Infoblog

Check out Omnipelagos, a search engine that "finds the shortest paths between any two things."

It reminds me of the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon trivia game in which you tried to connect Kevin Bacon and any other actor through films or television shows the two worked on using no more than six steps.

Omnipelagos lets you enter two names or concepts and then connects the two. Here's a preset example I saw when I visited.

From Desperate Housewives to William Shakespeare:

Desperate Housewives
set on Wisteria Lane in the fictional town of Fairview and written by Marc Cherry. The series tracks the lives of four housewives

Marc Cherry
Designing Women as Dixie Carter's personal assistant. In 1990 he became a writer and producer for the longrunning hit sitcom

Dixie Carter
A Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare. In 1967 she married businessman Arthur Carter (to whom she is not related)

William Shakespeare

Posted by gail mcgovern at 7:04 AM in Cool Tools | Web Searching | Permalink

BMW's web folks in Germany created countless "doorway pages" linking to their site to increase their search rank for a search in Google for "used car." Google figured out what they were doing, and so long to BMW's ranking. BMW's German site has now been given a search rank of zero. You might be able to fool the searchers, but you can't fool Google...at least, not this time.

Posted by sarah houghton at 4:00 PM in Web Searching | Permalink

Consumer Reports, our consumer information standby in the library, has written a report comparing eleven different online travel search engines. Sites like CheapFlights, PriceGrabber, and TravelZoo did not pass muster with CR's investigators. The key findings from the report:

- None of the sites culled fares and rates from the entire universe of travel sites available.
- There’s a disturbing “customer service vacuum” since many of these sites do not encourage direct communication with consumers.
- Technological glitches may prevent certain itineraries and rates from being captured by travel search sites.
- Questions remain about potential bias on display screens.

So, why should librarians care? Print out a copy of this report and make it available in your consumer resources section. Include it in your next class for users about online travel or e-commerce. And hey, librarians actually travel too, so the report might come in handy for your own next trip planning too!

Posted by sarah houghton at 2:47 PM in Web Searching | Permalink

From one of my favorite blogs, ResearchBuzz!, I found out about a new feature from the Internet Movie Database—Movie Keywords Analyzer (MoKA).

You can find titles that have a particular keyword and get a tally of all keywords from the titles that matched your initial keyword set.

I searched "tomatoes" because I was thinking of the funny sci fi parody I saw years ago and these are the matches I got. Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! was among them.

tomato (41 titles - Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie (2002), ...)
mashed-potatoes (2 titles - Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), ...)
giant-tomato (1 title - Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! (1978))
stuffed-tomato (1 title - Penny Wisdom (1937))
comatose (6 titles - "Carnivàle" (2003), ...)
automat-restaurant (1 title - That Touch of Mink (1962))
marcantonatos (1 title - Wannabees (2002))

Posted by gail mcgovern at 3:38 PM in Web Searching | Permalink

Are you curious about what topics were most popular on Google this year? Check out the 2005 Year-End Google Zeitgeist. The page lists the top 10 Google, Google News and Froogle searches. The page links to more top searches in 5 categories: world affairs, nature, movies, celebrities and phenomena

Posted by gail mcgovern at 6:50 AM in Web Searching | Permalink

Subtitled "Articles and news about Web searching and Internet use. Includes search tools, online news, email, current awareness tools, and general use," Internet News is Web Search Guide maven Gwen Harris' blog.

I recommend it highly for keeping up with the latest in search news.

Posted by carole leita at 9:49 AM in Web Searching | Permalink

A key evaluation point for information found on the web is when it was written. Dating the Web: The Confusion of Chronology provides excellent advice from Greg Notess on using tools such as Gigablast and the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine to track the real date of that web page.

Posted by carole leita at 5:37 AM in Training | Web Searching | Permalink | Comments (0)

I know, we're usually reporting a new Google thing. but today, for a change, it's Yahoo introducing its new Site Explorer. Plug in a URL, then click Explore URL. You can:

• Show all subpages within a URL indexed by Yahoo! I plugged in http://infopeople.org and got 7,207 hits. You can reduce that number by limiting the search to only the main domain (no sub-domains).


• You can also plug in a subdirectory. I tried http://infopeople.org/resources/security/ and got 31 pages.

If your site doesn't show up, they offer a submit form. Search Engine Watch offers a review here.

Posted by eileen o'shea at 8:20 AM in Web Searching | Permalink | Comments (0)

A couple of related web tools of benefit to people with vision problems you should know about and that should be on disability resources lists. Speegle reads search results and Speakwire reads from a selectable list of newsfeeds that includes the San Jose Mercury News. In Speegle, you have a choice of English or American accents. Male Voice #1 has an English accent and #2 and Female Voice have American accents. Speakwire doesn't give you a choice or accents, but it has a really neat tool lower down on the page -- Custom Feeds, where you can enter the feed URL of your favorite blog and have it read to you.

Posted by carole leita at 9:53 AM in Cool Tools | Web Resources | Web Searching | Permalink

Blogs are fast becoming a must place to search for the most current news and information (from disasters to politics to technology). Now that Google Blog Search (beta) has entered the fray, you need to compare its indexing and searching ability with other blog search tools as -- Feedster, Blogpulse, Technorati, and A-9, which will search blogs if you tell it to.

Posted by at 12:25 PM in Web Searching | Permalink | Comments (0)

What a great service! Lycos is maintaining a multiple-site search for Katrina missing persons. A lot of helpful folks are maintaining databases of missing persons as a result of Hurricane Katrina. All the databases searched are listed and if you know of any other, there is a form to fill out to get it added.

via Neat New's Katrina Edition

Posted by at 3:03 PM in Web Resources | Web Searching | Permalink

If you've never tried this out, you should. Yahoo! Local has been around for a while, and allows you to narrow your search for stuff to your home or work (or whatever) zip code or city. It's gotten a nice upgrade, and now offers city pages for every city, neighborhood and zip code in the U.S. Also:

Maps are now incorporated throughout the site to be there when you need them but not get in the way when you don't. For instance, on our results page, hover over the small map to reveal a larger, interactive map with icons that link to the detailed listing record page. You'll also notice that we have the option to refine location by neighborhood in major cities and even support searching by neighborhood...

And to add to the fun, the whole shebang has been RSS-enabled. Other nifty prepared content includes wi-fi hotspots and current traffic maps.

Read more about it here.

Posted by at 12:27 PM in Web Searching | Permalink

Yahoo has released beta version 2.0 of their My Web search engine. What's different about My Web? Well, Yahoo is calling it a "social search engine," which, they claim, "complements web search by enabling users to search the knowledge and expertise of their friends and community in addition to the web." This could be a very useful tool for reference librarians who would like to save useful searches and quickly find that great answer from last week. More from the Yahoo blog post announcement:

Social search complements web search, which is driven by publishers and web sites, by providing a better search experience that is powered by people and communities. Flickr is a great example of this power applied to photos and image search.

Much like links and anchor text enabled major improvements in web search by becoming a new source of authority for search engines, people and trust networks are now an additional source of authority for social search engines. In the same way that blogs and RSS are empowering individuals to participate in publishing, individuals and communities can now participate in search, using tools like My Web 2.0 that let them define what is valuable to them and their community.

Over time, we envision communities using My Web to build their own search engines to capture and make accessible the knowledge of their community – search engines populated with the collective experience of a group of medical researchers, a community of PHP experts, a bird watching club, or members of a structural engineering consulting firm.

If this interests you, also check out Google's personalized search.

Posted by at 10:34 AM in Web Searching | Permalink

Have you seen Official Find? It's a specialized search engine that searches for official company and brand websites and sorts through all the regular detritus you usually find with searches for "The Gap" and "PetCo."

Posted by at 2:38 PM in Web Searching | Permalink

There's a new kid on the search engine block called Acronyma. It's a database of over 450,000 acronyms in seven languages that allows you to search by word(s) or acronym. You can submit new acronyms (I did after searching for Interpol and coming up empty) and also look up statistics on how many acroyms have been added in each language. Nifty!

A tip o' the Mickey Mouse ears to Research Buzz for the link.

Posted by at 10:34 PM in Web Searching | Permalink

Yahoo! is offering a very cool tool that allows you to search for videos on the web. Try Yahoo Video Search the next time you need to find a short clip on stupid pet trick videos or something more, uh, educational, like space shuttle videos. You do need to add the word videos to your search to make it work. Have fun!

Posted by at 3:56 PM in Web Searching | Permalink

That darned Google, always coming up with new features! This one is a useful one that is quite handy if you or your patrons need to track packages - or other numbers. I for one often get confused about which carrier is delivering my stuff, but Google's Search by Number feature makes it a breeze! Just type in the tracking number, whatever it is, and hey presto! you get your tracking results. Works for UPS, FedEx, USPS, VIN numbers, UPC codes, area codes, and patent numbers. For tracking packages, VINs, and area codes just plug in the numbers; for patents, type in "patent 1234whatever." A nifty reference tool for the home or office!

Posted by at 10:04 AM in Web Searching | Permalink

Well, not exactly. But if you've ever wondered just how much information about you your searching patterns can yield, this article from Wired News may be enlightening. Cookies certainly offer some details about you, but registering for a site like My Yahoo! gives much more information to their parent sites. The article offers links to the privacy policies of some major search engines (which I had never bothered to look at before), and it also offers some tips to help you maintain at least some anonymity on the web. Of special interest to me, as I just signed up for one, it offers some strong concerns about Google Gmail. All in all, an interesting read.

Posted by at 12:40 PM in Web Searching | Permalink

When you can google the weather? Go to google.com and type "weather los angeles, ca" and hey presto! you get a four-day forecast, as well as links to related weather information. Forecasts are courtesy of Wunderground, Inc. Oh, and you can also just use zipcodes. Neato! Downside: this only works with U.S. locations.

Posted by at 1:21 PM in Web Searching | Permalink

From SearchEngineWatch, I learned that March 1 was Yahoo's 10th anniversary (of incorporation)! They have some links to old versions of Yahoo's home page: from 1995, and from 1996. Wow, I'm feeling my (web surfing) age - I can remember both of those pages when Yahoo! was just a set of pretty glorious bookmarks (and certainly wasn't being publicly traded!), and how techie and cool they seemed at the time!

Posted by at 1:14 PM in Web Searching | Permalink

Google has a new tool in beta (is it me, or is pretty much everything in Google beta now?): Google movies! Wow, what a coincidence, with the Academy Awards less than a week away! Okay, probably no coincidence. ANYway, all you do is add the operator movies: to a search for a line from a movie, the name of an actor, director, film, or just bits of stuff that happened in a film, say, "treasure and bandits and walter huston" (or the title of this post) and off you go! I tried "movie: play it again" and it did indeed find Casablanca. It was number seven on the list, but it WAS there. Then I tried "movie: woman lights two cigarettes" and while it didn't find Now, Voyager, it did mention the movie in the first or second description. Not bad, but I think I'll stick with the Internet Movie Database. Well, maybe I'll use both.

Posted by at 1:56 PM in Web Searching | Permalink

Google has upgraded its toolbar, and it's available for a beta download if you're interested. The new version has three new features:

• SpellCheck: Check your spelling whenever you type in web forms
  
• WordTranslator: Translate English words into other languages
  
• AutoLink (US only): Turn street addresses into links to online maps

I'm hankering for the AutoLink, but am concerned that the other two enhancements may prove to be either irritating or useless (in that order). But...the Google toolbar has become a staple in my reference toolkit at this point, as it has for many librarians. Download away!

Posted by at 1:09 PM in Web Searching | Permalink

The Google homepage has a new link! Next time you're looking for something, check out the Local link above the search box. Enter your term in the search box then click on Local, and you'll be taken to a page where you can enter a location beside your search. Then when you click on the Google Search button, you'll get results customized for that location. Useful if you're looking for free wi-fi in Los Angeles, or a good Italian restaurant in Sacramento.

Link via the Google Blog.

Posted by at 12:40 PM in Web Searching | Permalink

From their own description:

Babelplex is a bilingual search service that searches the web in one language and in another language via a cross-language information retrieval system utilizing AltaVista - Babel Fish Translation, Google Translate, or Yahoo! Language Search Tools for translation and utilizing AltaVista, Google, or Yahoo! for search. Sort of like plugging a Babelfish into a search engine to do bilingual search.

Languages include English to Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean and vice versa. Results give you a split screen with your query translated on one screen and the other with sites in the language you specified. A useful tool!

Posted by at 5:23 PM in Web Searching | Permalink

Google has a new service in Beta: Google Suggest. From their description of the new service:

This new web search service suggests queries as a user types what he or she is looking for into the search box. By offering more refined searches up front, Google Suggest can make searching more convenient and efficient, because it eliminates the need to type the entire text of a query. In addition, the service can connect users with new query suggestions that are useful, intriguing, and fun.

Posted by at 11:21 AM in Web Searching | Permalink

Yahoo! has expanded its image collection to 1 billion images (vs. 880 million that Google claims). Why am I telling your this? Because you should remember to try Yahoo's if your habitual Google Images search doesn't find exactly what you want.

Posted by at 9:40 AM in Web Searching | Permalink

Speegle Speak Perfect Web Search lets you select a female or male voice and reads back the results of your search. No registration, no software downloads. Very interesting technology.

Posted by at 2:20 PM in Web Searching | Permalink

Infopeople instructor (among other things) Gary Price at ResourceShelf tells us about a search engine you need to check out -- Say Hello to Clusty.com From Vivisimo.
He's also quoted on the topic in a NYT article about Clusty.

Posted by at 4:32 AM in People | Web Searching | Permalink

I use search engine plugins on my web browser Firefox on both Mac OS X and Windows XP.

The first time I encountered this site I just added some of the popular search sites listed on the main page -- Yahoo, IMDB, and Wikipedia. Then I wanted to add Gigablast so typed gigablast into their search box and found it. Then I searched on lii and added the Librarians' Index to the Internet to my browser's drop-down search box! A neat feature is that you can easily change the default search. Most often I have it on lii.org as I also use the Googlebar, an extension for Firefox.

Posted by at 3:42 PM in Web Searching | Permalink

Excellent information for the serious web searcher. This is the name of the 2-page PDF file Tara Calashain of Research Buzz has made available as a free download celebrating the launch of her new book. Check it and a sample chapter, "The Principle of Onions," out at the book's eponymous website Web Search Garage.

Posted by at 5:52 AM in Web Searching | Permalink

Google Guide: Making Searching Even Easier is a great online tutorial for getting below the surface of Google's deceptively simple search box. Although I knew Google didn't use proximity operators, I learned from this tutorial that Google does consider proximity.

Just as online classes require self-direction in the student, so does this tutorial that you can download as a 138 page PDF document for the princely sum of $1.99 (a great reason to set up a PayPal account if you haven't already). If you haven't been able to make Joe Barker's new workshop Extreme Googling this is a great way to get inside Google's simple shell.

At the very least, make it your home page for searching as a new tip from the tutorial pops up every time you reload the page! Painless learning.

Posted by at 10:18 AM in Training | Web Searching | Permalink

Search Engine Bookmarklets - http://www.searchengineshowdown.com/bmlets/
Librarian and Search Engine expert Greg Notess has a great page on what a bookmarklet is and a list of the best to use for searching. If you do a lot of searching on the web don't miss this. His site, Search Engine Showdown is a must read for anyone who uses Google and other search engines to find information. He has an RSS feed for those who'd like notification when he has news to report.

Posted by at 8:40 AM in Web Searching | Permalink

Sites to try when other engines fail you - Infopeople instructor and blogger Gary Price is quoted extensively in the San Jose Mercury News (requires free registration).

Posted by at 12:38 PM in Infopeople News | Web Searching | Permalink