Tag Archives: Search Strategies

Presentations, Search Engines, social media

ILI2010 – social search presentation

My presentation on using social media search tools as part of research, which I gave at Internet Librarian International on 15th October 2010, is now available on the sites listed below. I have uploaded it to several different sites and services as I know some of you are not able to access one or more of them at work.

PowerPoint Presentation (6.3 MB) (download from rba.co.uk site)
authorSTREAM
Slideboom
Slideshare

If you want to catch up with #iili2010 tweets there is a Twapperkeeper at http://twapperkeeper.com/hashtag/ili2010

Search Engines, Search Strategies, Top 10 Search Tips, workshops

Advanced search tips and tricks

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An interesting list of search tips came from the participants of the search workshops I recently ran in-house for a well known academic institution. (My Twitter followers will be able to work out who it was). As well as being experienced, savvy searchers they are fortunate in that they can choose which browser to use for searching. Attempts to demonstrate Google Instant failed, however. I was not able to show Google’s latest “enhanced search experience” in action, even when using the latest versions of the browsers and being signed in to a Google account. This was probably due to their firewall. Personally, I think that is a plus for the institution. Some of you may disagree.

Here is their combined top search tips list.

1. Keep it Simple!

There is a plethora of advanced search options and Google alternatives but starting off with a simple search string is often the best approach. Looking for data on the UK rat population? You might be tempted to include a file format limitation in your search and/or a site:gov.uk command but simply typing in a search for uk rat population statistics was quicker and came up with the relevant information. Note: the simple approach worked at the time with this example because it was a “hot topic” in the UK news. It might not work now, which brings us to number 2…

2. Be aware of personalisation and hot topics

The major search engines monitor what you search for and the links you click on, and use this to “personalise” your results and sponsored links/ads accordingly. This information is stored in cookies on the computer you used for the search. They also try and work out your location from your IP address so that they can deliver local content (this sometimes goes horribly wrong!). What is currently hitting the headlines will also be a factor in determining the results that are displayed on the first page (increase your displayed results per page to more than the default 10 and ideally to at least 50). This means that you will see different results from one day to the next and if you use a computer other than your usual machine.

3. Google isn’t infallible

We covered a range of search techniques that you can try to bring Google to heel but if you are not getting anywhere try another search tool. Google does not cover everything and your best result may be number 1,200,675 in the results list. Try Yahoo or Bing as alternatives and also think about using specialist search tools for real time and social media, images, and subjects/industries.

4. Get to know the Google alternatives

There is no easy way to do this but visiting Zuula (http://www.zuula.com/) or Browsys Finder (http://www.browsys.com/finder/) once very couple of weeks will remind you of the alternatives and alert you to new kids on the block.

5. Google additional search options

Open up and explore the additional Google search options on the left hand side of your results page. You can restrict your search to news, videos, blogs, images etc and to a time period. There are also options for related searches, less or more shopping sites and….

8. The Wonderwheel

Use this to extract phrases and concepts from the top results and to change the direction of your search. Worth investigating if you are stuck in a rut and fed up with seeing the same results again and again.

9. Google Public Data Explorer

This is currently a Google Labs project at http://www.google.com/publicdata/home “..makes large datasets easy to explore, visualize and communicate. As the charts and maps animate over time, the changes in the world become easier to understand.” There is a list of sources at http://www.google.com/publicdata/directory but the data available is more varied than the list suggests at first glance. The World Development Indicators and OECD Factbook are worth looking at in more detail to see if they have data that can help with frequently asked questions.

10. Creative Commons and public domain images

If you are looking for an image for a presentation or promotional literature, search for images that have the appropriate Creative Commons license. There are several licenses with varying degrees of restrictions. Details are on the Creative Commons web site at http://www.creative.commons.org/.  You can search Flickr photos that have a specific creative commons license at http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/ or use Compfight (http://www.compfight.com/). There are several other sites you can use for Creative Commons images but Geograph (http://www.geograph.org.uk/) was mentioned several times by the workshop participants. Geograph “aims to collect geographically representative photographs and information for every square kilometre of Great Britain and Ireland” and all photos have a CC 2 license, which means that they can be used commercially with attribution.

11. TinEye Reverse Image Search
http://www.tineye.com/

Type in the URL of an image or upload one of your own and TinEye will find similar images, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or if there is a higher resolution version. Provided by Idée Inc who also offer..

12. Multicolr Search Lab
http://labs.ideeinc.com/multicolr/

Search 10 million Creative commons Flickr images by colour. You can specify more than one colour and click on a colour several times to increase its prominence within the image. You can easily click through to the original Flickr image to double check the license.

13 . Slidefinder

http://www.slidefinder.net/

Ideal for locating individual presentation slides that contain your search terms. There is an Advanced Search that enables you to search specific areas of a slide for example title, text, notes. You can also limit your search to a university. There are browsable lists at the bottom of the page but they do not list every institution: there are only 47 for the UK. One workshop participant had been given a paper copy of a complex slide and it had taken her “ages” to find an electronic version. She had had to wade through hundreds of slides in presentations that had been identified by using the advanced filetype: ppt search. Slidefinder found it straight away.

14. Twitter search tools

Do not expect Google, Yahoo or Bing to carry out a reliable Twitter search. Use specialist search tools such as Twitter Search (http://search.twitter.com/), Twazzup (http://www.twazzup.com/), BackTweets (http://www.backtweets.com/) for tweets that refer to your content, Tweepz (http://www.tweepz.com/) for finding people and organisations on Twitter, and TwapperKeeper (http://www.twapperkeeper.com/) for archives of tweets on a conference hashtag or keyword.

15. Google custom search engine

http://www.google.com/cse/

Ideal for groups or collections of sites that you regularly search and use. Google CSE is very quick and easy to set up and can be hosted on Google. Two that had been set up by a workshop participant were a list of library associations worldwide and selected UK higher and further education web sites.

16. Watchthatpage

Tracking changes to web pages that do not themselves offer RSS or email alerts was not covered by the main part of the workshop but the question arose during one of the practical sessions. There is a list of some web based and downloadable programs and their features at Tracking Web Page Changes http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/monitor.htm . Watchthatpage (http://www.watchthatpage.com/) won the vote because it is free, web based and offers email alerts.

17. Evernote

http://www.evernote.com/

“Capture anything… Type a text note. Clip a web page. Snap a photo. Grab a screenshot. Evernote will keep it all safe.”. I don’t use this myself but it had several fans in this organisation. ( I use Firefox add-on Scrapbook to do a similar thing).

18. Add-ons for Firefox

If you are a Firefox user explore the many add-ons that are available to make searching and managing information easier. For example Feedly (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8538/) to organize your favourite sources into a magazine-like start page;  Scrapbook (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/427/) to save and organize web pages; and Optimize Google (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/52498/) for customizing your Google searches and results.

19. Don’t re-invent the wheel – re-use and share

As well as images, many presentations have Creative Commons licenses and their authors are often happy for you to re-use slides from them as long as you acknowledge the source and do not incorporate them into a product or service that you then sell. Slideshare.net is a good starting point but do check the license to confirm what you can and cannot do with the content – not all are CC. Also, consider assigning a CC license to your own photos and presentations. The Creative Commons web site (http://creativecommons.org/choose/) can help you decide which one to use.

20. Time to explore

There was time to explore new techniques and tools during the workshop but it is not so easy to try out, for example, a new option on Google when you are back in the office and an enquirer wants that result NOW! Try and incorporate some “play time” into your schedule so you can keep up with new developments, even if it is just 10 minutes a week.

Google, Search Strategies, workshops

London Workshop: Advanced Google Searching

I am running a series of hands-on workshops this autumn in London, and the first is on Advanced Google Searching. It is being held on September 23rd at Just IT, 7 Sandy’s Row, which is near Liverpool Street.

Google is the first port of call for many of us when it comes to searching the Internet, and with more data and services being added all the time it seems the obvious place to start. More information, more search features but not necessarily more relevant results. This hands-on workshop will look at the latest developments in Google and how to focus your search to obtain better results.

Topics covered include:

  • recent developments and new services from Google
  • how Google personalises your results
  • how Google is incorporating social media
  • essential advanced search commands
  • how to use the new options to narrow down your search for more relevant results
  • how to access and use the specialist tools
  • image, video and news search
  • build your own Google Custom Search Engine

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

Please note: this workshop concentrates on Google and does not cover the same topics as my recent UKeiG “Changing Landscape of Search” session.

A booking form is available at http://www.rba.co.uk/training/AdvancedGoogle.htm

Search Engines, Search Strategies, workshops

Another workshop – another Top 10 Search Tips

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The participants at the latest advanced search workshop were all from the public sector and had very strong views on some of the new developments in search. They were definitely not impressed by Google automatically enabling web history with a view to “personalizing” search results. (See Your Google results are about to get weirder
http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2009/12/17/your-google-results-are-about-to-get-weirder/). (The workshop participants  are switching off Web History as soon as they get back to the office!) There were several sites and search features, though, that did impress them. This is their list of Top 10 Search Tips.

1. The Google Wonderwheel was the clear winner of the day with this group. When your results page appear on screen, click on “Show options” just above the results and to the left of the screen. Then select Wonderwheel from the list on the left of the page. (For further details see Google new search and display options
http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2009/10/05/google-new-search-and-display-options/)

2. Google’s Timeline was a close second in the popularity stakes. This is also under Show options in Google when you do a default web search and is also available in Google News. It shows the distribution of your articles over time and gives you an idea of when something started to become a “hot topic” and how a story has developed over time. It is not 100% accurate but is good enough to give you an overall picture of how interest in a subject has waxed and waned.

3. LGSearch http://lgsearch.net/ They liked this one a lot! This a Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) set up by Dave Briggs (http://davepress.net/) that searches UK public sector web sites in one go. On the results page you can, if you wish, narrow down your search further to Local Government, Central Government, Health, Police & Fire, LG Related or Social Media.

4. Slideshare http://www.slideshare.net/. A site used by many people and organisations to provide access to PowerPoint presentations. Search for presentations on any topic or by a specific person then view online or download the original if the author permits. Once you have selected a relevant presentation Slideshare also shows you a list of other presentations containing similar content. No registration required if you just want to search.

5. Try something else other than Google. As well as giving Yahoo or Bing a go, try and think about the type of information you are looking for: news, video, statistics, what people are talking about. Then use the appropriate search tool for that type of information.

6. Twitter search http://search.twitter.com/ You may not want to indulge in Twitter yourself but it can give you an idea of what people are saying about a topic. It is also an essential part of reputation monitoring and competitive intelligence: what are people saying about you or your products and services? You do not have to have a Twitter account to search Twitter, just go to search.twitter.com.

7. Google Blogsearch (http://blogsearch.google.com/) and Blogpulse (http://www.blogpulse.com/) Blogs are another useful source of views and opinions on every topic imaginable. Blogpulse has a “trend this” option on the results page that displays a graph showing you how many blog posts mention your search terms over time.

8. Zuula.com (http://www.zuula.com/) for quick and easy access to a wide range of search tools covering different types of information. Enter your search once, click on the tab for the type of resource (video, images, reference, news), and then work your way through the list of search engines.

9. Google Custom Search Engines (CSE). We looked at several Google CSEs, LGsearch.net and Directionlessgov (http://directionlessgov.com) being just two of them. You can, though, set up your own CSE at http://www.google.com/cse/. Useful if you search the same web sites day after day. You will need a Google account or Gmail account to set up a CSE but you can host your CSE on your own web site or on Google. CSEs can be made public or kept private.

10. University of Auckland Official Statistics (OFFSTATS)  http://www.offstats.auckland.ac.nz/ This set of web pages provides information on Official Statistics on the Web and is an excellent starting point for official statistics by country and subject/industry.

Presentations, Search Engines, Search Strategies

Online Information 2009 presentations

The three  presentations I gave at Online Information 2009 are now available on Slideshare:

The Everchanging Landscape of Search: Google is not enough

Twitter for Business: an essential marketing and research tool
Business research: Web 2.0 is not an option but a necessity
Online Information Conference, Search Strategies

Presentations: Online Information 2009

I shall be giving three presentations this year at the Online Information conference and exhibition at Olympia, London (http://www.online-information.co.uk/). One is on Twitter in the main conference and I am also giving two free talks in the exhibition area. Details are as follows:

The ever changing landscape of search: Google is not enough (Free seminar being given as part of the Online Information 2009 exhibition)
 Online Information 2009 Tuesday, 1st December 2009, 11.45-12.15 Theatre C, Grand Hall, Olympia, London
Twitter for Business: an essential marketing and research tool (Online Information conference presentation )
 Online Information 2009 Tuesday, 1st December 2009, 16:00-17:30, Track 2 Olympia Conference Centre, London
Business research: Web 2.0 is not an option but a necessity (Free seminar being given as part of the Online Information 2009 exhibition)
 Online Information 2009 Wednesday, 2nd December 2009, 12.00-12.30 London Room, Grand Hall, Olympia, London

All three presentations will be available on Slideshare http://www.slideshare.net/karenblakeman

I shall be on the UKeiG stand (number 734) for a while over the next three days, so come and say hello if you are wondering round the exhibition.

If you are attending either the exhibition or the conference and tweeting, the conference tag is #online09

Search Strategies, Top 10 Search Tips

Top Tips from Advanced Internet Search Strategies

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Here are the Top Tips from the participants of yesterday’s workshop on advanced search (29th October 2009):

1. Creative Commons and public domain images

When searching for images that you can re-use on your web site, in your report or newsletters you need to be sure of what you can and can’t do with them. Rather than chasing after the “owner” of the image, the following tools only have creative commons or public domain images.

Geograph http://www.geograph.org.uk/ “aims to collect geographically representative photographs and information for every square kilometre of Great Britain and Ireland”.

Flickr Creative Commons http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/. This page lists the different Creative Commons licenses and enables you to search for images with a particular license.

Morguefile http://www.morguefile.com/ A relatively small collection of images but good quality, high resolution.

Most images on US government web sites are public domain. A few are not but these are clearly labelled with copyright statements. All of NASA’s images are also public domain.

Wikimedia Commons http://commons.wikimedia.org/. Be careful with this source. There are disputes over the copyright of some images, notably photographs from the National Portrait Gallery. Before using any images from this site look at the whole of image’s page to see if there could be problems. For example see Charles Abbot, 1st Baron Colchester by John Hoppner.

2. People search tools, for example LinkedIn, 123People.com, Whoozy.com

3. Google Customised Search Engine http://www.google.com/cse/.  Create your own Google search engine that searches only the sites that you specify. Great if you are always searching the same sites day after day, or want to provide your users with a search tool covering a specific topic

4.  “Show options” near the top of Google search results. It is not immediately obvious what it does, but click on it and a range of additional search options appear in a bar on the left hand side. See my blog posting Google new search and display options for further details.

5.Tripleme http://www.tripleme.com/ to display results from Google, Yahoo and Bing side by side. There is also a deduplicate button .

6. Google Squared http://www.google.com/squared/ Described as “fascinating” by one of the participants. This attempts to put information from the pages in your results list into a table. It is by no means perfect but has improved greatly since its introduction. Everyone agreed that it is “one to watch”. For some examples here are a few I prepared earlier: Volcanoes, Ducks and Royal Dutch Shell (to which I have added some competitors). I have left some of the wrong and questionable data in.

7. Geograph http://www.geograh.org.uk/ This was mentioned in number 1 but was singled out as a quick and easy way of finding Creative Commons images of locations, buildings and landmarks in the UK.

8. Blogpulse http://www.blogpulse.com/. Singled out because of the “Trend this” option which displays graphically how often your term or terms have occurred in blog postings over time.

9. Wolframalpha http://www.wolframalpha.com/ Despite my own clearly stated reservations about this tool, it was nominated for mathematical calculations and chemical structures. At least it shows that the participants were of independent mind and not to be swayed by my prejudices!

10. Exalead’s Chromatik, which is part of the Exalead Labs experimental area. This enables you to search image tags by keyword and then select one or more colours that you want as major components of the image. Although Exalead does now have a colour option in its main image search it is not as sophisticated as Chromatik.

Google, Search Strategies

Google new search and display options

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Some of you may have spotted that Google has introduced some excellent new search and display options. Many of you probably have not – the link to them is very discreet, almost as though Google does not want you to find out about them. Carry out a standard Google search and to the left just above your search results you will see a “Show options” link.

Click on ‘Show options’ or the plus sign and additional search and sort options will appear to the left of your search results.

At the top of the list you can choose to limit your search to videos, blogs, forums or reviews.

Below that are options to restrict your search to “recent results”, the past hour, past 24 hours, past week, past year or to your own specific date range. Not surprisingly the past hour, 24 hours and week pull up mostly blog postings and news articles. “Recent results” seems to pick results that go back about a couple of months.

As soon as you select any of the time options apart from the specific date range, additional options to sort by relevance or by date appear but the date option only sorts with most recent first. For some inexplicable reason sorting by date disappears if you want to specify your own range of weeks, months, or years; results are automatically sorted by relevance.

A word of warning about Google’s date sorting: the “date” of many of the web pages bears no relationship whatsoever to the real date of publication or when the content was actually written. In these cases Google is using the date and time stamp assigned to the page by the hosting web server. Most web sites have been revamped and reloaded at least once in their lifetime and some pages are dynamically created at the time of search. The dates of blog postings and news articles are a little more reliable, although there too you can find anomalies.

If you want to quickly identify articles that fall within a specific time period you may be better off selecting the Timeline but this seems to only include articles from Google Current News and Google Archive News. Also, the list of results below the Timeline graphic does not include every year. You have to click on the bar representing the required years and only then are all the articles displayed.

Related searches is obvious: this comes up with alternative search strategies that you might want to try. For me they would be far more useful displayed at the top of the standard search results rather than being hidden under  “Show options”.

The Wonder wheel is difficult to describe in words as it is a clustering and visualisation tool combined. Click on a link on the first wheel and a second pops up with a different set of clustered links for you to follow. Try it and see if it works for you.

“Images from the page” adds thumbnails of images found on the page next to the text entry in your results list.

The “More text” option gives you a larger extract from each of the pages in the results list making it easier for you to decide which are most relevant for your needs.

And if you are fed up with seeing shopping sites in your lists or perhaps want more, Google has thought of that as well. Simply click on “Fewer shopping sites” or “More shopping sites”. This works very well and reminds me of Yahoo’s Mindset experiment that allowed you to move a slider bar between research and shopping to change the emphasis of the results. Sadly, Yahoo never incorporated it into its standard search and abandoned the project a while ago.

Overall, Google has come up with a winner here. I would not want to use every option for every search so having a bar from which you can easily select and combine them is a great idea. It is a pity that Google has not made the additional options more obvious.

Top 10 Business Sites, Top 10 Search Tips, workshops

Internet and Business Information Search Tips – Manchester, 26th March 2009

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Here are the Top 10 tips from the Business and Internet Search workshop I ran for a group at Manchester Public Library on 26th March. They are the tips that the participants themselves suggested at the end of the day.

1. Site search

This one crops up again and again, but so many people have not yet discovered how powerful this command can be. Use the advanced site and domain search to limit your search to just one web site or a type of organisation (e.g. UK government, US academic). It is ideal for searching individual web sites which have diabolical navigation or appalling site search engines, and for searching for types of information, for example site:ac.uk for UK academic research papers on a particular topic. Use the advanced search screen in Google and Yahoo, or the ‘site:’ command as part of your search strategy in the standard search box on Google, Yahoo, Live.com and MSE360.com. For example:

carbon emissions trading site:ac.uk

If you are searching for PowerPoints or PDFs, use both Google and Yahoo. Google indexes the first 101 K of a document whereas Yahoo indexes the first 500 K so the results can be significantly different when it comes to larger files.

2. Filetype search
There are lots of goodies to be found on the advanced search screens of Google and Yahoo. Think about the type of information you are looking for and focus your search by file format. For example statistics and research data are often left in spreadsheet format (xls). If you are looking for an expert on a subject limit your search to PowerPoint (ppt, and also pdf as many presentations are converted into this format before being loaded onto the web).  Industry, market and government reports are often in PDF format.  Yahoo and Google have the more common file formats in a drop menu on their advanced search screens.  If  the one you want is not listed use the filetype: command followed by the file extension as part of your strategy in Google, Live.com and MSE360.com. In Yahoo, use ‘originurlextension: ”

3. TripleMe
http://www.tripleme.com/
Enter your search and TripleMe displays results from Google, Yahoo and Live side by side. The fourth column contains the inevitable ads.

4. Google Finance
http://www.google.co.uk/finance , http://www.google.com/finance
A worthy competitor to Yahoo Finance although it does not have the wide range of stock exchange coverage of Yahoo. It does, though, beat Yahoo when it comes to the share price graphs. The graphs are ‘annotated’ with labels at the appropriate time point and these link to news articles that are listed to the right of the graph. Both offer free, daily historical share prices in figures.

5. PIPL.com and 123 people.com for people search
http://www.pipl.com/ , http://www.123people.com/
As well as web sites, blogs, images and directories PIPL and 123People search social media and networking sites for a person by name.

6. Slideshare
http://www.slideshare.net/
A service that allows presenters to upload PowerPoint presentations  and make them available in various formats. Ideal if you are looking for information or an expert on a topic, a speaker for an event, or just some ideas for your own presentation.

7. Videos
Use services such as YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/) to track down  “how to” videos and news. Also, why not create your own videos to promote your services or business and put them on YouTube?

8. Google CSE
Google Custom Search Engines (Google CSE) at http://www.google.com/coop/cse/
Ideal for building collections of sites that you regularly search, to create a searchable subject list, or to offer your users a more focused search option.

9. SCoRe Search Company Reports
http://www.score.ac.uk
A catalogue of current and historic printed company reports held in UK libraries. The catalogue does not provide links to digitised documents but is a very quick and easy way of identifying libraries that hold hard copy reports. The participating libraries include London Business School, the British Library, Manchester Business School, City Business Library, Guildhall Library, Strathclyde University and the University of Warwick. A full list is available at http://www.score.ac.uk/collections.asp.

10. Bureau van Dijk’s (BvD) “A Taste of Mint”
http://mintportal.bvdep.com/
A free directory from BvD giving basic information on companies world-wide. One experienced researcher at an earlier workshop commented: “It found the company I have been looking for when every other directory failed!”

Presentations, Search Engines, Search Strategies, workshops

Workshop on Advanced Search Strategies, London

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Several people have asked me when I am next running my workshop on advanced search strategies (sometimes known as Google and Beyond) in London. The next date for London is Wednesday, 18th February and there are still some places left. The venue is InTuition House, Borough High Street, London SE1 1JX, which is close to Borough tube station and London Bridge. The cost is £150 + VAT (total: £172.50) and includes refreshments and a buffet lunch.

Full details of the workshop together with a booking from are on my web site at http://www.rba.co.uk/training/searching.htm . You can pay by credit card, PayPal or request to be invoiced for the event.

For those of you who live in the Manchester area, I am running a similar event for UKeiG on April 1st. Details are at http://www.ukeig.org.uk/training/2009/April/GoogleandBeyondManchester200904.html