Internet News

OCLC Study on Social Spaces

OCLC releases new international research study New release (Oct 22)

OCLC has released a report on Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World

It examines:

* Web user practices and preferences on their favorite social sites
* User attitudes about sharing and receiving information on social spaces, commercial sites and library sites
* Information privacy; what matters and what doesn't
* U.S. librarian social networking practices and preferences; their views on privacy, policy and social networks for libraries

"The report is based on a survey (by Harris Interactive on behalf of OCLC) of the general public from six countries—Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States—and of library directors from the U.S."

Available for download at www.oclc.org/reports/sharing/ as the complete report (over 250 pages) or by section. Can also order a print copy for a price.

Digitization and Hype

Future Reading - Digitization and its discontents . by Anthony Grafton, New Yorker (Nov 5)

Examines where we are going with digitized texts - will it be a world with everything at the finger tips (and probably impossible to find), or one that is fragemented and mixed? Grafton says it won't be the "universal library", but instead a "series of new information ecologies".

Google’s projects, together with rival initiatives by Microsoft and Amazon, have elicited millenarian prophecies about the possibilities of digitized knowledge and the end of the book as we know it. Last year, Kevin Kelly, the self-styled “senior maverick” of Wired, predicted, in a piece in the Times, that “all the books in the world” would “become a single liquid fabric of interconnected words and ideas.” The user of the electronic library would be able to bring together “all texts—past and present, multilingual—on a particular subject,” and, by doing so, gain “a clearer sense of what we as a civilization, a species, do know and don’t know.” Others have evoked even more utopian prospects, such as a universal archive that will contain not only all books and articles but all documents anywhere—the basis for a total history of the human race.

In fact, the Internet will not bring us a universal library, much less an encyclopedic record of human experience. None of the firms now engaged in digitization projects claim that it will create anything of the kind. The hype and rhetoric make it hard to grasp what Google and Microsoft and their partner libraries are actually doing. We have clearly reached a new point in the history of text production. On many fronts, traditional periodicals and books are making way for blogs and other electronic formats. But magazines and books still sell a lot of copies. The rush to digitize the written record is one of a number of critical moments in the long saga of our drive to accumulate, store, and retrieve information efficiently. It will result not in the infotopia that the prophets conjure up but in one in a long series of new information ecologies, all of them challenging, in which readers, writers, and producers of text have learned to survive.

Grafton takes us through the historical stages of information and its organization to our present day of digitization.

+ history of printing
+ search and retrieval
+ digitization era
+ digitization projects by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Open Content

Yahoo Messenger 9.0

Yahoo Messenger deepens social networking features InfoWorld Media via TMCNet (Oct 30)

Yahoo is trying to make its Yahoo Messenger the core to a social networking service.

"Among its new features, Yahoo Messenger 9.0 will allow people to invite friends to watch videos or flip through photo albums in real time, sharing those activities as if they were sitting side by side in one's living room."

Users will be able to:

+ make IM, voice, or SMS link with another user.
+ transfer files up to 2 MB
+ share photo sets from Flickr
+ call forward to a cell phone or land phone and leave a voice message

Available in new versions - Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, India (in Hindi), and Vietnam

Some figures: "According to comScore, last month Yahoo Messenger had 94.3 million unique users, up almost 30 percent from September 2006 and second worldwide to Microsoft's Windows Live Messenger with almost 227 million."

Meebo Expanding

Meebo Opens Site to Developers By REBECCA BUCKMAN, Wall Street Journal (Oct 30)

"Two years ago, Meebo began offering technology that enables instant messaging through a Web site without the user downloading software from other companies. Now, in a bid to become a broader "destination" site and cash in on the online-ad market, the Mountain View, Calif., company will allow outside software developers to build programs and applications around its instant-messaging technology."

Of interest: "Instead of posting a video on YouTube, a Meebo user could stream video of an event as it is happening and simultaneously share it with a pre-selected group of instant-messaging friends ..."

Blinkx Video Search

blinkx Advances Lead in Video Search, Surpasses New Milestone With Over 18 Million Hours of Content and More Than 220 Media Partnerships PrNewswire via Marketwatch (Oct 29)

"blinkx, the world's largest video search engine, today reached a new milestone: with more than 220 media partnerships and indexing over 18,000,000 hours of video, audio, viral and TV content, blinkx is the top destination for searching video on the Web."

Living with Information

Information R/evolution, a new video by Professor Michael Wesch and students at Kansas State University "explores the changes in the way we find, store, create, critique, and share information". From Digital Ethnography (Oct 10) It's excellent.

Veropedia - best of Wikipedia

Wikipedia Begets Veropedia Slashdot (Oct 29)

Veropedia - "a collaborative effort to collect the best of Wikipedia's content, clean it up, vet it, and save it in a quality stable version that cannot be edited. "

The Fabulous Newser

Newser — an Online News Service from HighBeam Research and Michael Wolff — Debuts Today Business Wire via Google News (Oct 30)

Newser a fabulous online news service is out of beta and nearly at full operation. "On a 24-7 basis, Newser locates and links to the best and most up-to-date news stories, video, audio and photos from vast news resources across the Web — and supplies concise, punchy summaries."

Newser was good in beta and is better now due to some new features:

+ news filters - slider bar to adjust from hard to soft news.
+ story summaries
+ audio and video links
+ topic threads - later users will be able to create their own threads. See all current topics on the thread index page.
+ widgets - "Widgets for iGoogle, RSS feeds, and alerts, plus tools allow users to post Newser news to Facebook, del.icio.us, Newsvine, StumbleUpon, etc."
+ access to HighBeam archives

When you first visit Newser, adjust the sliders to the kind of news you want to see - hard news (serious) or soft (entertainment or personal), number of stories on the front page.

If you register you'll be able to save your customized settings and also create your own Thread pages when it becomes available.

Next find the threads you want to follow - for example, Going Green under Business or In Vino Veritas under Science and Health. There are 9 broad topical areas with sub-topics or threads. You can subscribe to feeds for these threads adding them to whatever feed reader you use - iGoogle, my Yahoo page, Google Reader, Bloglines etc.

Newser lists its top 100 sources. Globe and Mail is the only Canadian source on the list. There are several from the UK (Independent, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, Guardian, Financial Times, BBC, Economist) and one from Germany (Der Speigel)

People in the US can set their city by zip code.

Digital Environment for Libraries

Library and Archives Canada Partners with the British Library, the Library of Congress, and the National Library of Australia on RDA Implementation, Press Release, Library and Archives Canada (Oct 22)

"Four national libraries have joined forces to implement a new standard for resource description and access designed for the digital environment in which libraries now operate. Library and Archives Canada, the British Library, the Library of Congress, and the National Library of Australia have agreed on a coordinated implementation of RDA: Resource Description and Access, the successor to the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules."

[Thanks to Carmen for article.]

Whois in peril?

Whois may be scrapped to break deadlock ANICK JESDANUN, Globe and Mail (Oct 29)

Whois is the 411 of the internet, containing the registrations for domains and some personal contact information.

"Law-enforcement officials and Internet service providers use it to fight fraud and hacking. Lawyers depend on it to chase trademark and copyright violators. Journalists rely on it to reach Web site owners. And spammers mine it to send junk mailings for Web site hosting and other services."

But there are privacy concerns and the parties can seem to agree on a way to resolve the problems.

"The disagreements are over "who gets to see it (and) how can we protect people's privacy while at the same time making accurate information available to those who need it," said Vint Cerf, ICANN's chairman."

inurl and link at Live Search

Link Searching at Live Greg Notess, Search Engine Showdown (Oct 29)

Karen Blakeman has found a way to get link:, linkdomain: and inurl: to work at Live.com again -- put a + in front.

Examples:

+link:http://www.websearchguide.ca tutorial - to see pages that link to websearchguide home page and mention tutorial.

+inurl:tutorials "records management" - tutorials in the url, "records management" anywhere

As Greg Notess says, enjoy it while it lasts.

Flock - a Social Browser

I Have a New Favorite Web Browser: Flock Harry McCracken, PC World (OCt 23)

McCracken likes the beta version of Flock 1.0 - a socially souped up version of Firefox. It is integrated with Facebook, FLickr, YouTube, and has capabilities for social bookmarking, rss, blogging etc.

Encrypting E-Mail

How to Protect E-Mail From Prying Eyes Encrypting your messages isn't the easiest thing to do, but it will ensure your privacy. Erik Larkin, PC World (Oct 24)

Describes what to do with Outlook and Thunderbird - "I worked with two e-mail programs, Microsoft's Outlook 2003 and Mozilla's Thunderbird. To use the built-in support for certificates in either program, first head to Comodo or Thawte, which both provide free certificates for secure e-mail."

Hulu: Video from NBC and Fox

Hulu adds Sony, MGM, launches test, Reuters via Globe and Mail (Oct 29)

Hulu - new online video service, joint venture of General Electric's NBC Universal and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, will pick up shows from Sony Pictures Television and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios.

To be launched early 2008 and will only be available to the US audience. Will offer free viewing of movies and television shows.

"NBC Universal has stopped offering its shows for sales on iTunes and pulled its channel off of YouTube."

Fox, NBC set YouTube rival - New online video site, Hulu.com, to premiere in a few months with free views of full-length TV episodes and films, CNN Money (Oct 29)

Digital Collections

Adventures in Wonderland by Anthony Grafton, New Yorker (Nov 5)

"In this issue, Anthony Grafton writes about the libraries of the past, and what they tell us about the books of the future. Here Grafton points to some favorite archives and historical resources."

Google Public Transit

Google Transit - plan your use of public transit (bus, train) in several US cities and Japan. Now out of beta and ready to help you get where you are going. (Yes, it seems that several American cities do have public transit.)

Yahoo UK has Search Assist

Yahoo Launches Search Assist In UK Search Engine Land (Oct 25)

Yahoo UK has the excellent Search Assist now. When can we expect to see it in Canada?

The Facebook Buzz

Should Google Be Afraid Of Facebook? by ALex Iskold, Read/Write Web (Oct 25)

Article has a photo of a box of apples and oranges suggesting that the comparison is all wrong.

"Google and Facebook are fundamentally in two different types of businesses. Yes, both of them monetize mainly via advertising, but Google is a web wide technology and Facebook is a single web site."

Bottom line seems to be that Facebook is getting the buzz and Google isn't. They are entirely different services serving different needs. I hope it stays that way.

DMOZ looking for editors

What Topic Do You Care About? DMOZ blog (Oct 24)

Dmoz seems to be inviting people keen on a topic to apply to be a category editor.

Post has some figures that tell us a bit about its operation.

+ "Over the history of the project, DMOZ has had more than 70,000 volunteer editors worldwide. On average, there are approximately 6,000 active editor accounts at any given time. "

+ "On average, DMOZ accepts 78 new editors per week"

People commenting on the post weren't impressed. Many aren't accepted as editors, and there may be a high turnover of those who are.

Yahoo More Open

Yahoo opening up home page to outside sources Elinor Mills, CNet (Oct 25)

The Yahoo portal will feature some outside resources (ie not Yahoo) on the front page. "It looks the same, except the items in the Featured section in the center of the page now include links to news and other items located on outside sites. The items are chosen by editors."

I don't think we are going to be overwhelmed by these - I don't see any today.

Travel videos

lastminute.com Selects Pixsy for Multimedia Travel Search Econtent (Oct 26)

Lastminute.com, an online travel retailer, will be using Pixsy's media search technology (video and image search). Users will be able to "to search millions of travel photos and videos while simultaneously shopping for travel services".

Lastminute.com is based in the UK and the flight finder has all its flights starting from there. For people in North America, this site will probably be good for ideas, and not for travel packages.

Exalead Canada

Calling up the Exalead search engine in Canada brings up Exalead Canada - http://www.exalead.ca/search. . This may have been true for sometime but I didn't notice because Exalead from the Firefox search bar still gets exalead.com.

I don't think a lot of thought went into creating this version.

It has the option to search for pages written in English. What about pages written in French, a link to a French language interface, an option to search for pages in Canada? Results are the same as at exalead.com. Maybe using the exalead.ca domain is the first step to something better - I hope so.

Social Networks for Research

Social Networks: Handy Research Tools , TVC Alert (Oct 24)

People reveal a lot about themselves through MySpace, Facebook and the others. Genie Tyburski also points to an article on use of social networks by a law firm -- MySpace Is a Treasure Chest for Cases.

It's quite amazing what can be found: "Diebolt said an eyewitness recently identified a first-degree murder suspect in a group photograph posted on MySpace. Such social networking sites have also been helpful in prosecuting gang-related crimes."

Open Content Alliance growing

Internet Archive's OCA Expands Online Books, TVC Alert (Oct 24) -- 80 new libraries have joined the Open Content Alliance for digitizing books.

Facebook Mania

Microsoft wins the Facebook sweepstakes Mathew Ingram, Globe and Mail (Oct 24)

"... why wouldn't Microsoft take a gamble on the popular social network, which has 50 million users and is growing at triple-digit rates?" Indeed.

Microsoft takes slice of Facebook by Matt Hartley, Globe and Mail (Oct 24)

Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li said, "Facebook really represents the new computing platform for this new age of computing and I think any social application that is written in the future is going to have to take into account the Facebook model .."

Fact: "With more than 50 million monthly users, and 200,000 more joining up nearly every day, Facebook presents a growing audience for advertisers and could reach 300 million users".

I sense a bubble and there will be a pin that will burst it. Perhaps that will be boredom - Facebook runs its course as things do, or a scandal over privacy erupts. The second is quite possible if the points made in this YouTube video (posted as a comment to the Globe and Mail article) are true.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZMWz3G%5FgPhU

AfterVote says search socially

AfterVote - a new metasearch engine - takes results from Google, Yahoo, MSN - and then weight them by votes from members.

"weight them against our own database to see what our users have said about where positions should be, and apply that weight to the results. Sometimes users have their own custom algorithm, and in that case you choose how to rank the results, not us."

You can get Google's page rank and the Alexa rating. To cap it off there is a sort by Digg.

Has possibilities. But these new metasearch engines come and go - especially after Google blocks access.

Teens on the Net

Parent and Teen Internet Use PEW/Internet (Oct 24)

"Parents are engaged with their children's media consumption, but have less positive views of the internet today than they did in 2004. A new data memo issued by the Pew Internet and American Life Project based on a telephone survey in October-November 2006 found that 59% of parents think the internet has been a good thing for their children, down from 67% in 2004. "

Spam removal in Google Blog Search

Remove Spam from Google Blog Search Google Operating System (Oct 22)

Names two features Google Blog Search has to reduce the number of splogs (spam blogs) from search results.

+ a duplicate filter that removes nearly identical posts (most of the time)
+ option to sort results by relevancy - get the benefit of other weighting factors.

Other ideas:

+ exclude blogspot.com and the .info domaiin because of the amount of spam there
+ exclude Google Alerts because of misuse at blogs.

Fatigue with Search Engines

Report: 7 Out Of 10 Americans Experience 'Search Engine Fatigue' Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Oct 23)

A study done for Autobytel by Kelton Research found that "7 out of 10 Americans experience what the report describes as “search engine fatigue.”" Users are frustrated with user the "clutter and the content of search results".

StumbleUpon Does More

StumbleUpon's 'Social Search' Upgrade Catherine Holahan, Business Week (Oct 23)

"StumbleUpon, maker of a Web browser toolbar that directs users to sites recommended by others, is offering a new version that runs alongside the major search engines. The goal is to combine the speed and authority of Google, Yahoo! Search, or Microsoft (MSFT) Live Search with the opinions of a community—and of one's friends and acquaintances within that network."

This is what it looks like in a Yahoo search.

More: StumbleUpon's Toolbar Adds More Search Engines by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Oct 23)

The toolbar will enhance search results at Google, Yahoo, Windows Live search, AOL, Ask.com, Google News, Yahoo News, Flickr, Wikipedia, and YouTube.

Reading News at Facebook

Google News Launches Facebook Application by Vanessa Fox, Search Engine Land (Oct 19)

Receive customized topics from Google News in Facebook - works in the same way as a Google Alert.

Open Content Alliance

The Politics of Book Search: Some Research Libraries Decline to Offer Books to Microsoft, Google by Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Oct 22)

Google Books and Microsoft Live Books ask for exclusivity when they strike an arrangement with a research library to digitize their books. Libraries are balking at this and turning to Open Content Alliance.

"Institutions participating in the Open Content Alliance, however, must pay the cost of scanning their libraries themselves. That's the one catch. But, as the article points out, some will do that to prevent their information from being controlled by commercial organizations and potentially used for commercial gain, if only indirectly."

Sept 2007 Search Engine Market Share Stats

Google and Yahoo are the top search engines in September: Nielsen DMNews (Oct 23)

Nielsen market share statistics for search engine use in the US Sept 2007

+ Google - nearly 4.0 billion searches, 54%
+ Yahoo Search - 1.4 billion or 19.5%
+ MSN/Windows Live Search - 890 million searches, 12%
+ AOL Search 6%
+ Ask.com Search 2.2%

Facebook, MySpace, Google

Facebook Catch-Up: MySpace Confirms Developer Platform by Erik Arnold, Newsbreaks (Oct 22)

Facebook made a giant leap when it opened its platform to other developers. MySpace is now doing the same. What is Google doing? It allows developers access to its technology through APIs. It also has quite a few "social" functions - Notebook comes to mind.

The article makes an important distinction -- "It is an important distinction to recognize that Google’s APIs are a platform for developing any type of Web application to run anywhere. The Facebook and MySpace platforms allow developers to create widgets for their users to use in their networks. So, it is now possible to create Google applications that run in Facebook (and soon in MySpace)."

Report on Scitopia

Scitopia Moves Into Next Phase With Full Launch by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (Oct 22)

Scitopia out of beta and will be expanding:

"With the refined version in place, Scitopia—already expanded to 15 societies—will turn its efforts to promoting the service and expanding the number of participating societies, according to Scitopia’s project manager, Barbara Lange, also director of product line management and publishing business development at IEEE."

Scitopia compared to Google Scholar:

"Scitopia advertises itself as one of the most timely of the Web’s sci-tech search engines, “ahead of other search tools such as Google Scholar.” Lange told of asking Anurag Acharya, Google Scholar’s creator, how frequently it updated and receiving the answer as 1 to 2 weeks. Since Scitopia’s federated searching runs searches in “real time,” it is, according to Lange, much more current. In discussion with Roth, he tested coverage of a journal’s current issue and found Scitopia beat one expensive licensed database and matched another. However, Google Scholar might have a different sort of edge on currency due to the type of content and sources it taps. For example, it will cover preprints, technical project reports, conference presentations (not final proceedings), etc. As Roth said, “Even with good services like Scitopia, a scientist would be a fool not to check Google Scholar too.” (In fact, Roth and I began to muse on how services like Scitopia might integrate Google Scholar into their searches, but that’s another story for another issue of Searcher magazine.)"

Vivisimo Velocity 6.0

Vivísimo Brings Social Search to the Enterprise, Newsbreaks (Oct 22)

"Vivísimo, Inc. (www.vivisimo.com) has introduced social search for the enterprise with the announcement of its new Vivísimo Velocity 6.0 enterprise search platform, which will be available within 45 days. Velocity 6.0 lets users save, share, and take action on search results to foster collaboration and new levels of communication within the organization."

Dictionary of Canadian Biography

Dictionary of Canadian Biography an unusual example of research translation Licensing agreement with federal government renewed by Maria Saros Leung, News@UofT (Sep 24/07)

Some enhancements are in the works for the online Dictionary of Canadian Biography.

"Under the direction of new general editor Professor John English, the DCB team is looking to enhance project’s online presence by adding accompanying photos and continuing to update the biographies."

Combatants: Libraries vs Google

Them! Google’s Ambivalence toward Library and Information Science by Shawne D. Miksa, ASIS&T (Oct 2007)

Combatants: Libraries vs Google -- "It is a bit extreme to paint librarians and Google locked in the same battle, but the questionable characterization by some librarians of Google as a mutant technology lamentably exists alongside those who admire it for its many innovations."

Methods: relevance ranking based on links vs applied classification -- "Library classification is one process of information organization that does not work based on the concept of popularity as employed by Google. "

Book Search: "Brewster Kahle of the Open Content Alliance (OCA) contends that the “idea of making all books accessible online in new and different ways is all good news. But if you do this in a way that the materials that have been housed in libraries for centuries are made available only through one corporate interface, this is an Orwellian future.”"

ISPs Controlling Traffic

U.S. ISP blocking BitTorrent users by PETER SVENSSON, Associated Press via Globe and Mail (OCt 19)

Comcast Corp in the US has been found to interfere with its subcribers transferring and sharing of large files. It mainly affects those using BitTorrent, eDonkey and Gnutella file-sharing networks and mostly dealing with very large transfer files. This is part of a greater debate on "net neutrality". Should ISPs be allowed to slow or stop this traffic? What are the larger implications? How will this affect companies that depend on peer-to-peer technology - music, movies, video conferencing?

"The practice of managing the flow of Internet data is known as "traffic shaping," and is already widespread among Internet service providers. It usually involves slowing down some forms of traffic, like file-sharing, while giving others priority. Other ISPs have attempted to block some file-sharing application by so-called "port filtering," but that method is easily circumvented and now largely ineffective."

User agreements and contracts with ISPs are likely to become a good deal more complicated.

"It's their network [Comcast] and they can do what they want," said Watson [Paul "Tony" Watson, a network security engineer at Google Inc.] . "My concern is the precedent. In the past, when people got an ISP connection, they were getting a connection to the Internet. The only determination was price and bandwidth. Now they're going to have to make much more complicated decisions such as price, bandwidth, and what services I can get over the Internet."

Also Comcast goes for the money, not service by Jack Kapica, Cyberia (Oct 19)

Meet Others at Hakia

Hakia launching new spin on social searching Rafe Needleman, News.com (Oct 18)

"Up-and-coming semantic search company Hakia is launching a new social feature next week, called "Meet Others." It will give you the option, from a search results page, to jump to a page on the service where everyone who searches for the topic can communicate."

Changes in Yahoo Directory

Search capabilities have changed significantly at the Yahoo Directory. This may have happened in the last month, more likely the last six months. Basically, the syntax that Yahoo allowed for the directory (but didn't publicize) has been removed, and the indexing practices have been changed.

+ Yahoo Directory searches for keywords in the title of the item, the description, the full category (from top to bottom of the hierarchy) AND NOW (this is the new part) the actual page. Google does this too in its use of the Open Directory Project. I think it is confusing for searchers since it causes less relevant material to turn up in the search results.

+ The syntax for u: to limit to a url doesn't work. You can use site: or inurl:.

+ The old t: for title search is gone. Use intitle:word1 intitle:word2. Yahoo Directory search doesn't seem to do a good job with phrases "word1 word2". Note that Yahoo often does not show the full title on the search results page, sometimes cutting it back to one or two words and not showing the part with your search terms. Click through to the page and you'll see the rest. It's annoying. Understandable with long titles, but certainly not with short.

+ There is no truncation operator. Don't bother with * at the end of the word. Yahoo Directory ignores it. But, now that Yahoo Directory has indexed versions of the pages the * would be less needed.

+ Yahoo Directory does pick up some variants automatically. Export will also find exports, exporting, and recipe picks up recipes. But sometimes this goes too far. trade databases finds trademarks. If you don't want these extras, put + in front of the word; eg +trade. This helps somewhat but not completely or reliably.

+ The commercial listings are overwhelming.

+ Granularity of categorization is taken to the extreme in some areas. There is a separate category for the movie Trade which (I guess) opened September 28, 2007. How bizarre (and not very useful) is this?

+ The one good thing is that it is easier to search the directory and not be switched to a full Yahoo web search.

Overall, these changes make using the Yahoo directory less pleasing and productive.

Scitopia out of Beta

Scitopia.Org Out of Beta EContent (Oct 19)

"Scitopia.org, a free, federated search portal created by science and technology societies, removed its beta label, marking the official launch of its service. ... During the beta phase, scitopia.org's cross-file searching was refined, in an attempt to increase the precision and consistency of keyword and author searches. The interface was modified according to user feedback, aligning the language and layout with searchers' expectations. The scitopia.org interface, developed by Deep Web Technologies, includes both simple and advanced search options, which allow users to find articles by title or author name, or conduct a keyword search."

Book Search

Briefs: Bradley on Google Book Search & Other Online/Free Book Sources; Elsevier launches DoctorPortal, the independent online voice of UK doctors, ResourceShelf (Oct 6)

Information on several book search services including Google Books.

Update on Infospace

With Dogpile Beating Google In Satisfaction, Owner InfoSpace Needs To Reinvent Itself, Be Risky With Metasearch Search Engine Land (Oct 18)

Update on Infospace, rapidly disappearing into the Web sunset as it sells of its assets. "So what's left? Specifically Dogpile and its cousins Metacrawler, Webcrawler and the domain InfoSpace.com. " But people still like Dogpile. Must all be in the name. Metacrawler, a near clone, has better features, and Info.com who must license Infospace in some agreement, has a much better display of the web metasearch results. Just a matter of time.

MedlinePlus with Vivisimo

Vivisimo Comes to Town: New Site Search Engine Allows Easier, More Efficient Navigation of MedlinePlus and NLM Web Site, ResourceShelf (Oct 12)

Great news indeed - US National Library of Medicine uses Vivisimo clustering technology to improve search at MedlinePlus .

"After extensive research, NLM selected search engine software from the Pittsburgh-based company Vivisimo. Vivisimo is also the current search solution for the www.usa.gov site (formerly FirstGov), which contains online information from the entire spectrum of U.S. government agencies. ... The new search engine also expands queries using synonyms specific to the sites and medical synonyms from the NLM Unified Medical Language System (UMLS)."

Calorie Counter

Calorie Count from About.com Health - browse foods, brands, activities - figure out calories in vs consumed.

NYTimes.com Introduces New Section on Health and Wellness Press Release (Oct 2)

Digitized Archives for Economist, Guardian, Observer

Try these archives of articles from 1800s and 1900s this month and next before they are switched over to subscriber for-fee access.

Economist to put archive online Guardian (Oct 18)

The Economist is putting articles from 1843 to 2003 available online with The Economist Historical Archive 1843-2003. Gale, part of Cengage Learning, is a partner. Some page views and searching is available now. The Guardian article said "Preview trials of the archive are available and the full archive will be available via subscription in December."

Of interest:

+ Economist.com offers readers free access to content under one year old.

+ Guardian and Observer newspapers will have an online digital archive at guardian.co.uk/archive. Portions for the Guardian 1821 to 1975 and the Observer 1900 to 1975 will be available Nov 3 - more to be released in 2008. [See Guardian and Observer to launch online archive Oct 15)

+ Guardian and Observer archives will be viewable in November for free and for a fee after that.

+ quoted - "With microfilm stock and paper copy in danger of degrading beyond repair, the launch of the archive ensures the preservation of the papers' legacy."

Google Health Update

Google cares about health data Reuters via Silicon.com (Oct 18)

Google is continuing its project to apply web search to health information. Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of Search Products & User Experience, is now acting head of the business. This goes beyond consumer health information and could include personal health records.

"Google started out two years ago on a service called Google Co-op. This taps various expert organisations to categorise high-quality health and other information, to make it easier to search and find on the web, Mayer said." But Google is also looking at "creating a special layer of doctor and medical-related locations on its online Google Maps service. "

Also Google Health To Launch In Early 2008, Greg Sterling, Search ENgine Land (Oct 18)

Google Moving Forward on Health Initiative Juan Carlos Perez, IDG via PC World (Oct 18)

Marissa Mayer spoke with IDG News - "With health records stored in a central server, patients will be able to access them from anywhere, whether they move to a new city or are traveling while on vacation, so that, in an emergency, unfamiliar health care providers can get a comprehensive view of their health history, she said."

About a prototype for Google Health: "According to the Times, the Google Health prototype is designed to let individuals create a health profile for themselves that includes information about medications and conditions. Google Health also features a "health guide" with suggested treatments and drug interaction warnings, pages with health-related reminders and health provider directories, the Times reported then." [August 2007]

Expert Witness Search

Resources: Expert Witness Research TVC Alert (Oct 17)

Several resources in this issue of TVC Alert from Genie Tyburski that relate to finding expert witnesses and experts. I'm surprised to see the Zuula metasearch engine on this but it is very good for quickly viewing results from Google, Yahoo, MSN etc.

Live Maps Better

Microsoft Releases New Maps, Local And Mobile Upgrades Search Engine Land (Oct 15)

Microsoft has added "feature and content enhancements for maps, local and mobile services".

Hooeey for Web Tracking

De.licio.us + Google Web History = Hooeey Josh Lowensohn, Webware (Oct 15)

Hooeey - new web-based tool with toolbar for tracking what you look at on the web and bookmarking and sharing what you select.

"The goal is to let you centralize your favorites, and make them easier to share with others, while combining some facets of other free tracking services like Google Web History to let you see which services you're visiting the most."

There might be an application for this in research projects where you need a record of what you tried and saw, and a way to select the best - and to put the best bits into a slide show. But, but for day to day one off searches - I think it's too much work.

ClipBlast Video Widget

Clipblast! Introduces Video Widget, Econtent (Sept 28)

ClipBlast is a customizable video finding tool with some big US media providers such as CBS, ABC, NBC, FOX. There is a public beta widget you can download and put on your desktop.

"ClipBlast! Video Widget is an internet video search and navigation tool that resides on the desktop, enabling search, navigation, browsing, and viewing of the Video Web without having to launch a browser or visit a specific website. ClipBlast! is working with video-content providers--including MySpace, Showtime, Fox, CBS and independent producers--to create customized, branded versions of the Video Widget for specific target audiences."

Blog about Enterprise Search

Enterprise Search Practice Blog from Lynda Moulton at The Gilbane Group

Lynda Moulton writes about the evolution of search technology particularly as it is occuring in enterprise search but with assessment and monitoring of the larger web scene.

For example - Random Notes from the World on Search from July 13, 2007 - to get the thoughtfulnes of this blog.

"The fact that the New York Times has recently had at least one article a week relating to search technologies is really a business marker. While search was introduced to professional searchers 35 years ago, it has been a real sleeper for most of the decades since. Web technology is truly the enabler of so much that makes search work for the masses in so many environments. It’s pretty clear that although search is ubiquitous in the workplace, its commodity status and the normalizing of enterprise search protocols are still a few years off. It is going to be interesting to see who stumbles and who prevails of the current bumper crop of offerings. Or will another disruption take us into more innovative forms of search?"

HowStuffWorks will have more video

Discovery Communications to Acquire Top Knowledge Website HowStuffWorks.com PRNewswire via Marketwatch (Oct 15)

Didn't know this -- "HowStuffWorks' 11 million global monthly unique visitors(1), which have grown 25% over the past year, have access to an extensive and rapidly growing library of deep and broad content designed to deliver the most relevant information possible. In addition to an editorial team that creates new content every day, HowStuffWorks leverages the exclusive digital rights to over 30,000 books, 800,000 images and more than 180,000 maps as it explains the world from brains to bats, from rocket engines to roller coasters, from hybrid cars to HDTV, and countless other topics."

Discovery Communications, the new owner, describes itself as "the leader in knowledge and curiosity on television".

Here's the plan - ""Contextually integrating engaging clips drawn from Discovery's vast video library of more than 100,000 hours of programming with the family-friendly and evergreen collection of expertly written articles on HowStuffWorks will ultimately deliver an accurate 'video wikipedia.' Information-seeking consumers will find a rich, multimedia experience to answer the world's questions, and our business partners will find new opportunities to reach targeted audiences of engaged consumers.""

Customize with a Swicki

Customizable search for your Web site visitors Posted by Stephan Spencer, CNet News Blog (Oct 12)

Describes the Swicki and how to use it - "A Swicki is a combination search portal and widget that can be customized on any topic or topics either within a Web site, group of Web sites, or the Web at large. The end product is a custom search experience returning relevant, targeted results as well as revenue opportunity (yes, you can monetize your visitors!) for blog and Web site publishers."

How Google Earth is Made

Google Earth - How Google Maps the World Simson Garfinkel, Technology Review (Nov/Dec 2007)

Fascinating -- Images in Google Maps a"re actually a combination of aerial photos and satellite ­imagery--and a lot of post­processing. Technology Review interviewed engineers at Google and at ­DigitalGlobe, the company that supplies Google's satellite photos, and did a little bit of reverse-engineering to figure out how it works."

Yahoo Finance Search

Look Closely: New Yahoo Finance Page Continues to Offer “Finance Only” Search ResourceShelf (Oct 16)

Yahoo Finance has a new look and it still has Finance Search - top bar, right beside Symbol Lookup.

Google Reader details

Google Reader Now Reporting Subscriber Figures Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Oct 15)

If you use Google Reader you'll be interested to know that it now shows how many readers a blog has within Google's dedicated feed reading service. Sullivan has details and screenshots.

New MapQuest

MapQuest is taking a page from the others and adding more features and razzle dazzle to their online map service. There is a short demo showing the features.

At MapQuest (beta) the first map you see is on North America - Canada included. It can give street directions in Toronto and find the pizza places. That's all that I ask.

MapQuest Rebuilds 'From The Ground Up' Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Oct 12)

Browsing is natural

What is browsing— really? A model drawing from behavioural science research Marcia J Bates, Information Research Vol 12 No 4, October 2007

Browsing comes naturally to people when gathering information. Unfortunately, it has sometimes got a bad rap from people trained in precision keyword searching as wasteful and unfocused. Marcia Bates in this article restores browsing to its rightful, high place as an approach she distinguishes it from mere scanning (which can be wasteful), and identifies ways website interfaces could be designed to facilitate user browsing.

"Browsing appears to be a manifestation of a fundamental animal exploratory behaviour. If so, it is natural to people and can be engaged in spontaneously, without training, provided information system interfaces lend themselves to this behaviour. Most browsing capabilities in Web-based and other online information systems consist of the capability of opening some text or images and scanning down a long list or a set of thumbnails. Such a capability is better than nothing, but it does not facilitate browsing very well. Put differently, such design facilitates scanning, but not browsing.

These designs appear to be based on an assumption that browsing equals scanning, rather than being based, as argued here, on a deeper understanding of the nature of browsing. Good browsable interfaces would consist of rich scenes, full of potential objects of interest, that the eye can take in at once (massively parallel processing), then select items within the scene to give closer attention to. "

Subscription Agents

Swets Continues to Redefine Role With Acquisition of ScholarlyStats by Jill E. Grogg, Newbreaks (Oct 15)

Update on subscription agents in libraries:

"Subscription agents and intermediaries continue to expand their service and product offerings in an effort to move beyond their conventional roles. Over the past 5 years, companies such as Swets, EBSCO Information Services, and others have broadened their scope to include A–Z listing services, link resolvers, and federated search products. They also continue to provide their own searchable, end-user content gateways that either cover journals hosted by the agent or links to full-text titles. All these new services and products co-exist with more traditional offerings that continue to facilitate the purchase and delivery of subscription-based content."

Phone Search

Two articles about conducting primary research over the phone by Risa Sacks from the archives of Searcher magazine .

Internet Librarian 2007

Internet Librarian 2007 begins October 29 and runs to October 31. Follow the Info Today blog at http://www.infotodayblog.com/. Links to presentations are often available a few days later.

Non-Roman Domain Names

Web domains get language lesson Matt Hartley, Globe and Mail (Oct 15)

"Today, the U.S. organization in charge of overseeing and regulating domain names online [ICANN], is to launch 11 test sites in languages that don't use the Roman alphabet – the 26 letters used in English and most other European languages."

The non-Roman languages to be tested will be Arabic, Persian, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese and Tamil – "using the native script in both the body and suffix of the web addresses".

CIRA registry for Canada will "support IDN [international domain names] through the use of Latin script with the addition of accented French letters" but not the non-Roman scripts at this time.

AOL Transforming

AOL to cut global work force by 20% KENNETH LI, Reuters via Globe and Mail (Oct 15)

AOL is 13 months into its transformation program: boost advertising operations; build up "key channels" for news, food, finance and entertainment; support email and AIM.

"On Monday, Mr. Falco told employees the company is now focused on three main areas, Platform A, the AOL publishing business and online access services, which continued to attract just over 10 million subscribers at the end of the second quarter."

Spam Doc

Documentary on CBC Newsworld about Spam - the email kind.

THE LENS
(Tuesday October 16 at 10pm ET/PT on CBC Newsworld)
SPAM: THE DOCUMENTARY
Spam: The Documentary explores the annoying consequences of a seemingly
useful invention: e-mail spam. In a humorous and insightful look into the global culture of spam, filmmaker David Manning meets with Monty Python's Terry Jones, tracks down a spammer in Las Vegas, talks with the world's foremost anti-spammer, and visits the secret control room of AOL.

Watch an excerpt online.
http://www.cbc.ca/thelens/program_171006.html

Source: CBC program alert: http://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/index.html

Classical Music on the Internet

The Well-tempered Web by Alex Ross, New Yorker (Oct 22)

Classical music is alive and well on the Internet.

"Classical-music culture on the Internet is expanding at a sometimes alarming pace. When I started my blog, I had links to seven or eight like-minded sites. Now I find myself part of a jabbering community of several hundred blogs, operated by critics, composers, conductors, pianists, double-bassists, oboists (I count five), artistic administrators, and noted mezzo-sopranos (Joyce DiDonato writes under the moniker Yankee Diva). After a first night at the Met, opera bloggers chime in with opinions both expert and eccentric, recalling the days when critics from a dozen dailies, whether Communist or Republican or Greek, lined up to extoll Caruso. Beyond the blogs are the Internet radio stations; streaming broadcasts from opera houses, orchestras, new-music ensembles; and Web sites of individual artists. There is a new awareness of what is happening musically in every part of the world. A listener in Tucson or Tokyo can virtually attend opening night at the Bayreuth Festival and listen the following day to a première by a young British composer at the BBC Proms."

Alex Ross's weblog is The Rest Is Noise.

His blog and new book received a lot of attention in http://operachic.typepad.com/opera_chic/Opera Chic, a must-visit blog for any opera buff.

Current.com - news and videos

Al Gore reinvents the Internet (ad model), Paul R La Monica, CNN Money.com (Oct 15)

Current is a cable network owned by Al Gore (available in the US on premium cable). Current.com, the companion website, has been relaunched as a more social version.

"The new Web site lets people submit news articles and videos, similar to what the cable channel, which mainly features short videos from users, does.... The new version of the site also does a better job of integrating clips from the TV network with the community aspects of the Web than its predecessor."

The new twist is that users can generate their own ads. For now, just take a look at the stories and videos.

Google Book Search

Book Publisher May Make Peace With Google, Georgina Prodhan, Reuters via PC World (Oct 14)

Random House, in spite of its support of a lawsuit against Google for scanning books, may enter into a partnership program with Google Books.

Article has some details on Google Book search.

+ "Google has agreements with more than 10,000 publishers"
+ "works with 27 academic and reference library partners to gain access to out-of-print works."
+ American Association of Publishers have a lawsuit against Google "to stop Google from scanning in-copyright works it gets from its library partners without explicit permission from publishers."
+ Google has digitized text from over 1 million books
+ book search is in 11 languages
+ there are links from books to Google maps to show where action is taking place.

Virtual Worlds

Virtual Worlds - Photos: Google Earth in the virtual world Silicon.com (Oct 15)

Photo story of what virtual-world developers will be able to do using Multiverse Networks' platform - import terrain from Google Earth, incorporate real buildings and cities and even interiors, and create "fantastical 3D models'.

Silicon.com has more with Virtual World.News and Virtual World.Extra.

Add to this STRIKE!* (*banana suit optional), Wendy Leung, Globe and Mail (Oct 15) "In a dispute over pay cuts, IBM workers took to the picket lines - of Second Life. The virtual protest echoed the real thing - bullhorns blared, IBM refused comment and no disciplinary action ensued."

"From fantasy to reality..." - indeed!

Serendipity do dah

A Way to Find Your Corner of the Internet Sky Miguel Helft, New York Times (Oct 7)

All about Stumbleupon -- "Web discovery, or search without a query, is still a niche activity, but StumbleUpon’s growth to 3.5 million registered users from 600,000 two years ago suggests it is on a path to becoming more mainstream."

What it does: "StumbleUpon has about 12 million sites in its database ... compiled by users of the service. You can influence that collection by giving a thumbs up or thumbs down to any Web site. The service uses that information — and similar data gathered from the 7.5 million “stumbles” its users perform each day — to keep refining what may be interesting to individual users, based on their shared interests and other characteristics."

Owned by EBay.

Does make money. "STUMBLEUPON makes money by charging Web sites that want to be included in its database or want to be shown to users more often." but only 1 in 25 stumbles seem to be a sponsored link and users can give it a thumbs down.

Best Online Tools

Top 10 Useful Web Tools, Pandia (Oct 13(

"The editors of Pandia share their favorite online tools for blogging, exploring and information management." - great picks. I think Yahoo tools won out over Google overall. I would have added Google Notebook for saving urls and clips.

Attaching Ads to Videos

Making YouTube Pay Off Andy Greenberg, Forbes (Oct 10)

It won't be long before ads are linked to the videos we view. This article also gives some information on the indexing Blinkx can do.

"Blinkx released a tool Wednesday that lets online publishers place targeted text ads in any video embedded on a Web site based on the actual content of the video. That's a big contrast to Google's approach: Google figures out what ads to pair with a video based strictly on the video's title and any keywords attached to the clip. Blinkx software "listens to" and "watches" the video, then inserts text overlay ads based on the spoken words and to some extent, the images in the clip. That technology depends on algorithms developed by a longtime Google competitor, search engine Autonomy."

I wonder what ads will be attached to those thousands of pet videos.

ILI Presentation on Search Engines

Karen Blakeman's presentation at Internet Librarian International 2007 on What the Search Engines Are Up To Now shows how much Google, Yahoo, Live and Ask can differ in interface and results across country versions. Presentation includes views of the personal pages (MY Yahoo, iGoogle) and some more experimental works by Yahoo (Mindset Research and Alpha version in Australia) and Microsoft (Tafiti - a completely different interface). Also looks at Exalead's Wikipedia search and its new Baagz for social networking. Lastly, Blakeman appears to recommend the all-in-one Intelways.

See Internet Librarian International 2007 presentation by Karen Blakeman (Oct 11)

Investor Education

Learning how to handle your money, Rob Carrick, Globe and Mail (Oct 8)

Rob Carrick recommended some investor-education sites for Canadians.

+ Investopedia - financial encyclopedia
+ Investorwords.com
+ investorED.ca - investing basics. Run by Investor Education Fund from Ontario Securities Commission
+ Canadian Business magazine website - canadianbusiness.com
+ Financial Webring Forum - financialwebring.org
+ Beginners Investing at About.com - beginnersinvest.about.com

Information Services in the Future

Thomson's challenge: Make data smarter GRANT ROBERTSON, Globe and Mail (Oct 8)

Michael Wilens, Thomson 's chief technology officer, sees an "intense technological race" with rivals such as Bloomberg in the creation and delivery of new, and more powerful, information products.

+ Using artificial intelligence: "The coming decade will see extensive amounts of time and money invested by companies like Thomson and Bloomberg to develop artificial intelligence capable of crunching the vast amounts of information circulating throughout the world each day."

+ Building new products: “The war of the future, in all information services and on the Internet, is going to be fought around data, about data,” Mr. Wilens said last week. “The ability to build products quickly and get them into the market faster than competitors is really critical.”

+ Some examples of new analytics -- "Reuters has already started work on programs that crunch financial news with an eye to automated stock trading. Meanwhile, Bloomberg's News Heat service lets users track which headlines on its terminals are being read most, which could offer a glimpse into upcoming trading patterns."

Thagoo for metasearching tags

Information Trapping for Tags: Thagoo ResearchBuzz (Oct 7)

"If you’re looking for more tag sites to do information trapping, check out Thagoo. It’s a tag meta-search site that offers RSS feeds for search results."

Thagoo really is a metasearcher of social bookmarking sites - BlogMarks, del.icio.us, Mr Wong, MyWebYahoo - more. Hope it's around for a while.

Yellow Pages Group in Canada

Canada’s Yellow Pages Group Expands Google AdWords Agreement, Now Reselling AdWords in Canada Loren Baker, Search Engine Journal (Oct 10)

"Yellow Pages Group has entered into a new strategic agreement with Google to become the first Canadian based reseller of Google AdWords. Under the agreement, Yellow Pages Group will be able to provide its 425,000+ advertisers with setup and consulting on Google AdWords campaigns."

"Yellow Pages Group owns Canada’s most visited online yellow pages, YellowPages.ca and Canada411.ca, along with CanadaPlus.ca, a local search network."

Yellow Pages clicks with Google MATT HARTLEY , Globe and Mail (Oct 9)

"Advertising partnership allows benefits of online market without challenging Web leader"

Of interest:: "In Canada, 86 per cent of Internet users are Google users, according to ComScore MediaMatrix data."

Search Engine first for Local Search

Survey: Search Now Top Resource For Local Information Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Oct 11)

Survey of 2000 U.S. consumers "validate(s) the consumer reliance on search generally and for local information in particular. The survey data also reflect a consumer preference for "relevant" ads (as in SEM) vs. other forms of "push" advertising."

How Search Engines Operate

Rewriting the Beginner's Guide - Part I: How Search Engines Operate SEOMoz (Oct 10)

What a good series this will be - "For the next few weeks, my blog posts will primarily consist of re-authoring and re-building the Beginner's Guide to Search Engine Optimization, section by section". Starts with How Search Engines Operate.

Using Yahoo Search - Video

Take a Tour of the New Yahoo! Search - short videos from the Yahoo Search Blog on using the new search assist in Yahoo Search. Good idea - has examples for health, travel, diet and 6 others.

Yahoo Site Explorer Link Search

Yahoo Site Explorer Not Showing All Link Data to All Users Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Oct 12)

Business and CI researchers could be put at a disadvantage when trying to see linkages. Seems Yahoo Site Explorer restricts full linkage information to the logged-in user who has authenticated their site.

FareCast in the US

Farecast Offers Hotel Search Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Oct 12)

FareCast began as a place for getting forecasts of air fares for flights in the US - now it does hotels in about 30 US cities.

Figures about Google Books

Google, Random House closer on book search GEORGINA PRODHAN, Reuters via Globe and Mail (Oct 12)

"Random House, the world's biggest book publisher, is considering joining a book-search project run by Google, once considered an arch-enemy by the paper publishing industry."

Some figures about Google Books:

+ Google has agreements with over 10,000 publishers for scanning books. Then Google Books makes them partially available.
+ "27 academic and reference library partners to gain access to out-of-print works."
+ Google has digitized the text of more than a million books [Worldcat lists over 91 million books]
+ integrates book results into web search at the US Google.com and is beginning to in Europe.

Review of Microsoft Tafiti

Microsoft Tafiti - reviewed by Karen Blackman (Aug 26, 2007) - describes with words and screenshots Microsoft's beta search front-end to Live Search called Tafiti.

Tafiti is a research tool that sits on top of Live.com and was developed with Microsoft's Silverlight technology . Tafiti is a download - works on Windows XP , Vista and Mac OS 10.4.8+ and several browsers. See Silverlight system requirements.

Also reviewed by Chris Koenig in Microsoft Tafiti - Search on Steroids (Aug 23, 2007)

ON10.net did a demo video on Tafiti before its release that gives the background, shows how to use it, and a little about the future.

It is definitely a new browsing experience.

Ask's Commercials Entertaining

In defense of Ask's commercial advertising following my earlier posting -- Ask's Marketing taken to task, it has been pointed out to me (by a prominent search person) that Ask works to be "a search engine for all types of searching" - for everyone and with any need. Ask may advertise in Entertainment Tonight but it also advertises on National Public Radio in the US.

It has many kinds of ads too - including this one saved at eSnips that just has text, some clicks, and music at the end.

That's the plain, unadorned ad - not all that exciting. So I went to YouTube to see others including the one that Barbara Quint questioned. That one, and another, Kato , are done as musicals (Kato, my favourite, was in the style of a Gilbert and Sullivan operatta). Both were advertising the new Algorithm at Ask for ranking results with a follow-up message of Experience Instant Getification. I'm not sure about the message being conveyed - I will leave to others the figuring out of match of message to demographic segment, but I can say that the entertainment value is very high.

See more videos of Ask.com commercials at YouTube. Judge for yourself.

Search Statistics August 2007

Asia has the most searchers: comScore search study Dianna Dilworth, DMNews (Oct 12)

Figures from Comscore qSearch service on internet use and searching.

+ searchers run an average of 80 searches each in August 2007. (750 million people ran 61 billion searches)

+ Asia-Pacific 258 million unique searchers, avg 78.7 searches / person
+ Europe 210 million, avg 85.7
+ North America 206 million avg 77.7
+ Latin America avg 95

+ Google was used most. "Google sites ranked as the top worldwide search property in August with 37.1 billion searches conducted. Of that total, 31 billion occurred at the Google search engine and 5 billion occurred at YouTube.com. Yahoo sites ranked second with 8.5 billion searches, while Baidu.com, a Chinese language search engine, followed in third place with more than 3.2 billion searches. Microsoft sites ranked fourth worldwide, while Korea's NHN Corp., which owns Naver.com, ranked fifth with 2 billion searches worldwide."

Geotagged Videos

News.blog: Google Earth's geotagged YouTube videos Josh Lowensohn,
CNET News.com (Oct 12)

Google Earth has a new layer that permits viewing YouTube videos of the place.

"With the layer enabled, videos will pop up anywhere you are on the map and play on the video's page on YouTube if you click the thumbnail. PC users get a slightly better experience than Mac or and Linux users, as the videos will play right inside the application."

More instructions and description in the article.

Diigo Beta Version 3

Diigo adds social network features Rafe Needleman, Webware (Sept 24)

Social bookmarking service, Diigo , is moving into version 3.0. The metasearch of other bookmarking services is gone and it intends to become a more of a social centre for interests - while people clip, tag, and save.

Social search at a site

Social Search: It’s Not Who You Know… by David Berkowitz, Search Insider (Posted September 25th, 2007 )

"Social search should be defined as the process by which a site's community of users influences the algorithmic search results displayed for any one of those users." Gives as examples the Swicki product from Eurekster, and Collarity.

Has a helpful list of things social search isn't: people search engines, live assisted search, human-powered search such as Mahalo (tho Mahalo would be better described as a subject guide).

Notwithstanding this article, "social search" will be a catch all term for some time.

Using Advanced Commands

Web Searching with Advanced Commands Genie Tyburski, Virtual Chase (Oct 11)

"This article examines ... using advanced search commands to manipulate or improve search results."

Nice to have all these advanced commands in one place with examples from an expert on how to use them.

I'm not sure, however, that * will work well as a wildcard at Ask or Live. It does at Google and will at Yahoo when inside a phrase (eg "three * mice).

At Exalead you can use NEAR to get words within 16 words of each other, and specify the nearness of the words with NEAR/number eg NEAR/2.

Also, Live.com has a partial stemming capability in its new "related terms" feature - it can do a reasonable job of picking up the singular on a plural word (eg - markets and market), and sometimes finds combinations (health care and healthcare).

Websearchguide has comparison charts for these engines, and a section on the use of syntax.

Social Search in the Enterprise

KMWorld is running a web seminar on Using Social Search to Drive Innovation through Collaboration on October 16, 2007. Vivisimo and Gilbane Group are the presenters.

"Go beyond just finding information and discover how to increase collaboration, accelerate innovation, and gain insight into the collective intelligence of your organization."

Register at http://www.kmworld.com/Webinars/Details.aspx?EventID=248

History of the Web

The 16 Greatest Moments in Web History Dan Tynan, PCWorld (Oct 11)

Memory lane - some big moments here - starting with Tim Berners Lee in December 1990 - "On Christmas morning 1990, Tim Berners Lee and Robert Cailliau of the CERN research lab in Geneva communicated with the world's first Web server--presenting all of us with a Christmas gift that keeps on giving."

Healia wins Award

Healia Selected as a 2007 Tibbetts Award Winner Market Wire via Market Watch (Oct 10)

Healia is a health search engine that aims to provide personalized results.

"The SBIR funding received by Healia from the National Cancer Institute was a critical success factor in Healia's initial R&D efforts. "Early on, the SBIR Program and the National Cancer Institute shared our vision that a health-optimized search engine providing high-quality and personalized results would be immensely beneficial to consumers," said Dr. Eng. "Healia continues to carry forward this shared vision of making health information more accessible and relevant to consumers.""

Vertical Search on Games

GenieKnows.com Games search engine gets tune up with version 1.1 PR Newswire via Marketwatch

GenieKnows, a Halifax-based company, has released a search engine to find games - "Games search engine offers users a cleaner, more relevant and better focused alternative online destination to find information contained within the Games sector."

GenieKnows has two other verticals - Health and Local. Health, oddly, had nothing on sciatica. Local is for US locations.

Doris Lessing

Sometimes a news alert can bring good news. Today, from the New York Times breaking headlines service, came the clip --

Doris Lessing Wins Nobel Prize in Literature

The Swedish Academy said that the 87-year-old British author "has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny" with "skepticism, fire and visionary power."

New York Times points to a Featured Author page on Doris Lessing with new and reviews from the archives of the NY Times. There are audio clips as well.

The New York Times recently opened its archives for free access. Registered members can get:

+ Articles from 1981 to present - free access
+ Articles from 1853 to 1980 - free access to articles in public domain
+ breaking news alerts
+ daily headlines from a section
+ a choice of newsletters (travel, movies, money etc)

The change in policy to make more content free is described in Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site (Sept 18, 2007)

The Times Online Fiction section had Comment: a fitting gift for Doris Lessing (Oct 11) also offering a quick overview of her writings. A search for doris lessing at the Times will find more.

Ask's Marketing taken to task

Ask.com & Its Continued Identity Crisis Lisa Barone. BruceClay.com (Oct 8)

"When you think of Ask.com, what comes to mind?" It's not the butler. Lisa Barone says that she thinks of it as the "librarian's engine" because Ask is so good with smart answers and quick information. Why then, Barone asks, is Ask partnering with "Entertainment Tonight and The Insider to include Ask product placements on their fine celebrity gossip-filled programming"?

Barbara Quint in an Information Today column (July / August 2007) really blasted Ask for its television ads that she thought implied that Ask would be good for sniffing out porn. Now Lisa Barone has to warn Ask to steer away from the celebrity gossip crowd. Television advertising is a dangerous thing - much better to follow Google's lead and build a reputation by word of mouth and key influencers (such as librarians).

Correction to this post (Oct 10) - changed author to Lisa Barone from Bruce Clay.

Genres at Google Books

Tuning in to Book Search Katherine Lu, Google Book Search - Kathernine Lu "stumbled upon the random subject of “Guitars” on Google Book Search. The new feature of categorizing books by genre allowed me to rediscover a hobby that I had woefully neglected."

Internet Use by the Disabled

E-patients With a Disability or Chronic Disease Susannah Fox, PEW Internet and American Life (Oct 9)

"The new survey data nails down what many people have long suspected -
people with chronic conditions are disproportionately offline, but once
they are online, they are just as enthusiastic as other internet users.
After detailing their general online interests, the report focuses on
how this special population uses the internet to gather health
information. Not surprisingly, once they are online, people with chronic
conditions are avid e-patients."

Full report at http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/222/report_display.asp

Worldwide Search Statistics

Google gets bulk of world search: report , ANICK JESDANUN, AP via Globe and Mail (Oct 9)

New market share figures from ComScore's qSearch 2.0 service for August 2007

+ "37 billion searches worldwide" through Google - 60%
+ Google search market share in the US - around 50%
+ "Yahoo Inc. was second worldwide with 8.5 billion, followed by Baidu at 3.3 billion, Microsoft Corp. at 2.2 billion and NHN at 2 billion." - yes - two regional search engines were in the top 5: Baidu in China, and NHN Naver.com in Korea.
+ "ComScore estimates that about 750 million people worldwide used Internet search in August, each person averaging about 80 searches."

Business Week had an article on NHN search -- NHN: The Little Search Engine That Could -- January 2006. Strong then, it looks even stronger now.

"Already in Japan [January 2006] , NHN is the largest game portal, with 13 million subscribers, while in China it bought half of Ourgame.com, a portal with 170 million subscribers, in 2004. And in October it set up a subsidiary in the U.S. to launch online games. Later, NHN hopes to introduce community sites and search services in those markets. Google may still be far ahead, but it would do well to keep an eye out for this little Korean search engine."

Google Features

Google Features to Increase your Online Productivity, Jennifer Evans, PCWorld Canada (Oct 3)

Google is much more than web search. This article describes some specialized tools businesses and individuals might find handy.

Ixquick adds Blinkx

Video Search Blinkx Meets Meta-Search Engine Ixquick Search Engine Journal (Oct 8)

"Powerful meta-search engine Ixquick announced today that it has partnered with top video search engine blinkx. Under the agreement agreed upon by both companies, Ixquick will be displaying the blinkx search box on its website to give Ixquick users a powerful way of doing video search into blinkx more than 14 million video content."

Transit on Google Maps

Google Transit Now in Google Maps Barry Schwartz (Oct 8) - select cities in the United States plus Japan.

New features at Google Books

Google Book Search Improved(?) Phil Bradley, Search Engine Land (Oct 6)

Google Book Search now opens with book covers considered interesting, classics, or highly cited. Bradley doesn't find this or the new search "refinements" particularly helpful. He has some other points that are part of Google's "sloppy execution".

Navigating Space

How We Navigate Our Online Landscape Gord Hotchkiss, Search Engine Land (Oct 5)

How do we really navigate online? Are there equivalents to physical space navigation where we use landmarks, knowledge of routes, and a developed cognitive map? The cognitive map "allows us to calculate the best route from several options." Hotchkiss sees equivalents for the first two but not the last: "We still identify landmarks, and we still memorize routes."

Most online navigation is done through search engines. These are the landmarks.

"Even if we’re treading down a familiar path, we’ll often use our search engine as a navigational shortcut to get there. Navigational searches are becoming a more and more common user behavior. If we need to navigate to a particular page deep within a website, most often it's a lot easier to use a search engine to get there. We become more specific with our query, we scan the results for the URL we’re looking for, and we hope the link provided will take us to the right page within the website."

We also might memorize routes - or at least our first search query. (This is why search history is so useful.)

Hotchkiss thinks searchers don't have a cognitive map. "As I said before, it's hard to create a cognitive map when there's no physical framework used from which to develop that map."

However, I think people can develop cognitive maps of types of tools and appropriate search tools and can find better routes based on that knowledge and experience.

Google Distributing Video

Google to show videos on other websites Michael Liedke, AP via Globe and Mail (Oct 9)

This is how Google is going to make money from YouTube - allow other websites to show the videos with an ad attached.

"The ads accompanying the outbound YouTube clips won't be in a video format. Instead, they will appear as a graphic straddling the video or as a link along the bottom." ... "The material sent to other websites will be confined to video from providers who sign consent forms." ... "If the broader distribution of video pays off, it could encourage Google to distribute other types of content, including news stories and audio files, across its vast network of advertising partners."

It's done through Google AdSense network. Maybe this is why Google stock went past $600 US today.

New Designs for Search Results

Gunning for Google by Matt Vella, Business Online (Oct 8)

"Recent redesigns at Yahoo!, Microsoft Live Search, and Ask.com are providing graphically rich alternatives to the minimalist search giant."

Matt Vella reviews and comments on the changes at all search engines in the past few months in how they are merging a variety of content formats (text, image, video etc) into a page of web results.

There are several issues:

+ not upsetting user expectations with new designs.
+ don't distract from the money-making text ads.
+ whether to introduce graphic ads (even though users ignore banner ads)
+ user eyes can be retrained to take in different parts of the page - proved by Ask's redesign and monitoring through "heat maps".

Of interest: eMarketer forecasts that advertisers will spend $8 billion with search engines this year (2007).

Translation Resources

October 2007 InfoTip: In Other Words..., Barbara Verble, Bates Info (Oct 8) - five web sites that provide translating services including free text translation, dictionaries, and other translation resources.

Graphwise for Data Search

Graphwise Launches World's First Data Search Engine and Visualization Tool, Market Wire via Marketwatch (Oct 8)

Graphwise is a new search engine that deals only with tabular data.

"Graphwise ( www.graphwise.com) today announced the launch of the world's first data search engine and visualization tool. The Graphwise online solution is designed to locate, extract and visualize data, creating the opportunity for those in search of relevant data, like students, researchers and analysts, to quickly find, compare and extract facts, figures and statistics and view them in powerful 3D graphs and charts."

The idea is wonderful, but it's not the simplest to use. This is still in beta and may not have crawled enough sites to be really useful. There is good data from U.S. Census Bureau which has pages of tabular data. Users are invited to submit urls for pages, but what about the data in statistical databases that can only be obtained through direct query?

Matches on searches are not strong and it is difficult to get the terms that work well. soybean exports is ok for US data, but can't get anything useful with canada soybean exports.

Query language doesn't support boolean which seems essential to pick up alternative terms (statistics OR figures). There is an advanced search to limit to a domain (edu, gov and presumably country codes like ca), and to a source (but you have to know the name). You could take a shot of looking for words in title.

There is some unexpected content here too - blog entries turn up on a query for iphone, along with many sponsored links. Finding any statistics on sales is hopeless, although some other interesting graphs might turn up.

However, if you like what you find, you can register and be able to save that data and graphs you've created. Later, registered members will be able to publish data to the search engine - will be interesting to see who does that.

The work of members can be seen in Graphs. This is very interesting to browse and let serendipity do its work. Here is a graph and article on instant messaging as a business tool. This entry was tagged under technology. Graphwise shows a short list of tags and of Channels > Showcases.

Promising - a site to watch and contribute to.

Using the edu domain

Discover the .EDU Underground item picked up in Digg on the value of searching the .edu domain of educational institutions (primarily US) for better quality information. Comments that follow have some tips on how to do that well - for example, at Google trying filetype:pdf site:edu.

Engines picked by AltSearchEngines

AltSearchEngines has two entries:

+ The Top 10 Stealth Search Engines - list of 10 pre-launch, private or beta trials shows work going into semantic search, video search, and social search.

The Top 10 Canadian Search Engines, eh? -- Canadian is used loosely. Mamma's is probably on the list because it started in the province of Quebec but this metasearcher doesn't have Canadian content. Ditto GenieKnows except it started in Nova Scotia. Vroosh is genuine - it does search Canadian sites. Canuckster is just too red (note to all Canadian sites - stop colouring all the pages red). Canada on the Web has a copyright date of 2004-2005. These are slim pickings.

Portals changing

Wither the Internet portal?, Anick Jesdanun, AP via Globe and Mail (OCt 7)

The role of the consumer portal to be the one-stop centre for everything is continuing to slip away. Consumers use them to find other places - search trumps content. The response by the portals is "to buy advertising companies and extend their sales networks".

Notess on Live and Yahoo

Microsoft and Yahoo! Update Search , Greg Notess, Newsbreaks (Oct 8)

Sums up 2007 - "In the evolution of Web searching, 2007 has become the year of multimedia integration. All four Web search engines now have incorporated images and videos into the results for some searches. The strong popular interest in video-sharing sites has moved some picture and film content into the regular, textual results from the Web."

Describes changes at Live and Yahoo Search and recommends them for improved delivery of results and relevancy.

Yahoo's Strategy

Yahoo’s 100-day review: A lot of cards shown already, Between the Lines, ZDNet (Oct 8)

Recap of stories from the last month about Yahoo as it wrestles with costs and market share.

MSNBC Newsvine

Msnbc.com buys social news site Newsvine, MSNBC (Oct 8)

Microsoft's MSNBC bought the "participatory journalism" site, Newsvine. Good for them.

"Tillinghast said msnbc.com was racing to foster a community among its readers and to exploit the power of unmoderated user commentary and ranking of the news. Ideally, he said in an interview, the site would design and build its own tools, but Newsvine, a small, lean company headquartered in downtown Seattle a few minutes from msnbc.com’s newsroom, “is just a great fit.”"

They also said that "Newsvine would continue to run as an independent site."

About Social Media

Top five sites with Web 2.0 social media coverage, Pandia (Oct

Pandia describes its favourite blogs that cover the social networking and social media scene: REad/Write Web, Mashable, CenterNetworks, Pronet Advertising, Somewhat Frank, and mentions a few others.

IE and Firefox Market Share

Internet Explorer 7 Marketshare Lagging, WGA Check Going Away, Gizmodo (Oct 5)

Browser and OS Market Share White Paper Firefox - IE - Netscape - Mozilla Janco (Oct ?)

IE7 has a marketshare of only 20 to 27% despite the fact that it comes with XP and Vista. Overall, however, IE still has 64% (Sept 2007 data), and Firefox 17%. There are still 10% with Netscape.

Yahoo! News Strong

The Big News About Yahoo! by Rachel Rosmarin, Forbes (OCt 5)

Yahoo is the "No. 1 provider of general, financial and sports news on the Internet. Two out of every five people who use Yahoo! look at its news, finance and sports sites--50 million people every month, according to Internet tracking firm ComScore. "

Of interest:

+ "Yahoo! News has broadened its sources of content". Now has "video and other content from outlets including 60 Minutes, CBS Local News, ABC News, CNN, Reuters, the BBC, the Weather Channel, and even a few blogs such as the Huffington Post."

+ Yahoo is "snatching snippets of content from around the Web and linking those back to a headline. "

+ This helps users - "boon to users, who can now finely tune the news settings on a Yahoo! page to pull together familiar sources, such as local news headlines, together with other Yahoo!-provided content."

Online office with Google and Microsoft

Office wars: Google vs. Microsoft By Michal Lev-Ram, Fortune (Oct 5)

"Competition in the online office software market is heating up as Google and Microsoft go head to head and a host of startups seek space on the virtual desktop."

WebSearchGuide Updates

The Research tutorials in Websearchguide.ca have been updated to reflect changes since March 2007. Mostly these affect the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Ask, and Live) who have added suggested searches and related searches to help the searcher construct and refine queries. These are summarized on a new WSG page on Related Searches under Search Syntax. All the major search engines have also adopted the "universal search" practice of including with the web results other content types such as news, images, video. Google invented the phrase "Universal search" to describe this integration but it is the new Ask3D that excels at it. If you haven't been using Ask lately, try it - you'll enjoy its display, its smart answers, and its search suggestions.

Social search seems to be a movement that will be with us for a while. It encompasses a great number of people-powered or people-assisted services such as social bookmarking (we all know del.icio.us), voting and ranking articles (Digg) or search results (Sproose), and building guides to topics (Mahalo, Squidoo). WSG has a new page about this.

There are enough "alternative" engines to warrant a separate page also. Meaning-based search where content is analyzed for concepts is making some inroads. Hakia, in particular, is getting stronger and could easily serve as a second-tier engine.

The updates include some edits to the search engine comparison charts for the major engines, showing features and syntax constructions. Edits to these were minor, except for Live.com which cut back on some syntax (inurl, links-to, date).

+ Web Search Guide at http://www.websearchguide.ca/
+ What's New for a review of the main changes - http://www.websearchguide.ca/whatsnew.htm
+ Comparison charts at http://www.websearchguide.ca/research/compfram.htm

Note: Websearchguide uses popups to show some search examples. Turn off your popup blocker for better viewing.

Reminder: The next Mastering Web Searching course starts October 15, 2007. This course is offered through Professional Learning Centre of the Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto. People who have already taken the course are welcome to audit it for updates and a refresher. More information and registration is at http://plc.fis.utoronto.ca/coursedescription.asp?courseid=3

Video Alerts, Video Reviews

Two entries about videos at ResearchBuzz. Seems that everyone is either watching videos or creating them and possibly both.

Information Trapping: Google Has Video Alerts (Sept 30) - you have to fiddle somewhat with the syntax to get an alert you can use.

Amazon’s New Video Reviews, Jeff Bezos Likes Milk -- "Amazon is now inviting customers to post video reviews of products". Calishain gives the syntax for finding these through Google - inurl:videopreplay site:amazon.com

NY Times Archives

Fun With the New York Times Archives, ResearchBuzz (Sept 21)

Tara Calishain did some digging into the older part of the New York Times Archives that are now open to the public.

Know more about companies

Knowmore.org is a wiki for gathering information about companies - their behaviour towards consumers, employees, community.

From the mission statement: "We are a grassroots, web-based community dedicated to chronicling and resisting corporate attacks on democracy, worker's and human rights, fair trade, business ethics and the environment. Our shared goal of a more informed and conscious consumer is being accomplished via this website: a vast database of easily searchable corporate and political info designed to aid responsible citizens, progressive thinkers and activists."

Browsing gives quickest access to the companies for which there are some reports, and to ratings by category (human rights, workers' rights, ethics, lobbying, environment). Rating scale is 1 (very poor, destructive) to 5 (excellent).

Members can add links to stories about companies very easily through a connections with del.icio.us. People are invited to be editors - no questions asked. However - how will Knowmore prevent cranks from posting or vandalizing entries?

Reasons NOT to E-Mail

29 Reasons to Not Send That E-Mail by Dan Costa, PC Magazine (Sept 12, 2007)

Costa is so right - "In these days of ubiquitous connectivity and CrackBerry addiction, it is possible to send e-mail anywhere, anytime—but that doesn't mean you should. In fact, I think there are as many reasons not to send that e-mail as there are to send it." Here's a list of 29 reasons not to send e-mail. One of the best reasons is that if the e-mail you are responding to was also sent to others - let them reply. Of course anger is always a reason NOT to send the e-mail.

Yahoo's Search Assist

Yahoo's "new" search: don't look now, but Yahoo is on the rise By Jacqui Cheng, Ars Technica (October 02, 2007)

Hits the high points about the new Search Assist at Yahoo, and Yahoo's competition with Live and Microsoft - at least for this week. Both Live and Yahoo say they are now competitive with Google (but will users agree?)

Berkeley lectures on YouTube

Berkeley university puts courses on YouTube, Sydney Morning Herald (Oct 4)

"Berkeley university, one of the most prestigious universities in the US, is embracing the Internet revolution by putting free videos of courses on YouTube.

More than 300 hours of University of California, Berkeley, classes and events are available online at the web address www.youtube.com/ucberkeley, college officials announced on Wednesday."

Google Syntax

Are Google's Allintitle, Allinanchor and Allinurl Operators Buggy?, Search Engine Roundtable (Oct 3)

People are noticing problems when searching on phrases (with quotation marks) using the syntax prefixes for allintitle:, allinanchor:, and allinurl.

Visual Medical Dictionary

Visual Medical Dictionary from Cure Hunter Inc is truly visual, an excellent example of information visualization. It displays the MeSH taxonomy of terms as a tree along with a network map showing the relationship of the disease or condition with other diseases, therapies, and treatments.

The dictionary has links to CureHunter's research, such as their Patient-Physician Summary Reports, for which there are fees. The free version does provide some sample data for key drugs and agents obtained from the FDA and other sources.

From the CureHunter website:

"The CureHunter Discovery Engine is the world's only fully unified and integrated numeric index of all known drugs, biologically active agents, diseases and empirical statements of all effective clinical outcomes published in the United States National Library of Medicine.

The engine you are accessing online right now computes: 121,000 drug and biological agent data points X 11,600 diseases X 15,000,000 peer-reviewed research articles X several hundred thousand additional variables of Gene, Protein, Enzyme, Hormone, Growth Factor, Ligand, Kinase, Receptor, Inhibitor and other important small biologically active molecules. "

There is a 5 -minute introductory screencast at http://www.curehunter.com/screencast/research/

The lay person can use this dictionary to research diseases and treatments. The professional may want to register for the newsletter and updates.

Use of Search Engines

New Yahoo! Search Makes Web Search Effortless for Consumers, BusinessWire via Marketwatch (Oct 2)

Of interest: "Recent research conducted by Harris Interactive on behalf of Yahoo! on the state of the Web shows that consumers are suffering from "Web search fatigue." The study revealed that while 99 percent of online adults use a search engine to find information on the Internet, a mere 15 percent of them find what they're looking for with their first search, with most needing to conduct three to four searches."

Swicki video

Eurekster Adds Video to Social Search Swicki With blinkx Partnership, Marketwire via Market Watch (Oct 2)

"Eurekster today announces the availability of custom social video search and a video buzzcloud widget featuring best-of-breed video content from blinkx. Eurekster is a pioneer and leader in providing a custom search experience and a content discovery engine that provides relevant, targeted, community-driven results - to increase search relevance and value for site visitors, Web publishers and "infopreneurs." With Eurekster, users can build and customize a swicki search portal on any topic, and share and distribute the widget to grow a community of interested users. With every search, the swicki becomes more relevant and meaningful to the user community, and more valuable to the swicki builder."

Yahoo Catches Up

Yahoo! has upgraded the look and feel for Yahoo! Search - but only in the United States and United Kingdom - Canadians won't see these changes if they are using the www.yahoo.ca domain.

The changes are in the same vein as those done earlier at Ask, Google, and Live (just yesterday).

+ Search Assist: Help the searcher refine the query with related searches and concepts. Yahoo is doing that with its Search Assist. As you key in terms, Yahoo suggests phrases.

This alone isn't much, but when you get to the search results page, clicking on the More button on the Also-Try line will bring up concepts that are related to the search query. This is useful.

Danny Sullivan says that Search Assist is similar to Altavista's Prisma of long ago when Altavista analyzed the first 50 results to pick out key terms. "Search Assist operates similarly to Prisma, though the suggestions are based on the top 20 pages that are found for a search, rather than the first 50 results. In addition, the integration is much slicker."

Selecting any of the concepts adds that phrase to your search query.

It's also here that you can turn off Search Assist, if you find the suggestions too distracting or time consuming (they take time to appear and read).

+ Multimedia results: Yahoo will show links to relevant photos from Flickr and Yahoo Images, and videos from YouTube, Metacafe or Yahoo! Video. For example - turkey pictures will show a map, travel photo, and the bird. Videos are not as certain - nothing for cooking a turkey (even if you add the word video and although Yahoo Video does have these), but cats jumping does bring one up.

As is the case at all engines, Yahoo will show multimedia results for any query on a Hollywood celebrity.

+ Performance: Greg Sterling reported that Yahoo claims search performance is 50% faster and the index is the "most comprehensive".

+ Shortcuts: There are more shortcuts. Greg Sterling noted, "... Yahoo has announced the availability of more categories of Shortcuts (content modules at the top of results) across a range of vertical categories: events, music, movies, travel, sports, health, shopping, businesses, and restaurants. These modules present structured content, including multimedia files, reviews, photos, and relevant links, depending on the category and the query."

Also see the Yahoo Shortcut page.

References:

From "To Do" to "Done" in One Search, Yahoo! Search Blog

Yahoo Sharpens Search Term Precision by Jeremy Kirk, IDG News Service via PCWorld. (Oct 2)

Yahoo Upgrades Search Experience, Launches 'Search Assist' & Multimedia Content In Results by Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (OCt 2)

Search Suggestions On Steroids: Yahoo Search Assist by Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Jul 25)

Postscript: Advanced Search - Yahoo moved this under Options where people really won't find it. Preferences are here too - increase number of results per page, and request a link to 'More from this site'.

BAAGZ in Beta

BAAGZ and the Future of Social Networking by Avi Rappoport, Newsbreaks (Posted On October 1, 2007)

"BAAGZ (www.baagz.com), from the French Web and enterprise search company Exalead (http://corporate.exalead.com), is a new search and collaboration system, still in beta, that applies Web 2.0 features to social networking. While the idea of using search topics and vetted results as nodes around which dynamic topical networks could form is interesting, the current early beta implementation gives just a hint of what may be possible."

Microsoft Office Live Workspace

Microsoft to unveil Office Live Workspace, by JESSICA MINTZ, Canadian Press via Globe and Mail (Oct 1, 2007)

Microsoft has launhced a beta version of Microsoft Office Live Workspace -- "Web component for Office programs lets computer users store, share and comment on documents -- but not create them"

"Office Live Workspace will give users about 250 megabytes of storage, or room to keep about 1,000 average Office documents "in the cloud." PC users can upload Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, and use the site to e-mail friends or colleagues and invite them to read and add comments to those documents through a Web browser."

CustomizeGoogle Firefox Addon

Briefs: CustomizeGoogle New Release; Open Yahoo; Portico News; Tracking Political Buzz in the U.S., ResourceShelf (Sep 14)

Describes CustomizeGoogle V0.63 as "the robust and popular add-on for Firefox.

From the website - "CustomizeGoogle is a Firefox extension that enhances Google search results by adding extra information (like links to Yahoo, Ask.com, MSN etc) and removing unwanted information (like ads and spam)." There is a 2 minute introduction. This has been around for a while. Two new features of interest are:

+ Stickly Google Preferences - keep your preferences but delete the cookies.
+ Stream Google results pages - never click Next.

del.icio.us in libraries

Briefs: Fast Delivers First Complete Platform For Next-Generation, Personalized Storefronts; More Tagging, Resource Shelf (Sept 18)

Refers to an article in the Library Journal - Tags Help Make Libraries Del.icio.us . Gary Price's comments in this posting raises many good questions about use of del.icio.us by a library. He also links to other postings expressing concern about quality of tagging when done by the masses.

Postscript Oct 12: Added link to Library Journal article.

Street Level Imagery

Street-Level Imagery for Canada? What About Other Countries?, ResourceShelf (Sep 25)

Lists "numerous sources for 360 street-level imagery (both static and live) from around the globe."

Addons for Add to SearchBar

ResourceShelf has instructions for adding just about any search engine to the Firefox searchbar. First install the "add on" for adding on - then use it.

"Add to Searchbar" for Firefox Instructions .

The AddOn is at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3682

Mentions that IE7 has something similar.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/searchguide/en-en/default.mspx

Maps for Visualizing Data

New Research Paper and Demo: Hotmap and How People Use Online Maps from Microsoft Research, ResourceShelf (Sep 27)

The research paper, Hotmap: Looking at Geographic Attention, is about using maps for visualizing data and tracking related user data. There are other examples of use of maps in this posting.

Podcasting v Phonecasting

Making Podcasting Easier for the Listener to Access, Enjoy, and Utilize, ResourceShelf (Sept 28)

Probably the best way to find podcasts is through a specialized directory - such as Yahoo's Podcast Directory which is to be closed. Is podcast search in a sad state? Gary Price mentions some other directories and comments on what might make podcasts more accessible to people - among these being phonecasts - listening to the program over the phone (mobile / cell).

Audio podcasting itself is not close to a mainstream tool - "Why? A learning curve (what is a podcast? How do I find a podcast? How and where can I listen to a podcast, and the list goes on). That’s a lot of work/time for people."

Will phonecasting be more successful? Marshall Kirkpatrick described the simple use of phone numbers to get programs from NPR's new mobile site -- NPR Launches Nice Mobile Site Read/Write Web (Sept 25)

Looksmart Cut Backs

Wisenut, a search engine that once was an early pioneer in clustering results and was bought by Looksmart to beef up its web search, has closed. It redirects traffic to Looksmart.

Looksmart is close to death too. The main site has lost all search capability. However, two other services owned by Looksmart survive.

+ FindArticles - claims over 10 million articles. There is a topical structure that can be browsed. There are also research guides to topics that refer to articles. This is a useful feature, but I worry about a guide for Alternative Energy that lists an article from April 2006 as the most recent. In fairness, the AID topic has articles from August 2007.

+ Furl - one of the earlier social bookmarking sites and one of the few that lets you save the page.

Wisenut showed up frequently at metasearch engines, sometimes under the name of Looksmart. If you see either of these now, you'll know they are duds.

It's Official - Wisenut is No More, ResourceShelf (Oct 1)

Finding Music

Searching For Music and Personalizing Those Results, ResourceShelf (Sept 28, 2007)

We can look forward to better ways to find music online. UCSD is working on a method to find songs just by describing what you want. Today, music lovers can use Pandora to find more of what they know they like.

European Research

"FUMSI Report: European Research Resources" by Adrian Adams, Freepint (Sep 27. 2007)

Excerpt from a new report from the FUMSI Regional Research Series about the European Union and especially on sources of information about the EU and Europe.

Podanza for podcasts

Podanza - the podcast search engine, Pandia (Sep 25)

Recommends Podanza - "Podanza is an American podcast search directory, with a pleasant Web 2.0 interface and a joyful color scheme."

Phrasing the Query

Salaries, Overlap, and the Perils of Phrase Searching by Greg Notess, Search Engine Showdown (Sep 28)

Greg Notess has created a "screencast of unique results found at only one or two search engines, but this search is also an example of the peril of relying too heavily on lengthy phrases for finding the best answers."