Because I spend so much time on the content management-type tracks, I don't get to go to as many of the sessions in the searching track as I would like. I did, however, manage to sneak in one. Greg Notess' programs are always jam-packed with information, and his session on new search strategies was no exception. By the way, Greg has a new book out called Teaching Web Search Skills: Techniques And Strategies Of Top Trainers
Flickr, Tricia@cheeky attitude's photos
But back to search strategies. Greg re-iterated the conventional wisdom that any serious researcher should use more than one search engine, then demonstrated how you can use bookmarklets to make it easy to re-run a search in other search engines. These bookmarklets can be simply dragged from a page on Greg's web site to your browser favorites, links or personal toolbar.
Other selected tips:
- Northern Light is back as a business search engine.
- When you're looking for definitions, try Answers.com, Wikipedia, Yahoo Reference or Google's define feature.
- For popular terminology and technology topics, try searching at social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us
- Microsoft's newly re-named search, Live Search, sometimes has more recent new content than Yahoo or Google.
- Brand new from Live.com is the "linkfromdomain" search.
- Exalead is the only search engine with proximity searching.
Be sure to check Greg's Search Engine Features Chart for more information on specific search engine features.
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