Recently in Internet Search Engines Category

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.

Here's just what we need to improve the image of librarians....Ms Dewey, the sexy librarian with an attitude. Some have already suggested that she has considerably more sex appeal than an unnamed butler. (Starts with a "j".)

Maybe I don't get out enough, but Ms. Dewey is the first web site I've seen that provides commentary on the searches and actions of its users. If you become so enamored of Ms. Dewey that you fail to enter a search in a timely manner, she reprimands you. She even comments on your search terms. Try typing in your favorite, or not so favorite, politician to get a reaction. Bush, Gore or Rumsfeld as search terms will precipitate a personal response from the lovely Ms. Dewey.

I'm guessing that most people, me included, will just watch her waiting, not so patiently, for you to type something in the search box. The problem is that if you start browsing your search results, she still thinks you're not doing anything, and her complaints in the background start to sound like, umm, nagging. :-)

You'll need to have Flash v. 8 installed in order to enjoy the Ms. Dewey experience.

I wasn't impressed with the search results, and there's no question that Ms. Dewey would wear out her welcome in short order; she's definitely high-maintenance. But you've gotta try her at least once. Just a word of advice, if you take her for a test run at work, you might want to turn the volume down.

[Thanks, Brent!]

With a name that sounds like my favorite candy, Rollyo takes over where the Gigablast custom search left off. Peggy Garvin describes how to use Rollyo to create a search engine that searches your own choice of web sites in her recent LLRX.com article, "The Government Domain - Roll Your Own Government Search."

There are several fun Rollyo searches that are already available for your use:

Amy Wharton has created Law Library List to search the law-lib archives, as well as Legal Research Guides and News, with a selection of research-related sites. (P.S to Amy, you might want to add Zimmerman's Research Guide to the mix!)

Dennis Kennedy has compiled on for Legal Technology, which includes a great selection of blogs and web sites on the topic.

I particularly liked the current annual content winner, Ask Mr. Fix-It, for it's excellent collection of DIY sites. I quickly and easily found information on how to repair grout.

For more possibilities, review the Explore Rollyo section to find your own favorites, making sure to register so you can easily keep track of them by adding them to to your profile.

Rollyo makes it easy to add your selection of searches to your web site or Intranet. I've added these searches, plus my own "Tech Product Reviews" search, to LawLibTech.com.

So does anyone have any suggested sites for Tech Product Reviews? It currently searches PC World, PC Magazine, Cnet, ZDnet, and E-opinions, and am looking for more nominations.

You may want to share this web page with your business development people. It provides a quick way to see how your organization's web site ranks in the major search engines for particular keywords. All you do is type in the keywords you're interested in, then the URL for the web site you want to see ranked, and there you go. So if your firm specializes in a particular area of law, type in keywords related to that area, and see where your firm's web site stands.
[Via LibrarianInBlack]

By the way, one of the big advantages of law firm blogs is that they increase search engine ranking in a significant way. A good blog is more likely to show up highly in search engine results than a typical, fairly static, web page, according to Dennis Kennedy.

"I was shocked by the impact a blog has on search engine placement. Not only does your ranking improve, but the speed your pages get added to a search engine like Google is astonishing."

A Continuing Discussion of Law Firm Marketing on the Internet: What are Blogs and Why is Everyone So Excited About Them?, LLRX.com, July 21, 2003.

Rumors are flying about a Google plan to offer previews/snapshots of for-fee content in their search results. (See Gary Price's article News of a Google "Premium Content" Program Begins Surfacing.)

I love this idea. We all know that everything is NOT free on the web, and that sometimes you have to pay for quality content. Depending upon what you're looking for, you certainly might be willing to pay for it if you only knew it was out there. If you see it in Google search results, you can make the decision whether it's worth the money. [Via LibrarianInBlack]

Yahoo's take on this same idea, Yahoo's Search Subscriptions, is already available in beta. There are several major publications available, such as the Wall Street Journal (last 30 days), Consumer Reports, and Financial Times, among others. I'd like this idea a bit better if the premium content being provided was available on a pay per view basis, instead of requiring a monthly subscription. On the other hand, I have a monthly subscription for Consumer Reports, and searching it via Yahoo is handy. For Barbara Quint's take on Yahoo's Subscriptions, see her Newsbreak, "Fee" Web Content Accessed by Yahoo! Search Subscriptions. According to Barbara, Factiva and LexisNexis content will also be available within the next few weeks.

For detailed information on the content scheduled to be offered, see another Barbara Quint Newsbreak, Varying Content Commitments from Vendors for Yahoo! Search Subscriptions. Note that the Factiva content will be limited to articles aimed at the general consumer market, such as entertainment and sports.

Books aren't dead yet! In fact, they're becoming more accessible than ever because of projects such as Google Print and Amazon's Inside the Book which offer the digitalized, full-text of thousands of books. Since you can actually search and view the content of included books, the likelihood of finding just the right book for you is really much greater.

But as Gary Price points out in his recent article, "Going Under Cover with Book Search Tools", they don't make it easy to limit your search to ONLY full-text books. That's okay because Gary helps you out with several strategies for searching.

Also keep in mind that Amazon online books can be searched via their A9 search engine. Just add books as a column and you'll see all the book results in one place.

Another option to use for Google Print is a new bookmarklet by the Distant Librarian. Just drag the bookmarklet link to your favorites, and with one click up pops a search box that will limit your search to full-text Google Print materials. That's easy! [Spotted on Librarian in Black.]

Google definitely has librarians worried; it's changing the information world as we know it and many librarians are wondering if the order will have a place for libraries and librarians.

Barbara Quint, never one to mince words, comes right out and says it in Searcher's Voice - Tick Tock,(Searcher, Feb. 2005):

"..all information professionals have known that the Universal Virtual Library is growing out of the Web and its search engines and that, some day, this emerging phenomenon will threaten and finally engulf the world of traditional, brick-and-mortar libraries." She even gives us a timeline, tied to Google's development cycle, suggesting that we have until 2011, 2015 at the latest. Don't worry, she sees hope for our future, but she suggests we start preparing...NOW. Unless, that is, you're due to retire by 2011.

Stephen Abram discusses the "Googlized landscape" in his article
The Google Opportunity by Stephen Abram (Library Journal, Feb. 2005). He asks the eternal question "Can libraries compete, complement, or cooperate? Or will we lose out?" He then goes on to list ten key things your can do in a Google world.

There's some good ideas here; the article is definitely worth reading. One of my favorite comments is "Recognize that librarians' and library works' key contributions aren't merely collecting, organizing, and delivering the information - it's improving the quality of the question." Other suggestions include "Push content out", "Get on the bandwagon early", Get into the community", just to name a few.

These two articles make good companions. Barbara's to tell us the future, and Stephen Abrams' to tell us how to prepare. Are you ready?

I was very excited to find a spellchecker built into the new version 3 toolbar for Google. It's perfect for checking text typed into forms on the web, making it indispenable for bloggers or anyone else who fill in a lot of web forms. Even better, I could use it to spellcheck form fields on some of our intranet applications.

A somewhat controversial enhancement is the AutoLink feature. If you click on AutoLink, it looks for ISBN numbers, street addresses, and package tracking numbers in the web page you're currently viewing and creates links that you can then click for further information. Click on an AutoLink address and Google will give you a map showing the location. If you're viewing a page with an ISBN number, click Autolink, and the number will now be an active link to Amazon. In particular, this last option made for some cranky people at Barnes and Noble who quickly created their OWN links on the ISBN numbers to keep people from being directed away from their site.

Spotted on the TVC Alert, Gigablast lets you create a custom topic search of just the sites you select. You can use it for your own research, or include it on your web site. This is just the kind of thing I was looking for!

For example, when I'm researching computer products, I often search PC World and PC Magazine. I'm been researching multifunction printers, and also found some interesting info at ZDNet.com. And, of course, Eopinions can offer some good user feedback. So now I can create my own search box that will search these 4 sites in one search. Like so:

If you want your results clustered by site, just change the sc parameter from 0 to 1.

At work, I've created a custom topic search of the top legal research sites including Virtual Chase and Zimmerman's Research Guide on our intranet. This should be very handy for finding resources quickly when I'm working on the reference desk.

What topic are you interested in? If you have a list of favorite sites that you go back to again and again, maybe you, too, would like to create a Gigablast custom search. It takes a very minimal knowledge of html. Just grab the code from Gigablast, make the few substitutions as instructed, and you're set.

Brenton B. Miller, director of knowledge management at Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton, talks about their choice of the Recommind in response to lawyer's pleas to give them their "own Google." ("The Search Engine that Could", California LegalPro, Summer 2004.)

As described by Walt Crawford in Losing What Counts: The Swamping Phenomenon, swamping happens when "the stuff that counts" disappears "under a flood of other vaguely similar stuff", such as what happened when Amazon introduced "Search in the Book". Though passages in books suddenly became findable, simply finding a book when you knew the title was problematic. Swamping can arise with any search engine when the amount of full-text content grows dramatically, especially when full-text resources are mixed with bibliographic ones. Luckily, Amazon was able to tweak their relevancy ranking to overcome the swamping phenomena.

I'm excited that so many search engines, such as Amazon's A9 and Google are directing people to, of all things, books. We know that not everything is on the web, and books contain valuable information, but if they're not represented somehow in the web search engine results, all that good stuff will go to waste.

Yahoo search is now getting into the act with their recent announcement that they will join the OCLC Open WorldCat Project. Two million cataloging records are now included in Yahoo search results, complete with a list of libraries holding any particular item. For more details see Barbara Quint's Newsbreak, Yahoo! Search Joins OCLC Open WorldCat Project.

In case you missed it, Amazon has released a beta version of their new search engine called A9. That's right, Amazon is jumping into the search engine fray by adding their own unique content to the mix. Run a search on A9 and you'll see results from the Google database in addition to relevant extracts from the 120,000 books Amazon has available in full-text. (See Amazon's Amazon.com Opens the Books.) So if a searcher does a web search using A9 he may discover that the best choice is actually a book; and if Amazon sells more books, well that's what I call a win-win situation.

Amazon.com's new "Search the Book" feature allows users to search and view the full-text of more than 120,000 books. Sales of books included in the full-text database have increased by 9 percent AND the information contained in these books is much more accessible to researchers, a win-win situation if I ever heard one. Michael A. Banks provides details on how to search this full-text database in his article "Amazon.com Opens the Books" (Online, March/April 2004).

I'm afraid it's true, I rarely use another search engine. Yes, I know I should, I've heard all the search engine experts say so. Reliable statistics and studies demonstrate how little overlap there is in search results between the major search engines. Many even believe that Google results are becoming less relevant. But there, at the top of my browser, sits the Google toolbar, calling to me, beckoning, so easy, so satisfying.

There may be a cure, the "Mother of All Toolbars," called Groowe. Mary Ellen Bates reviews this new search toolbar, which is actually 17 toolbars in one, in her "Tip of the Month" for March.

Webmasters need to know what their users are looking for when searching the intranet. What are the top search terms? Do users understand that they're searching the intranet and not the entire web? Are they trying to search "invisible" content, such as phone directories? Are they using search terms that will get them where they want to go? If not, can the search engine be tweaked to improve results?

According to Darlene Fichter, analyzing search engine log files can greatly help webmasters improve their intranets. (Exploiting Intranet Search Engines for Data Discovery, Online, Nov./Dec. 2003.)

Even the best search engine can fail. But when it falls short of finding the most commonly requested information, whether on an external web site or an intranet, that's a real problem.

That's why I found Rich Wiggins' Internet Librarian presentation so interesting. He discussed in detail how he enhanced the search engine at Michigan State University in a way that no doubt improves the user experience.

For better or for worse, web searchers are used to going to one place to search - Google. So is there a way we can make our systems more google-like by building systems that will search more than one source? Yes, according to this article in Library Journal - Trumping Google? Metasearching's Promise