Monthly Archives: October 2005

Top 10 Search Tips, UKeiG

Top 10 Search Tips

At the end of every advanced search workshop that we run, the delegates vote on their 10 top search tips. The latest course was run for UKeiG (UK eInformation Group) on Friday, October 28th and was held at CILIP in London. A summary of the tips is given below but a more detailed explanation will appear in the UKeiG members newsletter eLucidate, and in the members area on the UKeiG web site.

1. Use domain/site search to limit by type of site and to search individual sites that are difficult to navigate.

2. Trovando.it for a quick way to run your search in different search tools one by one.

3. Use Yahoo for complex nested Boolean searches.

4. Think about the format that the information might be in and use the filetype options to narrow down your search.

5. “Disappearing” pages: use the search engines’ cached pages for recently disappeared pages or the Wayback Machine for older pages and sites.

6. Use the Google numeric range when searching for ranges of prices, distances, weights, temperatures, years etc.

7. Don’t give up! If your favourite search engine is not working, try another one or a different type of resource.

8. Graball for comparing the results from 2 search engines side by side.

9. Copernic Desktop for desktop search.

10. Yahoo Mindset to adjust the ranking of results (“shopping” versus “research”)

Business Information

Business Week Top 100 Global Brands Scoreboard

Business Week have released their 2005 league table of top 100 global brands. The table ranks 100 global brands that have a value greater than $1 billion. The brands are selected according to two criteria: they have to be global in nature, deriving 20% or more of sales from outside their home country, and there also has to be publicly available marketing and financial data on which to base the valuation. The table also gives rankings for the years 2001 to 2004.

There is no change in the top 5: Coca-Cola, Microsoft, IBM, GE and Intel. Google makes a first appearance at number 38 sandwiched between Goldman Sachs and Kellogg’s, and Yahoo is up two places at 58. Apple has also gone up two places to number 41. Amazon has gone down slightly from last year’s 66 to 68 this year while eBay has risen 5 places to number 55.

ili2005

Email must die!

4 Comments

Email must die! That was the battle cry that rang out this morning at Internet Librarian International in London, with Brian Kelly leading the attack. Quote as posted on the ILI wiki by rakerman:

“Poor metadata – bad subject lines, subject lines not changed…”

“Viruses, spam, flame wars…”

“Email is where knowledge goes to die”

It was an excellent presentation and I wholeheartedly agree with Brian. I’m already using RSS, blogs, Wikis and Skype which were all mentioned by him as alternatives but I have been wary of IM, one of the other options he covered. But I am now going to give it a go, especially as May Chang gave some useful pointers to multi-protocol systems in her talk before lunch.

Top 10 Business Sites

Top 10 Business Sites

At the end of each of our Business Information on the Internet workshops we ask the delegates to compile a “Top 10 Business Sites” list. The list from the course held on 6th October is now at http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/top10/index.htm.

Yet again we failed to to narrow it down to just 10 sites so we actually have a round dozen! The new Alacrawiki site came straight in at number one with agreement from all delegates that this is an excellent starting point for industry specific information. Europages and Kompass made yet another appearance and have been joined by Kellysearch in the directories category.

Search tool Trovando is also a new entrant, enabling you to quickly run your search in several web, blog, image and reference search tools one by one.