"Theseus is definitely not about developing a European Google. This is a technology-push initiative in which research institutions and companies cooperate to develop search technologies that can be used in various search engines and tools. The main focus is on image and video search."
Pandia has been following the story of Quaero and then Theseus for some time.
"The Google Reader Blog announced that they have added two new features unique to Google Reader but not unique to many other RSS readers. The new features are "recommendations" and drag and drop capabilities."
Internet Librarian Conference 2007 - presentations now available. These are the ones that are most related to search. See IL page for others related to Web 2.0 and various tools useful for training and delivering.
+What's new with search by Stephen Cawley, Marketing Manager, Scirus/Elsevier - about scholarly web content and use of Scopus, Scirus and Science Direct. Introduces others such as Citizendium, Scholarpedia. http://www.infotoday.com/il2007/Presentations/A102_Cawley.pps
+ Future of Search by Danny Sullivan [Keynote] - blended results and personalized search have both arrived, but social search is struggling - mentions natural language (Hakia) and human powered (Mahalo) - and verticals are growing. http://www.infotoday.com/il2007/Presentations/WednesdayKeynote_Sullivan.pps
Highlights 10 semantic applications - they "all try to determine the meaning of text and other data, and then create connections for users". Describes this as being top-down - analyze the text, or bottom-up - embed meta-data.
Several are still in private testing. Hakia is one of the few search engines that while still in beta is open for use by the public.
Of particular interest - a Firefox extension named Gnosis from ClearForest.
"The Firefox extension is called Gnosis and it enables you to "identify the people, companies, organizations, geographies and products on the page you are viewing." With one click from the menu, a webpage you view via Gnosis is filled with various types of annotations. For example it recognizes Companies, Countries, Industry Terms, Organizations, People, Products and Technologies. Each word that Gnosis recognizes, gets colored according to the category."
Barry Schwartz reports that search spam has been getting worse for some time - hacked sites and links to malware were seen 2 or 3 months ago but Google and other search engines are only reacting to it now.
"Search spam, using techniques that manipulate the search results, is becoming more dangerous each and every day. Some search spammers go as far as hacking sites to inject link spam into unsuspecting web pages. And some go even further by polluting the search results with nasty malware."
Google is trying out having people identify if they like a result or not in a new experimental feature. People will also be able to provide a url as an example of a page that does answer the question. It's being called Digg style voting.
Summarizes the main points from a video by Matt Cutts of Google on the anatomy of search results. [6 minutes ] Get to see Matt Cutts and his analysis of what you see in a search result. Explains Google's use of Open Directory for title and description, and of the meta-description tag.
Fox's summary and Cutt's video (in spite of the static) - essential.
New study at Penn State University by C Lee Giles shows that "Website administrators increasingly are barring some search engines from all or part of their sites, while granting others more access ..."
Does Google get preference?
"C. Lee Giles, an information sciences and technology professor and the lead author of the study, said site administrators may allow crawlers from Google Inc. the most access among search engines because they know Google produces a lot of traffic."
"Ars Technica draws attention to an increasingly heated debate between University of Michigan librarian, Paul Courant, and media law professor Siva Vaidhyanathan. In a nutshell, Courant contends that the library's book-scanning deal with Google is not a violation of copyright law. Such deals further address the public's short-sightedness when it comes to finding information that isn't available online."
Elsevier has the web 2.0 bug. It has launched a collaboration tool for researchers - 2collab.
"2collab is a free Web application that provides researchers with a platform to share resources with networks of peers and specialists, creating an online community that facilitates information discovery, evaluation and debate. "
I saw some of this just the other day using a fairly innocent search - guide "child adoption in canada" - but it seemed to affect Yahoo and Live as well as Google
"Users searching Google with any of hundreds of legitimate phrases -- from the technical "how to cisco router vpn dial in" to the heart-tugging "how to teach a dog to play fetch" -- will see links near the top of the results listings that lead directly to malicious sites hosting a mountain of malware. "This is huge," said Alex Eckelberry, Sunbelt Software's CEO. "So far we've found 27 different domains, each with up to 1,499 [malicious] pages. That's 40,000 possible pages."
"Subverted search sites lead to massive malware attack in progress from ComputerWorld reports that Google, along with Yahoo, Live Search, and other search engines are being targeted more than ever with sites that contain malware."
DoctorPortal.co.uk - new online community resource from Elsevier in the UK with Doctor and Hospital Doctor magazines.
"Elsevier, the world's leading publisher of science and health information, has announced the launch of DoctorPortal, an online repository of the most current medical information. DoctorPortal is advertiser supported and based around enhanced online versions of the respected and freely available Doctor and Hospital Doctor magazines. Aimed at the UK’s 150,000 primary and secondary care doctors DoctorPortal promises to be the news source for UK doctors."
Eluma, if this press release is correct, may make social search easier, enabling us to organizing materials from the Web and then to share with trusted others. It aims to be comprehensive taking in feeds, bookmarks, notes, videos etc. This is available to those who apply to use the private beta version.
"Eluma is an end-user desktop application that allows users to collect and share online content. Similar to del.icio.us, a tool that stores bookmarks, Eluma users can create and share collections of web content with customer communities. Unlike del.icio.us, however, Eluma users' collections go beyond bookmarks to include RSS feeds, Flash content, podcasts, and video."
Yahoo is planning on making search for products more structured, employing, by the sound of it, the faceted navigation they have had for shopping for some time.
"If a user enters the words "mobile phone" in the search box, for example, apart from throwing up the usual search results containing the word "mobile phone," Yahoo's new structured search will also offer pull down menus with choices including mobile phone brands, technologies, and specifications, and other features, said Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Yahoo's vice president of research for Europe and Latin America, in an interview."
"A thesis submitted to the College of Communication and Information of Kent State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science"
Jason Morrison conducted this study as part of his Master's thesis. The study looked at the search effectiveness of services that employ tagging (folksonomies) and compared them to directories and search engines.
He constructed measures of precision, retrieval and recall to compare the effectiveness of the three types of search tools in retrieving information for five types of information queries: factual, known site or document, selection of documents, news, and entertainment.
The paper is interesting for showing the strengths of search engines and directories. Folksonomies do not come out well, being weak even in news and entertainment where we would expect better performance. They are also not good for factual answers or known site.
But this doesn't mean writing off folksonomies. A url that is found through a folksonomy and a search engine is likely to be of higher relevance (someone "voted" for it) suggesting that search engines would be stronger if they included the content of folksonomies.
One option would be to take folksonomies into account when ranking results (but spammers would have a heyday with that).
While folksonomies were found to have lower precision than the others, del.icio.us was as good as or better than Yahoo Directory and Open Directory Project for the first 20 results.
The study acknowledges that the search facilities at the folksonomy sites are weaker than that at directories or search engines, but doesn't recognize that each type requires different search techniques. It sounds as if most queries were straight keyword although there is some mention of using query operators. We have to use just one or two words at social bookmarking sites and directories, and do better with more words at search engines.
Morrison does note that folksonomies could be much more useful with better search systems. Absolutely.
The study, conducted in November 2006, examined 103 searches by 34 students in the Library and Information Science (SLIS) and Information Architecture Knowledge Management (IAKM) graduate programs at Kent State University.
"Folksonomy" services chosen were the social bookmarking sites - del.icio.us., furl, and the social news sites - reddit. Use of these was compared to the Yahoo Directory and the Open Directory Project, and the search engines - MSN, Google, Altavista.
Some Findings:
+ URLs returned by more than one search engine are more likely to be relevant - this is in line with other studies done of web searching.
+ Overlap was low - nearly 90% of results were from only one "IR system". This is consistent with other studies.
+ Relevance was higher if a search result was returned by the three types of systems: folksonomies (social bookmarking), directories, and search engines.
Web pages that were returned by all three types were most likely to be relevant (42.31%), followed closely by those returned by directories and search engines (41.79%) and those returned by folksonomies and search engines (31.91%). The web pages returned just by search engines were actually more likely to be relevant than those returned by both directories
and folksonomies (23.50% to 16.67%)
Although URLs that appeared in both directory and search engine results scored even better, the difference between that set and the folksonomy/search engine set was not statistically significant.
+ Precision: this is the number of relevant results divided by the total number of
results retrieved. Google did best in this study, and Reddit the worst.
Google had the highest precision, with about 28.6% of it's results judged to be relevant. Yahoo followed with a precision of 27.1%, then Alta Vista at 26.3%, and Live at 23.5%. Del.icio.us ranks next at 21.1%, followed by Open
Directory at 17.2 percent. At the bottom of the list are Furl at 9.4% and Reddit at 4.1%.
+ Retrieval:
retrieval rate results are a little different than the precision results, with Live and AltaVista returning sites 98.5% of the time, followed closely by Google at 89.4%. Reddit and Furl come in next at 56.2% and 53.1% respectively, with Del.icio.us, Open Directory, and Yahoo grouped together at the bottom at 19.1%, 18.1%, and 17.1% respectively.
+ Comparing the three types:
The search engines, which build their collections automatically, have both the highest precision and retrieval rate. The traditional directories Yahoo and Open Directory, which have strict control over what is included in their collections, have the next highest precision (22.1 %) but the worst retrieval rate (just 17.6 %). Searches submitted to the folksonomies that allow open submission had the lowest precision (10.4 %) but more than twice the retrieval rate of the controlled directories (42.8 %).
+ Recall: In this study recall was calculated from the number of relevant items retrieved in the first 20 at an engine divided by all the relevant items retrieved
by all engines in a search. Search engines, of course, with their larger databases, did much better on this, and folksonomies did poorly.
+ Examined by information need category: short factual statement, specific document or web site, selection of documents pertaining to an interest, all documents on an interest.
Searches submitted to the search engines for factual queries had the highest precision (44.1%), and search engines also performed well for specific item queries (35.4% precision, 26.8% recall) and queries for a range of documents (43.5% precision, 9.6% recall). The directories and folksonomies performed worst in specific item searches in precision, and worst in factual answer searches in recall. The folksonomies performed best when executing queries that required a selection of relevant documents – in that case, the precision was 16%.
+ Folksonomies for news and entertainment information. The hypothesis was that social bookmarking sites would be better at this than directories or search engines. They were better than directories for news (which stands to reason since directories are intended for collecting resources on a topic) though not entertainment. Search engines outperformed in both areas.
Much print and many bytes have been expended discussing the new digital device from Amazon for reading Amazon's ebooks. Paula Hane describes Kindle and examines what it can do (or is allowed to do).
Scott Spanbauer worked only on the web - no desktop applications - for a week.
"Sure, online applications can't do certain things--like rip and burn CDs, or capture screen shots. But for most of my work, the convenience of storing and editing my documents and e-mail online compensates well for the drawbacks and missing features of Google Docs, Zoho Office, Gmail, and the like. Google and Zoho provided all the tools I needed, and other sites such as ThinkFree offer similar features see 10 Outstanding Web-Hosted Applications."
"OCLC announced that the latest enhancement to WorldCat.org is a link to WorldCat Identities (www.worldcat.org/identities), an OCLC research prototype that creates a summary page for some 25 million personal and corporate authors mentioned in WorldCat. In addition, research journal articles discoverable on WorldCat.org now include links to the British Library Direct service, where electronic copies of the articles may be purchased. British Library Direct offers pay-as-you-go access to 20,000 international research journals in many fields."
These gadgets for Windows Vista are extremely colourful. Gadgets are small applications that are available to do things you want - get information, do calculations etc.
"In this article I will walk you through the major components of a Windows Vista Sidebar gadget including major differentiating features, best practices, and tips for widget packaging and distribution."
Kennedy wrote the article for people who want to develop and distribute gadgets, but users can get a sense of what they look like and how they work.
Users can vote with their feet - or in this case, fingers. "Techcrunch reports that many contributors to the social web “submit-and-vote-for-articles” site digg are frustrated with the current culture and practices. Many of them are therefore looking for a new home on the Web."
People are moving to propeller, reddit, and, the new, Mixx to save articles and comment. Pandia, in its review, suggests that Mixx has the qualities to become the new Digg. One of the most popular stories at Mixx today is an Oct 25 entry - Why Digg Is Neither Relevant Nor Useful
AccessMyLibrary, which provides web access to article collections of The Gale Group, enabled an RSS-based alerting feature on the site. This allows users to subscribe to a feed that will update when new articles are added to specific publications.
The easiest place to do this is from the publication list - for example, browse by the letter N, to find Natural Life, a quarterly about sustainable living.
Or pick up the feed from the article, or bookmark it, such as My Green Town .
Oddly, the choices for bookmarking, printing, adding to del.icio.us show in IE7 but not Firefox 2.0 - though Firefox does show the RSS icon in the address bar signifying that there is a feed.
"Market research firm comScore Inc said Google's core Web search properties captured 58.5 per cent of the U.S. market in October, up from 57.0 per cent in September."
"Google published three patent applications on Google Notebook this week, which describe the fundamentals of how the program works, and provide a hint at how notebooks may influence some search results."
Article also links to information about new features of Google Notebooks.
"Some of the newest features that aren’t covered in the patent filings include the ability to turn your notes into Google Documents, the mobile version of Notebooks, an integration with Google Maps and with the personalized home page, and the ability to add labels to notebooks."
Site Visibility is a blog on search marketing for people in the UK. This posting has notes from "Understanding Searcher Needs and Intent at SMX London". Gord Hotchkiss, one of the speakers, talked on understanding searcher needs.
"Gord Hotchkiss from Enquiro talked about the concept of working memory, which means most people can only deal with a few ideas at the time, whether that’s products that fit their need or brands, which would suit them.
Gord said from his research users go through the following stages.
• Awareness
• Set criteria – also known as satisficing
• General Search - Leads to Ideas
• Specific Requests – leads to brands"
These look like very good features - perhaps strong enough reason to switch to GMail. Bookmark your emails, filter messages like this, navigate browser-like, share mail searches with friends (and colleagues - could be useful).
Special report from Business Week on 101 freebies on the Net. Comes with a slide show.
"You want it? It's yours. From a college education to your favorite shampoo, it's all happening gratis on the Internet".
"What have I found? I've collected 101 of the very best freebies—including enough free software to run your own business or become a YouTube video mogul—all without putting my hand in my pocket. Of course, I did have to give something, even if it wasn't money. In some cases, I had to click on an ad or watch a video. In others, information about me—such as how I spend my time online, or how I spend my money—was so valuable it entitled me to free products."
Firefox has an office in Toronto and students at Seneca have contributed to the latest version (3.0).
"David Humphrey, a professor at Seneca’s school of computer studies who runs open source development courses for the college, said the school’s partnership with Mozilla gives students the ability to help build software on a scale unlike anything that could be typically offered by academic institutions."
Firefox will soon be releasing version 3.0 in beta for people to start using. Emphasis seems to be on bookmarks - but haven't many people switched to online bookmarks?
"One of the big changes with Firefox 3.0 is an overhaul of the way the browser bookmarks and keeps track of browsing history. With this new feature, called Places, browsing history will now be stored in a database, meaning that it will be much easier for Firefox users to search for sites they've visited. "Because of the new Places infrastructure we're able to store a much larger component of your history," Schroepfer said."
+ bookmarks - add keywords, or tags, to sort bookmarks by topic.
+ "Places" feature - "quickly access sites you recently bookmarked or tagged and pages you visit frequently but haven't bookmarked".
+ Star button for quickly adding bookmarks
"Google has announced the international availability of its Custom Search platform allowing companies to add Google's search technology to their websites." ... "The platform allows users to integrate search into personal and community sites and blogs, and developers can use the Google Custom Search APIs to allow searching from within their applications."
The Physicians' Desk Reference comes online as a new and free health vertical from Thomson Healthcare. PDRhealth.com has information on drugs, diseases and conditions, and also provides online health tools. (There's no web search.)
"Thomson Healthcare (www.thomsonhealthcare.com), publisher of the Physicians’ Desk Reference, has launched PDRhealth.com as a free site for consumers. PDRhealth.com is based on the same information platform that Thomson Healthcare uses to create the Physicians’ Desk Reference database. This drug information is then paired with comprehensive diagnostic tools. The new PDRhealth.com is designed to put critical health information into the hands of consumers. Individuals can also sign up to receive electronic newsletters, alerts on new clinical trials, and any new information about prescription drugs."
Google's experimental site, Search Mash, has not seen any changes in roughly a year until now with this flash version - Search Mash Flash .
You see a preview of the result in the right pane (instead of sponsored listings) that includes a snapshot of the page and more information.
The top bar has tabs for Images and Video. The More button leads to Maps, Wikipedia and Blogs.
I can see this being great for planning a vacation - get the images and the maps, and also see what people have said in blogs; or for shopping - see the products and find out where to buy them. It's certainly much more attractive than plain Google or SearchMash, but it is going to be more demanding on computer resources.
Hard to believe. Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corporation, thinks that advertising on a free Wall Street Journal will bring in more revenue than the $50 million a year in subscription fees.
"Mr. Murdoch said he believed that a free model, with increased readership for wsj.com, will attract “large numbers” of big-spending advertisers."
Means we can look forward to a free online Wall Street Journal sometime in 2008. Guess he's not worried about a downturn in the US and world economies.
Update on Sensebot - the engine that "takes results from Google, Yahoo! and [or] Live and summarizes them into one concise digest on the topic of your query."
There is a test page where you can choose the engine. Search results are in sentences.
"Those of us older than 25 can't imagine a life without e-mail. For the Facebook generation, it's hard to imagine a life of only e-mail, much less a life before it. "
In the space of a generation we've moved from letter writing, to email, and now to short text messages. People over 60 are just getting the hang of email and their grandchildren are ignoring it. What once served as a diary or log of our lives - the email archive - is being replaced by the MySpace / Facebook scene.
Jimmy Wales, of Wikipedia fame, showed an audience in South Africa some screenshots of the much-promoted-search-engine-to-come, Wikia.
"But the screenshot that Wales briefly showed us in the audience looked much more like a Facebook profile page than a search page. In fact, it looked pretty much identical to a Facebook profile page."
On the one hand Gmail storage is increasing but on the other, people are having problems with slow response from the new GMail 2.0 Looks like that you should stick with the old Gmail for a while longer if you can. And that people considering switching to Gmail should also hold off.
Goodman waxes positive about the advantages of using GMail and mentions that the storage limit will be 6 GB.
"Like master of micropersuasion Steve Rubel, I use GMail as kind of a personal and business nerve center and intranet (though not to the same extent). One of the many life-saving attributes of GMail is that I can access my "sent mail" anytime, anywhere. So if I sent that vital proposal to a client, or a presentation to the conference organizers and myself... even if the version I sent to myself goes astray, the "sent" version is always neatly archived."
But many people are having problems with the upgrade to GMail 2.0
This interview with Eytan Seidman, product manager for Live Search at Microsoft, hits the bases (search upgrade at Live, new Webmaster Tools, Neural Net ) but Seidman is often evasive.
There is this bit about related searches.
Question: The "related searches" on the side of Live.com's results - are those semantically related through term vectors/usage or "related" in that many folks who searched the given query also searched for the listed terms/phrases?
Answer:The related searches are a combination of “more specific” and “broader”. So if you search for [Eytan] it turns out that a fair number of people who looked for that are specifically looking for [Eytan seidman]: http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=eytan&form=QBRE. I swear that was not gamed. There are also scenarios where we think people might want to search more broadly. For example, if you search for [Perl] then we show as a related search [Php] as that tends to be broadly related to [Perl].
Slawski detects a possible move to a behind the scenes move to personalization that operates not from search history or expressed likes and dislikes, but from overall searcher activity in selecting certain results.
"We often talk about the ranking of Web pages with terms like PageRank or relevancy, meaning how relevant terms on a page might be to a query used by a searcher.
Many patent filings coming from Google refer to statistical models, like a probabilistic model that can learn about how words are related to each other, and how pages might be similar. Those models might tell us something about searchers. "
Information would be obtained from "user query sessions".
From the study - "In research among 2,062 U.S. adults surveyed by telephone in July and October, 2007, Harris Interactive found that 79 percent of adults are now online." ... "The average number of hours per week that people are spending online is now at 11 hours, up from 9 hours last year and 8 hours in 2005."
Search Engine Land has organized its extensive blogroll into about 30 high-level groupings. See the entire blogroll . Wonderful introduction to the entire field. How handy that Search Engine Land is doing the digest for us.
Has a video that demos the new TrueKnowledge search. Search engine is still under wraps.
"TrueKnowledge combines natural language analysis, an internal knowledge base and external databases to offer immediate answers to various questions. Instead of just pointing you to web pages where the search engine believes it can find your answer, it will offer you an explicit answer and explain the reasoning patch by which that answer was arrived at. There's also an interesting looking API at the center of the product. "Direct answers to humans and machine questions" is the company's tagline."
TrueKnowledge will be inviting users to add to the "knowledge" by adding what they know. Video briefly describes the process. But any contribution from users invites the wikipedia (and Yahoo Answers) problem of authority. correctness, and worth.
Firstly, Yahoo Pipes sounds like an excellent current awareness tool if you are able to identify the sources and keywords, but, right now, Google is blocking access but Yahoo Pipes to the news stories.
"Pipes is a highly regarded product from Yahoo's Brickhouse team. Users are able to collect data from various sources around the internet, manipulate it, filter it, sort it and then deliver it in another format. For example, with Yahoo Pipes a brand team could monitor news aggregators and blog search engines around the web for mentions of their brand and then deliver this research in one single RSS feed. "
"Will Success, or All That Money From Google, Spoil Firefox? from the New York Times asks if all the money Google is feeding Firefox going to hurt the browser and the community behind the browser in the future, by aligning the browser too closely with Google and its war against Microsoft."
"Elsevier’s Scopus announced that it has added new features to the abstract and citation database that are designed to further improve research productivity and support the researchers’ workflow. "
Thomson is enhancing its product line of information services with a selective web search engine. WebPlus uses the Microsoft Live search technology to crawl and search the public Web, and editors to "provide a measure of classification and authority control to the results by identifying and vetting relevant legal, scientific, financial, and other Web sites."
"WebPlus used human editors at Thomson as well as proprietary search technology to create an Internet search engine that targets and prioritizes its results as an adjunct to Thomson’s data products. The WebPlus Legal search engine, currently being beta tested in law schools and selected law firms, focuses the query results on government, educational, nonprofit, and commercial legal information Web sites that complement its Westlaw database. Thomson Scientific’s WebPlus does the same, albeit with the focus on science Web sites that complement Web of Science."
George Pike ran some comparison tests of WebPlus against Google and Scirus. See the comments in the article.
Refers to Take control of your online identity, with Wink in CNet News (Nov 7) - and clarifies - you may be able to suppress information about you in Wink but since Wink indexes the Web you still have a problem.
This would also apply at any of those people search engines where you can register and "correct" - such as ZoomInfo.
The new version of Google Earth has a "“Weather” layer showing constantly updated weather information like the clouds and radar images overlaying the map ..."
Reports on changes at Wink, a people search engine that uses social networking sites as well as other means.
"Wink allows users to claim and control their search profile on the Wink People Search engine and gives the owner of each profile complete authority to edit, correct or remove any content — photos, tags, labels, descriptions, links or feeds — in their profile. This helps them prevent false or defamatory information from persisting, and lets them present themselves as they’d like to be seen."
Wink also has a partnership with ZoomInfo to access its 38 million profiles.
Analyzed search use in September 2007 in the United States and ranked individual searchers by the volume of queries.
"In the interest of peeling back another layer in the continuing quest I thought I’d look into exactly who is performing the highest volume of searches on each engine. The beauty of Compete’s people based approach to click stream data is that I can dig into this question without having to worry about things like bots, meta-search, etc. Every search query we see in our data is a query performed by an actual person."
Findings:
+ top 1% of searchers performs a full 13% of all searches in a given month.
+ extrapolated to propose that 70% of searches are done by 20% of searchers.
+ Google might have the greatest concentration of repeat searchers.
"In choosing a site for social networking, the number of active users is of great importance. Amazon is in a league of its own, being one of the most visited sites on the net.
But traffic is not the only consideration. Use of ease, advanced functionality and networking options are also important. Read on to learn about my top 5 social web sites for book lovers."
Library Thing of course, but don't ignore Amazon, remember Book Crossing, and try Shelfari and Goodreads.
Google is starting to group results. This post shows how it handled cafe con leche (also works at Google.ca) and has found it is true for other food related searches.
It's always hard to make much sense out of the stripped down Powerpoint points, but there are few slides from this that have enough information.
+ Book search - shows the new capabilities: Amazon, Google, Live, and the National Academies Press.
+ Cache mining - where to find cached copies of pages
+ Google tricks mainly related to manipulating the url to search on dates, stop filtering, or get more from images (likely the most useful - see below).
+ Using quotation marks on long phrases will not always work. Notess had done some work on this earlier and found that breaking up a long phrase into sub-phrases could have better results. See his posting --Salaries, Overlap, and the Perils of Phrase Searching (Sep 28, 2007)
+ Link searching - best done at Yahoo.
+ Personalization at Google - can turn off having ranking influenced by your search history - use &pws=0
Google Image URL tweaks:
For faces, add &imgtype=faces to the query url
For news photos, add &imgtype=news
Tips on using some of the less well known Google search features.
+ number range - handy for prices $50..$100 and for years 2005..2007
+ date searching - limiting to pages added in the past few days - you specify the number
+ using your cell phone to search Google (good in the US).
This is the sound of the penny dropping. Looksmart sold Grub and Wisenut and closed its search site. Now, FindArticles.com is being picked up by CNET. Furl will be next. I'm surprised it didn't go to HighBeam but ...
"Gary Price spotted that Microsoft has added a new "more" tab to the Live Search home page, exposing some Live Search specialized search engines that haven't been promoted from the home page since last month's relaunch of Live Search."
The new True Knowledge from the UK "aims to give appropriate answers to natural language queries, even if key query terms are not included in the data being indexed. Current search engines are unable to return appropriate results for these queries."
True Knowledge is using structured databases - it isn't indexing the web. "Results can be returned based on inference of the intended meaning. So a question about if someone is married or not can be answered even if there is no specific structured data about that question."
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From the main page - "MarketWikisTM is an online library of free market research collected, updated and maintained by the global community of buyers, providers, students and academics"
Tara Calishain wrote - "For what is here I find one good thing and about each article, one bad thing, and one thing I’m missing."
Related to marketing research is another site Calishain has discovered in Get Your Marketing Charts. Ads, retail, media - lots of stats about these at Marketing Charts
"Intute is run by a national network of academic subject, Internet and information specialists from UK universities, who will use this blog to post news, views and reviews about Intute services, but also about the use of Internet resources to support higher education and research."
Categories will cover news about Intute, using Intute in teaching, integrating it with sites, academic use, Internet research skills, web credibility, technology watch, and "in" sites.
There are other Intute blogs --
ntute: Science, Engineering and Technology Blog
Intute: Arts and Humanities Blog
Intute: Social Sciences Blog
Intute: Health and Life Science Blog
"Truly global collaborative search - both international and universal in reach - would be a way for all information professionals world- wide, whether employed or independent, to discuss and help out with the search needs of others. For our clients, end-users world-wide, it would be a way to have access to advice, help with searches, and, if they wanted, the paid services of any information professional. It would involve a place where end-users and info-people could meet and interact; and also where sub-groups could meet, such as info-people discussing search questions between themselves. How close are we to this concept of global collaborative search?"
But we're nowhere near that. To get there Judith Koren proposes a "Web-based GCS community". Follow her Research Trail blog.
Five favourite business and company research sources from two experts in business research. Includes Country Insights from the Canadian Centre for Intercultural Learning,
Small survey at Hakia to get comments about how good Hakia is:
"The results are encouraging. We have found out that:
- In the long run, semantic search can carve out a significant market share
- There is frustration amongst users of search
- Even in BETA, hakia.com is showing overall favorable performance "
There is a YouTube Canada - small Canadian flag in top right corner. Is this helpful? Wouldn't Canadian video makers prefer to be in the popularity rankings at YouTube.com? Do Canadian viewers want to be limited? Funny that YouTube itself won't be geographically restrained.
Fortunately, YouTube won't redirect people according to their IP number.
Of interest:
"YouTube also had several new Canadian partners at the news conference, including the CBC, Dose.ca, the CommandN video blog and a site called NewsCanada. Partners are featured in a special location on the YouTube home page, and the company says it plans to share advertising revenue with its partners at some point in the future."
"One spokeswoman for YouTube said clips from the Canadian version of the site might make their way to the home page at YouTube.com as well, in the same way that videos from anywhere do -- that is, by being watched a lot or voted up by users. She said there was no specific program of featuring specific geographical content at YouTube.com."
Ziplocal.com for local search in Canada - if you don't like the results you get from Google Local or Yellow Pages, try ZipLocal.
From the About page: "Formed in August 2006 from the merger of redCity Search Company and Zip411.net, ZipLocal Inc. (TSX-V: ZIP) is Canada's new online search directory that provides a rich, user-defined local search experience. ZipLocal provides relevant search results from over 1.3million businesses with maps and capability for users to review, rate and tag business listings. ZipLocal is focused on creating the most comprehensive and engaging search experience at the neighbourhood and city-wide level."
On November 1 it enhanced its service:
Site Platform: said to be faster and have "cross browser support"
Online Consumer Community: users can add reviews of places. "Reviewers with the highest ZipScores will have their reviews ZipFeatured on the site. All ZipPeople reviews are searchable and appear when a Zip reviewed business is displayed in search results."
Enhanced Business Review Content: Picks up other reviews. "Relevant business and service reviews from Sweetspot.ca, Eye Weekly, HomeStars and Fresh Daily will appear in ZipLocal searches, greatly adding to users’ search experience and confidence in local businesses. "
Proximity/Neighbourhood Search: "Retail outlets, restaurants and services can be searched outwards from any address in a wide range from one kilometer to two hundred kilometers."
"Under the plan, Web properties such as Ask.com, Match.com and Excite will remain under the IAC banner, while other business such as Home Shopping Network, Ticketmaster and LendingTree will spin off into their own separate entities. Another company will be created out of the firm's vacation-planning services."
Conglomerate indeed - IAC had web, travel, loans, retail. ticket selling. The Web part will retain the IAC name -- "IAC -- This unit will own Web sites such as Ask.com, Match.com and Excite as well as several other Internet properties including Bloglines, Citysearch, Gifts.com and CollegeHumor and investments in sites such as Active.com, Points.com and Brightcove"
Michael Gorman, former president of the American Library Association, said that "that Google and Wikipedia were creating a generation of "intellectual sluggards incapable of moving beyond the Internet," with no interest in exploring non-digital resources."
Article recaps several instances from the past couple of years where Wikipedia entries had been vandalized, were intentional hoaxes, or were edited by the "self-interested" - companies specifically.
Citizendium, also a wiki-based encyclopedia, might be a competitor one day -- its aim is to become "the world's most trusted knowledge base" - but it has only 3,000 articles, and Wikipedia has 2 million.
Datamonitor predicts that active membership (not passive) in social networking sites is expected to climb to 230 million by the end of 2007. Of course there are the millions in MySpace and Facebook, but many million will be in smaller niche communities. Elsevier will be part of this.
"Elsevier said that its newest social networking initiatives are designed to support academic library communities and their researchers with advanced “Research 2.0” tools. Two new resources—still in beta release—from the STM publisher create social spaces in which researchers can work together. These new tools offer platforms for shared knowledge to be leveraged for information discovery and evaluation."
They are:
+ "2collab, an online platform for scientific collaboration, supports researchers by working as a community to filter information and enhance information literacy. "
+ "Scirus Topic Pages is a Wiki-like online resource for the scientific community that provides authoritative summaries of specialized research areas and offers a platform to facilitate scholarly debate."
"Bottom Line: Book scanning involves many more projects than the ones that get a lot of the attention" - there are more digitization projects going on than you would ever want to count. Fortunately Gary Price does it for us.
Who would ever have guessed there would be so many. Groups them by
+ books - but doesn't have Library Thing
+ people - but no Pipl
+ family - shouldn't Facebook be here?
+ friends - Facebook is here.
+ hobbies - even catspace.
+ Language
+ media
+ music
+ shopping!
+ social bookmarking 50+ sites and that's not an age bracket
+ students
+ travel and locals - Trip Advisor not here- why not?
"A global effort is underway to invent a better way of finding things on the Web. Could Google be vulnerable?"
Article reviews the search scene - Yahoo, Live etc. Makes this statement: "In fact, the biggest competitive hurdle for Yahoo and Microsoft is not that their searches don't work as well as Google's, but that people just don't try them as often. According to a recent Nielsen/NetRatings survey, the gap between Google, Yahoo and Microsoft narrows when you look at the percentage of users of each site who keep returning—79, 69 and 65, respectively. A University of Michigan study released in August shows that Yahoo passed Google in customer satisfaction in the past year."
I find it hard to believe that Yahoo surpassed Google in search satisfaction. WHile the new search assist is useful, Yahoo, in my experience, doesn't match on relevancy, and Live even less so.
Any loss in market in CHina, Russia and Korea doesn't mean that Google can't deliver results but rather that it might be blocked. Politics is a big factor.
Charles Knight does track many alternative engines - but many are experimental, not in the running, or not worth considering.
Everyone, and especially the media, is waiting for the great Google slayer. Why? Can't hurt to keep Google on its toes, but be realistic. I'll bet most searchers don't read these articles and thankfully won't be waylaid and mislead.
Concluding paragraph was: "Last quarter, Google raked in $925 million in profit, 28 percent more than the same quarter last year. The game is still Google's to lose. Even Stark, who resorted to Quintura to find her snorkeling beach, still makes Google her first stop when she needs to track down a Web site. What, after all, would Google have to fear from a tiny company with a goofy name that sometimes returns more-useful results?"
Qunitura is interesting because of the somewhat graphical display but it does not serve up more useful results.
Firefox - terrific browser, wonderful add-ons. Get a head start with this compilation.
"Search the Web with Firefox Add-ons -- Some of the most underrated Web search tools out there are Firefox add-ons, small tools that add functionality of some type to your Firefox browser. The following are just a few of the best Firefox add-ons I've come across so far to help me in my Web searching."
Sounds like a lot of changes for a company that was hoping to bring a new "natural language" search engine / service online soon - "Barney Pell, who has been CEO at Powerset, posted today in his blog that he is transitioning to CTO, that Steve Newcomb, who had been COO, is leaving the company, and that Ron Kaplan, who had been CTO and Chief Science Officer, is now solely Chief Science Officer. The company is currently looking for a CEO."
Microsoft proposes to solve information overload with lists - or rather Listas. Of course, it's another version of social networking. Gary Flake, at one time a Yahoo man and now the director of Live Labs, was the mind behind it.
"Listas is, put simply, about making lists. Users can make their own lists, by either typing in original content or taking clippings from Web pages, or they can read or edit public lists. The lists can include almost any type of content, including images and videos. They can be designated either public or private, and they can be tagged to make them easier to search."
Hakia , the meaning-based search engine, has added a social component with Meet Others which helps you meet people who are searching for what you are. Enter your query and view results. Then click on link to "Meet others who asked the same query". Create a new room for your query or get involved with other rooms.
"Today, with Meet Others, they hope to add a social networking component to search. The feature is entirely opt in. Once you do a search on Hakia, you'll see a Meet Others icon above the search results. Click that to access a room designed for those doing similar searches. You can post a message and then provide details about how you want to be contacted (masked email or instant messaging via MSN or Skype). You can also contact others who have posted messages to the room. The freshest and most highly rated posts stay in the room longest. Older and less popular posts fall off as searchers make new posts. Hakia says they monitor abuse and have safeguards in place for spam (for instance, your post is authenticated through email)."
Flash from the past - a new Daily Me for personalized news picks.
"Florida-based DailyMe is a personalized news aggregation service that creates a daily online newspaper that can be delivered at set times via email or browsed from the web. The site aggregates news in a wide variety of topic areas from over 3,000 mainstream and blog sources, including the Associated Press, Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Engadget, Time Magazine, and BusinessWeek."
"Information professionals involved in music research understand the subject’s broad scope. From opera, classical, jazz, blues, hip-hop, soul, pop, and world music, the genres evolve and merge, creating fusions that result in new research opportunities. The Internet plays well with music research, offering sound and video that are lacking in older resources, both print and electronic. Free Web sites help even the tone-deaf appreciate the full range of music topics."
"This article will highlight 10 sites, all of which are available for free and without user registration. I have evaluated each site for coverage, scope, and ease of use. They should help any researcher of music, as well as librarians who have not formally studied music."
"The BL/Microsoft project is designed to digitize 25 million pages of 100,000 out-of-copyright titles from the BL collection related to 19th-century literature. Access will be provided via Microsoft’s Live Search Books site (http://books.live.com) and the BL’s Web site (www.bl.uk). Live Search Books now includes many partners: The University of California Libraries, Cornell University Library, the University of Toronto Library, The New York Public Library, and the American Museum of Veterinary Medicine have all joined, as well as more than 50 publishers."
"Internet social networking leader MySpace is joining Google Inc.'s platform for sharing applications across the Web — a concept that threatens to undermine the rapid growth of their common rival, Facebook Inc."
Advice on how not to be taken in by a phisher trying to get access to your financial accounts or trick you out of money.
Of interest: "Be careful about social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, as well as the increasing number of business and professional social networking sites that are popping up. Scammers troll these waters looking for innocents to bait, tricking them into revealing financial information, Social Security numbers, mothers’ maiden names, and so on."
Users of Google Notebook to clip and save parts of web pages along with the url can now add labels to these clippings and select clippings that have that tag for viewing.
Notes can also be sorted by date and label.
There is also an extension by which you can add bookmarks to the notebook.
Pandia will be running a series of articles about European search engines beginning with Quaero, being developed by the French.
"Quaero is to take part in this market [blogs, podcasts, multimedia], by developing technologies for finding, accessing, manipulating and processing multimedia and multilingual content."
