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Tales from the Terminal RoomJune 2003 Issue No. 44 |
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Please Note: This is an archive copy of the newsletter. The information and links that it contains are not updated.
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Tales from the Terminal Room ISSN 1467-338X June 2003 Issue No. 44 Editor: Karen Blakeman Published by: RBA Information Services Tales from the Terminal Room (TFTTR) is a monthly newsletter, with the exception of July and August, which are published as a single issue. TFTTR includes reviews and comparisons of information sources and search tools; updates to the RBA Web site Business Sources and other useful resources; dealing with technical and access problems on the Net; and news of RBA's training courses and publications. If you have taken a look at TFTTR on the Web site recently, you will have noticed a few changes. We are using a new template to make navigating this section easier and more consistent. The main consequence of this is that the pages now have the file extension .shtml and not htm. If you link to any pages in Tales from the Terminal Room, have bookmarks set up or are using page change monitoring software please change the URLs accordingly. Also, if you browse the archives you may have noticed that we have started removing the hyperlinks from some of the older issues. This is because we do not normally update the content of the archived issues and URLs do change or sometimes end up pointing to completely different content. The text of the links will be kept but you will not be able to click on them. We have also added a new page that lists the Gizmos of the Month. Not every Gizmo will be listed, only those that are still alive and kicking and of continued relevance. Other changes in the pipeline include a PDF option for email delivery and additional print options for printing from the web site. Watch this space! Karen Blakeman In this issue:
Turbo10 meta-search: less “turbo” and fewer breakdowns pleaseYou have to hand it to Turbo10. If nothing else, they certainly know how to create interest in their product by turbo-charging their press releases. Every newsletter editor I know seems to have received details of the launch of this supposedly novel and innovative search service. Turbo10 is a meta-search tool which means that it takes your search and runs it across several other search tools at once. The results are combined and presented as a single list with any duplicates removed. One does not always have time to review a new service properly but I was surprised at some Newsletters carrying Turbo10's press release almost verbatim and without any comment on the erroneous statements made by Turbo10. Claims such as “first commercial metasearch engine to connect to hundreds of specialised engines en masse” and “the first of its kind in the industry" are just plain wrong. Or do the likes of Copernic and Webseeker not count? And the clustering technology is not new either. NorthernLight is no more but Vivissimo and KillerInfo, both of whom cluster results into topics, are very much alive and kicking. Testing the serviceWhat about the service itself? As well as covering the standard search engines Turbo10 also searches what is sometimes referred to as the invisible or deep Web, or in Turbo10's case – the “Deep Net”: that is specialist databases not picked up by crawler based engines such as Google. The type of information covered in the “deep web” ranges from business sites, universities, and government departments to commercial directories and scientific databases. With over 1000 sources to choose from, where does one start? Well, there is always the default Turbo10 (Globalseeker, Dogpile, Dmoz, mirago, encyclopedia.com, MSN, Yahoo and Wisenut). It is fast and the results of my test searches were of average to good relevance, but not as good as those achieved with Killerinfo, another meta-search tool and reviewed in the May issue of Tales from the Terminal Room. What looks more promising, though, is the option to set up “My collections”. This enables you to set up topics or channels of up to 10 search tools selected from Turbo10's list. It is an interesting if somewhat eclectic list but, being UK based, Turbo10 has a refreshing sprinkling of UK and European sources. The difficulty here is finding out which are the best ones for a particular subject. The sites can be displayed under broad headings e.g. cooking, medical, science, legal, but you still need to know what individual sites cover in order to build up a good collection. Another issue, which some people may object to, is that you must supply a valid email address for "My Collections" to work. This, apparently, is so that they can email you a link for reloading your collections should you lose them by deleting the cookies set on your PC by Turbo10. I set up two collections: one covering UK government and another for biomedicine. I started off with quite complex search strategies and got nowhere so ended up simplifying my test searches to “one- worders”. For UK government I searched on IR35 and for my biomedicine collection I tried separate searches on aspartame and on anthrax. Zilch! I checked that the sites did in fact have information relating to my queries by searching them directly. As I had expected, there was plenty of information on all of my subjects. I tried out some other “My Collections” of “invisible” sites and experienced the same problems. Turbo10 is quite happy with standard search tools such as Google and AltaVista but fails dismally when it comes to tackling the specialist databases. I am not sure why this is. Many of the sources I looked at are handled perfectly well by KillerInfo and software tools such as Copernic, and it is not that difficult to set up interfaces to these databases. I had a go myself with Bluesquirrel's Webseeker. Webseeker is a meta-search software tool that sits on your PC and, in addition to predefined categories of search tools, it provides a wizard that enables to define your own groupings and add whatever sources you want. I replicated my Turbo10 “collections” and my test searches worked. Clearly, then, the problem is at Turbo10's end. ConclusionsWhat can I say? It is a nice idea: a free meta-search service that covers standard search tools, includes specialist databases and directories, and allows you to define and select your own groupings. The problem is that the most interesting and useful part of the service – the “deep net” searching – does not work. If Turbo10 can actually get their search interface to work, then it may be a contender. As it stands, I am sticking with KillerInfo for meta-searching, Copernic Professional for subject groupings of databases, and Webseeker for setting up my own lists of resources for searching. Both Copernic and WebSeeker are priced – USD 79.95 and USD 29.95 respectively - but they do work! Karen Blakeman URLs of sites: Turbo10 http://turbo10.com/ New browser on the block: Mozilla FirebirdIf you want a fast, reliable, free alternative to Internet explorer try Mozilla's Firebird. Firebird is just the browser component of Mozilla – no news or email reader, or other bells and whistles. Features include options for blocking pop-ups, managing passwords and cookies, and controlling javascript options such as scripts that hide or change the status bar text. There is also a neat automatic image resizer that shrinks any image that is bigger than your window to make the whole image visible. And for Google Toolbar fans, there is a Mozilla version available at http://googlebar.mozdev.org/ Mozilla Firebird can be downloaded from http://www.mozilla.org/ Information ResourcesGeneral Sources http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/general.htmCookies and IT Law Two sites from UK Law firm Masons are helping business stay legal on the Web. A new UK law, coming into force on 31st October 2003, will require Web site owners to tell visitors about the use of cookies on their sites and how they can control them. AboutCookies.org (http://www.aboutcookies.org/) is a service provided by Masons and provides up-to-date information on the law surrounding cookies as well as how to manage cookies. The free service encourages Web site owners to direct their visitors to www.aboutcookies.org to find out more about cookies. Masons out-law.com (http://www.out-law.com/) is another free service and was launched in May 2000. It provides guides, articles and news stories relating to everything from the drawing up of on-line contracts and agreements to issues of taxation and defamation. Out-Law explains IT, e-commerce, privacy, software, tax and employment and is updated daily. The initial target market included start-ups, Internet businesses and new media companies but the free service is now also used by government bodies, academic institutions and in-house lawyers.
Miscellaneous Essentials http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/misc.htmLand Registry Online
(pilot Web site) http://www.landregisteronline.gov.uk/ Until now, a request for property ownership details had to be made by post, although the required forms could be downloaded from http://www.landreg.gov.uk/. The new pilot site provides immediate access to the register. Each property request costs GBP 2 and payment is made online via credit/debit. Once payment has been authorised the details are delivered as a PDF file. The database has details of 18 million registered individual properties in England and Wales. The details include a description of the property, who owns it, mortgage lender (if any), price stated (if registered since 1st April 2000), rights of way (not public rights of way), and any conditions or restrictions. The Land Registry does not provide historical or genealogical information, cannot provide a search by owner's name and does not provide details about the internal layouts or contents of any building. Fast Book Finder http:www.fastbookfinder.com/
Industry Specific Directories http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/trade.htmDirectories of UK law firms and barristers Law on the Web has set up two UK legal directories: Law Firms on the Web (http://www.lawfirmsontheweb.co.uk/) and Bar on the Web (http://www.barontheweb.co.uk/). Law Firms on the Web is a directory of over 450 UK law firms that have a presence on the Web. You can search by legal problem (select from a pull down menu), keyword, location, and name. Click on a link in the results list to go direct to the law firm's own Web site. Bar on the Web is maintained in association with the Kennedy Guide to Barristers and has details of approximately 70 barristers who have supplied details for the Web site. Search by name, practice area, chamber or region, or browse the whole directory. These are useful additional resources to those already listed in the legal section of the Industry Specific Directories listing:
Research Buyers Guide http://www.rbg.org.uk/
Gizmo of the MonthAlltheWeb URL Investigatorhttp://www.alltheweb.com/ Identifying which Web sites have set up links to a particular Web page can be a useful indicator of the quality or authority of that Web page. It is also a useful way of finding similar pages to that at a known URL, the assumption being that pages with similar content or on the same subject tend to link to one another. The Google command link: combined with the URL, for example link:www.rba.co.uk, will find pages that link to www.rba.co.uk but will also pick up internal links on the RBA site. AlltheWeb's URL investigator goes a step further and excludes internal links within a site. To use the URL Investigator go to AlltheWeb and type the URL you want to investigate into the search box. You are then presented with a page of information that gives you:
You can view the linked pages by clicking on “Find all external web pages that link to....” The link to see how the site looked in the past takes you to the Wayback machine (http://www.archive.org/) which has been archiving Internet sites for several years. There is no guarantee that the site in question will be in the archive, as the site may have asked Wayback to remove or exclude their pages. I found that the link to the Whois service does not always work and is limited in the type of domains it covers. A far better option for checking domain name ownership is Allwhois at http://www.allwhois.com/ Strangely, URL investigator does not work on UK government sites but does with US government pages. If you need to carry out a comprehensive search for linked pages, for example if you are restructuring your site and want to contact everyone who has set up a link to you, then you should use the link commands on other search engines as well. If, say, you are researching the site www.xyz.co.uk:
Meetings and WorkshopsPresentation: Making sense of visitor logs: a black art? Part
of the UKOLUG series of seminars at Umbrella 2003 Workshop: Market Research on the Web Workshop: Assessing the Quality of Information TFTTR Contact InformationKaren Blakeman, RBA Information Services ArchivesTFTTR archives: http://www.rba.co.uk/tfttr/archives/index.shtml Subscribe and UnsubscribeTo subscribe to the newsletter fill in the online registration form at http://www.rba.co.uk/tfttr/index.shtml To unsubscribe, use the registration form at http://www.rba.co.uk/tfttr/index.shtml and check the unsubscribe radio button. Privacy StatementSubscribers' details are used only to enable distribution of the newsletter Tales from the Terminal Room. The subscriber list is not used for any other purpose, nor will it be disclosed by RBA or made available in any form to any other individual, organisation or company.
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| This page was last updated on 29th June 2003 | 2003 |
