Tag Archives: search tools

Presentations, Search Strategies

Slidefinder

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Slidefinder  (http://www.slidefinder.net/) was recommended to me way back in August 2009 and I have been using it ever since to track down information inside presentations. PowerPoint presentations can hold a wealth of information: corporate structures, strategic plans, research activity, statistics, industry information etc. Using the advanced file format search options in the general search engines is one way of locating relevant presentations and there are also searchable presentation sharing sites such as Slideshare (http://www.slideshare.net/) and Authorstream (http://www.authorstream.com/). Slidefinder (http://www.slidefinder.net/) is a similar service but locates and presents you with individual slides that contain your search terms. This means that you do not have to wade through the whole file to find the information you want.

It covers publicly available PowerPoint presentations that are on the web but does not include services such as Slideshare or Authorstream. The default simple search is straightforward. Type in your search terms and relevant slides are displayed as thumbnails. The advanced search enables you to search by slide title, text, notes, presentation name, keywords, language and site. To see a larger version of a slide and any notes associated with it move the cursor over a slide, or you can download the entire presentation if you wish.

There are also options to restrict your search to university sites. These are listed by country in regions (Europe, North America, Oceania and Asia) but it is not comprehensive. Once you have identified the university you want you can either browse the title slides or keyword search the available presentations. Phil Bradley has already reviewed the service and he commented that no UK universities were listed. This is obviously a part of the service that is under continual development and I note today that  two universities have been added to the UK list since I last looked. It is not clear how the universities are selected for inclusion (there are only 47 for the UK) and many major institutions such as Reading University are missing from the list.

Slidefinder is powered by Slide Executive (http://www.slideexecutive.com/) and is a showcase for Swedish company Novatrox’s desktop and enterprise presentation management tools. They are essentially search tools for presentations stored on your own computer or networks but they also enable you to build new presentations from existing slides and manage “libraries”. There are a range of products depending on the number of users and how you wish to create and organise your files. They are all priced but you can download free trials. I am currently looking at the single user desktop edition and although I know my own presentations inside out and their location I am finding Slide Executive very useful for presentations given to me by co-workers and colleagues. The question for me now is whether or not it is worth 249 Euros. Possibly not, but the free Slidefinder is definitely worth adding to your search toolkit.

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
Search Engines

Ixquick becomes Startpage

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Ixquick has changed its name to Startpage. The name and URL may have changed but the technology and way you use it is the same. Ixquick/Startpage is what is sometimes called a meta search engine, which I find misleading. It doesn’t search web page or document meta-data but takes your search and runs it across several tools at once and generates a single list of results. For the Web option it covers All the Web, Ask, Bing, Cuil, EntireWeb, Exalead, Gigablast, Lycos, Open Directory, Qkport, Wikipedia and Yahoo. All are automatically searched by Startpage but you can de-select individual services if you wish. Google is conspicuous by its absence.

The great thing about tools of this kind is that it presents you with a single list gleaned from all of the search tools in the list. The disadvantage is that you cannot always use the advanced features of the individual services, although Startpage does have a go at addressing this. On the home page the Power Search option takes you to a page where there are boxes for “at least one of the words” (OR), “all the words”, “exact phrase” and “without the words”. There is also an expert search link that adds options for text in the title or URL, “at this domain name” (site search), pages “with links to this domain name”, and type of domain name (but only .com, .edu, .gov, .net, .org). Note that there is no filetype search. You can bring this screen up by default when you connect to Startpage by going to My Settings and selecting Expert Search as Homepage search mode.

The site search seems to work well but the link option returns just a fraction of the true results and only displays the top 10. To find pages that link to a domain or specific page, searching direct on Yahoo or Exalead gives far better results.

As well as Web Startpage does video search, which is powered by Blinkx.com, and allows you to restrict your search to categories such as business, news, sport and entertainment. The Pictures (image) option is disappointing and there is no information on which search engines are used to compile the results. The phone number option varies depending on the country you select but again there does not appear to any information on which telephone directories are used. Oddly, there is a “reverse” option to find a name from a telephone number even if you select the UK as a country. When you click on search, though, Startpage says the combination is not valid. Hardly surprising since reverse lookup is not available for public use in the UK.

I don’t generally use tools such as Ixquick/Startpage or Dogpile. If I want to search quickly across multiple search engines I prefer to use something like Zuula or Browsys Advanced Finder and click through the tabs for each tool one by one. There are many people who do use them, though, and Ixquick has often been named as a favourite by people on my Advanced Search workshops. It is all down to what suits you and what works for your type of searches.  From the feedback that I have had over the years Startpage is definitely worth trying.

Search Engines, Search Strategies

iSEEK

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iSEEK is a new, neat search engine that as well as coming up with good results also clusters results into topics on the left hand side of your results screen. Clustering is not new: Clusty, for example, is just one of many search tools that have been doing this for several years. For my test searches, though, iSEEK comes up with more meaningful topics and clusters. These include places, people, organisations and date and time.

It passed with flying colours on my first test search – gin vodka sales uk. My “ego-search”  on Karen Blakeman also came up with good results and listed my various profiles on social media such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn on the first page. The results from more test searches on other people’s names suggest that iSEEK gives priority to biographies and social media profiles. All of my test searches came up with relevant sites and in an order that was different from Google’s, so this could be a good Google alternative.

As well as the default “Web” search there is an “Education” option that appears to give priority to more research oriented pages. For some searches, for example “peak oil”, the topics on the left of the screen included US school grade level.

To search you can type in a natural language question or keywords, and use quotation marks around phrases, but that is it. There is no advanced search for searching by filetype for example. Nevertheless, I would recommend that you give it a try.

Hat tip to Peter Guillaume for recommending iSEEK.