Category Archives: Search Strategies

Search Engines, Search Strategies

Use more than Google

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If you need more evidence – other than me telling you! –  that you need more than Google then take a look at The Disruptive Searcher (Sanity checking Google http://disruptivesearcher.wordpress.com/2012/02/27/sanity-checking-google/):

“if I hadn’t searched across more than Google for data on a small, new company that I was asked to research recently, I would have missed out on some very significant information that Google just wasn’t showing me.”

So take a look at Bing (http://www.bing.com/), DuckDuckGo(http://duckduckgo.com/) and Blekko (http://blekko.com/) for starters. The Disruptive Searcher also mentions Dogpile (http://www.dogpile.com/), which combines results from Google, Bing and Yahoo.

Google, Search Strategies

Google personalisation: web history isn’t the only problem

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On March 1st a major change to how Google uses your search and personal information will be implemented. Under the innocent sounding title “Updating our privacy policies and terms of service” (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/updating-our-privacy-policies-and-terms.html) Google announced in January that it is consolidating more than 60 privacy policies into a single main Privacy Policy. (You can preview the new policy at http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/preview/). Until now there have been separate Terms and Conditions and policies for each Google product (YouTube, Gmail, Reader etc). From March 1st there will be just one. In principle this is a good thing and makes sense, but Google have used this to sneak in changes in how it uses your search behaviour to personalise results.

“Our new Privacy Policy makes clear that, if you’re signed in, we may combine information you’ve provided from one service with information from other services. In short, we’ll treat you as a single user across all our products, which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience.“

In the past, data such as your web history was kept separate from other Google products. It will now be combined with information that Google has gleaned from its other services, for example YouTube, and your results personalised accordingly. A lot has been made of deleting and disabling the web history associated with your account. It’s simple enough to do by logging in to your account and going to http://www.google.com/history/. From here you can delete entries and disable your web search history altogether.

You may, though, prefer to keep your web history. Several groups I have talked to over the last couple of months share a Google account for the library or their subject team and use it to keep track of searches and sites they have visited. One example they gave me involved a student who came back to them asking for another copy of the paper that they had given him three weeks previously. He had lost it, forgotten who the authors were, could barely remember the title and definitely could not recall the journal! Trying to repeat the search was no good; it was difficult enough attempting to recreate the search string and in any case Google had made so many changes to web search that the results would have looked totally different anyway. By using the search history the librarians managed to locate not only the search but also the document they had retrieved for the student.

Unfortunately the Web History is not the only piece of information that Google uses when personalising results. To get an idea of what it could be using take a look at your Google account dashboard by going to http://www.google.com/dashboard/. Now is the time to do a spot of spring cleaning and remove any “stuff” you no longer use or need. It won’t be possible to remove everything but you may be surprised at how much clutter there is in your account. I have told Google a lot about myself including links to other services and networks that I use. Being self employed it is one way of promoting and advertising what I do but now Google’s attempt at personalisation has become increasingly annoying. Two weeks ago I went into YouTube. I have told Google that I live in Reading in the UK and YouTube automatically presented me with videos from ReadingBerkshireUK (note that I do NOT subscribe to this channel).

The videos about the redevelopment of Reading Station and local transport are relevant but I was not tempted to view any of them – I see enough of it first hand every day. As for Reading Football Club I regret to say that I have no interest in football whatsoever. When I visited YouTube this morning it had given up trying to persuade me to click on Reading videos and decided to push content that had been shared by members of my Google+ circles. Most of it was irrelevant.

We can expect to see a lot more of this type of intrusion in the future as Google is determined to ram Google+ down our throats (see And the next Google killer is….Google! http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2012/01/30/and-the-next-google-killer-is-google/). There are even reports that people setting up a new account for YouTube, Gmail, or any other Google product are being forced to set up a Google+ account. (Google Now Forcing All New Users To Create Google+ Enabled Accounts http://marketingland.com/google-now-forcing-all-new-users-to-create-google-enabled-accounts-3912). If you do not want this cross-fertilisation to occur then sign out of your account before searching. But have you noticed how insistent Google is that you have an account and that you are signed in? The new Google home page has removed the cog wheel that gave access to Advanced Search and Language tools from the top right hand corner of the screen. Instead there is now a prominent button exhorting you to “Sign in”.

Once you have carried out a search the cog wheel comes back but it is underneath the persistent Sign in link.

If you are a heavy user of Google services it can be a nuisance having to sign out each time you want to conduct a search. I now have two browsers open on my desktop: one signed out for searching, the other for Google+, Gmail, Blogger etc. Ironically, an alternative is to install Chrome, which is Google’s own browser. This has an Incognito option that depersonalises your search and removes traces of your activity when you close it down. It will keep any bookmarks that you make and files that you save during the session.

In summary, to take back control of your search:

1. Review and prune what is in your Google account’s dashboard

2. Decide whether or not the web history is going to be useful to you. If it isn’t, delete and disable it.

3. Sign out of your account before searching, or use a separate “un-signed in” browser, or use Chrome Incognito

Google, Search Strategies, Top 10 Search Tips, UKeiG, workshops

Top search tips from UKeiG Google workshop

UKeiG organised a workshop on Google, which was held on 8th February 2012 and hosted by Birimngham University. (My slides for the day can be found on authorSTREAM and on Slideshare). Twenty-two people from a variety of backgrounds and sectors attended the event and their combined Top 10 Tips are listed below.

1. An understanding of how Google works and is messing up “improving” search is vital. Minor changes in functionality and ranking algorithms can cause havoc and are impossible to counter unless you know what is going on. Google’s various official blogs are a starting point but they don’t tell you everything. Identify and monitor blogs from searchers and organisations that monitor what Google and other search engines are up to. (A selection are listed on the final slide of the presentation).

2. “Google assumes that all searchers are stupid and don’t know how to search” said one workshop participant! It takes far too many decisions on their behalf: automatically corrects what it thinks are typographical errors, excludes and adds terms to the search without asking, changes results according to past searching behaviour, and gives priority to network connections. To bring Google to heel, learn how to use advanced search commands and the options available in the menus on the left hand side of the results pages.

3. If you have a Google account investigate your Dashboard (http://www.google.com/dashboard/). This contains all of the information you have given Google about yourself plus data that Google has collected from your various accounts such as Gmail and Google Reader. Clear out anything you don’t need or use (you won’t be able to do this for everything) and make sure you are not sharing anything that you want kept private, for example docs and maps.

4. Order matters. Changing the order in which you type in your search terms will change the order of your results. The pages that contain the terms in the order you specified in your search are usually given a higher weighting. Also keep an eye on any oddities when combining advanced search commands. For example the search allintitle:diabetic retinopathy site:ac.uk comes up with sensible results. Switch the order to site:ac.uk allintitle:diabetic retinopathy and Google totally loses the plot.

Site and Allintitle commands combined in the wrong order

 

5. Be aware that Google no longer searches for all of your terms all of the time. It now does what it calls a ‘soft AND’. See the first comment to my blog posting on this issue at http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2011/11/08/dear-google-stop-messing-with-my-search/#comments. If you want all of your terms to appear in your documents exactly as you typed them in then you have to use….

6. Verbatim. This tells Google to carry out an exact match search. Run your search as normal and then use Verbatim in the menu on the left hand side of your results page. It is normally hidden from view so click on ‘More search tools’ at the bottom of the menu and Verbatim is right at the bottom. It appears that you can use advanced search commands such as filetype:, site:, and the tilde (~) with Verbatim but it cannot be combined with the date options or ‘Pages from the UK’ in the results page menus.

7. Public Data Explorer is one of Google’s many well kept secrets. It can be found at http://www.google.com/publicdata/ and allows you to search data sets from organisations such as the IMF, OECD and World Bank. You can compare the data in various ways and there are several chart options.

8. Google has a habit of hiding and moving links to resources and tools such as the Public data Explorer, Advanced Search and Language Tools. Bookmark them so that you can always find them (unless, of course, Google decides to remove them altogether).

9. Three tools that are intended for people maintaining websites can also be useful to searchers in identifying trends, alternative search terms, and research into key players and competitors in a sector.

Google Trends http://www.google.com/trends/ – can be used to view search trends over time and to compare multiple search terms

Google Trends for Websites http://trends.google.com/websites – looks at search trends for individual websites or you can compare several websites. In addition it shows what people  ‘Also visited’ and ‘Also searched for’.

Google Insights for Search http://www.google.com/insights/search/ – advanced options for identifying search trends including countries and categories.

If you are responsible for content on your web pages these tools can help identify terms that could increase traffic to your site.

10. If you have had enough of Google and do not feel secure with the way it monitors your activity and personalises results try DuckDuckGo (http://duckduckgo.com/) as an alternative. DDG does not track, filter or personalise and several people found some of the results to be better than Google’s. Many of the workshop participants had tried Bing but there was little enthusiasm for it. They had found that the results were not as relevant as Google’s and there was concern over Bing’s links with Facebook, personalisation and what it calls “adaptive search”. Google is so often considered the bad guy because of the amount of personal information it gathers but it does at least show users a lot of what has been collected about them. The same cannot be said for Bing.

 

Google, Search Strategies

Top search tips from London

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Sixteen people attended the two half day search workshops that I ran on Monday, 6th February 2012. As usual, I asked them at the end of the session to come up with a list of what they thought they would find really useful. Below, in no particular order, is a combined list of top tips.

1. intitle:

If there is too much “noise” in your results list try searching for your terms in the title of the document. This will ensure that your subject is the main focus of the article. Prefix a single terms with intitle: or if you want all of your terms in the title use allintitle:

For example:

intitle:insulin

allintitle:diabetic retinopathy

2. Advanced search screen

If you are unsure about using advanced search commands use the advanced search screen. A link to this can usually be found under the cog wheel in the top right hand corner of the Google screen. Google has a bad habit of moving this link around periodically so bookmark the address in case the link disappears.

3. site:

Use the site: command to search within a single site or type of site.

For example:

diabetes diagnosis site:statistics.gov.uk

pancreatic cancer statistics site:nhs.uk OR site:gov.uk

4. The results page left hand menu

The menu on the left hand site of the results page has options that can be used to focus and narrow down your search. Open up the ‘More’ links to ensure you are seeing the full range of options. The menus change in content depending on the type of resource you are searching, for example images, blogs, news.

5. Check ad preferences and your dashboard

Check your ad preferences and your dashboard (if you have a Google account) to see what Google thinks you are interested in and what information Google has on you.

For your ad preferences go to http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/. Google monitors what you search and lists on this page the categories it thinks you are interested in. It then delivers targeted ads that reflect these interests. You can edit the categories, delete them or opt out altogether. If your computer is set up to regularly delete cookies you will not see any categories.

To see your dashboard, sign in to your Google account and go to http://www.google.com/dashboard/. This contains all of the information you have given Google about yourself plus other information such as your social contacts, which Google has collected from your various accounts such as Gmail and Google Reader. Clear out anything you don’t need or use (you won’t be able to do this for everything) and make sure you are not sharing anything that you want kept private for example docs and maps.

6. Web History

One of the things that Google uses to personalise your search results is what you have searched for and clicked on in the past. This is stored in your web history and there are two: one that records your history when you are not logged in to a Google account and one for when you are. You can disable the ‘logged out’ web history from the Web History link under the cog wheel in the top right hand corner of the Google screen. Your ‘logged in’ web history can be viewed and managed from within your dashboard http://www.google.com/dashboard/. Some people find the web history useful so you might want to keep it.

7. Verbatim

Google no longer automatically searches for all of your search terms and the plus sign can no longer be used in Google web search to force an exact match search. If you want all of your terms included in your search and to stop Google looking for variations, run your search and then use Verbatim in the menu on the left hand side of your results page. Click on ‘More search tools’ at the bottom of the menu and Verbatim is right at the bottom. Verbatim cannot be combined with the date options or ‘Pages from the UK’

8. filetype:

Use filetype: to search for particular types of information or reports for example PowerPoints for presentations, spreadsheets for data and statistics or PDF for research papers and industry/government reports. Note that filetype:ppt will not pick up the newer .pptx so you will need to include both in your search, for example

filetype:ppt OR filetype:pptx

You will also need to include .xlsx if you are searching for Excel spreadsheets and .docx for Word documents.

9. Numeric range search 

Use this for anything to do with numbers – years, temperatures, weights, distances, prices etc. Use the boxes on the Advanced Search screen or just type in your two numbers separated by two full stops as part of your search:

macular degeneration statistics UK 2009..2012

10. Minus to exclude terms from a search

To exclude pages containing a term prefix the term with a minus sign.

11. Dictionary

For definitions of a term use the Dictionary option in the menu on the left hand side of your results page. (You will have to click on ‘More search tools’ at the bottom of the menu).

12. DuckDuckGo

Try DuckDuckGo (http://duckduckgo.com/) as an alternative to Google web search. No filtering, no personalisation and a lot less rubbish!

13. Search Translated foreign pages

For a different perspective, search for pages and sites in other languages. Use ‘Translated foreign pages’ in the results page side menu. This is another option that Google hides so to reveal it you will have to click on ‘More search tools’ at the bottom of the menu.

14. Tilde (~) for synonyms

Use the tilde (~) before a word to include synonyms in your search. This can be used with Verbatim if you want an exact match for most of your terms but are happy for Google to include variations on one or two of the others.

 

Google, Search Engines, Search Strategies, social media

And the next Google killer is….Google!

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Many of us have been saying for a while that the search engine that will kill Google is Google itself. It has come so close in the past, two of the more recent incidents being the removal of the plus sign from general web search and stopping the ‘ANDing’ of search terms. Prefixing search terms with the plus sign enabled searchers to disable Google’s synonym and variation search so that it carried out an exact match search. It still works in Google Scholar but not in general web search; Google is now using the ‘+’ prefix within Google+ to help users find Google+ business pages, for example +BASF will quickly take you to the BASF business page.  Google redeemed itself to some extent by hastily bringing in the Verbatim option, which can be found in the left hand menu of your results page. This will run your search exactly as you specify it (Google: Verbatim for exact match search http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2011/11/18/google-verbatim-for-exact-match-search/). However, while it works with Google commands such as ‘filetype:’ and ‘site:’ it gives up as soon as you start using some of the options in the left hand menu on the results page, such as date.

And now enter Google+ and Search Plus Your World (SPYW). If you decided to add Google+ to your Google account Google has seriously messed up altered the way it handles your search if you are logged in. It now incorporates and gives priority to results from your Google+ network. (For more details from Google see Search, plus Your World – Inside Search http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/01/search-plus-your-world.html). At present it is only available if you are signed in on Google.com and searching in English. “Search Plus Your World” is now the default and personalizes your results based on both your own behaviour and social connections, and content that has been shared with you through Google+.  Phil Bradley has written an excellent posting on how this works (Why Google Search Plus is a disaster for search http://philbradley.typepad.com/phil_bradleys_weblog/2012/01/why-google-search-plus-is-a-disaster-for-search.htmll).

Initially I was in two minds about SPYW. I thought I might find it useful if I wanted to check what people in my Google circles were saying about a particular issue but then realised that most of them prefer to post on Twitter rather than in Google+ and Google+ does not cover Twitter! The Search+ results include

  • listings from the web
  • pages from the web that have been given priority because of your search behavior
  • pages from the web given priority because of your social connections
  • both public and private (or limited) Google+ posts, photos and Google Picasa photos

When it comes to serious research Search+ includes far too much irrelevant information. So how easy is it to turn it off? If you are logged in when you run your search you will see a message above your results that tells you the number of personal results and “other results” that have been found. There is also a toggle that enables you to switch between personalised and unpersonalised results. You can also switch it off permanently within your search settings.

You can of course just log out of your Google account before you run a search, or never sign up for Google+ in the first place. But Google is making the latter increasingly difficult. Let’s look at the results that might be popping up on your screen and as an example I’ll use a search on Phil Bradley, search and social media expert and President of CILIP. First of all a search on Phil Bradley before Search+ arrived:

On my screen I see pages from his web site, his blog and a Wikipedia entry (which is not the Phil Bradley I am looking for!). When I sign in to a Google account that has Google+ associated with it I see something completely different:

 

Phil’s Google+ profile is given priority above everything else and takes up most of the screen regardless of whether or not it is the most relevant or most up to date (Real-Life Examples Of How Google’s “Search Plus” Pushes Google+ Over Relevancy http://searchengineland.com/examples-google-search-plus-drive-facebook-twitter-crazy-107554).  And don’t think you can escape with a Google account that does not include Google+. Google has ways of enticing you to “upgrade”:

Even worse, if you sign up now for a new Gmail, YouTube or Blogger account you are automatically joined to Google+ (http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2140440/New-Gmail-YouTube-Blogger-Users-Join-Google-by-Default).

Search+ has even tainted the suggestions that pop up as you type in your search:

Phil’s Google+ profile is given prominence and if you click on the link without having an account yourself your are invited to join:

To see what the suggestions should look like a group called Focus on the User (http://www.focusontheuser.org/) has produced a bookmarklet for Chrome, Firefox and Safari and extensions for Chrome and Firefox. This tries – and succeeds most of the time – to display your search results without the intrusion of Google+ results. For my search on Phil his Google+ profile is replaced with Twitter.

When I run a search on my own name my Google+ entry is supplanted by my LinkedIn profile.

“What Google should be” does not, though, remove the extra “content” that Search+ sometimes adds to the right of your results. Run a subject search and you may see “People and Pages on Google+” that are supposedly related to your search terms.

I have not yet found these entries to more relevant than standard search results and the link “Learn how you could appear here too” indicates that Google sees this as another way of persuading people and organisations to join Google+. Switching it off is not easy. It is still there if you are logged out of your Google account. It is still there if you add &pws=0 to the search URL (in fact &pws=0 does not seem to work any more at all for depersonalising results). It does disappear, though, if you use Incognito in Chrome. The intrusion of Google+ is most obvious when running searches with just one or two terms or more consumer biased searches. As soon as you start building more complex searches involving filetype: or site: for example, or research more scientific subjects then Google+ takes a back seat.

Search+ is not all that is affecting how Google presents results. Google is simplifying its privacy policies and combining user data from all of its services (Official Google Blog: Updating our privacy policies and terms of service http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/updating-our-privacy-policies-and-terms.html). It sounds innocent enough but I’ve already spotted major changes. Google knows I live in Reading because I have told it and I do find that useful when I am carrying out local searches for restaurants, builders etc. Google has now decided, though, to bombard my YouTube home page with videos about Reading.

The videos of the Reading railway station redevelopment are vaguely interesting but I see enough of that in real life on a daily basis when I pass through the centre of town. The football videos are of no interest to me whatsoever. So the crossover of content has already started and I am not looking forward to what Google decides to put in my web search results as a consequence of my YouTube activity!

It is becoming increasingly difficult to make Google behave. Using advanced search commands is one way but many searches do not require them. The best method I have found so far is to use Chrome as your browser and open an incognito window. This depersonalises your results, ignores your web history and existing cookies, and leaves no traces of your search activity. Alternatively, since Google has clearly lost the plot when it comes to search, try another service. The three that I would currently recommend are Bing (http://www.bing.com/), DuckDuckGo (http://duckduckgo.com/) and Blekko (http://blekko.com/).

Search Strategies, workshops

Online Information pre-conference workshop: Searching without Google

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The slides for my workshop “Searching without Google”, 28th November 2011, are available at:

http://www.rba.co.uk/as/  – please note that this is a temporary location for the presentation and it will be removed after 2-3 months. Archive copies will remain on authorSTREAM and Slideshare

authorSTREAM 

Slideshare

There is also an addendum to the presentation that summarises some of the questions and answers covered throughout the day together with “top tips” and sites that the participants themselves suggested. This is also available at http://www.rba.co.uk/as/.

authorSTREAM

Slideshare

The text of the addendum is reproduced below.

Tools for creating your own search engine

Several people said they will investigate setting up a custom search engine for their preferred sources and frequently used web sites. Google’s custom search engine is at http://www.google.com/cse/ and Blekko.com lets you set up ‘slashtags’ to create lists of sites for searching. One person said that they are going to try both and compare ease of use and results.

What can one do when the link to the Google’s advanced search screen disappears altogether?

The link to Google’s advanced search screen has been moved to the drop down menu underneath the cogwheel in the upper right hand corner of your screen, but several reported that it had even vanished from there for a couple of days last week. Next time you use the screen bookmark its URL so that you can go directly to it (of course Google can always change that!). Also learn the advanced search commands e.g. filetype: site: etc. so that you can type them into the standard search box.

There is a list of commands at http://www.rba.co.uk/search/SelectedGoogleCommands.shtml (also a PDF version)

(The GoogleGuide list of commands at http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators_reference.html was last updated in 2008 and contains commands no longer in use)

Tools for monitoring social media and alerting you when a subject is mentioned

Although Google and Bing both include social media in their search results it is often better to use a tool designed specifically for the job. All three of the following offer RSS alerts for searches.

Topsy.com –  searches tweets, videos and photos on Twitter, and now Google+

SocialMention.com (can be slow at times) – blogs, Twitter, bookmarks, video, audio

Icerocket.com – blogs, twitter, Facebook, images

Are there still some directories alive and updated e.g. DMOZ? Or is the war of directories vs search engines over?

The Yahoo directory is still online although it is not easy to find and it has not been updated for several years. Similarly, some sections of DMOZ appear not to have been updated for at least a year and the entries under some headings look like advertising. The day of the mega-directory may be over but specialist and subject specific listings are still being developed. They do, though, require considerable time and effort to maintain and inevitably some are forced to close because of a lack of funding e.g. Intute.

Are there good tools for events search by subject, region, date?

The events databases that some of us accessed via services such as DataStar have long gone so it is not possible for example to search for events on nanotechnology taking place next year between June and September in Europe. Possible alternative search strategies include:

– identifying major events venues and their calendars

– locating relevant trade and industry newsletters, portals, magazines that may list events in their sectors

– relevant trade and professional bodies and associations

Are there tools that search the live web rather than using indexes of cached pages?

Biznar.com, Mednar.com and some social media search tools search the “live” web but they are limited to searching a small number of sites and are slower than Google and Bing in returning results. There are no free public search tools that search the entire web live – it would take far too long – and by the time the search engine would have finished the information would be out of date!

Searching for scientific publications that are not published in major English language journals

Google and Google Scholar are still a good starting point for this type of search, but it was suggested by several of the workshop participants that Open Access journals could also be investigated as well as national digitised collections and subject specific listing and portals.

Searching news in other languages (alternatives to Google News)

Country versions of Google News give priority to local content but you can identify news sources in individual countries at the Newspaper & News Media Guide http://www.abyznewslinks.com/. You cannot search the publications from this site but it will tell you what is available and the language of publication.

What will be the trend of the next 5 years? More competition? More takeovers of the smaller search engines? More specialist tools?

All of that! Many smaller specialist search tools continually emerge and many of them quickly disappear or are bought up by the competition. It is impossible to predict exactly what will happen, or even if Google will remain the dominant search tool on the web. If Google’s popularity starts to wane it probably will not be because a “Google-killer” arrives on the scene but because Google goes too far in trying to take control and automatically “improve” results for users. Many of us feel that it is already going in that direction.

Top tips and tools to try back at work

  1. Custom Search Engines – use Google CSE (http://www.google.com/cse/) or set up a ‘slashtag’ on Blekko.com so that you can quickly and easily search those sites you regularly use. Note: they will not include password protected sites or sites where you need to conduct a database search
  2. Biznar.com – real time federated search of selected key business resources
  3. Chemspider.com – brings together chemical information from a wide range of resources. Maintained by the Royal Society of Chemistry
  4. Investigate image search sites other than Google. (Multicolr http://labs.ideeinc.com/multicolr/ was specifically mentioned
  5. Paper.li – gather together tweets and/or Google+ posts containing links based on keywords or from a user and their twitterstream. Results are presented in an easy to read newspaper style.
  6. http://www.zanran.com/ – searches for data and statistics contained in graphs, charts and tables
  7. http://duckduckgo.com/  – alternative search engine that does not customise or personalise your web results
  8. http://integrals.wolfram.com/ – Wolfram Mathematica online integrator. Ideal for maths homework.
  9. http://www.coremine.com/ – Norwegian initiative providing an interesting visual interface to the biomedical literature
  10. Central Index of Digitized Imprints (zvdd) http://www.zvdd.de/ Access to and search options for German digitized works from the 15th Century to the present. Collections are listed at http://www.zvdd.de/dms/browsen/. See also http://www.europeana.eu/portal/  “to explore the digital resources of Europe’s museums, libraries, archives and audio-visual collections”
Search Engines, Search Strategies

Yahoo Site Explorer closes – try Blekko instead

17 Comments

A reminder that Yahoo Site Explorer is closing down tomorrow (November 21st ) and I assume that the link and linkdomain commands will go with it, although they are not specifically mentioned (http://www.ysearchblog.com/2011/11/18/site-explorer-reminder/). Webmasters are being told to use Bing Webmaster Tools. This enables you to analyse links to your own domains but is no use if you want to find who links to other web sites as part of research. Bing, or Live.com as it then was, removed its link and linkdomain commands in November/December 2007 and Yahoo was left as the only reliable alternative. The link command enabled you to find who linked to a specific page on the web and linkdomain found links to anywhere on a specified web site. Both were useful ways of finding other sites containing similar content and discovering what others were saying about a page. Google’s link command is useless as it picks up a minuscule number of results, which now leaves Blekko (http://blekko.com/) as the only realistic alternative.

Blekko enables you to track down linked pages in two ways but both lead to the same results. The first is to use their slashtags ‘/links’ and ‘/domainlinks’ with a URL or domain name. For example http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/registers.htm /links will find pages that link to my official company registers page whereas http://www.rba.co.uk/ /domainlinks finds all inbound links to my site rba.co.uk.

The second route is via your search results. Below each entry is a downwards pointing arrow. Click on this and select ‘links’ from the pop-up box.

Blekko Lonks

 

You will then see a list of sites that link to that page.

To view inbound links to the whole of the web site click on the seo option below the result and you will see some statistics together with the total number of inbound links.

Blekko SEO

 

Click on the inbound links number and Blekko presents you with a list of domains containing links to yours and how many.

 

Blekko Domain Links

 

To see exactly where the links are located and where they go to on your site just click on the number in the links column.

 

Blekko inbound links

 

I have only looked in detail at a couple of sites but Blekko seems to do a good job and is certainly far superior to Google. The Blekko data on my own site seems to correspond with that available from Bing Webmaster Tools but of course I cannot compare other sites in the same way. My initial thoughts are that for link searching Blekko is definitely worth adding to your research toolkit.

Google, Search Engines, Search Strategies

Google: Verbatim for exact match search

4 Comments
Well it looks as though the user feedback to Google on the discontinuation of the +/plus sign for enforcing an exact match search has paid off. Google removed the plus sign as a web search option a few weeks ago and told searchers to use double quotes around terms instead.The double quote marks option does not always force an exact match and increasingly Google is ignoring them and making  some of your search terms optional. (See my blog posting Dear Google, stop messing with my search, http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2011/11/08/dear-google-stop-messing-with-my-search/). The official reason for the change was that hardly anyone used it: the real reason has become clear with Google implementing its Google+ Direct Connect Service. This enables you to go direct to an individual’s or company’s Google+ page by prefixing their name with the plus sign, for example +BASF.

 

For those of us who really do NOT want Google to second guess what we are looking for there is now a Verbatim command. Google’s Inside Search blog (http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/11/search-using-your-terms-verbatim.html) says:

 

 With the verbatim tool on, we’ll use the literal words you entered without making normal improvements such as
  • making automatic spelling corrections
  • personalizing your search by using information such as sites you’ve visited before
  • including synonyms of your search terms (matching “car” when you search [automotive])
  • finding results that match similar terms to those in your query (finding results related to “floral delivery” when you search [flower shops])
  • searching for words with the same stem like “running” when you’ve typed [run]
  • making some of your terms optional, like “circa” in [the scarecrow circa 1963]
So be warned: when using Verbatim you are rejecting Google’s “improvements”!

 

Verbatim can be found in the options on the left hand side of your results page, which means that you have to run your search before you can implement it. Go to the menu to the left of your results and click on ‘More search tools’ at the bottom. This will open up a menu that includes the Verbatim option.
Google Verbatim
It works!. When I run a Verbatim search on St Laurence I get only St Laurence and not St Lawrence as well. And my Heron Island Caversham UK parrot search now finds only those pages that contain all of my terms. There is one drawback in that Verbatim is all or nothing. I often want to have an exact match search on just one or two of my terms but am happy to have Google mess around with the remainder. Verbatim works on your whole search strategy but I think that you can include advanced search commands in your strategy. Running searches such as ‘”Heron Island” Caversham UK ~parrot’ or ‘”Heron Island” Caversham UK parrot OR pigeon’ followed by Verbatim gives me what I would expect. However, more complex searches incorporating filetype: and site: gave me very bizarre results. I need to do more research on this part of the strategy.

 

Overall, I welcome Verbatim and thank Google for listening to its users. However, as Phil Bradley has said it is a tool that “Google should not need to have created” (Google Verbatim tool http://philbradley.typepad.com/phil_bradleys_weblog/2011/11/google-verbatim-tool.html)
Google, Search Strategies

Dear Google, stop messing with my search

11 Comments

I have been complaining for several months that Google does not always “AND” your search terms and delivers results that do not contain all of your terms, or their synonyms, in the page itself or in links to the page. There was a time when you could force Google to deliver exactly what you wanted by prefixing your terms with a plus sign. That option has now gone and Google says that you have to use double quote marks around your terms and phrases instead. Not only is it tedious to have to surround every term with “…” but it does not always work!

The evidence

I recently took a photograph of autumn leaves on Heron Island in Caversham and uploaded it to Flickr. At the time I hadn’t noticed that there was a bird hiding amongst the leaves and when it was pointed out to me I assumed it was a pigeon of some sort. Someone else, however, thought it might be a parrot. I have not heard of any sightings of parrots in my area but decided to check Google to see if there were any reports. My first search strategy was parrot “Heron island” caversham UK

Google search results 1

 

Over 8,000 results! Unbelievable – which it was. Looking at the top results and their cached copies revealed that Google had decided to forget about parrots or birds of any kind and look for just “heron island” caversham UK.

Google search results 2

 

Changing the search to “parrot” “Heron island” caversham UK reduced the number of results to 84.

Google search results 3

 

This time Google was leaving out Caversham or UK or both. Amending the strategy yet again so that both caversham and UK were within quote marks reduced the number of hits to 23.

Google search results 4

 

There were a handful of directory listings containing all of my terms but the rest contained only one or two of my terms, for example the Tripadvisor page shown below.

Google Search results 5

There was no obvious logic as to why these irrelevant pages had been chosen by Google – remember that the grand total was a mere 23 – and they were not advertisements. Using advanced search and the allintext option made no difference whatsoever. For the final version of my search Bing found 15 pages that contained all of my terms but sadly nothing to do with parrots in Caversham, UK. DuckDuckGo found three documents but again no sighting of a parrot of the feathered variety in my neighbourhood.

I was disappointed that my original identification of the bird seems to have been correct but extremely annoyed with Google. I had to wade through irrelevant documents and wasted time tweaking my search only to find that Google was ignoring my strategy anyway. I could understand it if my search had zero results and Google wanted to give me something, but there were some documents that did have all of my words. Various scripts that automatically add quote marks around your terms have been written since Google withdrew the + sign for general searching. These really aren’t much help because I sometimes want Google to look for variations of some of my terms and Google seems to be ignoring the quotes marks when it feels like it. More reasons to look seriously at the alternative search tools that are out there.

Internet Librarian International, Presentations, Search Engines, Search Strategies, workshops

ILI 2011 web search presentations

The presentations I gave at International Librarian International this week in London are now available on my Advanced Search page at http://www.rba.co.uk/as/. They are also available on authorSTREAM and Slideshare.

Searching without Google

Presentation given as part of the main conference on Friday, 28th October 2011

It is also available on Slideshare at http://www.slideshare.net/KarenBlakeman/searching-without-google

Web Search Academy

This was a pre-conference workshop held on Wednesday26th October with myself, Marydee Ojala and Arthur Weiss presenting.

Alternative Search Tools 

Please note the content of this presentation is similar to that of my main conference presentation “Searching without Google”.

Also available on Slideshare at http://www.slideshare.net/KarenBlakeman/alternative-search-tools

Visual Search

Looks at image search tools, video search engines and visualisations.

The Slideshare version is available at http://www.slideshare.net/KarenBlakeman/visual-search-9892558