy Gahran, Contentious weblog, June 22, 2005) - ten things and links to postings with more Furl tricks.
Enterprise Grokker
Groxis Releases Web2.0 Application for Enterprise Search Management
- "GrokkerESM Integrates Content Federation, Powerful Text Mining, and Visual Search Capabilities for the Enterprise ", PR Newswire via Marketwatch (Nov 16)
"GrokkerESM provides businesses, libraries and content providers with a powerful combination of federated content access and topically organized visual search results for any type of information found online."
Would seem from this press release that Grokker, a "visual" search engine that displays results clustered in orbs, is having some success in providing "federated access" to various databases including IEEE and EBSCO
"Sun Microsystems partnered with Groxis in 2004 and then licensed an advanced version of GrokkerESM, called SunLibrary Grokker, which provides federated access and visually organized search results for several different research sources including the IEEE Electronic Library, the EBSCOHost journals database and Sun's own internal email research repository."
Swickis for hire
Eurekster Introduces Swickis - Community-Powered Search Engines for Personal and Small-Business Websites; Swickis Are a Powerful New Way to Improve Search Relevance and Advertising Revenue by Harnessing the Knowledge of Online Communities, Business Wire via Marketwatch (Nov 16)
Eurekster has developed a new search engine it calls a Swicki to be used on individual web sites. "Swickis automatically learn from search behavior, without collecting or identifying individual user information, to deliver content and advertising that is highly relevant and valuable to a specific community. "
"Publishers are invited to create their own swickis -- free of charge -- with the Eurekster SwickiBuilder at http://swicki.eurekster.com, and can opt to share in the search-related advertising revenue, a feature that will be available soon."
Canada's TerroGate
It's the Google of police tools "Canadian experts invent search engine to find, track down terrorists" by Sarah Staples, The Ottawa Citizen (Nov 17) [Thanks to LT for this story.]
Defence R&D Canada has developed a new search engine called Terrogate for tracking down references to terrorism in documents. At present this works on documents that have been collected, but is to be rolled out to analyze web content and eventually real-time news feeds. The algorithms work with the "vocabulary of terrorism" on five main themes: terrorist tactics, weapons, locations, targets, groups and individuals. Researchers identified 3,000 terms that are exclusively related to terror.
"TerroGate melds two emerging search trends. An "entity extraction" component sifts through documents tagging relevant words for easy retrieval. And the system is one of a handful in the world capable of performing "conceptual" searches, which don't merely hunt for keywords the way Google or Yahoo do, but also notions more vaguely associated with the keyword."
The software grew out of a project by the University of Sheffield, in England, on "entity extraction" done in the mid 1990s.
There are two commercial systems - "AeroText, by a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin, and ThingFinder, by Inxight Software, Inc., which is used by the U.S. Defence Department and the U.S. army -- but they only annotate generic proper or place names in a document."
Plans for TerroGate include:
- "incorporating link analysis software that analyses relationships between references to terrorism in different documents."
- web crawlers
- displaying results in map form.
- languages other than English
November 16, 2005
GoshMe for metasearch
GoshMe - new metasearch engine developed in Brazil - searches collections of databases and search engines. The welcome page has 17 "verticals" for searching. GoshMe comes back with links to results at a variety of search engines. It's not possible to control on selection, or syntax (as far as I can see). GoshMe might tell you about some databases you hadn't considered, but it's better to get to know the resources well and search them directly.
Eudora 7
Qualcomm has released a new verision of Eudora Mail - QUALCOMM’s Eudora® 7 Email Software Increases Productivity with Ultra-Fast Search, Powered by X1 Technologies Press Release (Nov 15)
Freshdaily for Canadian cities
Freshdaily is "Canada's first national blog network". It promises to carry news and comment on culture and events. At present there are city blogs for Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto and Mississauga, Ont.
Social Side of the Web
How wikis are changing our view of the world By Daniel Terdiman, Cnet (Nov 15) - About the use of wikis (open forums) for bringing together people for various projects. Wikipedia encyclopedia is the most famous Wiki project. Also Wikinews especially as seen for reporting on Katrina and the London Bombings. There are a few other applications in communities and in companies.
"While blogs, newsgroups or e-mail lists also can keep people informed of recent events and available resources, none of these alternatives have the ability to present the very latest information--and nothing but the latest information--in a single place."
This article is part of a series on Taking Back the Web: New generation, technologies return Net to social roots. This was Day 2. Look for upcoming articles on tagging, maps, youth.
Declan McCullagh started the series with The law of 'spontaneous order' (Nov 14) "Do technologies like collaborative Web sites, methods of "tagging" photos and documents, and mapping-related projects really represent the next Internet revolution?"
Online Travel Market
The Googlization of Business: Travel by Joshua Stylman & Peter Hershberg, iMedia Connection (Nov 14)
Here's a figure -- "U.S. online market is expected to grow to $91 billion in 2009, or 33 percent of travel purchased, according to Jupiter Research."
Google has helped buyers and sellers - as have other search engines (which isn't stressed in the article).
"But Google's impact is not limited to the individual user. America's number-one search engine has also fundamentally changed the way companies do business. Its ability to bring together sellers and interested buyers at a pivotal point in the purchase process has made it mission-critical to a number of industries."
Google Base Launched
New project expands Google's reach "New project expands Google's reach" by Matthew Fordahl, AP via Globe and Mail (Nov 16)
Google launched Google Base in beta (base.google.com)> where anyone with content is invited to upload it.
"... Google Base has the potential to make instantly available a vast sea of content including -- but not limited to -- recipes, job ads, photos, DNA sequences, real estate listings and individual standalone databases.
Normally, it takes Web "crawlers" days or weeks to scour the Web and feed Google's main search engine with updated information, but they usually can't penetrate content buried in databases. This tool will make locating anything that's been uploaded nearly instantaneous, provided it finds users willing to provide the content."
Of interest: "Mr. Kamangar said the company eventually wants to integrate the results with results from its main search engine, its local search site, which identifies results by geographical location, and its shopping comparison service, Froogle.com."
Google Base Live, Accepting Content by Danny Sullivan, SearchDay (Nov 15) - describes how to use it and ponders the implications. Will Google Base take on eBay, Monster.com, Craigslist for selling good or finding jobs? (Not at this point.) Will the labeling that Google has adopted help people find things? (Not necessarily.) Does the fact that people can upload databases mean that a bite has been taken out of the invisible web? (Maybe - Sullivan doesn't mention this but surely quality will be a concern - an entomologist might upload a database about insect but so might a grade school hobbyist.)
Google Base is Live by Harry McCracken, PC World, (Nov 15)
Some screenshots taken in October from Google Blogscoped -- More Google Base Screenshots.
November 15, 2005
Our Online Histories
Google is watching you AS WE SEARCH AWAY, WEB FIRMS GATHER DATA ON OUR HABITS By John Battelle, Mercury News (Nov 13)
Warns about the amount of personal information we are giving up to the search engines as they log what we do with or without our permission.
"But consider the concentration of information about us that resides with the search companies, or that's accessible using their tools. It goes beyond the database of intentions we create when we click around the Web. Because we are increasingly moving our digital lives from the constraints of the PC to the relatively boundless Web, we also are creating virtual profiles of ourselves. Hundreds of millions of us store our e-mail, photographs, social networks, contact databases and personal journals on the Web, and we are adding to that pile at an extraordinary rate."
Google's Dream
The Google Story: An Excerpt "Chapter 26: Googling Your Genes" Washington Post (Nov 14) [subscription] - Excerpt from the Google Story by David A Vise and Mark Malseed - goes on sale on Nov 15.
Reveals that Google founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, hope to " empower millions of individuals and scientists with information that will lead to healthier and smarter living through the prevention and cure of a wide range of diseases". Specifically describes a project involving biological and genetic research.
RLG Partners with Looksmart
LookSmart & RLG Announce Partnership EContent (Nov 15)
"RLG, a not-for-profit organization of over 150 research libraries, archives, and museums has announced a partnership with LookSmart, an online media and technology company specializing in vertical search. The partnership will bring RLG's Trove.net, a database containing over 209,000 images, to LookSmart's users through FindArticles--LookSmart's search vehicle for free and premium content on the Web."
ebrary Books
Search and Read Full Text Books Online via ebrary by Gary Price, SEW Blog (Nov 14) eBrary has 20,000 in-copyright books online. Some can access this through their public library. But if your library doesn't have this service you can browse and shop directly at http://shop.ebrary.com/. Get details in Price's posting.
Yahoo Shopping
Yahoo Personalizes Shopping, Adds Community Features by Chris Sherman, Searchday (Nov 15)
"Yahoo Shopping's shoposphere is a new form of social commerce where the Yahoo user community can get involved in commerce without having to worry about any infrastructure."
Also - Yahoo! Embraces Word-of-Mouth in Shopping Redesign by Pamela Parker, CLickZ (Nov 15) - It's all about a "pick list" that users create and share.
"The new community features are consistent with other initiatives that Yahoo! has undertaken recently, including allowing users to share travel advice in Yahoo! Travel and reviews of local merchants in Yahoo! Local."
""Our goal is to make online shopping socially interactive by allowing shoppers to create, build upon and share their areas of interest and expertise," said Rob Solomon, vice president of Yahoo! Shopping Group, in a statement."
Blog Search Engines
State of Blogosphere Search Randy Charles Morin, RSS Blog at KBCafe.com (Nov 14) - State of blogosphere search is not good.
The big aggregators Technorati, PubSub and others - are not updating their content inspite of multiple pings to announce that there are new postings.
Splogs are clogging the works mainly from Weblog.ro and Blogspot.com.
Ranks the search tools. Finds IceRocket and Google Blog search to be the two best blog-search engines, and BlogPulse to be fairly current but small.
November 14, 2005
Will Google Rent Out Books?
Want to rent a book online? Steven Musil, Google Blog - CNet (Nov 13) - Google is pitching a new idea to publishers to rent (through Google) an online book for a week - user won't be able to save or print. Proposed price was 10% of list price, which the publishers thought was too low. SHould ask the potential reader - they might have said the price was too high.
Internet Movie Database
INTERVIEW: Volunteers helped turn IMDb into big business by Paul Bond, Reuters via Yahoo (Nov 13) - interview with Col Needham, who in 1990 when he was 23, created the Internet Movie Database. In 1998 Amazon bought it - and the volunteers who had helped build the IMDb benefited.
Needham described the extent of the database today -- "... 470,000 titles -- films, made-for-TV movies, TV series, made-for-video movies. And we now have a section for video games. But the vast number of the titles are feature films from every country in the world and as far back as 1888 -- very early experimental films from the birth of cinema. In terms of people, we're honing in on 2 million."
November 13, 2005
Google Jagger Update
On the Google Jagger Algo Update - Part 1 "There has been a major update of Google’s ranking algorithm, changing the way the search engine orders search results." Atul Gupta, Pandia (Nov 13)
November 11, 2005
Orgy of Articles about Google Print
Critics should grasp Google projects before blasting them by Keven Maney, USA Today (Nov 10) - defends Google's work to digitize books through Google Print (with publishers) and Google Print Library (public domain held in libraries) and says that, "The misinformation and misguided attempts to stop these projects are mind-blowing."
TVC Alert has related articles - The Real Deal on Google Books.
MSN Shopping
New and Improved MSN Shopping Launches Right on Time to Give Shoppers Relief This Holiday Season PR Newswire via Marketwatch (Nov 11)
MSN Shopping has added some tools for comparison shopping and many more retailers in part by collaborating with PriceGrabber.com and Shopping.com.
Mainly, MSN Shopping has categorized products by product type, theme, store, price. Select and compare items.
Sympatico/MSN Shopping Canada does not have the comparison features but it will show products by type, stores, and sometimes price range.
November 10, 2005
Google Personalized Services
Google released an improved version of its personalized service to 38 Google domains. Canadians can use Google's personalized service to set up a personal home page with Canadian news and save their search history at Google.ca.
Using the Google Personalized Service (www.google.ca/psearch) account holders can customize the main search page to include weather in selected cities and news items. Unfortunately, Google Canada does not yet have the complete list of weather reporting centres.
The search component saves a record of Web searches made and the specific results that were clicked on. You can revisit the searches and the sites. Google will use this history to interpret interests and weight search results. If you do a lot of searching for tigers and leopards, Google will weight any search for jaguar to the cat rather than the car.
You can now bookmark a site you viewed by clicking on an asterisk on your search history page.
Google Canada also records searches done for images. The same capability is promosed for News soon.
This is supposed to work with Firefox, IE 4.0+, Netscape 6.0+, Safari, and Mozilla. Make sure you don't have a tool loaded that removes click tracking.
Of course, you must be signed into your account for Google to keep the search history. You may have one already through news alerts or gmail.
See Google Personalized Search help page.
Google Personalized Search Leaves Google Labs by Chris Sherman, SearchDay (Nov 10) Describes several of the features especially those concerning privacy.
"The remove results feature has also been enhanced. In addition to removing single URLs from future results, you can also block entire domains. You can also remove results for a single search or for all future searches."
Google's Personalized Search exits test phase "Service is designed to learn the searching habits of individual users" By Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service (Nov 10)
Selling Digital Books
Amazon Jungle: Book Purchasing Models Struggle in the Digital Objects Era by John Blossom, Shore (Nov 8) - Amazon's announcement to sell digital parts of books raises questions for Blossom about book publishing and electronic distribution. "As new ways of developing, collecting and monetizing content are accelerating in popularity, the book industry needs to consider what it is that they can do best in this new publishing environment."
Firefox Plans
Firefox: Now we are one By Dawn Kawamoto, WebWatch (Nov 10 ) - Firefox is one year old this month. There have been 106 million downloads, and Firefox has taken at least 8.6 % of the browser market - almost all of that away from IE. Look for Firefox 1.5 in a few weeks and a Firefox 2 in 2006.
Ask for music
Ask updates music and video game features Net Imperative (Nov 4) Ask Jeeves has new smart answers for video game and music related searches.
"Ask Jeeves has also partnered with All Music Guide, providing musician and band biographies, discographies, lyrics, pictures, and product price comparisons." Has an entry for the band BareNaked Ladies.
Finding Podcasts
Podcast search engines Pandia ( Nov 7) - Pandia explains that podcast sare "online radio programs made by professionals and amateurs alike" - download these and listen to them when you have the time. Article mentions ways to find these, and specifically names podcasts that are about search engines and search engine marketing.
November 09, 2005
Abebooks
Berkeley's BookFinder.com sold to Canadian company San Francisco Business Times (Nov 7) Victoria's Abebooks bought the metasearch book store finder, Bookfinder. Both are excellent - perhaps this will make Abebooks even better.
Morville on Findability
Ambient Findability: Libraries at the Crossroads of Ubiquitous Computing and the Internet By Peter Morville, Online (Nov / Dec)
Peter Morville, author of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, has a new book - Ambient Findability.
"I envision a future of ambient findability in which we can find anyone or anything from anywhere at anytime. At the heart of this brave new world is a library, or rather a multitude of libraries, that help us find what we need, whether the objects sought (and the libraries themselves) are physical, digital, or in between."
Blinkx.tv Growing
blinkx.tv Comes of Age With One Million Hours of Video Content, 500,000 SmartFeeds Daily "Rapid Growth of User-Generated and Commercial Content Sees blinkx.tv Getting Ahead of Its Years and the Competition", PR Newswire via Marketwatch (Nov 8)
Blinkx.tv has over 1 million hours of TV clips as well as hundreds of thousands of user-created video blogs and podcasts.
"... blinkx added popular new features such as SmartFeed and my blinkx.tv to its service. For example, users who want to go way beyond watching traditional broadcast content can now create and view their own "selfcasts" through my blinkx.tv and watch a single personalized media stream featuring clips which other users have uploaded to the service."
November 08, 2005
More Tyburski Tips
Short presentation by Genie Tyburski on Tips for Keeping Up - mainly good practices and 2 or 3 tools. Given at Internet Librarian 2005 Conference (Oct)
Searching Inventively
Answers in Unusual Places by Genie Tyburski, Law Office Computing ( ) - explores ways a researcher can use eBay, Amazon, and other shopping sites for purposes other than shopping. There is often information about products - the code, the description, the specifications. Tyburski also described how she used A9 and Amazon to get some thoughts and quotes about information overload. As always - a good account of a search process.
AOL and Yahoo into Travel
The Online Travel Landscape Is Getting Crowded by Bob Tedeschi, New York Times (Nov
Yahoo and AOL are building up their travel services, and Google may do the same.
"The latest evidence came late last month when Yahoo began testing new features in its travel section. The most noteworthy, Mr. Harteveldt said, was Yahoo's Trip Planner tool, which allows people to create, store and print virtual trip folders and post them in a public database for others to view. Among other things, travelers may post articles, hotel and restaurant picks and reviews - from Yahoo or outside Web sites - and photos from their own files or from those on Yahoo's online picture-sharing service, Flickr."
While Yahoo has Trip Planner and Farechase, AOL offers PinPointTravel.com (based on Kayak.com) and the AOL CityGuides for the US.
November 07, 2005
Blogs added to Topix.net
Topix Tags Blogs Topix.net weblog (Nov 6) Topix.net has added 15,000 weblogs to its feeds. Topix analyzed the content of top blogs vs main stream media. There is significantly more coverage of technology and business in the blogs - even entertainment. They chose the blogs by "by crawling about 1M blogs, and then began automatically filtering and ranking these using our NewsRank algorithms -- which consider a variety of factors, such as blog posting frequency, writing style, type of reference, popularity, and so forth. We ended up adding the top 15,000 sources that passed these tests."
Google Mobile
Google Launches Local for Mobile By Chris Sherman, SearchDay (Nov 7) "Google's new Local for mobile service is a stripped-down version of the web-based Google Local that puts a heavy emphasis on maps and driving directions."
Many Webs
The Future of the Web -- in Many Dimensions Richard Reisman, Always On (Oct 18) "Just when we think we understand the Web we find it has yet another dimension and here are eight to start with". There are many webs - the content one we search, the social where we network, the semantic, the service and even more.
Web Sites for Cinema Buffs
Internet offers fun diversions for film fans By Ann Hornaday, THE WASHINGTON POST [subscription] (Nov 7) - Selection of "Web sites dedicated to satirizing, preserving and providing insight on film fans' beloved Seventh Art." It's fun. Try the cartoon bunnies at Angry Alien. Also mentions archive.org for moving images.
Community intelligence at Yahoo
A Journey to the Center of Yahoo by James Fallows, New York Times (Nov 6) Fallows spent a day at the Yahoo HQ and came away with two impressions - "One is that while Yahoo is ever conscious of Google and determined to match it head to head in familiar keyword search, in the long run its plans for search seem quite different from Google's. The other is that Yahoo views the very scale and sprawl of its operations - the seemingly random assemblage of sites and functions, the 200 million active users in more than 20 countries - as a crucial competitive advantage." Because of those numbers, it hopes to "... build "community intelligence" into nearly all aspects of its operation - and in turn, to entice users to spend more and more of their time on Yahoo sites, where they can see Yahoo ads." That's where MyWeb2, the personal Yahoo search, fits in.
November 06, 2005
Searching Digital Books
Busy Day for Digital Books: News from Amazon and Google Gary Price, SEW Blog (Nov 4) - lists many services for searching in-copyright books and some for books in the public domain - including accouncements from Google and MSN.
Google, the "front-runner"
Just Googling It Is Striking Fear Into Companies by Steve Lohr, New York Times [subscription] (Nov 6) - everything Google is into. No wonder the stock price hit $300 a short while ago.
Guba Multimedia Search
New Multimedia Search Finds Terabytes of Content on 'The Dark Web' Press Release via Yahoo (Nov 2) - Guba.com finds multimedia content from Usenet, the old bulletin board system. Seems like a timewarp, but supposedly Usenet is still a place for finding these files.
"For video and images alone, GUBA indexes 300,000 files per day from Usenet -- that is the equivalent of one image or video every .3 seconds, 24 hours a day, 365 days per year. Content found on GUBA is available for download at the maximum speed of a subscriber's connection."
Good idea to keep the Safe Search filters when browsing Guba.
Vertical Search
Web search gets down to business by Cathleen Moore, InfoWorld (Oct 31)
"... several enterprise search vendors are directing their technology toward Web search, offering ways to categorize Web data for specific markets and tie these fine-tuned Web results together with intranet and desktop search findings."
Convera targets search to vertical industries such as media, financial services, research, and legal. Its private label search engine Excalibur will organize content "facets" (topics and sub-topics) drawing on Excalibur's 4.5 million categories.
Exalead is also mentioned for providing an "integrated search experience" to enterprises. It has 4 billion index and 2 million categories.
Also Convera Positioned to Launch Web Service PR Newswire (Oct 31)
The Excalibur index has 4 million pages, 500 million images, 5 million video, and 20 million audio.
November 04, 2005
Google Print Not Ready
Google launches controversial digital book site AFP via Yahoo News (Nov 3)
Google has added out of copyright "cultural artifacts" to Print Google. "The works being made available include US Civil War regimental histories and early American writings from the University of Michigan; congressional acts and other government documents from Stanford; works of Henry James from Harvard; and biographies of New York citizens and other collected biographies from the New York Public Library.'
However, it isn't easy to find these.
+ A search for civil war, years 1850 to 1900, finds books about the civil war but they are not viewable.
+ Search for Henry James as the author published between 1850 to 1900, finds some bibliographic entries and also an error message - "inauthor:henry inauthor:james date:1850-1900" is too general a query. Please try again with a more specific query."
Regardless of the error message about Henry James, individual books such as Terminations, published by Harpers and Brothers, do come up as searchable, but, oh the snippet is so small, that why should one bother?
Very much looks like the announcement of availability is premature.
InquisitorX for faster answers
InquisitorX(beta) is a new search engine start delivering the top three results as you type. Results come from Google, though there are options to switch to A9, Amazon, Technorati, Google News, Flickr. It also has a short list of "did you mean" to help refine the search with other keywords (similar to Google Suggest). But three "did you means" and three results do not provide a lot of information.
Interestingly this is one service that works better with Firefox, Opera, or Safari - not IE.
Reviewed in ResearchBuzz - InquisitorX Search Engines Gives Answers Before You Hit Enter (Oct 31)
Google Blog TagCloud
Google Blogs Everywhere! ResearchBuzz (Nov 1) Lists 9 blogs done by Google about its activities. Calishain put them into a tag cloud to see what was going on.
TagCloud is way to read several RSS feeds to identify the topics getting most attention (prevalence of keywords". Not surprisingly Google is the big keyword from these blogs, but also "hard to find books" and "publishers.
Buying Consumer Electronics
Consumer Reports: Shopping Online Smarter by May Wong, AP via Yahoo News (Nov 3)
Online shopping has been found to be better for price and selection than brick-and-mortar for "purchases of televisions, digital cameras, DVD/DVR players, camcorders, handheld computers, or audio equipment."
"The survey, to be published in the magazine's December issue [Consumer Reports], found that while online outlets may have wider selections and lower prices, physical stores — namely local independent stores and smaller chain retailers, such as Tweeter Home Entertainment and Ritz Camera — offer good service."
Best online stores: Crutchfield.com, Amazon.com, Costco.com, J&R.com, and Buy.com.
Article has tips on shopping for consumer electronic online or off.
Browser stats
Firefox back on the up , PC Pro (Nov 3) - Firefox has 11.5% of the browser market, according to monitoring done by OneStat.com. Internet Explorer has dropped to 85.4%. Firefox is picking up users from Netscape (which has dropped to the nearly invisible .26%) and Internet Explorer. Mac users though are switching to Safari (1.75% of total browser market).
Detailed figures are at One Stat - Mozilla's browsers global usage share is still growing according to OneStat.com
Canadians have adopted Firefox more readily than Americans. Firefox browsers make up 17% vs 78.5% for IE; whereas in the US, 14% use Firefox.
Amazon will sell parts of books
Amazon.com plans programs allowing online access of books Marketwatch [subscription] (Nov 3) Amazon is "developing two new programs that will allow customers to purchase online access to any page, section, or chapter of a book, as well as the entire book."
Amazon to offer excerpts of books By Bambi Francisco, MarketWatch
Amazon.com to Sell Individual Book Pages, by Hillel Italie, AP via Yahoo News (Nov 3)
Authors' Guild approves of the Amazon plan, saying that, "The Amazon programs are the way copyright is supposed to work." Random House, as one publisher, is keen too - "saying it will "work with online booksellers, search engines, entertainment portals and other appropriate vendors to offer the contents of its books to consumers for online viewing on a pay-per-page-view basis.""
"The new Amazon programs are an extension of the company's "Search Inside the Book," which lets users browse a book's contents for free. Over the summer, the company also launched Amazon Shorts, which offers brief, original fiction and nonfiction for 49 cents each."
Microsoft and British Library
Microsoft in deal with British Library Jon Boone and Maija Palmer, Marketwatch [subscription] (Nov 3)
"Microsoft on Thursday announced a "strategic partnership" with the British Library that will allow the software group to digitise 25m pages of content the equivalent of 100,000 books."
November 03, 2005
Yahoo Maps Beta
Yahoo Enhances Maps, Integrates Local Search Chris Sherman, SearchDay (Nov 3) Many improvements in Yahoo Maps (beta) to show local services for places in the United States.
Giants compete to digitize books
Different paths taken to book digitization By Jesse Nunes, Christian Science Monitor Blo (Nov 2) - Google Print LIbrary Program v Open Content Alliance.
Internet Librarian 2005
Presentations from the Internet Librarian Conference 2005 are coming online.
Of interest:
+ Tips for keeping up by panel of Gary Price, Genie Tyburski, and Steven Cohen. Stephen Cohen talked How RSS Has Changed My Life and How it Could Benefit Yours As Well
+ Social Software & Sites for PLs with Jessamyn West on Flickr, Tagging and the F-Word.
+ Taxonomy for Metadata & Information Architecture - Alice Redman-Neal, Access Innovations.
+ Web WIzard's Cool Tools - short list by 4 wizards.
+ Developing Information Literacy Tutorials Online
+ Competitive Intelligence (CI) Strategies, Services, Skills, & Sources
+ Medical Search Tips by Vicky Duncan and Sandra Kendall from universities in Canada. Compares Google Scholar to PubMed, shows Cochrane Consumer and other consumer heath sites. [Powerpoint]
+ Personal Knowledge Management by Bob Berkman. Handout pdf
Digital Reference on CiteSeer and Time Archive
Peter Jacso reviews CiteSeer and the Time Archive at the Digital Reference Shelf for November 2005.
CiteSeer collects open-access papers from the Internet that are computer-science related and excels at citation indexing. Jacso comments that CiteSeer was the likely model for Google Scholar, which is not to say Google is successful in his version. Of interest - Steve Lawrence, formerly of the NEC Reseach Institute and developer of CiteSeer, now works at Google.
The Time Archive carries archives of Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report and TIME. Free access for print subscribers of Time.
Tagging
Where Tagging Works: Searching for a Good Game by Chris Sherman, SearchDay (Nov 2) Sherman admits that he is not a fan of tagging, the practice of individuals adding index terms to pages or bookmarks they save, in the new social-bookmark centres. But he does see it being useful when used for a more restricted subject area like games, specifically Millions of Games.
"The site uses controlled vocabulary (called "Gameology") to describe categories (arcade, shooter, puzzle, etc). Although you can also add your own free-form tags, these category tags are well known to most users, so there's little ambiguity about what the tags mean."
Teens on the Internet
New report on Family, Friends and Community from Pew Internet and American Life (Nov 2)
"Teen Content Creators and Consumers: More than half of online teens have created content for the internet; and most teen downloaders think that getting free music files is easy to do."
November 02, 2005
Canadians Use the Internet
Internet study shows Canadians are heavy users CBC News (Nov 2) A survey by the Canadian Internet Project "showed that 56 per cent of all Canadians are online at least seven hours a week, with the average Canadian user online 13.5 hours each week."
Of interest: "Most Canadians report little awareness of Canadian cultural content on the internet while fewer than a third of Canadians are satisfied with the quality, quantity and accessibility of Canadian cultural content online."
Online Journalism Awards
NYTimes.com Wins Big at ONA Awards Editor and Publisher (Oct 29)
"The New York Times on the Web won three Online Journalism Awards and surprising upstart New West took home two at the Online News Association's 6th annual convention Saturday at New York City's Hilton Hotel."
Article has the list of awards and winners.
Google Print Resuming
Google restarts online books plan BBC News (Nov 1) - Google is back to digitizing books but according to a posting in its blog, it will "focus on books that were out of print or in the public domain." Article reviews the controversy.
The Googleblog entry was by Adam Smith Discovering hard-to-find books by Adam Smith (Oct 31)
Communicating Well Through EMail
How Not to Stick Your Foot in Your Mouth via E-Mail by Reid Goldsborough, LinkUp DIgital (Oct 15) - Good advice on putting your best foot forward in an email all the time by paying attention to spelling, grammar, and expression.
"Appearance counts. Don’t be careless while trying to be efficient or overly casual while trying to be cool. “People wind up conveying a sloppy image of themselves and their organization[s],” said Chan."
Protecting your Identity
Another Phine Kettle of Phish: Identity Theft Prevention by Carol Ebbinghouse, Searcher (November)
Carol Ebbinghouse is the law librarian at the Second District Court of Appeal, Los Angeles, Calif. She knows her stuff. This article is long, likely comprehensive, somewhat frightening, certainly daunting about the prevalence of identity theft and measures individuals should take to reduce the risk. All references to resources to use are in the United States, but Canadians can avail themselves of the general advice and get an idea of what to look for in Canada.
"While you cannot prevent the theft of your identity from banks, credit bureaus, alumni offices, swiped laptops without encryption, unscrupulous employees, etc, you can take precautions to limit the odds of identity theft. Just as using seat belts, yielding to rights of way, and reading road signs may not prevent all accidents, these precautions do eliminate many risks. Using these suggestions will reduce the opportunities for would-be ID thieves to make you his or her next victim."
November 01, 2005
Exalead for the Enterprise
The French connection, KM World (Nov 1) Exalead launches enterprise search in the US and a desktop seach product. "The platform serves as the foundation for Exalead’s suite of search products designed for desktop, enterprise and the Web. The company has also released exalead one:desktop professional edition, the first software solution from the exalead one:search family of products."
Google No-Frills
Google's Search for Simplicity "That famously spartan user interface is about to face a major test as the outfit seeks to drum up attention for its many new offerings" by Ben Elgin, BusinessWeek Online (Oct 3) - Stay with the no-frills looks or show off all those many frills Google is intol? - that is the question for Google
IBM and Google do Desktop
IBM, Google Team on Search "Two giants are integrating their enterprise search technologies." Red Herring (Oct 28)
IBM and Google will be "integrating their enterprise search technologies for office computers so employees can better search for information in documents, personal e-mail as well as large databases. "
Find Books in the Library the Easy Way
RedLightGreen is a terrific search service for finding library books and information about the books. It has access to catalog entries for 120 million books in library catalogs across the world. Search is dead simple and you can check if the book is in your library - Canadian libraries included.
A9 users can add RedGreenLight to their search options; Firefox browser users can add the search plugin.
Read Searching for Library Books with RedLightGreen by Gary Price, SearchDay (Oct 31)
 | Find important books for research, check availability in the library, and create citations with this free resource. |
MSN Book Search
Microsoft Launches Book Digitization Project—MSN Book Search by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (Oct 31)
"Initially, Microsoft will focus on public domain books, relying on the Internet Archive to do the digitization as one of the tasks the Archive performs for OCA. Microsoft plans to expand the content of MSN Book Search to include academic materials, periodicals, and other print offline resources. Initially, Microsoft will commit some $5 million dollars for the digitization of 150,000 books from currently unnamed collections. The figure is based on an average of 10 cents a page for a 300-page book. A beta search site for MSN Book Search is expected to be available in 2006."
Quint concludes - "Google’s mission statement—”to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”—seems to have become the mantra for all major Web suppliers." Seems so.
Open Library Alliance Expands
Open Content Alliance Expands Rapidly; Reveals Operational Details
by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (Oct 31) Open Content Alliance, the initiative to digitize books, is growing apace with new members. There are now 34 participants including Internet Archive (one of the founders), Microsoft, Yahoo, and the Research Libraries Group. Several university libraries have joined recently.
"The interface for books at the Open Library site models a book with page turning, highlight searching, virtual highlighting, and magnifying. Some of the books will even offer an audio version, in which case one can click on “listen” at the book. LibriVox supplies the audio technology and a network of volunteers does the reading. A connection with Lulu.com supplies bound, print-on-demand versions of books at a user’s request with an estimated average price of approximately $8 a book or about $1 for a short (100-page) black and white book."
Brewster Kahle has said OCA would begin with out-of-copyright books published between 1923 and 1964.
Read more about the project at Open Library Details - this is done in the style of the books. Click on the arrow key to turn pages. For selection of the digitized books, go to Open Library.