Internet News

Google's Query Operators

Google Power User Tips: Query Operators, Stephan Spencer, Search Engine Land (Aug 5)

Stephan Spencer admits that he likes to show off his knowledge of Google query operators. He presents a table of the operators with a short description, and a longer discussion of many of them and some shortcuts.

But not all operators are equally useful, and some are of limited to no use.

For example, searching for keywords intext limits the search to words in the text. Why would you do that when Google automatically looks in title and body text? There is no advantage.

Using inurl: to look for a word used in the domain, directory path, and filename can by used surgically to parse through a site. Otherwise, intitle is stronger.

In fact the biggest bang for the effort comes from:

intitle: - look for primary concept in the title and other words elsewhere - one of the best strategies in my book.

allintitle: - same as using the Advanced Search form - good on names, places, popular topics - but keep the keywords down to 2 or 3.

site: - search a high level domain - but for more punch, search a known organization domain. If you are looking for the registrar at University of Toronto, you could use site:utoronto.ca registrar.

inurl: - occasionally and in a very specialized way - have to know the patterns in directory naming.

filetype: - especially to restrict to pdf files.

For shortcuts, certainly define: for definitions taken from glossaries on the web, or entering an address to get a map are good to know.

Stocks - for US exchanges, and phonebook for US numbers.

Some others aren't needed - daterange - firstly, dates are abominably bad, and secondly, it's far easier to use the new date selection in the left rail.

WebSearchGuide has shorter guides to using syntax in Google. See the comparison chart for Google, Bing, Yahoo and the Google Search Guide.

Wolfram Alpha for Everyday

10 Search Terms To Put Wolfram Alpha To Good Use Everyday, by Saikat Basu, Make Use Of (Jul 27)

You don't have to be a scientist or mathmatician to use Wolfram Alpha. It can answer more mundane questions.

"For instance, you can figure the number of words needed to fill up the right number of pages (and the typing time to finish a book)."

Also good for what time is it, how many calories are there, how you can burn off calories - and others.

Using syntax at Bing and the near operator

Bing’s Buffet of Special Syntax, Research Buzz ( June 30)

Bing has a guide to its search syntax. This was prepared for programmers using APIs to create applications, but searchers can avail themselves of it too.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff795667.aspx

Two key documents

+ Operator Precedence - Bing is the only engine to still supports full boolean operators - AND, OR, NOT. Use them in the correct order. Of interest -- foo bar OR bing yahoo is handled as foo AND bar OR bing AND yahoo, You might not want that. Use parenthesis to say what you do want.

+ Advanced Operator Reference - many prefixes are available - right down to searching a meta tag.

There is a near operator -- "Constrains the distance between terms so that documents that contain instances of the specified terms within ten words of each other are returned before those that don’t."

format is near:n -- example dolostone near:10 bruce - to find page where dolostone and bruce are up to 10 words apart. The number can be adjusted up or down - which way depends on how you think the words might be spaced in a document. This does not replace the simple keyword search where the search engine can go to work with it relevancy ranking. But there may be occasions where you will want to do more selective followup queries looking for proximity.

Book: Power Google

Power Google

Here's a treasure - Power Google - online book by McGraw-Hill, published in 2003 and still very relevant. Google has some new features and syntax, but by and large this has very good advice on developing a search strategy, building a query, and evaluating results.

The Google Logic secion is out of date for use of + (now turns off stemming, or requires that the word be on the page - rather than in the anchor text of a linking page). This book must have predated ~ as the synonym operator since there is no mention of it. There is * as a wildcard word.

"Welcome to Power Google, By Robert Harris, a practical, how-to book about using Google to locate information on the Internet. Below you will find a brief description of each chapter’s content along with two formats in which they can be viewed (Adobe® or HTML). If you do not have an Adobe® Acrobat® reader or would like to update your current reader to the latest version, click on the Adobe® icon below for a free download."

Tips for using Google

3 Google Tricks When You Don’t Know What to Search For, by Ann Smarty, Make Use Of (May 19)

Here are good tips on using three little known Google operators.

+ wildcard * to substitute for a word - put it between words or at the end
~ tilda as the "synonym operator". ~help will pick up tutorial, guide, tips and much more.
+ related - to find pages that are somewhat similar to the one you like.

Backlinks through Yahoo Site Explore

Examining Your Backlinks with Yahoo! Site Explorer, by Yahoo Search Marketing Blog (May 6)

It's not often that you see Yahoo Site Explorer explained. Yahoo Site Explorer will show who is linking to a particular url or an entire domain. Amount and type of information is different for the general user versus one who is logged into their Yahoo account. The general user sees inlinks in a variety of modes. This can be useful to the searcher in locating other sites about a topic. The Yahoo user with a website can get a detailed analysis of that site.

"If you have one or more sites, you can verify them with Yahoo!, so that Yahoo can give you exclusive data about your site. When you visit Yahoo! Site Explorer, you’ll see a link for My Sites on the left. From there you can add your site(s). Once you add a site, you’ll need to take a simple step to verify it, which is explained when you add the site."

Generating keywords

Out Of Keyword Ideas? These 7 Tools Will Help, Brad Geddes, Search Engine Land (Apr 26)

As the author says - "There are times when you want to expand your keywords but you have run out of ideas and places to look. In this post I will examine some alternate tools to help you come up with new keywords."

Searchers might want to do this too.

What date do we see in SERPS?

How Google is Reverse Engineering Page Dates, Michael Gray (Apr 26)

One of the great mysteries of the web is the date on the page. What one does the search engine use - indexed, server date, date in the copyright? But it's more than that - as this article shows: Google may be extracting the date from clues in the text and url. Also - it isn't just the page, it can be the posting on a page.

Using Site at Google

Is Google Crippling The Site: Command?, Search Engine Roundtable (Apr 26)

Site command at Google (site:) has been giving screwy number counts for some time. Some are wondering if Google intends to disable this command, now that it has given webmasters many tools for getting better analysis of page indexing at their sites. Searchers hope now - using site: to restrict a search to a site is one of the top 5 search strategies. But, we will have to take the results count with several grains of salt.

Keyword Research

3 Ways To Use Google’s Search Results For Keyword Research by Aaron Wall, Search Engine Land (Apr 8)

Aaron Wall, author of the SEO Book, knows whereof he speaks. These are good points for the person writing content and tags for a website, and searchers can get ideas for picking up search terms.

Twitter Syntax

Search Twitter with Twitter search operators, Wendy Boswell, Web Search About.com (Mar 26)

Twitter has search operators - of course quotation marks for word together, a near - but it is geographic - near Toronto, and most useful - search for tweets with links and a keyword - "arctic ice" filter:links

Alternatives for Search

Alternative Search Engines Offer Rich Options , by Paula Hane, Newsbreaks (Apr 1)

Alternative engines can give us a fresh perspective. Three are named in this article.

+ Leapfish - the living web - metasearch that targets social media.
+ Hakia - meaning based engine - except they did a redesign that I find unattractive and time consumign to use.
+ ipl2 - merger of Internet Public Library and LII.

It is a good practice to try new engines - and this article recommends following The Next Web for profiles and announcements. It also refers to Web Search Guide for more material - fior which I am honoured.

Google's Show Options

Google’s Search Options Reveal More by Gwen Harris, SLA Courier (Jan 2010)

And since we are sharing secrets, here is my article on making good use of Google's show options to get more from your search results. There are five questions to ask yourself:

1. What kinds of Web content should I be considering?
2. Is there a time dimension? Do I need very recent material or more historical?
3. Am I shopping? Does this question have a product angle?
4. Have I done this search before?
5. Is this a research topic where I will need more information about the page to judge whether it is suitable?

Mary Ellen Bate's Google Secrets

My Favorite Google Secrets, Mary Ellen Bates (March 2010)

Secrets include (I won't give away the main tip)

+ Show Options - especially if you also use Google Web History
+ Google transliterate
+ Google public data explorer - expermental at this point but interesting to look at.

Social media's place in the research continuum

Social Networks in Research: Friend or Foe? by Ellen Naylor, Freepint (Mar 2010)

Social media is part of the research continuum now. Ellen Naylor, a competitive intelligence researcher, tells us how she uses the networks and the to and fro of using the age-old find-and-talk-to-people technique.

"As I conduct research projects I find myself climbing up and down the research continuum, usually starting with secondary research queries, then going to people's blogs and social networks like LinkedIn, Twitter, industry Nings, and Slideshare and lastly to human intelligence (HUMINT) where I either talk to a knowledgeable person over the telephone or in person. I like the intermediate phase of using blogs and social media, as they are so much more interactive, and I have an opportunity to ask questions electronically or better yet to read the answers to my question since someone else already asked it! Before social networks I would have to go back to the Internet to find more human sources to query; now I can also go back to a social network."

Synonyms in Google Custom Search

Synonyms made easy, Google Custom Search Blog (Mar 17)

Enhancements to Google Custom Search for better search.

"Today, we're excited to announce that we've made it easier than ever for Custom Search and Site Search administrators to enable advanced synonym options. Now, you can add sets of synonyms specific to your website content and can also trigger search expansion, so that a query automatically triggers results for synonymous terms."

The importance of words in the url

How To Name Your Website’s Files, Daily SEO Tip (Marc h 10)

Searchers take note - website developers are thinking carefully about the words they use in path names and file names. Searching in the url may become more productive.

"Filenames play a role in SEO, but a good file naming structure also makes it easier for your visitors to save and share links and navigate your website. From a developer’s point of view, having well named files makes it easier to find files and properly structure the hierarchy of the website."

Hack for site searches

Create keyword-based site-specific searches, Seth Rosenblatt, Download (Mar 1)

Use your browser to create and remember site-specific searches at Firefox, Chrome, and Opera.

Essentially, go to the site, run a search on a word, hack the url to replace term with %s, then bookmark it (with twists at each browser). You'll want to watch the short [2 min] video.

Works for search engines such as Google and Bing too.

Suggested searches

Google’s Super Bowl ad good, parodies even better., Charles Knight, The Next Web (Feb 160

Everyone knows about the ad Google used during the SuperBowl. Here it is again along with three parodies.

Using Craigslist

Top Craigslist scams and how not to be bamboozled By: Rachel Sadon, IT Business (Feb 10)

Describes some scam classics - how they work and how not to fall for it.

Links to Ten tips to get the most out of CraigsList, Brennon Slattery (Marc 2009)

First tip - use Google to get more information.

" One of the best ways to get the most out of Craigslist is to start outside of the site itself. Using Google Advanced Search can narrow down your browsing options in an effective, clean manner. Say you're looking for a couch in Boston, but you don't want to drive 25 miles to pick it up. Using Google Advanced Search, you can put your desired neighborhood in the 'this exact wording or phrase' field and keep "couch" in the generalized search.

You can also add other words you'd like to see in the posting, such as "good condition." Specify your city's Craigslist site (boston.craigslist.org, in this example) in the 'Search within a site or domain' field, and tell Google to do its work. You'll see your results, organized how you want them, in Google's easy-to-read format. "

Getting around Internet Annoyances

15 Internet Annoyances, and How to Fix Them, by Jared Newman, PCWorld (Feb 15)

Yes - there are many annoying things about the Web - the automatically run flash or video ads, the endless registrations, the phishing, junk pages, the can-only-view-in-IE sites. Those are the ones that bug me. The article provides fixes for these and several others.

One tip to searchers which I give too. The search engine at many sites is usually very poor - this includes government sites, and newspaper sites. Use a site search at a search engine.

"Head to your search engine of choice and precede your search with site:nameofsite.com "what you're looking for” for a surprisingly good index of what you seek. Google can even display results by date when you click “Show options.”"

Good advice.

How to find manuals

Lost that users manual? You can find it on the Web, Wendy Boswell, About.com (Feb 4)

Can't find a manual, or the product didn't come with one? Find it on the web using these tips from Wendy Boswell.

There are also some search engines that specialize in manuals such as Free Manuals and diplodocs from Safe Manuals where you can browse by manufacturer.

Internet Librarian 2009 Presentations on Search

Internet Librarian 2009 - Information Discovery and Search

It is never too late to blog something. The Internet Librarian site has three presentations on aspects of search.

+ WebSearch Review by Chris Sherman - Down to 4 search engines, cool Bing, Wolfram Alpha, "Real Time" search follies and Twitter Twaddle, the Targetting Trend. Finally, some one who says social search is a fad.

+ Super Searcher Shares Search Tips Spectacular by Mary Ellen Bates

+ Digging for Gold with Social Media Tools by Samara Omundson and Emily Wheeler. Evaluating social media tools for their usefulness in obtaining information on a current interest (product, issue etc).

SearchZooka Video on Advanced Search

SearchZooka helps people create advanced search queries at Google, Yahoo< Bing, Ask, Digg, Technorati, Delicious. The video describes the advanced search options and explains how you can use these. The first 5 minustes is an excellent tutorial on advanced searching. The remainder shows how to use the SearchZooka interface and take advantage of its features to save and rerun searches. Only 9:19 min.

Open Site Explorer

SEOmoz Launches Open Site Explorer, A Competitor (Replacement?) To Yahoo Site Explorer, by Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Jan 20)

"SEOmoz has launched Open Site Explorer, a new tool that joins the already crowded field of link analysis tools. In choosing that name, SEOmoz is somewhat blatantly positioning it as a competitor, and perhaps eventual replacement, for Yahoo’s popular Site Explorer tool."

Searchers can use this tool to help evaluate a site.

Word Order in Search

Doing Real Time Search? Watch Your Word Order, Research Buzz (Jan 13)

Word order makes a difference at the web search engines - they will rank results that have the order you have used more rarely - hence the advice to use natural phrasing. This applies to real time search as well, as Tara Calishain demonstrates. To be really sure, run a variety of searches.

Good advice in last paragraph: "I remember being astonished when search engines hit a billion pages of indexed content, but that’s nothing these days. The name of the game continues to be narrowing down your results to get the information you need and approaching a search problem from different angles. You can make a different angle just from changing the word order in your query even in Google’s real-time search; try it!"

Using Advanced Google Operators

Tools and Resources to Learn Google Advanced Operators, Ann Smarty, SEO Journal (Dec 23)

Ann Smarty gives us all a year-end present with this posting about using Google's advanced search sytnax for making searches more productive. Facility with thinking about searching a site or parts of a url, or narrowing to a title or filetype are what marks the difference between a novice searcher and an expert.

She wrote that, "I for one use Google advanced operators all the time: when doing on-page diagnostics; searching for backlink opportunities, doing competitive research, etc, etc"

Several tools that can help in constructing the query are listed:
+ Searchzooka is on the web. It helps in constructing the query and will save the search.
+ Google Advanced Dork - an extension for Firefox
+ Google Search Tool - a desktop application for Windows.

There are also tutorials.

+ Unofficial Google Advanced Search - by Joseph Becher. Very detailed - right down to hacking the search URI.

+ Google Guide - all the tricks with examples.

+ Articles written by Ann Smarty herself.

Using Google's Query Analysis

Google Trends and More Trends, Mary Ellen Bates (Nov 2009)

Google analyzes the searchers people do to derive trends and produce several different cuts. Google Trends and Google Insights are two that searchers can explore. Two others - Google Domestic Trends (US) and Google Trends for Websites (but it has to be a major website).

Power Search Tips from Matt Cutts

Matt Cutts of Google does a short video of Google Search tips. Describes quotation marks, use of the + (for exact word), the minus sign (to exclude), site: with examples. He calls them "power tips" - all in 2:29 min.

Doing Competitive Intelligence

Keeping An Eye On The Competition - Go Beyond Google, Cascade Insights (Nov 12, 2009)

Cascade Insights prepared this presentation on tools and techniques to learn more about people and companies than you can normally get from a Google web search.

Techniques include looking at employee movement, getting a sense of a competitor's business and culture, tracking, seeing the products - all parts of competitive intelligence. Lots of social networking and some news, and some ways to track websites. Shows many novel ways to extract the information, including some tips at Google

Kosmix for competitive intel

Recruiting competitive intel with Kosmix, Altsearchengines (Nov 7)

Interesting proposition in this short video: use Kosmix for competitive intelligence and recruiting. This is because Kosmix will pick up blogs, twitter, conversations. The searchers uses a boolean construction - Engineer (stress OR design). Kosmix seems to be processing the 'or' whether it is in lower or upper case. And it makes a difference whether you put (stress OR design) at the before or after engineering. Kosmix was built to be natural language, and not Boolean. I would be inclined to look for engineers who specialize in design, and then search on engineers for stress.

The appeal may be the variety of resource types. If this is the case, you might also try the relaunched Leapfish.com.

Perils of "Personalized" Search

The Risks of Personalized Search, Stephen Arnold, Beyond Search (Oct 28)

Finally - someone warns us of the perils of social search. Stephen Arnold notes three in response to Google's announcements about real time search and social.

1. Basically, novice searchers will rely on systems they don't understand.
2. Poor searchers will develop poor queries and rely on the results. "Users who lack basic search skills are likely to accept information in a results list at face value. Users lack a foundation in determining what is reliable and what is not."
3. Razzle dazzle at a search tool - the appearance of being right - will fool searchers who don't understand the system and therefore not able to critically judge.

2.

Getting Value from Twitter

Using Twitter Searches, Mary Ellen Bates (Oct 2009)

Describes four "real-life uses for Twitter".

Bing Reference Channels Powerset

Taking a Look at the Bing Reference Homepage, ResearchBuzz (Oct 19)

Tara Calishain introduces us to a new Reference service from Bing that will do natural language searches of Wikipedia and Freebase.

Bing doesn't show this at bing.com - not as a tab nor under More. You need to know the url - www.bing.com/reference

The opening page for Reference has a featured article from Wikipedia - today it's about the Longhorn cowfish, October 20 in History (US history), People in the news (based on what?), and sample searches.

Here is where it gets interesting. Microsoft is using the Powerset technology for natural language search that it acquired a year ago or so. Powerset service searched Wikipedia. Now Bing Reference runs Powerset to answer questions . Essentially, Bing Reference channels Powerset: search results from Bing Reference are the same as from Powerset.

This really boils down to which interface you prefer.

Bing Reference

+ front page - not very useful
+ controls to turn on highlighting, and view results are a grid or list
+ thumbnail images - detail obliterated but adds interest to page.
+ has links to sections on a page
+ Groups by source: Facts from Freebase, Articles from Wikipedia

Powerset

+ welcome page describes what Powerset does with several examples. Shows why you would want to use this.
+ option to hide highlighting
+ sort by article or sort by sentence
+ open preview of article in the results page
+ Explore pages on Powerset - kind of related search
+ Shows by source: Freebase, then Wikipedia

Both are pleasant to use, and will do fairly well on questions like - what did Robertson Davies write, who won the war of 1812-14, causes of obesity, languages in China - where you are looking for facts or summaries. It's worth some time to review the examples on the Powerset home page. Either of these tools could serve as starting points on a topical search - and many quick fact searches

Freebase is a Wikipedia-like community effort - that uses Wikipedia.

From the Metaweb About page:

"Drawing from large open data sets like Wikipedia, MusicBrainz, and the SEC archives, it contains structured information on many popular topics, including movies, music, people and locations – all reconciled and freely available via an open API. This information is supplemented by the efforts of a passionate global community of users who are working together to add structured information on everything from philosophy to European railway stations to the chemical properties of common food ingredients."

Gripes about Google

David Dillard, who runs the website, Meet the Googles, posted an item in BUSLIB-L today about Google Has Rough Edges and Downsides.

This is a worthwhile reminder. Google adds new display options and reindexes pages within minutes, but the search results are not always good and too often have bizarre and annoying results.

David Dillard had his examples, and I have mine from today.

What has happened to OR? In this search I want to find articles about h1n1 vaccine being mandatory for healthcare workers - sometimes referred to as health workers.

h1n1 mandatory vaccine ("health workers" OR "healthcare workers") = 30,100
h1n1 mandatory vaccine "health workers" = 263,000
h1n1 mandatory vaccine "healthcare workers" = 163,000

That does not compute. If I remove the word mandatory, the sets are more reasonable. But I shouldn't have to do that.

BUT if I use the fancier construction -- h1n1 mandatory vaccine "(health OR healthcare) workers" -- Google has the "right" count of 289,000. Both search statements should work. We shouldn't have to do reasonability tests on our OR searches.

Problems are intermittent. A search I ran yesterday to search two sites (site:hc-sc.gc.ca OR phac-aspc.gc.ca) would not work properly. Today it does.

Web search isn't web search. Much as I love Google Books I do not want web search results loaded with book snippets. Universal search has gone too far - it's time to go back to the days when web meant web, and news meant news - or change the page display to group by source and relevance.

Searches related to - firstly this is based on search queries, rather than on the much preferred topical groupings derived from an analysis of results. Putting that aside, why are there "searches related to" regulation of pediatric nursing, but there are none for the simpler pediatric nursing? To add to the puzzle, it does have related searches for pediatric nurses and nursing pediatric. Bottomline: You cannot count on Google to help you with search refinements. Be thankful for what you get and hope that the engineers improve this soon.

Expanding on Communities

Directory of Social Networks, Research Buzz (Oct 1)

Tara Calishain discovered a Directory of Social Networks which she used in combination with Google Sets to get more of the same.

"Some of the sites listed here are not what I would consider full social networks in a Facebook or MySpace sense; instead they’re gathering places or tools that focus on a particular communication aspect or type of multimedia. While I found these listings useful I found them even better as a jumping off point for another place, Google Sets."

Tara used cats - we can use Health - find Nurse Linkup and Organized Wisdom - and enter these at Google Sets - use words, not domains - and get other online community web sites.

Clever way to use a directory as a base for finding more.

Social.com itself is of uneven quality. Furl.net is listed under bookmarking but is long gone, and several categories are very thing.

Hacking Google for "Real-time" search

The Return of the URL Hack: Finding Google’s REALLY Recently-Indexed Content, ResearchBuzz (Sep 21)

Trust Tara Calishain to sort out how to hack the inurl command in Google search to make it into a "near real-time search engine". The secret is in hacking the tbs parameter.

Example - &tbs=qdr:h (searches an hour’s worth of indexed content)

She wrote, "I have been trying to use Twitter as an information trapping resource to find links that people announce in tweets, etc, but with the explosion of spam in Twitter it’s gotten just about impossible. But maybe by using recently-indexed Google content and Google’s syntax to severely restrict WHERE I search, maybe Twitter can become, in the information trapping sense, useful again…"

Real Time Search at Google

Near-Real-time search on Google?, Altsearchengines (Sept 13)

Google can help you find new pages on the Web - right down to the last minute - through Search Options. One of the time periods is 24 hours but you can hack the url to change the period.

"Notice the URL parameter qdr:d. I assume qdr stands for Query Date Range (sounds about right). All you have to do to search for the query in the past minute is to change the parameter to qdr:n, and for the past second to qdr:s."

This does work but the qdr is not always in exactly that format, and it is fiddly work to change the values. [m=month, d=day, n=minute, s=second]

Results for the short time frame come mainly (entirely?) from Google News.

Video Tutorials on Web Search

Get a tour of web search engines from Tinkernut through this video on Best Search Engine. Shows Google, Yahoo, Bing and Wolfram Alpha. [About 5 min]

Mentions some special features (which Tinkernut calls scripts) such as using keywords at Yahoo (facts) or some syntax for manipulating results. The features are just a sampling of what can be done in web, image, and video search.

It comes with a supporting page of links to other Tinkernut videos Google Shortcuts and Google Hacks (using inurl and intitle related to security holes). Also has articles by others on Bing Tips and Wolfram Alpha.

Mentioned in AltSearchEngines

Add Canada as a search term

Only 70 Percent of Canadian Searches are Successful, Hitwise (Aug 18)

Hitwise Canada found that only 70% of searches done in Canada are "successful" - where "A successful search is defined as one where the consumer leaves the search engine after performing a search."

"Hitwise analysis of success rates for various search terms indicates that the problem may originate from international results, particularly U.S. results, appearing in the search engine information. Searches for brand terms are particularly prone to a have a higher success rate with the word “Canada” included in the search, especially for US companies that include Canada in promotional efforts."

If you want Canadian content, add Canada as a search term.

Using Google Insights

Google Insights for Search Adds More Languages, Forecasting, ResearchBuzz (Aug 20)

Google Insights is an excellent tool for looking at the use of a search term or phrase over time and geographically. A recent enhancement has given it a forecast feature too - with a dotted line to 2011.

Tara Calishain describes how she uses this tool as a searcher - "Instead I use Google Insights for Search to get a history of a query — did a search term have a particular time when it really took off? What were the search results for it right before then? Google Insight also has lists of related topic and related rising searches. Sometimes these help me decide how I want to refine a query, especially when using alert services."

Multimedia Search Tools

Finding Videos, Audio and Images on the Web: Search Tools by Cindy Shamel, FUMSI (May 2009)

Looks at sources that can help in finding "videos, audio and images for competitive intelligence and general business applications."

Article has good real-life examples, such as this one.

"The goal was to develop insights into the business strategy of a privately held non-US company known for keeping a low profile. Neither the website nor the news or trade literature yielded anything of substance. A search of video sources through YouTube uncovered a 30-minute interview with the CEO conducted at a large financial investment conference."

Mentions:

+ Samepoint -- "images, video, and podcasts across tens of thousands of social media sites. "

+ Tubesurf - for video - "searches YouTube, MySpace Videos, Google Video, and Yahoo! Video." Much to my amazement this tool found videos on information governance

+ Searchvideo.org - videos galore and can refine to heart's delight. Has channels that includes Reuters and Forbes. Try information governance.

+ blinkx - known for having 35 million hours of video. Enormous number of sources and good for browsing - I always find it difficult to search well.

+ Yidio - has TV, songs, movies, but also news. It really is geared to entertainment and you must login to this community (can do with Facebook). I did find a TV Show on the Canadian Arctic (Pond Inlet to be specific), and news items on Prime Minister Harper's current tour.

+ Videosurf - video meta-searcher - after first search you can narrow by category, sources, type, shows. Fantastic results for canadian arctic.

More in the article about audio search, image search, and places to look for even more.

One to watch if you are really interested in online video business is ReelSeo - "online video marketing guide".

Funding Research

Grantsmanship - Information Resources to Help Researchers Get Funding by Nancy K. Herther, Sociology/Anthropology Librarian, University of Minnesota. Searcher (July)

Background to the research funding process and its players in the United States. Has key databases and other useful sites.

"Behind every significant research breakthrough, every key social program, or advanced medical treatment in history lies some form of financial support — a foundation, government funding, or the kindness of some benefactor. Michelangelo and da Vinci worked as apprentices. Mozart received support from aristocratic patrons and worked as a court musician. Jonas Salk’s work to find a vaccine for polio received funding from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis and from coins contributed by the public to the March of Dimes. Thomas Edison developed strong entrepreneurial roots and early in his career lived and worked in the basement of a fellow telegrapher and inventor."

Popular queries

Bing: Can a "Popular" Search Engine Become Popular? , Traffick.com (June 3)

Tip for getting answers at Bing - don't add qualifiers.

Andrew Goodman tells this story about getting stats on Roy Halladay, pitcher for the Blue Jays.

"Type 'Roy Halladay shutouts single game' or whatnot." (We search experts try not to give more precise directions. It makes normal people feel uncomfortable.)

I've seen many demos (by Microsoft, even). But rarely do I do just like the people in Microsoft focus groups did: notice a difference with the engine's usability, and recommend it to someone.

We didn't find the stat quickly.

Then I remembered that the Bing engine has been tuned to offer more orchestrated consumer-friendly results pages when you type in "Roy Halladay" without any qualifiers.

Sure enough, Carolyn saw a pretty useful Roy Halladay search result full of photos, stats, and search refinements... just one notch short of a Roy Halladay shrine."

To give credit where due though, that one big page of stats was from Yahoo Sports.

How well do other search engines do on this kind of popular query about a sports person.

Ask.com is supposed to be strong on sports. For Roy Halliday - we get a smart answer with profile, photo, news, video, questions, statistics - bonanza.

Yahoo.ca shows photo and stats from Yahoo Sports and an enhanced Wikipedia entry.

Google.ca compared to the others has the answers - with news first, followed by Wikipedia and Yahoo - but is very plain.

Ask and Yahoo seem to me much more attractive and informative than the plain text display of Bing and Google. Sorry Bing - struck out on this one. I did check other names. Bing is more competitive with Yahoo for information on singer Celine Dion and golfer Tiger Woods. Ask holds its own on both. In all cases though, we do quite well just entering the name - don't even need quotation marks.

Searchers Don't Think

Digital Literacy And Digital Diligence, by Gord Hotchkiss, Search Engine Land (May 29)

Shocking but true - searchers don't think, they just put a few words into the search box - and often those searches are navigational - to go to a known site.

+ Gord Hotchkiss says he loves the search enhancements - Google's Wonder Wheel, the Search WIki - "they make the user experience better. .. But I have to confess something. I don’t use any of them." Oh yes.

+ average web user relise on Google for navigation - they don't use the address bar to enter an address, they use Google. I've noticed that too.

+ digital diligence? We don't practice it. "We will only work as hard as we have to to find information, Peter Pirolli’s Information Foraging Theory says we use the same equation to track down information that we use to track down food: The investment should always be less than the reward. If we burned more calories finding food than we received from the food, we wouldn’t last long."

Topic Visualization

3+ Keyword and Topic Visualization Tools, Ann Smarty, Search Engine Journal (May 19)

Online tools for topic visualization - and not one is a clustering metasearch engines. Five great tools - VisWiki is one. Use them to learn about the topic, consider words, get angles, and plan strategies.

Real Time Search

Google Hurdles Headlong Into Real-Time Search , by Andrew Goodman, Traffick.com (May 14)

The new option in Google Search to see results from last 24 hours strikes Andrew Goodman as a move to the "real time" right now mentality. That, plus the new "rich snippets" that can show content graphically could foster new search behaviour, says Goodman.

"These developments open up a new type of search behavior - further solidifying the notion that many different users will see more and more different results pages with content differently ordered. Although not unfolding exactly as described long ago in these pages, the principle of users taking charge of the "algorithm" (or at least becoming more comfortable with displaying search results in a form that is more useful to them) is gradually taking hold."

Live Search

Live Search has gone too far. I ran 5 quick searches on search.live.com and it asked me to enter characters in a box to proceed.

It explained - "Some programs perform repeated searches for malicious purposes. Preventing those automated searches ensures that everyone else has faster, more reliable search results. Your computer, or another one in your network, has done so much searching lately that we're concerned an automated program might be at work."

This may have been triggered because I was doing a site search, and Live is very sensitive to hackers running syntax queries. It pulled its inurl and link searches several months ago.

Live Search has lately been up and down in processing boolean searches too.

-- ("post socialism" OR "post communism") -- has 28,900 results
-- ("post socialism" OR "post communism") poland -- has 67,200

The results look ok - Live does AND poland in this case and pages with either post socialism or post communism do show up.

But don't count on doing any Venn diagrams.

-- "post communism" has 5.5 million results
-- "post socialism" has 4.4 million

Unlike last week, where Live on a query with an OR clause seemed to be searching for any word on all the words, actual results today (not the record count) are more in line with boolean logic.

I have also noticed that it is no longer possible to create search macros - little custom search routines. This used to be at http://search.live.com/macros - not there now.

Perhaps Live is tinkering with operations in preparation for switching to Kumo.com? They should know though that it's not good to annoy or confuse the user. The user might not come back.

Spotting trends through search data

Google searches were first indication of outbreak, by Omar El Akkad, Globe and Mail (Apr 30)

Search data at Google showed an increase in searches in mexico about flu a week before rest of world knew about swine flu.

"For months, Google has been tracking and releasing data on the number of U.S.-based flu-related queries made to the search engine. The theory is that when people get sick, they go online to search for information. Since tracking those queries provides a near-real-time picture of how many people are sick, the data can spot outbreaks more quickly than conventional methods.

This week, Google released data on the number of flu-related Web queries made by users in Mexico. The data shows a sharp spike in the number of queries, especially in Mexico City, beginning early in the week of April 19. By the end of that week, Mexican health officials had sounded the alarm and swine flu had become a global concern."

US Population data - Google

New tip from Google Help.

Public Data To see trends for population and unemployment rates of U.S. states and counties, type "population" or "unemployment rate" followed by a state or county. You can click through to a page that lets you compare different locations.

For example - population hi - gets data from U.S. Census Bureau, Population Division

Google's Backwards Link

Google's backwards link has been improved. Can combine link: with search terms or site:.

Examples:

link:www.davidsuzuki.org "climate change" - find pages linking to David Suzuki home page that also mention climate change. One of the results is Tufts University, Office of Sustainability with an excellent and current list or resources on climate change.

link:www.davidsuzuki.org site:ca - find pages linking to David Suzuki home page that are in the .ca domain.

Combinations with intitle don't work.

The Search Process

Filling in the Gaps: Company Intelligence Beyond the Corporate Website , by Sarah Hinton, FUMSI (March 2009)

Good advice in this article - particularly the point that much depends upon words.

"There are useful search phrases which help to generate interesting results on topics such as company strategy or product innovation. With this sort of search I've even found, on occasions, that the oft-avoided route - taking the plunge and entering just what you want to find into Google - can work surprisingly well.

But, most of the time, the search involves playing around with your keywords, bearing in mind the context of what's required ... "

The article links to others on the same theme and also excellent. One to note is Key to Research Success: Asking the Right Questions by Jane John

Clouds for Visualizing Results

March 2009 InfoTip: My Favorite Clouds by Mary Ellen Bates

We are all too used to long pages of search results that offer little relief in terms of visualizing whether in clusters or images. But it doesn't have to be that way. There are visual aids. Mary Ellen Bates describes two that will present a "cloud" view of the results - where more important words (by some measure) are bigger and bolder.

+ SearchCloud.net lets the user indicate relative importance of words.

+ Search Cloudlet is an add-on for Firefox that will show relative frequency of words in search results.

Read her reviews of both.

There is one point I will quibble regarding how search engines rank results - "They are all weighted (relatively) equally by a search engine, which uses the order of my search words as an indicator of importance; at most, the search engine will assume that the most important concept is nanotech if I put that word at the beginning of my query. "

I'm not sure that putting most important word first applies anymore. Changing the order of the words in the query can make some difference in the ranking of results, though usually it's just a repositioning in the top 20 or so. Google also ranks according to the order and proximity of words - suggesting that natural phrasing could be more effective.

A classic example from the training pages at University of California, Berkeley, is grass snake is different from snake grass. Run both searches at Google and you'll see differences where grass snake gets more snakes, and snake grass finds an article at eHow on how to grow the grass sooner.

However, you can indicate importance by repeating a word. Back to Mary Ellen Bates' example - nanotechnology "renewable energy" Boulder nanotechnology - really raises the importance of nanotech and noticeably changes the ranking.

Google's Search Advice

Google search basics: Basic search help

This may be a new page at Google Help that has Google's advice on how to construct a query and some explanations about what Google does.

More Search Help tells us:

Google looks for ALL words on the page but there are exceptions: you might get some pages that don't have them because:

1) "Synonyms might replace some words in your original query." Google uses its related-words feature to automatically look for these for you. Sometimes this is good and other times annoying and confusing.

2) "A particular word might not appear on a page in your results if there is sufficient other evidence that the page is relevant." That other evidence could be in the linking text of another page - your word is not in that search result but on another page. I've written about this and am finding more instances every day. I suspect that it is more likely to occur with queries that have many terms - but don't have proof yet.

However, Google says nothing about anchor text. Instead it explains that, "The evidence might come from language analysis that Google has done or many other sources. For example, the query [ overhead view of the bellagio pool ] will give you nice overhead pictures from pages that do not include the word 'overhead.'"

You can stop Google from playing with your words by putting + in front of the word or using double quotes; eg +overhead view.

Secondly, Google pays attention to some punctuation.

+ It will handle the dollar sign: eg manual lawn mower $100..$200 will find lawn mowers in that price range.

+ The hyphen is recognized as a connector. life-cyclemight be one word, a hyphenated word, or as two words. Google looks for them all.

+ Underscore connecting two words is kept. life_cycle finds many results with that form most of which have the term in the url.

Under Guidelines, Google has very good advice on formulating the query: keep it simple (elaborate queries are usually not needed); and think of words the author might use.

There are two I would like to discuss.

1. "Describe what you need with as few terms as possible." - essentially this is to start with a broad query - use weather cancun not weather report for cancun mexico. Actually, Google handles both quite well - and weather is a trigger word in most search engines. But on many searches it's important to add some context ,-such as country, or a modifier, such as report, to indicate what you hope to find.

2. "Choose descriptive words" - absolutely a good guideline, but it also says, "Words that are not very descriptive, like 'document,' 'website,' 'company,' or 'info,' are usually not needed". These words are general but they do identify what you hope to find and can be good to consider. Info won't be useful, but "official website" can be, document might be in combination with your search terms.

It's worth a few moments to review Google's two Basic Search Help pages.

Using + at Google to fight anchor text ranking

Google Search is delivering more results that use anchor text from other pages for matching on your search terms. The way to stop this appears to be to use the + sign - but there are disadvantages to this.

On this rather long query - protocols for applying for funding from the government of ontario - the first and third results do not have the word protocol in the snippet at all, and as it turns out, not on the page either.

Click through on the Cached link to see Google's note that funding government ontario on the page, but that "These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: protocols applying". The words protocols and applying (and likely related words such as protocol, apply) were in the anchor text of links from other pages.

However, protocol is an important word to me and anchor text is not good enough. To force Google to look for it on the page, I had to use +protocols. Number of results dropped to 4,600, and results improved.

Unfortunately, using the + also stopped Google from returning related words - specifically the singular form - protocol. My next step would have to be using OR -- (protocol OR protocols) -- and this quickly becomes too much work.

Children Searching the Web

How Children Search the Internet with Keyword Interfaces: Allison Druin, Elizabeth Foss, Leshell Hatley, Evan Golub, Mona Leigh Guha, Jerry Fails from Human-Computer Interaction Lab, University of Maryland; and Hilary Hutchison, Google (March 2009)

Searching the web is all about words - thinking of them, typing them, reading them - and then making sense of everything. For children this can be daunting and frustrating.

From the abstract:

"This paper presents the findings of our initial study to understand how children ages 7, 9, and 11 search the Internet using keyword interfaces in the home. Our
research has revealed that although today’s children have been exposed to computers for most of their lives, spelling, typing, query formulation, and deciphering results are all still potential barriers to finding the information they need."

The problems that children deal with in using search tools, are really the same many adults do - but have got used to. Even tools that have been developed to help kids - auto complete and spelling suggestions - go ignored.

By the end of this article you may conclude 1) the search interface we live with really is bad - from query to results; and 2) having children use adult tools is not good.

I'm sorry that the study didn't comment on what does work for children. Just guessing, I would think that the Ask.com interface would be friendlier - answers at the top, work in natural language. I have heard that children like the metasearcher kartoo.com because it is visual. Quintura for kids could be a good choice because it is also visual and groups results.

One of the researchers on this project does work for Google. Perhaps this will lead to a Google for Kids someday.

Stages in Search Behaviour

The Relationship Between Search Behaviour and SERP Landscape (Part 1) - STAGES OF SEARCHER BEHAVIOR by Ian McAnerin, McAnerin Muse (Feb 27)

These are excellent musings on search behaviour.

Insight: "People search differently at different stages in their comfort levels and experience with search engines, but progression through these stages are in turn affected by the SERP landscape they are provided."

The SERP landscape refers to type of search engine - image, blogs, etc and mobile.

Of most interest are Ian's observations on behaviour stages - beginning with simple (and tentative ) 1 or 2 words, working into exploration, then some analysis, and eventually control and possibly mastery (expert level).

Control is well described as:

"At this stage, advanced search tactics are used, such as:

* tiered searches (searching in a general manner, then using information gleaned from those results to perform the "real search" using the information and keywords from the previous search - like looking up the wikipedia entry for a topic, then using keywords and ideas from that to perform a second, "real" search)
* searches based on likely content or title of a desired result, rather than the user's question
* long tail searches become more prevalent
* Simple parameters such as quotes or "results from this country" are more likely to be used
* Actively trying to prevent bad or off-topic results by using negative parameters or less ambiguous terms.".

Expertise, not surprisingly, involves planning and using all the techniques.

Google Helps Too Much

Is Google Getting Too Pushy with Search Suggestions and Modifications? by Ann Smarty, Search Engine Journal (Feb 25)

Ann Smarty and others have identified some uncooperativeness from Google in completing the search as the user entered it. On googlesearch, it splits the words in google search. The only way to force the search is to use the plus sign: +googlesearch.

Punctuation can't be counted on either. A search for freeshipping.org gave high prominence to freeshipping.com with no org anywhere on the page. In this case the . is punctuation and is treated as a space: we need to use quotation marks -- "freeshipping.org" But freeshipping.com still shows prominently although rest of results look better.

Using +freeshipping.org (with the + in front) increases results to an unreasonably large number.

Google has been able to automatically search for word variants for some time, and has been especially capable at hyphenated words. For example, by-laws will show as by laws, by-laws, bylaws, as well as the singular. But it's not perfect - and for by-laws toronto you will see in result #8 that there is the word law prominent in the title but no by and no by-law on the page.

By the way, results change significantly if we re-order the words to toronto by-laws : the number drops to 716,000 results from 15.7 million, and the law firm is gone. I think this might be because order of words matter, and Toronto by-laws is more natural phrasing - but it's a long shot.

If you search on the one-word form - bylaws Toronto - you'll see bylaws, bylaw, by-laws - and nary a two-word form anywhere - Google did not split the word into two.

Google is not consistent in its ways to assist the searcher in word forms. And we may see it trying to help us more by interjecting other words it deems to be relevant and useful - without telling us and without giving us the option to turn off the help. I suspect that is what it was doing with freeshipping.org - it may have figured that if we want .org, why not .com?

What is a searcher to do? Keep a sharp eye, and when you want just the one word, preface it with +, and the two words, use quotation marks - and hope that Google understands your intent. And - take some extra time to change word order as well.

Searchers Using More Words

Searchers Using Longer Queries in 2009 by Matt McGee, Small Business Search Marketing (Feb 17)

New data from Hitwise shows that people are using more search terms -- "1- and 2-word queries are on the decline, while 4- and 5-word queries are rising."

These are the figures:

Words/Query 2009 2008 2007
1 word 20.4% 21.1% 24.5%
2 words 23.6% 24.9% 25.7%
3 words 21.8% 21.9% 20.7%
4 words 14.9% 14.5% 13.3%
5 words 8.7% 8.2% 7.5%

The total for 2 words or less is now 44% compared to 50% two years ago. That is a change.

Use the Phone

February 2009 InfoTip: When Online Isn't Enough by Mary Ellen Bates (Feb 10)

What to do when you can't find the answers online - pick up the phone. As always, there is good advice well told and illustrated in this InfoTip article.

Google Search Help

Google has been improving its help pages for Web Search and iGoogle. Best start page is Web Search Help .

There is a new page for help in troubleshooting - click on the image of the Google home page to indicate where you have the problem. I'm not sure how easy it will be for people to connect a problem with an area on the screen, but following the trail on each of these areas reveals answers to a multitude of problems including presence of malware and Google preferences that you set up and then disappear.

One of the most informative pages explains Search customization details - how Google customizes results based on your location, recent searches, and web history.

Building Google News Press Release Alerts

Information Trapping: Follow 17 Press Release Wires with Google News, Research Buzz (Jan 26)

Tara Calashain identifies the source names for 17 press release services that Google picks up and shows how to build information traps on topics and receive them in an RSS feed.

Search History Tells All

Police Blotter: Google searches lead to murder conviction by Declan McCullagh, Police Blotter, Cnet news(Jan 27)

Your web searches can betray you. This time a Florida man is convicted of killing his wife based in part on his search history for gunshot and other terms.

"A physical search of Justin's computer revealed that a few months before the murder, he had searched for terms including "trauma, cases, gunshot, right chest" and "Florida & divorce." Prosecutors had also discovered that the defendant downloaded a suggestive Guns N' Roses song called "Used to Love Her" and then deleted it a few weeks later, after his wife's death. "

There have been other cases - as noted in the article. Usually the evidence is obtained from the person's computer, but the article points out that all search engines will turn over history if "legally obligated".

Would-be killers are going to have to get better at searching anonymously, in another town, and not using a computer that could be traced back to them. Though I have seen at least one TV crime show that showed the police tracking a killer to an internet cafe through his use of instant messaging.

Using Google's Search Wiki

When Google Fails, It's SearchWiki to the Rescue!, by Jill Whalen, High Rankings Advisor (Jan 21)

It's a very long story about searching for a site where one can reserve a rental car, but it does show how one might use Google's SearchWiki to see what is useful to you the next time you need to book a rental rather than the junk of doorway pages and badly designed sites.

Concludes with, "When searching while logged in with my personalization on, my favorite website does show up first, complete with a little green SearchWiki arrow next to it showing that I moved it there. My comment also shows up as part of its description. As long as Google doesn't scrap SearchWiki by the time I'm looking to reserve a car next year, I should be able to easily find my favorite site right at the top of the results."

Mentions that using the incognito window in Google's Chrome browser is a good way for searching anonymously.

Commenters on this post asked why not just bookmark it? My answer - because we forget that we have done so, because we tend to search first and that it is useful to see what we found and liked before.

Using Web 2.0 Content in Research

Supreme searcher Mary Ellen Bates describes her thoughts and actions in researching a question for a client in the January InfoTip When You Come To a Fork In The Road, Take It!. She considers a variety of finding tools, looks for professional associations, and debates other types of resources - most particulary Web 2.0 content (blogs, wikis). She wrote, "I have found that I now search Web 2.0 content for almost all my research projects, even – particularly – those that do not at first glance appear to be on cutting edge or consumer-driven topics."

Finding PDFs

Search for SEO eBooks and PDF Tutorials, by Ann Smarty, Search Engine Journal (Jan 7)

Scribd, it seems, is good for finding ebooks written by the scribd user community. Quick browse shows many word docs and pdf files, both short and long.

Ann Smarty then describes some other ways for finding pdf documents - using filetype:pdf at Google being one, and also the PDFDatabase.

Relevance of Search Results

Google Tech Talk: Reconsidering Relevance by Daniel Tunkelang, The Noisy Channel (Jan 8, 2009)

Daniel Tunkelang, Chief Scientist at Endeca, has posted slides on a presentation on Reconsidering Relevance. "We’ve become complacent about relevance", he says. Perhaps search has become a kind of "fast food". We are too easily satisfied by the results we get from web search engines and don't appreciate that there is deeper and better content. Exploring information through tags and facets is one important method by which searchers can search (and learn) more effectively.

Information Search Process Model

The ‘information search process’ revisited: is the model still useful? by Carol C. Kuhlthau, Jannica Heinström and Ross J. Todd at the Centre for International Scholarship in School Libraries, Department of Library and Information Science, Rutgers. Published in Information Research (Dec 2008)

The information search process model developed in 1990s by Carol Kuhlthau (one of the reviewers in this study) continues to be applicable in understanding search behaviour of students in an even-more online environment.

The model shows six stages: "initiation, selection, exploration, formulation, collection, presentation, named for the primary task to be accomplished at each point in the process."

The progression of feelings and understanding is summarized here - "The findings of this study support the progression of feelings, thoughts and actions as suggested by the search process model. The students' feelings tended to be more negative at the mid-point of the project with relief and satisfaction at the end. Their topical understanding developed from factual to more analytical towards the end and they struggled with issues of finding a focus and sorting out relevant information at the midpoint."

Knowing this, teachers might design assignments of inquiry so that there is planned intervention or guidance in the exploratory middle part.

"In addition, the model continues to be instructive when designing user centred information services and systems. Its consecutive stages can form the basis for timed interventions in order to support users throughout the progress of a project. This research indicates that a crucial stage for interventions is the exploratory middle part where the formulation of focus is developed."

What do you know about how search engines work?

Britons unaware of how search engine results are compiled, FastHosts (Dec 16, 2008)

The findings in this report about the low level of understanding by Britons about search results likely apply to searchers everywhere.

+ "71 per cent of web users are unaware of how Internet Search Engine results are compiled"

+ "consumers today have a strong preference for 'Organic' or main search engine results as opposed to additional 'Sponsored' links which website publishers pay to display, with more than 1 in 3 (38 per cent) choosing to ignore these when they appear"

+ Internet Search Engines are the most commonly used gateways

+ "over two thirds of consumers remain in the dark about how the search engine results they use come about. Whilst 97 per cent of those questioned frequently use search engines, only 29 per cent are aware that search results are ordered according to a combination of relevance to search terms and optimisation techniques used by the individual website owners."

+ "The level of confusion on the subject also varies with age, with 30 per cent of over 55 year olds having no idea at all, as opposed to only 7 per cent of 16-24 year olds."

+ people are distrustful of the sponsored links - "Two thirds of web users (66 per cent) report that they always pay attention first to main results, and some 40 per cent of women and 34 per cent of men will consciously ignore sponsored links whenever they appear."

What is the Question?

Key to Research Success: Asking the Right Questions by Jane John, FUMSI (Nov 2008)

First step to any research -- "A key step in matching your ‘search' with your ‘find' is asking the right question at the start of the process. Competitive Intelligence professionals may call this ‘requirements' or key intelligence topics. Corporate library reference staff may call it the reference interview. An independent information professional (IIP) doing a large project may call it project scoping. The bottom line is the same - what is the question?"

Jane John presents 8 tips for asking the right questions.

Using Dictionaries

Keyword Research: How Can Words Be Related?, Ann Smarty, Search Engine Journal (Dec 2)

Tools for finding related terms - these are mainly dictionaries, which every searcher should have handy. Especially check the Lexical Freenet

Twilight Zone

IT Business Net has a short piece on an instructional video by Patrick Crispen - Introduction to Internet Searching: Google Labs - that is offered through Lynda.com

I checked Lynda.com to find that it does have a huge library of training materials including over 33,000 video tutorials.

Introduction to Internet Searching can be found and some parts can be viewed for free. The bits are well explained and well illustrated BUT this was released in 2004. That was four years ago - much has changed.

One of the free bits is about the + sign. I don't recall that the + ever worked as an indicator of extra importance at Google - but putting that aside - it doesn't work that way now. Today it turns off the stemming so that Google will only pick up that exact word and not the plural or singular or word variants.

Lesson - don't use old internet search training materials.

Internet Librarian 2008

Internet Librarian 2008 in Monterey, California is over but the presentations are coming online at the conference site. Watch these pages for more.

General Conference - Monday October 20, 2008 - especially Track A Information Discovery & Search. Mary Ellen Bates mentions a few new search tools in Super Searcher Shares.

Tuesday, October 21 - Three contributors are packed into the Business Info Online: Super Searcher Strategies presentation: Greg Notess with updates on major search engines, Mary Ellen Bates with advice on using Web 2.0 tools and sources for research, and Marcy Phelps showing video search engines and also "Going Local: Case study in finding local and hyperlocal information". This one is a real gold mine.

Wednesday, October 22 - "Social Media & Networked Technologies: Research & Insights"

Hyphen in Search

Small Change to Google Phrase Search Syntax, Phillip Lenssen, Google Blogscoped (Oct 28)

Reports that Google no longer treats punctuation between two words as a phrase search (ie words together). Even gets confirmation (of a sort) from Matt Cutts. Example given is foo.bar.

My tests show that foo.bar has different results than foo-bar.

> foo.bar = 1.9 million. Appears to pick up foobar, "foo bar", foo.bar, as well as foo and bar far apart.

> foo-bar = 4.8 million. Shows foobar, foo bar, foo$bar, foo.bar etc but I do not see any lot of bolded foo or bar words.

Conclusion: I still think the hyphen is the easiest way to search on compound words where the words might be separate, hyphenated or one word.

Finding Sites in a Niche

How to Find the Top Sites in a Niche by Glen Allsopp (Oct 21)

Glen Allsopp has developed a very impressive strategy for identifying "top sitees in a niche". He does this as an internet marketer, but any researcher could use this strategy for researching markets, industries, companies and other kinds of niches.

For Allsopp, "top site" means sites that have --

* The most traffic
* The most number of feed subscribers
* Sites with a specific audience (if I’m marketing a country specific item)
* The most evangelical audience

He uses the example of the "internet marketing" niche to show the strategy at work.

Important (and transferrable) steps are:

+ Gather keywords
+ Search on those words and add stock terms (such as blog, resources - words that describe what you want to find)
+ Check for blogs through specific tools. He recommends Google Reader and Bloglines
+ Browse a directory. Of interest, he recommends BOTW well over dmoz, because Best of the Web "is updated regularly and fully of quality sites".

Things to do at Google

Find a new thing to do with Google today - Google UK has 52 ideas on things you can do through Google - web, books, maps, documents, email, translations - great list delivered through mini instructional videos.

Using Boolean Search

How to Use Boolean Search Operators : SEO Application, Ann Smarty, Search Engine Journal (OCt 16)

Anoher good article by Ann Smarty on search techniques - this time using boolean operators for search engine marketing research purposes. OR is he most important operator and Smarty makes good use of it in combination with field names.

Web Search in Plain English

Web Search Strategies in Plain English is another excellent video from CommonCraft, the company that has also explained social bookmarking and RSS to us. This short 3 minute video is quite good - clear explanation of how search engines work and some basic strategies for searchers to get better results - essentially describe what you want, use quotation marks to mark words together, and sometimes use - to exclude.

http://www.commoncraft.com/web-search-strategies

Tutorial on Image Searching

New tutorial from Intute on image searching. From the announcement:

""Internet for Image Searching" is a new, free online tutorial to help staff and students in universities and colleges to find digital images for their learning and teaching:

http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/tutorial/imagesearching/

The emphasis of the tutorial is on finding copyright cleared images which are available free; facilitating quick, hassle-free access to a vast range of online photographs and other visual resources.

This tutorial has been created by TASI - the JISC Advisory Service for digital media, and Intute as part of the Virtual Training Suite, with funding from the Higher Education Academy/JISC Collaboration Initiative.

"This tutorial is an excellent resource for anyone needing to know more about where and how to find images online. The fact that it concentrates on copyright cleared images will make it even more valuable for busy learning and teaching professionals, researchers and students alike. It will also serve to inspire confidence in those needing to use images from the web in their work." (Sharon Waller of the Higher Education Academy).

For further information please contact Dave Kilbey (d.kilbey@bristol.ac.uk) of TASI or Emma Place of Intute (emma.place@bristol.ac.uk)."

Another use for advanced search commands

How To Diagnose Your Site with Google Advanced Search by Ann Smarty, Search Engine Journal (Oct 7)

Diagnose your own site and any other with these tips on using advanced commands of Google to look at most viewed pages, size of site, duplicate content.

Lessons about Information Literacy

Information is Power - Even When it’s Wrong, Amy Fry, ACRLog (Sep 11)

Amy Fry, a San Diego-based librarian, gives us all a lesson in examining what we read on the web much more carefully - and certainly do so before using it. This tells a story where the mistake or misinformation should have been caught at several stages, and especially at the beginning when a close look at the date would have revealed that the story was not current. But it also shows us that the web is still the wild west of unvetted, uncontrolled information.

Yahoo Search Hacks for RSS feeds

Yahoo! RSS Feeds Available for Web Search, Images & Video Search, Digital Inspiration (Sep 1)

Gives the addresses you can use to set up a RSS feed for a Yahoo search on the web, video, news, or images - just substitute your keywords or phrase for the search statement.

Live Search Hacks

Windows Live Search Tricks You May Not Know About, Digital Inspiration (Aug 29)

Live Search from Microsoft does have some helpful features:

+ video previews
+ find documents that link to multimedia or other document types. Use the prefix contains:. The example I have often used is "margaret atwood" reads contains:audio - should find Margaret Atwood reading one of her books. But you can't count on this - it's a long shot.
+ save images as you search - Live's image search has been very user friendly for a long time
+ Live search results in an RSS feed. Nice feature but you have to be happy with the search results.
+ search websites that have rss feed using hasfeed command. I think this is of limited value but maybe feed fanatics would disagree.
+ prefer operator to add weight to a concept or term. Live is the only search engine to offer this -- utah tourism prefer:scenery.

The Research Skill

FIVE QUESTIONS…for Jane John bu By Lisa Neal Gualtieri, Editor-in-Chief, eLearn Magazine (July 2008)

"As the volume of online information increases, it becomes increasingly important to formulate research questions, understand information quality, and synthesize. In the following interview, Jane John, past president of the Association of Independent Information Professionals and founder of On Point Research, tells eLearn Magazine Editor-in-Chief Lisa Neal Gualtieri how online instructors and students can be more successful at finding information online."

Frame the question, assess the quality, reflect - good advice.

Synonyms at Google

Google Now Searching For Synonyms by Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Aug 26)

It's confirmed. Google is now automatically searching for synonyms (or what Google considers to be related word) in addition to the stemming they adopted some time ago.

Danny Sullivan quoted this from a Google posting -- "The algorithm that is responsible for the titles and snippets of result pages now highlights stems and some synonyms of the original query term."

I've even seen Google be able to pick up Bobby Kennedy on a search for Robert Kennedy.

This probably means that searchers will have less need to use the tilde as a "synonym operator" .

Boolean Operators

Yahoo! drops Boolean support, Pandia Search News (Aug 15)

Pandia picked up a report from Greg Notess that Yahoo no longer recognizes the NOT operator and has essentially dropped full boolean operator support. I noticed this last June but might not have reported it in this blog.

Pandia writes, "Google still accepts the most popular Boolean terms, and Exalead even supports the NEAR operator. Still, as Notess says: “Live Search is now the only major search engine with full Boolean support.” Hm. Interesting. In this area Microsoft is the search engine winner!"

But Exalead is the one with full operator support - AND, OR, NOT, and NEAR.

But the fact that neither Google nor Yahoo have NOT is not a hardship: it's just as easy to use the - sign, and use OR to search for alternatives; for example - stratford ontario (b&b OR "bed and breakfast" OR inn) -victorian -hotel I will add, though, that Yahoo is not always robust at handling parentheses around OR constructs.

Using Link Operators at Yahoo

How Much Do You Know About / Use Yahoo!'s Site Explorer and Link Data, SEOMoz (Aug 12)

Rand Fish makes that point that Yahoo's Site Explorer is the best tool available for analyzing link data - in spite of its weaknesses. This posting tells search engine optimizers why and how to use it. But more importantly, he also shows how to use link operators in search statements to find out who links to what. Searchers can get some tips too.

Also refers to a page by Ann Smarty on Advanced Link: Operator to Explore Your Competitor’s Backlinks - use for competitor and industry analysis.

Postscript: Ann Smarty has just identified 5 FireFox Extensions to Enhance Link Analysis in Yahoo

Use the Phone

Search Beyond the Web: When to Pick Up the Phone by Risa Sacks, FUMSI (Jul 2008)

"This article encourages you to think of situations where you can use phone research to find the unique information you need. We'll look at ten categories as examples, although in your searching life, you'll likely to find many more."

Yahoo Web Search

Fine-tune Yahoo Web search queries Paul Bausch, CNet Tips and Tricks (Sept 2005)

Paul Bausch makes it easy to be a power searcher at Yahoo. This article clearly and succintly describes how to construct the queries and use commands. All the advice applies although this was written nearly 3 years ago.

Learning research practices

Research Methods ‘Beyond Google’ Inside Higher Ed (June 17, 2008)

Today's students may be able to read a page of web search results quickly and make sense of it, but are they thinking critically, do they know what else to consider? Probably not - that is the feeling in the universities. This articles describes some programs to develop programs that will teach good research practices and skills with the tools.

"In an effort to nudge curriculums in the direction of incorporating research methodology into the fabric of courses themselves, two universities are experimenting with voluntary programs that encourage cooperation between faculty and research specialists to develop assignments that will serve as a hands-on and collaborative introduction to the relevant skills and practices."

Blakeman's Search Tips

Top Search Tips Posted by Karen Blakeman, Karen Blakeman's Blog (Jun 17)

Tips from an advanced search workshop (Google and Beyond) run at for UKeiG on June 11th. Mentions a variety of tools including Alacrawiki - "guide to business information companies, publishers and databases".

Research Needs of Entrepreneurs

Finding Competitive Information for Growing Companies Christine Hamilton-Pennell, FUMSI (June 2008)

Tackles how to serve the research needs of early-stage entrepreneurs concerning competitors, markets, customers, industry.

"... examine sources of information that can address these research needs. This round-up of resources is not exhaustive; rather it is meant to suggest a basic approach and starting point for conducting more in-depth research in each area. The focus is on information available through the Web, but keep in mind that public and university libraries have a wealth of resources that are often available for free to business owners."

Mentions many excellent resources as the starting point for this research including several from Canada.

Christine Hamilton-Pennell Founder and President of Growing Local Economies (www.growinglocaleconomies.com), a company that provides training, consulting and research to communities developing local entrepreneurship support initiatives.

This articles was mentioned in Competitive Research for Small Businesses, The Virtual CHase, along with a reference to Genie Tyburski's Company Information Guide.

Yahoo Site Explorer Links

Yahoo Site Explorer adds subdomain data SEOptimise (Jun 20)

Reports that Yahoo Site Explorer has added a third choice for Show Inlinks. In addition to All pages, and Except from this Domain, there is Except from this Sub-Domain.

I tried this on plc.fis.utoronto.ca.

+ Show inlinks except from this domain removes all utoronto.ca links to the home page

+ SHow inlinks except from this sub-domain removes links by PLC to itself, but allows links from fis.utoronto.ca

Powerset for broad topics

May 2008 InfoTip: Powerset.com Mary Ellen Bates (May 2008)

See potential in using Powerset, the new semantic search tool that helps one make sense of search results by identifying the facts and creating summaries.

"PowerSet is best used for those searches that cover a number of topics or areas. It's not perfect, and it only searches Wikipedia, but I find it an exciting new approach in the efforts of search engines to make sense out of web content.

Matt Larkin has some comments on Powerset too - Smarter isn't better...yet Traffick.com (June 6)

"While it’s silly not to consider a search engine that “understands” us an exciting prospect, the effectiveness of existing methods makes me wonder if we “need” semantic search yet. Powerset claims it works best for research, for those not searching for specific items but instead seeking general information on a topic. Well, which types of users are most likely to use search for research and inductive gathering of information? Anyone in the educational field. The last time I checked, they have large internal databases through which they can gather boatloads of literature on their topics of study, be it government documents, journal articles or online writings. In other words, they’re doing just fine. Is there a demand yet for a smarter search?"

Using Backwards Search

Advanced Link: Operator to Explore Your Competitor’s Backlinks by Ann Smarty, Search Engine Journal (May 27)

Explains why the backlink search (backwards search) is so important to search engine marketers and explores the use of the link: operator in Yahoo. Example searches show the power of combining link: with keywords or other field limitors.

Navigational searches

The URL Is Dead, Long Live Search by Josh Catone, Read Write Web (May 22)

Navigational" searches are on the rise. These are "searches done when the user already knows exactly where he or she wants to end up -- and they make up a surprising large number of total seaches".

Of interest: "According to Compete last fall, navigational searches make up about 17% of all searches on average, more on Yahoo! and Live than on Google. For well-known web sites, Compete found that about 9 out of the top 10 search terms for that site tend to be some sort of variation on the domain. Surprisingly, people actually often search for entire domain names rather than type them into their browser's address bar."

I've done this and observed others do it - enter one or two words for a known site to Google rather than type a partially remembered domain in the address bar. Usually saves time.

Discovery vs Search

Stumbling Upon Discovery And Search by David Berkowitz, Search Insider
(April 29th, 2008)

Lots in this on search vs discovery as practiced in web search and video search. It looks at the popularity of stumbles (Stumbleupon), and the study by Clipblast that showed the video viewers much prefer discovery and recommendations over searching for finding new videos.

"Last week, right after I released a column on “The Fine Line Between Search and Discovery,” three reports came out from Radar Networks, StumbleUpon, and ClipBlast that offer more clues on how search and discovery are converging and diverging."

Dreaming up Keywords

5 Tools for Keyword Brainstorming by Ann Smarty, Search Engine Journal (May 13)

Everyone can get mileage from these tools for finding keyword combinations.

+ Google Sets - Google's related terms
+ MSN clustering tool from the labs - when will they add this to Live Search?
+ Searchradar - tag cloud and some keyword in context.
+ Keyword Map - see the words graphically
+ Urban Dictionary - to which we might add any dictionary or thesaurus.

Separating the hoax from the real

Sites for Teaching Evaluative Skills by Genie Tyburski, TVC Alert (May 12)

Lists some sites that trainers can use to teach web site evaluation skills - particularly in identifying the hoax or parody.

Finding Small Business Owners

Finding Out Who Owns a Small Business by Genie Tyburski, The Virtual Chase (May 5)

Addresses how to find the name of the owner of a small private company in the United States.

"There are a number of resources and research strategies for finding business owners. I'll outline several methods, starting with relatively easy approaches and free sources of information. Then I'll suggest several harder-to-accomplish tactics that still utilize free sources and I'll end by mentioning some commercial databases."

Tips and Web Tools for Finding People

The Research Practitioner - Skills Day by Karen Blakeman (May 1)

Presentation by Karen Blakeman on Using the Web, given at ‘The Research Practitioner - Skills Day’ in London on April 23rd and 24th 2008.

Has many tips on searching for people through the main search engines and using Web 2.0 tools for social networks, blogs, photos. Includes many people search tools.

+ search for presentations to get more information about the authors. Limit to the ppt format. Also look at presentations sites - Slideshare, authorStream, YouTube

+ use syntax - searching intitle or inurl.

+ search different country versions of search engines - results will be different

+ look into the past at the Internet Archive

Language Search at the Majors

Multilingual Searching: Search Engine Language Tools by Greg Notess, Online (May 1)

Good overview of the tools for searching in languages other than your own at the major search engines: choosing the interface, restricting to a language and using translations services.

Conclusion: "Even so, with multiple translation tools using differing underlying technologies, searchers can gain a general sense of the content on non-English pages. For those needing accurate translations, these tools can help decide which pages are worth the cost of buying a professional translation. For the rest of us, the tools can give an insight into conversations, opinions, and professional web content in otherwise inaccessible languages."

Course, there are many specialist tools as well. Multilingual.ch is a search interface for translators that uses Google

Effectiveness of search tools

In Search of Better E-Discovery Methods By H. Christopher Boehning and Daniel J. Toal, New York Law Journal (April 23, 2008)

Effectiveness of search tools is especially important in law where researchers must examine large bodies of digital files and documents. This article reports on the results of studies that compared boolean and keyword search (the standard) with other technologies that use taxonomies, auto classification, concept analysis and clustering.

Interestingly boolean outperformed, but the other techniques identified additional documents.

"For now, the available evidence suggests that keyword and Boolean searches remain the state-of-the-art and the most appropriate search technology for most cases. This seems particularly true when keyword or Boolean searches are used in an iterative manner, where litigants: (i) negotiate search terms and Boolean operators, (ii) run the agreed-upon searches, (iii) review the preliminary results, and (iv) adjust the searches through a series of meet-and-confers."

Important: "That does not necessarily mean that alternative search technologies are not worth considering, either independently or along with Boolean or keyword searches. But practitioners would be well advised to carefully scrutinize the marketing claims of the purveyors of such technologies and to factor in often substantial direct and indirect costs of such approaches."

Article was mentioned in The search for better e-discovery tools -- TVC Alert

Geographic way to search

Search for Mapped Web Pages in Google Maps Google Operating System (Apr 20)

Google Maps has picked up the map view available through Google Experimental.

"This is an entire new way to search the web by changing the focus from general information to geographical information. You could use it to search for people, companies, organizations, events, traditional food or anything that could be connected to a location."

Posting has screen shots. This really will be an interesting way to search the web. We should be able to do some creative things with it.

Search Tips - Fine Strokes

April 2008 InfoTip: A Few of My Favorite Things Mary Ellen Bates

Three tips for searchers:

1. square brackets at Yahoo - seems Yahoo will search for words in that order if enclosed in square brackets - except that I don't see any difference at all. Bates has the example of [subprime crisis] to get various types of crises. Use the * as a wildcard inside a phrase -- "subprime * crisis"

2. conference tags used by bloggers

3. prefer but not absolutely require a word (available at Live and Exalead).

To these I would add using * at Google to require words to be close to each other. This is better than using quotation marks to force the words to be next to each other. water management policies * gives a different set of results than "water management policies".

Teaching Search

What not to teach (about searching) Joyce Valenza, School LIbrary Journal (Mar 18)

School librarian and teacher, Joyce Valenza, presents her thoughts on what to teach about searching. She advises against teaching Boolean "explicitly". Students will do better learning to be flexible in responding to search results, using quotation marks, using Advanced, and searching nouns.

She also recommends listing most important words first. This is the one thing I would change. The point is good but it isn't the only point. Search engines rank partly on order of words. Framing the query with natural phrasing can mean better ranking and easier recognization of best hits. For example, the case against cholesterol drugs - has somewhat different ranking and results than cholesterol drugs case against. Sometimes we'll want to use both approaches - most important words first PLUS the natural phrasing. An even better search in this case is cholesterol drugs case against cholesterol drugs.

Genie Tyburski ( Do's and Don'ts of Teaching Search ) feels it is a disservice to students to not introduce Boolean. Students, she feels, benefit from a broader understanding of the history of search and will be better able to adapt to using databases.

For me, the most important aspect of boolean is in learning how to identify the concepts or the topical elements to one's question, and then work with those elements to see which ones should be made more specific (AND more concepts) and if any should be expanded (use OR to pick up alternates). This is a thought discipline - and once mastered makes it much easier to use the advanced techniques for searching title, url, or domain effectively. For actual web searching, since all engines search for all the words, we really only need to know how to use OR - and to do that very selectively.

What actually gets taught in a course will depend on the amount of time and the search experience of the students. Boolean (really concept analysis) is too much for a novice to absorb in a workshop or even a short course, but it does suit an intermediate class.

Search Switching

Search Switching, Greg Notess, Search Engine Showdown (Apr 8)

Interesting new term from Greg Notess - search switching - means being able to switch from one search engine to another using a single interface. Intelways is an example. I call this all-in-one. Regardless, this kind of site can be very handy if it seems to suit your work habits.

To Greg's list on his Search Switching page I would add Whonu - though mainly Google, is still switching from one tool to another.

Greg refers readers to a presentation he did at CIL and an article in Online that many can view through AccessMyLibrary (if they have a library card at their local public library).

Advanced Google Search Tips

Advanced Google: Search Faster, Find More by Scott Spanbauer, PCWorld (Dec 2007)

Has good advice on constructing queries at Google - adding words, using the Advanced Search, using command-line search for finding files (doesn't cover other strategies). Also mentions Google's Experimental Search for alternate views of results - worth lplaying with but features to view on a map or by timeline are only helpful for certain special-case searches.

Mentions G-Zapper software ($30) -- block Google "from tracking the keywords you search for. The program also blocks Google Analytics from recording the sites you browse to". Works for Windows 2000 and XP. Or delete the cookies regularly yourself - I guess.

Language Translation

Language Search Tools, Greg Notess, Searchengineshowdown (Apr 1)

Here's an invaluable comparison of the language capabilities of the major search engines. Greg has charts on language limits that can be applied at Ask, Exalead, Gigablast, Yahoo, Google, and Live. Also a list of online translation tools - Google, Live, Yahoo. And lastly translated search from Google - to translate your English search terms into your choice of 13 languages and display results in both.

I had to try Google's translated search. Tried bed and breakfast in Spanish - got spanish results with the Spanish terms - Alojamiento y desayuno. Tried the same in French and discovered that 'bed and breakfast' is being used extensively in French - it wasn't an automatic translation to gîte - though Google lets you change the translation.

Differentiators in Keyphrases

Using Differentiators in Keyphrases: What Every Search Engine Optimization Company Needs to Know by Scott Buresh, Search Engine Guide (Mar 5)

Using modifiers to describe the kind of document the searcher hopes to find is a good search strategy. In this article we see the search engine marketer going through the same process to think of good words and phrases to differentiate the site and get more traffic.

"In this case, however, it is using your company differentiators in the keyphrases that they target to make sure that the traffic that comes to your site is of a very high quality."

.... "There are hundreds of modifiers that can give a competitive advantage by reflecting a company's differentiators, including words such as "free", "affordable", "high-end", "full service", "proven", "turnkey", etc. The point is that by making use of your unique differentiators in the search terms you target, your search engine optimization company is already setting the table for your prospect before he or she even clicks over to your website. When the message that is seen on your site then supports the keyphrase that was typed, you now have an engaged visitor. This can mean more leads, less site abandonment, and better overall website performance."

And the searcher will be happier too.

The Case with Google

Upper Case & Lower Case Searches May Return Different Google Search Results - Search Engine Roundtable (Feb 28)

Growing number of reports that Google web search is sensitive to case. People find they are getting different results with lower case v upper case v mixed.

"An interesting thread has been brewing over at WebmasterWorld with reports of an unusual Google query test. It seems like searchers in the UK, searching on UK based IPs at Google may see different results when they search first in all lower case and then next in upper case."

However, I don't see it affecting google case sensitivity with and without caps. There might have been a slight difference in ranking but it doesn't seem to be related to actual case matching.

Search engines as mind readers

Generic Searching On Non-Generic Search Engines, Researchbuzz (Feb 25)

Nice piece by Tara Calishain on the uncanny ability for a search engine to answer even the vaguest question - as long as you give enough clues.

Her example was someone trying to remember the name - Anna Nicole Smith - and who typed into Google - that woman who died after her son died - and got the answer.

I tried a couple of my own.

+ movie about burning books - Fahrenheit 451
+ founder of the reform party - Preston Manning
+ soprano who hit the high C - shows a YouTube Video - "females hitting soprano C in full voice" - though it didn't answer my question.

Don't count on this strategy - but could be worth a shot.

POV on Search v Discovery

How’s discovery different from search? by Pete Warden, ReadWriteWeb (Feb 26)

Makes these distinctions.

1. Search is goal-oriented, discovery is about the journey.
2. Search is solitary, discovery is social.
3. Search is about universal answers, discovery is customized.
4. Discovery is a background task.

Search Behaviour and Patterns

Search Behavior Patterns by John Ferrara, Boxes and Arrows (Jan 30)

Examines search behaviours and suggests ways designers can improve the interface. Until they do, we can use the analysis to help people search more effectively.

"The good news is that while users vary widely in the ways they search, their behaviors follow a limited number of identifiable patterns. By examining the factors that cause variability in user behavior and considering personas that illustrate those variations, we can identify common search behavior patterns and the interface affordances that support them. "

Murder She Searched

Once Again, A Google Murder Case Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Jan 29)

Would Agatha Christie put this into one of her mysteries?

"In the UK, a woman has been convicted of trying to murder her husband after researching methods on Google. It's one of several cases like this that have come up in past years."

Examine the search result carefully

There is a lesson in this report of malware lurking in search results. Always assess the result for reasonableness.

+ Look at the url. Does it make sense? Are there a jumble of letters?
+ What does the snippet look like? Are your key terms repeated many times? Does the snippet make any sense at all?
+ How many results? Are there just a few - none of them very good?

Hackers Rig Google to Deliver Malware Erik Larkin, PC World (Jan 28, 2007)

"The latest malware trend should prompt you to think twice about the links you click next time you search."

"If last November you googled one of thousands of innocuous and common search terms, such as "Microsoft excel to access" or "how to teach your dogs to fetch," you were in line for an Internet attack that infects PCs with spam senders, password stealers, and other kinds of nasty malware."

Digital Information Seeking Behavior

New report on research practices shows that the younger, computer and web savvy, generation sticks to basic search tools and methods and lacks skill in critical and analytical thinking. Report examines the digital information seeking behaviour in general and specifically of the "google generation".

‘Google Generation’ is a myth, says new research, Gary Price, Resourceshelf

Google Generation: Myth or Reality? Genie Tyburski, TVC Alert

Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future British Library and JISC (Jan 11, 2008)

Metadata on digital photos

Metadata in photos: There’s a lot of hidden information in digital photos Out-of-the-box lawyering (Jan 3)

"... there is also some extremely valuable information hidden away in the digital version of digital photographs. And Microsoft has a free – that’s free – program [Photo Info] that allows you to discover from the digital version such information as the date and time when the photo was taken.

See full posting at The Virtual Chase - Jan 16 - for more on getting the metadata and authenticating digital photographs.

Google Search Tricks

Top 10 Obscure Google Search Tricks Lifehacker (Jan 2)

Lifehacker lists its favourite web search tricks at Google. There are a few "shortcuts", such as time, flights, currency conversion. Also - ways to use words or syntax to get better results. These are all good suggestions, and people commenting on the entry have several more.

Invisible Government Information

CDT and OMB Watch Release Report on Searchability of Government Information Docuticker (Dec 17)

Report from Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) and OMB Watch found that some vital government information may be invisible to searchers who are using the popular search engines. The “Hiding in Plain Sight: Why Important Government Information Cannot Be Found through Commercial Search Engines” includes several examples.

From the report: "“It is unclear if agencies know there is a roadblock between the public and their information and have not taken the adequate steps to correct the problem, or if the agencies simply do not realize that their important information is not being found and indexed by search engines,” said Sean Moulton, Director of Federal Information Policy for OMB Watch. “In today’s Internet age, either answer is unacceptable.”"

The report has suggestions for the government agencies, but not for the searchers. This is a clear case of "invisible web".

Microsoft disables link command

Live Search Link Command Back Offline Search Engine Roundtable (Dec 19)

Microsoft has blocked the work-around to do backwards searching at Live Search with +link or +linkdomain. This is one more reason for professional searchers not to use that engine. Returing Google Ads in search results is the other reason that turned up today.

US Public Records Research

Audio and Video Files on The Virtual Chase, The Virtual Chase (Dec 4)

TVC has created some audio and video screencasts on the art of public records research in the US.

Search at Internet Librarian 2007

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.

+ 2.0 & the Internet World by Lee Rainie for PEW Internet and American Life
http://www.infotoday.com/il2007/Presentations/MondayKeynote_Rainie.pps

+ What's new with search by Heather Dystrup-Chiang, Progam Manager, Live Search, Microsoft Corp. - about changes at Live Search. Include Live Academic and Live Book Search.
http://www.infotoday.com/il2007/Presentations/A102_Dystrup-Chiang.pps

+DigitalClassic Web: Experience the Power by Ron Rodrigues, MLS, Sr. Content Specialist for Engineering, Thomson Scientific
http://www.infotoday.com/il2007/Presentations/A102_Rodrigues.pps

+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

+ Mobile Search by Gary Price
http://www.resourceshelf.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/mati2007_il.html

+ 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

+ Search Engine Strategies by Greg Notess
http://www.slideshare.net/notess/search-engine-strategies

Notess on Search Strategies

Search Engine Strategies: Digging Deeply by Greg Notess - Slideshare of presentation to the Internet Librarian Conference Oct31 2007

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

Google Tips from Bates

November 2007 InfoTip: Google Can Do That? by Mary Ellen Bates (Nov 9)

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).

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.

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."

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. "

Phone Search

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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."

Searching Google video

Fun With Google Video, Research Buzz (Sept 17)

Big tip on searching Google's collection of videos - all 4.8 million of them - use site:google.com or use Advanced search to look for video from google.com.

Information Trapping at Google Blog Search

Google’s Blog Search and An Option I Didn’t Know About, ResearchBuzz (Sept 18)

Tara Calishain picks up a tip about using Google Blog Search for "information trapping". It's all in the new date search - "In fact, it isn’t. Jeremy explained that when you narrow your search by time using the links on the left, the results from that time span are sorted by relevance. In other words, you’ll still get results by relevance, but only for the time span you specified."

Google Web Search Tips

In the Sept 20, 2007 Virtual Chase newsletter, Genie Tyburski has a few tips for people using Google who need to look at the cache, look for words close together, or search by date.

+ Corporate Filters Interfere with Research - corporate security might block access to a site and one's only recourse is to look in Google cache. But this doesn't always work. Google and others cache text but not other components. You won't see them but the monitoring software might log it as an attempt. So - use the qualifier &strip=1 to request only the text.

+ Proximity, Wildcard Searching on Google -- * in a Google query substitutes for one word (roughly - I've seen it substitute for 3 or 4 words). This can be used for names, email addresses. Experiment - anything where two parts are typically close.

+ Google Improves Searching by Date - new date-restricted options on the Advanced Page. The date is the date Google crawled the page - not the date it was published.

Book: Googlepedia

All Things Google - Que Publishing Releases New Edition of Best-Selling Googlepedia: The Ultimate Google Resource, press release Marketwatch

Googlepedia: The Ultimate Google Resource, Second Edition by Michael Miller - available through Informit.com. Covers everything - blogs, mail, Office aps, video, maps, AdSense - the works.

No excerpts - but there is a Googlepedia Blog.

Google Date Query

Useful Google feature: better date search, Matt Cutts, Gadgets, Google, and SEO (Sep 12)

"As Google has gotten fresher, our advanced search page started showing more useful options for restricting searches by date. The shortest time frame used to be something like three months; now you can look for things that are less than 24 hours old."

Also shows tweaks you can do to the url using as_qdr= to see urls discovered by Google in the last few days (d), weeks (w) or years (y)..

Google: Date search and file formats

Google Updates Date Search on Advanced Search Page, ResearchBuzz (Sep 5)

Google advanced search now supports search for pages added in the last 24 hours and 2 months, in addition to the 1, 3, 6, and 12 months. But Tara Calishain has some extra tips on hacking the url to get more choices.

Also mentions that Google will search Google Earth kml and kmz files, and I noticed it will now search Flash files - swf.

For information on kml and kmz files see Google Earth Files - KML/KMZ at Google Earth Blog.

Google Date Search

How To Go Beyond Google's Advanced Search Page Date Options, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine land (Aug 31).

Use these parameters in the url to search for page the past few days / week / months - except, dates on web pages are next to useless.

Got the Time?

Barry Schwartz notes that you can get the current time in a foreign city through some search engines. But there are some other methods.

Got The Current Time? Your Search Engine Does! by Searchengineland (Aug 30)

"Typically, a search in the format of "time in [city] or [state] or [country]" returns the current time for the area you searched for at the top of the search results, for most major search engines."

Works in Yahoo and Ask - but not in Google (it used to) and not Live.

Another method is to get current time for a city directly from World Time Server or from the Time and Date Worldclock.

Or add a gadget for a world clock to iGoogle (your personal page) or to the Yahoo Widget collection.

Researching Experts

Finding and Researching Experts and Their Testimony, The Virtual Chase (Aug 28)

Five legal researchers contributed to this guide to researching experts.

"The purpose of this article is to suggest various online resources that can be used to find experts, gather information about them (whether your own or the opposing party's), and assess the admissibility of their testimony – as well as tips on how the information uncovered might be utilized. In addition, to assist in research efforts, some potentially-relevant web sites have been included. "

The advice on resources to use and approach to take has general relevance for researching a topic and finding knowledge experts.

Trust in the SERP Rankings

In Google We Trust: Users' Decisions on Rank, Position, and Relevance Pan, B., Hembrooke, H., Joachims, T., Lorigo, L., Gay, G., and Granka, L; Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12(3)

A recent study from Cornell suggests that students put an inordinate amount of trust in the ranking that Google gives search results. The study involved using eye tracking to watch 22 students select results from a Google search. Students would select from the top results even if the snipit had less relevant information than later results. Questions were a mix of information and transactional. Results were manipulated in some case to change the order of the ranking and make lower ranked show in a higher position. They concluded that "... when all factors are considered, subjects trust Google's positioning more than their rational judgments based on the evaluation of different alternatives."

This study seems to have been a sequel of one picked up last October 2006 in Online Marketing Research - Distribution of Clicks on Google’s SERPs.

Here too the first listing got the majority of first clicks (56%) and the most time (28%), and the first 3 received nearly 80% clicks.

People really do focus on the first few results and barely consider the rest. Furthermore, they may let the rankings influence their own assessment of relevance.

Setting Information Traps

Searching Dirty to Find What's Hidden by Genie Tyburski, The Virtual CHase (Aug 27)

How to really dig for documents on the Web that the owner doesn't realize and likely doesn't want. There are many good tips for those looking for the information and those wanting to hide it.

" Companies and other organizations that want to protect proprietary or confidential information should conduct this type of research with regularity. You can expedite some of the search process with information traps. But considering the stakes, regular thorough searching is a worthwhile investment."

Bits from Bass

Please Do Not Use These Programs for Illegal Purposes, Steve Bass, PCWorld (Aug 21)

Today's column is packed with goodies - "Powerful new tools let you search for free software and music, zoom in on landmarks and buildings, and add comments to news stories."

Try Microsoft's Photosynth for virtual travel - but will need XP on a Vista capable machine.

And for people keen on really stretching Google by using the syntax, Jason Stallings, author of Google Hacks, has created a program that sets up the query for searches for music, tools, video and other types. Worth trying to see the query - though it won't always find something. The download comes with a Blue Shirt Studio toolbar for Firefox. If you are a technophile you might use this - otherwise don't install it.

Amazon Forums

Information Trapping: Amazon Forum Threads with RSS Feeds, ResearchBuzz (July 23)

Suggests searching Amazon's forums for discussion of books. You can do this at Google with site:amazon.com inurl:forum

Google Guides

Cheat Sheet For Google Cheat Sheets By Barry Schwartz, Search engine land (Aug 6)

A lot of cheat sheets with tips and directions for using Google. Add to these the Google Guide from WebSearchGuide.

Background Checks on Experts

How to Vet an Expert by Robert Ambrogi, Editor of IMS ExpertServices' BullsEye Newsletter, The Virtual Chase (Jul 31)

"Robert Ambrogi, Editor of IMS ExpertServices' BullsEye Newsletter, outlines resources and strategies for vetting an expert. He offers search tool suggestions for finding blog commentary, participation in social networks, business filings, public records and more."

Advanced Search at Google

How Lawyers Can Improve Search Results by Tracey R. Rich, The National Law Journal (July 25, 2007)

Although geared to law librarians, this is a good article to introduce concepts and techniques involved in doing more advanced searches at Google.

+ using the Advanced Search page.
+ domain / site search
+ fill in the blanks - using the *
+ using specialized Google services: US Government search, Google News, Google Books

Also has some advice on evaluating the source - what to look for and how to check the domain.

Mentioned in The Virtual Chase

Trapping Press Releases

Information Trapping for Press Releases, ResearchBuzz (Jul 8)

Tara Calishain shows how to monitor Google News for press releases.

Google Global Firefox Extension

See Google Results From Any Country With Firefox Extension, Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Jul 16)

Firefox extension from Redfly shows you the results you would get at Google if you were there - it could make a difference. More info from Redfly.

Turn off Google Personalized Results

Easy Way To Turn Off Google Personalized Results, Search Engine Land (June 11)

If you've been allowing Google to log your searches you may want to stop it from personalizing results according to your previous work. Barry Schwartz has a hack to turn off personalized results -- "To turn off personalized search quickly, for specific search results, just add "&pws=0" to the end of the URL string in your browser."

Would be nice to have that as a Google toolbar button.

Good Advice on Search

The 10 Commandments of Search, metamojo at Alt Search Engines (June 25) - good list.

Duplicates at Google

Google: Please Don't Filter My Query!, Genie Tyburski, TVC ALert (June 15)

Tyburski shows how to stop Google from removing duplicates - run the search and then add &filter=0 to the end of the search url to see all instances. This is useful for finding all pages where a particular sentence appears.

Be Anonymous

Top 7 Ways To Hide Your Online Identity by Wendy Boswell, About.com

One of the ways is to use RSS rather than subscribing to email newsletters.

Book: Consider the Source

Information Today Publishes Consider the Source: A Critical Guide to 100 Prominent News and Information Sites on the Web, Multimedia and Internet Schools (June 6)

New book to help people evaluate online news sources - Consider the Source: A Critical Guide to 100 Prominent News and Information Sites on the Web by James F. Broderick and Darren W. Miller, Information Today.

"Consider the Source is an A-to-Z guide to the best and worst news and information sites, according to the announcement. It features100 in-depth, critical reviews and a 5-star rating system."

Text Mining with an Info Professional

Information Professionals in the Text Mine By Kathryn A. Lavengood and Pam Kiser, Online (June 1)

Text mining - it's all about words - but let an information professional help you use the new sophisticated tools and build the queries.

"Yet text mining is frequently viewed as an information technology tool—build it, and people will use it. While there is a definite need for a solid technical infrastructure to support these tools, there is also a need for a semantic infrastructure that focuses on information quality and decision support. The information professional is ideally suited for this latter role."

Especially note these three key parts:

" We generally think of text mining as being used in one of three ways:

1. Seeing the big picture (clustering)
2. Finding answers to very specific questions (question answering)
3. Hypothesis generation (concept linkages) "

Using Date at Google

Google Makes Change to Daterange Syntax, ResearchBuzz (May 30)

Change in date stamping and retrieval at Google - "NOW, a Web page will be found on one date only — the date that it’s added to Google’s index. It doesn’t matter how many times it’s refreshed by Google’s spider, the only time it’ll appear in response to a daterange search is the date it was indexed."

Know Your Resources

Let’s Talk Metasearch, Federated Search, or Universal Search, ResourceShelf (May 16)

History (almost) of meta-search on the web - good, bad, and core message - metasearch can save time but you still need to know your resources.

"For many years, ResourceShelf has been talking about metasearch or, as some call it, federated search, single interface, or cross-database searching. In a nutshell, we’re talking about one search that will query multiple databases in a single query, dedupe results, sort (as desired by the end user; most likely by relevance), and offer post processing options. Perhaps the most important issue is database selection help; with technology coming online, that can be made easier. This is key because, in truth, most users just want results and care little where they are coming from. Resource selection can be and should be a key role for the info professional."

Fill in the Blank at Google

Google has updated its information page about Advanced Search
http://www.google.com/help/refinesearch.html

I don't remember seeing the Fill in the Blank Search before. Here Google says --"Sometimes the best way to ask a question is to get Google to 'fill in the blank' for you. You can do this by adding an asterisk "*" in the part of the sentence or question that you want filled in." and presents the parachute was invented by * as the example. Results are excellent

Linking into Invisible Web

Exposing the Invisible Web to Search Engines, by Raj Dash, Search Engine Journal (Apr 24)

Makes the point that much of the web is invisible and is likely growing. Makes suggestions to webmasters for making pages visible. Has good diagrams. Also, shows that social bookmarking and Wikipedia can help searchers find those pages (but ignores the issue of how time consuming that would be and how questionable the quality).

Google's Dominance

Is Google too big?, Stephen Abram, Stephen's LIghthouse (Apr 20) - Stephen sums up some usage figures about Google and other engines. In the US, 2 of every 3 searches are done at Google, and traffic to tavel, businsess, finance and much else (doesn't mention health) comes through the search engine. He suggests that librarians are quite partners to Google's expansion - Google Scholar links, Google search use. My view - Google is the largest search engine, and although it has flaws, it is better to use it well than poorly while also availing ourselves of alternatives. We haven't stopped using Windows because we think Microsoft is too commercial.

Problem with Search

Online Search: The Five Essential Questions by Deborah Richman, RedOrbit (Apr 12)

"Online search isn't passing muster. End users conduct their searches using the big engines, which lead them to appropriate information if they are lucky. They may discover other destinations where there's something better to search. They may find something good enough, without knowing what's been missed. Or they may be really dissatisfied with the hunt overall."

No solutions here - just worries and warnings. Too much reliance on keyword, too little structure, too much crawling, too little help. Seems to indicate that communities might be helpful, but how to find the right ones?

New Web Skills for Journalists

Researcher/Guide: Online Journalism Skills I Wish I'd Learned in School, Part 1 by Mac Slocum, E-Media Tidbits (Apr 11)

Journalist Mac Slocum wishes he had learned more about search skills and web tools in a formal way and recommends journalism schools add this to the curriculum. Might put this under "information literacy".

"These days, all journalism students should be introduced to research and organization techniques. Show them how to use a feed reader, show them how to stay on top of a specific trend via e-mail alerts and search feeds, show them how to develop source relationships through blogs, instantmessaging and e-mail."

Other skills that are important - how to generate traffic to a web site, and "leading and moderating communities".

Convera Study on Search Practices

Consumer Search Engines Leave Professionals at a Loss, says Convera® Survey, Press Release, Convera (Dec 19, 2006)

Convera, who is in the business of vertical search, surveyed 1,000 professionals on search habits, successes and failures. Searching is not as easy as it looks. Searchers aren't satisfied with results, they get lost or distracted, they don't use the advanced search and have little to no training.

" * A commanding 95 percent of professionals find Internet search engines an aid for conducting work, yet only 40 percent say they are very satisfied with the results.
* Only 21 percent feel that their search query is always understood.
* Less than 25 percent of professionals are very confident that when using popular Internet search engines they’ve looked everywhere to find answers."

Those surveyed indicated that they think using a specialty / vertical search engine would yield better content faster.

" * Nearly 90 percent of professionals believe that such search engines would offer more relevant content than popular Internet search engines.
* Eighty-six percent feel these tools would find information more quickly.
* And 85 percent believe they would offer access to content not indexed by popular search engines"

No Backwards Link at Live

Microsoft’s Live Search Shutsdown Advanced Search Queries, Andy Beal, Marketing Pilgrim (Mar 29)

Live Search no longer allows the backwards search - looking for pages that link to a given url. This option still appears in the Advanced Search but it doesn't work - you get a blank page - not even a message. Previously you could also do link: or linkdomain:. Supposedly Microsoft is working at restoring it.

Postscript: April 2 - inurl doesn't work either!

Microsoft must really want to annoy advanced searchers.

Researching the European Union

"Finding Facts: The European Union after 50 Years" by Adrian Janes, Freepint (Mar 20)

"This article attempts to sketch some of the background to the EU's development, point out the functions of some of the key institutions and above all indicate useful sources of information."

A search examined

'Murder,' She Googled Linda Rosencrance, Computerworld via PC World. (Mar 17)

"Google search history is evidence in trial of New Jersey woman accused of murdering her husband."

Examples given in this trial show some good search techniques.

"Melanie McGuire, 33, also did searches on Google and MSN for "undetectable poisons," "fatal digoxin levels," "instant poisons," "toxic insulin levels," "how to purchase guns illegally," how to find chloroform," "fatal insulin doses," "poisoning deaths," "where to purchase guns illegally," "gun laws in PA," "how to purchase guns in PA," and "where to purchase guns without a permit," according to Seymour's court testimony. The testimony can be viewed in this video clip from Court TV."

"how to" is a excellent stock-term phrase to use, and there are many good work combinations - "toxic insulin levels", "instant poisons".

The searches could be improved by using the state name - Pennsylvannia, searching the state site, and using other terms for guns. Eg - site:state.pa.us intitle:firearms

As to privacy, McGuire's activities were found out through the examination of the hard drive - and not from any logs provided by Google or MSN.

More about the use of the computer files in this article - Murder trial logs into files on computer, Home News Tribune Online (Mar 14)

"[Jennifer] Seymour explained to the jury how digital investigators can trace activity on a computer, including information the user has deleted, and information that identifies topics which have been searched.

She testified that she isolated searches conducted in the weeks leading up to the murder, and found the activity on inquiring about poisons, gun laws and ways to commit murder and suicide."

The lesson: make sure you use a very good computer file shredder if you really don't want to leave a trail.

Google's Filetype and Inurl

Google's filetype: Fixed by Greg Notess, Searchengineshowdown (Mar 9)

Can use filetype: at Google with and without terms. Why want to do a filetype:pdf alone? To get a count, but Greg says the counts are poor.

Not mentioned - you might want to combine filetype:pdf with a site or domain command.

Of interest - "Any URL that has a dot followed by something else can be found." Keep in mind that doesn't necessarily mean the domain. Eg this search for .bmp which has much different results from inurl:bmp

Date Search

Restricting Search Results to a Date Range, Google Operating System (March 11)

Refresher on why dates are poor in Google Web Search but good for blogs, news, books, and groups.

Intute Health and Life Sciences Tutorials

New Internet Tutorials for Health and Life Sciences, Intute (Feb 15)

Intute in the UK has released three new Internet tutorials for the Health and Life Sciences: Veterinary Medicine , Biosciences, Health and Social Care. Although created for students and educators in the UK, these are always very good tours of resources and have good advice on evaluating what you find.

Search Engine Overlap

Page Found at 3 or 6: Not Google , Search Engine Showdown (Feb 14)

Greg Notess has found a Canadian university page that has been on the Web for four years that Google hasn't indexed but other have - proving once again - don't rely on one search engine.

Link Command

Google Releases New Link Reporting Tools, Search Engine Land (Feb 5)

Google has finally improved its link command to see who is linking to a site but only for registered webmasters. If you have a site and want to analyze who links to you, register here.
Danny Sullivan describes what you will be able to do.

In a comment to this post, Gary Price notes that there is no change for researchers who are using link: for the backwards search. Searchers will be better off using Live and Yahoo. (<b>New Tools for Webmasters from Google)

Selecting Search Terms

Unlocking Keywords to Ensure Effective E-Discovery By Craig Ball, Law Technology News (January 29, 2007)

Author warns that keyword searching isn't enough in legal research: textual information might not be stored as text (image instead), or might be buried deep beyond the reach of the search tool.

Also, one word or one version is not sufficient - consider variants, misspellings, proximity, synonyms and noise words (occur so frequently as to lose usefulness)

Closes with good advice: "Effective keyword searching demands more than many imagine. You don't have to put every synonym and aberrant spelling on your keyword list, but you need to appreciate the limits of text search and balance the risk of missing the mark against the burden of grabbing everything and the kitchen sink. The very best results emerge from an iterative process: revisiting potentially responsive data using refined and expanded search terms."

Mentioned in TVC Alert Jan 30

One-Word Search Queries

Most people use 2 word phrases in search engines according to RankStat.com (Jan 19, 2007)

New figures from One-Stat on how many words people use in search queries.

1 word - 13.48
2 words - 28.38
3 words - 27.15
4 words - 16.42

But in July 2006 1 word was 11.43% and 2 to 4 words were very similar to December figures.

1 word - 11.43
2 words - 28.91
3 words - 27.85
4 words - 17.11

Searcher habits have probably stabilized. There are situations where 1 word is all that a searcher needs, and in others it's not a bad opening move since several search engines (Ask, Live, Yahoo are examples) are good at offering suggestions for refinement.

Less people use 1 word phrase in search engines according to OneStat.com (July 24, 2006)

Auto-corrections

Disclosing When Queries Are Autocorrected Search Engine Land (Jan 16)

Search engines that automatically correct your spelling are ok as long as they tell you they have done it and how to override it. Google doesn't seem to do that, although Yahoo does. Entry also explains auto-stemming at Google.

Google Link Command

A Google Link Command that Returns Perfect Data, SEOMoz Blog (Jan 4)

Link command has never worked properly in Google Web search, but it appears to be good in blog search.

Query terms for a topic

Where do good query terms come from?

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

From Abstract:

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

Mentioned in Resourceshelf (Dec 22)

Web Search Alert

Now that I've discovered Slideshare, I have used it to put up the slides from a presentation I did to librarians and interested others in Toronto at a CASLIS meeting. The topic was the current state of web search. There has been very little change in web search as we think of it at Google and Yahoo (with the notable exception of the new interface for Live.com and improvements at Ask.com and Exalead.com). But there are huge changes arising from social search - social bookmarking especially, and the availability of online video, and growth in academic / scholarly tools. The links do work in this presentation - watch for the pointing arrow and finger. Unfortunately, the speaker notes are gone.

Internet Librarian 2006

Presentations from Internet Librarian 2006 are available.

Greg Notess did several sessions all of them listed on his 2006 Presentations page.

+ New Search Strategies - good walkthough use of advanced syntax for limiting search to site, url, domain etc.
+ Comparing Book Engines - Amazon (and A9), Google, Open Content, Open Web (Project Gutenberg, Online Books), publisher sites.
+ Teaching Web Search Skills

More presentations by others may appear over the next few days.

Advanced Search Techniques

Long List of Link Searches by David Temple, in seomoz.org (Oct 27) - describes types of searches one can do to dig more deeply for information. The example is a project for a client to see who else is in the "snowboard equipment" business. Tactics used include fielded search at search engines (advanced operators), using stock terms like directory or catalog, searching blogs, and looking for input pages.

Instructional web videos

Internet Librarian 2007: Creating Online Tutorials in Less that 30 Minutes, Cindy Chick, LawLibTech (Oct 22) - recommends screencasting for creating online tutorials.

"I've created some instructional web videos, but I wanted to learn more about the process. Greg's session didn't disappoint. By the way, you'll find much of the information from the handout, and a lot of other good stuff on Greg's new LibCasting - Screencasting and Libraries blog."

Using Google Scholar

Exploring the scholarly neighborhood byLuiz Barroso, Google Blog (Aug 22) - tips on making more use of Related in Google Scholar to become acquainted with a topic.

Mentioned in the excellent Internet Resources Newsletter - Oct / Nov 2006.

Internet Librarian 2006

Internet Librarian 2006 began on October 23. Follow along through the InfoToday blog. Good to watch some of the bloggers on this list too.

Search Trends

What People are Searching For Right Now, Pandia (Oct) -- "Using search for analyzing social and cultural trends" - Google Zeitgeist, Yahoo Buzz, folksonomies, site popularity - more.

LinkFromDomain at Live

Live Search adds LinkfromDomain operator at Pandia (Oct 17)

Use linkfromdomain at Live.com to find what sites a particular domain links to. Of course, linkdomain lists what sites link to that domain.

Also described by Danny Sullivan - Windows Live Search Adds linkfromdomain Command- describes the linkdomain commands plus inanchor and site.

Search Behaviour

Long Tails and Short Queries - An Interview with Amanda Spink, Boxes and Arrows (Oct 17) -- Amanda Spink did some early research into searcher behaviour using data from the Excite search engine. Ten years ago people used very few terms, did not vary the query, and looked at just the first 10 to 20 results. Spink says that this has not changed much.

"We are seeing a growth in more complex search behaviors. More people are searching for information using more than one search. This might mean repeat searches of the same query over time or modifying the queries in successive searches over time. Many people are multitasking or searching for information on more than one topic during a search session. People’s information needs are often quite complex in their home and work environments."

She feels that it would be better if search engines had larger input areas so that searchers would feel they have more room to use more terms. People do best with terms if they have had a chance to talk with another person first.

"Stimulating users to talk with someone or thing (agent) about their information problem helps generate terms and look at the results for additional terms."

Book Review: Librarian's Internet Survival Guide

"The Librarian's Internet Survival Guide: Strategies for the High-tech Reference Desk, 2nd Edition", Written by Irene E. McDermott. Reviewed by Adrian Janes. FreePint (Oct 16)

"... the emphasis is on information sources tested by author Irene McDermott's own experience as a reference librarian. The book has several chapters on the technical side, but these are jargon-free and similarly rooted in working needs."

Book Review: Teaching Web Search Skills

Teaching People to Search Like Pros, by Chris Sherman, SearchDay (Oct 17)

Reviews Teaching Web Search Skills By Greg R. Notess (Information Today, $29.50)

"Teaching Web Search Skills should be required reading for anyone who teaches others to search, no matter how experienced or skilled they may be. The combination of fundamental knowledge and dozens of anecdotes and techniques based on years of experience that Greg has accumulated makes the book a great read."

Web Site Stats

A List of Every Website Statistic Publicly Available, SEOMoz.org, Oct 11 - finding out all that you would ever want to know about a site from ownership, rankings, subscriptions (if a blog/feed), and pages indexed at various engines. Searchers can use these techniques to validate a site.

Searching with accents

Searching Google for words with accents, Pandia (Sep 25)

The example given is how can you search for pages with the accent on México and ignore those without. It's next to impossible. Google tends to find both. You can use + (eg +México) which helps somewhat but there will be other factors such as the google search sitee (eg google.es vs google.com), language of the google home page, the IP number, and whether personalized Google is on.

"This is all part of the process towards personalized results, where Google and other search engines take the personal interests or social or cultural context of searches into consideration."

Social Information Foraging

Social Information Foraging and Collaborative Search Ed H. Chi, Peter Pirolli, Palo Alto Research Center

"In this article, we outline several explorations on models of social information foraging, and how some of these ideas might impact social search engines. We will touch upon general results concerning the costs and benefits of
cooperative foraging, the effects of group diversity, and patterns of social structuring that are correlated with innovative discovery."

Of interest -- "We surmise that new social foraging tools could mediate some of these interference costs, focusing users’ interactions to enriched information patches, thus enabling larger groups of users to collaborate with each other. Web technologies such as Wiki, Blogs, and Collaborative Tagging might change the scaling effects, enabling larger groups to work more effectively on the web."

Book: Teaching Web Search Skills

Information Today, Inc. Announces Publication of Teaching Web Search Skills

"Information Today, Inc. (ITI) has announced the publication of Teaching Web Search Skills: Techniques and Strategies of Top Trainers, by leading trainer and search guru Greg R. Notess."

Google info on url

Changes in URL Queries, Matt Cutts, Gadgets, Google, and SEO (Sep 18) -- To get information about a url through Google, you must now use the prefix info:

This shows description, cache, link to, link from, anchor text. Example: info:www.websearchguide.ca

Fun with Google

55 Ways to Have Fun with Google from Philipp Lenssen, author of Google Blogscoped. Buy the print copy or download a free copy in either PDF or DOC (228 pages).

"In this book, you’ll find Google-related games, cartoons, oddities, tips, stories and everything else that’s fun. Reading it, you won’t be the same searcher as before! "

Phillip Lenssen was the creator of the Google Image quiz - guess the search terms - which is mentioned in Chapter 3.

Using Advanced Search

It’s Not Rocket Science: Making Sense of Scientific Evidence By Paul Barron, LLRX (Aug 2006)

"The purpose of this article is to review a search process using advanced search query features in Google, Yahoo, and other search tools to find publicly accessible Web-based information on toxic substances and the law and, more specifically, the reliability of scientific evidence about toxic substances. Search tools that perform better with specific topics are searched using queries related to “sick building syndrome.” "

Search and the Popular Site

Surprising Search Patterns "
A new study questions the common assumption that search engines control the hierarchy of the Internet." By Kate Greene, Technology Review (Aug 18)

The belief the traffic drives popularity and therefore top ranked sites and that as a result there is a "googlearchy" of sites is seriously questioned in a study done at University of Indiana in Bloomington. It showed that typical Web use was a mix of search and surf and that people do find the less popular, trafficked sites. They do so because they use tend to use more complex queries. Findings are tentative.

INtute Virtual Training Suite Announcements

Intute in the UK (previously RDN) has announced new editions of Web research tutorials in their virtual training suite :

+ Internet Social Worker
+ Internet for Social Policy
+ Internet Economist
+ Internet for Education

"The tutorials recommend key Internet resources for education and research; offer advice on Internet searching, with improved interactive exercises; and have a new section called "Success Stories" to illustrate how the Internet can be used effectively to support education and research in a variety of scenarios ... "

The Intute tutorials are excellent.

Search Behaviour Studies

Information Research July 2006 has some articles of interest related to web searching.

Fast surfing for availability or deep diving into quality - motivation and information seeking among middle and high school students, Jannica Heinström -- found "Students with a surface approach prioritized easily available sources, deep students were aware of quality aspects, and strategic students organized and structured their searches."

Scholarly use of information: graduate students' information seeking behaviour by Carole George, Alice Bright, Terry Hurlbert, Erika C. Linke, Gloriana St. Clair and Joan Stein -- Students look to their professors first . Of course "The Internet plays a major role, although students continue to use print resources. Convenience, lack of sophistication in finding and using resources and course requirements affect their information behaviour."

Google Newsletter

Google put the camera on librarians in its July newsletter. It has created a short movie on stories told by librarians about ways to use Google more productively and supplemented by text . There is also a new newsletter for teacher librarians. At least Google recognizes their importance: "Google recognizes the central role teachers play in breaking down the barriers between people and information, and we support educators who work each day to empower their students and expand the frontiers of human knowledge."

Webinar on Deep Web

Recording: "Invisible Web: How to Move Beyond the First Search Result" by Dan Balzer, Dennis O'Connor and Carl Heine

"This recorded webcast session led by the 21st Century Information Fluency Project unpacks the "invisible web". We look at core concepts for helping searchers reach beyond the first search engine result, explore ways to teach the invisible web in the classroom and library, and use new game-based approaches that teach 21st century search skills to today's learners."

Recording is available through Learning Times. [Subscription required.] Webinar is done using Elluminate. It's quite good. Recommended especially for people who are training others in web searching.

Google US Government

Google Government Search, Now With State Filtering, ResearchBuzz (July 2) - tips on filtering searches by state using inurl at the new Google US Government search engine .

Internet Detective is Back

Internet Detective is back and we're glad.

"Internet Detective, a free online tutorial designed to help students
develop the critical thinking required for their Internet research, is
being launched on the Web on June 13th in the RDN Virtual Training Suite
at: http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/detective/

This tutorial is directed to new university students of all subjects, but will be useful to everyone who is using the Internet for academic research where evaluating quality of information is especially important.

This is a British project, "developed by staff from ILRT at the University of Bristol and the Manchester Metropolitan University "

Exploratory Search

Exploratory Search Interfaces: Categorization, Clustering and Beyond -- "
Report on the XSI 2005 Workshop at the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory, University of Maryland"

"Search engines, bibliographic databases and digital libraries provide adequate support for users whose information needs are well-defined. However, they do not work well in situations where users lack the knowledge or contextual awareness to formulate queries or navigate complex information spaces. ... In situations where information needs are vague or evolving users generally have developed coping strategies to compensate [1,2,5]. For example, they submit a tentative query that retrieves documents and browse from there, dependent solely on their ability to interpret contextual cues and navigate between documents. In short, they explore available information, selectively seeking and passively obtaining cues about where next steps lie. The goal of information exploration is the refinement of a vague information need that leads, through interaction with information objects and information resources, to a more thorough understanding of the problem. Searchers may benefit from interfaces that provide additional support, for example by enabling grouping of results and/or guided discovery processes [3,4,6]. Researchers from communities such as information retrieval, user interface design, visualization and library sciences have been working for some time on techniques to support such exploratory searches."

Fun with Google

55 Ways to have fun with Google, Googling Google (June 1)

New book about using Google - 55 Ways to Have Fun with Google by Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped.

Search Queries Getting Longer

Yahoo: 'Searches more sophisticated and specific', Digital Micro-Market Blog (May 18) - Claims that searchers at Yahoo are more sophisticated based on the fact that words in a query are now 3.3 on average.

"The average search query length was 1.2 words in 1998, 2.5 words in 2004, and is now 3.3 words:"

Refers to a study on done at Rutgers University and Queen's College which found that longer queries brought higher user satisfaction. (2003)

"Results show that the specific technique results in longer queries than a standard query elicitation technique, that this technique is indeed usable, that the technique results in increased user satisfaction with the search, and that query length is positively correlated with user satisfaction with the search."

Tracking Down Tags

Meta-Search by Tag or Site URL, ResearchBuzz (May 17) - tips on tagging from one of the Net's best searchers. Tara Calishain has added following up on tage in her bag of tricks. The new tool is Tagground . "Currently it searches a variety of tagging sites, including digg, del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia, and RawSugar. You can search Tagground by tag but the cool thing is to search by URL. That way you can see where a particular site is being tagged and better, what words it's being tagged with."

This strategy would appeal more to the researcher than the casual user or for reference desk work. And the person would have to have some tolerance for the junk that accumulates on the Web. A search for ResearchBuzz at Tagground shows such meaningless tags as blog, news, cool, wissen. A few are relevant but still not especially useful - search engines, reference, search engine blogs.

Search Behaviour in the UK

British study of search practices, by Lars Iselid, Internetbrus via Pandia Search (May 2)

"As many as 20 percent of respondents use four or more search engines, a British study reports."

"As many as 68 percent of the respondents use more than two keywords in their queries. Of these 40 percent use three keywords."

Searcher Surge

Think Like a Searcher by Barbara Quint, Searcher (May 2006) - Quint considers a recent statistic that online searches have jumped 55 percent -- "That means an increase from a per-searcher average of around 16 searches a month to some 25 searches a month or from approximately one search every 2 days to close to one search a day." It's great that people can have access to the information, but how well are they searching and assessing what they find? There are shoals of hoaxes and misinformation. But as well, there are techniques, and how is the amateur untrained searcher to learn about those?

Relevancy of search results

Is Google Search More Relevant Or Is There A Brand Factor?, by Barry Schwartz, SEW Blog (Apr 26) - Search behaviour was discussed in a panel at the SES conference in Toronto. Results are fuzzy but it may be that perception makes Google's results seem relevant to searchers, whereas they could do just as well at Yahoo or MSN.

Earth Day Searches

Earth Day Piques Interest in Environment-Related Searches by Enid Burns, Clickz (Apr 21) -- People at AOL Search have been thinking about the environment. "The top searched-for terms on the portal include: recycling, global warming, endangered species and solar power. Hybrid cars came in as the fifth-highest searched for environmental term." People have also been looking for sites about earth day such as earthday.net.

Studies into Searcher Behaviour

Searcher Behavior Research Update by Chris Sherman, SearchDay (Apr 11) - The new iProspect Search Engine User Behavior Study shows that searchers are becoming a bit more dexterous in searching.

+ more look beyond the first page of 10. "62% of search engine users click on a search result within the first page of results, and a full 90% of users click on a result within the first three pages of search results." In 2002 the figures were 48% and 81%.

+ on finding nothing on the first search 41% will change engines or change search terms. It used to be 28%.

+ but of those more will stay at the same engine and change the search terms. 82% vs 68%.

In the UK Harvest Digital examined searcher behaviour and found many more using more than one search engine. (Only 24% said they used only one, and 20% used more than 4.) UK searchers might be more skeptical of the results: "Just 22% of users reported that they were confident that search engines would always give them the information that they needed."

Credibility of Web Searches

Project to make Internet searches more credible UWNews.org (Mar 15) - Research group at the University of Washington working with Syracuse University is looking at ways to evaluate the credibility of websites and search results.

"... to create what they are calling the "Credibility Commons." The Commons is envisioned as a place where researchers can come together to develop ideas for improving the credibility of Internet searches and Web information. It is also envisioned as a location for making different Web search tools and collections available to the public to raise awareness regarding issues of credibility of the information that is retrieved."

Search Engines Use Statistics in the UK

Brits regularly use more than one search engine- survey, NetImperative (Apr 4) - An online marketing agency in the UK surveyed people who had been online three years or more. Most (94%) used Google, while around 40% each used Yahoo (40%), Ask (39%) and MSN (37%).

"Only a quarter of people used just one search engine exclusively, while most users habitually used more than one search engine and a fifth of respondents used four or more search engines regularly."

Most people (69%) feel they find what they want "most of the time", but only 22% say they always find what they want. "More than two-thirds (68%) of users attributed this to a fault in their behaviour, thinking they are not using the correct search terms or believing the information they are looking for is too specialist. "

Some respondents were suspicious of advertisers. About a quarter felt results were skewed because advertisers pay to show up at the top.

Searchers are using more terms. More than two thirds say they use at least 3 words most of the time.

US Legal Research on the Web

The People’s Law: Free Legal Help and Legal Research on the Web by Carol Ebbinghouse, Searcher (April 2006) - finds that free legal resources in the United States are getting better. However, use them warily and carefully.

Researching Public Records

The Art of Public Records Research. Genie Tyburski, Virtual Chase (Mar 2006) -- "This article explains important differences between public records, public information and private information. It introduces select public records databases and search techniques. It would take a book to cover all worthwhile sources." Public records are those in the U.S. Canadian researchers can get ideas on types of resources to look for in Canada.

Google Search Tips

10 tips to improve your Googling by Peter Grad, Ottawa Citizen (Mar 2) - 10 tips on how to use Google on searches. The two tips concerning telephone numbers apply to numbers in the United States.

Using Search History at Search Engines

Tracking Your Search History, by Greg Notess, Online (March 2006) -- Search engines have been adding personal search features over the past 12 to 18 months. Ask.com has Mystuff (renamed from MyJeeves), Yahoo has MyWeb2.0 (an upgrade from MyWeb), Google introduced Personalized Search, and A9 combines the history tracker with bookmarking and notes. They vary in capabilities.

Notess reviews these noting their idiosyncracies. He found Google and Yahoo buggy and awkward - and I agree. I think Yahoo has recently added the My Search History to My Web 2.0 - although it could also be that it was very well hidden. The search history is not searchable and it only keeps clicked-on links - not all that useful.

A9 requires the toolbar but it's much easier to use and keeps records of all searches, regardless of search engine.

I have had need to check back on searches from time to time and not one of these tools has helped me.
- A9 has too much history - though of the three I prefer it because it does tell me what I tried.
- Yahoo's search history can't be searched.
- Google has to be turned on and when I needed it, it must have been turned off. I will turn on Google History on particular research projects when I want to run several different searches, bookmark some discoveries, and keep track of it all.

Notess is not a great fan of any of these either, in part because he uses several engines. He also warns of privacy concerns and recommends not using this where computers are shared or there is a highly secured office environment.

About Trust

Second issue of Google Librarian concerns trust - How Does Google Determine Which Web Sites Are the Most "Trusted"? by Matt Cutts at Google; and Beyond Algorithms: A Librarian's Guide to Finding Web Sites You Can Trust by Karen G. Schneider, Director, Librarians' Internet Index.

Judging a Page by its Colours

Web users judge sites in the blink of an eye - Potential readers can make snap decisions in just 50 milliseconds - Michael Hopkin, Nature.com (Jan 13)

"A study by researchers in Canada has shown that the snap decisions Internet users make about the quality of a web page have a lasting impact on their opinions."

Yahoo Search Tips

Yahoo Hacks by Paul Bausch, CNet (Jan 2006)

Fine-tune Yahoo Web search queries covers the basics of using Yahoo meta words (site, intitle, inurl, link, hostname) and some of the main search shortcuts.

Personalize, track, and share the Web is a useful orientation to using Yahoo's MyWeb2 for saving and sharing pages.

Compare Yahoo and Google search results points people to Twingine, and to a graphical comparison done by Christian Langreiter. Article doesn't mention Dogpile.

Yagoohoogle, which used to be very good at this, seems to have died.

Legal Research

Yes, Virginia, Everything is available on the Web for free, by Lyn Warmath, Virginia Lawyer (Dec 2005)

It's not time to give up books yet for legal research. Article looks at what to expect from the free web and for for-fee services and where the weaknesses are.

December issue of Virginia Lawyer has several articles on research. Table of contents is at http://www.vsb.org/publications/valawyer/dec05/index.html

Doing research on the Web

"It's not rocket science": Making sense of scientific evidence, by Paul Barron, Virginia Lawyer (Dec 2005)

"This article will review a search process using advanced search query features in Google, (see figure 1) Yahoo and other search tools to find publicly accessible Web-based information on toxic substances and the law and the reliability of
scientific evidence about toxic substances. Search tools that perform better with specific topics are searched using queries related to “sick building syndrome.”

Also uses and comments on Scirus, OAIster, and PubMed.

Mentioned in TVC Alert Jan 11.

Doing A Criminal Check

The Research Reality Check by Genie Tyburski, Search Snippets in Law Office Computing (Jan)

Sometimes the information is not to be had. Tyburski tells a fascinating story about doing research as part of a criminal check in the US on a witness for the opposing side. Along the way she mentions the sources she used and the techniques.

Digital Overload

Too heavy on my mind - Overload lurks as information flows so fast, so easily - By Anick Jesdanun, Associated Press via Rocky Mountain News (December 24, 2005)

Amount of digital information available over the Internet is expanding exponentially through scanned books, television broadcasts, radio programs - all of it contributing to information overload. What will we do? This article suggests that part of the solution may be in virtual communities to help sift out the best, but also recognizes that research skills will be essential.

"Del.icio.us, Flickr and several newer services also support tagging, the ability to organize items by keywords. Even more important will be good research skills - infoliteracy. That means knowing where and how to look, and evaluating what you get back."

Also lists several book scanning projects.

Book Reviews of How-To Search Books

A Compilation How-To Search Book Reviews by Chris Sherman, Searchday (Dec 21) - last in a series of articles about books on web searching. This set lists reviews about books that were for subject-specific searching - several titles from the Super Searcher series.

Six Reasons to Like Tags

Tara Calishain comes out in favour of tagging - love it. Why I Love Tagging in Research Buzz (Nov 3) There are six good reasons. Concludes - "Tagging is not perfect. Absolutely not. Tagging is not the only searching method. I believe it is complementary to other searching methods, like full-text searching. Tagging is not invulnerable to spammers, though there are aspects of it that make it easier to avoid spammers. "

LC subject headings are magic words

Amazing, Magic Searches! By Becky Kornegay, Heidi Buchanan, & Hiddy Morgan, LIbrary Journal (November 1, 2005)

"Subdivisions combine the precision of the cataloger with the freewheeling style of a Googler"

Who, but librarians, would know that the Library of Congress subject headings and subdivisions could be used as powerful search terms in Web searches? These three librarians at Hunter Library, Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, NC, have developed a starter list of 25 sub-divisions from LC that cover many of the topics that come up.

"Subdivisions perform magic in a library catalog, allowing librarians to finesse their keyword searches in ways that astonish amateurs. They replace the sometimes disparate strings of keywords searchers use to express the nuances of their questions. Sometimes they identify the format of a book’s content: diaries, longitudinal studies, pictorial works. They put spin on a subject—psychological aspects, for example. At their most powerful, they can define and specify relationships between topics. For instance, if you wanted to find a book about how librarians are viewed by the public, you would use librarians–public opinion. If you wanted to find books about the views of librarians, you would use librarians–attitudes. Who knew?"

Finesse is the operative word in web searching, and terms used in these subdivisions can help in arriving at better keywords that take into consideration types of studies, formats, and subject aspects.

The Great Debate about the Perfect Search

On Library Card Catalogs, OPACs, The Perfect Search & Teaching Searchers by Gary Price, SEW Blog (Oct 5)

This seems to be a riff on a piece by Danny Sullivan on - More On Query Refinement, The Human Scale Problem & Creating The Search Dialog that compared searching a card catalog with a full-index of all the books and argued for algorithm search by keyword. Ask Jeeves is part of this because it changed from the Knowledge Base of the old Jeeves to the algo search of the new Jeeves (who also tries to deliver Smart Answers). Supposedly the problem with directories and pre-selected sites is scalability. Gary Price disagrees.

"First, while the human-edited model might have scalability issues, it doesn't mean that these types of tools (for example, general web directories) from non-commercial organizations are now, no less valuable to many searchers."

And Price follows up with defence of catalogs, and more generally, being able to find and use specialty databases.

It's a great debate: using a universal search engine vs being selective (ie being sufficiently info literate to seek out the specialty sites.)

Price says, "Sure, the power searcher will have the skills to create a great search strategy from the outset and then refine as needed using the right tools. However, to this point, the typical open web searcher doesn't do anything like this and likely doesn't even know that have some of the tools to do it. Who is going to show them?"

Read the debate and all the links to supporting materials.

Searching Inventively

Answers in Unusual Places by Genie Tyburski, Law Office Computing ( ) - explores ways a researcher can use eBay, Amazon, and other shopping sites for purposes other than shopping. There is often information about products - the code, the description, the specifications. Tyburski also described how she used A9 and Amazon to get some thoughts and quotes about information overload. As always - a good account of a search process.

Internet Librarian 2005

Presentations from the Internet Librarian Conference 2005 are coming online.

Of interest:

+ Tips for keeping up by panel of Gary Price, Genie Tyburski, and Steven Cohen. Stephen Cohen talked How RSS Has Changed My Life and How it Could Benefit Yours As Well
+ Social Software & Sites for PLs with Jessamyn West on Flickr, Tagging and the F-Word.
+ Taxonomy for Metadata & Information Architecture - Alice Redman-Neal, Access Innovations.
+ Web WIzard's Cool Tools - short list by 4 wizards.
+ Developing Information Literacy Tutorials Online
+ Competitive Intelligence (CI) Strategies, Services, Skills, & Sources
+ Medical Search Tips by Vicky Duncan and Sandra Kendall from universities in Canada. Compares Google Scholar to PubMed, shows Cochrane Consumer and other consumer heath sites. [Powerpoint]
+ Personal Knowledge Management by Bob Berkman. Handout pdf

Study of Web Searching by Youth

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

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

Web Search Books

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

A few words go a long way

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

Book - Google Power

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

Go Beyond Search Engines

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

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

Article was mentioned in TVC Alert (Oct 4).

Finding Experts

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

Yahoo Link and Linkdomain

Yahoo! Link Command More Accurate Says Tim Mayer Search Engine Roundtable (Sept 2) - Yahoo made some changes to the link commands in response to criticism.

Lars Våge explains how to use link and linkdomain in this article - Link search with Yahoo's linkdomain

Information Literarcy

Shirl Kennedy at ResourceShelf recommends the 21st Century Information Fluency Project from the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy as a learning tool about Information Literacy.

"Digital Information Fluency (DIF) is the ability to find, evaluate and use digital information effectively, efficiently and ethically. DIF involves knowing how digital information is different from print information; having the skills to use specialized tools for finding digital information; and developing the dispositions needed in the digital information environment. As teachers and librarians develop these skills and teach them to students, students will become better equipped to achieve their information needs."

Background Checks

Employer background checks: Protection or violation? by Mark Terry, Bankrate.com (Mentioned in TVC ALert) (Aug 22)

Article describes the types of background checks and employer in the United States and conduct on a potential employee and identifies the sources. Among them: Criminal records (not online), Department of Motor Vehicles, Civil court records, worker's compensation, credit history.

SLA 2005 Conference - view from the West

SLA Western Canada Chapter's Summer issue of Wired West has several articles about sessions at the SLA 2005 Conference.

Of interest to searchers:
+ Gary Price - The Newest and the Best from One Who Knows - Arden Matheson - update on search tools
+ Researching Listed & Private Companies Globally: A Guide & Model - Jane Moxon - about a pre-conference course.
+ Mining the New Web for Information - By Christina Zeller - Mary Ellen Bates session about RSS and Weblogs and other newish things.
+ Canadian Pharmaceutical Information Sources: Find Information for a Small Market - Sandra Wong - session by Ms. Maude Lethiecq-Normand from Pfizer Canada.

Book: Google Power

Chris Sherman's New Book, Google Power, is Now Available by Gary Price, SEW Blog (Jul 21) - comments from Gary Price about his colleague's new book - Google Power.

Bates shows how to search

Thinking Outside the Search Box by Mary Ellen Bates, SearchDay (Jul 27) - Super sleuth Mary Ellen Bates worked through a search on trends in the UK market for Internet phones using many different Web resources.

Search Case

Thinking Outside the Search Box by Mary Ellen Bates, SearchDay (July 27) - uses a variety of search approaches and tools to find informatin on VOIP. Good example of a search task.

Google Power - book review

Become a Google Power Searcher by Shari Thurow, Clickz (jul 18) - very positive review of Chris Sherman's new book, Google Power

"Whether you're new to using Google or a seasoned search professional, Google Power is an essential addition to your search library. In his book, Chris Sherman not only shows you how to become a better searcher, he also provides valuable information for preparing your site for Google visibility."

Searchers found to be using s"emantic maps"

Keeping an Eye on Google by Chris Sherman, SearchDay (July 5) - highlights from a new report by Enquiro, Did-It and Eyetools about how searchers react to the display of search results at Google.

"One of the most interesting parts of the report describes "semantic mapping ..." -- "The idea behind semantic mapping is that when we search, we're not just looking for the "best" results, but rather the best match between an online destination and the concept we have in our minds. This goes far beyond the notion of larding a page with keywords or key phrases that match search queries."

Tests for Internet IQ

New Test would measure students' Web wisdom AP Via Globe and Mail (July 1) - Cal State in the US has developed a test to evaluate Internet IQ that goes looks at critical thinking skills.

"That's why Cal State and a number of other colleges are working with ETS to create a test to evaluate Internet intelligence, measuring whether students can locate and verify reliable on-line information and whether they know how to properly use and credit the material."

"Cal State is the lead institution in a consortium which includes UCLA, the University of Louisville, the California Community College System, the University of North Alabama, the University of Texas System and the University of Washington."

Google Answers

"An Insider's View of Google Answers" By David Sarokin, Freepint (Jun 30)

"In truth, Google Answers (GA) is one of Google's lesser-known, and lesser-used services. And that's a shame really, because it's one of the great tools available on the internet. " ... "Google Answers is more than a Q&A service, however. It's quite an intriguing web community in its own right."

Online Search Course

"Promoting Information and Search Skills" By Jean Bedord, Freepint (Jun 30) -- Jean Bedord teaches an online course on use of commercial databases (Dialog, Factiva, and Lexis-Nexis) through the graduate school of Library and Information Science at San Jose State University. She describes the methods (Blackboard for lecture notes and communication and WebEx for the realtime vendor presentations) and the challenges in teaching search techniques online. Comments on the aspects of search that students find most difficult - using alternate words, appreciating the variety and number of sources, logic errors vs syntax errors.

How we scan

I Love to Search but Words Get in the Way By Gord Hotchkiss, Search Engine Guide - June 27, 2005 -- Describes what people do when scanning results:

"Based on these two studies, here's what seems to happen. The eye looks for a visual cue, generally the phrase we just searched for, in the title. Starting on the top of page on the left hand side, we start scanning down the page in an "F" pattern. While we're focused on the visual cue, our peripheral vision is open to the appearance of words that might match our semantic map. Even though we didn't search for any of these words explicitly, their appearance in the title and description has a strong implicit impact on which link we start reading. When there seems to be a match based on a quick scan including both where our eyes are fixated and the extra detail picked up by our peripheral vision, we switch to more traditional reading behavior, reading first the title and then the description from left to right. This lateral activity creates the horizontal arms of the "F"."

MSN Search supports intitle:

In MSN Search Gets Neural Net/RankNet Technology & (Potentially) Awesome New Search Commands, Danny Sullivan describes new search operator now available at MSN mainly for field searching.

+ inanchor: to look for words in the text of a link. Can be handy to find more relevant pages. Google has used those words for ranking results. But Sullivan couldn't make it work at MSN and neither can I.

+ intitle: finally a title search. But MSN didn't add the option to its Search Builder. How's a new person to know? Seems to have full function - will look for word or phrase in the title as in intitle:websearchguide or intitle:"resource shelf". Can OR terms also -- intitle:("resource body" OR "resource shelf").

+ inurl: look for parts of a url. For example -- intitle:msn site:searchenginewatch.com inurl:blog

+ filetype: to limit search to particular document types -- filetype:pdf site:gov.on.ca tourism. Recognizes pdf, doc, ppt, xls but not xml, rss, swf.

+ contains: a method for finding pages that link to a particular file type, most useful for finding audio and video content. For example, intitle:iraq contains:ram audio - will find pages with audio excerpts or feeds. But where's the list of recognized file types? Course, the MSN example is to search for pages that link to a wma file - Windows Media Audio.

Operators are described on this MSN Sympatico Search Help page.

Yahoo and the Extreme Searcher

Yahoo to the Max BY Chris Sherman, SearchDay (June 21) - reviews new book by Ran Hock, Yahoo to the Max - An Extreme Searcher Guide.

"Yahoo to the Max continues in the tradition of taking a careful, thoughtful look at the huge amount of content and the multitude of services and tools available at Yahoo."

Searching Paths at Yahoo

Some tips from Michael Fagan for using syntax at Yahoo to limit a search to sites -- Puzzlepieces – yahoo site searching syntax (May 19) Especially good for showing how to specify a path to a particular folder - combine site search with inurl -- site:company.com inurl:foldername

RDN Tutorials for Adult Learning

Resource Discovery Network has introduced Tutorials for Adult & Community Learning for using the Internet for research. The colourful new page features Internet for Arts and Crafts, Digital Photography, Gardening, Health and Well Being, and Job Searching.

"These tutorials will take you on a tour of the best of the Web and help you develop your Internet search skills. The "Success Stories" offer inspiration and ideas for using the Internet in new and creative ways."

RDN has many more tutorials in fields of Social Science, Engineering, Education, Humanities, Health and Life Science.

Natural Language vs Structured Search

ANALYSIS: The way we navigate data may be changing by David Mort in Research Information (Mar / April 2005)

For many years most trained information professionals preferred a "structured searching model" using controlled vocabularly and boolean constructions. New studies done by IRN Research start to show a shift.

"According to the latest research, 60 per cent of librarians and information specialists still opt for some form of structured search or Boolean search as their preferred search model but a relatively high percentage - 51 per cent - also accept that natural language searching could play a role in many searches. And, this time, almost a quarter of those interviewed - 23 per cent - highlighted natural language searching as their preferred searching choice."

Of course, end users are overwhelmingly in favour of natural language searching, and may turn to structured searches if natural language fails.

Article lists the perceived weaknesses and strengths of natural language searching; basically natural language may bring up irrelevant results, but when there is new terminology involved, natural language may be the only way.

Title tags

Terrific Title Tag Tips by Erik Dafforn, HighRankings.com (May 11) in advising people in the practice of title tags on documents reveals some details about search engine practices.

+ Google truncates title at around 64 characters and indicates the remainder with elipsis ....
+ MSN might be around 69
+ Yahoo is longer at 90, but "... sometimes uses its own directory to generate results data" - that might explain results that appear with no matching words.

Good advice in the article about use and placement of phrases.

Searching for source

Thinking About Where Information Lives - by Rita Vine, Sitelines (May 12) - searchers will think to search by topic, but will they consider source and know how to find it?

"For example, if you're looking for trends in soft drink consumption in Europe, and you think about type rather than topic, you might think about finding associations that are concerned with the topic, or journal articles on the topic, or government starter sites that link to European industry information."

How We Search For Products

There have been several studies and articles about how searchers search for products.

Anne Kennedy, guest writer at Searchday, reports on What Clicks with Web Searchers (May 3) and summarizes findings from recent studies.

"Some of the surprising, almost counter-intuitive findings from this research: Most people begin shopping searches using generic searches long before they get down to brands. Most click on one of the top three listings, if one interests them. Most—more than half—click on the first paid search result. People also take their time shopping, as long as several weeks in many cases. And no big surprise: searchers continue to prefer Google, though Yahoo, MSN and AskJeeves are gaining share."

Online not the place for the Road less Travelled - By Gord Hotchkiss, Search Engine Guide - May 03, 2005 - distinguishes between the familiar and the new. As searchers we go to the online properties we know such as the popular travel services at Expedia and Travelocity. When we don't know, we turn to search engines.

..."we turn to a general search engine to help quickly identify new landmarks to help navigate this unfamiliar territory. As soon as we can, we try to find vertical reference sites in the market we’re researching, because we know they’re built to provide richer content and more searching functionality for that particular product than a general, one size fits all search engine. We use the navigator to find the reference landmark."

Pretrieve?

Hidden Cost of Free Public Records by Genie Tyburski, TVC Alert (Apr 27) -- about Pretrieve, a public records meta search service for the US. Recommends consulting with expert public-records searchers.

Looking for RSS feeds at Google

Find RSS Feeds in Yahoo and Google by Tara Calishain, ResearchBuzz (Apr 20) - Tara works with syntax to find RSS feeds in Yahoo and Google and is perplexed by what she finds (or doesn't find) at Google. Interesting for techniques she uses.

Whois - Network Solutions

What is Whois? - Tracking who owns a Web site, By Sree Sreenivasan (Apr 21) - information on how to get information about the registration of a site. Recommends the Networks Solutions Enhanced Whois Directory.

Using Google Syntax

Google Tutor shows how to use syntax at Google for inurl and intitle along with standard wording to find unprotected multimedia files. Voyeur Heaven: finding interesting video, sound and image files in unprotected directories (April 15)

Using Metatags

Do You Still Need Meta Tags? By Paul J. Bruemmer, Pandia (April) - good tips on writing a web page and adding metatags. Covers title, description, keyword, and alt for image.

It's good for searchers to know about these metatags. Title is a key field to search. Description is sometimes given in the results. The one other "tag" that searchers should know about is the anchor text for links - sometimes useful for picking up more relevant sites. At Google this is inanchor or use the Advanced page to look for words in links.

Evaluating a Website

Quality assuring health information resources - By Carolyn Eager, Tips Article in Freepint (April 5) - - Presents "a list of the kind of issues you will need to consider when assessing health information websites. The list is
easily adaptable to suit other subject areas." Provides URLs on a few websites that discuss quality. Note that one of them is the set of guidelines used by the excellent BIOME.

Background Checks

More from Genie Tyburski on How to Conduct a Background Check (Part 2), The Virtual Chase (April) -- Describes the process and the tools one might use in investigating people who are dealing with a lot of money. There are hundreds of databases investigators in the US might use. Article closes with mention of the Web search engine -- "Lawyer X recommends these search tools [Google, Yahoo, Teoma, Gigablast] over other public Web search engines because they have unique databases. Descriptive terms useful in narrowing the results of a query include words that describe the person's profession, business affiliations, hobbies, interests, places of work or residence."

Presentations from CIL 2005

Presentations for several of the sessions at the Computers in Libraries Conference in March are available online at http://www.infotoday.com/cil2005/Presentations/

+ Tips for Keeping Up: Expert Panel with Gary Price and Genie Tyburski
+ Tech Forum 2005: Looking at dead and emerging technologies - several panelists
+ LISNews — Collaborative Blogging by Blake Carver
+ Search Engine Update - Chris Sherman
+ Specialty Engines - Raul Valdes-Perez on Vivisimo, Jefferey LaPlante on Xrefer
+ Graphical Data Visualization - Michael Sauers
+ A Dozen Search Engine “Shortcuts” by Ran Hock
+ Five Ways to Make Search Smarter - Chris Farnum from ProQuest.
+ Ten Hot News Sites - Ran Hock
+ Favelets & Bookmarklets Cybertour - Michael Sauers
+ Link Checking: A Better Way to Search the Web - Paul Barron

Bates for Directories

Search-engine savvy librarian shares some of her expertise By Pam Mellskog, The Daily Times-Call (April 4) - In this profile and interview, Mary Ellen Bates strongly endorses using directories and specialty search engines.

What To Use When

Phil Bradley has a revised guide to what search engine to use when. Many people have done up similar tips but this set is up-to-date and fairly thorough.

Finding information: search engines (Updated March 11, 2005)

Mentioned in Internet Resources Newsletter - April 2005

UW Research 101

Excellent online interactive tutorial to build research skills. Done by the University of Washington Libraries - Research 101.

Google * Works

Google's wildcard word in a phrase has been fixed. An asterisk will substitute for a word in a phrase. For example: "google * * wildcard" -- looks for google two words removed from wildcard.

Google Tutor

Let Mark Fleming be your Google Tutor. Blog style site with Tips, Techniques and Advice for Google Users. ALready has quite the 'taxonomy' of categories for following Google news. There is a Using Google Manual. Is a work-in-progress - give it some time. Opened with a substantial article on Don’t Overlook the Google Deskbar (I didn’t say Toolbar).

Yahoo OR and Nesting

Yahoo Search is supposed to support AND, OR, NOT and nesting, but when it comes to handling this on intitle searches, Yahoo falls apart.

intitle:landmines ban anti-personnel -- 1780 hits
intitle:"land mines" ban anti-personnel -- 322 hits
intitle:"land mines" OR intitle:landmines ban anti-personnel -- 84,800 - doesn't add up.
(intitle:"land mines" OR intitle:landmines) ban anti-personnel -- 5
(intitle:"land mines" OR intitle:landmines) AND ban AND anti-personnel -- 0 - doesn't work.

However, nesting does work on simpler queries.
"land mines" ban anti-personnel -- 36,000
"landmines" ban anti-personnel -- 68,000
("land mines" OR landmines) AND ban AND anti-personnel -- 85,600 - Reasonable

And also when ORing sites. You can use the ANDs or not.
"landmines" ban anti-personnel (site:gov OR site:mil) -- 354
"landmines" AND ban AND anti-personnel AND (site:gov OR site:mil) -- 357

Don't Be Fooled

Gullible.info has some fascinating bits of information but nothing is true. Kyle Stoneman, a student at George Washington University created this "as a social experiment, parodying people's willingness to accept bits of information without question".

If it's on the Internet, it must be true ... right? By Lisa Napoli, New York Times via Globe and Mail (mar 18)

Evaluating Search Tools

Rita Vine writes about "Tips and techniques to help you find the best Web search tools" in Search Savvy, Information Highways (Mar 2005) Walks the reader through a process for evaluating search tools.

US Public Records through Pretrieve

Free Public Records Access - What you can find without leaving your desk(top) - By Sree Sreenivasan (Mar 8) Poynter ONline -- recommends Pretrieve as a search engine for public records in the US. It has several categories -- criminal, court, financial, professional, miscellaneous.

My searches showed it was best for finding phone numbers and reminding you of other databases and aspects of a person's life you should consider.

Pretrieve doesn't do wildcard searches - you need to know exactly the name as it would be listed, otherwise Petrieve just picks the first combination it comes upon. Searching by initials is hopeless.

More Tips from Bates Information Services

Three new articles from Mary Ellen Bates at The Virtual Chase:

Do You Culture Pearls? Using descriptors or subject indexing applied to one article to find others that are on topic.

Is This Information For Real? Walks the reader through evaluating a web site. Starts with an examination of CEO Central.

Is this Information on the Record? What should you do if (when) you find confidential or sensitive information on the Web?

Google Hacks Revised

Newer, Fresher Google Hacks By Chris Sherman, SearchDay (Mar 2) - review of the revised edition of Google Hacks by co-authors Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest.

"The book has also been reorganized to better reflect Google's structure, rather than focusing on the geekier aspects of programming. Although many of the "hacks" are essentially unchanged, they're now organized in a more logical fashion."

There are some sample hacks at the O'Reilly page.

Reverse Phone Lookup

Is It Too Easy To Find People On Google? Pete Barlas, Investor's Business Daily via Yahoo (Feb 18) It's easy to do reverse phone lookup for US phone numbers at Google - just enter the number in the search box and then link to a map and directions. Many telephone directories on the Web support reverse lookup and maps, but Google is what people know and it has made it very easy.

"Google's reverse directory service, called Google PhoneBook, is a bit quicker than similar services. InfoSpace and AnyWho require at least one extra step before getting to the reverse directory. After that, users get the same results as they do on Google."

People who are concerned about this can ask to have the information removed from Google. However, Danny Sullivan got to the nub when he said ""The real issue is that you have third-party companies out there compiling information on you, and they are publishing it and putting in on the Web."

My view -- Removing the listing from Google is just swatting at one fly. People who have any concern at all should switch to an unlisted number or perhaps switch to a cell phone.

Bates' Google Search Tips

The Virtual Chase has a new contributor in Mary Ellen Bates, known for her columns and sessions at conferences about web search tools and techniques. She will be providing search tips to TVC starting with this month's "Googling Better" - four ways to exploit Google's capabilities.

- synonym operator ~ - my favourite also - tends to pick up word variants and related words (not exactly synonyms).
- personalized Google available through the labs (http://labs.google.com/personalized)
- shortcuts -- define: is good, most others are for the US
- specialized searches on US federal government content, specific universities and others.

Background Checks

New article by Genie Tyburski on How To Conduct a Background Check previously published in Law Office Computing. Provides a general overview of privacy protection considerations and the availability of public records online. Part one of two.

RSS Feed for MSN Search Results

MSN Offering XML Feeds of Web Searches ResearchBuzz (Jan 14) Run a keyword search at the new MSN Search and arrange to have results sent to you through an RSS feed. Details about this "alpha" service are at RSS Feeds for Search Results. Probably more useful for news than web searches.

Information Seeking

January issue of Information Research has Papers presented at ISIC 2004: the 5th Information Seeking in Context Conference, Dublin, Ireland, 1-3 September, 2004

Of interest Assessing Website quality in context: retrieving information about genetically modified food on the Web by Claire R. McInerney and Nora J. Bird - developed the Website Quality Evaluation Tool as an instrument for evaluating the credibility of a website on a topic - in this case genetically modified food. Model looks at bias, update-access interval, commitment, and metatags.

Google Tips

Googling Better by Mary Ellen Bates (Jan 2005) - covers the very useful ~ for synonyms and define for definitions. Also recommends Personalized Google.

Tips from Jan Dempsey

Six tips to hone your searches by Jan Dempsey, The Post-Standard (Jan 5) -- presents several valuable "principles of searching":

+ look for authoritative sources
+ try to find primary sources
+ use a library
+ use several search engines
+ use advanced search features
+ visualize results.

Hacking Google

Google — A new weapon for criminals by Robert Masse, Globe and Mail (Dec 24) - an alarmist article about "malicious hackers are using the search engine [Google] to find everything from credit card information to social insurance numbers." Article is of interest because of the examples of syntax used.

-- searched for "social security numbers" at sites with ".gov" domain (US Government) and file type ".xls" (Excel spreadsheets) -- returned 3,600 Microsoft Excel spreadsheets on government websites

- notes that some high-tech new photocopiers that can scan, copy, fax and print are also connected to the Web and their digital content is being indexed. Doesn't say how these photocopiers can be found.

- claims to have found I"a U.S. Military report described as "Top Secret" describing operations in Iraq — from communications to weaponry to psychological warfare".

Internet Librarian 2004

Presentations at the Internet Librarian Conference 2004 held in November in Monterey are gradually being mounted. Of interest:

Favelets & Bookmarklets Cybertour by Michael Sauers
Graphical Data Presentation by Michael Sauers
Teaching Searching of the Web by Laura Cohen
Making the Most of the Blogosphere by Jenny Levine and Greg Schwartz
Thirty Search Tips in 40 Minutes by Mary Ellen Bates

Evaluating A Site

Mary Ellen Bates describes what she did to validate a site that supposedly had information on an executive's corporate activities. Lists four things that one should do to evaluate a site.

Is This For Real Bates Info (Nov 2004)

Yahoo Link and Linkdomain

Calculating Deep Link Ratio Using Yahoo ResearchBuzz (Oct 20) Comments on a formula that was developed to determine the Deep Link Ratio. This will be mainly of use to search engine optimizers but the use of the syntax at Yahoo for checking links is very interesting. See The Deep Link Ratio at Text Link Ads UK

URL Parts

URLs. Part II: URL tips - how your knowledge of the structure of URLs can help when problems arise by Sue Eipert. - Things to look for when fixing links or in assessing whether authenticity.

Searching for Images

Searching For Images Search Engine Watch Blog (Nov 8) Did you know that Google's image database is only updated twice a year? I didn't. Gary Price points us to Yahoo, Altavista, and four specialty image databases.

Thwarting Google Hackers

Are you Google hack-proof? By Ong Boon Kiat, CNETAsia (nov 5) With some well-turned phrases and syntax a person determined to find sensitive information on web servers will succeed. This article gives some examples and some pointers for foiling Google hacks.

Searching TV Programs

Searching Television via Closed-Captioning Search Engine Watch Blog (Nov 5) - tools and techniques for searching closed-captioning on TV programs and viewing television content online.

Google Guide

Using Google for African Studies Research: A Guide to Effective Web Searching http://www.hanszell.co.uk/google/[Pilot edition, September 2004] by Hans M. Zell -- Detailed guide to Google's web search and other search services. Works through 7 searches examining the results and showing the effects of choice of words on the success.

Internet Resources Newsletter (November) picked this as a "nice web site". "This is an excellent study of how to make the most of Google when researching into African Studies, which, at the same time, also highlights some limitations of Google. Hans Zell has done a thorough job, using practical examples to show the ins and outs of using the world's most popular search engine. "

Yahoo Size Limit

Genie Tyburski found that Yahoo Search has a limit on the size of query. Her test suggested 100 characters, mine came in at 80 characters not counting spaces between words. At an average of 5 letters per word, the limit could be around 16 to 20 words.

See TVC Research News (Nov 5)

Google's Cheat Sheet

Tara Calishain explains the syntaxes listed on Google's cheat sheet [ http://www.google.com/help/cheatsheet.html ] and adds a couple of other undocumented ones -- Google's Cheat Sheet Reveals A Couple Hidden Syntaxes (Oct 28)

Web Search Garage

Tuning up your Skills in the Web Search Garage By Chris Sherman. SearchDay (Nov 3) - Glowing review of Tara Calishain's new book on web search techniques and tools.

Web Date Deficiencies

Dating the Web: The Confusion of Chronology Greg Notess, Online Magazine (Nov/Dec 2004) Examines the problems and weaknesses in dating web documents and their implications. "Exploring the Internet dating scene for the information professional means understanding the dimensions, deficiencies, and differences of the various dates associated with Web pages." The article itself is an example of the problem. It does not have an orgination date - just shows that it was in the Nov/Dec issue of Online.

Finding Books Through Open WorldCat

Open WorldCat Pilot:A User's Perspective by Nancy O'Neill. Searcher (Nov/Dec 2004) Tells the story of the Open WorldCat project by OCLC to make books held in libraries visible to searchers at Yahoo and Google. Has some helpful search tips for finding these records. Still some kinks to work out.

This project has been on trial during 2004 and is expected to roll out soon. It includes libraries who subscribe to WorldCat on FirstSearch. "OCLC intends to make members' collections visible and available to information seekers, from library portals and on the open Web." Has links to information pages at OCLC.

Search Habits Die Hard

Searcher Habits by Gary Price, Search Engine Watch Blog (Oct 26) - comments on AP story Experts: Web searches for sex declining, e-commerce increasing - seems most searchers are merrily doing the very simplest of searches completely unaware of advanced techniques or variety of information sources.

Google's * placeholder

Google has a one page cheat sheet of commands -- http://www.google.com/help/cheatsheet.html It shows that the * can be used as a placeholder for a word at anytime, inside or outside a phrase. However, do so carefully.

three * ducks -- works alone to find three wooden, blind, plastic ducks
three * ducks row -- collapses completely - with three and ducks often separated by many words
"three * ducks" row -- this is a better construction

Throwing in an * does change the rankings but the words are not necessarily only one apart.

"cutting boards" wooden plastic 93,600 hits
"cutting boards" wooden * plastic 93,300 hits - slightly different order giving higher rankings to cases where wooden and plastic are somewhat apart.
"cutting boards" plastic * wooden 93,300 hits - plastic shows as the more important word.

It may be handy for parts of a company name, or other situations when you know you want words slightly apart.

great * desert australia has significantly different listings to great desert australia

Internet Archive for Due Diligence

The Internet Archive and the Search for Integrity by Genie Tyburski. The Virtual Chase - published in The Cyberskeptic's Guide to Internet Research (APril 2004) Recommends using the Internet Archive in any case requiring due diligence. The Internet Archive holds some 30 billion web pages dating back to 1996.

Don't kill the search engine

Is Web Search Becoming Useless? by Genie Tyburski, TVC Alert (Oct 22) - hits nail on head in comments about an article on searching in PC Magazine. "If the results of a Web search are useless, it's more likely because the searcher hasn't given thought to where he will find what he seeks. If you use search engines to find answers instead of sources, you'll be disappointed, unless you are seeking basic facts or opinion."

Doing reference at Google

Google, The Great Time Saver by Tara Calishain, b/ITe, SLA (Oct 2004) [pdf file] -- This is mainly a review of using shortcuts and other features at Google to get definitions, translations, US phone numbers, US addresses, and calculations. She mentions Google's local search for the US -- local.google.com. There is also a local search for Canada -- local.google.ca.

Web Search Garage - Pandia Review

Web Search Garage - a comprehensive introduction to Internet searching Pandia (Oct 16) Pandia Search has added Tara Calishain' Web Search Garage to its list of recommended books - says that it is " probably the best book on web searching available today" - absolutely.

Yahoo Maps

Letting Maps Lead by Jonathan Dupe. Poynter Online (Oct 12) "Yahoo! Maps' function lets you find businesses near a specific address, and began phoning them." Used Microsoft's Streets & Trips software to zoom in on a location.

Dates on the Web

Problems With Searching By Date by Gary Price. Search Engine Watch Blog (Oct 12) Dates shown for web pages in search engine results have been fraught with problems for years. Is this the date the page was spidered, or last updated? And if updated was that a significant update or just the copyright? While dates on Web pages are completely unreliable, those in the news databases are properly time stamped. The problem with news services like Google and Yahoo is that their archives are only for 30 days. Price looks at all the aspects.

Price refers to an article in First Monday -- Internet time and the reliability of search engines by Paul Wouters and others. They found that search engines are continuously reconstructing themselves - deleting pages, respidering, changing dates, not to mention destroying indexes as Yahoo did to Altavista - impair the value of the Web for social science research.

"The past in the Internet is constantly overwritten by search engines. This affects the numbers of results as well as the actual Web pages that the search engines retrieve. The present, from where the data is collected, affects search results considerably. Search engines not only lose information quantitatively, but they also erase the structure entailed in the relationships between words in the titles of the Web pages."

"In short, search engines are unreliable tools for data collection for research that aims to reconstruct the historical record or for research that aims to analyze the structure of information at a particular moment in history. Only those Web pages that contain the date of the publishing document in question (for example, in various Web archives and citation index databases), can be used for this purpose"

Researchers should use the more stable and controlled online databases from publishers - usually available through the library.

Google Helps Detective

Google Used to Identify 1993 Victim AP via Las Vegas Sun (Oct 8) Article is short on details, but Detective Pat Ditter of the Washington State Patrol managed to get a lead on an unidentified accident victim of 11 years ago by scouring Google.

Proximity search for Yahoo

Tara Calishain has created a Yahoo hack to search for words near each other. YNAPS -- Yahoo Non-API Proximity Search ResearchBuzz (Oct 5)

Dealing with information overload

Information overload, retrieval strategies and Internet user empowerment By Christopher Carlson. E-prints in Library and Information Science ( ) -- Finds that "Initial user benefits from search engine technology have been critically degraded over time by the rapid increase of Internet pages. Traditional retrieval strategies therefore yield increasingly poor results due to a dramatic increase in ballast in the results. Search engine users thus increasingly experience information overload."

Mentioned at Sitelines.

Yahoo Filetype

Updated Yahoo! Search Review By Greg Notess. Search Engine Showdown (Sep 25)

Greg Notess noticed that filetype no longer works at Yahoo for limiting a search. But the old Inktomi field name does - originurlextension. (Same applies for Altavista and Alltheweb). Surely Yahoo won't leave it like this. The word filetype makes much more sense. Other old Inktomi terms for feature also work.

Google Image Search

Tim Bray has found that Google Image Search will locate images by file name and not by the alt tag (or not very well). Presumably Google Images also uses surrounding text.

Pix MisGoogled. Tim Bray, Ongoing (Sep 24)

Invisible Web Explained

Searching Smarter: Finding Legal Resources on the Invisible Web by Bonnie Shucha, Wisconsin Lawyer (Sept 2004) Shucha demystifies the invisible web in clear and encouraging text. For finding any information she offers the ageless advice -- "The first step in locating any type of information is considering where an authoritative source of that information might be found. It may be a print source, the Web (visible or invisible), a subscription database, a phone call, and so on." There is a good example of using Google to find the specialty site and then searching it for the answer.

People Locator - Beware

Do your homework on search services "Don't let your pocket get picked when many services are free" by DOUG BEDELL. Knight Ridder Tribune Business News Bradenton.com.

It's easy to be ripped off by services on the Web that promise a profile on a person and don't deliver anything more than an address you could have got from a phone directory. This article mentions the better services such as Accurint.com and PUblicData.com and lists good free services on the Web. All sites are mainly for people in the United States.

Four Good Tips

Mary Ellen Bates has some great tips on about using define at Google, search inside the book at Amazon, social networking for competitive intelligence, and Google Answers for research ideas. September 2004: Things Learned By Accident

Tips from Tara Calishain

Another freebie from Tara Calishain from her new book, Web Search Garage -- Seven Ways to Save Time Searching - good tips that embrace a variety of tools and methods.

MSR Answer Machine

From factoids to facts Economist (Aug 26) Microsoft is developing an answer machine called Ask MSR. Ask a question and MSR will turn it into several other likely phrases, run the search, then sift through the results. This will save searchers the time and trouble of doing this "manually". MSR is in development and may in time turn up on the Web as the Answerbot. (Drum roll). (Source: Mentioned in TVC Alert)

Also see Gary Price's comments in ResourceSHelf (Aug 30)

Yahoo's no limit

One of the advantages of Yahoo today over Google is that there is no word limit. At Google, you can't go over 10 words. At Yahoo, it's endless - as Tara Calishain proves in Yahoo's No-Limit Query Limit As Opposed to Google's -- So What? (Aug 19). She throws in a couple of tools for searching content at county of city sites in the United States or State library archives.

Go to a librarian

Know where to look when searching Web Rachelle Ramsey. Dayton Business Journal (Aug 20) - Cut time spent searching by asking a librarian seems to be the message of this article. Good advice. Goes on to say that one needs to be knowledgeable about the engines. Unfortunately, article is somewhat out of date regarding Google and Alltheweb.

Yahoo does it better

Tara Calishain says there are Four Things Yahoo Can Do That Google Can't. [pdf file - 2 pages) - promo for new book Web Search Garage.

Google vs Libraries

Gary Price has something to say to Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google following comments they made about librarians in an interview with Playboy. Google Guys on Libraries. ResourceShelf (Aug 14)

Researching the Competition

Search Engines and Competitive Research by Shari Thurow. SearchDay (Aug 17) -- "Search engines can tell you a lot about your competition, if you know what to look for. A panel of experts offers tips on profiling your competition. "

Answer-Focused Search

When Search Engines Become Answer Engines by Jakob Nielsen. Alertbox (Aug 16) Web site guru Nielsen says that searchers are intent on finding specific pages with answers, and are not looking, on the whole, for "good" sites. "The Web as a whole has thus become one agglomerated resource for people who use search engines to dredge up specific pages related to specific needs, without caring which sites supply the pages. " People are not using search engines for resource discovery - they want answers - and they are less likely to become repeat visitors. Nielsen has advice for website designers.

But I have advice for the searchers - do resource discovery and identify the best sites for the information you need and use regularly.

CI from Mary Ellen Bates

b/ITE e-zine (July / Aug 2004) from SLA has an article by Peggy Garvin - Mining the Invisible Web for CI - a summary of Mary Ellen Bates' presentation to the SLA 2004 conference. [pdf] Actual presentation is at http://www.batesinfo.com/speeches.html.

Hack Your Name

Why you should Google yourself--and often Robert Vamosi ZDNet (Aug 9) Shows some ways you should search for yourself or your company at Google - just in case there is something on the public Web that shouldn't be. Refers to Johnny iHackStuff.

Google: The Missing Manual

Slashdot reviewed the book - Google: The Missing Manual - and on the whole liked it - "redundant" for geeks, but useful to those new to the Internet or "broaden their research skills".

More information and sample chapter at O'Reilly - Google: The Missing Manual.

Credit card numbers

Wouldn't hurt to check if your credit card number has been plucked onto the public Web. CNet has a story that Google queries provide stolen credit cards (August 3, 2004) By Robert Lemos. The story limits itself to discussing Google, but could be any search engine - and especially Yahoo since it also does deep and wide indexing.

The expert on Google Hacking for finding security vulnerabilities is Johnny at iHackStuff.com. His site is down at the moment (it's been hacked) but you can view it through Google cache.

Evaluating Web Sites

Genie Tyburski has updated and expanded her page on Evaluating the Quality of Information on the Internet -- ". A new component, titled Why Information Quality Matters, documents six incidents of false or fraudulent information, printing errors, or illicit revisions of published works." The page on Alerting Services lists sites for information on scams and hoaxes.

Using Weblogs for Business

Searching blogs for rumors and buzz by Susan Eipert - Eipert Information Services (July / August 2004) Short primer on using blogs for following business interests.

Recruiting on the web

Recruiting firm shows how to search the web for candidates for a position. Example given was a search for a highly trained manufacturing employee. Query used "stock words" to search for "cissp (directory OR bios OR people OR speakers)."

Trying to Hire? Hit the Web Monster offers tips to find qualified candidates among online job-seekers. Emily Kumler, Medill News Service PC World (July 21)

Information Research July 2004

Information Research Vol 9 Issue 4 July 2004 is ready for reading.

Has papers from the Conference, 'Toward a user-centred approach to digital libraries', Espoo, Finland, September 8 - 9, 2003 and a variety of others in English and Spanish regarding information seeking and information technology.

Editorial describes the making of this issue. Wilson, T.D. (2004) "Editorial." Information Research, 9(4), editorial E94 [Available at: http://informationr.net/ir/9-4/editor94.html]

More than two words

More searchers are entering queries of over two words according to the latest OneStat survey. Most people use 2 word phrases in search engines according to OneStat.com OneStat.com (July 20) Three-word phrases have increased from 25.61% in February 2004 to 26.83% in July 2004. Even seven-word phrases are up to 1.13%. Meantime Yahoo and others simplify their systems to respond best to the two-word queries.

Google's Scholarly Archives

Gary Price has more proof of why we shouldn't rely only on Google. He points to a tool created by Peter Jacso that compares the searches at five prominent publishers vs Google's index of scholarly archives. More on CrossRef/Google Search Pilot ResourceShelf (June 17)

Web Search Behaviour

The web search behavior of adult learners Pandia (June 16)

Pandia has summarized the main findings of an EU Socrates project into the search strategies of adult learners.

The study identified three types of searchers: Passive - tend to use a commercial portal; Selective - who know where to find something or use a search engine; Dynamic - use a wide variety of tools and strategies. Researchers found that searchers are often unwilling to spend additional time learning how to search or evaluate information. Even the advanced searchers haven't learned how to select good information.

Yahoo's Shortcuts

More Yahoo! Shortcuts "You can use the Yahoo! search form for more than searching. Use it , for instance, as a calculator or a currency converter. "
By Lars Iselid. Pandia (June 27) - A Swede's view of the US-centric set of shortcuts at Yahoo. "Shortcuts converting weight, measures, and temperatures are very convenient e.g. for Scandinavians, who might have problems with tasks like convert 81 fahrenheit, convert 81 inches, convert 81 pound. "

Ask Jeeves Smart Search Shortcuts

Ask Jeeves has some new smart search shortcuts - trigger words that bring up answers quickly - as well as binoculars to indicate thumbnail image for web page. Gary Price describes the AJ shortcuts in Ask Jeeves Sharpens Its Focus SearchDay (June 21)

Ones I think are handy:

- Ask Jeeves recognizes the name of a movie and will bring up ratings, official site, review, trailers.
- People Search - enter name and place for people in the USA.
- Definitions - define moot
- Top sites - editorially selected sites for a current topic such as "west nile virus" or news stories on iraq

Also see the Pandia article AskJeeves gets smarter and shows thumbnails of web sites (July 12) for user response to the binoculars. Seems people like them.

Gary Price at SLA 2004

Arden Matheson took good notes when attending Gary Price's session at the SLA Conference 2004. Keeping up with Search Engines and the Web in the Summer 2004 issue of Wired West (SLA Western Canada chapter) picks up the points and the tools.

Starting points

In the revised The Skill of the Hunt: Effective Research Strategies for Finding Information on the Web Genie Tyburski recommends methods for finding good starting points through a search engine and a subject directory. Describes techniques for narrowing a search at a search engine.

Investigative Research - Tips

Tools for Investigative Research -- Genie Tyburski has put online her presentation to SLA on Web Tools 2004. These are 45 tips on tools and techniques for doing research on the Web covering getting current news, monitoring pages, using feeds, using the advanced search at Amazon, some Google tricks and much else. Has several tips on searching American sources and public records for people and companies.

Presentation also references Googling Up Passwords by Scott Granneman at Security Focus (Mar 9, 2004) - insight into how easy it can be to find confidential information on the web such as budgets or passwords by searching on filetype and/or site.

FindArticles has search syntax

Whoopee! FindArticles Now Offering Serious Search Syntax ResearchBuzz (June 8) FindArticles has been annoying to use because of poor syntax. Tara Calashain cheers on finding it has added an Advanced page. It will finally look for all words and accept phrases, search only title, limit to selected publications, and look for articles within a date range.

FindArticles has 2.8 million articles from 500 publications. This is down from 700 publications and includes many newswires.

Finding people for a price

The Best Web People Finders Are Free Steve Bass. PC World (May 26) Bass says "You don't have to spend money to get reliable information about somebody." Article mainly slams the for-fee services. Points to Docusearch Investigations as a place to see for-fee services listed.

Yahoo shortcut for cheap gas

Only in the United States - Yahoo has a shortcut for finding gas prices in a zip code area using GasBuddy and GasPricWatch.

Mentioned at ResearchBuzz

Searching for Images

Search Engines in an Iconic Age: Using Search Engines to Find Images by Chris Tighe. SLA b/ite (May 2004) [pdf file] Covers the regular seaerch engine (Google images etc) and several specialized image search engines for professional quality images.

Why Search is still too hard

David Brown listed the The top five reasons why search is still way too hard in ACM Queue (April 2004) and Gary Price commented.

Info Overlook

Vivisimo's clustering fights "information overlook". Interesting paper - Needed: A More Selective Ignorance. [pdf]

More about A Cure for info overload in Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. (May 18)

Source: ResourceSHelf.

Ask Jeeves New Movie

Gary Price has another smart answer from Ask Jeeves - new movie . For example new movie shrek has a plot outline, movie review score, links to official site, trailer, reviews. Enter the zip code (US only) to get local theatres and show times. If AJ doesn't have any information on the film it still offers a local-showtime box, and links to the Movie Center at MyWay.com (which AJ now owns) for coming soon and just released. Fun.

New book on Google

Everything Google by Chris Sherman. SearchDay (May 20) - recommends How to do Everything with Google, a new book about using Google, by Fritz Schneider and Eric Fredricksen, both Google employees, and Nancy Blachman, author of the GoogleGuide.

Search trends

How Search Engines Teach Users To Search Garrett French WebProNews (May) - search engines are making it easier to do quick lookups - the ready-reference question - with shortcuts and smarter answers. Clustering helps too, such as at Vivisimo. Gary Price is quoted on the future - more niche engines, and select your own databases through federated search.

Google searches in court

Search engines take the stand By Declan McCullagh CNet. (May 13) - Legal researchers and even judges are using web search engines, especially Google, to get background information for cases. There are some examples of bizarre reasonings in this article. Gary Price, Resourceshelf (May 13) , wonders if the public really understands how search engines work or appreciates that the results may be insufficient or wrong.

Boolean

Mary Ellen Bates asked Is Boolean Dead? in eContent. (Apr 5) New tools don't change the need for information professionals to be able to understand and intuit - to be "zen researchers" - and they need tools that will help them "sniff out" the answer. Searchers still need to do boolean searching to find A and B without C or D.

Agreed. But good luck using boolean operators on the Web. The new Yahoo Search does not support boolean well (and it dumped the Near operator at Altavista), Teoma can't do nesting, Google has some strange sets, and Gigablast can't count.

Yahoo Shortcuts

Pandia Search lists all the Yahoo! Shortcuts. These are one word commands that will quickly look up defintions, get information on flights, find a hotel, get a traffic report - though most of these are US specific. New Yahoo! shortcuts

Shortcuts

Search Engine Prefixes and Shortcuts Greg Notess in Online Magazine (May / June 2004) Several search engines offer one-word shortcuts or commands for retrieving certain bits of information - weather, definitions, calculations, etc. Notess recaps the ones at Alltheweb, Altavista, Ask Jeeves, Google and Yahoo.

Yahoo Shortcuts

Yahoo has added a few new shortcuts for finding travel information, using the encyclopedia, and getting sports scores. There is also a synonym finder for looking up words in Rogets Thesaurus. The Yahoo Search Tips page lists them all.

Invisible Web

Jennifer Laycock, guide at Websearch.about.com, writes about the Invisible Web in a series of articles. What is the Invisible Web defines the invisible Web (pages on the web but not indexed) and explains why search engines can't or won't index those pages. Finding the Invisible Web has some advice on how to find the major databases through a search at Google (or other engine) and lists resources Laycock recommends as starting points. However, her list includes the defunct InvisibleWeb.com - this pair of articles may have been written some time ago.

Search Tutorial

Four Nets for Better Searching by Bernie Dodge at San Diego State University - one page tutorial that uses NETS as memory jogger for 4 things to remember to do. Short - good start.

NPR on Search

National Public Radio in the U.S. has been running a series on Search and Search Engine Wars starting April 12, 2004 on the Morning Show. The Search Engine Wars. These are online as audio files. Transcripts are available for a price. [Source: ResourceShelf]

Ask Jeeves does Famous People

Ask Jeeves Introduces Famous People Search By Chris Sherman, SearchDay (April 12) Ask Jeeves' smart answers now cover biographical information from a variety of services. Sherman notes that the service is "inconsistent". Canadians will find Jean Chretien but not Paul Martin (or any other Canadian prime minister).

Number Range at Google

Hacking The Google Numrange Operator by Garrett French. WebProNews (April 1) - has examples for using numrange operator at Google.

Here's another - to get information about Confederation in Canada, where debate and conferences went on for several years - enter confederation canada 1860..1870

More on numrange at Google's Advanced Search Made Easy.

More Google Tips

Same old tips but presented more compactly -- Favorite Google Tips and Tricks From the Google Staff - Dr Joseph Mercola - adapted from an article by David Pogue in the New York Times.

Blachman on Google

The WebTalk Guys interviewed Nancy Blachman, co-author of "How to Do Everything with Google" and owner of the the excellent Googleguide.com. Google 101: How to search more effectively on the popular Website (March 20) Interview is available in text and audio. Blachman lists her favourite Google tools

Google Search Recap

Jagdeep Pannu at the ISEDB.com site has written up a page of Google Advanced Search Tips (March 22) - describes the syntax, search operators, and extra features and tools.

Reliability on the Web

In Search of Truth How to determine the reliability of information on the Internet by Reid Goldsborough. Link-Up Digital (March 16) - primer on what to consider in determining the reliability of information found on the Web.

PCWorld on Searching

Beyond Google by Laurianne McLaughlin in PC World. (March 2004 in April 2004 issue) - recommends specialized sites for many search needs - "... best data resources on the Web, from the latest business news sites to the most useful addresses for hearth and home. "

Includes a chart of new features at the major search engines.

There is a section on Searching the Hidden Web but it is quite outdated. Resources mentioned are no longer updated (Gary Price's Direct Search) and Invisible Web Directory, or are poor (Turbo10). The metasearch engines mentioned are helpful for searching - Dogpile, Ez2find, Vivisimo - but not only if you choose the specialized searches will they help at all for "deep web".

Company Websites

Search Strategy Tip: searching within a company's website from Eipert Information Services (March 2004). Describes the type of information you are likely to find at a company website and methods for locating it using the website itself or a search engine.

Source First

Genie Tyburski shows how a search on a Windows XP technical question could have been done better at Google. Her comments were provoked by an article that found results from Googlel Groups and Teoma were better than Google. Two lessons - think source and choose words carefully Is Google Relevancy Slipping? TVC Alert (March 3)

The Technical Searcher

Making the Case for Patent Searchers? Go Tell the Clients by Howard S. Homan. Searcher (March 2004) - all about what a technical searcher really does. Has strategies, search statement construction, and process.

Searching by File Type

Fiddling with File Types By Greg R. Notess. Online (March/April 2004) - primer on file types on the web such as Adobe pdf, Microsoft Office files, and several others. Covers syntax for searching specific file types at the main search engines.

Notess on unrealistic expectations.

Internet May Not Have It All, Says Web Search Expert ASHU KUMAR in Financial Express (March 1, 2004) - reports on a presentation given by Greg Notess in New Delhi, India, in which he warned against reliance on the free Web for answers to important questions. The free Web will likely have basic information but not the in depth research and analysis.

The New Yahoo Syntax

Gary Price worked out all the syntax that can be used at the new Yahoo search. Web Search--Yahoo (Feb 18, 2004)

Where to start a search

Search Tips Report: Information You Can Use by Sue Eipert. (Feb 2004) -- Search Strategy Tip: where to start searching the Web - has 7 starting points.

Hacking Google

Bob Ducharme gets a lot of mileage out of using the filetype field name at Google to track down xml files. Article has several examples of using filetype: and inurl: well. Googling for XML. XML.com (Feb 11)

Book for Extreme Searchers

An Extreme Searcher's Guide to the Best of the Web By Chris Sherman. SearchDay (Feb 11) - reviews Extreme Searcher's Internet Handbook by Randolph Hock. Says that the book is "full of tips on how best to find and use specialized resources". See also the Extreme Searcher's Web Page.

Googledorks

Online Search Engines Help Lift Cover of Privacy By Yuki Noguchi. Washington Post (Monday, February 9, 2004)

"Google hackers" are getting into pages that should have been under lock and key. But Google's crawl is so effective, that if webmasters don't take all the necessary precautions, some confidential material does make it into the public index. There is a new word - "Googledorks" - to identify people "who troll the Internet for confidential goods".

"Search strings including "xls," or "cc," or "ssn" often brings up spread sheets, credit card numbers, and Social Security numbers linked to a customer list. Adding the word "total" in searches often pulls up financial spreadsheets totaling dollar figures. A hacker with enough time and experience recognizing sensitive content can find an alarming amount of supposedly private information."

"The availability of private information contributes to rising incidence of identity theft, which for the last four years has been the No. 1 consumer problem for the Federal Trade Commission. Last year the FTC received nearly 215,000 complaints about identity theft, up from about 152,000 in 2002."

Search Modifiers

Search Engine Keyphrases and the Power of the Modifier By Scott Buresh. Search Engine Guide. (February 03, 2004 ) - These tips about choice of keywords and phrases are intended for search engine marketers who are trying to get best placement, but searchers can apply them too. Add modifiers to identify the region, and descriptive adjectives and/or nouns to describe the object. He advises people to be wary of using low quality modifiers such as "free", "sample", "ideas", "advice" on their web pages - but all are good words for searchers to use.

Two word searches most popular

Most people use 2 word phrases in search engines according to OneStat.com, OneStat.com (Feb 2)

From the report:
The 7 most used word phrases in search engines on the web are:
1. 2 word phrases 32.58%
2. 3 word phrase 25.61%
3. 1 word phrases 19.02%
4. 4 word phrases 12.83%
5. 5 word phrases 5.64%
6. 6 word phrases 2.32%
7. 7 word phrases 0.98%

1 word searches have dropped to 19.02% from 24.76. Figures are averages from the past 2 months.

Problems with Google

Gary Price lists 10 things Google should fix. A Couple of Comments About Google - Google is a great search engine, but it is not perfect - Pandia Post (Jan 2004).

New Google Guide

Searching Google more efficiently, Pandia Post (Feb 1 2004) features Nancy Blachman, author of How to Do Everything with Google and the companion website, Google ~Guide Both look excellent.

Google Your Date

Fugitive Nabbed Because Of Date's Google Search Woman Finds FBI Warrants For Failed Developer's Arrest The Indy Channel (Jan 28)

Google Whois

There is no Google Whois. Network Solutions cuts short Google shortcut by Stephanie Olsen. News.com (Jan 27) Network Solutions won't processes queries from Google for whois. They limit queries to slow down the spammers who hunt for email addresses and phone numbers registered for the domains.

Google Site

It is now possible to search at Google by site without adding keywords or other extras. For example site:websearchguide.ca shows Google has indexed 5,200 pages. But there are some oddities. Pages in Canada for site:gc.ca are 938,000 but for Web in total there are 1,480,000.

Finding Things

Now Where Was I? New Ways to Revisit Web Sites By LISA GUERNSEY New York Times (Jan 22) - summary of study at Information School at the University of Washington about "Keeping Found Things Found". "So far, observation of a few dozen people in their work environments has revealed a hodgepodge of approaches to organizing pages, and bookmarking them is not at the top of the list. "

Backwards link at Google

Gary Price finds that Google's link command does not always list all the pages that link to a particular one.

You Might Be Missing Material: Backwards Link Searching (Link:) With Google (Jan 20)

Genie Tyburski has noticed this too -- Google not displaying all reverse links.

Alltheweb is much stronger for searching on links. It allows for modifying the backwards search with other search terms and for excluding the self-reference links (ie site linking to its own pages).

Sci/Tech Research

Sue Eipert manages Eipert Information Services for custom research. She has a monthly newsletter "featuring practical tips about business and sci/tech information sources and research strategy for you to apply in your own business". January 2004 issue is about A few good business reasons to search archived web sites. There are several other good articles as well.

Google tips

TIP OF THE MONTH: Some Hidden Google Tools by Mary Ellen Bates (January 2004) Describes ways to enhance your Google search - new interfaces, visual presentation, shortcuts. Google also has a feature similar to Alltheweb's URL Investigator for getting background information on a page. At Google use info: - for example, info:www.batesinfo.com.

Super Searchers on Madison Avenue

A new Super Searchers book has been released, this time for people in advertising and marketing.

Super Searchers on Madison Avenue Top Advertising and Marketing Professionals Share Their Online Research Strategies By Grace Avellana Villamora Edited by Reva Basch

See review by Chris Sherman in SearchDay (Jan 6). Book is available from http://www.infotoday.com/supersearchers/.

Query Structure

Are People Asking Questions of General Search Engines? by Seda Ozmutlu, Huseyin C. Ozmutlu, Amanda Spink (Dec 2003) Online Information Review through Emerald and Informed Librarian - Paper examines use of question format for entering search queries at Excite and Alltheweb in 2001.

"Overall, we are not seeing a move to more complex querying by users of general Web search engines. However, there seems to be some common patterns of Web question and request format query structure. Although a
small proportion of users still prefer to express their information need in question or request format. "

Finding Answers

Finding answers took new directions by Jan Dempsey. The Post-Standard (Syracuse) December 31, 2003
-- Picks 10 notable new search services from 2003: Froogle, Ask a Librarian, New York Times Movie Reviews, New York Times historical archive and others.

Re-Finding Information

Keeping Found Things Found: Web Tools Don't Always Mesh With How People Work Ascribe (Dec 17) A study by William Jones and Harry Bruce at the University of Washington's Information School and Susan Dumais of Microsoft Research shows that people prefer to rely on their memories to refind information than tools. "... regardless of your "keeping" technique, Jones, Bruce and Dumais have found that, when you want to revisit a Web site, there's a good chance you first try three other options: directly entering the URL in your Web browser (often with help from the browser's autocompletion feature); searching with a search engine; or accessing it via another Web site or portal." That certainly describes what I do.

Article was mentioned in the ResourceShelf - Online Behavior.

Finding Local News

TIP OF THE MONTH: I Heard The News Today, Oh Boy by Mary Ellen Bates. December 2003 Bates found information on product tampering through local newspapers and radio stations. This newsletter tells how she did it.

Genie Tyburski has more related articles about finding local news.

Research 101 Tutorial

Research 101 is an interactive online tutorial developed by the University of Washington Library in 2001. It is an excellent starting point for building skills in doing research using a range of resources. There are 6 units covering the basics about types of resources including the Internet, information cycles in the dissemination of information, identifying and defining topics, searching databases and finding material in libraries, and evaluating materials. The tutorial includes a variety of self-tests, animated illustrations, and worksheets.

Spotted at Sitelines.

Much Ado About Boolean

There is a continuing discussion at TVC Alert about how much attention librarians should give to teaching the use of boolean in search. The Boolean Debate has involved Gary Price, Stephen Abram, Genie Tyburski, and Cindy Carlson (who started it). I will throw in my two cents here. Boolean is useful for the OR to pick up variants - and will continue to be until search engines are better at handling stems and variants. And the discipline of identifying concepts in constructing a search query can be helpful - but that could be taught without ever mentioning boolean.

Google - Airport Conditions

Check delays and weather conditions at airports in the United States using the airport code. Example -- sfo airport -- for San Francisco. Information is provided by provided by the FAA's Air Traffic Control System Command Center.
http://www.google.com/help/features.html#travel

Lycos Weather (http://weather.lycos.com) is another way to check on weather and airports. It has more information and has information for Canadian cities.

Google - Search by Number

Google can handle parcel tracking IDs, patents and other specialized numbers when the correct prefix is used. I suspect that this is U.S. only. http://www.google.com/help/features.html#number

Amazon Search Inside the Book

Péter's Digital Reference Shelf - December 2003 issue reviews Amazon Search Inside the Book.

Péter Jacsó fully describes how to use Amazon Search Inside the Book to bring up excerpts from books that will answer reference questions or for general interest. he calls Search Inside the Book a quasi-bookstore experience because we can now flip through the pages. Examples illustrate getting travel information about a place (southeast Oahu).

"It makes many genres of books ready-reference tools that were never considered as such because you could not instantly locate tidbits or passages of information about concepts, events, people, locations, procedures, treatments, customs and practices, even if the books had informative titles and good indexes. "

Source selection and analysis

Are You Practicing What We Preach about Searching? By Cindy Carlson. LLRX (Nov 29, 2003) Carlson responds to comments made by Stephen Abram at the November Internet Librarian Conference in which "he thought librarians were spending too much time focusing on teaching people how to search, as opposed to teaching them how to choose the right resource". Carlson defends boolean but does agree that "source selection and analysis" is important.

Specialized Databases

Searching With Invisible Tabs by Danny Sullivan. SearchDay (Dec 2, 2003) Many of the big search engines provide access to specialized search too. Google has news, images, newsgroups etc. But who notices the tabs on the page? Sulllivan says very few people do. He says that tabs across the top of a page at a search engine don't get searchers using those collections rather than a broad web search. The keywords that Ask Jeeves, which Sullivan calls hidden tabs, are better but they too have a downside in the assumptions AJ must make.

The article nicely explains the two approaches while also emphasizing the importance of finding and using specialized databases.

The bias in search results

Do Search Engines Suppress Controversy? by Susan L Gerhart at Software Engineering and Computer Science, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (Nov 9, 2003)

Study team picked five topics with known controversies and ran searches to see if the results picked up the controversies. "("Belize", "distance learning", "Albert Einstein", "St. John's Wort", "female astronauts"). The results were mixed, 2 controversies showed and 3 were virtually missing when search results were plied from three popular engines (Google, Teoma, and AllTheWeb) and two meta-searchers (Profusion and Copernic, querying and collating from different engines). Most enlightening were the factors that suppressed or revealed the controversies."

Study concluded that "Search technology is biased to present the "sunny side" of topics. You have to search harder for the "dark side".

Web Search Reading

Gary Price recommends three articles about web search to read. (Nov 16)

- Challenges in Web Search Engines by Monika Henzinger et al. (Sept 2002) Discusses problems web search engines have not the least of which is dealing with spam and determining quality of content.

- A taxonomy of web search by Andrei Broder -- navigational, informational, transactional.

- U.S. Versus European Web Searching Trends by Amanda Spink et al. Found differences in topics (understandable) and behaviour.

Importance of Glossaries

TIP OF THE MONTH from Mary Ellen Bates for November is Or In Other Words... - using glossaries and thesaurii on the Web to learn about the subject and pick up words before starting the search.

People Search

Here's a story about how a simple Internet search would have prevented Buckingham Palace staff from hiring Ryan Parry, an undercover journalist, two months before the visit by President Bush.

Internet Search Would Have Unmasked Undercover Reporter By Lisa Davies, PA News (Nov 19)

RDN Virtual Training Suite

New ideas for teaching Internet Information Skills to students - from the RDN Virtual Training Suite JISC X4L Project Resource Discovery Network (Nov 5, 2003)

"The RDN Virtual Training Suite offers 61 free Web - tutorials designed to help students to become more effective Internet users. A subject-focus enables students to learn Internet skills in a context that has relevance for them.

With support from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), the service has just released new resources designed to support lecturers, librarians and learning technologists interested in using these tutorials with their students ... "

These are good tutorials, but naturally use mainly UK materials.

Primer on web searching

Pandia Search has a five-part article on web searching by Daniel Bazac - Search the Web More Efficiently. Has tips on types of tools, ways to narrow and widen, things to consider in evaluating sites, attributes of good searchers - and much else. Good, basic advice all in one primer.

Advanced Search Commands

http://www.infotoday.com/online/nov03/OnTheNet.shtmlBy Greg R. Notess. Online (Nov/Dec 2003) - describes the advanced web search commands at Google, Altavista, and Alltheweb with the warning that with Overture/Yahoo's rework the ones at Altavista and Alltheweb may be changing soon.

"The features and capabilities of the search engines go through regular churn. By learning what is available and which offer special capabilities, we can be prepared to use these unusual advanced features to retrieve the information we need. And then we just hope that the features remain available for next time. "

Basic Search Tips

Sharpen Your Internet Searches All search engines are not equal. Knowing where and how to make your queries can help you and your business get that vital info -- fast - by Ben Elgin and John Cady and Business Week (Oct 27)

General article on what to do. Has an interesting example of where Inktomi with its paid-inclusion was better than Google for hotels in San Francisco.

Using Amazon's Search Inside the Book

Genie Tyburski has tips on using the new Amazon Full-Text service. Amazon Full-Text Search; Advanced Search Features (Oct 23) - advises using specific words and using Amazon's power search.

Amazon doesn't make Search Inside easy to find.

- Click on tab for Books to get the book section.
- Start with a general search. Amazon will show the titles and descriptions as it always has PLUS excerpts from the books where available.

There is no easy way to refine this. You might see a link to In Books at the bottom of the page as part of your Recent History.

Otherwise --
- Click on Search in the Amazon Menu Bar to get the Advanced Search page.
- Use the boxes to construct a new search or use the Power Search at the bottom of the page.
- Example - looking for books with information about collaborative online (or on the internet) published after December 2002 -- keywords:"collaborative learning" and (internet or online) and pubdate:after 12-2002

To start with Search Inside a Book you need the URL. At present Amazon doesn't have it in floodlights.

Google Define

Google has incorporated its glossary function from the Labs into Google search. Enter define followed by the word or phrase. Google will find definitions on web pages and display the first one with a link to more. For example, define semantic web picks up a definition from www.ktweb.org/rgloss.cfm. Other normal web results follow.

If you only want definitions enter define:semantic web ,. Five results are displayed on a page. This is two more than is produced at Google Labs.

Also see Google Releases Glossary Search Command EContent (Oct 24)

"Google has introduced a new advanced search command that is designed to enable users to find the most current definitions to word(s) and phrases."

Gary Price found that you can also start the search with definition, what is, what are. But he warns against using the results blindly. They can be wrong and of course, incomplete. See Glossary Comes to English Language Versions of Google ResourceShelf (Oct 20)

Work Around Search Problems

Think Different - Tip of the Month from Mary Ellen Bates (October, 2003) - good advice and excellent examples on how to work around tough research questions - turning the question around, getting an angle, defining the question.

Gary Price's Tips for Google

Tips for Searching Google by Gary Price atThe Virtual Chase (Oct 17)

Heath Information and Teens

Teens struggle to find accurate, useful health information online University of Michigan Health System (Oct 17, 2003)

Of interest -- "In a study of how teen-agers search the Internet for answers to health questions, University of Michigan researchers found that misspelled words, ambiguous search terms and an imprecise approach to scanning a Web site often prevented students from finding the information they sought.
The study, published today in the online Journal of Medical Internet Research, suggests the importance of teaching teens better search strategies as well as encouraging Web site designers to target teens. "

"The researchers offer several suggestions that both teens and Web designers can take to help improve access to health information. For example, teens can be taught better search strategies. This may mean using directories within search engines that drill down into specific topics, or teens could learn to formulate and refine search terms used on general-purpose search engines. "

Adolescents Searching for Health Information on the Internet: An Observational Study by Derek L Hansen1, BS; Holly A Derry2, MPH; Paul J Resnick1, PhD; Caroline R Richardson3, PhD. Journal of Medical Internet Research. (Vol 5, Issue 4 - December 2003)

Personality and Information Behaviour

Five personality dimensions and their influence on information behaviour
Jannica Heinström. Information Research October 2003

"It is shown that information behaviour could be connected to all the personality dimensions tested in the study - neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, competitiveness and conscientiousness. Possible explanations for these relations are discussed. It is concluded that inner traits interact with contextual factors in their final impact on information behaviour. "

Pity there isn't a predictive questionnaire.

Legal blogger finds Google easier to use

Free Search Engines vs. Westlaw & Lexis at NetLawBlog (Oct 10) Sometimes Web search engines have the edge over the for fee Westlaw and Lexis, says Jerry Lawson. Main point is that Google is easier to use than the for fee services. In particular it allows one to limit the search to a site. (Entry doesn't mention that Google may not have indexed all pages at that site.)

Amazon Hacks

How to hack Amazon David Coursey. ZDNet (Oct 10) - reviews the new book Amazon Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips and Tools by Paul Bausch and throws in a few tips on making Amazon do more for you.

Tara Calishain on Google

20 Great Google Secrets By Tara Calishain. PC Magazine (October 28, 2003 issue) - short article that covers syntax, other neat tricks (spell check, calculator etc), and extended googling - Google's other search places.

Bookmarklets

Bookmarklets: Nifty Tools a Mouse-Click Away by Mary Ellen Bates, Tip of the Month (September 2003) - Mary Ellen Bates likes bookmarklets - small javascript applications that act as quick links from the browser toolbar. So do I - good for dictionary look up, adding pages to a page monitoring service, and many other applications.

Web Research Guide

Elsevier's Science Direct has developed a 10 part Web Research Guide. The Guide is intended to help people who use ScienceDirect but can be helpful to those who don't. There are many good tips on using the search engines effectively (mainly Google and Alltheweb) and reference to some good resoures. (Spotted at Sitelines)

WHOIS

Article by Bob Berkman in the Information Advisor on Knock Knock! Whois There ... To Assist Researcher (PDF file, July 2003) - made available through ResourceShelf. Helpful information on how to track down domain names and ownership.

Magic Words

Search the Web Like a Pro by Reid Goldsborough LinkUP (Sept 1) - Paul Krupin recommends using "magic search words" to improve search results and has written three books about narrowing searches for jobs, scholarships and health. Review has a few tips.

Google's Synonym Operator

Google's Synonym Operator by Rita Vine. Sitellines. (Aug 28) - links to what other people have said.

Amazon Hacks

There is a whole book on Amazon Hacks - 100 tips and tools - by Paul Bausch. Preview it at O'Reilly -- http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/amazonhks/

Google for emergencies?

Andrew Orlowski takes aim at Sergey Brin's (president of Technology at Google) story of a user "who turned to the popular search engine to determine whether a family member was having a serious heart attack and what actions to take". Google heals the sick. The Register (Aug 26)

Google Guide

Google Pocket Guide by Tara Calishain, Rael Dornfest, D.J. Adams is ready for ordering.

Computer Buyer at PC Pro in the UK reviewed it (Book Review: Google Pocket Guide Aug 22) and found the explanation of search syntax and of the results page useful. Did note that many of the tips were specfic to the USA.

The O'Reilly web site has some excerpts from the book. Google Pocket Guide.

Bookmarklets

Learn lots about Bookmarklets, Favelets, and Keymarks: Shortcuts Galore from Greg Notess. ONline (July 2003) Bookmarklets are small javascript programs that can be set up as shortcuts to things you do often - calculations, translations, lookups.

Experts

Mary Ellen Bates reviews techniques on how to find an expert. First tip was to use the usenet groups at Google and Yahoo. What Do You Know? (August 2003)

Doing Math

Google can answer math questions now. It has a built-in calculator that will do arithmatic and evaluate some mathematical equations. Enter the terms in the search box -- 5*10 See Google calculator.

Alltheweb also has a conversion calculator for length, time, speed, temperature, weight, area, cooking/volume and can do 5*10.

This may be useful to people with handhelds with wireless Internet connections. Use this instead of a calculator.

Google Proximity

Google doesn't have true proximity operator like Altavista does with Near. But you can play games with * to substitute for a word. Rita Vine reviewed the main points in Microdoc-News. The Experts Declare "Nothing New" on Google Proximity Searching (Aug 11)

She noted Kevin Shay's Proximity Search API is a better alternative - http://www.staggernation.com/cgi-bin/gaps.cgi. It allows one to set up the proximity search for two words n words apart combined with other search terms, to sort the results by proximity.

Proximity is good to use when you're looking for a term that might be expressed in more than a couple common phrases, such as market share and share of market.

Google's ~

Maryjee Odala has kicked the tires with Google's new synonym operator - tilde ~. Google Introduces Synonym Searching, News Alerting Features Information Today Newsbreaks (Aug 11).

She found that the ~ will work on fielded searches. "In addition to free-text synonym searching, the new advanced search feature works in fielded searches. Search for browser intitle:~help, browser inurl:~help, allintitle:browser ~help, or allinurl browser ~help, and you will retrieve synonyms for help occurring in the title and URL fields, respectively. For example, enter intitle:~cancer and Web sites with pain, one of the synonyms for cancer along with disease and oncology, in the title will show up on the results list."

Google is not divulging details on how the tilde works but the "synonyms" are computer generated and Odala sees page ranking at work. ~apple will bring up computers, so be sure to say what you really want -- ~apple fruit.

Google Synonym Search

Google has added a method for widening a search through synonyms. Put the ~ before a word. Google gives the example of browser ~help to get guides, faq, tips, support, tutorials, helps, helper and a few more. The "synonyms" are in bold (not, unfortunately, in a list at the top). Not all are truly synonyms. Some are word variants, others are antonyms.

To check if your use of ~ made a difference, run the search without and note the number of results returned. Naturally there should be more with the ~ since Google is looking for the occurrence of ANY of the terms.
However, Genie Tyburski did note the anomaly that ~research had fewer results than research alone. This is true also for cancer, heart, feet. Puzzling.

When to use this?
Any time you are doing a broad-brush startup search. You might be interested in health taxonomies. taxonomies ~health finds healthcare, medicine, medical.

Or when you know that alternatives could make a difference. For example, if doing a search on syndication through RSS you might look for alternatives to RSS such as XML and RDF. Enter syndication ~RSS.

The use of the synonym operator might help increase relevance, since Google will rank results more highly if they have many of the terms.

References
New Google Feature: Synonym Search - Microdoc News ran ~ through several tests and advises that one use it sparingly.

Synonym Operatorat Waxy.org gives several examples of words with synonyms. To find out Google's synonyms use the operator and then exclude the keyword; eg. ~help -help

Big News! New Google Operator Google Weblog

Google Help page Very brief mention.

Google Country Search

Google Localization Produces Patchy Results Based on tests with Australian sites Dr. Elwyn Jenkins found that Google mainly filters on domain names and is especially spotty properly identifying Australian sites. He has set up a new blog at sizzle.net.au to help direct Google to Australian sites.

Guide to Australian Searching in Google from the Microdoc Google Manual. Dr. Elwyn Jenkins makes a good point that the country filter may not bring up all pages for a country. It's a good practice to include identifying words - city, region, phone number.

Search Strategies:

Search Strategies: Anant Patil, WebMaster at AskSam Systems, has Research Tips: Finding the Right Information on the Web - short article that covers main points.