Internet News

Canada's Cultural Gateway

Culture online: Made in Canada - announces revamped Culture.ca site (Dec )

"Culture.ca, Canada's cultural gateway is for everyone who wants to explore, find, and share the best of Canada's cultural and creative life.

This latest version of Culture.ca has more than a new look, it offers you more content organized under new subject categories that include: Arts, Heritage, Nature, Recreation, Society and Tourism.

We're more current with timely cultural articles updated regularly and daily cultural news. The site is also more interactive with popular links as chosen by you, cultural polls and the best of Canada's cultural blogs."

AskCity

AskCity From Ask.com: Fast Facts About the New Service by Gary Price, ResourceShelf (Dec 4)

"The best way to get to know the service, any search service for that matter, is to run some searches. That said, what follows is a brief but hopefully fact-filled guide to a few of the many features that the new AskCity service offers."

Tooting Intute

Google, eat your heart out by Stephen Hoare, The Guardian (December 12, 2006)

Promotes using Intute, the excellent UK university sponsored and managed subject directory.

"Academics, researchers and students searching for obscure reference material can now access a powerful new online tool. Intute is an academic search engine that can track down books, journals or research materials from university libraries and collections across the UK."

Autonomy for LoC

U.S. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS SELECTS AUTONOMY FOR ITS ENHANCED WEBSITE SEARCH FEATURES
( Dec. 14, 2006)

... "U.S. Library of Congress has selected Autonomy's enterprise search infrastructure platform to offer enhanced search features on several of its websites, including Thomas and the Legislative Information System" Features are "framework for organizing and managing the legislative information, providing multiple guided navigation paths, and new flexibility in searching.."

Canadian Web Archive

Library and Archives Canada has announced a Government of Canada Web Archive (Dec 2006). LAC received permission to begin preservation in 2004 of Canadian web content. First part of this project has been mainly of the Federal Goverrnment pages, and some provincial.

"The Archive includes 1, 489 Federal Government web sites which were harvested using the Heritrix web crawling software between December 22nd, 2005 and March 24th, 2006. Approximately 1.8 TB of data was collected, comprising over 40, 000,000 digital objects. "

"A second harvest of the Federal Government web domain (.gc.ca) was started on October 25th, 2006. LAC also began harvesting the web sites of Canada's provincial and territorial governments during that same week. Further study of the archived websites will help to determine the frequency of future harvests. Analysis performed on the results of the first .gc.ca domain harvest has greatly aided in the configuration of the web crawling software and the development of other software tools utilized for the second harvest."

Government of Canada Web Archive Now Available But Not Online, Internet Access Planned for the Future, Resourceshelf (Dec 20)

Library and Archives Canada has begun to save Canadian web sites.

Yahoo Mail with Shortcuts

Y!Q and Yahoo Maps: New Feature Integrates Info, Maps and More into Yahoo Mail (Classic Version Only), Resourceshelf (Dec 22)

Old version of Yahoo Mail has something of Yahoo’s Y!Q contextual search technology with the addition of Yahoo Mail “shortcuts.”

Meebo

Meebo: New Features Added to Web-Based IM Service, Resourceshelf (Dec 22)

"As instant messaging continues to grow in popularity, Meebo is a totally web-based (and free) tool that provides users access to all of the major IM services (AOL, Yahoo, MSN, and GTalk) in one place."

Good for getting around using a software client.

Query terms for a topic

Where do good query terms come from?

Muresan, Gheorghe and Roussinov, Dmitri (2006) Where do good query terms come from?. In Grove, Andrew, Eds. Proceedings 69th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST) 43, Austin (US).

From Abstract:

"This paper describes a framework for investigating the quality of different query expansion approaches, and applies it in the HARD TREC experimental setting. The intuition behind our approach is that each topic has an optimal term-based representation, i.e. a set of terms that best describe it, and that the effectiveness of any other representation is correlated with the overlap that it has with the optimal representation. ... An important conclusion of comparing different query expansion approaches is that machines are better than humans at doing statistical calculations and at estimating which query terms are more likely to discriminate documents relevant for a given topic. ... However, the best results are obtained from hybrid approaches, in which human relevance judgments are used by algorithms for deriving terms representations. This result suggest that the best approach in improving retrieval performance is probably to focus on implicit relevance feedback and novel interaction models based on ostention or mediation, which have shown great potential."

Mentioned in Resourceshelf (Dec 22)

Book Search Projects

More Book Search News, Search engine showdown (Dec 23)

Greg Notess points to an article by Walt Crawford that examines the main projects for digitizing books so that they may be searched -- Book Searching: OCA/GBS Update, Cities and Insights (Jan 2007)

Article summarizes Google Book Search (GBS), Yahoo (no action), Internet Archive, Open Content Alliance with partner Microsoft Live. Seems to find all projects disappointing.

However, the large grant to the Internet Archive for digitization from Sloan Foundation was announced after this article.

Google's results count

Super Clustering Google, SearchEngine Showdown (Dec 15) - Greg Notess noted one of Google's many oddities in the number of results it says it finds and the number it displays. Basically - the total count can be wildly off. Notess includes a link for his test search. Likely everyone will get a different answer.

What People Searched For In 2006

The Year in Search: A 2006 Review by Enid Burns, Clickz (Dec 21 )

Recaps Microsoft Live; Google Zeitgeist; Yahoo Search; AOL; and Lycos Top 50 - draw your own conclusions from these highlights of web, news, and product searches. If we were to judge the users of search engines from these results, the ones searching for news at Ask.com or Lycos seem to be more seriously minded.

Time: Person of the Year 2006

If you participate on the Web by blogging, bookmarking, video sharing, adding content to a wiki, posting photos to Flickr, myspacing - in any way - you are this year's Person of the Year according to Time Magazine.

Time's Person of the Year: You -- In 2006, the World Wide Web became a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter By LEV GROSSMAN, Time.com (Dec 13)

"But look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes."

I've seen a few articles that are scornful of this choice (2006 having been a very difficult year), but I think it is a good one. There seems to be a very strong current running that is dragging people into communities on the Web. It isn't new - Usenet used to be very strong, people have been reviewing products for years at Epinions and others, people have been running blogs for 4 years or so. Still - there is a sense of something stronger now. Much seems to be for the entertainment purposes, but knowledge building and sharing is taking place.

Time Magazine celebrates participatory media, Pandia (Dec 19) -- Pandia reminds us that there is at least one voice warning us of the dangers of "online collectivism" - Jaron Lanier who wrote about the hive mind in Digital Maoism.

Time has 15 stories of what people are doing on the Web today. Citizens of the New Digital Democracy "You control the media now and the world will never be the same. Meet 15 of the web generation's movers and shakers" By LEV GROSSMAN

Live Search Slipping, Ask Gaining

Windows Live Search in big trouble, Pandia (Dec 20) "Google remains the giant, Windows Live is in free fall, Ask is growing."

Nielsen/NetRatings for November show Windows Live Search dropping by 12% over the year to 8.2% market share in the US. Google has 49.5%, Yahoo 24.3%, AOL at 6.2%, and Ask reaching 2.6 % (up 33%).

Pandia suggests that the rebranding isn't working. I would add that the search isn't working. Live.com is fun to use if you have time to figure out all the morphing and emerging that goes on, but the web search results are poor. There are many wonderful features but as a package it doesn't deliver.

Ask, on the other hand, is a delight to use, and as Pandia notes, has managed to survive its rebranding to carry on without Jeeves.

Tech Stories 2006

The Top 10 Tech Stories of 2006 "Mergers, acquisitions, lawsuits, scandals, and battery recalls kept journalists busy in 2006" Marc Ferranti, IDG News Service via PC World (Dec 22)

Franco-German War

Germany Leaves Quaero To France, To Start Theseus Search Project, Searchengineland (Dec 21)

France and Germany have parted ways in developing the "European" search engine Quaero. "France will continue developing Quaero to help counter American-based search giants like Google and Yahoo. Germany is to start their own search technology project called Theseus."

Germany pulls out of the European Quaero search engine project and sets up its own. Fast leads alternative development project.

Postscript: Pandia has more details about the Quaero project for building a European multimedia search engine in European search engine project in trouble (Dec 22). It's not known why the Germans and French fell out, but Pandia thinks that part of the problem may have been because the project lacked a clear market strategy - and the rest was politics.

"It seems parts of the French government has failed to understand this, [that success depends on science and markets] focusing mainly on the science part, and — on top of that — turning this into a weapon to be used in trans-Atlantic political rivalry. That has been a big mistake."

Top Search Terms Adjusted

The Lies Of Top Search Terms Of The Year, Searchengineland (Dec 20)

Danny Sullivan and others find it suspicious that the most popular search terms at the various search engines don't match well. Simple answer is that the results are filtered for the offensive and probably navigational (how to get to a site) and maybe more.

A Washington Post article reported that Google had said that "its annual list does not reflect the most-searched-for terms by volume; rather, it selects the fastest-growing search terms and removes those that are always very popular, such as searches for Web sites that host free e-mail accounts or adult content. "

You won't find this explanation in the press releases of the various engines.

The lesson: take these results with a grain a salt and by all means do not stake your sociology thesis on the results.

Internet Archive Coup

Google's book-scanning efforts trigger philosophical debate by MICHAEL LIEDTKE, Associated Press via Globe and Mail (Dec 20)

Open Content Alliance is opposed to universal access to digital content being the in the hands of one commercial entity - Google. Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has announced a $1 million grant to the Internet Archive for digitisation of
collections owned by the Boston Public Library, the Getty Research Institute, the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

"The deal represents a coup for Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle, a strident critic of the controls that Google has imposed on its book-scanning initiative."

" Google's restrictions on its digital book copies stem in part from the company's decision to scan copyrighted material without explicit permission. Google wants to ensure only small excerpts from the copyrighted material appear online — snippets that the company believes fall under “fair use” protections of U.S. law. .... In contrast, the Open Content Alliance won't scan copyrighted content unless it receives the permission of the copyright owner. Most of the roughly 100,000 books that the alliance has scanned so far are works whose copyrights have expired."

Scirus Review

Scirus is reviewed by Peter Jacso in the December 2006 Digital Reference Shelf . Scirus is a free science search engine provided by Elsevier and has web and journal content. Jacso compares it, Google Scholar and Academic Live in detail and finds Google Scholar, in particular, to be riddled with errors - still. Scirus is the more reliable and although smaller than GS is larger than Academic Live.

"Scirus has come a long way since it is debut. It has a rich, layered content built from a variety of primary document genres from a variety of journal archives, depositories and repositories. It is far the most capable and reliable in terms of software functions of the three scholarly search engines."

AskX - Preview

Ask.com Releases Prototype of New Results Page User Interface, Video Search Also Begins Testing, ResourceShelf (Dec 19)

Gary Price has information on the new user interface for search results that Ask.com is testing. Being connected to the test url is random, but Gary has provided a link to the new Ask prototype. and describes the display panels.

It has possibilities. I like the display for this search for hurricanes.

Quintura for Kids is Great

Quintura for Kids ? Quintura brings its visual clooud to kids, Press release (Dec 20)

OK - if we can't get adults using tag clouds to help comprehend search results, maybe kids will see the value. Quintura, which uses tag clouds to help visualize search, has issued a kids version - and what a delight it is for content and display.

From the press release: "Designed specifically for kids, this new experience demonstrates Quintura’s continued commitment to change the way people search and find information on the Web. Based on the same cutting edge Neural Network technology used on Quintura.com, Quintura for Kids utilizes the Quintura cloud, which allows kids to find what they are looking for faster and easier than ever before."

Scrapbook for saving pages

Easily capture, manage Web pages in Firefox at Robert Ambrogi's Lawsites (Dec 19)

Ambrogi says Scrapbook, a Firefox extension for saving web pages, is better than Microsoft's Onfolio (part of the MSN toolbar / desktop).

"Among this program's many nice touches is its ability to capture linked pages and linked files along with the captured page. So if you want to capture a page as well as all pages it links to, you can. In fact, you can set the depth to multiple levels of linked pages. Or, if a page links to audio or image files, you can set the capture to include those files."

Satisfaction with Search Results

Survey: General Search Fails Professionals, Searchengineland (Dec 19) -- Survey by Convera states that professionals "in publishing, advertising, marketing, healthcare, finance and government" are not satisfied with search results from search engines. Sullivan examined the numbers more closely and saw that 95% were very or somewhat satisified with results.

Study is at Knewworld - Professionals Reveal Their Search Failures, Successes

Google Finance Competition

Google Revamps Finance "Struggling financial site gets redesign, new functions but faces tough competition." Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service via PC World (Dec 13)

Google Finance falls far behind Yahoo Finance (#1) and MSN Money (#2). Will the enhancements that allow more personalization and show more history help? Not in Canada - the Canadian exchanges aren't listed.

Virtual Earth for walkers

New Release of Virtual Earth Launched, Search Engine Watch blog (Dec 13)

Cyclists and walkers might use the new build of Microsoft's Virtual Earth to create routes.

Also see posting in Windows Live Blog - New Virtual Earth release launches

Collaborative Online News

Digg Burrows Down a New Path "The popular news-aggregator site has launched a redesign to counter criticisms of its turn away from hard news. Will the changes help?" by Catherine Holahan, BusinessWeek.com (Dec 19)

Digg, the online news community, has 700,000 online. Is this enough to create "wisdom of crowds"? Readers were complaining that the news being posted was getting too weird and foolish. Digg has adopted a redesign.

"On Dec. 18, Digg launched an extensive redesign of the homepage that could address some of its core users' concerns. The site is planning more redesigns in 2007 to focus on personalizing the Digg experience. Digg also plans to expand into different kinds of content aside from news. Adelson, Digg's CEO, says the critics are in the minority. "There are always squeaky wheels," says Adelson, adding that Digg users have public profiles and want to develop reputations for digging quality content. "Most feel their experience has improved based on the increased numbers.""

But these changes sound as if they will move Digg away from hard news and more towards entertainment.

People looking for news might turn to Techmeme and Tailrank.

"As Digg embraces more entertainment content, other upstarts are poised to steal its news audience. Techmeme and Tailrank, for example, use formulas that give preference to the stories most blogged about in order to highlight the news most likely to be fresh and interesting. "

Techmeme monitors 1,000 sources for tech news. Tailrank picks up hard news by monitoring 160,000 blogs every half hour.

Newsvine was not mentioned in this article. But this community news site does have hard news and opinion.

From their about page -- "At Newsvine, you can read stories from established media organizations like the Associated Press, ESPN, and New Scientist as well as individual contributors from all around the world. Placement of stories is determined by a multitude of factors including freshness, popularity, and reputation. Contribution is open to all, and editorial judgement is in the hands of the community."

Open Directory Project Failing

DMOZ had 9 lives. Used up yet? by Rick Skrenta, Skrentablog (Dec 19) -- Alarming and tragic news about the Open Directory Project - DMOZ.org - computer failures and poor backups have damaged the database and Skrenta thinks it unlikely that AOL will do much to revive it. People have been proclaiming the end of subject directories for the year or two as tagging and social bookmarking became so popular. But DMOZ has been an important resource, whatever its failings in bias or timeliness, for presenting the big picture of a topic. The taxonomy was excellent. Hopefully, someone will salvage it and use dmoz as the base for a new service.

SEC Resources

An Overview of Selected SEC Resources on the Web, by Jan Bissett and Margi Heinen, LLRX (Dec 2006)

This is an update to an earlier column. "We offer this column on Securities and Exchange filings as well as selected guides to SEC research as a pathfinder to assist those who are challenged by the complexities of this area of the law."

Zillman's List

Deep Web Research Research 2007 By Marcus P. Zillman, LLRX.com (Dec 2006) - Zillman has updated his list of articles and resources that are somewhat related to "deep web". As always, Zillman provides no annotations - not even author, source, or date.

Searching for Video

How do People find Video? , iMedia Connection (Dec 15)

Mainly they prefer direct navigation over keyword search - or tips from friends.

"According to the February 2006 OPA study, 50 percent of U.S. online video viewers go to specific websites to watch video, while 48 percent discover videos randomly while on a range of websites (mostly thanks to YouTube and other video sites that make it easy to distribute content across the network). Word of mouth is also an element for finding new online videos, since 42 percent said they click on email links-- which often come from friends, family and co-workers."

End of year search reports

2006 Top Searches, Searchenginewatch (Dec 18)

Looks at end-of-year-search reports from AOL, Lycos, Yahoo, MSN and finds differences.

Yoople Hoople

Yoople For Collaborative Searching, Searchengineland (Dec 18)

It's a good thing Danny Sullivan figured out what to do at Yoople because it wasn't obvious to me. It searches Yahoo (and hopes to search Google). The difference is that you can change the ranking - move something else into number one slot. People have time to do this?

Maporama adds 21 countries

MAPORAMA INTERNATIONAL EXTENDS ITS GLOBAL CARTOGRAPHIC COVERAGE TO MAGHREB, MIDDLE EAST AND EASTERN EUROPE COUNTRIES, Maporama (Sept 28, 2006)

Maporama added cartographic data for 21 new countries at street-level detail. This includes Eastern Europe (Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, Georgia, Lettonia, Lithuania, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Bielorussia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Moldavia, Albania, Slovakia, Macedonia, etc.), Mediterranean basin (Lybia, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria) and Egypt.

BuzzMetrics picks up the people's voice

Brands for the Chattering Masses By KEITH SCHNEIDER, New York Times (Dec 17 ) [Requires registration]

The times are changining for marketers and brand meisters. The days of the disembodied voice advertising Kraft recipes on Ed Sullivan are over. Today agencies like Nielsen BuzzMetrics do the work online.

"The company, an A. C. Nielsen unit formed this year in a merger of three smaller companies, asserts that it has welded together technology, communications and business expertise in a new way; in essence, it can gain access to the electronic musings of millions of people to learn about the values, desires and opinions that start marketing trends. Essentially, BuzzMetrics represents the entrepreneurial convergence of brand- and online-business specialists holding M.B.A.’s — several of whom trained at Procter & Gamble — with computer scientists who say they are building the digital equivalent of a crystal ball."

And they do it using search engines that scour blogs and community places to see what is being said.

"The search engines retrieve phrases, opinions, keywords, sentences and images, and the company runs the data through processing programs powerful enough to sift millions of messages simultaneously. By analyzing vocabulary, language patterns and phrasing, the programs determine whether comments are positive or negative, and whether the authors are men or women, young or old."

BuzzMetrics is one. Others are Umbria, Cymfony, BrandIntel (Toronto); Biz3, and MotiveQuest. (All but BrandIntel are in the US).

People turn off ads on the television, block popups, and refuse telephone sales. What's left? Comments on products at review sites.

"At the same time, new surveys show that 90 percent of consumers trust word-of-mouth suggestions, and that some make purchases based on such guidance. “Consumer-created content is still new enough that it’s much more influential at driving brand awareness than driving purchases,” said Ms. Riley, the Jupiter analyst. “People who read about something on a blog will generally do some further research, either by asking friends or through a search engine, for example, before forming their opinion,” she said."

Nielsen BuzzMetrics is owned by VNU, a Netherlands company. BuzzMetrics took over Intelliseek, notable for Web search and software for several years, and became Nielsen BuzzMetrics. Mr. Kadayam, previously of Intelliseek, has created Floodgate - "It is a program that displays in real time what people around the world are saying on thousands of blogs and message boards. The program shows each new message as a blinking green dot that fades to light blue and then vanishes after a few minutes. The program can cluster messages according to general themes, and track keywords and phrases and the full content of what the writer is saying."

It's really all about commerce, but more than ever before, the consumer will be heard.

Thanks to Barbara S for this lead.

Hurisearch - vertical for human rights

HuriSearch: The Human Rights Search Engine, Searchengineland (Dec 11)

"HuriSearch, which is a human rights search engine was officially launched on December 10th, Human Rights Day. The search engine is designed to provide searchers with data specific to the area of human rights, and has indexed over 3,000 websites and 2,300,000 pages concentrating in this area. Its crawler refreshes between every 24 hours and 8 days, depending on type of site."

Trending to Search 2.0

Search 2.0 - What's Next? Written by Emre Sokullu and edited by Richard MacManus, Read/Write (Dec 13)

Good end-of-year article for looking at trends in search: user interface (sees promise in Snap and the new Live.com), technology (clustering, natural language), and vertical engines.

Comments by others worth a quick browse.

Swicki Improvements

Eurekster Swicki Improvements, SearchEngineLand (Dec 14)

Swickis are custome-made search engines which learn from their users to deliver better results. Popular Science has been using one for some time.

"The improvements to the service allow much greater input from each swicki user community, to let publishers leverage the knowledge of each community in order to better understand their traffic and drive more searches per swicki."

Police Using Online Video

Police discovering power of YouTube by AMANDA-MARIE QUINTINO,
Canadian Press via Globe and Mail (Dec 15)

Police forces are starting to use YouTube to get witnesses to crimes. Hamilton police posted a one-minute clip of a surveillance video done of a hip-hop concert. Young people are frequent the social networking spaces and video sites - this could be a way of finding witnesses.

"Police are looking for two "people of interest" who were at a hip-hop concert the night a 22-year-old man from nearby Grimsby, Ont., was killed. The video clip has been viewed over 2,000 times since it was uploaded earlier this month."

Police are also catching people who have committed a crime through the videos they post themselves.

"It also works both ways: a pair of Winnipeg teens who posted a first-person, white-knuckle street-racing clip earlier this year soon found police knocking at their door, looking to talk to the people responsible for putting the clip online."

Querying The Next Generation by Steve Smith, Omma (March 2006)

Predictions at the beginning of 2006 were for Search 2.0 mobile, personalized, and social, and there is a lot of video.

" Search 2.0 will involve "more of an evolution of how to determine relevance," says Gary Stein, director of client services, BuzzMetrics. With an eye toward mobile searches and video queries, the search engines will push hard this year to get their algorithms beyond back links and text tags. "Filtering will be huge," says Rob Griffin, U.S. director of search for MPG's Media Contacts.

The longstanding hope of personalized search is starting to bear fruit. For example, Google's News page now recommends stories based on a searcher's click history. Keywords and copy scans only go so far, says Danielle Leitch, executive vice president, client strategy at MoreVisibility, a search engine marketing firm. "The writing is on the wall. Behavioral targeting and demographic profiling will be the next layer in search," she says, pointing to MSN's plan to include both options in AdCenter.

Yahoo hopes to refine the search model by leveraging social networking, the collaborative search and user-tagging that recent acquisitions of Flickr and Del.icio.us add to its fold. Ultimately, it may take a village, or several, to tweak and target results so they account for subjective qualities like trustworthiness and personal taste. As search becomes the interface for a wider range of content, especially video, merging it with a recommendation engine may be as important as tagging video. "

hakia for meaningful search

7 Search Evolutions for '07, Marketwatch (Dec 15)

"According to Dr. Riza C. Berkan, CEO of hakia, the web's new meaning-based search engine and a nuclear scientist by training with a specialization in artificial intelligence and fuzzy logic, here are seven evolutionary changes coming for '07:"

The first few results at Hakia related to my question - best things to do in Grenada. The press release describes seven ways that hakia will be the "first time" you experience this kind of search.

Good enough to try. We all need meaning in our searches.

The ads aren't bad either. How did it know that I drink scotch?

Google Patent Search

Need to Search Patents? Try Google "Search giant now provides easy access to U.S. patent database." Nancy Gohring, IDG News Service (Dec 14)

Yes - Google has developed a Patent Search engine - http://www.google.com/patents

"The new site lets anyone search for U.S. patents by keyword, patent number, inventor, and filing date. Users can view a scanned image of the original patent and zoom in on pages."

+ covers 7 million patents
+ only US patents but hopes to expand
+ ranks according to a "number of different signals"
+ can't save or print at the moment.

Stumble Upon Video

StumbleUpon adds video to its repertoire with StumbleVideo By Josh Lowensohn, WebWare (Dec 14)

StumbleUpon, the social bookmark tool that runs on serendipity, has added a StumbleVideo to get content from YouTube, Google Video, and MySpace.

"This is the perfect service for people who don't want to spend time sorting through the chaff that tends to find its way onto the most-watched list of major video providers."

Humming Search

If you can hum it, Nayio might find it By Rafe Needleman, WebWare (Dec 13) - Hum a tune into your computer mic and Humming Search might be able to identify it. Works on IE and requires installing the Humming Search Client. Cool.

Firefox Bookmarks

Building a Kickass Firefox Sidebar, SEOMoz.org (Dec 12) - It only took Rand 20 minutes to clean up bookmarks and organize blogs. The collection of Social Buzz, Blogs, Forums, News. More tips about doing this in the comments to the posting.

New Interface at Accoona

accoona improves its interface? by Phil Bradley (Dec 13) -- Bradley doesn't see any improvement in this change to searching web, news, and businees in one shot on the first search. Users can adjust on the second run.

Accoona purports to be a business search engine. The SuperTarget your search is a useful feature for identifying countries, people, and companies that turn up in the results.

Google Toolbar for Firefox

Google Toolbar For Firefox 3.0 Adds Great Features, SearchEngineLand (Dec 13) - I think they meant Toolbar Version 2.0. No matter - Google has a new toolbar for Firefox that is also integrated with Google Docs and Spreadsheets. It also connects to Google Bookmarks.

Read about the features

Google Co-op Collaboration

Google Custom Search Engine Eases Collaboration Process, SearchEngineLand (Dec 13) -- collaborate with others in creating and improving a Google Custom Search engine.

Mamma - Meta-video-search

Mamma.com Launches New Video Search Engine "This venture enables Mamma.com Users to Search and Discover Millions of Broadband Videos", CCNMatthews via Marketwatch (Dec 12)

Mamma with Pixsy Media Search Platform has a video metasearch engine that picks up videos from "the web including YouTube, Revver, StupidVideos.com, AddictingClips.com, Blastro, BusinessWeek, Grouper, MetaCafe, Reuters, Sharkle, Roo Media, USA Today, and many more."

Some International Content at Searchforvideo

Searchforvideo.com Launches First Phase of International Video Podcast Directory - Video Search Engine Simplifies Finding and Downloading International Video Podcasts, Marketwatch (Dec 12)

SearchforVideo has added international content under Podcasts. There is some news from BBC, and Comedy has Channel 4. You can also select Francais or Deutsch podcasts (at bottom of page).
"The first phase of the international video podcast directory provides access to the most popular video podcasts from Germany and France. Specific video podcast categories include news, comedy, television, film, arts, science and technology. International video podcast producers can submit their podcasts for review and inclusion in the directory for free. In the coming months, additional languages will be considered for the international video podcast directory."

Top Social Bookmarking Services

Top 5 social bookmarking services, Pandia (Nov 28)

Names Furl, Netvouz, del.icio.us, Mag.nolia, and Bluedot (for MySpace) as the 5 of 20 tools that meet Pandia's criteria for size of community, help pages, import / export, RSS feeds, and an information blog.

Diigo Social Annotation

Diigo Unveils Innovative 'Social Annotation' Service for the Web, BetaNews - press release (Aug 3, 2006)

"Diigo's Social Annotation service seamlessly integrates Web Highlighter, Sticky-Note, Clipping, Social Bookmarking, and Advance Search, into a powerful personal tool and a rich social platform, and in the process, turns the entire web into a writable, participatory and interactive media. The service is free and is available at http://www.diigo.com ."

A Xmas List for Google

What we want from Google this Christmas "15 features and improvements Pandia wants from Google this Xmas." Pandia (Dec 12) - "Dear Brin", Susanne and Per of Pandia write - and every one of the 15 items on this list are bang on. I would add one more - please make Google Personal Search work with Google Bookmarks and Google Notebook. The current separation is ludicrous.

Changes to Google Finance

New look to Google Finance page. Has market and sector summaries, news, top movers. Registered users can easily add stocks and other financial instruments to their portfolio. Only has US stock exchanges.

See Google Updates Google Finance Home Page, SearchEngineLand (Dec 12)

Microsoft Books and Academic Searches

History and Overview: Microsoft Live Book Search (Beta) Now Online; Medical Content Being Added to MS Live Academic, by Gary Price, ResourceShelf (Dec 6)

History of announcements about Microsoft Live Book Search to the present when the beta release became available, links to reviews of it, and description of options.

Also - Academic Live has said it has added medical content but as Gary pointed out it has not updated its list of journals since the launch in April 2006. It is now Dec 12 - Gary noted that on Dec 6. No one ever updates the documentation, not even when it is beneficial to the product or service.

McAfee SiteAdvisor Warnings

McAfee Updates Groundbreaking Study of Search Engine Safety Overall risk declines by 12%; Sponsored ads continue to pose high risk, however; "Drive-by" malware sites frighteningly common, Marketwatch (Dec 11)

"McAfee, Inc. today released a follow up report to its study from May that shows search engine users continue to be at significant risk of clicking through to Web sites that can compromise their online safety. The investigation, conducted by McAfee(R) SiteAdvisor(TM), studied the five major U.S. search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, Ask) and found that the overall chance of clicking through to a risky site declined by 12.0%. Still, McAfee estimates that consumers click through to risky sites more than 268 million times each month."

Of special interest:

+ free is a dangerous word. "... queries containing the word "free" are particularly likely to lead users to sites with unsavory practices."
+ tech toys can bring trouble. " Of the Google Zeitgeist search terms analyzed, the most dangerous category is "tech toys," examples of which include "ipod nano," "mp3 music downloads," and "winmx." 23.3% of results for this category are rated red or yellow by McAfee SiteAdvisor."
+ childhood favourites have dangers - " (6.7% risky results) which includes keywords such as "Winnie the Pooh" and "Tweety." "

Full McAfee search engine study is at http://www.siteadvisor.com/studies/search_safety_dec2006.html

US AskCity

New AskCity Integrates Local Content, Technology, and Tools
by Paula J. Hane, Newsbreaks (Dec 11)

There are good reasons for people in the US to use the new AskCity.

"The folks at Ask.com claim that AskCity offers users a superior local search experience for several reasons. It integrates four specialized search engines into one service—Business and Services, Events, Movies, and Maps and Directions. It uses Ask.com’s proprietary search algorithms. It taps some of the best local-themed content from around the Web, including from sister IAC properties such as Citysearch and from many other content partners. And, finally, it offers unique tools for interacting with the data and then moving from information to action—such as buying tickets or booking a restaurant reservation."

Microsoft's Live Search Books

Microsoft Launches Live Search Books by Greg R. Notess, Newsbreaks (Dec 11)

Microsoft finally launched Live Search Books but how much demand is there for out-of-copyright titles?

"All of the books available on Live Search Books are out-of-copyright titles, thus avoiding the copyright controversy at Google Books. The initial load at Live features titles from several libraries’ collections, including the University of California, the University of Toronto, and The British Library. Microsoft also announced the addition of The New York Public Library and the American Museum of Veterinary Medicine as future contributors."

Geo-Tagged Photos

Google Earth Adds Wikipedia, User Content, GigaOM

More mashups of photos with Google Earth done through Panoramia

"Little icons now indicate selected entries from Wikipedia, geo-tagged photos from Panoramio, and posts by the Google Earth Community. All of this is very sparingly done, but it’s great to see Google incorporating community content into the default version of one of its product."

Also described in Google Earth Adds Geographic Web Layer, Search Engine Land

Google Health URLS

Gmail and Health URLs: Why Google cares less about your privacy, and why you should care by Donna Bogatin, Digital Markets, ZDNet (Dec 10)

Basically, when it comes to trusting Google with email and search history -- "Nothing is risk-free: Risks of fraud, data manipulation and identity theft can be reduced, however, by choosing email systems which provide for more user control and which are not integrated within data mining business models."

More alarm bells when off for Donna Bogatin when she heard about Google's idea of a personal databank of health information about individuals that medical care updates and patient uses.

This was floated by Adam Bosworth in a speech at Connecting Americans to Their Health Care:Empowered Consumers, Personal Health Records and Emerging Technologies National conference sponsored by The Markle Foundation
Washington, D.C. December 7, 2006

"So what can be done? We should start at the beginning. Let’s put the patients in charge of their health and medical information. Let’s build a system which puts the people who are sick in control. For every single medical and health-related event, let’s make sure that patients can effortlessly retrieve and share their information in its totality and then use it to ensure that they get the best quality of care possible. It is their health. The people who treat, diagnose, test or dispense medications to patients should be required to deliver, instantly, over the net, at the speed of light, that information to those patients to use as they see fit. If these patients choose to share it with caregivers or health coaches or nursing services, that should be their right."

The idea may have some merit, but there will surely be major issues over privacy protection.

Competition for YouTube?

Media giants discuss YouTube rival again: WSJ online, Marketwatch (Dec 9)

"Four major media companies are again discussing the possibility of creating a video Web site to compete with Google' Inc's YouTube, the Wall Street Journal online reported Saturday." They are News Corp's Fox, Viacom, CBS, and GE's NBC Universal.

"The media companies believe YouTube has built the foundations for its business of their video content, with many of its most popular clips pirated copies of television shows."

Tutorials at Intute

Subject experts from universities in the UK have updated several tutorials at Intute. They have a new fresh look and are good subject guides to resources. These will have a UK slant but will still be useful for students and users in Canada.

1) Internet Business Manager (HE)
By Andy Hargrave, Content Developer, Biz/ed

2) Internet for Business Studies
By Andy Hargrave, Content Developer, Biz/ed

3) Internet Economist
By Dr. Poulter of the The Economics Network of the Higher Education Academy, University of Bristol

4) Internet for Education
By Gwyneth Price, Rozz Evans, Andy Welshman and colleagues in the Library of the Institute of Education, University of London

5) Internet for Government and Politics
By Heather Dawson, London School of Economics (LSE) Library

6) Internet for International Relations
By Heather Dawson, London School of Economics (LSE) Library

7) Internet for Lawyers
By Sue Pettit, Subject Librarian for Law, University of Bristol

8) Internet for Social Policy
By Angela Upton, Information Manager, Social Care Institute for Excellence

9) Internet for Social Statistics
By Robin Rice, Data Librarian, University of Edinburgh

10) Internet Social Worker
By Angela Upton, Information Manager, Social Care Institute for Excellence

CitySearch at Ask.com

Citysearch Content Available Through Ask.com's AskCity Citysearch's Content and Ask.com's Search Technology Create a Comprehensive Local Search Experience, MarketWatch (Dec 8)

"Citysearch, an operating business of IAC/InterActiveCorp, today announced the company will serve as the core local content provider powering Ask.com's new local search product, AskCity. For over 10 years, consumers have relied on Citysearch's trusted content and directory structure for information on local goods and services. Ask.com provides quick access to much of the Citysearch content with direct links to Citysearch's deep content for users who want more. With AskCity acting as a gateway, millions of consumers will be able access Citysearch's editorial and user reviews on over 12 million local businesses nationwide."

PageBull Metasearch

PageBull — new visual metasearch engine, Pandia (Nov 29)

"Pagebull metasearch engine presents results as screenshots of the listed web pages."

You have to like a checkerboard layout and be able to adjust your eyes to different fonts, colours, and styles.

85 Billion Pages

The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine Now Home to 85 Million Archived Web Pages, ResourceShelf (Dec 7)

Imagine - the Wayback Machine has nearly 86 Billion pages.

"A snapshot of the World Wide Web is taken every 2 months and donated to the Internet Archive by Alexa Internet. Further, librarians all over the world have helped curate deep and frequent crawls of sites that could be especially important to future researchers historians and scholars. " From Internet Archive Forum

Using Online Maps

Are online maps dangerous? by Mathew Ingram, GeekWatch (Dec 8)

Was Google Maps responsible for CNet editor James Kim taking the Bear Camp Road in Oregon that led to his death? Other printed maps made the same mistake of not warning that the road is not to be used in the winter. So - not Google Maps exactly. But maybe anyone for trusting to the first map they see (always check 2 or 3 sources), and what about the State Highways - why was the road open?

.asia TLD

ICANN signs off on .asia domain, AP via Globe and Mail (Dec 8) -- "The Internet's key oversight agency said Thursday it has signed a contract to create Internet addresses ending in “.asia” as a way to unify businesses and other users in the Asia-Pacific region."

Future of LCSH

Subject Headings or Keywords? Google, Microsoft Join LC Working Group on Bibliographic Control , Library Journal (Dec 7)

Does reliance on search engines for keyword searches mean inferior results? The Library of Congress "has convened a Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control "to examine the future of bibliographic description in the 21st century," according to an LC statement. Besides representatives from several library organizations, the working group also includes representatives from tech behemoths Microsoft and Google. The group aims to advise LC on its role in steering the library community to analyze "how bibliographic control and other descriptive practices" can help librarians manage and users access library materials."

Refers to The End of LCSH? Provocative Report Stirs Up Cataloging Discussion (April 24) where there was the suggestion that libraries "should reduce the costs of producing catalogs".

"LC Associate Librarian Deanna Marcum said, "Tom [Mann] quite rightly points to the superiority of doing searches the library way." However, she said, "Instead of trying to force the users into our systems, are there ways we can take our vast resources to where the users are?""

Live Search Books

Microsoft Offers Book Search Live Search Books rivals Google Book Search, but limits selection. by Juan Carlos Perez, PCWorld (Dec 6)

"Starting today, the service will feature books scanned from the collections of the University of California, University of Toronto, and the British Library, said Danielle Tiedt, a Live Search general manager. The books are either in the public domain or those whose copyright is owned by the libraries, she said. Microsoft is also scanning books from Cornell University's library and has just struck a partnership with the New York Public Library and the American Museum of Veterinary Medicine."

Microsoft Releases Live Search Books Beta, Barry Schwartz, SearchEngineLand (Dec 7)

"The Live Search Blog announced that Microsoft released a beta named Live Search Books this morning. Plus they enhanced Live Search Academic by adding millions of new articles, plus indexing theses, dissertations, and books within these disciplines."

Expect Changes at Yahoo

Yahoo! remodelling itself on its users "Expect social media features, say analysts..." By Elinor Mills, Silicon.com (Dec 7)

There will be some changes at Yahoo with the reorganization - may mean rationalization and consolidation of some services.

"Greg Sterling, principal analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence, said: "We will see products merged, maybe Del.icio.us and MyWeb or Yahoo! Photos and Flickr. ... There will be a stronger focus on what the audience is interested in, which could include the integration of more social media features into the existing media products, said Charlene Li, an analyst at Forrester Research."

What Canadians Search For

How Canadians are different from Americans judging from the top 10 searches recorded by Yahoo - as reported by Jack Kapica in Cyberia.

"In Canada, the top-10 list is as follows: 1) NHL; 2) FIFA World Cup; 3) American Idol; 4) RockStar Supernova; 5) World Wrestling Entertainment; 6) Neopets; 7) Revenue Canada; 8) Days of Our Lives; 9) Environment Canada; 10) Jessica Simpson.

The top-10 U.S. Searches were: 1) Britney Spears; 2) WWE; 3) Shakira; 4) Jessica Simpson; 5) Paris Hilton; 6. American Idol; 7. Beyoncé Knowles; 8) Chris Brown; 9) Pamela Anderson; 10) Lindsay Lohan. "

Dealing with IE7

Living with (or without) Internet Explorer 7.0 "Having compatibility problems with IE7? Here's how to use IE6 as a backup or to uninstall IE7 completely" ComputerWorld, Scot Finnie (Dec 7)

Advising using Firefox 2 or Opera 9 until problems are fixed, or uninstalling IE7.

"As the days have turned into weeks (soon to be months) since Microsoft released Internet Explorer 7, what has become clear to me and many others is that some Web sites and many Web applications just aren't ready for this new version of the browser. On my computers, that has meant a return to IE6, until the Web and Web-based applications catch up with IE7."

Advice for people about to install IE7 -- "Back to Internet Explorer 7 -- if you're going the other way and are about to install it for the first time, this software does affect your Windows system files. I recommend taking a System Restore point, or better yet, making a backup of your Windows installation or entire drive prior to the installation."

Yahoo's New Company Structure

Yahoo's Shakeup, BusinessWeek ONline (Dec 6)

"In the wake of criticism that the Internet portal is spread too thin, CEO Semel is revamping operations and putting more on Sue Decker's plate."

"Yahoo said it's reordering the company into three groups, effective Jan. 1: one focused on advertisers and publishers, another on Yahoo's base of more than 500 million users, and a third on technology."

Google Librarian Center Newsletter

December issue of Google Librarian Newsletter is mainly about Google Scholar and Google Book Search. There are some video clips from the ALA conference and other sources.

Google at ALA: Google Book Search and Google Scholar -- from Google Video [25 minutes]

Also has an interview with Anurag Acharya, Google Scholar lead engineer - describes very broadly the aims of Google Scholar and content, and answers questions about Library Links and Library Search.

Regarding overarching objective:: "I would like Google Scholar to be a place that you can go to find all scholarly literature -- across all areas, all languages, all the way back in time."

Vista Search

Finding Power in Vista Search, eWeek (Dec 5)

Article is meant for developers, but does give some clues on how search will work in Vista.

"How do search facilities change the overall environment of the Vista user?

Search is integrated all over the OS. A kind of buzzword we're throwing around is "instant search." There is a search column in every Explorer window. There is searchability from the Start menu, where I can pull up any application [whose name] I start typing. You see search everywhere. "

NationMaster Data Source

Data-Mining With NationMaster by Mary Ellen Bates (December 2006)

Mary Ellen Bates, like thousands of others, has had "fun" at NationMaster , a superior site for world statistics and country information.

"So I have been having fun playing around with NationMaster, a cool site developed by Luke Metcalfe, an Australian and fellow stat-geek who was frustrated at his inability to mine the data within the CIA World Factbook. NationMaster now includes data from the World Bank, various United Nations entities, OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), World Trade Organization, and so on."

People Through Wink

Wink Launches “People” Search, ResourceShelf (Dec 3)

"Wink, a federated or metasearch type search resource that allows users to search multiple social search tools (del.icio.us, Digg, Yahoo MyWeb, etc.) simultaneously has recently added a new feature that allows users to do the same type of thing with multiple social networking services including MySpace, LinkedIn, and Bebo, with more to come."

End of Year

2006 Top Searches - And What a Year it Was, Yahoo Blog (Dec 4) - It is that time of year again when the search engines report on what interested their users. Yahoo is first out - searh, news, and video

Zoho and other Office-like products

In sync with Zoho by Mathew Ingram, Globe Technology (Dec 4 )

Competition for Microsoft Office -- "One of those companies is Zoho, which has an entire suite of Web-based office services that either duplicate or extend many of the features offered by Microsoft's Office. Zoho isn't the only company active in this area -- Google has its Google Docs, Gmail and Google Calendar (not to mention billions of dollars to spend on marketing), and a company called ThinkFree also has an Office-style suite of applications that can either be used on the Web or downloaded and installed on a desktop PC."

Zoho has a lot of features including the ability to synchronize online documents and offline documents.

City.Ask for U.S.

Ask.com Debuts AskCity -- "All-in-One" Web Application Raises the Bar for Local Search PR Newswire (Dec 4)

"Ask.com, a leading search destination and wholly-owned business of
, today introduced AskCity, a new local search service that integrates the best local information on the Web with a distinctive, "all-in- one" user interface and intuitive search tools. A free service, the new AskCity is immediately available at http://city.ask.com , as well as via the Ask.com homepage Toolbox ( www.ask.com)."

Beautiful maps, snapshots, links, drawing tool,s business search, categories - the works - for places in the United States.

Question Answering Services

Google Shutters Its Answers Service by Tara Calishain, Newsbreaks (Dec 4)

Comprehensive review of the ask-and-answer-question scene of the many that have failed, of the current successes - specifically Yahoo, of the position of "ask the librarian", and "ask the expert". All in all, why did Google close its answers service? Might it be because people really don't want to pay for answers?

Calishain speculates - "On the other hand, the rise of blogging and person-to-person communication might mean that niche ask-an-expert sites set up by individuals or small groups might be the next generation of answer services, with the person-based services offered by librarians taking the credibility vanguard."

IngentaConnect new interface

Ingenta Releases New Subscription Management Service

"Ingenta (http://www.ingenta.com) has revealed details of a new subscription management service for IngentaConnect. A new Web interface—which makes use of technologies such as Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), and JavaScript Pages and Faces—will provide IngentaConnect’s publisher, librarian, and agent partners with improved administration capabilities."

Europe vs America

Exalead CEO Warns Of "Google Monster" & Closed Yahoo & Microsoft by Danny Sullivan, SEW Blog (Nov 28) - rumblings in Europe about the "Google monster" and practices of Yahoo and Microsoft. Partly it's over their agreements with newspapers. Sullivan thinks that CEO of Exalead, Bourdoncle was scaremongering when he said - "The press in particular should be worried about becoming sub-contractors of Google, he said. Whilst at present Google News brings plenty of traffic to sites under the brand names of the press outlets, this would change to Google’s brand in the future."

Google Book Search

Review: Google Book Search - Genie Tyburski in TVC Alert (Dec 1) comments on Greg Notess' review of GBS. "It's a balanced review that points out the tool's deficiencies as well as its strengths. However, I think there are a few workarounds for some of the problems Greg mentions."

Wikipedia Vindicated Again

Experts rate Wikipedia's accuracy higher than non-experts by Nate Anderson, Ars Technica (Nov 27)

"Thomas Chesney, a Lecturer in Information Systems at the Nottingham University Business School, published the results of his own Wikipedia study in the most recent edition of the online journal First Monday , and he came up with a surprising conclusion: experts rate the articles more highly than do non-experts."

The Networked Book

The Book as Place: The “Networked Book” Becomes the New “In” Destination by Paula Berinstein, Searcher (Dec 2006)

"We begin with a definition: “A networked book is social,” explains Vershbow. “It incorporates feedback mechanisms and discussion platforms in its overall structure.” Sounds like a blog. He continues, “It has the possibility of being distributed in its composition rather than being a discrete media object, which is the way we’re used to thinking about books or really any kind of media.” In other words, it’s collaborative:"

Using OPML

Gear Up Your Research Guides with the Emerging OPML Codes by Kimberley Wilcox, Computers in Libraries (Dec 2006)

"What if you could create a dynamic research guide that displays the latest headlines from selected blogs, feeds of new book and article titles from the library’s catalog and databases, and audio and video files—along with your traditional Web links and bibliographies? Even better, what if this guide could be syndicated so that people were able to subscribe to it and automatically receive updated versions in their RSS aggregators?"

Answer: use Outline Processor Mark­up Language (OPML)

"In this article, I’ll discuss the strengths and limitations of the OPML format, explain how it can help you create and share dynamic outlines, and walk you through the creation of your first OPML file. Don’t worry; it’s easier than you think to get geared up!"