30 Tips in 45 Minutes
Mary Ellen Bates, Bates Info Service
April 18, 2007
Simply Google
Excellent overview site of Google’s options and features
AskX.com (was ask jeeves)
Left side navigation is static, gives suggestions for expanding/narrowing search.
Right side includes images results, encyclopedia results, shopping links and blog posts on the subject.
New interface for ask.com
Good clustering
Ask.com sends you to askx.com, but you can exit (top left)
Search the Web 2.0
Lets you narrow the searchg using popular terms and long tail search results.
Sort results on left side nav by popular or ‘long tail’
Google Search History
Limit your search to what you’ve searched before
Big Brother?
Google.com/searchhistory
Can turn on and off.
Consider the Q&A services
Answers.yahoo.com – you can vote on which answers are useful/not. Some peer review. Some compiled bibliographies there.
Qna.live.com
Askville.ask.com
Linkedin.com/answers
Use With Caution!
Use search eng’s quick answer feature
Ask.com’s smart answers
Google’s OneBox
Yahoo’s Shortcuts
MSN’s Instant Answers
Like a ready ref collection at your fingertips.
Squidoo
Hybrid of a web page, interactive poll, flickr-like photos, notes from readers and a blog.
Great way to share resources with colleagues.
Put interactive polls in your blog. Make your blog more interactive.
(ex: treadmills in cubicles.)
Things you could do in a blog, but easier to do in squidoo.
Build customized search engine
Rollyo.com
Yahoo search builder
Google co-coop
Live.com’s macros
Gigablast’s custom topic search.
She wrote article on this topic.
Yahoo’s search subscriptions
Non-subscribers can search factiva, lexisnexis, WSJ, forrester, ieee, ft.com, etc.
Pay with credit card
Ltd version of some db’s
Search.yahoo.com/subscriptions
Not substitute for fee-based db’s, but nice option
Kosmix.com
Vertical search engine on steroids
Excellent clustering
Ex: “autism” clusters by “for med professionals”, “natural remedies”, “related topics”, etc.
NationMaster.com
Source for national stats
Cool tool for presenting graphical info
Data from WHO, world bank, cia world factbook, unesco, etc.
Lets you make sense of data with graphical interface.
Ex: taxation as percentage of gdp. Graphical output, ranked by country. Breaks the stats down, as well. Shows linkages between some statistics.
(I can see many uses for this in public libraries!)
Use Yahoo’s Mindset feature
Mindset.research.yahoo.com
Are you researching or shopping?
Most search eng’s, you get a lot of irrelevant hits. If you use the mindset tool (though labeled beta, it’s fully functional), move slider bar between shopping and researching to narrow result. Reorders results based on your focus. Cool!
MSN’s cool synonym-suggestion tool
Intended for helping search eng advertisers identify similar worlds and common misspellings
Snurl.com/zqyd
Shows list of related terms, misspellings, etc.
MSN misspelling-suggestion tool: snurl.com/zqyl
Get most common misspellings of word, to make more complete search or create metadata. (ex: aluminum, aluminium)
Consider 37signals.com
Great collaborateive resources
Project mgt, to-do lists, file sharing, time slips, etc.
Gives you these tools, password-protected, web-based.
Ask’s maps
Both driving and walking directions (!)
Takes local topography into account
Maps.ask.com
Use Exalead’s NEAR/n operator
She LOVES this tool
(solar or sun) NEAR/3 power
Adjacency searching.
Not as powerful as google, but very good.
Live academic search
Great search results page
Sort options
Slider bar for verbosity (MEB: if only we could do this with people!)
Endless scroll of results – great to show users, because most people stop with the first page.
Academic.live.com
Compare search engines
Comparesearchengines.dogpile.com
Jux2
Ranking.thumbshots.com
Twingine.com
Yahoogooglemsn.com
Data visualization
Factiva’s Discovery Pane
TouchGraph
Finds relationships among urls’ – uses google’s similar pages function
Finds related books in amazon – uses subject terms.
Gigablast
Limit to multiple sites
Gigabits clustering
Extremely cool complex search and ranking tools (see Help file for syntax)
Snap Search – snap.com
Gives preview of the page you’re going to go to for all results!
Can link while still in snap. – great when doing tabbed browsing.
GooFresh
Limits google search to only sites recently added or updated in the index
Great fr doing repeated searches!
Porps to Tara Calishain
www.researchbuzz.org/2003/09/goofresh.shtml
Podcast lectures from:
Yale
Princeton
UC Berkeley
Stanford
Johns Hopkins
101 courses or one-off lectures – no good way to search through them as yet.
SearchMash
Google that doesn’t look like Google
New interface
Also searches Images, blogs, wikipedia, videos - + menu to expand (right frame)
Same results as google, better organized.
Also has complete scroll – expand as go.
Google’s Topic Search
Health, destination guides, etc.
Info pros can contribute – subject familiarity
www.google.com/coop/topics/?show=all
destination guides – refine results by outdoor activities, dining, etc.
PageBull
Metasearch tool
Entirely visual
Good for right-brained searchers
Shows page shots as results – bunch of screen boxes. Kinda cool (would drive me crazy!)
Watch Google’s Librarian Center
Blog, newsletter, teaching tools
Tips of the trade
Librariancentral.blogspot.com
(MEB: bit condescending, but they actually have good tools for us to teach our patrons about advanced search tools on Google.
OneLook
Reverse dictionary!
Better than a thesaurus!
Onelook.com/reverse-dictionary.shtml
When you can describe the word, but can’t remember the word!! Useful for “senior moments”.
