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Monthly Archives: June 2005
Acronyma
Claims to be the largest database of acronyms and abbreviations on the web with over 471000 acronyms. Acronymfinder.com appears to have more definitions (it claims to have 2,020,000) and sorts the definitions into categories, for example Science and Medicine, Slang and Chat. Acronyma returned fewer results with my test searches but as well as English, it also offers definitions of Spanish, French, German, Dutch, Italian and Portuguese acronyms.
Yahoo to the Max
Yahoo to the Max is a new book from Ran Hock that tells you all there is to know about Yahoo together with recommended strategies for getting the best out of the service. I sometimes suspect that Ran knows more about Yahoo than Yahoo themselves!
AskOxford: Collective Terms for Animals
AskOxford: Collective Terms for Animals
A useful section of the Oxford Dictionaries site for settling arguments and checking your pub quiz Q&A. We were having a heated discussion regarding the correct collective noun for a group of hippopotamuses. Yes, sad, isn’t it? We had a laptop and mobile coms but a Google search came up with all sorts of terms, some of them hotly disputed. Where do we Brits go to in situations such as this? Answer – the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Unfortunately, we were not in a venue where I could access my own multi volume hard copy but AskOxford came up with the answer, or rather answers. For the record, a group of hippos can be a pod, a bloat, a herd or a school. Now you know!
Zephyr M&A coverage increased
Bureau van Dijk’s M&A database, Zephyr, has been increased to more than 300,000 deals. Zephyr contains information on M&A, IPO and private equity deals and includes company financials. In addition to current deal information, historical deal information has been added for Asia and other regions. There is now five years of global coverage. Deals involving US or European companies go back to the beginning of 1997. More information on Zephyr can be found at http://www.bvdep.com/, or by calling +44 20 7549 5000.
Yagoohoogle becomes Twingine
Yagoohoogle, mentioned in a posting on April 7th, has becomeTwingine. Same features (compares Google and Yahoo side by side) but the title and URL are much easier to remember!
EEVL Xtra
A new service from EEVL that helps you find articles, key websites, books, the latest industry news, job announcements, ejournals, eprints, technical reports,
and the latest research in engineering, mathematics, and computing. EEVL Xtra searches databases and resources that most search engines miss.
Subject Finder – Search for educational Subjects & Information
I found this site via the Internet Resources Newsletter: Issue 129
http://www.hw.ac.uk/libwww/irn/irn129/irn129.html
“Subject Finder is developed by Teum Teklehaimanot to help students, teachers and lecturers find educational websites easily without being overwhelmed with a huge number of search results. It is designed to search only educational websites which contain tutorials, learning and teaching materials such as Accounting, Arts and Design, Biology, Business, Chemistry, Computing, Construction, Counselling, Economics, Electronics, Engineering, Geography, Health, History, Law, Languages, Mathematics, Physics, Psychology, Reference, Science, Social Science, Sociology, Travel, etc.”
You can browse by subject or carry out a keyword search. Although the site says that it searches only educational web sites, that does not mean it is restricted to academic pages. I found some good quality resources on a number of topics from organisations such as trade and professional associations. I am definitely adding this service to my collection of “specialty” search tools.
Official Find – The Official-Site Searcher
Official Find – The Official-Site Searcher
This site claims to make it easier to find the official web sites of top brands and companies. Type in your brand name or company into the search box and you should find the official site at the top or in the top 5-10 search results. For major brands it seems to work well, except that you still have to watch out for advertisements at the top of the results. I had problems, though, with some UK and European brand names and in particular with household cleaning products.
I was on the point of being moderately impressed, but when I ran the same searches in Google most of the results looked identical except for the UK and European brand names. Google managed to find most of those and placed them in the top 3. I then realised that I use Google.co.uk as my default and when I used Google.com the results looked very similar to Official Find’s.
I am not sure what is so special about Official Find. The “About” file refers to their InstaNav which instantly searches for Official Sites with each keystroke and presents results in a drop down menu in the actual search box. You should then be able to select and click on the site without going to a search results page first. They go on to say that “InstaNav tm will make searching at Google and other search engines feel old fashioned!” None of the claimed features worked in Firefox and in IE I kept getting warnings about Active-X.
Verdict: I’ll stick with the boring old fashioned search engines.