Search Tips

Mary Ellen Bates
“creating info groupies” white paper
http://www.batesinfo.com/groupies.pdf

1. Use search engines “answers”
a. ask – smart answers
b. google – one box
c. yahoo – shortcuts
d. msn’s – instant answers
i. livesearch (formerly msn)

2. Squidoo
a. hybrid of a web page, interactive poll, flicker-like photos, notes from readers, and a blog
ii. (walking while working)
b. great way to share resources with colleagues

3. Use Rollyo.com, yahoo search builder (builder.sesarch.yahoo.com or Gigablast’s Custom Topic search to build customized search engine
a. Has the library’s imprimatur
b. Surface the best results; limited search universe

4. Put that customized search engine on users’ home pages
a. Use google gadgets API to add it through Google personalized homepage (creating a portal)
b. 4.5 can also add link to your online catalog or other resources
c. Tallis.com for mashup for libraries

5. Google’s synonym finder
a. syntax is: ~word
b. Example: ~obesity ~kids will retrieve:
c. Obese, diet, weight, diabetes, overweight AND childhood, child children, youth
d. Tends to be a little broad, may catch things you don’t want

6. Google Co-op
a. www.google.com/coop
i. Not ready for prime-time yet, but...
ii. Tagging on steroids, by experts
iii. The “health” topic is particularly useful

7. Google trend search to see relative mentions of a concept over time
a. www.google.com/trends

8. Google notebook
a. Save snimppetsz from web sites into “notebooks”
b. Share them selectively with clients
c. Put the notebook on your google home page
d. www.google.com/googlenotebook

9. Google’s new archive
a. news.google.com/archivesearch
b. Timeline is a useful “clustering’ of news
c. content from publsiehrs and aggregators
d. cost: from $0-7 each

10. Yahoo’s search subscriptions
a. Search.yahoo.com/subscriptions (usually a subset of the subscription database, free to search, pay for articles) news archives

11. Use Yahoo’s Mindset feature
a. Mindset.reasesarch.yahoo.com
i. Are you researching or shopping?
ii. A slide bar between the two

12. Yahoo site explorer
a. Siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
b. See all indexed pages within a domains
c. Also able to see who links to the domain/site (used after executing search

13. Exalead
a. Great advanced search features: Proximity search, phonetic and approximate
b. Metasearch engine
c. Advanced search phonetic, approximate spellings, and adjacent, logical, regular expressions

14. Gigablast
a. search results link to cached
b. don’t bother with advanced
c. stripped pages
d. older copies

15. MSN’s cool synonym-suggestion tool

16. Misspelling suggestion engine on MSN
a. (in adCenter Labs)

17. Zibb.com
a. Vertical, for business

18. Kosmix.com
a. US politics, sort by point of view (liberal, conservative, libertarian)

19. Stumped on an unfamiliar topic?
a. University libraries
b. Librarian’s Internet Index
c. Internet public library pathfinders
d. Wikipedia

20. Tara Calishain’s Kebberfegg
a. www.kebberfegg.com
b. Generates rss feeds by category
c. You then add those feeds to your reader with one click
i. Basically a filter for rss

21. Scandoo…
a. Then tell it to search in other search engine
b. It labels the search engine by icon for classifications about quality

22. NationMaster.com
a. Source for national stats
b. Uses graphic form for presentation of stats

23. AccessMyLibrary.com
a. Interfaces with infotrac

24. Eurekster’s Swiki
a. Swicki.eurekster.com
b. Create a vertical search engine and then watches what you find useful and then adds to relevancy ranking

25. TaxonomyWarehouse.com
a. useful to find hierarchical structure of information
b. provides links to both published and unpublished/online controlled vocabularies

26. Mining podcast content
a. Podscope and podzinger
b. Blinkx
c. Plugged

27. Qwika.com to specifically search wikis
a. It’s beta, so manage your expectations

28. Furl.net
a. Organize bookmarks by topics
b. Create webliography in several citation formats
c. Export to bibTeX and EndNote
d. Export to a web page, dynamically updated

29. LibraryThing
a. “People who own this book also own”
b. Create rss feeds of recent acquisitions, LT books with a specific tag
c. Create own tagged records

30. Data visualization arrives to the value-added online services
a. Factiva’s Discovery Pane in Search 2.0

‘Search tip of the month’: to subscribe to newsletter mbates@BatesInfo.com