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).
The presentation was part of a day looking at “Providing Effective Information Services for Generation Y”. Many of the slides probably won’t mean much on their own but feel free to take a look and share.
Google closed down its RSS Reader on July 1st and shortly afterwards stories that it had also discontinued RSS alerts started to circulate. The first one I saw was by Google Operating System (Google Alerts Drops RSS Feeds http://googlesystem.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/google-alerts-drops-rss-feeds.html) quickly followed by Search Engine Land (Google Alerts Drops RSS Delivery Option http://searchengineland.com/google-alerts-drops-rss-delivery-option-165709). Both reported that when they went to manage their RSS alerts Google told them that they would have to convert all of their feeds to email alerts. From this it was assumed that Google had decided to abandon RSS altogether, which confused me because I was still receiving RSS feeds for alerts I had set up in News and Blogs. It transpires that Google no longer offers alerts for web searches. That is no great loss to me as I have always found the web alerts to be unreliable. News and blog search alerts are a different matter, though, as I usually have about 70-80 running at any one time. I could set up a separate email account for the alerts but I find it so much easier to organise and view them in an RSS reader.
Two weeks later and my feeds continue to come through. I can still set up new alerts for Blog searches by running the search and then clicking on the RSS link at the bottom of the page.
The eagle-eyed amongst you will have spotted that they have not yet removed the link inviting you to subscribe to the feed in Google Reader!
The procedure for a News RSS alert is more long winded and you need a Google account to set it up. First sign in to your account and go to Google News. In the upper right hand area of the screen there is a cog wheel. Click on the wheel and a set of personalization options should appear underneath it.
In addition to the standard categories that you can add or remove there is a box into which you can type in your own “topic”. Click on the + button to add it to the list and save the personalization. Your search topic should now appear in a list on the left hand side of the screen.
Click on your topic and at the bottom of the results page you should see an RSS icon which takes you to the feed for that search.
So the good news is that Google blog and news alerts are still available as RSS feeds. The bad news is that they are complicated to set up in news, and the links and text on the blog search results page have not been updated to reflect the discontinuation of Google Reader. This strongly suggests that RSS is very low on Google’s list of priorities so it really could be axed across the board.
If Google does decide to “retire” RSS and you want to carry on receiving RSS rather than email alerts there are several alternatives. So far, the best of the free services for me is the Netvibes Dashboards (http://www.netvibes.com/), which uses a number of tools including Google. Even if I ignore the Google results, Netvibes generally comes up a comprehensive and relevant set of alerts on my topic. Overall, I would rather not have the hassle of setting up my alerts afresh but Google has a habit of finishing off services with little or no warning. Now is the time to start looking for replacements.
Towards the end of June I headed off to Swansea Central Library to facilitate a workshop on search tools and techniques for finding business information and statistics. The session was organised for the libraries of the wonderfully named SWAMP – South West and Mid Wales Partnership.
We had fantastic views from the library of the sea and shore line so they did very well to remain focused on the work in hand. The top tips that the group suggested at the end of the day were a mixture of search techniques and business information sites.
1. Persistence.
Don’t give up and don’t get stuck in a rut. If your first attempts fail to produce anything useful try a different approach to your search. Try some of the tips mentioned below: use advanced search commands, a different search tool or go direct to a website that covers your subject area or type of information.
2. Verbatim.
Google automatically looks for variations on your search terms and sometimes drops terms from your search without telling or asking you. To beat Google into submission and make it run your search exactly as you have typed it in, click on ‘Search tools’ in the menu above your results, then click on the arrow next to ‘All results’ and from the drop down menu select Verbatim.
3. Private Browsing.
To stop search engines personalising your results according to your previous searches and browsing behaviour, find out where the private browsing option is in your browser (in Chrome it is called Incognito). This ignores all cookies and past search history and is as close as you can get to unfiltered results.
Short cuts to private browsing in the main browsers are:
Chrome – Ctrl+Shift+N
FireFox – Ctrl+Shift+P
Internet Explorer – Ctrl+Shift+P
Opera – Ctrl+Shift+N
Safari – click on Safari next to the Apple symbol in the menu bar, select Private Browsing and then click on OK.
4. The site: command.
Include the site: command in your search to focus your search on particular types of site, for example site:ac.uk, or to search inside a large rambling site. You can also use -site: to exclude sites from your search. For example, if you are searching for information on Wales and Australian websites mentioning New South Wales keep coming up include -site:au in your search.
5. The filetype: command.
Use the filetype: command to limit your research to PowerPoint for presentations, spreadsheets for data and statistics or PDF for research papers and industry/government reports. Note that in Google filetype:ppt and filetype:xls will notpick up the newer .pptx and xlsx formats so you will need to incorporate both into your strategy, for example filetype:ppt OR filetype:pptx, or run separate searches for each one. In Bing.com, though, filetype:pptx will pick up both .ppt and .pptx files.
6. Guardian Data Store (http://www.guardian.co.uk/data/)
For datasets and visualisations relating to stories in the news. This is proving to be a very popular site on both the public and in-house workshops. As well as the graphs and interactive maps the source of the data is always given and there are links to the original datasets that are used in the articles.
7.Company Check (http://www.companycheck.co.uk/)
Company Check repackages Companies House data and provides 5 years of figures and graphs for Cash at Bank, Net Worth, Total Liabilities and Total Current Liabilities free of charge. It also lists the directors of a company. Click on a director’s name and you can view other current and past directorships for that person.
8. BL BIPC industry Guides The British Library Business Information and IP Centre’s industry guides at http://www.bl.uk/bipc/dbandpubs/Industry%20guides/industry.html highlight relevant industry directories, databases, publications and web sites. Excellent starting points if you are new to the sector.
9. Web archives for documents, pages and sites that are no longer “live”.
Most people know about the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine at http://www.archive.org/and its collection of snapshots of websites taken over the years. There is also a collection of old UK government webpages at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/webarchive/, and the British Library has a UK web archive at http://www.webarchive.org.uk/ukwa/.
10. Keep up to date Keep up to date with what the search engines are up to, changes to key resources and new sites. Identify blogs and commentators that are relevant to your research interests and subject areas and follow them using RSS or email alerts.
Yahoo is finally pulling the plug on AltaVista on July 8th. It appears as a one line entry in Yahoo’s latest list of closures (http://yahoo.tumblr.com/post/54125001066/keeping-our-focus-on-whats-next) with the comment “Please visit Yahoo! Search for all of your searching needs”. AltaVista was started by Digital Equipment in 1995 and quickly became the default search engine for many of us. I still meet people who have remained loyal to AltaVista even though it lost its unique search features a long time ago. Danny Sullivan has written a short history and eulogy for the search engine at http://searchengineland.com/altavista-eulogy-165366 – “A Eulogy for AltaVista, The Google of its Time”. Great though it was, some of us had already defected to the Inktomi powered search engine HotBot by the time Google had arrived on the scene. Alas, HotBot is now a shadow of its former self and AlltheWeb, which Yahoo had also acquired, was closed down in April 2011.
It seems that Google has dropped the tilde (~) synonym operator (http://googlesystem.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/googles-tilde-operator-no-longer-works.html). Although Google automatically looks for variations on your terms, placing a tilde before a word seemed to look for more variations and related terms. It meant that you didn’t have to think of all the possible permutations of a word. It was also very useful if you wanted Google to run your search exactly as you had typed it in except for one or two words. The Verbatim option tells Google to run your search without dropping terms or looking for synonyms, but sometimes you might want variations on just one of the words. That was easily fixed by placing a tilde before the word. Now we are left with the OR command, which is unreliable at the best of times.
I must admit I didn’t see this one coming. My money was on another option going first.
Many thanks to Aaron Tay (@aarontay) for the alert.
Update: @dmrussell (https://twitter.com/dmrussell) has confirmed via Twitter that it was removed because it wasn’t much used and Google could not justify the cost of maintaining the index and code.
The John Spalding Library in Wrexham hosted the North Wales Libraries Partnership (NWLP) workshop “Search is more than just Google”. Delegates from public, government, academic and NHS libraries gathered together to look at the effect of mobile technologies on search, open access, getting better results from Google and alternative search tools. The consensus reached during one of the breaks was that Cyril, one of the library’s residents and pictured on the left, should have ignored Google’s nutrition advice and gone for the more authoritative sources available in the library and on the web. If only he had waited and attended the workshop he would have known exactly where to look!
There was much discussion on how mobile devices change how we can search – not always for the best – and there was concern, as usual, over how much we willingly give away about ourselves to services such as Google and Facebook. Open access was debated in the afternoon along with possible directions for academic publishing.
The Top Tips that the group came up with included some of the usual advanced Google commands but others concerned cloud computing and social media. Here they are.
1. Back up your stuff. Having your data hosted in the cloud means you don’t have to worry about it disappearing when your laptop or server crashes. But what if your cloud service goes under or your account is deleted for some reason? Have you made a local backup of your essential files and treasured family photos? One of the participants mentioned the Library of Congress digital preservation toolkit for preserving family memories (http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/personalarchiving/).
2. Private browsing for “un-personalising” search results. If you want to make sure that your results are not being influenced by past searches and browsing behaviour, find out where the private browsing option is in your browser (in Chrome it is called Incognito). This ignores all cookies and past search history and is as close as you can get to unfiltered results.
3. Change the order of your search terms to change the order in which results are listed. This is an old trick but still seems to work.
4. Use advanced search commands such as site:, filetype;, intext:, to focus your search. Some of the commands are available not just in Google but also in Bing and DuckDuckGo.
5. Create “newspapers” of articles mentioned on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or news sites by using services such as Paper.li (http://paper.li/). These can be generated from hashtags, keyword searches or your own Twitterstream. Have a look in the Paper.li news stand to see if someone has already created a paper on your topic. Paper.li automatically compiles the newspaper but there are other services such as Storify (http://storify.com/) and Scoop.it (http://www.scoop.it/) that enable individuals to curate the content that appears in their personal newspaper.
6. Guardian Data Store for datasets and visualisations relating to stories in the news (http://www.guardian.co.uk/data). This was so popular that it was mentioned twice for inclusion in the top tips. What people liked about this is that the source of the data is always given and there are links to the original datasets.
7. Million Shorthttp://millionshort.com/. If you are fed up with seeing the same results from Google again and again give Million Short a try. Million Short runs your search and then removes the most popular web sites from the results. Originally, as its name suggests, it removed the top 1 million but the default has changed to the top 10,000. The page that best answers your question might not be well optimised for search engines or might cover a topic that is so “niche” that it never makes it into the top results in Google or Bing. One person loved it because the type of research they do often pulls up pages of Amazon and eBay results in Google. Not a problem with Million Short
8. Google Reading level to change the type of results that you see. Run your search and from the menu above the results select ‘Search tools’, ‘All results’ and from the drop menu ‘Reading level’. Options for switching between basic, intermediate and advanced reading levels should then appear just above the results. Click on the Advanced option to see results biased towards research.
9. Beware fragmented discussions. Articles can be posted and reposted in many different places: blogs, websites, LinkedIn, Facebook etc. with the result that potentially useful and informative discussions are dotted all over the place. Learn how to locate fragmented discussions in your subject area and where they are likely to occur.
10. Try something other than Google. Take a look at the slides for a few(!) suggestions of what you could use.
Google is now showing detailed nutritional facts for food. Type in the name of a food and Google brings up a side panel to the right of the standard results showing images, Calories per 100gm, levels of fat, cholesterol, carbohydrate, protein and selected vitamins and minerals.
You can bring a specific nutritional fact to the top of the results by including it in the search, for example iron in spinach.
Typing in just the name of a food works in most cases but for some you have to be more specific to pull up the facts. Butter and olive oil are two where you have to include additional terms, for example calories. It also does not have facts for the more unusual foods such as scorzonera and salsify.
The general description is taken from Wikipedia. The sources for the facts include USDA (US Department of Agriculture) so the figures for Daily Values may not be the same as the EU Recommended Daily Allowance.
Companies and directors can be searched from the same search box. You then select the appropriate entry from a list of possible matches. The company summary is free of charge and includes a business overview, data on its status and business activities, and a list of trading addresses.
Also free of charge are the accounts and list of directors but you have to register (free of charge) to view the information. There are options for logging in with your Facebook, Twitter or Google account but if you prefer you can register a user name and password.
Five years of key financials (cash at bank, net worth, total current liabilities and total current assets) are shown as graphs and more detailed information is displayed in the Company Accounts Table.
The financial statements submitted to Companies House can be downloaded free of charge as PDFs. Other documents lodged at Companies House such as “Change of director’s details” or “Allotment of securities” are listed under the Documents tab and are £2 each.
The Credit Risk information (risk score, credit limit, payment data and key factors) and Charges (mortgages and County Court Judgments) are priced. For a single company the price is £4.99 + VAT, which gives you 30 days unlimited access to all premium credit data on that company for 30 days. If you are likely to be researching more than four companies on a regular basis it is worth upgrading to the All Companies options costing £20 + VAT. This gives you 30 days unlimited access to credit data across every company and director.
Current directors and secretaries for a company are listed free of charge. Previous directors and secretaries are part of the subscription service. The free director profile includes an overview, their registered details and a summary of the companies of which they are or have been a director. This can be more informative as a way of identifying connections between companies and other directors than looking at the company records in isolation. The full director report reports are £8.99 and include credit risk, CCJs, mortgages and charges, and a summary for each current appointment with key information taken from the associated company report.
For both companies and directors you can set up free alerts and add them to a dashboard. This is an easy way to compare results for companies, with negative and positive changes in key financials shown as red or green arrows pointing up or down.
Company Check is not the only service providing free access to some of UK Companies House and Ireland company data. DueDil (http://www.duedil.com/) and Bizzy (http://bizzy.co.uk) are two others that are worth looking at. I understand, though, that Company Check is working on additional services that are due for launch in the next few months. It will be interesting to see what they come up with.
Picture the scene: an obviously distressed researcher is hunched over a computer screen, sobbing hysterically. All they wanted was a list of donkey sanctuaries in Surrey. How difficult is that? But Google decided that what they really wanted was a field guide to identifying buttercups. Our researcher tries all the advanced search commands and options they know but to no avail. It seems that Google has locked them into its dreaded live experiments (1) with no possibility of escape, and the information is needed NOW.
There is hope, though. There are other search engines out there. Bing may seem consumer/retail focused, but its list of advanced search commands is great at unearthing serious research information that Google buries at around the 2 millionth entry in your results list. My comparison and summary of search commands at http://www.rba.co.uk/search/compare.shtml lists the Bing commands that you are most likely to need. Or if you just want a no nonsense summary of your topic without all of Google’s personalisation and experiments look no further than DuckDuckGo. But should you even be using Google or similar, generic search engines in the first place? Think about the type of information you are looking for.
For news, RSS feeds are still a great way to pull together updates from your favourite newspapers, blogs and websites. Google Reader is about to disappear into a black hole but there are other, better RSS readers out there. I use a desktop client called RSS Owl (http://www.rssowl.org/) but if that doesn’t suit you Phil Bradley has a list of alternatives on his blog at http://philbradley.typepad.com/phil_bradleys_weblog/2013/03/20-alternatives-to-google-reader.html. Or you could try a different approach: create a Twitter list of essential news sources, or use Paper.li to create daily “newspapers” using keyword searches or hashtags. See my own “daily” at http://paper.li/karenblakeman or the paper.li on biofuels athttp://paper.li/karenblakeman/1321447614.
If you are looking for images Flickr.com is an obvious alternative. For photos you can re-use without fear of being dragged through the courts for copyright infringement try Geograph (http://www.geograph.org.uk/) or Morguefile (http://www.morguefile.com/).
It looks as though Google has quietly removed yet another search tool from its menus. This time it is “Sites with images”, which used to be under “Search tools”, “All results”. Like translated foreign pages I suspect it has been dropped because of low usage. I used it about once or twice a month, usually to identify a building or a landmark that I had seen whilst out and about and to find further information on the subject. I would put in a description, run the search and then apply sites with images. The results gave the usual extracts from web pages together with thumbnails of the images on those pages. It was very quick and easy to use and more reliable than the two alternative strategies.
The first option is just to run the search in images, but because I’m often looking for something along the lines of ‘hotel between Windsor and Maidenhead Thames’ there can be a significant amount of noise in the results. Also, that approach often pulls up Flickr photos, which can sometimes tell me the name of the place, but does not always provide the more in depth information I require.
The second option is to use Google’s search by image option. This enables you to upload a photo, or point to the URL of an image on the web, and look for similar images. The option can be found by clicking on the camera in the search box on the Google images search page.
You are then given the option to point to the URL of an existing image on the web or upload your own. This is not much help if I haven’t taken a photo of the subject, and if I had a URL I probably would not be trying to identify it. There is also the problem that if Google does not find many exact matches it looks for “visually similar” images that have similar patterns, shapes and combination of colours but which may be of a completely different subject. In the example below I uploaded my own photo and Google has found the exact copy that I had previously uploaded to Flickr. None of the visually similar images are photos of the building I am interested in.
I’m disappointed but not surprised that Google has discontinued sites with images. My money had been on one of the other search tools going before this one. As with the disappearance of translated foreign pages I can live without it, but it means I have to spend more time and effort on finding the information. At this rate there won’t be many search tools left on Google so it makes even more sense to become familiar with the alternatives.
