This is the prefect Firefox add-on for the dreaded 404 message, or if you want to see which version of a page the search engines have in their cache. You can try five page cache/mirrors in turn: CoralCDN, Google Cache, Yahoo! Cache, The Internet Archive and the MSN/Live Cache. The search engine caches usually only have copies going back days or, at most, weeks but the Internet Archive may have copies going back to 1996. If you have installed Firefox 2 you may need to use the Nightly Tester Tool add-on to persuade Firefox that Resurrect Pages is compatible.
This is a list of Top 10 Tips that the participants of Assessing the Quality of Information compiled at the end of a workshop held at TFPL in London on 31st October 2006. On a scale of 1 to 10, most of the delegates started out with a paranoia level of around 7 or 8. By the time they had worked through half the exercises a couple of them had increased that to 25-30! Paranoia had eased off slightly by the end of the day and at least they had a toolkit at their finger tips that they could use to help evaluate and assess the quality and validity of information.
Check who is behind the domain name of a web site using www.allwhois.com . The contact details sometimes just give the ISP or service who organised the domain name for the web site owner but at least it is a starting point if you need to contact the owner to discuss any issues about the content. If someone really wishes to hide, they can use an agent to do the registration for them and in that case there is little one can do to track down the real owner. Note that you can only find out who owns a domain name; you cannot take a person’s or company’s name and find out which domain names they own.
Try the Wayback Machine (Internet Archive) (www.archive.org) for tracking down pages or sites that have disappeared. Type in the web site URL or the URL of the document/page you have ‘lost’. This can pick up pages no longer cached by the search engines (see number 3 below). This trick is not guaranteed: some sites have asked to be removed from the archive or have designed their pages so that they automatically refresh to the most recent page. This can also be a useful tool for reviewing how a company presented itself on the web in the past and how organisations have evolved, both of which can be useful components of assessing quality.
Look at the search engine cached copies of pages for more recent past pages. This is especially useful if the current web page that you found via Google et al does not seem to resemble your search strategy in any way. The cached copy is the copy that the search engine has in its index and it will also highlight your search terms within the page.
Use links to and from the site or page to find pages that are similar to a known quality page (pages of similar content tend to link to one another), or to see what other people saying about the page in terms of quality and the authority and of those that link to it. Use Windows Live (www.live.com) . For pages that link in to your known or ‘suspect’ page use the link and linkdomain commands.Link will find pages that link to an individual page, for example: link:www.rba.co.uk/sources/stats.htm
Linkdomain will find pages that link to anywhere within a web site, for example:
linkdomain:rba.co.uk
To find out what page a site links to (can give you an idea of bias, political stance, ideology etc) use linkfromdomain, for example: linkfromdomain:rba.co.uk
If relevant and appropriate double check information and data with other independent sources (not always possible and you may find yourself going round on circles chasing sources that quote each other!)
Use the search engine advanced options to focus your search. For example the domain and site command or box to limit your search to, for example, UK government sites (gov.uk), academic sites (.ac.uk, .edu etc), a known trusted site.
Use different search tools and their features to give you results that are prioritised in a different order or for suggestions on alternative search strategies: Yahoo – search.yahoo.co.uk – for results sorted in a different order from Google AltheWeb Livesearch – Livesearch.alltheweb.com – for results that change as you type and suggestions for alternative search terms Ask – www.ask.co.uk – for ways of narrowing down or broadening your search Exalead – www.exalead.com – for its unique advanced search commands and related terms Windows Live – www.live.com – for its link, linkdomain and linkfromdomain commandsThink about using different types of resources for example reference sources, video/audio, blogs and RSS feeds (yes, there are some good ones around!). Have a look at Trovando (www.trovando.it ) for some starting points. And don’t forget evaluated listing such as Intute (www.intute.ac.uk) and, for business, Alacrawiki (www.alacrawiki.com ).
If you are looking for up date to market research etc. use market research content aggregators to identify who is publishing on a topic and go direct to the publisher. Individual publishers do not always give their full catalogue to the aggregators, may embargo their information for weeks or months, and may have more up to date information on their web site. You can also sometimes get a better deal by going direct to the publisher.
Dates. Compared with structured databases, proper and accurate date searching is almost impossible with Google et al. A web page is assigned a date by the web server when it is loaded or reloaded onto the web site. It is not when the information was gathered or written. The web server date is the one that the search engines look at when you use the date option in the advanced search. Neither should you automatically trust the date that so often appears at the bottom of a page. It may be accurate and reflect the date of the content, but pages can be set-up to incorporate the date the page was loaded or reloaded onto the site, the date when minor changes are made, or even today’s date 🙁 If the date is not obvious from the content, contact the author.
Two additional general points were made in conclusion:
it is important to build up your own personal collection of sites, relevant to your sector and applications, and that you have already quality assessed and trust
errors and misleading information are not new and pre-date the Internet era. Nothing has changed in that mistakes and bias in the media – whatever form – are a fact of life. What has changed is that everyone now has the opportunity to become involved in creating and perpetuating myths and mis-information, which means that we have to wade through so much more rubbish and spend more time separating the gold from the dross.
Many of the presentations made at Internet Librarian International 2006 are now available on the ILI web site. If you want to ‘flesh out the bones’, try and track down blog postings on the event. Tom Roper’s blog is a good place to start.
Presenter: Karen Blakeman, RBA Information Services
Date: November 8th 2006, half day seminar starting at 1.30 pm
Venue: Manchester Central Library, St Peter’s Square, Manchester M2 5PD
Cost: Aslib members GBP 50; non-members GBP 60
There is still time to book a place on this half day seminar on what is new and what is hot in the search engine world. Find out what is wrong with Google and why other search tools are often better and more reliable. This session will take you through the latest alternative web search engines; blogs and RSS search tools; image, video and audio tools; and specialist tools including evaluated listings.
Tom Roper has neatly summarised my ILI presentation on out-Googling Google on his blog. He’s done a good job of encapsulating the main points, so worth reading it along side my Powerpoint slides.
My Internet Librarian International presentation on Out-Googling Google is now available at http://www.rba.co.uk/ili/index.html. I have not written any notes to accompany the Powerpoint so you may not be able to make much sense of some (or even all) of it. If you are interested in seeing photos of the event, go to Flickr and use the tag ili2006.
A fantastic event with lots of good practical tips and case studies. If you have never been, watch the web and feeds for news of next year’s event. This year there must have been at least 350 people there and the key note sessions were packed solid with standing room only for late arrivals! The rest of the program was split into parrallel tracks so you could almost guarantee a seat. At the rate this conference is expanding, ILI will have to take over the entire hotel for the event next year 🙂
In addition to the main programme, there are plenty of networking opportunities including receptions, “group”dinners, and lunch tables hosted by the speakers. A great way to met new people and exchange experiences and success/disaster stories.
Internet Librarian International starts today in London at the Copthorne Tara hotel, but many of us were here yesterday for the preconference workshops. I attended Greg Notess’ Advanced Search Techniques seminar and, as usual with Greg’s sessions, I came away with lots of useful tips. Two that have particularly stuck in my mind are:
Windows Live images search – note the scroll bar on the right hand side of the browser. Live lets you view a lot more than the usual 10 or 20 displayed in the other search engines.
Undocumented Yahoo commands – use the region command to restrict your search by continent or region, for example region:europe or region:southamerica.
“The heritage organisations involved in the “History Matters – pass it on” campaign are asking every UK resident to take part in a mass blog event, which will record how we lived on one single day: Tuesday, 17th October 2006. The aim is to create a massive electronic treasure chest of diaries showing everyday life at the beginning of the 21st century, to be kept as a social history archive by the British Library. The date is chosen deliberately as an ordinary Tuesday, with no national importance. But with your help, it will become truly “One Day in History”: by logging on to historymatters.org.uk and taking part in this mass blog everyone will be contributing something valuable to the historic record a fascinating resource for future generations to explore. Uploading can be done until 31 October 2006″
Created by Digimind, this is an excellent overview and introduction to blogs and RSS and how they can be used in competitive intelligence. It includes an extensive list of references and further reading. Highly recommended if you are wondering what all the fuss is about and whether or not you should leap onto the bandwagon.
Fubra, who run and maintain the OurProperty.co.uk and PetrolPrices.com web sites, have launched the Fubra Passport. This is a single login system that will be valid for all existing and future Fubra web sites and consists of your email address and just one password. You no longer need your user name.
Fubra say that the benefits will become obvious as they launch more sites over the next few months, but no clues from them yet as to what those sites are likely to be. So far, I have been very impressed with Fubra’s sites. I use regularly use OurProperty, which repackages Land Registry data, and friends and colleagues reckon that PetrolPrices, which gives details of local petrol prices, is excellent. (We gave up our car 15 years ago as an experiment and are still managing to survive and travel with out it!). Fubra also run Compare Airport Parking.
News and comments on search tools and electronic resources for research
