All posts by Karen Blakeman

I have worked in the information profession for over twenty years and have been a freelance consultant since 1989. My company (RBA Information Services) provides training and consultancy on the use of the Internet, and on accessing and managing information resources. Prior to setting up RBA I worked at the Colindale Central Public Health Laboratory, and then spent ten years in the Pharmaceutical and Health Care industry before moving to the International management consultancy group Strategic Planning Associates. I edit and publish an electronic newsletter called Tales from the Terminal Room. Other publications include Search Strategies for the Internet. I am a Fellow of CILIP: The Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, a member of the UK eInformation Group (UKeiG).
Business Information, directories

Business-Ukraine

Many thanks to Britta Nordström for alerting me to this site.  Business Ukraine (http://biznes-ukraina.ua/) has a useful collection of directories of companies, products and services in Ukraine as well as links to postal codes and transport timetables. There is also a list of  Directories of the world on-line (http://biznes-ukraina.ua/extra.phtml?ttt=1&l=en) that is mostly yellow pages for countries around the world. The market reviews look interesting but the articles are subscription only.

There are Russian, Ukrainian and English language options for many of the sections but you may have to resort to Google’s translation service for some areas of the site.

 

Google, Search Strategies, Top 10 Search Tips

All About Google – Top Tips

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As well as the “Anything BUT Google” sessions, I have also been running “All About Google” workshops. The participants are asked to come up with a group Top 10 Tips and a combined list from the last three events is listed below. Many tips were common to all three so the final list has 16 tips. I also spotted people experimenting with the Google Art Project (http://www.googleartproject.com/), Fusion Tables (http://www.google.com/fusiontables/), Google Custom Search Engines (http://www.google.com/cse), Google Internet Statistics (http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/landing/internetstats/), and one person found Google Labs Transliteration (http://www.google.com/transliterate/) very useful.

1. Use the filetype: command or the file format option on the Advanced Search screen to limit your research to PowerPoint for presentations, spreadsheets for data and statistics or PDF for research papers and industry/government reports. Note that filetype:ppt, for example, will not pick up the newer .pptx so you will need to incorporate both into your strategy, for example filetype:ppt OR filetype:pptx

2. Use the plus sign (+) before a term or phrase to try and force an exact match – be aware, though, that Google sometimes still does what it wants with your terms – or use the minus sign immediately before a term to exclude pages that contain it. The minus sign can also be used with commands to exclude, for example, a specific site (-site:nameofsite.com) or a file format (-filetype:ppt) from your results.

3. Include the site: command in your strategy or use the domain/site box on the advanced search screen to focus your search on particular types of site, for example site:nhs.uk

4. Try the two proximity commands. An asterisk (*) between two words will look for your words in the order specified and separated by one or more terms, for example solar * panels. The AROUND(n) command, which is undocumented, looks for your terms in either order separated by the number of words (n) specified, for example solar AROUND(2) panels. Note that AROUND did not work for everyone on the workshop.

5. Usage rights. Use the Advanced Search screens for the web and image search to limit your search to Creative Commons material. The options are in the pull down menu under Usage Rights.

6. Use Google Realtime (http://www.google.com/realtime) for searching Twitter. Other social networks are supposedly included but the results are usually dominated by Twitter. Archives go back to February 2010 and there is a useful timeline that enables you to visualise activity over time and look at specific dates.

7. Use the tilde (~) before a term to search for synonyms. For example ~energy will search for energy, power, oil, gas, electricity or electric.

8. Wonder wheel. This can be found in the side bar to the left of your web search results page. Google pulls out terms and phrases from the top results and represents them as spokes on a wheel. Click on one of them and your search is revised and another wheel created. You can view the list of results to the right of the wheel. Note: the Wonder wheel is not available if you have Instant Search switched on.

9. Change the order in which you enter your search terms. This will change the order in which your results are presented and in some cases can change the search completely.

10. Repeat important terms to change the order in which results are presented. Like changing the order of your search terms, this can sometimes significantly alter the results.

11. Google Reader (http://www.google.com/reader). As well as using to aggregate RSS feeds that you have entered individually the Add Subscription box also allows you to search for new feeds using keywords.

12. Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com/). Although there are serious limitations to Google Scholar and the advanced search options are unreliable it can be very useful in tracking down the details of a half remembered reference. One member of the workshop explained that students often fail to accurately note down articles mentioned in lecturers. The specialist databases do not always retrieve the references in these cases whereas Google Scholar often does.

13. Google Scholar for citations. Although far from comprehensive and sometimes inaccurate not everyone can afford the more reliable but expensive databases. (Note: although it does not cover all subjects it is worth looking at Microsoft Academic Search at http://academic.research.microsoft.com/as an alternative).

14. Quality. Just because you found something through a Google search does not mean it is true or a trusted source, or that it is the most relevant document. Young students in particular often need to be reminded of this.

15. Open up the side bars to the left of your results. The options change depending on the type of search (general web search, images, news, books, recipes) and it is the key to narrowing down your search, especially by date.

16. Stand your ground! Don’t let Google take over. Clear your web history, cache and cookies. If you are responsible for access to the internet in your information centre or library, set up the browsers so that web histories and caches are cleared everytime a user logs out.  (You may need to enlist help from IT to set this up)

 

Search Engines, Search Strategies

Anything but Google – URLs

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I omitted to include the URLs of some of the specialist tools mentioned in the Anything but Google presentation. You could Bing or Yahoo the names of the services (we’re not going to Google them are we?) but to save time I’ve listed them below.

ChemSpider – Database of Chemical Structures and Property Predictions
http://www.chemspider.com/
Owned by the Royal Society of Chemistry Chemspider links together compound information across the web and provides free text and structure search of millions of chemical structures. Search by systematic name, synonym, trade name, registry number, SMILES or InChI.

Biznar http://biznar.com/
Live federated search from Deep Web Technologies and covering 60 business collections. As well as presenting you with a standard list of results, the pages are organised into folders on the left hand side of the screen covering topics, authors, publications, publishers and dates (years).

TechXtra http://www.techxtra.ac.uk/
This is an initiative of Heriot Watt Universit providing a free service for finding articles, books,industry news, job announcements, technical reports, technical data, full text eprints, thesis and dissertations in engineering, mathematics and computing.

Scirus http://www.scirus.com/
Owned by Elsevier, Scirus covers scientific information. (See the About Us section for the full details). Some of the information is from free web resources but it also includes many priced articles.

PhilPapers: Online Research in Philosophy http://philpapers.org/
Directory of online philosophical articles and books by academic philosophers. Its purpose is “to facilitate the exchange and development of philosophical research through the Internet. Our service gathers and organizes philosophical research on the Internet, and provides tools for philosophers to access, organize, and discuss this research.”

Microsoft Academic Search http://academic.research.microsoft.com/
Currently concentrates on chemistry, computer science, engineering, mathematics and physics. It has advanced search options that actually work (unlike Google Scholar!), lists citations and has a wonderful Visual Explorer.

Not mentioned in the slides but discussed briefly during the session was HealthMash http://healthmash.com/. A semantic metasearch health search engine with “clustering and advanced linguistic capabilities.” I’d be interested in people’s experiences and views of this one.

Tales From The Terminal Room

Latest issue of Tales from the Terminal Room available

The March 2011 issue of Tales from the Terminal Room is now available. It includes articles that have already appeared in this blog but many people prefer to read the information in newsletter form.

In this month’s issue:

  • Search tools
    • Google decides that coots are really lions
    • Google includes your social circle in search
  • UK crime data as clear as mud
  • Business Information
    • M&A Portal – free information from BvD
    • Company registers: Slovenia and Croatia
  • Twitter Notes

The new Twitter Notes section is a summary of some of my recent tweets and retweets. They are selected because they contain links to resources or announcements that may be of general interest.

Google

Google lets you create your own naughty list

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You may have picked up the news that both Google and Bing have admitted to having whitelists of  ‘nice’ sites that manually override their search and ranking algorithms (Google, Bing Have White Lists Of Sites Not To Be Impacted By Algo Changes http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/110310-175043 and Google contradicts own counsel in face of antitrust probe http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/03/11/google_admits_search_algorithm_whitelists/). No big surprises there, as many of us have suspected that was the case for some time, but Google now also lets you set up your own naughty list and block selected sites from your search results. (We’ve already been able to set up nice lists for about a year – Google SearchWiki replaced with starred results http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2010/03/12/google-searchwiki-replaced-with-starred-results/)

You first need to sign in to your Google account and then run your search as normal. For each entry in your results list there should now be a ‘Block’ option for the site.

Google Block Sites

Click on the block option and you will no longer see pages from that site in future searches. If you carry out a search that would normally contain pages from a blocked site you will see a message saying how many results were blocked. You can manage your naughty list and unblock sites by going to your Search Settings or clicking on the “Manage blocked sites” link that appears when you block a domain. Google says that it is not currently using blocked domains as a signal in search ranking but it may do so in the future.

Yet another way for Google to thoroughly mess up our searches.

Firefox

Firefox eQuake Alert

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As I write this the media have moved on from the 8.9 magnitude earthquake that hit Japan earlier today and are now concentrating on the tsunami that is moving across the Pacific. But those in the area originally affected by what is being called a “superquake” now have to endure aftershocks. I discovered a long time ago from friends living in earthquake zones in New Zealand, China and Turkey that the initial quake is often only the beginning of their troubles. Aftershocks can have a devastating effect on weakened buildings, infrastructure and on morale. Those of us living far from the area and who have never experienced such a disaster cannot begin to comprehend what it must be like, despite the horrific images appearing on our TV and computer screens. If you use Firefox you can at least begin to appreciate the frequency of aftershocks and their strength.

eQuake Alert (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2239/ or http://www.freebookzone.com/exec.php?cmd=firefox_addon) uses USGS (US Geological Survey) data and adds an alert to the status bar of Firefox showing you the magnitude and location of the latest event.

eQuake Alert in Firefox Statius Bar

Right click on the alert and you can choose to view a list of recent quakes that also gives you date and time.

eQuake Alert list

There is an additional option to “Shake browser on earthquake”. This makes your browser screen wobble when news of a quake comes through and you can set it to shake proportional to earthquake magnitude. So set your options to check the data every 1 minute and to shake your browser as part of the alert every time there is a USGS report. You may also want to set the alerts only for quakes above magnitude 5. Yes,  it  is extremely irritating but leave it on for 15 minutes. At least you will have an idea of  what is happening and perhaps begin to understand what it must be like for those trying to survive in the quake zone.

Update: Two people have got back to me reporting that when they try to install eQuake Alert  they are told that it has not been updated for their latest version of Firefox. I forgot that I have the Nightly Tester Tools add-on installed, which lets me “Force Addon Compatibility”. If you want to give eQuake Alert a try the Nightly Tester Tools is at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/nightly-tester-tools/. I have not so far experienced any problems by forcing eQuake Alert compatibility with the latest version of Firefox.

Google, Search Strategies

Update on coots vs. lions

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If you have landed on this page thinking that this is a post about your favourite football or rugby team, please note that this is an update on my earlier article ‘Google decides that coots are really lions’ (http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2011/02/12/google-decides-that-coots-are-really-lions/). It has nothing to do with sporting activities unless you count trying to work out what Google is doing with your search! The original post was about how and why Google decided that a search on coots mating behaviour should really have been lions mating behaviour.

The first response to my posting was a comment from Arthur Weiss (http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2011/02/12/google-decides-that-coots-are-really-lions/comment-page-1/#comment-14207).
He suggested that Google was treating coots and lions as synonyms (both are living creatures). I thought that was pushing synonyms too far even for Google. (Sorry, Arthur).

I then had two comments in quick succession from Susanna Winter via Twitter (@Mrs_Figaro). The first is at (http://twitter.com/Mrs_Figaro/statuses/36714410223341568):

Twitter comment on lions vs coots

Moving coots from the beginning to the end of the strategy resulted in an exact match and not a single lion in sight:

Mating behaviour coots

Changing the order of the search terms is a trick I often use to change the order of my results or bring up pages that might be buried in the hundreds or thousands, but I have never seen such a dramatic change such as this.

Susanna’s search strategy ‘coots feeding behaviour’, which came up with an exact match, muddied the waters even more. Perhaps there is a search frequency algorithm coming into play? Are there more searches for lions mating behaviour than for coots, but not lions feeding behaviour? I am not convinced that this explains Google’s insistence on looking for lions rather than our animal of choice. Susanna’s next tweet suggests what is going on (http://twitter.com/Mrs_Figaro/statuses/36715389190676480):

Google spelling correction

What you see is:

Google coots search minus lions

So Arthur was on the right track. (My apologies, Arthur).  What probably happened with our search is, as Susanna said, that Google first assumed a typo and then did a synonym search on cats. What puzzles me, though, is how Google arrived at cats from coots. Surely coyotes or goats would be nearer when it comes to typographical errors?

I have two final variations on our search to confuse you even further.

The first is repeating coots at the start of the strategy. An exact match:

Repeating coots in the search

Now move one of the ‘coots’ to the end of the strategy and Google asks “Did you mean lions mating behaviour coots”:

Repeating coots in the search

I give up!

Google, social media

Google includes your social circle in search

Google has been including search results from your social circle for quite a while. If you are logged in to a Google account it sometimes includes a box either at the bottom or in the middle of your search results page with a couple of “Results from people in your social circle”:

Google Social Circle

Click on the link and it will show you more from your circle.

If you are using Google.com and open up the search options in the side bar to the left of your results there is a “Social” option that will do exactly the same thing.

Google Social search option

Want to know who is in your social circle? Head straight to your Google dashboard at http://www.google.com/dashboard and scroll down to Social Circle. This not only tells you which of your social networks Google is using but also lists who.

Google lists your social circle

Any social networks that you have mentioned in, for example, your Blogger profile or your general Google profile such as Twitter will be included as will contacts in Google Reader, Google Buzz, Google Contacts and Picasa. In addition to your direct connections Google also searches the content of secondary connections that are publicly associated with your direct connections. The A-Z reveals all!

Until now the Social option has been kept separate but Google has started integrating all of these results with the rest of  your search starting with Google.com (see Official Google Blog: An update to Google Social Search
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/update-to-google-social-search.html). So if you are using Google.com and are logged into your Google account you will now start seeing results automatically from your social circle.

Google's new social search

Underneath the social search entry it will say something like “Joe Bloggs shared this on Twitter”. Hover over this and it tell you how you are connected.

I frequently use social media to search for information and advice but I much prefer to choose when and how to do it. I do not always want Google unilaterally deciding to add opinions from all and sundry in my network. Remember, this is not just the direct connections that you have chosen to make but others who are connected to them and over which you have no control. The only way you can shut this off completely is to log out of your Google account. I will reserve final judgement until I have used it more but after only 2 hours of experimentation I am already finding that some searches are dominated by results from Twitter, Google Reader and Flickr. The results look even more cluttered than before and I fear it gives Google even more opportunity to completely mess up the search.

mashups, unconferences, workshops

Pancakes and Mash: mashed library unconference – places still available

Pancakes and Mash
Pancakes and Mash http://www.flickr.com/photos/pstainthorp/5388040023/

There are 14 places remaining on Mashed Library “Pancakes and Mash”, a library technology un-conference taking place at the University of Lincoln on 8 March 2011 (Shrove Tuesday).

You can claim one of the last 14 places at: http://mashlib.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/booking/

Booking costs only £12 and will remain open until Monday, 28 February.

There’s a growing list of delegates, drawn from a range of academic, public and commercial libraries at http://mashlib.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/who/

The programme is taking shape and the organisers are confirming speakers/mashup ‘experts’ for the various workshop sessions. The keynote presentation will be from Gary Green (Technical Librarian, Surrey County Council Library Service) on: “Loud Library Voices: Campaigning, The Web, Journalists & The Offline World”.

Further details and programme (in perpetual beta) at http://mashlib.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/

For photos of previous events search Flickr.com for mashlib, haggisandmash, mashliv, mashspa, chipsandmash or middlemash just for starters!