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Both Google and Microsoft Bing announced yesterday that they have partnered with Twitter to include their updates in all search results. According to All Things Digital, Microsoft has also reached an agreement with Facebook to provide real-time status updates in Bing’s search results as well. These new partnerships are particularly significant as the Pew Internet and American Life Project has recently reported that the number of people who now publish status updates has increased from 11% in December 2008 to 19% as of April 2009.
Ann Smarty at ProductiveWise sizes up the most popular real-time search engines in her post How to Search the Web Real-Time which compares each by indexing time, data sources, and advanced search & filtering options.
Samuel Eyitayo at LIPs Common Concerns blog has compiled a list of 10 FREE Google’s Custom Search Engines for Librarians. Each of these niche search engines look interesting and many relevant to the LIS field. Here are his top five:
Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb writes about 10 Ways to Archive Your Tweets. This is especially useful since tweets made over 1.5 weeks ago can no longer be searched using search.twitter.com. Here are her first 5 suggestions for creating your own archive:
The Archivist: A Desktop Tool for Archiving Searches
Twapper Keeper: Archive Tweets Based on Hashtags
Twitter Tools: Archive Tweets in WordPress
Twistory: Tweets in Your Calendar
SweetCron, AmpliFeeder, or Storytlr: A Lifestream of Tweets
Microsoft has unveiled a real-time Twitter search engine which it has combined with results from its new Bing “decision engine”. The BingTweets engine provides popular Twitter Trending Topics at the top of the search interface, with a real-time stream of tweets along the left sidebar, and finally Bing search results down the center portion of the page.
If you’re interested in what’s happening in the search arena, please check out my latest article Search Engine Wars Redux in my Stacking the Tech column in LJ’s Academic Newswire.
“As the content of the Web continues to grow, we are seeing search engines and other similar services competing to serve our retrieval needs. To access the vast content stores of the read/write Web, these search tools make use of structured and linked data, real-time search, personalization, and more focused filtering techniques. If you’re a fan of buzzwords, you might say we’ve entered Web 3.0, a new era that is motivated by the need to more effectively organize, filter, and access information online.”
The new computational knowledge engine called Wolfram Alpha launched on Friday amid a flurry of media attention. Searchers using this engine can enter a question or a calculation, and rather than return relevant results, Wolfram Alpha uses its algorithms to digest the query and compute the answer based on its collection of data. Try it out by searching for the next solar eclipse, the GDP of Norway, or the Nobel Prize winners from France. Scientists, researchers and techies alike will be interested in this new computational search engine which is running on R Smarr, the world’s 44th largest supercomputer, created by launch partners, R Systems.
A new search application from Google Labs, the Google News Timeline allows searchers to view news within a zoomable graphical timeline which can be adjusted by weeks, months, years, or decades. Data sources include “recent and historical news, scanned newspapers and magazines, blog posts and Twitter status messages, sports scores and various types of media like music albums and movies.”
Charles Knight, Editor of AltSearchEngines, posts on ReadWriteWeb about the Top 10 Alternative Search Engines of 2008. You may recognize a few of these top search tools, and discover a few more. Here are five out of his ten (order is alphabetical):
Are you redesigning your website or creating a new one for your organization? Get some great advice on how to properly design and code your site for optimal usability and search engine optimization from this rap video.
The Wired Campus blog covers the story of a new project in development called Reference Extract which will be a Web search engine powered by the expertise of librarians. The project is being developed by OCLC, Syracuse University, and University of Washington.
“Have you ever wished for a personal reference librarian, an information guru to point you to the most reliable sites whenever you search the Web? A new search-engine project aims to simulate something like that. The trick? Weighting search results so that librarians’ picks rise to the top.”
Wondering about which search engine is the best when looking for blog content? Search Engine Journal provides a breakdown of the features and functionality of today’s top blog search tools in Blog Search Engines : The Complete Overview. Applications discussed include:
Google has re-launched its Blog Search as a memetracker - a tool which tracks and aggregates discussions happening throughout the blogosphere. Those who have used Tech Meme or Postgenomic will be familiar with the interface. Users can browse through eleven popular categories on the left, and view much-discussed stories which are grouped on the right.
The latest video from Common Craft offers Web Search Strategies in Plain English. It gives tips on ways to conduct effective search engine queries including phrase searching, keyword searching, and implied Boolean operators.
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