This week I'm at CIL. Yesterday I got to hear an awesome presentation by Mary Ellen Bates in which she listed the following search tips:
- Altsearchengines.com - blog of alternative and niche search engines - click the top 100 tab - subscribe to rss feed
- Keotag - search across web 2.0 sites (technorati, delicious twitter and more)
- MSN product reviews - search for a specific brand
- Google’s new n improved timelines - creates a readable page easy to scan and identify trends (find when there was a buzz about a particular topics) - yellow line at the top shows where there was a buzz
- Watch for blended search results - lower precision results, but more long-tail content, esp. for obscure topics - seeing a lot more other search results (products, directions - what for what else appears at the top of the screen) - look at search results with new eyes
- searchCrystal - touchy feeling
- Carrot2.org - clustering on demand with a choice of search engines - let’s your determine how the search results are organized - uses different algorithms
- Loki toolbar - find location-dependent content - based on IP address or nearby wifi signals - tells you where you are not and locates on map - search locally
- Customizegoogle.com - Firefox fix for Google - nice customization - removes ads - infinite scroll results
- Google has experimental search - new way to see results - add view:timeline or view:info to your search query and you see things like dates or images or measurements on the pages - more efficient way to find images on a page
- Searchmash - unbranded Google site - cool interface - why do i care? it’s extremely cool - that’s why! free of ads - lets you see other search indexes on the top right
- google date-limiting - advanced search screen (remember a date search on the web is never a reliable thing) can also roll your own - add +&as_qdr=dn to the SERP (search results page) URL - where n is the number of days (d15 = 15 days) - items spidered in the last n days
- Doubletrust.net - a tool for comparing search results - i prefer more results from Google or Yahoo - trust-o-meter
- I’d prefer this… search.live.com - add prefer:word to query - ranks these search results higher - test search “hybrid car prefer:convertible”
- MSN’s misspelling-suggestion engine - lets you find ways to misspell things since things on the web are not always spelled right
- Ask’s maps - both driving and walking directions - maps.ask.com - takes local topography (san fran - hills=bad) into account (i always use this tool when at conferences - to find out how to walk somewhere)
- Exalead.com - use Exalead’s NEAR/n operator — (solar OR sun) NEAR/3 power
- use search engines’ quick answer features - Ask.com Smart Answers - Google’s OneBox - Yahoo’s Shortcuts - MSN’s Instant Answers (at the top of the search results)
- Gigablast - limit to multiple sites - has all kinds of advanced search features
- SnapSearch - visual search results - lets you preview the page and lets you interact with the page on the search results screen - based on the Gigablast search engine
- Pagebull - metasearch tool - entirely visual - no words - all pictures - good if you remember what the page looked liked and can’t remember name
- Factbites.com - search results deliver small fact-bites - max 30 results - pull factual sentence from the search results
- TextRunner “information mining” looks for statements like factbites
- nationmaster.com - source for national stats - cool tool for presenting graphical info (also a statemaster)
- TouchGraph - find relationship among URLs - finds related books in amazon (uses subject terms) - graphical results
- just a reminder here - check out podcast lectures from yale, princeton, uc berkley, stanford, johns hopkins - all providing lectures online for free
- Kosmix - a vertical search engine on steroids - more than just websites - trusted sources - other concepts/related concepts - videos - yahoo questions and answers
- LOUIS - library of unified information sources - searchable documents from congressional reports
- public.resource.org for the full text of us supreme court cases - incomplete now - but keep an eye on this one - bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/c/US/
- librarianoffortune.com
I know this is a very note-like post - but this presentation lended itself to this style. See Mary Ellen’s list of links.
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