Search Engines

blinkx and Times Online launch Times Smart Search

Blinkx and the Times Online have launched a co-branded toolbar called Times Online Smart Search. This is a variation on the Blinkx desktop search with content from the Times being delivered via the blinkx News channel. It works in the same way as the standard Blinkx desktop search in that it analyses what the user is viewing at the time and delivers related content. Blinkx and Times Online have also customised the Smart Folders that update themselves automatically with content relevant to a topic specified by you. I have to confess that in the past I have been very confused as to how to get this to work but I think I’ve finally cracked it.

There are two versions of Times Smart Search: a light version that does not search your own PC but gives you access to Smart Folders and some custom-made Times Online services, and the full “advanced” version that includes desktop search. They are only available for PCs running “later versions” of Windows – there is no Mac version at present – and the toolbar works with both IE and Firefox.

It is not obvious on the Times home page where one can download the Smart Search but I think the starting point is the invitation to try Smart Search beta.

Techie Stuff

Dot-eu domain about to go live

Expect to start seeing sites in the .eu domain within the next few days. The new top-level domain goes live on December 7th but only trademark holders and public bodies will be able to register during the so-called “sunrise period”. Registrations for the domain, which will be handled by Eurid, will be open to the rest of us on 7 April 2006.

Firefox

Firefox 1.5 released

The latest version of Firefox, 1.5, has been released. New and improved features include:

* “drag and drop” feature for tabbed browsing so that you can re-arrange the tabs
* Improved pop-up blocker
*Addition of Answers.com now included in the integrated Search box.
* Improved Live Bookmarks feature for RSS feeds.
* New Automatic Update system
* New Clear Private Data tool so that you can clear all private information, such as history and form entries, via one settings window.

I have also noticed that it displays pages significantly faster.

You may find that some of your extensions may be disabled because Firefox thinks that they are not compatible with this latest version. I initially had a problem with Flashblock, Googlebar, TinyUrl creator and Pagerank. Checking for updates will sort out most of the “incomptibilities”. For the rest, try the Nightly Tester Tools extension. Primarily intended to check for new nightly builds of Firefox, it also has an option that tells Firefox your existing plug-ins can work with the latest download. There is a chance that an extension could cause problems but it worked OK with my collection.

Uncategorized

See the Cheapest UK Petrol Prices for Free – PetrolPrices.com

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See the Cheapest UK Petrol Prices for Free – PetrolPrices.com

This site is maintained by Fubra who are the people behind OurProperty.co.uk. To find the lowest petrol price in your area you just type in a town or postcode. By default it looks for unleaded prices within 5 miles of your area. You can change the fuel type to Super Unleaded, LPG, LRP, or Premium Diesel and the distance to 2 miles (inner metropolitan areas only), 10, 15 or 20 miles. As well as listing the 5 cheapest stations and the price, you can see their location on a map from Google Local.

The data covers over 10,000 stations and there are about 8000 daily updates. Data is provided by Catalist in asssociation with Arval and collected from fuel card transactions that are processed at petrol stations across the country each day.

You can search 20 unique areas or postcodes per week and are allowed to search for each unique postcode as many times as you like. It is a free service but you do have to register to view the detailed information.

Google

Google Print Becomes Google Book Search

Google Print has become Google Book Search with a new URL at http://books.google.com/.

Google say that “This change reflects the ongoing growth of the product and our continuing effort to make the search service more user-friendly… Additionally, users and publishers told us the name Print was confusing: some thought the product existed to help them print web pages.”

As well as a name change, there are additions to the Advanced Search screen including options for searching by title, author, publisher, year or years of publication, and ISBN.

Top 10 Search Tips, UKeiG

Top 10 Search Tips

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

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

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

3. Use Yahoo for complex nested Boolean searches.

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

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

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

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

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

9. Copernic Desktop for desktop search.

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

Business Information

Business Week Top 100 Global Brands Scoreboard

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

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

ili2005

Email must die!

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

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

“Viruses, spam, flame wars…”

“Email is where knowledge goes to die”

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

Top 10 Business Sites

Top 10 Business Sites

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

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

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

Business Information

AlacraWiki launched

Alacra has launched AlacraWiki, a guide to business information companies, publishers and databases. The Alacra Industry Spotlights in particular are extremely useful in providing reviews and commentary on industry specific web sites and the Types of Content section lists resources under headings such as mergers and acquisitions, news, people and corporate governance. There is also information on content aggregators, databases and the best business information blogs. Anyone can contribute and edit the pages, apart from the Industry Spotlights which are locked, but you have to create an account in order to do so. If you want to keep up with what’s new at Alacra, they also have a blog and news feed.

News and comments on search tools and electronic resources for research