Archive for the ‘Search’ Category

Looking to go beyond Google for Web search? If so, you’ll want to check out these eight search engines listed by Web Worker Daily as viable alternatives to the search heavyweight including interfaces which allow you to search web forums, video, images, and people. Here are their suggestions:

• Addict-o-matic
• Redzee
• Omgili
• Dogpile
• Truveo
• Blinkx
• QnA search
• ZabaSearch

Are you a visual learner who prefers to have sets of data presented graphically rather than in text lists? There are many websites and desktop applications out there which let you do just that, and Read/Write Web has compiled a list of nearly 100 of them in their Best Tools for Visualization article. If you’re a fan of tools such as grokker, Twittervision, and KartOO, enjoy heat maps and visual search engines, you’ll want to check out this post which divides these tools into the following categories:

• Visualize Social Networks
• Visualize Music
• Visualize the Internet
• Amazon
• Flickr
• Miscellaneous
• Sites Dedicated to Visualization
• Search
• News and RSS
• Data

Lifehacker has created another intriguing guide with this list of ten lesser-known search recipes to try on Google:

1. Get the local time anywhere
2. Track flight status
3. Convert currency, metrics, bytes, and more
4. Compare items with “better than” and find similar items with “reminds me of”
5. Use Google as a free proxy
6. Remove affiliate links from product searches
7. Find related terms and documents
8. Find music and comic books
9. ID people, objects, and foreign language words and phrases with Google Image Search
10. Make Google recognize faces

A new report is available from the Pew Internet and American Life Project titled Digital Footprints: Online identity management and search in the age of transparency. The report reveals some interesting statistics:

• 47% of Internet users have searched for information about themselves online.
• 60% of Internet users are not concerned about how much information is available about them on the Web.
• 61% of Internet users do not feel the need to limit the amount of information about themselves online.

A new study of global search activity issued by comScore reports that over 750 million people over the age of 15 conducted 61 billion searches in the month of August. The study provides analysis of the top 50 worldwide Internet search properties with Google sites ranking at number one with over 37 billion of those searches conducted on its properties. Read the full report here.

Click for full image.

The social book cataloging app, LibraryThing released an interesting feature this summer called the tagmash. It allows users to conduct a search for multiple tags and have the website mash them together with all their variant tags, providing for a comprehensive search of the collection.

In anticipation of Halloween next month, I tried out a search for some scary reads. Here’s my tagmash for the search query : fiction, horror, vampires, -anne rice. LibraryThing has aggregated all of the variant ways which users have spelled and cataloged their books with the terms fiction including with capitalization and possible misspellings. It did the same for the other tags, including “genre: horror” within my mash as well as the singular “vampire”.

I got back the top 250 books which are relevant to my search, as well as related tags to search, and additionally a list of related tagmashes, and related subjects. To try out your own tagmash, you can search by tag on the main search page.

Like all librarians, I am curious about the informaton architecture behind search tools - infrastrucure and alogorithms. As I am not a mathematician or a technologist, some answers can become too complex.

However, I have found a couple of gems about Google. The first takes us back in time to Stanford University and two eager students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, working on a large-scale prototype search engine. The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine introduces some key ideas that we are now familiar with - but which were revolutionary and which underpin the force of Google today.

We know from The Google Story just how different the Google setup is. David Carr in How Google Works explains:

Google buys, rather than leases, computer equipment for maximum control over its infrastructure. Google chief executive officer Eric Schmidt defended that strategy in a May 31 call with financial analysts. “We believe we get tremendous competitive advantage by essentially building our own infrastructures,” he said.

Google does more than simply buy lots of PC-class servers and stuff them in racks, Schmidt said: “We’re really building what we think of internally as supercomputers.”

Previous search engines had not analyzed links in the systematic way that Google did - all part of the original ideas of the two young researchers. If you’d like more answers to your question, How Does a Google Query Work, provides a few clues.

Pandia Powersearch is an all-in-one list of search engines and directories. Search the Web using the search window (with a dropdown set of choices), or select from extensive list of the best Internet search tools found by Pandia. Search for files, images, music, video, online reference, dictionaries, books and more!

Pandia Powersearch is a search service from Pandia Search Central.

There is a perception among users that all search engines are similar in function, deliver similar result and index all available content on the web. Librarians, on the other hand, understand the differences.

The goal of a metasearch engine is to mitigate the inherent difference of single source search engines, thereby providing Web searchers with the best search results from the Web’s best search engines!

In an overlap research study conducted by Dogpile.com in collaboration with Queensland University of Technology and Pennsylvania State University, which measured the overlap of first page search results from Google, Yahoo! LIve and Ask, found that only 0.6 percent of 777,435 first page search results were the same across these Web search engines.

The top four search engines further diverged in terms of search results:

+ 88.3 percent of total results were unique to one search engine.

+ 8.9 percent of total results were shared by any two search engines.

+ 2.2 percent percent of total results were shared by three search engines.

+ 0.6 percent of total results were shared by the top four search engines.

Full report: Different Engines, Different Results: Web Searchers Not Always Finding What They Are Looking For Online - Research Study 2007.

[From: ResourceShelf]

In addition to YouTube and TeacherTube, there are many other sources of videos from traditional news sources and educational sites. How can you find them all?

Hurray! To the rescue comes Blinkx… a video (and audio) search engine. You can put in your search term and get a list of videos from over 130 sources. You can then select the appropriate ones for your needs and can usually play them without additional software or other technology.

[From: A Library by any other Name]

The National Library of Australia is ready to begin a major undertaking of newspaper digitization. Within the next five years, Australian newspapers printed before 1954 will be available online for free. According to NLA director-general Jan Fullerton, “Within this project, we are planning to digitise one newspaper from each of the capital cities and the territories from the beginning of their time until 1954 which is the copyright cut off.” [From The Age]