Archive for the ‘Search’ Category

Ed Oswald at Extreme Tech writes an elucidating article Demystifying Semantic Search. If you’ve been wondering about this new trend in search technology but aren’t certain exactly what it is, you’ll want to check out this article which discusses Google, Bing, and Wolfram Alpha.

“Web searchers these days are a sophisticated bunch. We expect more from our search results, and sometimes a list of links just doesn’t cut it. Plus, who wants to muddle around those results trying to find precisely what you’re looking for? Shouldn’t a search engine know what you want? That’s why search engines, including heavy hitters such as Google and Bing, are beginning to look for ways to get you the information you want more quickly.

The latest attempt to make search results more relevant is by peering into the meaning of your search query itself. This is called semantic search.”

Christine Erickson at Mashable highlights 10 Google Search Tricks You Might Not Know. These are all great suggestions for ways to make the most of Google. Here are the ten tricks discussed:

1. Boolean Search Parameters
2. Public Data
3. Easter Eggs
4. Tracking a Package
5. Calculator
6. Unit Conversions
7. Sports Tracking
8. Medication
9. Flight Schedule
10. Sunrise and Sunset

Chris Hoffman at How-To Geek writes about 10 Amazing Uses for Wolfram Alpha. This is a great article to find inspiration for how to get the most out of the computational knowledge engine, and help your patrons do the same. Here are the first four recommended uses:

1. Comparisons
2. Nutrition Information
3. Complicated Math
4. Where Am I?

Rich Brooks at the Social Media Examiner has put together the Ultimate Blogger’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization. If you blog on behalf of your library or organizatin, you’ll want to check out this all-in-one tutorial to improve your blog’s search engine ranking. Here’s what’s covered:

• What You Need to Get Started
• What Affects Your Search Engine Ranking?
• How to Improve Your On-Page Optimization
• Blogging for Search Engine Success
• SEO Tools and Plugins
• Off-Page Optimization
• How Do You Get More Incoming Links?

Curious as to what’s being researched on Britannica’s Web site? History and economics dominate the list of the most-read articles in the Top 10 Britannica Queries in 2010.

1. French Revolution: Explore the movement that shook France between 1787 and 1799 and introduced the world to the guillotine.
2. Romanticism: This attitude or intellectual orientation that rejected the precepts of order, calm, harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality characterized many works of literature, painting, music, architecture, criticism, and historiography in Western civilization from the late 18th to the mid-19th century.
3. Civil Rights Movement: In this essay by Clayborne Carson, director of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute at Stanford University, delve into the mass U.S. protest movement against racial segregation and discrimination that came to national prominence in the mid-1950s.
4. Walt Disney: The world’s animator-in-chief changed the way that we look at the world and the way we vacation. The company he founded is now one of the world’s largest entertainment conglomerates.
5. Industrial Revolution: In this brief treatment of process that moved Europe from an agrarian, handicraft economy to one dominated by industry and machine manufacture, you’ll learn that there was not one but two industrial revolutions. (Britannica’s detailed treatment can be found in our European history article.)
6. Great Depression: With insights from Richard Pells, history professor at the University of Texas, and Christina Romer, an economist at University of California, Berkeley and former head of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, learn about the decade of depression between 1929 and 1939 from both an economic and cultural perspective.
7. World War II: With dozens and dozens of videos and photographs, you can grapple with this worldwide conflict that ended in the deaths of some 40,000,000 to 50,000,000 people.
8. Socialism: Terence Ball and Richard Dagger, professors of political science at Arizona State University, discuss the economic and social doctrine that calls for public rather than private ownership or control of property and natural resources. If you hear some called a socialist, especially as a pejorative, this is essential reading to know whether the label is accurate or not.
9. Danube River: It is one of the most picturesque rivers in the world, and Europe’s second longest (after the Volga), rising in Germany’s Black Forest and flowing about 1,770 miles to the Black Sea.
10. United States: With an essay on cultural life by Adam Gopnik, editor and staff writer at The New Yorker, and two dozen other contributors and the history of the United States through the passage of health care earlier this year, the midterm, and the effect of the WikiLeaks disclosures, explore in-depth this country of more than 300,000,000 people.

via Stephen’s Lighthouse

Danielle Rosenthal and Mario Bernardo write about Creating a Library Database Search using Drupal in the most recent issue of the Code4Lib Journal. If your library is one of the many which have adopted the Drupal content management system, you’ll want to give this article a look.

“When Florida Gulf Coast University Library was faced with having to replace its database locator, they needed to find a low-cost, non-staff intensive replacement for their 350 plus databases search tool. This article details the development of a library database locator, based on the methods described in Leo Klein’s “Creating a Library Database Page using Drupal” online presentation. The article describes how the library used Drupal along with several modules, such as CCK, Views, and FCKeditor. It also discusses various Drupal search modules that were evaluated during the process.”

Lee Odden at TopRank gathers 6 Facebook Search Engine & Data Visualization Tools. Each app on his list is reviewed noting feature strengths.

Veezzle is a new search engine which finds free stock photos by crawling dozens of websites. If you’re looking for high-quality images, but don’t want to pay for them, check out this new search tool.

Josh Peters at Social Media Today aggregates 50+ Ways to Search Twitter. This useful post links to over fifty search tools to find conversations, people, trends, and media.

Simon Mackie at WebWorkerDaily has put together 10 Simple Google Search Tricks. You can use all of these shortcuts and tips in Google’s basic search field. Here are the top five tricks:

1. Use the “site:” operator to limit searches to a particular site.
2. Use Google as a spelling aid.
3. Use Google as a calculator.
4. Find out what time it is anywhere in the world.
5. Get quick currency conversions.

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.

via Steve Rubel

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:

1. ALA-RUSA Best Free Reference Web Sites
2. Librarian’s E-Library
3. Intergovernmental Organization Search Engine
4. Theological Journals Search
5. eBooks Search

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:

1. The Archivist: A Desktop Tool for Archiving Searches
2. Twapper Keeper: Archive Tweets Based on Hashtags
3. Twitter Tools: Archive Tweets in WordPress
4. Twistory: Tweets in Your Calendar
5. 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.