Tag Archives: Search Strategies

Presentations, Search Strategies, workshops

Workshop and presentation given at the 11th SAOIM June 5th-8th

June 11, 2012 Karen Blakeman

The slides for the workshop and presentation I gave at the 11th Southern African Online Information Meeting are now up on authorSTREAM and Slideshare.

Personalisation of search: take back control

http://www.authorstream.com/Presentation/karenblakeman-1438076-personalisation-of-search-take-back-control/

http://www.slideshare.net/KarenBlakeman/personalisation-of-search-take-back-control

Personalisation of search: take back control – ADDENDUM

Answers to some of the questions that arose during the workshop

http://www.authorstream.com/Presentation/karenblakeman-1442618-personalisation-of-search-take-back-control-addendum/

http://www.slideshare.net/KarenBlakeman/personalisation-of-search-addendum

The future of search: localisation, personalisation and socialisation

http://www.authorstream.com/Presentation/karenblakeman-1438816-the-future-of-search-localisation-personalisation-and-socialisation/

http://www.slideshare.net/KarenBlakeman/the-future-of-search-localisation-personalisation-and-socialisation

Google, workshops

Workshop: Getting the best out of Google (Reading)

April 26, 2012 Karen Blakeman

Having problems with Google? Fed up with it ignoring your search terms and giving you something completely different? Or confused by irrelevant postings from complete strangers appearing in your results? Personalisation, localisation, social networks and semantic search are all being used by Google in an attempt to “enhance” your results but it can go horribly wrong. Austria suddenly becomes Australia and Google decides that buttercups are really goats! There are many tricks that we can use to make Google return better results and this workshop will look in detail at what is available.

Topics will include:

how Google works – what Google tells us and what we have to guess
recent developments and their impact on search results
how Google customises your results and can you stop it?
how to focus your search and control Google
Google’s specialist tools and databases
what Google is good at and when you should consider alternatives

You will have ample opportunity to experiment and try out the techniques for yourself. Exercises will be provided to help you test out the search features but you are free to explore and try out searches of your own.

This workshop is suitable for all levels of experience. The techniques and approaches covered can be applied to all subject areas.

The workshop leader is Karen Blakeman.

Date: Thursday, 28th June 2012, 9.30 – 16.30
Venue: Agriculture Building, Reading University, Reading, UK
Cost: £150 +VAT (Total £180). A limited number of places for unwaged and students are available; please contact karen.blakeman@rba.co.uk for further details.
Further details: http://www.rba.co.uk/training/Google.htm

Google, Search Engines, Search Strategies, workshops

Forthcoming workshop: Effective online search tools and techniques (Sheffield)

April 23, 2012 Karen Blakeman

If you want to make Google behave or learn about alternative search tools, I am running a workshop for SINTO next week in Sheffield. It is a one day hands-on workshop to be held at Sheffield Hallam University on Tuseday 1st May (10 am – 4 pm).

This workshop will start with how Google works, important changes that are affecting search results, and how to make use of Google search features to improve and focus your search. It will then move on to other options for general web search and specialist tools for different types of information (for example statistics, social media, research) and subject areas. This workshop is suitable for all levels of experience and the techniques covered can be applied to all subject areas.

Cost: SINTO members £80 + £16 VAT= £96. Non-members £110 + £22 VAT = £132

Feel free to contact me if you require further information about the workshop content.

A booking form is available at http://extra.shu.ac.uk/sinto/Events/events.html or you can contact SINTO on Tel 0114 2255740, email sintoenquiry@shu.ac.uk

CILIP, Facebook, Presentations, privacy, Search Engines, Search Strategies, social media, Twitter

Presentation: Search Turns Social – Resistance is Futile

April 19, 2012 Karen Blakeman

The presentation I gave to CILIP in Hants & Wight yesterday (Search Turns Social – Resistance is Futile) is now available on authorSTREAM at http://www.authorstream.com/Presentation/karenblakeman-1392940-search-turns-social-resistance-futile/

It is also available on Slideshare at http://www.slideshare.net/KarenBlakeman/search-turns-social-resistance-is-futile and temporarily on my web site at http://www.rba.co.uk/as/

Search Strategies, workshops

IFEG advanced search presentation now available

April 9, 2012 Karen Blakeman

The presentation on advanced web searching that I gave to the Information for Energy Group on April 3rd, 2012 in London is now available. It can be found on:

authorSTREAM at http://www.authorstream.com/Presentation/karenblakeman-1383280-ifeg-20120403/

and

Slideshare at http://www.slideshare.net/KarenBlakeman/advanced-web-searching-ifeg-3rd-april-2012

If you have problems accessing it on either of those sites it is temporarily available as a PowerPoint file on my web site at http://www.rba.co.uk/as/

Google, Search Strategies

Order matters with Google advanced search commands

March 18, 2012 Karen Blakeman 1 Comment

The great thing about running search workshops is that you have so many people experimenting with advanced commands that someone is bound to spot an anomaly that you haven’t. We’ve become used to seeing different results when changing the order in which we enter keywords but not when using advanced search commands. During one of my workshops we had a couple of people playing around with Google’s allintitle command. This tells Google to look for all of the keywords following allintitle in the title of a document.

The search that was initially used was allintitle:diabetic retinopathy and came back with 277,000 results. Restricting the search to UK academic sites by using allintitle:diabetic retinopathy site:ac.uk reduced the number to about 2,190 and gave sensible results. But changing the order of the commands to site:ac.uk allintitle:diabetic retinopathy gave two very bizarre results:

Both results are from academic sites but the allintitle as a search command seems to have been ignored. The first entry includes intitle, diabetic and retinopathy and the second has allintitle, diabetic and retinal. Using the Verbatim option from the menus on the left hand side of the results page gave us zero!

Next we tried combining allintitle with fieltype:pdf.

allintitle:diabetic retinopathy filetype:pdf

gave us 3490 results of which at least the first 100 were relevant.

Switching the order to :

filetype:pdf allintitle:diabetic retinopathy

gave 495,000 results some of which were relevant but many did not contain all of our terms nor did they contain both diabetic and retinopathy in the title. Google was also looking for variations on our terms.

Using Verbatim on this search gave us zero again.

When we looked at the advanced search screen Google had put everything in the right boxes. If we used the advanced search screen to enter our terms afresh the search worked with Google putting the allintitle command at the start of the search.

Was this a general problem or just with allintitle? We then played around with the intitle command.

intitle:diabetic intitle:retinopathy site:ac.uk – 2220 sensible results (slightly more than our original allintitle search)

site:ac.uk intitle:diabetic intitle:retinopathy – 2220 sensible results identical to those above

intitle:diabetic intitle:retinopathy filetype:pdf – 3480 sensible results

filetype:pdf intitle:diabetic intitle:retinopathy – 3480 sensible results same as previous search

We then tried using a phrase after intitle:

intitle:"diabetic retinopathy" site:ac.uk – 2130 sensible results

site:ac.uk intitle:"diabetic retinopathy" 2130 sensible results identical to previous search

Following a suggestion made by Tamara Thompson of PIBuzz ( http://pibuzz.com/) changing the search slightly to site:ac.uk "intitle:diabetic intitle:retinopathy" gave exactly the same results.

Just to make sure that it wasn’t just us in the UK seeing this I asked fellow members of AIIP (http://www.aiip.org/) to run the original two allintitle searches. They saw exactly the same thing.

Its seems, then, that there is a problem when allintitle is not the first command in a search. The intitle alternatives appear more reliable. If you prefer to use the command line rather than fill in the boxes on the Advanced Search screen remember that order sometimes matters.

Does this affect other combinations of commands? I left it at allintitle and intitle but I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

Search Engines, Search Strategies

Use more than Google

March 14, 2012 Karen Blakeman 1 Comment

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

February 22, 2012 Karen Blakeman 9 Comments

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

February 10, 2012 Karen Blakeman

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.

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.

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