In 2017 my Website was migrated to the clouds and reduced in size.
Hence some links below are broken.
One thing to try if a “www” link is broken is to substitute “faculty” for “www”
For example a broken link
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Pictures.htm 
can be changed to corrected link
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Pictures.htm
However in some cases files had to be removed to reduce the size of my Website
Contact me at 
rjensen@trinity.edu if you really need to file that is missing


 

Helpers for Searching the Web
Bob Jensen at Trinity University


It may seem surprising, but I’m having better results in most cases these days using Microsoft’s Bing search engine than either Google or Yahoo --- http://www.bing.com/
Google still has the huge advantage of cached documents that can be found after they are no longer posted at their original Websites.

Business Insider compared Google Search with Bing and DuckDuckGo to find the best search engine out there — and the race was closer than expected ---
https://www.businessinsider.com/bing-vs-duckduckgo-vs-google-search-comparison-2018-10

Jensen Comment
If you're searching for an entity's home page, DuckDuckGo is a better alternative, although Google Search got better after criticisms that home pages were hard to find in search outcomes. For example, if you searched for a hotel's home page Google used to give priority to travel companies that would book the hotel rather than begin with that hotel's home page. I suspect this is because the travel agencies provided more advertising revenue to Google or paid to be listed early on in search outcomes.

If you're searching for some things like people, towns, and companies Wikipedia is sometimes better. For product searches, Amazon is often a better search engine.

Google has specialized search engines to factor into the comparisons. For example consider the following:

Google Scholar --- https://scholar.google.com/

Google Books ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#OnlineBookFinders

Google's Once Upon a Try (Fantastic):  A journey of invention and discovery with CERN, NASA, and more than 100 museums around the world  ---
https://artsandculture.google.com/project/once-upon-a-try

YouTube --- https://www.youtube.com/

Crash Course: Navigating Digital Information ---
www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8dPuuaLjXtN07XYqqWSKpPrtNDiCHTzU

Some drawbacks and dangers of Bing and Cha Cha search engines --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm#Bing

Scholarpedia (a cross between Wikipedia and Google Scholar) --- http://www.scholarpedia.org

Beyond Citation (study of scholarly search engines) --- http://www.beyondcitation.org

Google Scholar --- https://scholar.google.com/

Wikipedia --- https://www.wikipedia.org/

Bob Jensen's World Library --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm

Free Residential and Business Telephone Directory (you must listen to an opening advertisement) --- dial 800-FREE411 or 800-373-3411
 Free Online Telephone Directory --- http://snipurl.com/411directory       [www_public-records-now_com] 
 800 Numbers.net: Find 1-800 Numbers for (most) Any Company --- http://www.800-numbers.net/
 Google Free Business Phone Directory --- 800-goog411
To find names addresses from listed phone numbers, go to www.google.com and read in the phone number without spaces, dashes, or parens
International Dial Code Directory --- https://www.callersmart.com/articles/8/International-Dial-Code-Directory

Public Libraries Online --- http://publiclibrariesonline.org

The Keepers Registry (back issues of journals in large libraries) --- http://thekeepers.org
For example search for "Accounting"

250+ Killer Digital Libraries and Archives --- http://oedb.org/ilibrarian/250-plus-killer-digital-libraries-and-archives/

Bob Jensen's threads on libraries --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm#---Libraries

Cool Search Engines That Are Not Google --- http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/06/coolsearchengines
Internet Guide --- http://www.internet-guide.co.uk/

Computer Desktop Encyclopedia --- http://computerlanguage.com/

DiracDelta Science & Engineering Encyclopedia --- http://www.diracdelta.co.uk

Search Tricks --- http://prezi.com/mohshuoe-qcf/google-search-tricks/

You can search video and start the video when a particular word crops up
YouTube's Interactive Transcripts --- http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2010/06/youtubes-interactive-transcripts.html

YouTube added a cool feature for videos with closed captions: you can now click on the "transcript" button to expand the entire listing. If you click on a line, YouTube will show the excerpt from the video corresponding to the text. If you use your browser's find feature, you can even search inside the video. Here's an an example of video that includes a transcript.

This is a must-view video
Video: Ted Talk Pivot a new tool for web exploration?" Simoleon Sense, March 3, 2010 ---
http://www.simoleonsense.com/video-ted-talk-pivot-a-new-tool-for-web-exploration/

Gary Flake demos Pivot, a new way to browse and arrange massive amounts of images and data online. Built on breakthrough Seadragon technology, it enables spectacular zooms in and out of web databases, and the discovery of patterns and links invisible in standard web browsing.

Gary Flake is a Technical Fellow at Microsoft, and the founder and director of Live Labs.

Bob Jensen's threads on visualization of multivariate data ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/352wpvisual/000datavisualization.htm 

From the Scout Report on August 5, 2011

Aardvark --- http://vark.com/ 

Recently purchased by Google, the Aardvark site is a great way to get quick answers to questions large and small. Visitors can type in their question into the text box on the Aardvark site, and the site will find just the right person to answer the question. Users are encouraged to send questions via Twitter or email as well, and it will generally take just a few minutes to get an answer. Essentially, Aardvark sends out these questions to people in a users' network who are available via IM or email in order to find a suitable response. The site also includes sample questions and contact information. This version is compatible with all operating systems.


DuckDuckGo --- http://duckduckgo.com/ 

You may have played "duck duck goose" growing up, but have you used "DuckDuckGo" yet? It's a new search engine that is geared towards those folks browsing the web who are looking for a general, all-purpose way to search for materials online. DuckDuckGo doesn't track users like some search engines, and there's even a "Goodies" section. In this section, users can personalize their search homepage, learn about their syntax commands, and also find out information about their keyboard shortcuts. This version is compatible with all operating systems.

From the Scout Report on January 17, 2014

Searchlet --- http://searchlet.io/ 

If you're interested in a way to quickly search for information without opening a new tab, Searchlet is for you. Visitors can just highlight any text on any page to search Google, Wikipedia, or any number of dictionaries. Visitors can simply drag the Searchlet button to have it added to their bookmarks for quick reference. This version is compatible with all operating systems

Search for People

How the Internet Has Made Us Smarter:  Tip-of-the-Tongue Syndrome

Harvard Professor Attacking Google Thrives as Web Sheriff,

Find Books to Read

Wikipedia Versus YouTube

Free JSTOR and MAAW

OmniFind Business Data Search
IBM and Yahoo try to challenge Google with free data-search tool for businesses

Quandl:  over 8 million demographic, economic, and financial datasets from 100s of global sources ---
http://www.quandl.com/

How do you get a great Wikipedia module about yourself?

Wolfram Alpha's Second Act Following a sharp drop in interest, the "computational knowledge engine

Some Things You Might Want to Know About the Wolfram Alpha (WA) Search Engine:  The Good and The Evil
as Applied to Learning Curves (Cumulative Average vs. Incremental Unit)
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theorylearningcurves.htm

MAE 10: Introduction to Engineering Computations --- http://ocw.uci.edu/courses/course.aspx?id=129

What's the Best Q&A Site?

Deep Links and How They Differ From Web Links

Free Access to The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and The New York Times (NYT)

Digital File Cabinets and Searching for Text in Picture Images

Standardized Test Helpers 

Bob Jensen's Favorite  Online Encyclopedias

The Dangerous Side of Search Engines

Sex-Filtered Searching: Kid-Friendly Search Engines Filter Content

Google Links --- Click Here  

Baidu

Search Tricks --- http://prezi.com/mohshuoe-qcf/google-search-tricks/

DuckDuckGo (a search engine that leaves no tracks when you want to be truly anonymous) ---
https://duckduckgo.com/

Google Hacks

Google Hummingbird

Search Google and Wikipedia at the Same Time With Googlepedia

Are we witnessing the birth of a new challenger to Google?

Is Google Becoming Skynet? 

"Facebook’s New Graph Search: Not Very Good," by Rachel Metz, MIT's Technology Review, January 19, 2013 --- Click Here
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/510036/facebooks-new-graph-search-not-very-good/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20130121

Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) and Infotopia  

How can you locate students who fail to show up for class, children who seem to have disappeared, and untrustworthy husbands?

Twitter --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm#Twitter

The SemanticWeb

Search National Public Radio (NPR) Archives

How Faculty Search Electronic Publications

How to tag Websites using Yahoo

Duckduckgo and Searching Privacy 

Search for Terms on Book Pages:  The Absolutely Fantastic New Search Tools From Amazon and Google 

How Scholars Search the Web

"Introducing the Knowledge Graph: things, not strings," Google, May 16, 2012 ---
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/05/introducing-knowledge-graph-things-not.html

Features (including equation solving) of the Amazing Google 

Tutorials and Books on How to Use Google  

Google Searching by Sending Google Email Messages 

Google Hardware 

Google Directory and Other Key Google Links 

Semantic Web Searching: FactSpotter and AskOnce from Xerox

eBay. Click Fraud, and Other Online Frauds

The Dark Web of Pirated Articles and Books (e.g., Sci-Hub)

Search Among Blogs  

Search for Websites 

Search Inside a Given Computer (Google vs. Yahoo vs. Microsoft's Desktop Search)

Search by Name Toolbar 

Cell Phone Search Engines 

Find Cell Phone Numbers

Download the Free Google Deskbar 

Using Google to "define" versus define: words  

Biomedical Search --- http://www.biomedsearch.com/

GOOGLE expands services for the following:   

Google Lawsuits 

Google Will Generate a Map to An Address From a Telephone Number

Search for Audio, Video, Movie, and Television Shows

The Future of Search

Donate or Swap Books

Find Books

Book Finders

Find Rare Books

Trade In Your Books for Other Books

Knowledge Bases

Open Library is yours to borrow, read & connect ---
https://openlibrary.org/

One web page for every book ever published. It's a lofty but achievable goal.

To build Open Library, we need hundreds of millions of book records, a wiki interface, and lots of people who are willing to contribute their time and effort to building the site.

To date, we have gathered over 20 million records from a variety of large catalogs as well as single contributions, with more on the way.

Open Library is an open project: the software is open, the data are open, the documentation is open, and we welcome your contribution. Whether you fix a typo, add a book, or write a widget--it's all welcome. We have a small team of fantastic programmers who have accomplished a lot, but we can't do it alone!

Open Library is a project of the non-profit Internet Archive, and has been funded in part by a grant from the California State Library and the Kahle/Austin Foundation.

Bob Jensen's threads on libraries ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm#---Libraries

Bob Jensen's threads on free electronic literature ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

Bob Jensen's links on free scholarly downloads in various academic disciplines ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm

 

Immigration Forms --- http://www.immigrationforms.com/military-and-immigration/index.html

From the Harvard Business School:  Working Knowledge --- http://hbswk.hbs.edu/
Topics --- http://hbswk.hbs.edu/topics/
Accounting and Control is listed under Finance --- http://hbswk.hbs.edu/topics/accountingandcontrol.html

Social Networking for Education:  The Beautiful and the Ugly
(including Google's Wave and Orcut for Social Networking and some education uses of Twitter)
Updates will be at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm

Public.Resource.Org --- http://public.resource.org/

Bankruptcy Records from LexisNexis
The phrase “Bankruptcy Records” should be the clickable link to:
http://risk.lexisnexis.com/manage-bankruptcy-information 

"Social Search:  A new website will offer personalized search results based on the user's social network," by Erica Naone, MIT's Technology Review, February 1, 2008 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20138/?nlid=848 

People are flocking to online social networks. Facebook, for example, claims an average of 250,000 new registrations per day. But companies are still hunting for ways to make these networks more useful--and profitable. In the past year, Facebook has introduced new services aimed at taking advantage of users' online contacts (see "Building onto Facebook's Platform"), and Yahoo announced plans for an e-mail service that shares data with social-networking sites. (See "Yahoo's Plan for a Smarter In-Box.") Now a company called Delver, which presented at Demo earlier this week, is working on a search engine that uses social-network data to return personalized results from the larger Web.

Liad Agmon, CEO of Delver, says that the site connects information about a user's social network with Web search results, "so you are searching the Web through the prism of your social graph." He explains that a person begins a search at Delver by typing in her name. Delver then crawls social-networking websites for widely available data about the user--such as a public LinkedIn profile--and builds a network of associated institutions and individuals based on that information. When the user enters a search query, results related to, produced by, or tagged by members of her social network are given priority. Lower down are results from people implicitly connected to the user, such as those relating to friends of friends, or people who attended the same college as the user. Finally, there may be some general results from the Web at the bottom. The consequence, says Agmon, is that each user gets a different set of results from a given query, and a set quite different from those delivered by Google.

"We have no intention of competing with the Googles of the world, because Google is doing a very good job of indexing the Web and bringing you the Wikipedia page of every search query you're looking for," says Agmon. He says that Delver will free general search queries such as "New York" or "screensaver" from the heavy search-engine optimization that tends to make those kinds of queries return generic, ad-heavy results on Google. "[As a user], you're always thinking, how can I trick Google into bringing me the real results rather than the commercial results?" Agmon says. "With this engine, we don't need to trick it at all. You can go back to these very naive and simple queries because the results come from your network. Your network is not trying to optimize results; they just publish or bookmark pages which they find interesting." As a consequence, the results lean toward user-generated content and items tagged through sites such as del.icio.us.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's consumer helpers and finders --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm

Bob Jensen's technology finders and helpers --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob4.htm


Find home values, reverse phone numbers, animated population growth maps, specialized research sites and more.

The first thing to try is to feed the phone number into a search engine such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo. This of course will not work for unlisted phone numbers.

Also see http://cwflyris.computerworld.com/t/2960878/999427/103876/2/
The above link was forwarded by Ed Scribner

March 18, 2008 (PC World) If you dig around the Web long enough, you're bound to find things somebody might not want you to know. (Maybe, like me, you hang your laundry out in the backyard.) This week I have a bunch of sites to help you dig up the dirt and do some serious research.

Find the Dirt on Your Neighbor

With two free Web services, I found the address of a neighbor, his first and last name, his phone number and how much his home is worth. If Zillow would only update its images, I could even tell you if he hangs his laundry out in the backyard.

met a neighbor while walking the dogs, and we chatted a while. When I got home, I decided to pop something in the mail. (It was some census tract stuff if you must know.) He lives about two blocks down the road, but for the life of me, I couldn't remember the guy's name or his street address. Okay, sure, I could've just dropped by his house. But what would I have to write about today, eh?

I popped open Zillow and searched on my neighborhood until I found the image of his house, then clicked on it. Zillow told me lots of stuff about the value of his home. What I needed--and got--was his street address.

Now that I had his street address, I went to the Reverse Lookup tab at http://www.reversephonelookup.com/  411Locate, entered info in the Reverse Address Lookup section, and got lucky. In a second, I had Jess's name. You might not be so fortunate--411Locate doesn't always come up with the right name.

Dig This: Tempted to buy a set of those newfangled color-pencil input devices? Be sure to read the review first--it details advanced features, usability, and, no surprise, bugs.

Trulia's Hindsight: Watch Cities Grow

If you enjoyed Zillow, you might also like Trulia. But there's more to this real-estate site than you might expect. I was poking around the other day and discovered Trulia Hindsight, which shows annual population growth in most parts of the U.S.

Once you're on Trulia Hindsight, click on Plano, Texas. You'll see a city map paint on the screen and a timeline at the bottom of the page will begin to advance. The map begins to populate, showing how the area developed over time.

Use the contrast slider on the bottom right to adjust how much of the background you want to see and the slider on the bottom left to zoom in or out of the map.

Once you get your bearings, grab the timeline slider, move it to the left, then slowly move it to the right. Type a city and state into the search field at the top to find your hometown. Unfortunately, the site doesn't have data for every area. If your town isn't on Trulia's radar, try downtown Los Angeles.

Dig This: You've gotta watch The Front Fell Off. My editor started kvetching that while hilarious, it also looks quite plausible. And she complained that the actors aren't getting credit even though there are lots of clips floating around the Internet. Okay, so here it goes: The guys are Australian comedy team Bruce and Dawe.

Top 5 Little-Known Research Web Sites

AskNow lets you ask a librarian a question. If they ask you where you live, say California. OWL, the Online Writing Lab, lets you look up the whys and wherefores of grammar. The Phrase Finder is a handy thesaurus for phrases. Need a fact checker? Refdesk.com has all the facts--or links to them--you'll ever need. Visiting the LibrarySpot is like walking into the local library and walking into the reference room. The site's part of the StartSpot Network, which includes HomeworkSpot and MuseumSpot.

 

Dig This: Whenever I go to CES in Las Vegas, my first stop is the craps table for some fast action--and maybe a chance to make a couple of bucks. Yet after watching these videos of Texas Hold'em--the game that "takes five minutes to learn and a lifetime to master"--I may have to find a low-stakes game.

Dig This, Too: Need a change of pace? Try Reel Fishing. You'll need patience and a steady hand.

 


From the Scout Report on October 12, 2007

Dugg-Digg Widget for Dashboard 1.1.5 --- http://web.mac.com/duncankeall/Dugg/Dugg.html 

Digg is perhaps one of the web’s best known sites, and it contains various content submitted by users from all over the world. Dugg 1.1.5 is a tiny widget that can help Digg devotees (and Digg neophytes) search and find content on Digg quickly. Visitors can view stories for specific topics or users and also check out what friends might be “digging”. This version of Dugg is compatible with computers running Mac OS X 10.3.


Question
What does Walt Mossberg think about the Ask3D search engine?

But Ask's new system, called "Ask3D," is a much bolder and better advance in unifying different kinds of results and presenting them in a more effective manner. It shows, once again, that Ask places a higher priority than its competitors do on making search results easy to navigate and use. Both new systems are now the defaults on the search sites. You don't have to do anything special to use them. Indeed, Google's change is so subtle you may not even notice it for some searches.
Walter S. Mossberg, "Ask.com Takes Lead In Designing Display Of Search Results," The Wall Street Journal,  June 28, 2007; Page B1 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118298543501150751.html

Ask.com --- http://www.ask.com/


StumbleUpon and Kartoo

Find FAQs Online

Yahoo's Y!Q

Speegle:  Listen to Your Search Outcomes 

Biomedical Search --- http://www.biomedsearch.com/

Searching for words and phrases at a particular university --- Scroll to the bottom of http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en 


International Telephone Code Directory --- http://www.callersmart.com/articles/8/International-Dial-Code-Directory

Free Residential and Business Telephone Directory (you must listen to an opening advertisement) --- dial 800-FREE411 or 800-373-3411
 Free Online Telephone Directory --- http://snipurl.com/411directory       [www_public-records-now_com] 
 800 Numbers.net: Find 1-800 Numbers for (most) Any Company --- http://www.800-numbers.net/
 Google Free Business Phone Directory --- 800-goog411
To find names addresses from listed phone numbers, go to www.google.com and read in the phone number without spaces, dashes, or parens

You might want to check if your cell phone numbers can be easily obtained:

 To find some cell phone numbers (for a fee):
 The "Free Cell Phone Tracer" only indicates that it has found the cell phone owner's name and address. Then your must pay to see that name and address.
 http://www.b2byellowpages.com/directory/b2b_directory_guide/800-phone-directory.shtml

 

Six Tips to Protect Your Search Privacy --- http://www.eff.org/wp/six-tips-protect-your-search-privacy
Also see http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce/000start.htm

Online Free Tutorials in Multiple Disciplines --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Tutorials

Find Free Online Literature --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm 

Lost Titles, Forgotten Rhymes: How to Find a Novel, Short Story, or Poem Without Knowing its Title or Author --- http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/lost/

Find Free Online Music --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Music.htm

Bob Jensen listens to music free online (and no commercials) --- http://www.slacker.com/ 

Catalog of U.S. Government Publications --- http://catalog.gpo.gov/F

State and Local Government on the Web --- http://www.piperinfo.com/state/states.html

Google Maps Street View --- http://maps.google.com/help/maps/streetview/

Links by Logos --- http://www.allmyfaves.com/

Bob Jensen's threads on how researchers/scholars search the Web are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm#Scholars

Bob Jensen's threads --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Threads.htm

Bob Jensen's links to electronic literature --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

Free online tutorials in various academic disciplines --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Tutorials

Open Source and Knowledge Sharing Links --- --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI


Introductory Notes:

When it comes to many questions (products, science, etc.) , I refer people to http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/
This fantastic site now has a new search engine. 

When it comes to encyclopedia-type questions my next favorite referral is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
If you don’t like something in a Wiki module, you can change it yourself from your browser.  If you don’t find a module, you can perform a service for the world by writing a module.

From the Scout Report on June 1, 2007

Pathway 1.0.3 --- http://pathway.screenager.be/download/ 

Sometimes wandering through the wilds of Wikipedia can result in confusion. For Dennis Lorson, his wandering led him to create this handy application. With Pathway 1.0.3 visitors can retrace their own steps through Wikipedia by creating a graphical network representation of article pages. It’s worth a try, and it will work with all computers running Mac OS X 10.4.

Bob Jensen's threads on encyclopedias are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#080512Encyclopedias

CatsCradle 3.5 --- http://www.stormdance.net/software/catscradle/overview.htm 
Many websurfers enjoy going to sites that might be based in other countries, and as such, they might very well encounter a different language. With CatsCradle 3.5, these persons need worry no more, as this application can be used to translate entire websites in such languages as Thai, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian. This version is compatible with all computers running Windows XP or 2000. (Scout Report, September 1, 2006)

April 4, 2006 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

FREE ACCESS TO SOME FOR-FEE ARTICLES

Congoo, a search engine launched this month and partnered with Google, gives registered users free online access to a selection of publications that normally required a subscription or a pay-per-view fee to read. After downloading the Congoo plug-in and registering, users can get access to "between four and 15 articles per month per publisher." Publications available include the Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, Financial Times, BusinessWire, Editor & Publisher, The New Republic, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, The Denver Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer and other major U.S. newspapers. Congoo is available at http://www.congoo.com/.

Critics of Congoo note that many public libraries, such as the San Francisco Public Library
( http://www.sfpl.org/sfplonline/dbcategories.htm ), also offer free access to subscription databases. And your own college and university library may also have online subscriptions that you can access at no additional fee.

See also:

"Internet Technology--Going Beyond Google" by Tom Warger UNIVERSITY BUSINESS, August 2005 http://www.universitybusiness.com/page.cfm?p=906

From the Scout Report on October 9, 2009

RadioSure 2.0 --- http://www.radiosure.com/ 

Are you looking for pop music from Senegal? The latest news from Romania? It's a fairly safe bet that you can use RadioSure to locate radio stations that will fit the bill. With this program, users can search over 12,000 radio stations, and even use a record button to save audio segments for later use. The stations are categorized by style of programming, city, and language. This version is compatible with computers running Windows 2003 and newer.

 

Evaluation of Information Sources --- http://www.vuw.ac.nz/~agsmith/evaln/evaln.htm 

Check whether things you read are true or false 
See Urban Legend helpers at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/245glosf.htm#UrbanLegend 

No A Grades to 83.33% of search engine users.
They say they trust their favorite search engines, but there’s a distressing lack of understanding of how engines rank and present pages -- only 38 percent of users are aware of the distinction between paid or “sponsored“ results and unpaid results.“ And only one in six say they can always tell which results are paid or sponsored and which are not.“  The funny part about this last bit is, nearly half of users say they would stop using search engines if they thought the engines were being unclear about how they presented paid results.
David Appell, "Search Engines," MIT's Technology Review, February 11, 2005 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/blog.asp?blogID=1732&trk=nl 


"Is Stupid Making Us Google?"  By James Bowman, The New Atlantis, no. 21, Summer 2008, pp. 75-80 ---
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/is-stupid-making-us-google

Generally speaking, even those who are most gung-ho about new ways of learning probably tend to cling to a belief that education has, or ought to have, at least something to do with making things lodge in the minds of students--this even though the disparagement of the role of memory in education by professional educators now goes back at least three generations, long before computers were ever thought of as educational tools. That, by the way, should lessen our astonishment, if not our dismay, at the extent to which the educational establishment, instead of viewing these developments with alarm, is adapting its understanding of what education is to the new realities of how the new generation of 'netizens' actually learn (and don't learn) rather than trying to adapt the kids to unchanging standards of scholarship and learning.

A prominent librarian utters dire warnings about new media
"Mass Culture 2.0," by Scott McLemee, Inside Higher Ed, June 20, 2007 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/06/20/mclemee

 

Jensen Comment
Yikes! When I'm looking for an answer to most anything I now turn first to Wikipedia and then Google. I guess James Bowman put me in my place. However, being retired I'm no longer corrupting the minds of students (at least not apart from my Website and blogs --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
I would counter Bowman by saying that Stupid is as Stupid does. Stupid "does" the following:  Stupid accepts a single source for an answer. Except when the answer seems self evident, a scholar will seek verification from other references. However, a lot of things are "self evident" to Stupid.

Scholars often forget that Google also has a scholars' search engine --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm#ScholarySearch
For example enter the search term "bailout."
How experts/scholars search the Web are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm#Scholars

There is a serious issue that sweat accompanied with answer searching aids in the memory of what is learned --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
But must we sweat to find every answer in life? There is also the maxim that we learn best from our mistakes. Bloggers are constantly being made aware of their mistakes. This is one of the scholarly benefits of blogging --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm

Scholarly Online Publishing Bibliography --- http://www.digital-scholarship.org/sepb/sepb.html 


Scribd Wants to Become the YouTube for Documents --- http://www.scribd.com/categories
It has a long way to go, although it now has over 350,000 archived documents --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribd
There are many tutorials such as those in basic accounting.

"A YouTube for Documents?" by Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 21, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2762&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Borrowing a page from the popular video-sharing site YouTube, a new online service lets people upload and share their papers or entire books via a social-network interface. But will a format that works for videos translate to documents?

It’s called iPaper, and it uses a Flash-based document reader that can be embedded into a Web page. The experience of reading neatly formatted text inside a fixed box feels a bit like using an old microfilm reader, except that you can search the documents or e-mail them to friends.

The company behind the technology, Scribd, also offers a library of iPaper documents and invites users to set up an account to post their own written works. And, just like on YouTube, users can comment about each document, give it a rating, and view related works.

Also like on YouTube, some of the most popular items in the collection are on the lighter side. One document that is in the top 10 “most viewed” is called “It seems this essay was written while the guy was high, hilarious!” It is a seven-page paper that appears to have been written for a college course but is full of salty language. The document includes the written comments of the professor who graded it, and it ends with a handwritten note: “please see after class to discuss your paper.”

There’s plenty of serious material on the site, too — like the Iraq Study Group Report and an Educause report about the future of technology at colleges.

Bob Jensen's threads on free online documents are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on general education tutorials are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch


"Web Searches That Really Bear Fruit:  New Free Tools Aim to Make Online Results More Relevant by Tracking Your Reactions,"
by Katherine Boehret, The Wall Street Journal, January 15, 2009 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123189045689079109.html

There's nothing more frustrating than a fruitless Web search -- or one that returns results that distract you from your original goal. Search giant Google knows this all too well and realizes that there's a chance you might switch to another search engine if you get tired of poor results.

This week I tested two free tools that attempt to make your Web searches more relevant by learning from users' reactions to search results: Google's SearchWiki and Surf Canyon Inc.'s namesake tool for Web browsers. These two don't necessarily compete against each other; in fact, they can be used in tandem. But after initially entering a search query, SearchWiki requires additional work on the part of the user that many people may not want to do. Surf Canyon works automatically as you go, sorting results according to real-time user behavior.

But who wants to do all this work? Google says your votes don't influence the way other Google users see search results, nor do they affect your search results if you aren't logged into Google. You can see the number of votes a URL got from fellow voters, as well as comments made about the URL -- but only after you select a link at the bottom of the search-results page. If you promote a URL, you'll automatically see what other people think about this link.

SearchWiki depends on people to rank their own search results by promoting favored URLs to the top of a screen and knocking others to the bottom. It is available to most people who are logged into a Google account, and these user preferences are remembered if the same searches are performed at other times.

This sorting is done using elegant animation; preferred URLs float to the top of the screen when selected and unwanted results disappear in a magic-trick-like poof when removed. Comments about a link can be typed into a word bubble beside the URL and all comments are available to the public, labeled as posted by "Searcher" unless you create another nickname for yourself. People can also add preferred URLs to a search-results page if, for example, they know a better link about something than those that show up.

But who wants to do all this work? Google says your votes don't influence the way other Google users see search results, nor do they affect your search results if you aren't logged into Google. You can see the number of votes a URL got from fellow voters, as well as comments made about the URL -- but only after you select a link at the bottom of the search-results page. If you promote a URL, you'll automatically see what other people think about this link.

SearchWiki depends on people to rank their own search results by promoting favored URLs to the top of a screen and knocking others to the bottom. It is available to most people who are logged into a Google account, and these user preferences are remembered if the same searches are performed at other times.

This sorting is done using elegant animation; preferred URLs float to the top of the screen when selected and unwanted results disappear in a magic-trick-like poof when removed. Comments about a link can be typed into a word bubble beside the URL and all comments are available to the public, labeled as posted by "Searcher" unless you create another nickname for yourself. People can also add preferred URLs to a search-results page if, for example, they know a better link about something than those that show up.

For your efforts, you'll create a small collection of results that are saved in your account, sorted by date and time should you ever want to revisit them. This could come in handy in some circumstances, such as if you were researching a topic and you forgot to save Web pages as you went. Google confusingly calls these "SearchWiki notes," though they really include all of the links you voted on, as well as typed-in notes about links.

SearchWiki is a tough sell because most of us are already trained to surf the Web quickly, skipping ahead and back through links without taking the time to rank those results or comment on them. And it only works with Google searches.

If you like the idea of more personalized Web searches but would like to use other search engines or don't want to do extra work, you might like Surf Canyon. Once downloaded, this tool displays bull's-eyes beside certain results to show that Surf Canyon has found additional related hits. Clicking on this bull's-eye reveals those suggested links, pulled from deeper down in the search results, and these links might have bull's-eyes of their own. This cascade of data goes on and on as an algorithm studies which of the returned results you do or don't choose.

You might be deterred from using Surf Canyon because it must be downloaded before it works on Internet Explorer or Firefox. (A version of Surf Canyon for Apple's Safari browser is due out within a month.) This tool works with Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Live Search and Craigslist, and just started working with LexisNexis's LexisWeb.com legal-search engine.

Surf Canyon might not seem to be doing much at first, but it changes and reflects your preferences as you make them. For example, a search for "Obama dog" originally returned results about how the President-elect and his family are narrowing their search for a puppy. But as I opened more links related specifically to Mr. Obama's daughters, more results appeared on screen about Sasha and Malia. Each time I hit the browser's Back button to return to the original search page, Surf Canyon offered a new set of relevant URLs.

I tried looking at Craigslist.com for last-minute inauguration tickets, and one hit listed an inauguration-appropriate dress that someone was giving away free. The Surf Canyon bull's-eye appeared beside this result, and when I selected it, three more dress listings appeared.

Surf Canyon recently released an option for users who want long-term personalization, found at my.surfcanyon.com. It lets people select sources from which they prefer to receive news, shopping, research, or sports and entertainment results. Individual sites not listed on this page can also be added to a list of sources to use; likewise, sites can be added to a blacklist so results never come from them.

Unlike Google, Surf Canyon doesn't save your history or usage profile. And if you haven't created personalized preferences using the link above, it responds solely using your as-they-happen signals, like when you choose one link over another.

Google's SearchWiki is asking users to do extra work, which may not be practical for many users. But if you do use it, this tool's personalized, saved results could be a real boon. Surf Canyon worked well for me with multiple search engines, retrieving data from result pages I likely wouldn't have opened. Either way, your days of futile Web searching are numbered.


The easiest way to find definitions is to go to Google Define --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm#define
Simply go to Google at http://www.google.com/ or http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en
In the search box type define and insert the phrase you want defined in quotations.
For example, suppose you want to define “Grid Computing”
Simply type in define “Grid Computing” in the search box and hit the search button 

Free Video, Movie and Music Links --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm

LocateTV will search over 3 million TV listings across all channels in your area
Type in the name of a TV show, movie, or actor
Locate TV will find channels and times in your locale
http://www.locatetv.com/

Songza
Search for a song or band and play the selection --- http://songza.com/
I tried it for Arturo Toscanini, Stan Kenton, and Jim Reeves.
The results were absolutely amazing!

SpiralFrog.com, an ad-supported Web site with a terrible name that allows visitors to download music and videos free of charge, commenced on September 17, 2007  in the U.S. and Canada after months of "beta" testing. At launch, the service was offering more than 800,000 tracks and 3,500 music videos for download ---  http://www.spiralfrog.com/

Digital Duo Video
The Differences Between DVRs DVR, TiVo, huh?
The Duo clear up the recorder confusion with a history lesson.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,124109/article.html

Dan Tynan
Finding Online Video Search tools are just catching up
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,122859/article.html

Google Links --- Click Here
Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google

Yahoo Links --- http://www.yahoo.com/
Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo

Searching for PowerPoint ppt files, Excel xls files, and other file types

Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Google Open Encyclopedia, and YouTube as Knowledge Bases

How do scholars/researchers search for academic references?

Pandora for finding songs and recording artists --- http://www.pandora.com/

Pixsy's updates on free news videos --- http://www.pixsy.com/search.aspx?cat=12

From the Scout Report on October 9, 2009

RadioSure 2.0 --- http://www.radiosure.com/ 

Are you looking for pop music from Senegal? The latest news from Romania? It's a fairly safe bet that you can use RadioSure to locate radio stations that will fit the bill. With this program, users can search over 12,000 radio stations, and even use a record button to save audio segments for later use. The stations are categorized by style of programming, city, and language. This version is compatible with computers running Windows 2003 and newer.

Zaba Search free database of names, addresses, birth dates, and phone numbers. Social security numbers and background checks are also available for a fee --- http://www.zabasearch.com/

Click Here for Specialized Search Engines (including shopping catalogs)

Shopping Comparison Sites

"Become.com Selected as Best Search & Comparison Site by eLab eXchange Experts!" Posted by Donna Hoffman, UCR eLab Sloan Center for Internet Retailing, June 22nd, 2008 --- Click Here

The Internet experts at the eLab eXchange, using data from Nielsen/NetRatings and their own expert judgment, selected Become.com as the clear winner out of 8 sites in the best search and comparison web site contest. eLab eXchange members selected the Jellyfish Smack Shopping site as the best search and comparison web site from a set of 8 sites.

Jellyfish is a terrific site, but pales next to Become.com when considering search and comparison shopping sites because Jellyfish doesn't bring together search, product comparison, reviews and other features to help consumers find what they are looking for. Jellyfish is more like a different kind of social shopping site than a search and comparison site.

Experts deemed Become.com to have the greatest chance for success in the category based on key Web usage statistics, including unique audience, reach, total number of sessions, sessions per person, total minutes and page views. On all those metrics, become.com blew away the competition.

However, Like.com, chosen a distant third by the members of the eLab eXchange, was judged by the experts as a site to keep a careful eye on. Its metrics are trending up and people spend more time per person than they do on Become.com.

In other words, Like.com is stickier, although Become.com visitors are more engaged and there are many more of them.

Like.com is a great looking site and the visual search feature is innovative. But it doesn't have the breadth or depth of become.com. The experts thought that consumers might find it a useful adjunct to Become.com.

Become.com offers online consumers a good set of search tools, an easy to use interface, and plentiful reviews. It is easy to navigate and good looking. Key Web 2.0 features including discussion forums and product reviews are obvious reasons that consumers are visiting in droves. Further, the advertiser links are well done (and not annoying), and there are plentiful external links to further information, and handy price comparison tools.

What do you think?

Bob Jensen;s shopping helpers are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob3.htm

 

Searching for Knowledge on the Web
Finding Dulcinea --- http://www.findingdulcinea.com/home.html
Tries to be your "Librarian on the Web"

Searching Library Collections in Facebook

Internet Resources --- http://www.internet-resources.com/writers/wrlinks-wordstuff.htm

Price Comparison Guide

The Global Accountancy Search Engine

The Best Way To Search Videos On the Internet

Find Sounds --- http://www.findsounds.com/

Search for Free Patents --- http://www.freepatentsonline.com/
Wiki Patent Review --- http://www.wikipatents.com/

Google, Cuil, Yahoo, Wikipedia, and YouTube as Knowledge Bases

Google History and Features --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google
"Ten reasons why Google is still number one," by David A. Vise, MIT's Technology Review, September 12, 2008 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/guest/22128/?nlid=1334

Google is a great search engine, but it's also more than that. Google has tons of hidden features, some of which are quite fun and most of which are extremely useful— if you know about them. How do you discover all these hidden features within the Google site?
See http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=675528&rl=1

  1. Google Is a Calculator
  2. Google Knows Mathematical Constants
  3. Google Converts Units of Measure
  4. Google Is a Dictionary
  5. Google Is a Glossary
  6. Google Lists All the Facts
  7. Google Displays Weather Reports
  8. Google Knows Current Airport Conditions
  9. Google Tracks Flight Status
  10. Google Tracks Packages
  11. Google Is a Giant Phone Directory
  12. Google Knows Area Codes
  13. Google Has Movie Information
  14. Google Loves Music
  15. Google Knows the Answer to the Ultimate Question
  16. Google Advanced Search
  17. Language Tools --- http://www.google.com/language_tools?hl=en
  18. Web Images Video News Maps Desktop more --- http://www.google.com/ 
    Books, Froogle, Groups, Scholar even more --- Click on "More" at
    http://www.google.com/
  19. Google Maps  --- http://www.google.com/maps?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&tab=wl&q= 
    Google Maps Street View --- http://maps.google.com/help/maps/streetview/

Amid the flurry of news over Microsoft's bid for Yahoo and Google's rebuttal, a research announcement by Google went largely unnoticed.
Last week, the search giant began a public experiment in which users can make their search results look a little different from the rest of the world's. Those who sign up are able to switch between different views, so instead of simply getting a list of links (and sometimes pictures and YouTube videos, a relatively recent addition to the Google results), they can choose to see their results mapped, put on a timeline, or narrowed down by informational filters. Dan Crow, product manager at Google, says that the results of the experiment could eventually help the company improve everyone's search experience.
Kate Greene, MIT's Technology Review, February 6, 2008 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20162/?nlid=857
Jensen Comment
You can read more about this experiment at http://www.google.com/experimental/index.html

Search for Blogs (Weblogs) ---  http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm 

Bob Jensen's Search Helpers --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm
 
Free Residential and Business Telephone Directory (you must listen to an opening advertisement) --- dial 800-FREE411 or 800-373-3411
 Free Online Telephone Directory --- http://snipurl.com/411directory       [www_public-records-now_com] 
 800 Numbers.net: Find 1-800 Numbers for (most) Any Company --- http://www.800-numbers.net/ 
 Google Free Business Phone Directory --- 800-goog411
To find names addresses from listed phone numbers, go to www.google.com and read in the phone number without spaces, dashes, or parens

You might want to check if your cell phone numbers can be easily obtained:

 To find some cell phone numbers (for a fee):
 The "Free Cell Phone Tracer" only indicates that it has found the cell phone owner's name and address. Then your must pay to see that name and address.
 http://www.b2byellowpages.com/directory/b2b_directory_guide/800-phone-directory.shtml

 

Google Links --- Click Here

Google Cloud --- Click Here

Google Maps Street View --- http://maps.google.com/help/maps/streetview/

Custom Google Searches

Google Hacks

Google added historic map overlays to its free interactive online globe of the world to provide views of how places have changed with time.
"Google Earth maps history," PhysOrg, November 14, 2006 --- http://physorg.com/news82706337.html

Google Earth --- http://earth.google.com/

See Google Maps Features --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Maps
Google Maps Street View --- http://maps.google.com/help/maps/streetview/

"Finding Yourself without GPS:  Google's new technology could enable location-finding services on cell phones that lack GPS," by Kate Greene, MIT's Technology Review, December 4, 2007 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19809/?nlid=716&a=f

As more mobile phones tap into the Internet, people increasingly turn to them for location-centric services like getting directions and finding nearby restaurants. While Global Positioning System (GPS) technology provides excellent accuracy, only a fraction of phones have this capability. What's more, GPS coverage is spotty in dense urban environments, and in-phone receivers can be slow and drain a phone's battery.

To sidestep this problem, last week Google added a new feature, called My Location, to its Web-based mapping service. My Location collects information from the nearest cell-phone tower to estimate a person's location within a distance of about 1,000 meters. This resolution is obviously not sufficient for driving directions, but it can be fine for searching for a restaurant or a store. "A common use of Google Maps is to search nearby," says Steve Lee, product manager for Google Maps, who likened the approach to searching for something within an urban zip code, but without knowing that code. "In a new city, you might not know the zip code, or even if you know it, it takes time to enter it and then to zoom in and pan around the map."

Many phones support software that is able to read the unique identification of a cell-phone tower and the coverage area that surrounds it is usually split into three regions. Lee explains that My Location uses such software to learn which tower is serving the phone--and which coverage area the cell phone is operating in. Google also uses data from cell phones in the area that do have GPS to help estimate the locations of the devices without it. In this way, Google adds geographic information to the cell-phone tower's identifiers that the company stores in a database.

Continued in article

See Google Maps Features --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Maps
Google Maps Street View --- http://maps.google.com/help/maps/streetview/

My Location (Beta) --- http://www.google.com/gmm/index.html

Bob Jensen's Search Helpers --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm

Search for Manufacturers and Suppliers --- http://www.zycon.com/

Search for Music Equipment (Devices) --- http://www.zzounds.com/

ProQuest Digital Dissertations ---  http://wwwlib.umi.com/dissertations/ 

Corporate Reports Now Searchable Via EDGAR --- http://www.sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/webusers.htm

The SEC released a new, improved search tool for EDGAR --- http://sec.gov/news/press/2006/2006-190.htm

A full text search of a filing includes all data in the filing as well as any attachments. Other features of the EDGAR Full-Text Search tool include:

The EDGAR full-text search tool is available on the SEC website at http://searchwww.sec.gov/EDGARFSClient/jsp/EDGAR_MainAccess.jsp. The Commission plans further enhancements based on user feedback. Requests, comments and suggestions should be sent to textsearch@sec.gov


 

Google Links

Search Tricks --- http://prezi.com/mohshuoe-qcf/google-search-tricks/

Google (Web Images, Video, News, Maps Desktop, and More) --- http://www.google.com/
Google Maps Street View --- http://maps.google.com/help/maps/streetview/
Google Advanced --- http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en
Google Advanced Scholar Search ---  http://scholar.google.com/advanced_scholar_search?hl=en&lr=
Google Maps --- http://maps.google.com/
Google Finance --- http://finance.google.com/finance

Did you ever scroll down Google's Advanced Search Site?
Go to http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en


Google Book Search - Search the full text of books
New! Google Code Search - Search public source code
Google Scholar - Search scholarly papers
Google News archive search - Search historical news

 

Apple Macintosh - Search for all things Mac
BSD Unix - Search web pages about the BSD operating system
Linux - Search all penguin-friendly pages
Microsoft - Search Microsoft-related pages

 

U.S. Government - Search all U.S. federal, state and local government sites
Universities - Search a specific school's website
 

Google Books --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Book_Search

Google's Book Search --- http://books.google.com/

"Google's Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars," by Geoffrey Nunberg, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 31, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Googles-Book-Search-A/48245/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Whether the Google books settlement passes muster with the U.S. District Court and the Justice Department, Google's book search is clearly on track to becoming the world's largest digital library. No less important, it is also almost certain to be the last one. Google's five-year head start and its relationships with libraries and publishers give it an effective monopoly: No competitor will be able to come after it on the same scale. Nor is technology going to lower the cost of entry. Scanning will always be an expensive, labor-intensive project. Of course, 50 or 100 years from now control of the collection may pass from Google to somebody else—Elsevier, Unesco, Wal-Mart. But it's safe to assume that the digitized books that scholars will be working with then will be the very same ones that are sitting on Google's servers today, augmented by the millions of titles published in the interim.

That realization lends a particular urgency to the concerns that people have voiced about the settlement —about pricing, access, and privacy, among other things. But for scholars, it raises another, equally basic question: What assurances do we have that Google will do this right?

Doing it right depends on what exactly "it" is. Google has been something of a shape-shifter in describing the project. The company likes to refer to Google's book search as a "library," but it generally talks about books as just another kind of information resource to be incorporated into Greater Google. As Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, puts it: "We just feel this is part of our core mission. There is fantastic information in books. Often when I do a search, what is in a book is miles ahead of what I find on a Web site."

Seen in that light, the quality of Google's book search will be measured by how well it supports the familiar activity that we have come to think of as "googling," in tribute to the company's specialty: entering in a string of keywords in an effort to locate specific information, like the dates of the Franco-Prussian War. For those purposes, we don't really care about metadata—the whos, whats, wheres, and whens provided by a library catalog. It's enough just to find a chunk of a book that answers our needs and barrel into it sideways.

But we're sometimes interested in finding a book for reasons that have nothing to do with the information it contains, and for those purposes googling is not a very efficient way to search. If you're looking for a particular edition of Leaves of Grass and simply punch in, "I contain multitudes," that's what you'll get. For those purposes, you want to be able to come in via the book's metadata, the same way you do if you're trying to assemble all the French editions of Rousseau's Social Contract published before 1800 or books of Victorian sermons that talk about profanity.

Or you may be interested in books simply as records of the language as it was used in various periods or genres. Not surprisingly, that's what gets linguists and assorted wordinistas adrenalized at the thought of all the big historical corpora that are coming online. But it also raises alluring possibilities for social, political, and intellectual historians and for all the strains of literary philology, old and new. With the vast collection of published books at hand, you can track the way happiness replaced felicity in the 17th century, quantify the rise and fall of propaganda or industrial democracy over the course of the 20th century, or pluck out all the Victorian novels that contain the phrase "gentle reader."

But to pose those questions, you need reliable metadata about dates and categories, which is why it's so disappointing that the book search's metadata are a train wreck: a mishmash wrapped in a muddle wrapped in a mess.

Start with publication dates. To take Google's word for it, 1899 was a literary annus mirabilis, which saw the publication of Raymond Chandler's Killer in the Rain, The Portable Dorothy Parker, André Malraux's La Condition Humaine, Stephen King's Christine, The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, Raymond Williams's Culture and Society 1780-1950, and Robert Shelton's biography of Bob Dylan, to name just a few. And while there may be particular reasons why 1899 comes up so often, such misdatings are spread out across the centuries. A book on Peter F. Drucker is dated 1905, four years before the management consultant was even born; a book of Virginia Woolf's letters is dated 1900, when she would have been 8 years old. Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities is dated 1888, and an edition of Henry James's What Maisie Knew is dated 1848.

Of course, there are bound to be occasional howlers in a corpus as extensive as Google's book search, but these errors are endemic. A search on "Internet" in books published before 1950 produces 527 results; "Medicare" for the same period gets almost 1,600. Or you can simply enter the names of famous writers or public figures and restrict your search to works published before the year of their birth. "Charles Dickens" turns up 182 results for publications before 1812, the vast majority of them referring to the writer. The same type of search turns up 81 hits for Rudyard Kipling, 115 for Greta Garbo, 325 for Woody Allen, and 29 for Barack Obama. (Or maybe that was another Barack Obama.)

How frequent are such errors? A search on books published before 1920 mentioning "candy bar" turns up 66 hits, of which 46—70 percent—are misdated. I don't think that's representative of the overall proportion of metadata errors, though they are much more common in older works than for the recent titles Google received directly from publishers. But even if the proportion of misdatings is only 5 percent, the corpus is riddled with hundreds of thousands of erroneous publication dates.

Google acknowledges the incorrect dates but says they came from the providers. It's true that Google has received some groups of books that are systematically misdated, like a collection of Portuguese-language works all dated 1899. But a very large proportion of the errors are clearly Google's own doing. A lot of them arise from uneven efforts to automatically extract a publication date from a scanned text. A 1901 history of bookplates from the Harvard University Library is correctly dated in the library's catalog. Google's incorrect date of 1574 for the volume is drawn from an Elizabethan armorial bookplate displayed on the frontispiece. An 1890 guidebook called London of To-Day is correctly dated in the Harvard catalog, but Google assigns it a date of 1774, which is taken from a front-matter advertisement for a shirt-and-hosiery manufacturer that boasts it was established in that year.

Then there are the classification errors, which taken together can make for a kind of absurdist poetry. H.L. Mencken's The American Language is classified as Family & Relationships. A French edition of Hamlet and a Japanese edition of Madame Bovary are both classified as Antiques and Collectibles (a 1930 English edition of Flaubert's novel is classified under Physicians, which I suppose makes a bit more sense.) An edition of Moby Dick is labeled Computers; The Cat Lover's Book of Fascinating Facts falls under Technology & Engineering. And a catalog of copyright entries from the Library of Congress is listed under Drama (for a moment I wondered if maybe that one was just Google's little joke).

You can see how pervasive those misclassifications are when you look at all the labels assigned to a single famous work. Of the first 10 results for Tristram Shandy, four are classified as Fiction, four as Family & Relationships, one as Biography & Autobiography, and one is not classified. Other editions of the novel are classified as 'Literary Collections, History, and Music. The first 10 hits for Leaves of Grass are variously classified as Poetry, 'Juvenile Nonfiction, Fiction, Literary Criticism, Biography & Autobiography, and, mystifyingly, Counterfeits and Counterfeiting. And various editions of Jane Eyre are classified as History, Governesses, Love Stories, Architecture, and Antiques & Collectibles (as in, "Reader, I marketed him.").

Here, too, Google has blamed the errors on the libraries and publishers who provided the books. But the libraries can't be responsible for books mislabeled as Health and Fitness and Antiques and Collectibles, for the simple reason that those categories are drawn from the Book Industry Standards and Communications codes, which are used by the publishers to tell booksellers where to put books on the shelves, not from any of the classification systems used by libraries. And BISAC classifications weren't in wide use before the last decade or two, so only Google can be responsible for their misapplications on numerous books published earlier than that: the 1919 edition of Robinson Crusoe assigned to Crafts & Hobbies or the 1907 edition of Sir Thomas Browne's Hydriotaphia: Urne-Buriall, which has been assigned to Gardening.

Google's fine algorithmic hand is also evident in a lot of classifications of recent works. The 2003 edition of Susan Bordo's Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (misdated 1899) is assigned to Health & Fitness—not a labeling you could imagine coming from its publisher, the University of California Press, but one a classifier might come up with on the basis of the title, like the Religion tag that Google assigns to a 2001 biography of Mae West that's subtitled An Icon in Black and White or the Health & Fitness label on a 1962 number of the medievalist journal Speculum.

But even when it gets the BISAC categories roughly right, the more important question is why Google would want to use those headings in the first place. People from Google have told me they weren't included at the publishers' request, and it may be that someone thought they'd be helpful for ad placement. (The ad placement on Google's book search right now is often comical, as when a search for Leaves of Grass brings up ads for plant and sod retailers—though that's strictly Google's problem, and one, you'd imagine, that they're already on top of.) But it's a disastrous choice for the book search. The BISAC scheme is well-suited for a chain bookstore or a small public library, where consumers or patrons browse for books on the shelves. But it's of little use when you're flying blind in a library with several million titles, including scholarly works, foreign works, and vast quantities of books from earlier periods. For example the BISAC Juvenile Nonfiction subject heading has almost 300 subheadings, like New Baby, Skateboarding, and Deer, Moose, and Caribou. By contrast the Poetry subject heading has just 20 subheadings. That means that Bambi and Bullwinkle get a full shelf to themselves, while Leopardi, Schiller, and Verlaine have to scrunch together in the single subheading reserved for Poetry/Continental European. In short, Google has taken a group of the world's great research collections and returned them in the form of a suburban-mall bookstore.

Such examples don't exhaust Google's metadata errors by any means. In addition to the occasionally quizzical renamings of works (Moby Dick: or the White Wall), there are a number of mismatches of titles and texts. Click on the link for the 1818 Théorie de l'Univers, a work on cosmology by the Napoleonic mathematician and general Jacques Alexander François Allix, and it takes you to Barbara Taylor Bradford's 1983 novel Voice of the Heart, while the link on a misdated number of Dickens's Household Words takes you to a 1742 Histoire de l'Académie Royale des Sciences. Numerous entries mix up the names of authors, editors, and writers of introductions, so that the "about this book" page for an edition of one French novel shows the striking attribution, "Madame Bovary By Henry James." More mysterious is the entry for a book called The Mosaic Navigator: The Essential Guide to the Internet Interface, which is dated 1939 and attributed to Sigmund Freud and Katherine Jones. The only connection I can come up with is that Jones was the translator of Freud's Moses and Monotheism, which must have somehow triggered the other sense of the word "mosaic," though the details of the process leave me baffled.

For the present, then, scholars will have to put on hold their visions of tracking the 19th-century fortunes of liberalism or quantifying the shift of "United States" from a plural to singular noun phrase over the first century of the republic: The metadata simply aren't up to it. It's true that Google is aware of a lot of these problems and they've pledged to fix them. (Indeed, since I presented some of these errors at a conference last week, Google has already rushed to correct many of them.) But it isn't clear whether they plan to go about this in the same way they're addressing the scanning errors that riddle the texts, correcting them as (and if) they're reported. That isn't adequate here: There are simply too many errors. And while Google's machine classification system will certainly improve, extracting metadata mechanically isn't sufficient for scholarly purposes. After first seeming indifferent, Google decided it did want to acquire the library records for scanned books along with the scans themselves, but as of now the company hasn't licensed them for display or use—hence, presumably, those stabs at automatically recovering publication dates from the scanned texts.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
I think the phrase "disaster for scholars" is very misleading. Google's Book Search has certainly been a delight for me. Also Google had the resources and stamina to fend off all the court challenges. In general, the major universities have been in favor of this project from get go.

 A project this massive is bound to have startup problems, but Google is adaptive and will listen to its critics. It's better to have the world's largest digital library than a bunch of decentralized smoke stacks of from the previous century.

 

Bob Jensen's links to finding free online books
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

 

Did you ever notice the links below?  http://www.google.com/help/features.html#wp

Google Web Search Features

In addition to providing easy access to billions of web pages, Google has many special features to help you to find exactly what you're looking for. Click the title of a specific feature to learn more about it.

  • Book Search Use Google to search the full text of books.
  • Cached Links View a snapshot of each page as it looked when we indexed it.
  • Calculator Use Google to evaluate mathematical expressions.
  • Currency Conversion Easily perform any currency conversion.
  • Definitions Use Google to get glossary definitions gathered from various online sources.
  • File Types Search for non-HTML file formats including PDF documents and others.
  • Froogle To find a product for sale online, use Froogle - Google's product search service.
  • Groups See relevant postings from Google Groups in your regular web search results.
  • I'm Feeling Lucky Bypass our results and go to the first web page returned for your query.
  • Images See relevant images in your regular web search results.
  • Local Search Search for local businesses and services in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada.
  • Movies Use Google to find reviews and showtimes for movies playing near you.
  • Music Search Use Google to get quick access to a wide range of music information.
  • News Headlines Enhances your search results with the latest related news stories.
  • PhoneBook Look up U.S. street address and phone number information.
  • Q&A Use Google to get quick answers to straightforward questions.
  • Refine Your Search - New! Add instant info and topic-specific links to your search in order to focus and improve your results.
  • Results Prefetching Makes searching in Firefox faster.
  • Search By Number Use Google to access package tracking information, US patents, and a variety of online databases.
  • Similar Pages Display pages that are related to a particular result.
  • Site Search Restrict your search to a specific site.
  • Spell Checker Offers alternative spelling for queries.
  • Stock and Fund Quotes Use Google to get up-to-date stock and mutual fund quotes and information.
  • Street Maps Use Google to find U.S. street maps.
  • Travel Information Check the status of an airline flight in the U.S. or view airport delays and weather conditions.
  • Weather Check the current weather conditions and forecast for any location in the U.S.
  • Web Page Translation  Provides you access to web pages in other languages.
  • Who Links To You? Find pages that point to a specific URL.

And more Google Links --- http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/

Blog Search
Find blogs on your favorite topics
Book Search
Search the full text of books
Catalogs
Search and browse mail-order catalogs
Checkout
Complete online purchases more quickly and securely
Desktop
Search and personalize your computer
Directory
Browse the web by topic
Earth
Explore the world from your PC
Finance
Business info, news, and interactive charts
Froogle
Shop for items to buy online and at local stores
Images
Search for images on the web
Local
Find local businesses and get directions
Maps
View maps and get directions
News - now with archive searchNew!
Search thousands of news stories
NotebookNew!
Clip and collect information as you surf the web
Patent SearchNew!
Search the full text of US Patents
Scholar
Search scholarly papers
Specialized Searches
Search within specific topics
Toolbar
Add a search box to your browser
Video
Search for videos on Google Video and YouTube
Web Search
Search over billions of web pages
Web Search Features
Find movies, music, stocks, books, and more

"Google Plans Searchable Text in Images:  InformationWeek reports that Google filed a patent in June 2007 for a technology that could make text in images searchable," by Hurley Goodall, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 7, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2642&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

The yet-to-be-developed technology detailed in the patent application carries serious implications for the future of search technology, particularly in regard to the Google Book Search project.

What could that mean for the future of academic research and the role of libraries? In an interview, Wendy P. Lougee, University of Minnesota librarian, frames the would-be technology in the context of “discoverability” — the ease with which an item can be found through a search.

“With respect to images, the challenges have been in the metadata,” or the data that contextualizes items in a database, she says, and the potential technology “could significantly enhance” librarians’ ability to catalogue and retrieve information.


"Searching Library Collections in Facebook," by Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 7, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2642&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

A new application lets Facebook users start their library research in the popular social-networking system. The plug-in provides an interface in Facebook for searching the popular Worldcat database, operated by the nonprofit OCLC. The group’s Web site says the index includes more than a billion items in more than 10,000 libraries.

So far the application does not seem to be listed in Facebook’s official directory. But a quick search of Facebook’s other applications shows that more than a dozen other academic libraries have created their own search tools for the social-networking platform. The University of Notre Dame has one, for instance, as does Elmhurst College, Pace University, and Ryerson University. JSTOR, the popular, nonprofit digital archive of scholarly publications, also offers a Facebook application.

One thing I discovered when I invited Wired Campus readers to join my Facebook friend group is that librarians are some of the most enthusiastic nonstudent users of social networks. But can Facebook, known as a place for socializing, become part of the research process as well?

You can read more about Facebook at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook

Frontiers (open source scholarly publishing) --- http://www.frontiersin.org/

CiteSeerX (Princeton University Library search engine) ---  http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/

Boston University Libraries: Research Guides --- http://www.bu.edu/library/guides/

 


 

How do scholars search for academic references?

Scholarly Online Publishing Bibliography --- http://www.digital-scholarship.org/sepb/sepb.html  

Some Things You Might Want to Know About the Wolfram Alpha (WA) Search Engine:  The Good and The Evil
as Applied to Learning Curves (Cumulative Average vs. Incremental Unit)
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theorylearningcurves.htm

From the Scout Report on August 23, 2013

Fidus Writer --- http://fiduswriter.org/ 

The Fidus Writer is an application that academics will be most excited to learn about. This version functions as an online collaborative editor made specifically for academics who need to use citations and formulas. The program is focused on the content rather than the layout, which means users can publish it later in a variety of formats. The site also contains an FAQ and information about updates. This version is compatible with all operating systems running Google Chrome.

Jensen Note
The Wolfram Alfa site is fantastic for computing answers from formulas, generating graphs, and formatting formulas for documents ---
http://www.wolframalpha.com/

For illustrations see
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theorylearningcurves.htm

 

MAE 10: Introduction to Engineering Computations --- http://ocw.uci.edu/courses/course.aspx?id=129

Scholarpedia --- http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Main_Page

PLoS One --- http://www.plosone.org/home.action

Google Scholar --- http://scholar.google.com/
Not to be confused with Google Advanced Search which does not cover many scholarly articles --- http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en

Google Knol --- http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/encouraging-people-to-contribute.html

Google Research --- http://research.google.com/

JURN (search engine for humanities and social science research) --- http://www.jurn.org/

One Million University of Illinois (Free) Books to be Digitized by Google --- http://www.cic.uiuc.edu/programs/CenterForLibraryInitiatives/Archive/PressRelease/LibraryDigitization/index.shtml
Google Digitized Books --- http://books.google.com/advanced_book_search?q=Accounting
For example, key in the word "accounting"
Then try "Advanced Managerial Accounting"
Then try "Joel Demski"
Then try "Accounting for Derivative Financial Instruments"
Then try "Robert E. Jensen" AND "Accounting"

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign announces the availability of a newly-digitized collection of Abraham Lincoln books accessible through the Open Content Alliance and displayed on the University Library's own web site, as the first step of a digitization project of Lincoln books from its collection. View the first set of books digitized at: http://varuna.grainger.uiuc.edu/oca/lincoln/

Microsoft's Windows "Live Search" or  "Academic Search" ---
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?scope=academic&q=

Amazon's A9 --- http://a9.com/-/search/advSearch 

The University of California's eScholarship Repository has recently exceeded five million full-text downloads, according to the university
The eScholarship Repository, a service of the California Digital Library, allows scholars in the University of California system to submit their work to a central location where any users may easily access it free of charge. The idea is to ease communication between researchers. Catherine Mitchell, acting director of the CDL publishing group, says the number shows that both content seekers and creators have embraced the service, allaying concerns among researchers that others wouldn't contribute to the repository.
Hurley Goodall, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 16, 2008 --- http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2667&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Beginning October 23, 2003, Amazon.com offers a text search of entire contents of millions of pages of books, including new books ---
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/10197021/ref%3Dsib%5Fmerch%5Fgw/104-3984945-7813514 

How It Works --- http://snurl.com/BookSearch 
A significant extension of our groundbreaking Look Inside the Book feature, Search Inside the Book allows you to search millions of pages to find exactly the book you want to buy. Now instead of just displaying books whose title, author, or publisher-provided keywords that match your search terms, your search results will surface titles based on every word inside the book. Using Search Inside the Book is as simple as running an Amazon.com search. 

Soon to be the largest scholarly library in the world:
Google Book Search --- http://books.google.com/advanced_book_search 

Answers.com --- http://www.answers.com/

Carnegie Mellon Libraries: Digital Library Colloquium (video lectures) --- http://www.library.cmu.edu/Libraries/DLColloquia.html

America [multimedia] --- http://www.america.gov/

United Nations World Digital Library --- http://www.wdl.org/en/

Frontiers (open source scholarly publishing) --- http://www.frontiersin.org/

CiteSeerX (Princeton University Library search engine) ---  http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/

Boston University Libraries: Research Guides --- http://www.bu.edu/library/guides/

 


Video:  Wolfram Alpha has gotten much better --- http://www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html
It is best described as a search engine that will perform complicated computations

Wolfram Alpha --- http://www.wolframalpha.com/

From the Scout Report on August 23, 2013

Fidus Writer --- http://fiduswriter.org/ 

The Fidus Writer is an application that academics will be most excited to learn about. This version functions as an online collaborative editor made specifically for academics who need to use citations and formulas. The program is focused on the content rather than the layout, which means users can publish it later in a variety of formats. The site also contains an FAQ and information about updates. This version is compatible with all operating systems running Google Chrome.

Jensen Note
The Wolfram Alfa site is fantastic for computing answers from formulas, generating graphs, and formatting formulas for documents ---
http://www.wolframalpha.com/

For illustrations see
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theorylearningcurves.htm

 


Question
How Do Scholars and Researchers Search the Web?

"Automating Research with Google Scholar Alerts," by Ryan Cordell, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 1. 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Automating-Research-with/25158/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

This post is something of a public service announcement. Two weeks ago the Google Scholar team announced that users could now create alerts for their favorite queries.

I would explain how to set up a Google Scholar Alert, but both Google and Resource Shelf have already done so. Instead, I'll discuss how this new featuer might be useful to the ProfHacker community.

Google Alerts have been around for awhile. Users can set up a Google Alert for any query, and Google will automatically email them a digest of all new hits for that query. Users can set how many results they'd like included in the emails, how often the emails should be sent, and what email address(es) different alerts should be sent to. Google Alerts can help you stay abreast of a particular topic, such as a developing news story. Many folks also set up Google Alerts for their name, their company, or a particular project, so they can track how those topics are being discussed across the net.

Google Alerts pull from Google's entire index, however, which is not always useful for research questions. I could set up a Google Alert for an author I write on—say, Nathaniel Hawthorne—but I'd likely have to wade through many high schoolers complaining about reading The Scarlet Letter before finding any new scholarly work on the author. Google Scholar Alerts pull results only from scholarly literature—"articles, theses, books, abstracts," and other other resources from "academic publishers, professional societies, "online repositories, universities," and other scholarly websites. In other words, Google Scholar Alerts provide scholars automatic updates when new material is published on research topics they're interested in. A Google Scholar Alert for "Nathaniel Hawthorne" would email me whenever a book or article about Hawthorne was added to Google Scholar's index.

I worded that last sentence carefully in order to point to some problems with Google Scholar, and by extension with the new Google Scholar Alerts. Peter Jacso wrote last September about serious errors in Google Scholar's metadata, particularly with article attribution. What counts as "new" in Google Scholar is also problematic. An article will appear in a Google Scholar Alert when it's indexed—that is, when it's new to Google Scholar, even if it's actually an older article.

As Jacso points out, however, Google Scholar remains valuable for "topical keyword searches," which is what most folks will set up Alerts to track. No one should set up a Google Scholar Alert and consider their research complete‐but Alerts can be a good way to keep abreast of new scholarship on a variety of topics, or on the wider context of a particular research interest. I work on nineteenth-century apocalyptic literature, for example, and I've set up a Google Scholar Alert for several variations on the word "apocalyptic." The emails I've received comprise work on apocalypticism from a variety of periods and geographical areas. Even if I can't read most of these works in full, I've found it useful to get this larger overview of scholarship on the topic.


Alternatives to Google Scholar:  The next generation discovery citation indexes — a review of the landscape in 2020 (I)

In terms of cross disciplinary citation indexes that are used for discovery, everyone knows of the two incumbants — Web of Science and Scopus(2004). Joined by the large web scale Google Scholar (2004), these three reigned as the “Big 3” of citation indexes for roughly a decade more or less unchallenged.

However 10 years later, around 2015 and in the years after, a new generation of citation indexes started to emerge to challenge the big 3 in a variety of ways .

As of time of writing in 2020, some of these new challengers have had a couple of years of development. How do things look now?

First off, using newer techniques and paradigms, we have for-profit companies like Digital Science launching Dimensions (2018) which strike me as challengers to Scopus and Web of Science in the arena of citation/bibliometric assessment, just as Scopus itself was a challenge to the older Web of Science back in 2004.

On the other end of the spectrum we have the rise of more “open” citation indexes . In particular, a very important player in this area is the relaunched Microsoft Academic(2016) which not only uses web crawling style technologies like Google Scholar to scour the web, applies the latest in Natural Language Processing (NLP) /“semantic” technologies and makes the dataset dubbed Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG) available with open licenses.

Semantic Scholar(2015) is yet another project with Microsoft ties ( funded by the Allen Institute for AI) that play in the same area and releases data with open licenses. One of the more “Semantic” features of this search engine is that it types citations into whether the cite is for citing of background, methods or results using machine learning.

While scite (2018) a new citation index by a startup does not provide open data, it’s selling point is the use of NLP to type citation relationships into “Supporting”, “Disputing” and “Neutral” cites which is yet another way of contextualizing research by describing citation relationships.

Besides the two above mentioned well funded think tanks projects, we also see more grassroot like movements like 2017's I4OC (Intiative for open Citations) — an amazingly successful push to get publishers to deposit and make references open in Crossref as well as efforts by OpenCitations.net (a founding member of I4OC) to extract citations from open access papers from PMC to produce the OpenCitations Corpus (OCC), which have served to further increase the pool of Scholarly meta-data and citations that are available in the public domain/CCO.

For the first time in history, by combining some or all of the below

a) open citations made open in Crossref by publishers (about 50% of works with references in Crossref is now open thanks to I4OC)

b) citations and metadata from sources like OpenCitations.net ,Wikidata/Wikicite , Fatcat (Internet archive?)

c) data made available in Microsoft Academic Graph and other sources

it is now possible for new big and comprehensive, mostly free to use “hybrid/merged” citation indexes to arise from the aggregation of the above mentioned sources. Still even with the raw materials freely available, one must still not underestimate the effort needed to combine, normalize and clean the data as well as the effort to create compelling user interfaces that add value.

There are at least half a dozen such discovery citation indexes, a typical example is Cambia’s Lens.org (2017) that marries patent sources (their speciality) with Scholarly meta-data and citations from Microsoft Academic, Crossref, Unpaywall, PubMed, JISC CORE and more to create a powerful free discovery citation index with power user search and visualization features.

Others include ScinapseNAVER academicScilit and more. But do these new alternatives add anything interesting or desired by users to the table?

Such hybrid type citation indexes, may also have question marks hanging over them in terms of speed of updates, cleanliness and consistency of data from merging so many varied sources and questions of sustainability as they rely on upstream projects and initatives to continue providing the raw materials required to construct the index.

Continued in article

 


"SAVVY SEARCHING Google Scholar revisited," by Pe´ter Jacso,

Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to revisit Google Scholar.

Design/methodology/approach – This paper discusses the strengths and weaknesses of Google

Scholar.

Findings – The Google Books project has given a massive and valuable boost to the already rich and diverse content of Google Scholar. The dark side of the growth is that significant gaps remain for top ranking journals and serials, and the number of duplicate, triplicate and quadruplicate records for thesame source documents (which Google Scholar cannot detect reliably) has increased.

Originality/value – This paper discusses the strengths and weaknesses of Google Scholar.

Keywords Data collection, Worldwide web, Document delivery

Google Scholar had its debut in November 2004. Although it is still in beta version, it is worthwhile to revisit its pros and cons, as changes have taken place in the past three years both in the content and the software of Google Scholar – for better or worse.

Its content has grown significantly - courtesy of more academic publishers and database hosts opening their digital vaults to allow the crawlers of Google Scholar to collect data from and index the full-text of millions of articles from academic journal collections and scholarly repositories of preprints and reprints. The Google Books project also has given a massive and valuable boost to the already rich and diverse content of Google Scholar. The dark side of the growth is that significant gaps remained for top ranking journals and serials, and the number of duplicate, triplicate and quadruplicate records for the same source documents (which Google Scholar cannot detect reliably) has increased.

While the regular Google service does an impressive job with mostly unstructured web pages, the software of Google Scholar keeps doing a very poor job with the highly structured and tagged scholarly documents. It still has serious deficiencies with basic search operations, does not have any sort options (beyond the questionable relevance ranking). It recklessly offers filtering features by data elements, which are present only in a very small fraction of the records (such as broad subject categories) and/or are often absent and incorrect in Google Scholar even if they are present correctly in the source items.

These include nonexistent author names, which turn out to be section names, subtitles, or any part of the text, including menu option text which has nothing to do with the document or its author. This makes “F. Password” not only the most productive, but also a very highly cited author. Page numbers, the first or second segment of an ISSN, or any other four-digit numbers are often interpreted by Google Scholar as publication years due to “artificial unintelligence”. As a consequence, Google Scholar has a disappointing performance in matching citing and cited items; its . . .

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on how scholars search the Web ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm#Scholars 


The World is Open (Website to accompany the book) ---
http://worldisopen.com/


Daily News Sites for Accountancy, Tax, Fraud, IFRS, XBRL, Accounting History, and More ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNews.htm

Accounting History Libraries at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) --- http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/accountancy/libraries.html
The above libraries include international accounting history.
The above libraries include film and video historical collections.

MAAW Knowledge Portal for Management and Accounting --- http://maaw.info/

Academy of Accounting Historians and the Accounting Historians Journal ---
http://www.accounting.rutgers.edu/raw/aah/

The National Library of the Accounting Profession

Hi Linda,

The National Library of the Accounting Profession at Ole Miss has a home page at http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/accountancy/libraries.html  

This includes a link to the Digital Collection in this library.
My reason for mentioning this is explained below.

In 1986 when Steve Zeff was President of the AAA, I was his Program Director for the annual meetings in the heart of Times Square (Marriott Marquis). Although NYC is always a relatively high priced hotel city and a rather poor choice for accompanying families with small children, NYC did have some huge advantages for me as program director and for registrants who attended some unique sessions in NYC.

The biggest advantage (aside from the private showing of CATS that I've already mentioned) was that we could get some top investment bankers from Wall Street to appear on the program. Those particular sessions were so well attended that people were packed into the meeting rooms like sardines. Those speakers would've never taken the time to take a day off to fly to be in a concurrent session of the AAA annual meetings. But they agreed to take the time off to take a cab to Times Square to be on our program.

I suspect that there will be similar advantages for the 2009 meetings in NYC if the AAA can arrange for parole of some of the top Wall Street speakers. It would really be nice to compare how the messages changed between 1986 and 2009.

I've already mentioned that, before I retired in 2006, I captured nearly two decades of video of sessions at accounting educator meetings, especially the American Accounting Association annual meetings. I suspect that some of those 1986 NYC sessions are among the 200+ videotapes that I donated to the National Library of the Accounting Profession at the University of Mississippi.

It may be necessary to travel to the University of Mississippi to view these tapes, but Dale Flesher can probably arrange it so researchers can view these and other archived presentations on my tapes. Dale has my only copies.

The National Library of the Accounting Profession at Ole Miss has a home page at http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/accountancy/libraries.html
This includes a link to the Digital Collection in this library, but these are only a small percentage of the recordings available in the library.

I mention my video tapes because in later years I taped two successive annual meeting presentations by Denny Beresford when, as Chairman of the FASB, his struggles to get FAS 119 and 133 launched were just getting started under a storm of controversy. People don't realize that the SEC virtually mandated that the FASB generate FAS 133. SEC Director told Denny that the “top three priorities at the FASB should be Derivatives, Derivatives, and Derivatives.”

I have made audio recordings of Denny's two successive sessions available online. Denny is not only an articulate speaker he has a great sense of humor. One of my all time favorite lines is when he referred to a "derivative as something a person my age takes when prunes just quite do the job."

To download the audio files of Dennis Beresford scroll down at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/000overview/mp3/133summ.htm

Bob Jensen

 


Encyclopaedia Britannica to let readers edit content
Encyclopaedia Britannica, the authoritative reference book first published in 1768, is to let readers edit its entries, it said Friday, as it battles to keep pace with Internet resources like Wikipedia. From next week, visitors to the publication's website, Britannica.com, will be able to submit proposed changes to editors, who will check them and make alterations if they think they are appropriate. Users whose suggestions are accepted will then be credited on the site, the firm said in a statement. Gorge Cauz, president of the US-based firm, insisted that the publication was not trying to be a wiki -- a collection of web pages which allows users to edit content -- like Wikipedia . . . But some technology commentators say the step is a doomed attempt to preserve Britannica's subscription-based business model in the face of the challenge from Wikipedia, which is free. The Times reported that while Britannica.com attracts 1.5 million visitors per day, Wikipedia attracts roughly six million.
PhysOrg
, January 23, 2009 --- http://www.physorg.com/news151938162.html
Jensen Comment
Whereas full text is available on Wikipedia for fee, Encyclopeaedia Britannica only provides full text to paid subscribers. Subscriptions are about $70 per year and a complete bound set is $2,000. Britannica is more reliable for accuracy on topics covered, but Wikipedia overwhelms Britannica in terms of millions upon millions of more topics covered. A scholarly approach might be to first look up a topic in Wikipedia and then try to authenticate it in Britannica, but this will only work for topics covered in Britannica. Also Wikipedia has millions upon millions of "discussion" commentaries that vastly widen the perspectives covered on many topics.

No Other Encyclopedia Comes Close to Wikipedia
"Understanding collaboration in Wikipedia,"  Royce M. Kimmons, First Monday, December 5, 2011 ---
http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3613

Abstract
Previous attempts at studying collaboration within Wikipedia have focused on simple metrics like rigor (i.e. the number of revisions in an article’s revision history) and diversity (i.e. the number of authors that have voluntarily contributed to a given article) or have made generalizations about collaboration within Wikipedia based upon the content validity of a few select articles. By analyzing the contents of randomly selected Wikipedia articles (n = 1,271) and their revisions (n = 85,563) more closely, this study attempts to understand what collaboration within Wikipedia actually looks like under the surface. Findings suggest that typical Wikipedia articles are not rigorous, in a collaborative sense, and do not reflect much diversity in the construction of content and macro-structural writing, leading to the conclusion that most articles in Wikipedia are not reflective of the collaborative efforts of any community but, rather, represent the work of relatively few contributors.

Wikipedia stands as an undeniable success in online participation and collaboration. By looking more closely at metrics associated with each extant Wikipedia article (N=3,427,236) along with all revisions (N=225,226,370), this study attempts to understand what collaboration within Wikipedia actually looks like under the surface. Findings suggest that typical Wikipedia articles are not rigorous, in a collaborative sense, and do not reflect much diversity in the construction of content and macro–structural writing. Most articles in Wikipedia are not reflective of the collaborative efforts of the community but represent the work of relatively few contributors.

Bob Jensen's search helpers ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm

 


"Wikipedia Comes of Age," by Casper Grathwohl, Chronicle of Higher Education's Chronicle Review, January 7, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Wikipedia-Comes-of-Age/125899/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en

The key challenge for the scholarly community, in which I include academic publishers such as Oxford University Press, is to work actively with Wikipedia to strengthen its role in "pre-research." We need to build stronger links from its entries to more advanced resources that have been created and maintained by the academy.

It is not an easy task to overcome the prejudices against Wikipedia in academic circles, but accomplishing that will serve us all and solidify an important new layer of knowledge in the online-information ecosystem. Wikipedia's first decade was marked by its meteoric rise. Let's mark its second decade by its integration into the formal research process.

Continued in article

Casper Grathwohl is vice president and publisher of digital and reference content for Oxford University Press.


 

Search Engine, ChunkIt, Marketed to College Students

A new search engine from TigerLogic Corporation, of Irvine Calif., is being pushed to scholars and researchers, among others. Called, ChunkIt, the search engine refines results from other search engines and databases, and displays chunks of text surrounding the key words. In one of the company's promotional videos, shown below, a stressed-out college student uses ChunkIt to narrow a search on the Russian Revolution via the Lexis/Nexis database. The student sports an Oberlin College sweatshirt and gripes about meeting a deadline for a research paper in two hours. Steven J. Bell, a research librarian at Temple University, picks apart the video on a blog from the Association of College and Research Libraries, noting that it gives short shrift to the skills of librarians. He questions why the student would need ChunkIt to refine his search when Lexis/Nexis already has tools available to narrow search results. His conclusion? ChunkIt is appropriate for use with other search engines like Google, but not with library databases.
Andrea L. Foster, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 15, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3166&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en


Wikipedia Versus YouTube

The YouTube Revolution in Knowledge Transfer ---
https://medium.com/@samo.burja/the-youtube-revolution-in-knowledge-transfer-cb701f82096a

Growing up as an aspiring javelin thrower in Kenya, the young Julius Yego was unable to find a coach: in a country where runners command the most prestige, mentorship was practically nonexistent. Determined to succeed, he instead watched YouTube recordings of Norwegian Olympic javelin thrower Andreas Thorkildsen, taking detailed notes and attempting to imitate the fine details of his movements. Yego went on to win gold in the 2015 World Championships in Beijing, silver in the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics, and holds the 3rd-longest javelin throw on world record. He acquired a coach only six months before he competed in the 2012 London Olympics — over a decade after he started practicing.

Yego’s rise was enabled by YouTube. Yet since its founding, popular consensus has been that the video service is making people dumber. Indeed, modern video media may shorten attention spans and distract from longer-form means of communication, such as written articles or books. But critically overlooked is its unlocking a form of mass-scale tacit knowledge transmission which is historically unprecedented, facilitating the preservation and spread of knowledge that might otherwise have been lost.

Tacit knowledge is knowledge that can’t properly be transmitted via verbal or written instruction, like the ability to create great art or assess a startup. This tacit knowledge is a form of intellectual dark matter, pervading society in a million ways, some of them trivial, some of them vital. Examples include woodworking, metalworking, housekeeping, cooking, dancing, amateur public speaking, assembly line oversight, rapid problem-solving, and heart surgery.

Before video became available at scale, tacit knowledge had to be transmitted in person, so that the learner could closely observe the knowledge in action and learn in real time — skilled metalworking, for example, is impossible to teach from a textbook. Because of this intensely local nature, it presents a uniquely strong succession problem: if a master woodworker fails to transmit his tacit knowledge to the few apprentices in his shop, the knowledge is lost forever, even if he’s written books about it. Further, tacit knowledge serves as an obstacle to centralization, as its local transmission provides an advantage for decentralized players that can’t be replicated by a central authority. The center cannot appropriate what it cannot access: there will never be a state monopoly on plumbing or dentistry, for example.

Some will object that tacit knowledge acquisition must be possible without close observation of a skilled practitioner; otherwise we would never see skilled autodidacts. It’s true that some are able to acquire tacit knowledge by directly interacting with the object of mastery and figuring out things on their own, but this is very difficult. True autodidacts who can invent their own techniques are rare, but many can learn by watching and imitating.

The scarcity of people who can truly learn from what they’re given is why the massive open online courses of the early 2010s didn’t work out, with 95% of enrolled students failing to complete even a single course, and year-on-year student retention rates below 10%. Learners who wish to acquire tacit knowledge, but who are unable to figure things out on their own, are therefore limited by their access to personal observation of skilled people.

Massively available video recordings of practitioners in action change this entirely. Through these videos, learners can now partially replicate the master-apprentice relationship, opening up skill domains and economic niches that were previously cordoned off by personal access. These new points of access range from the specialized trades, where electricians illustrate how to use multimeters and how to assess breaker boxes, to less specialized domestic activities, where a novice can learn basic knife-handling techniques from an expert. YouTube reports that searches in the “how-to” category has grown 70% year-on-year.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
Two days ago a replacement gasket for an Amana lower freezer door arrived (from Amazon). When I commenced to take the old gasket off I discovered that replacing the old gasket was going to be a bit trickier than I realized for a very old refrigerator that came with our house when we purchased the house 15 years ago. I had no original refrigerator manual and most likely would have to spend hours locating the manual if I had one in the first place. So I went to YouTube and in seconds found dozens of helper videos for replacing Amana freezer door gaskets. I watched one of these videos and discovered how to take out 32 panel screws to remove the inner door panel and how to heat my new gasket in a clothes dryer to get it to shape properly for replacement.

The training needed to do the job took me less than ten minutes on YouTube. Millions of similar training videos are available for fixing almost anything imaginable and addressing a myriad of health issues should the need ever arise.

My point here is that YouTube makes it easy to find just-in-time training modules in a matter of seconds.

For education modules my first approach is usually to look in Wikipedia. However, some educational modules are better in video. This morning Tyler Hall made reference to the well-known Monte Hall game theory problem ---
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/09/the-intuitive-monty-hall-problem.html

Over the years I've occasionally written tidbits about the Monte Hall problem. But it helps to renew my old memory on this and other technical education issues that come up every day. First thing I went to Wikipedia ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monty_Hall_problem

Then for added kicks I went to a sampling of the many YouTube modules on the Monte Hall problem (search for Monte Hall) at www.youtube.com

My point here is that YouTube is truly amazing for training and education needs. It's better than Wikipedia in terms of coverage of topics like freezer door gasket replacements or replacing the starter cord on Toro lawn mower (which was also a problem for me this summer).

Of course YouTube now has amazing free education channels maintained by top educators (think complete course modules for many disciplines)---
https://www.youtube.com/edu

My point here is that YouTube is evolving to a point where it's easy to lose sight of the many wonderful ways you can learn from YouTube. It's not the YouTube you forgot to follow closely over the last 10 years even though you used it for specific needs quite often.

Some of the most wonderful things in life really are free. Activists seeking to break up giant tech companies like Amazon and Google should keep one thing in mind. Those tech companies can bring us a lot of wonderful things for free or with ease because of the ability to cover losses in one area with profits in another area. What would happen to the many wonderful free videos we get on YouTube or the free or very cheap books that can be downloaded from Amazon if we tear those companies apart?

Sure we can take all the videos about repairing freezer gaskets (so I would have to phone for a maintenance technician) and videos of the Monte Hall problem away from the public. And sure we can restore some shopping in malls (think bookstores) by banning online shopping from Amazon. And we make it a lot more expensive to file tax returns by removing all the tax helper videos from YouTube.

But in this regard I would like you to watch Milton Friedman's lesson on "spoons" ---
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/08/spoons-are-in-aisle-9.html
Chopsticks would be even better


"Wikipedia, a Professor's Best Friend," by Dariusz Jemielniak, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 13, 2014 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Wikipedia-a-Professors-Best/149337/?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Jensen Comment
I am a cheerleader for Wikipedia. However, one of my criticisms is that coverage across academic disciplines is highly variable. For example, coverage of economics and finance is fantastic. Coverage of accountancy can best be described as lousy. It's a Pogo thing. When I look for the enemy I discover that "He is us."

Disciplines covered extensively are generally strong in both theory and academic debate, particularly philosophy and science. Accountancy is weak in theory and the top academic research journals in accounting will not publish replications or even commentaries. This greatly limits anything interesting that can be posted to Wikipedia ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm

Academic leaders in philosophy and science are nearly all covered extensively in Wikipedia. Academic leaders in accountancy are rarely mentioned, and when they are mentioned their Wikipedia modules are puny and boring.

What academic accounting leader has an extensive Wikipedia module? I've never found a single one.

When I look up academic economists I not only find frequent Wikipedia modules, virtually all of those modules contain summaries of their research and summaries of controversies surrounding their research. I've never found a Wikipedia article about an academic accounting researcher that contains summaries of the controversies surrounding that professor's research.

Accounting research won't have much respect in the world until its leading researchers are in Wikipedia, including summaries of controversies of their research findings. The enemy is us.

From the Scout Report on February 13, 2015

Wikipanion --- https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wikipanion/id288349436?mt=8 

We all know the dangers of relying too faithfully on Wikipedia, which can sometimes lead us astray. But the platform remains a productive resource for initial forays into obscure topics. Wikipanion streamlines users' Wiki browsing and search activities with history grouped by visitor date, advanced bookmarking, and multiple search methods. Think of it as a quick and easy way to explore Wikipedia. Users can upgrade to Wikipanion Plus for a small fee, but there is plenty to enjoy here, including a fun link to Wiktionary, which will provide a dictionary type entry for each term entered. Compatible with iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch running iOS 7.0 or later.

Wikiverse (data visualization of Wikipedia concepts) --- http://wikiverse.io


 

Experts vs. Amateurs Searching the Web
The credibility war rages on in the world of Web 2.0. Those who say information provided by Internet research tools needs to be vetted have made their case in several ways. Knol, for example, appears to be Google's answer to Wikipedia. And for now, while the project is under development, authors can contribute content by invitation only. The plan is to let users rank the wheat among the chaff; the highest-ranking articles would pop up first in a Google search. A clear example is Mahalo. It's essentially a search engine run by staff members, who hand-pick links for popular search terms. That's a familiar concept for academic libraries. There is resistance to the idea that experts have lost their place in the indiscriminate, user-generated Web 2.0. John Connell, an education-business manager at Cisco Systems, writes in his blog that experts and laymen can coexist on the Web: "We are not dealing with a zero-sum game of any kind -- the rise of one source of information does not (necessarily) cause the dissipation of another. Why then do those who espouse the ‘cult of the expert,’ for want of a better term, feel it necessary not just to have access to the authoritative information (in their terms) that they seek, but to deny those who want access to the ... trivial information they want? "It is elitism, pure and simple." The question is, do users need someone else to filter information for them? We know from past reports that the "Google Generation" has a hard time sorting the relevant from the trivial. But isn't it better to teach them how?
Hurley Goodall, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 14, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2818&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

 


Is banning of Wikipedia/Google for coursework both stupid and wasted effort?
 

Some professors ban their students from citing Wikipedia in papers. Tara Brabazon of the University of Brighton, bars her students from using not only Wikipedia, but Google as well, The Times of London reported. Google is “white bread for the mind,” Brabazon said. “Google offers easy answers to difficult questions. But students do not know how to tell if they come from serious, refereed work or are merely composed of shallow ideas, superficial surfing and fleeting commitments,” she said. “Google is filling, but it does not necessarily offer nutritional content.”
Inside Higher Education, January 14, 2008 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/01/14/qt

 

"The University of Google," by Andrea L. Foster, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 17, 2008 --- Click Here

Tara Brabazon, professor of media studies at Britain’s University of Brighton, was expected Wednesday to criticize Google and what she sees as students’ over-reliance on the search engine and Wikipedia in an inaugural lecture at the university. She calls the trend “The University of Google,” according to an article Monday in The Times, and labels the search engine “white bread for the mind.” The professor bans her own students from using Wikipedia and Google in their first year of study.

A columnist for the paper responded in a piece that accuses Ms. Brabazon of snobbery. “Curiosity, it seems, can only be stimulated by trawling library shelves or by shelling out substantial amounts of money,” he writes, sarcastically.

January 17, 2008 reply from Derek

Very interesting. I understand Brabazon’s point about students’ over-reliance on Google and Wikipedia, but I don’t know if banning those web sites helps to improve students’ information literacy. I think students need to know how to use these kinds of web sites wisely.

If I can make a plug here, our teaching center just started a new podcast series featuring interviews with faculty about issues of teaching and learning. The first episode, available here, features an interview with a (Vanderbilt) history professor who uses Wikipedia to teach the undergraduate history majors in his class how to think like historians. He’s a great teacher and interviewee, and I think he offers an effective way to use Wikipedia to help him accomplish his course goals.

Episode 1 --- http://blogs.vanderbilt.edu/cftpodcast/?p=4

 

Jensen Question
How will Professor Brabazon deal with the new and authoritative Google Knol?

Jensen Comment
So how might a student find refereed journal or scholarly book references using Wikipedia?

  1. Most scholarly Wikipedia modules have footnotes and references that can be traced back such that there is no evidence of having ever gone to Wikipedia.
    For example, note the many scholarly references and links at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jung
     

  2. Don't overlook the Discussion tab in Wikipedia. Here's where some information is turned into knowledge by scholars.
     

  3. If there is not a footnote or a reference, look for a unique phrase in Wikipedia and then insert that phrase in Google Scholar or one of the other sites below:

Scholarpedia --- http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Main_Page

PLoS One --- http://www.plosone.org/home.action

Google Scholar --- http://scholar.google.com/
Not to be confused with Google Advanced Search which does not cover many scholarly articles --- http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en

Google Knol --- http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/encouraging-people-to-contribute.html

Google Research --- http://research.google.com/

One Million University of Illinois (Free) Books to be Digitized by Google --- http://www.cic.uiuc.edu/programs/CenterForLibraryInitiatives/Archive/PressRelease/LibraryDigitization/index.shtml
Google Digitized Books --- http://books.google.com/advanced_book_search?q=Accounting
For example, key in the word "accounting"
Then try "Advanced Managerial Accounting"
Then try "Joel Demski"
Then try "Accounting for Derivative Financial Instruments"
Then try "Robert E. Jensen" AND "Accounting"

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign announces the availability of a newly-digitized collection of Abraham Lincoln books accessible through the Open Content Alliance and displayed on the University Library's own web site, as the first step of a digitization project of Lincoln books from its collection. View the first set of books digitized at: http://varuna.grainger.uiuc.edu/oca/lincoln/

Microsoft's Windows "Live Search" or  "Academic Search" ---
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?scope=academic&q=

Amazon's A9 --- http://a9.com/-/search/advSearch 

Beginning October 23, 2003, Amazon.com offers a text search of entire contents of millions of pages of books, including new books ---
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/10197021/ref%3Dsib%5Fmerch%5Fgw/104-3984945-7813514 

How It Works --- http://snurl.com/BookSearch 
A significant extension of our groundbreaking Look Inside the Book feature, Search Inside the Book allows you to search millions of pages to find exactly the book you want to buy. Now instead of just displaying books whose title, author, or publisher-provided keywords that match your search terms, your search results will surface titles based on every word inside the book. Using Search Inside the Book is as simple as running an Amazon.com search. 

Soon to be the largest scholarly library in the world:
Google Book Search --- http://books.google.com/advanced_book_search 

Answers.com --- http://www.answers.com/

Carnegie Mellon Libraries: Digital Library Colloquium (video lectures) --- http://www.library.cmu.edu/Libraries/DLColloquia.html

 

For example,
Wikipedia describes how Jung proposed spiritual guidance as treatment for chronic alcoholism --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jung#Spirituality_as_a_cure_for_alcoholism
Professor Brabazon might give a student an F grade for citing the above link. Instead the student is advised to enter the phrase [ \"Jung\" AND \"Alcoholism\" AND \"Spiritual Guidance\" ] into the exact phrase search box at http://scholar.google.com/advanced_scholar_search?hl=en&lr=
Hundreds of scholarly references will emerge that Professor Brabazon will accept as authoritative. But never mention to Professor Brabazon that you got the idea for spiritual guidance as a treatment of alcoholism from Wikipedia.

Also there's a question of how Professor Brabazon will deal with the new Google Knol

"Google's Answer to Wikipedia:  Google's Knol project aims to make online information easier to find and more authoritative," MIT's Technology Review, January 15, 2008 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/20065/?nlid=806 

Google recently announced Knol, a new experimental website that puts information online in a way that encourages authorial attribution. Unlike articles for the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which anyone is free to revise, Knol articles will have individual authors, whose pictures and credentials will be prominently displayed alongside their work. Currently, participation in the project is by invitation only, but Google will eventually open up Knol to the public. At that point, a given topic may end up with multiple articles by different authors. Readers will be able to rate the articles, and the better an article's rating, the higher it will rank in Google's search results.

Google coined the term "knol" to denote a unit of knowledge but also uses it to refer to an authoritative Web-based article on a particular subject. At present, Google will not describe the project in detail, but Udi Manber, one of the company's vice presidents of engineering, provided a cursory sketch on the company's blog site. "A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read," Manber writes. And in a departure from Wikipedia's model of community authorship, he adds that "the key idea behind the Knol project is to highlight authors."

Noah Kagan, founder of the premier conference about online communities, Community Next, sees an increase in authorial attribution as a change for the better. He notes the success of the review site Yelp, which has risen to popularity in the relatively short span of three years. "Yelp's success is based on people getting attribution for the reviews that they are posting," Kagan says. "Because users have their reputation on the line, they are more likely to leave legitimate answers." Knol also has features intended to establish an article's credibility, such as references to its sources and a listing of the title, job history, and institutional affiliation of the author. Knol may thus attract experts who are turned off by group editing and prefer the style of attribution common in journalistic and academic publications.

Manber writes that "for many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the same subject. Competition of ideas is a good thing." But Mark Pellegrini, administrator and featured-article director at Wikipedia and a member of its press committee, sees two problems with this plan. "I think what will happen is that you'll end up with five or ten articles," he says, "none of which is as comprehensive as if the people who wrote them had worked together on a single article." These articles may be redundant or even contradictory, he says. Knol authors may also have less incentive to link keywords to competitors' articles, creating "walled gardens." Pellegrini describes the effect thus: "Knol authors will tend to link from their articles to other articles they've written, but not to articles written by others."

Continued in article

August 31, 2007 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

NEW GOOGLE RESEARCH UNIVERSITY SERVICES

Google,Inc. recently announced two new services as part of its Google Research University program.

Google Search "is designed to give university faculty and their research teams high-volume programmatic access to Google Search, whose huge repository of data constitutes a valuable resource for understanding the structure and contents of the web." For more information and to register for the service, go to http://research.google.com/university/search/ 

Google Translate "offers tools to help researchers in the field of automatic machine translation compare and contrast with, and build on top of, Google's statistical machine translation system." For more information and to register for the service, go to http://research.google.com/university/translate/.

For an overview of all Google Research activities visit http://research.google.com/

 

Bob Jensen's threads on Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Open Encyclopedia, and YouTube as Knowledge Bases --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm#KnowledgeBases


"Flickr Taps User Tags to Organize Library of Congress Images," by Scott Gilbertson, Wired News, January 16, 2008 --- http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2008/01/flickr-taps-use.html

Flickr has unveiled a new project, dubbed The Commons, which will give Flickr members an opportunity to browse and tag photos from Library of Congress archives. The goal is to create what Flickr likes to call an "organic information system," in other words, a searchable database of tags that makes it easier for researchers to find images.

The pilot project features a small sampling of the Library of Congress’ some 14 million images. For now you’ll find two collections. The first is called “American Memory: Color photographs from the Great Depression” and features color photographs of the Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information Collection including “scenes of rural and small-town life, migrant labor, and the effects of the Great Depression.”

The second collection is the The George Grantham Bain Collection which features “photos produced and gathered by George Grantham Bain for his news photo service, including portraits and worldwide news events, but with special emphasis on life in New York City.” The Bain collection images date from around 1900-1920.

In effect the Library of Congress has become a Flickr user, complete with its own stream and while it’s great to see these image available to a much wider audience, we’re not so sure how much it’s going to help researchers.

If you’re looking for historical photographs do you want to search through comments from self-appointed experts criticizing the composition skills of photography pioneers or adding the ever insightful “wow?” Then there’s the inevitable comments soliciting photos to be added to whatever banal and increasingly inane groups and pools that Flickr members have come up with.

The tagging aspect will no doubt produce something of value, but pardon our cynicism, this may well turn out to be a good test of whether the positive aspects of the Flickr community outweigh the negative.


August 31, 2007 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

NEW GOOGLE RESEARCH UNIVERSITY SERVICES

Google,Inc. recently announced two new services as part of its Google Research University program.

Google Search "is designed to give university faculty and their research teams high-volume programmatic access to Google Search, whose huge repository of data constitutes a valuable resource for understanding the structure and contents of the web." For more information and to register for the service, go to http://research.google.com/university/search/ 

Google Translate "offers tools to help researchers in the field of automatic machine translation compare and contrast with, and build on top of, Google's statistical machine translation system." For more information and to register for the service, go to http://research.google.com/university/translate/.

For an overview of all Google Research activities visit http://research.google.com/


 

Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Open Encyclopedia, and YouTube as Knowledge Bases

A professor wrote to me drawing a fine line between information and knowledge. Information is just organized data that can be right or wrong or unknown in terms of been fact versus fiction. Knowledge generally is information that is more widely accepted as being "true" although academics generally hate the word "true" because it is either too demanding or too misleading in terms of being set in stone. Generally accepted "knowledge" can be proven wrong at later points in time just like Galileo purportedly proved that heavy balls fall at the same rate of speed as their lighter counterparts, thereby proving, that what was generally accepted knowledge until then was false. "Galileo Galilei is said to have dropped two cannon balls of different masses from the tower to demonstrate that their descending speed was independent of their mass. This is considered an apocryphal tale, and the only source for it comes from Galileo's secretary." Quoted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaning_Tower_of_Pisa#History

In my opinion there is a spectrum along the lines of data to information to knowledge. Researchers attempt to add something new and creative at any point along the spectrum. Scholars learn from most any point on the spectrum and usually attempt to share their scholarship in papers, books, Websites, blogs, and online or onsite classrooms.

That professor then mentioned above then asserted that Wikipedia and YouTube were information databases but not knowledge bases. He then mentioned the problem of students knowing facts but not organizing these facts in a scholarly manner. He conjectured that this was perhaps do to increased virtual learning in their development. My December 5, 2007 reply to him was as follows (off-the-cuff so to speak).

Although I see your point about information versus knowledge, the addition of the “Discussion tab” in Wikipedia changed the name of the game. As “information” gets discussed and debated and critiqued it’s beginning to look a whole lot more like knowledge in Wikipedia. For example, note the Discussion tab at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_Design

And when UC Berkeley puts 177 science courses on YouTube (some of them in biology), it’s beginning to look a lot more like YouTube knowledge --- --- http://www.jimmyr.com/free_education.php

With respect to virtual learning, my best example is Stanford’s million+ dollar virtual surgery cadaver that can do more than a real cadaver. For one thing it can have blood pressure such that a nicked artery can hemorrhage. Learning throughout time is based on models and simulations of sorts. Our models and simulations keep getting better and better to a point where the line between virtual and real world become very blurred much like pilots in virtual reality begin to think they are in reality.

Much depends on the purpose and goals of virtual learning. Sometimes edutainment is important to both motivate and make learners more attentive (like wake them up). But this also has drawbacks when it makes learning too easy. I’m a strong believer in blood, sweat, and tears learning --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
When I put it into practice it was not popular with students of this generation who want it to be easy.

You note that:  “These students have prepared but it is poorly arranged, planned, and articulated.” One thing we’ve noted in Student Managed Funds (like in Phil Cooley’s course where students actually control the investments of a million dollars or more of a Trinity University's endowment) where students must make presentations before the Board of Trustees greatly improves students “planning and articulation.” You can read more about this at the University of XXXXX (December 4) at http://financialrounds.blogspot.com/
Note that the portfolios in these courses are not virtual portfolios. They’re the real thing with real dollars! Students adapt to higher levels of performance when the hurdles require higher ordered performance.

I prefer to think of higher order metacognition --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metacognition
For specific examples in accounting education see http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
One of the main ideas is to make students do their own discovery learning. Blood, sweat, and tears are the best teachers.

Much of the focus in metacognitive learning is how to examine/discover what students have learned on their own and how to control cheating when assessing discovery and concept learning --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm

Higher order learning attempts to make students think more conceptually. In particular, note the following quotation from Bob Kennelly at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#ConceptKnowledge

We studied whether instructional material that connects accounting concept discussions with sample case applications through hypertext links would enable students to better understand how concepts are to be applied to practical case situations.

Results from a laboratory experiment indicated that students who learned from such hypertext-enriched instructional material were better able to apply concepts to new accounting cases than those who learned from instructional material that contained identical content but lacked the concept-case application hyperlinks. 

Results also indicated that the learning benefits of concept-case application hyperlinks in instructional material were greater when the hyperlinks were self-generated by the students rather than inherited from instructors, but only when students had generated appropriate links. 

Along broader lines we might think of it in terms of self-organizing of atomic-level information/knowledge ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organization

I look forward to your writings on this subject when you get things sorted out. You’re a good writer. Scientist's aren't meant to be such good writers.


Wikipedia in Hardcover?
Yes in terms of selected modules you want in hard copy near your desk

"The Open-Source Encyclopedia, Now in Hardcover," by Brock Read, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 10, 2009 ---

Need a gift for that open-source enthusiast in your life who happens to have some bookshelf space to fill? A German company called PediaPress has come to the rescue: For a not-unreasonable fee, it will create a book that compiles your favorite Wikipedia articles.

PediaPress has been at this since January, when it started printing volumes drawn from Wikipedia’s German-language edition, but late last month it added to its repertoire six new languages: French, Polish, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and Simple English (from a version of the encyclopedia written for children and for adults learning English as a second language). Regular English is on its way soon. It’s taking longer to work out the kinks, though, since that encyclopedia is so massive.

Assembling a book is pretty easy: Wikipedia has set up a Web site that lets you drag-and-drop your way through the process. A 100-page book will set you back $8.90 (additional pages cost more), plus shipping, and it’ll be at least halfway handsome — if the photo below, from Wikipedia user He!ko, is any guide. (photo not shown here)

So the books look perfectly good. But then comes the $64,000 question: Will people really pay for a hardbound copy of something they can view online for free? As like-minded books-on-demand projects such as the Espresso Book Machine have shown, there’s at least some kind of a market for readers of made-to-order books, so it’s not inconceivable that some Wikipedia visitors will order special volumes as gifts or buy texts that they can mark up with marginalia. Wikipedia says the press is doing brisk business: It sold more than 1,000 German-language books in its first month of operations.

Jensen Comment
Whereas finance is one of the best topics covered in Wikipedia, accountancy sadly has terrible coverage. My additions tend to be rejected on the basis of their length.

It sort of puts accountants in their places when aardvarks get better coverage than accountancy.

Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Google Open Encyclopedia, and YouTube as Knowledge Bases ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm#KnowledgeBases


Question
What's a WikiDashboard?

"Who's Messing with Wikipedia? The back-and-forth behind controversial entries could help reveal their true value." by Erica Naone, MIT's Technology Review, February 6, 2009 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/web/22076/?nlid=1757&a=f

Despite warnings from many high-school teachers and college professors, Wikipedia is one of the most-visited websites in the world (not to mention the biggest encyclopedia ever created). But even as Wikipedia's popularity has grown, so has the debate over its trustworthiness. One of the most serious concerns remains the fact that its articles are written and edited by a hidden army of people with unknown interests and biases.

Ed Chi, a senior research scientist for augmented social cognition at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and his colleagues have now created a tool, called WikiDashboard, that aims to reveal much of the normally hidden back-and-forth behind Wikipedia's most controversial pages in order to help readers judge for themselves how suspect its contents might be.

Wikipedia already has procedures in place designed to alert readers to potential problems with an entry. For example, one of Wikipedia's volunteer editors can review an article and tag it as "controversial" or warn that it "needs sources." But in practice, Chi says, relatively few articles actually receive these tags. WikiDashboard instead offers a snapshot of the edits and re-edits, as well as the arguments and counterarguments that went into building each of Wikipedia's many million pages.

The researchers began by investigating pages already tagged as "controversial" on Wikipedia: they found that these pages were far more likely to have been edited and re-edited repeatedly. Based on this observation, they developed WikiDashboard, a website that serves up Wikipedia entries but adds a chart to the top of each page revealing its recent edit history.

WikiDashboard shows which users have contributed most edits to a page, what percentage of the edits each person is responsible for, and when editors have been most active. A WikiDashboard user can explore further by clicking on a particular editor's name to see, for example, how involved he or she has been with other articles. Chi says that the goal is to show the social interaction going on around the entry. For instance, the chart should make it clear when a single user has been dominating a page, or when a flurry of activity has exploded around a particularly contentious article. The timeline on the chart can also show how long a page has been neglected.


Question:
What vexing problems do Wikipedia Authority and Online Product Reviews share in common?

"Reconsidering Authority in Wikipedia World," by Scott Carlson, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 23, 2008 --- http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3413&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Simson Garfinkel takes a look at authority and sourcing in Wikipedia world with an article in the latest edition of Technology Review. He focuses on Wikipedia’s requirement to cite published sources in adding information to Wikipedia articles. Yes, with a mob-written encyclopedia, a requirement for citing published, vetted sources makes sense, he writes.

“But there is a problem with appealing to the authority of other people’s written words: Many publications don’t do any fact checking at all, and many of those that do simply call up the subject of the article and ask if the writer got the facts wrong or right,” Mr. Garfinkel writes. “For instance, Dun and Bradstreet gets the information for its small-business information reports in part by asking those very same small businesses to fill out questionnaires about themselves.”

This policy is particularly problematic if you are the authority on a particular topic, but you can’t use your own base of knowledge. Jaron Lanier, a futurist, had problems changing a statement on the Wikipedia entry about himself that said he was a filmmaker. He wasn’t a filmmaker, yet every time he removed that non-fact, someone put it back in.

He finally got the item changed, but was then criticized for editing his own wikientry. (PR directors who maintain their college Wikipedia pages, take note.)

 

Comments

  1. Doesn’t the problem of unreliability of other sources apply to any secondary or tertiary work? ;) (…and on that note, I suggest reading the Wikipedia page Wikipedia:Reliable sources …)

"Online User Reviews: Can They Be Trusted? They're all over the Web. Everybody reads them. But are reader reviews reliable enough to depend on when it comes to spending your cold, hard cash?" by Robert Luhn, PC World via The Washington Post, October 23, 2008 --- Click Here

Anyone can write a product review, and everybody reads them. But can you trust them? I refer, of course, to reader or user reviews, the kind you find on Amazon, Buy.com, Epinions, PC World, Yelp, and even the sites of tech product manufacturers, such as Dell. They're everywhere.

But it's the fraudulent reviews--positive reviews contributed by "readers" paid by the company being evaluated--that worry critics and advocates alike.

In an October 2007 poll conducted by the PR firm Burson-Marsteller, 1000 savvy Web consumers (dubbed "e-fluentials" by some wordsmith who evidently was unfamiliar with the term " effluent") were clearly convinced that fake reviews are endemic--and could result in a backlash from online consumers.

The numbers tell the tale: 48% (up from 39% in 2001) believe that fake reviews are being planted on consumer sites. 57% say they won't buy a product if the reader reviews seem suspect. And a whopping 76% claim to double-check what they read online. All are signs of a healthy skepticism.

So, how pervasive are falsified reviews?

Beau Brendler, Director of Consumer Reports' WebWatch site, says that the bottom line is: "[Fake reviews] happen all the time--but proving it, quantifying it--is very hard."

WebWatch--whose motto is "Look Before You Click"-- says on its site that its credibility campaign has led more than 170 sites, including CNN, CNet, The New York Times, Travelocity, and Orbitz to agree to uphold WebWatch's credibility guidelines.

Barbara Kasser, author of Online Shopping Directory For Dummies and Internet Shopping Yellow Pages, says: "There's no way to check the reviewer's veracity or if they're on the take--they're anonymous." Another concern: the reviewer might not be competent. "How did [the reviewer] use the product? Did they use it properly? Did they follow the manufacturer's directions? There's no way to know," she points out.

Why So Enticing?

Many ordinary people consider reviews written by consumers to be more reliable, more critical, and ultimately, more useful than many other sources of information. At least that's what they told The Nielsen Company in a survey conducted in April 2007. The top three most trusted sources: "Recommendations from consumers" (78%), "Newspapers" (63%), and "Consumer opinions posted online" (61%). (In a story that PC World posted in 2003, we generally agreed with the above perceptions--but we're a bit more cynical now.)

Certainly, reader reviews have come a long way since the era of Usenet and reader forums. Depending on the site and its readers, you may find pithy commentary, long-winded rants, numeric ratings, pros and cons, graphs, and even reviewer videos.

But Mitch Meyerson, author of the book Guerilla Marketing on the Internet, thinks that "influenced" reviews (paid for or not) are pretty common. For example, says Meyerson, "authors often enlist friends, colleagues, and clients to review their books on Amazon."

According to Blogging Tips founder and Web developer Kevin Muldoon, "tech sites usually have fair, accurate [reader] reviews...but there are definitely more fake reviews [on sites] covering cosmetics and hotels." Read Muldoon's blog entry on his own guidelines for how he reviews products.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on consumer fraud and reporting of such fraud can be found at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm


Thus Far Cuil is Not So Cool

"Ex-Googlers launch rival search engine," CNN Money, July 28, 2008 --- http://money.cnn.com/2008/07/28/technology/cuil.ap/index.htm?cnn=yes

Anna Patterson's last Internet search engine was so impressive that industry leader Google Inc. bought the technology in 2004 to upgrade its own system.

She believes her latest invention is even more valuable - only this time it's not for sale.

Patterson instead intends to upstage Google, which she quit in 2006 to develop a more comprehensive and efficient way to scour the Internet.

The end result is Cuil, pronounced "cool." Backed by $33 million in venture capital, the search engine plans to begin processing requests for the first time Monday.

Cuil had kept a low profile while Patterson, her husband, Tom Costello, and two other former Google engineers - Russell Power and Louis Monier - searched for better ways to search.

Now, it's boasting time.

Web index: For starters, Cuil's search index spans 120 billion Web pages.

Patterson believes that's at least three times the size of Google's index, although there is no way to know for certain. Google stopped publicly quantifying its index's breadth nearly three years ago when the catalog spanned 8.2 billion Web pages.

Ex-Googlers: Where are they now? Cuil won't divulge the formula it has developed to cover a wider swath of the Web with far fewer computers than Google. And Google isn't ceding the point: Spokeswoman Katie Watson said her company still believes its index is the largest.

After getting inquiries about Cuil, Google asserted on its blog Friday that it regularly scans through 1 trillion unique Web links. But Google said it doesn't index them all because they either point to similar content or would diminish the quality of its search results in some other way. The posting didn't quantify the size of Google's index.

A search index's scope is important because information, pictures and content can't be found unless they're stored in a database. But Cuil believes it will outshine Google in several other ways, including its method for identifying and displaying pertinent results.

Content analysis: Rather than trying to mimic Google's method of ranking the quantity and quality of links to Web sites, Patterson says Cuil's technology drills into the actual content of a page. And Cuil's results will be presented in a more magazine-like format instead of just a vertical stack of Web links. Cuil's results are displayed with more photos spread horizontally across the page and include sidebars that can be clicked on to learn more about topics related to the original search request.

Finally, Cuil is hoping to attract traffic by promising not to retain information about its users' search histories or surfing patterns - something that Google does, much to the consternation of privacy watchdogs.

Cuil is just the latest in a long line of Google challengers.

Other contenders: The list includes swaggering startups like Teoma (whose technology became the backbone of Ask.com), Vivisimo, Snap, Mahalo and, most recently, Powerset, which was acquired by Microsoft Corp. (MSFT, Fortune 500) this month.

Even after investing hundreds of millions of dollars on search, both Microsoft and Yahoo Inc. (YHOO, Fortune 500) have been losing ground to Google (GOOG, Fortune 500). Through May, Google held a 62% share of the U.S. search market followed by Yahoo at 21% and Microsoft at 8.5%, according to comScore Inc.

Google has become so synonymous with Internet search that it may no longer matter how good Cuil or any other challenger is, said Gartner Inc. analyst Allen Weiner.

"Search has become as much about branding as anything else," Weiner said. "I doubt [Cuil] will be keeping anyone at Google awake at night."

Google welcomed Cuil to the fray with its usual mantra about its rivals. "Having great competitors is a huge benefit to us and everyone in the search space," Watson said. "It makes us all work harder, and at the end of the day our users benefit from that."

But this will be the first time that Google has battled a general-purpose search engine created by its own alumni. It probably won't be the last time, given that Google now has nearly 20,000 employees.

Patterson joined Google in 2004 after she built and sold Recall, a search index that probed old Web sites for the Internet Archive. She and Power worked on the same team at Google.

Although he also worked for Google for a short time, Monier is best known as the former chief technology officer of AltaVista, which was considered the best search engine before Google came along in 1998. Monier also helped build the search engine on eBay's (EBAY, Fortune 500) online auction site.

The trio of former Googlers are teaming up with Patterson's husband, Costello, who built a once-promising search engine called Xift in the late 1990s. He later joined IBM Corp. (IBM, Fortune 500), where he worked on an "analytic engine" called WebFountain.

Costello's Irish heritage inspired Cuil's odd name. It was derived from a character named Finn McCuill in Celtic folklore.

Patterson enjoyed her time at Google, but became disenchanted with the company's approach to search. "Google has looked pretty much the same for 10 years now," she said, "and I can guarantee it will look the same a year from now."

 

The Cuil Search Engine is at http://www.cuil.com/info/

Jensen Comment on July 28, 2008
Thus far the hype seems to be more hyped than the performance on this first day of trials. For example I typed in the following in both Cuil and Google:
"Basis Adjustment" AND "FAS 133"

Google gave me hundreds of hits and many of them were quite relevant to my research.
Cuil gave me four hits and most of them were irrelevant to my research. Cuil said it had 1,116,835,248 hits, but I could only find a way to list four of these hits.

Go figure! Thus far the "World's Largest Search Engine" has a ways to go.

Another limitation is that Google has many cached documents where the original link is no longer active. Cuil does not mention a caching service.

First turn your speakers on and read in "Excel Magic Trick #73" in Cuil.
Results:  Nothing!

Next read in ""Excel Magic Trick #73" in Google.
Google's cached version takes you to an interesting video on the significant-digits bound in Excel.

Please let me know when and where Cuil is better than Google.

Also is Cuil like Yahoo in that early listing priority of hits goes to advertisers' sites?

If that's the case, Cuil will be a bummer. It does have Preferences button, but thus far that seems to be inactive.

July 28, 2008 reply from Schatzel, John [JSchatzel@STONEHILL.EDU]

Thanks Jagdish,

I do a great deal of google searching almost everyday and so this is of great interest. To run a quick test, I went to cuil.com (which is supposed to stand for "cool") and entered "audit simulation." I received nine rather large blocks of information relating to web sites that I found to be mostly irrelevant. I then tried "auditing simulation" and got pretty much the same thing. I also noticed that it was looking for "audit" and "simulation" separately and that there was no option for an advanced search, which on google allows you to combine words into phrases and sentences. I then tried "audit simulation" again, but this time with the quotes. This improved the results slightly, but most of the hits were still not very relevant. The links did have more information attached to them, but the information seemed to take up too much space. When I type "audit simulation" or "auditng simulation" into the basic google search page or toolbar, I get http://realaudit.com as most relevant. This makes more sense to me and when this link does not come up in cuil.com at all, it leaves me thinking that cuil still has a long way to go. Thanks again, for the tip,

John Schatzel

"Google Beats Cuil Hands Down In Size And Relevance, But That Isn't The Whole Story." Michael Arrington, The Washington Post, July 28, 2008 --- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/28/AR2008072800098.html?wpisrc=newsletter

We've been testing the engine for the last hour. Based on our test queries Cuil is an excellent search engine, particularly since it is all of an hour old. But it doesn't appear to have the depth of results that Google has, despite their claims. And the results are not nearly as relevant.

. . .

It seems pretty clear that Google's index of web pages is significantly larger than Cuil's unless we're randomly choosing the wrong queries. Based on the queries above, Google is averaging nearly 10x the number of results of Cuil.

And Cuil's ranking isn't as good as Google's based on the pure results returned from both queries. Where Cuil excels is with the related categories, which return results that are extremely relevant. With Google, we've all gotten used to trying a slightly different search to get the refined results we need. Cuil does a good job of guessing what we'll want next and presents that in the top right widget. That means Cuil saves time for more research based queries.

And I want to reemphasize that Cuil is only an hour old at this point, Google has had a decade to perfect their search engine.

 

 


Question
How does Google's new Wikipedia-like online Encyclopedia differ from the real Wikipedia?

Hint
Colleges may one day give scholarly performance credit for authoring a module in Knol. In a sense it's like exposing your scholarship and research in such a way that the entire world may become "referees" of you contribution. Of course most of the modules fall into the realm of scholarship (mastery of existing knowledge) rather than research (contribution to new knowledge). The catch of course, is that the author must approve the reviewer's call. Darn! The rejected reviews may be, in most instances, be published in Wikipedia. In that sense Wikipedia is more academic.

"Google Presents Wikipedia Competitor," by Andrea L. Foster, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 23, 2008 --- Click Here

Google today launched Knol, an online encyclopedia that, in many ways, mimics Wikipedia, the popular encyclopedia that anyone can edit. As in Wikipedia, anyone can create a page in Knol. But changes to the page become active only after they are approved by the page’s author or authors. And unlike Wikipedia, the author’s name is featured prominently on Knol articles.
 

Among the featured articles on the Knol site today are “How to Backpack,” “Lung Cancer,” and “Toilet Clogs.”

Daniel Colman, director and associate dean of Stanford University’s continuing-studies program and author of the blog OpenCulture, predicted in December that Knol would have a hard time attracting experts to write articles.

 


I get free online access to Encyclopaedia Britannica':  Is this my just reward?

'Encyclopaedia Britannica' Is Now Free to Bloggers," by Catherine Rampell, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 21, 2008 --- http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2923&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Encyclopaedia Britannica, which apparently fears being nudged into irrelevance by the proliferation of free online reference sources, has started giving bloggers free access to its articles, TechCrunch reports.

Reference sites such as Wikipedia, which are often criticized for their amateur (if zealous) authorship sources, have made the expensive, expert-vetted, hard-bound book set a less popular purchase. (Comscore analysis, also reported on TechCrunch, found that “[f]or every page viewed on Brittanica.com, 184 pages are viewed on Wikipedia,” or 3.8 billion v. 21 million page views per month).

Under a new program entitled Britannica WebShare, the encyclopedia publisher is allowing “people who publish with some regularity on the Internet, be they bloggers, webmasters, or writers,” to read and link to the encyclopedia’s online articles. The company seems to hope that by offering its services free to Web publishers, links to Britannica articles will proliferate across the Internet and will persuade regular Web surfers to cough up $1,400 for the encyclopedia’s 32-volume set, or perhaps $70 for an annual online subscription.

Posted Comments as of April 21, 2008

“What’s that laugher?” Sir Colin wondered aloud to no one in particular. The entire room sat in nervous silence.
“I say, what is that laughter?”
— S. Britchky Apr 21, 12:50 PM #

The Encyclopedia Britannica print edition is worth every penny of the $1400 I paid for it. Other readers should note that the print edition of the set is marked down each year, to below $1000, near the end of its run, as the next year’s edition approaches publication. I don’t work for Britannica, but in my opinion, every home library should have a set. I’d be lost without it., even though I have full access to the Internet.
— Richard    Apr 21, 08:49 PM  

Jensen Comment
Woe is me! Should I continue to be one of the billions or join the millions?

This is the classic issue of open source versus refereed publishing. Refereed articles, including Encyclopaedia Britannica, assign a few highly qualified referees to pass judgment on the accuracy and relevance of each module once and some modules are not reviewed again for many years. Wikipedia freely allows the entire online world to edit each module in real time. Do you have more faith in one-time decisions of experts or real-time decisions of possibly millions of people with expertise ranging from dunder heads to the best experts in the world on a given topic.

What Encyclopaedia Britannica has going for it is that it prevents dunder heads from messing up the module. What Wikipedia has going for it is that experts generally override the dunder heads of most topics, although errors may remain indefinitely in modules that nobody online is particularly interested in to a point of searching for the module on Wikipedia.

There also is the "problem" in Wikipedia that organizations and individuals such as the CIA, FBI, IRS, Israel, Russia, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and the Fortune 500 largest corporations are "maintaining" certain modules about themselves and sensitive terms. This is both good and bad. It prevents kooks from spreading lies about these organizations/individuals, but it also affords these organizations/individuals to present their own biased accounts of themselves. Fortunately Wikipedia added a Discussion Tab to each module where even the kooks are allowed to express opinions on the modules. Readers can then choose whether to read the discussions or not.

Now what about scholarly journals. Should the refereeing be done by two or three experts (sometimes cronies) selected by the Editor or should the working papers be exposed open source to online people of the world who can then publish feedback regarding the strengths and weaknesses of the research paper or other scholarly work? Me, I'm an open source kinda guy!

Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Open Encyclopedia, and YouTube as Knowledge Bases --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm#KnowledgeBases

Nothing's Perfect But what Consumes you?
Poems at the Poetry Free for All --- http://www.everypoet.org/pffa/archive/index.php/t-24023.html


"6 Degrees of Wikipedia," by Catherine Rampell, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 28, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3041/six-degrees-of-wikipedia

A researcher at Trinity College Dublin has software that lets users map the links between Wikipedia pages. His Web site is called “Six Degrees of Wikipedia,” modeled after the trivia game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.” Instead of the degrees being measured by presence in the same film, degrees are determined by articles that link to each other.

For example, how many clicks through Wikipedia does it take to get from “Gatorade” to “Genghis Khan”? Three: Start at “Gatorade,” then click to “Connecticut,” then “June 1,” then “Genghis Khan.”

Stephen Dolan, the researcher who created the software, has also used the code to determine which Wikipedia article is the “center” of Wikipedia—that is, which article is the hub that most other articles must go through in the “Six Degrees” game. Not including the articles that are just lists (e.g., years), the article closest to the center is “United Kingdom,” at an average of 3.67 clicks to any other article. “Billie Jean King” and “United States” follow, with an average of 3.68 clicks and 3.69 clicks, respectively.

More detailed information can be found on Mr. Dolan’s Web site


A geology professor defends use of Wikipedia in courses --- http://www.wooster.edu/geology/HOL.html

"Professors Should Embrace Wikipedia," by Mark A. Wilson. Inside Higher Ed, April 1, 20058 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/04/01/wilson

When the online, anyone-can-edit Wikipedia appeared in 2001, teachers, especially college professors, were appalled. The Internet was already an apparently limitless source of nonsense for their students to eagerly consume — now there was a Web site with the appearance of legitimacy and a dead-easy interface that would complete the seduction until all sense of fact, fiction, myth and propaganda blended into a popular culture of pseudointelligence masking the basest ignorance. An Inside Higher Ed article just last year on Wikipedia use in the academy drew a huge and passionate response, much of it negative.

Now the English version of Wikipedia has over 2 million articles, and it has been translated into over 250 languages. It has become so massive that you can type virtually any noun into a search engine and the first link will be to a Wikipedia page. After seven years and this exponential growth, Wikipedia can still be edited by anyone at any time. A generation of students was warned away from this information siren, but we know as professors that it is the first place they go to start a research project, look up an unfamiliar term from lecture, or find something disturbing to ask about during the next lecture. In fact, we learned too that Wikipedia is indeed the most convenient repository of information ever invented, and we go there often — if a bit covertly — to get a few questions answered. Its accuracy, at least for science articles, is actually as high as the revered Encyclopedia Britannica, as shown by a test published in the journal Nature.

It is time for the academic world to recognize Wikipedia for what it has become: a global library open to anyone with an Internet connection and a pressing curiosity. The vision of its founders, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, has become reality, and the librarians were right: the world has not been the same since. If the Web is the greatest information delivery device ever, and Wikipedia is the largest coherent store of information and ideas, then we as teachers and scholars should have been on this train years ago for the benefit of our students, our professions, and that mystical pool of human knowledge.

What Wikipedia too often lacks is academic authority, or at least the perception of it. Most of its thousands of editors are anonymous, sometimes known only by an IP address or a cryptic username. Every article has a “talk” page for discussions of content, bias, and organization. “Revert” wars can rage out of control as one faction battles another over a few words in an article. Sometimes administrators have to step in and lock a page down until tempers cool and the main protagonists lose interest. The very anonymity of the editors is often the source of the problem: how do we know who has an authoritative grasp of the topic?

That is what academics do best. We can quickly sort out scholarly authority into complex hierarchies with a quick glance at a vita and a sniff at a publication list. We make many mistakes doing this, of course, but at least our debates are supported with citations and a modicum of civility because we are identifiable and we have our reputations to maintain and friends to keep. Maybe this academic culture can be added to the Wild West of Wikipedia to make it more useful for everyone?

I propose that all academics with research specialties, no matter how arcane (and nothing is too obscure for Wikipedia), enroll as identifiable editors of Wikipedia. We then watch over a few wikipages of our choosing, adding to them when appropriate, stepping in to resolve disputes when we know something useful. We can add new articles on topics which should be covered, and argue that others should be removed or combined. This is not to displace anonymous editors, many of whom possess vast amounts of valuable information and innovative ideas, but to add our authority and hard-won knowledge to this growing universal library.

The advantages should be obvious. First, it is another outlet for our scholarship, one that may be more likely to be read than many of our journals. Second, we are directly serving our students by improving the source they go to first for information. Third, by identifying ourselves, we can connect with other scholars and interested parties who stumble across our edits and new articles. Everyone wins.

I have been an open Wikipedia editor now for several months. I have enjoyed it immensely. In my teaching I use a “living syllabus” for each course, which is a kind of academic blog. (For example, see my History of Life course online syllabus.) I connect students through links to outside sources of information. Quite often I refer students to Wikipedia articles that are well-sourced and well written. Wikipages that are not so good are easily fixed with a judicious edit or two, and many pages become more useful with the addition of an image from my collection (all donated to the public domain). Since I am open in my editorial identity, I often get questions from around the world about the topics I find most fascinating. I’ve even made important new connections through my edits to new collaborators and reporters who want more background for a story.

For example, this year I met online a biology professor from Centre College who is interested in the ecology of fish on Great Inagua Island in the Bahamas. He saw my additions and images on that Wikipedia page and had several questions about the island. He invited me to speak at Centre next year about evolution-creation controversies, which is unrelated to the original contact but flowed from our academic conversations. I in turn have been learning much about the island’s living ecology I did not know. I’ve also learned much about the kind of prose that is most effective for a general audience, and I’ve in turn taught some people how to properly reference ideas and information. In short, I’ve expanded my teaching.

Wikipedia as we know it will undoubtedly change in the coming years as all technologies do. By involving ourselves directly and in large numbers now, we can help direct that change into ever more useful ways for our students and the public. This is, after all, our sacred charge as teacher-scholars: to educate when and where we can to the greatest effect.


How helpful is Wikipedia to scholarship?
Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, told educators last year that students shouldn't cite his sprawling Web site: "For God's sake, you’re in college," he said. "Don’t cite the encyclopedia.” It's a safe bet that most professors agreed with that assessment. But according to BBC News, Mr. Wales has now modified his message. He told attendees at a London IT conference this week that he doesn't object to Wikipedia citations, although he admitted that scholars would "probably be better off doing their own research." From the BBC report, it's hard to tell how gung-ho Mr. Wales is about Wikipedia's academic value. But the online encyclopedia's efforts to improve the quality of its articles might be starting to pay dividends: A German magazine recently compared 50 Wikipedia articles with similar pieces in Brockhaus, a commercial encyclopedia. According to the study, the Wikipedia articles were generally more informative.
Brock Read, Chronicle of Higher Education, December 7, 2007 --- http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2598&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en 

Bob Jensen's threads on how scholars search the Web are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm#Scholars

Bob Jensen's threads on general education tutorials are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch


See, I'm not the only one!
University of Texas Professor Praises Wikipedia
Scholars often take swipes at Wikipedia, claiming that it dumbs down education and encourages intellectual laziness. Some professors have even banned their students from using it for research. But in an
article this week in Science Progress, a scholar at the University of Texas at Dallas argues that such bans are irresponsible. David Parry, an assistant professor of emerging media and communications at the university, writes that students need to become familiar with new and non-static forms of communication. He encourages his students to read Wikipedia’s “history” and “discussion” pages, saying they explain how articles were produced. And he says the online encyclopedia’s entry on global warming does a good job of explaining both the controversy and the science surrounding the issue.“Like it or not, the networked digital archive changes our basis of knowledge,” Mr. Parry writes “and training people for the future is about training them for this shift."

Andrea L. Foster, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 14, 2008 --- Click Here


Wikipedia (heavily used by scholars in spite of authenticity risks)--- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s

Who is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? --- http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/09/who_is_mahmoud_ahmadinejad.html
The Iranian-born author of the above article invites anybody to contact him with corrections at amil_imani@yahoo.com
It would be great to see if and how the author tries to defend himself about contentious “facts.”

Wikipedia --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Ahmadinejad

It goes without saying that Wikipedia modules are always suspect, but it is easy to make corrections for the world. I think this particular model requires registration to discourage anonymous edits.

What is often better about Wikipedia is to read the discussion and criticisms of any module. For example, some facts in dispute in this particular module are mentioned in the “Discussion” or “talk” section about the module ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Mahmoud_Ahmadinejad

Perhaps some of the disputed facts have already been pointed out in the “Discussion” section. Of course pointing out differences of opinion about “facts” does not, in and of itself, resolve these differences. I did read the “Discussion” section on this module before suggesting the module as a supplementary link. I assumed others would also check the “Talk” section before assuming what is in dispute.

Since Wikipedia is so widely used by so many students and others like me it’s important to try to correct the record whenever possible. This can be done quite simply from your Web browser and does not require any special software. It requires registration for politically sensitive modules.

Wikipedia modules are often “corrected” by the FBI, CIA, corporations, foreign governments, professors of all persuasions, butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers. This makes them fun and suspect at the same time. It’s like having a paper refereed by the world instead of a few, often biased or casual, journal referees. What I like best is that “referee comments” are made public in Wikipedia’s “Discussion” sections. You don’t often find this in scholarly research journals where referee comments are supposed to remain confidential.
Reasons for flawed journal peer reviews were recently brought to light at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#PeerReviewFlaws

The biggest danger in Wikipedia in generally for modules that are rarely sought out. For example, Bill Smith might right a deceitful module about John Doe. If nobody’s interested in John Doe, it may take forever and a day for corrections to appear. Generally modules that are of great interest to many people, however, generate a lot of “talk” in the “Discussion” sections. For example, the Discussion section for George W. Bush is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:George_W._Bush

Bob Jensen's search helpers are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm

 

 

"Forget the Articles, Best Wikipedia Read Is Its Discussions," by Lee Gomes, The Wall Street Journal, August 15, 2007; Page B1 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118712061199497533.html

You already know about Wikipedia -- or think you do. It's the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, the one that by dint of its 1.9 million English-language entries has become the Internet's main information source and the 17th busiest U.S. Web site.

But that's just the half of it.

Most people are familiar with Wikipedia's collection of articles. Less well-known, unfortunately, are the discussions about these articles. You can find these at the top of a Wikipedia page under a separate tab for "Discussion."

Reading these discussion pages is a vastly rewarding, slightly addictive, experience -- so much so that it has become my habit to first check out the discussion before going to the article proper.

At Wikipedia, anyone can be an editor and all but 600 or so articles can be freely altered. The discussion pages exist so the people working on an article can talk about what they're doing to it. Part of the discussion pages, the least interesting part, involves simple housekeeping; -- editors noting how they moved around the sections of an article or eliminated duplications. And sometimes readers seek answers to homework-style questions, though that practice is discouraged.

But discussion pages are also where Wikipedians discuss and debate what an article should or shouldn't say.

This is where the fun begins. You'd be astonished at the sorts of things editors argue about, and the prolix vehemence they bring to stating their cases. The 9,500-word article "Ireland," for example, spawned a 10,000-word discussion about whether "Republic of Ireland" would be a better name for the piece. "I know full well that many Unionist editors would object completely to my stance on this subject," wrote one person.

A ferocious back and forth ensued over whether Antonio Meucci or Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. One person from the Meucci camp taunted the Bell side by saying, "'Nationalistic pride' stop you and people like you to accept the truth. Bell was a liar and thief. He invented nothing."

As for the age-old philosophical question, "What is truth," it's an issue Wikipedia editors have spent 242,000 words trying to settle, an impressive feat considering how Plato needed only 118,000 words to write "The Republic."

These debates extend to topics most people wouldn't consider remotely controversial. The article on calculus, for instance, was host to some sparring over whether the concept of "limit," central to calculus, should be better explained as an "average."

Wikipedia editors are always on the prowl for passages in articles that violate Wikipedia policy, such as its ban on bias. Editors use the discussion pages to report these sightings, and reading the back and forth makes it clear that editors take this task very seriously.

On one discussion page is the comment: "I am not sure that it does not present an entirely Eurocentric view, nor can I see that it is sourced sufficiently well so as to be reliable."

Does it address a polarizing topic from politics or religion? Hardly. The article was about kittens. The editor was objecting to the statement that most people think kittens are cute.

These debates are not the only treasures in the discussion pages. You can learn a lot of stray facts, facts that an editor didn't think were important enough for the main article. For example, in the discussion accompanying the article about diets, it's noted that potatoes, eaten raw, can be poisonous. The National Potato Council didn't believe this when asked about it last week, but later called back to say that it was true, on account of the solanine in potatoes. Of course, you'd have to eat many sackfuls of raw potatoes to be done in by them.

The discussion about "biography" included random facts from sundry biographies, including that Marshall McLuhan believed his ideas about mass media and the rest to have been inspired by the Virgin Mary. This is true, said McLuhan biographer Philip Marchand. (Mr. Marchand also said McLuhan believed that a global conspiracy of Freemasons was seeking to hinder his career.)

Remember, though, this is Wikipedia, and while it tends to get things right in the long run, it can goof up along the way. A "tomato" article contained a lyrical description of the Carolina breed, said to be "first noted by Italian monk Giacomo Tiramisunelli" and "considered a rare delicacy amongst tomato-connoisseurs."

That's all a complete fabrication, said Roger Chetelat, tomato expert at the University of California, Davis. While now gone from Wikipedia, the passage was there long enough for "Giacomo Tiramisunelli" to turn up now in search engines as a key figure in tomato history.

Wikipedia is very self-aware. It has a Wikipedia article about Wikipedia. But this meta-analysis doesn't extend to "Wikipedia discussions." No article on the topic exists. Search for "discussion," and you are sent to "debate."

But, naturally, that's controversial. The discussion page about debate includes a debate over whether "discussion" and "debate" are synonymous. Emotions run high; the inability to distinguish the two, said one participant, is "one of the problems with Western Society."

Maybe I have been reading too many Wikipedia discussion pages, but I can see the point.

Jensen Comment
This may be more educational than what we teach in class. Try it by clicking on the Discussion tab for the following"

Credit Derivative --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_derivative

Capital Asset Pricing Model --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_asset_pricing_model

Socratic Method --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_Method

Moodle --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moodle

"Seeing Corporate Fingerprints in Wikipedia Edits," by Katie Hafner, The New York Times, August 19, 2007 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/technology/19wikipedia.html?ex=1188532800&en=c387035de4ec887b&ei=5070

"CIA, FBI Computers Used for Wikipedia Edits," by Randall Mikkelsen, The Washington Post, August 16, 2007 --- Click Here
"CIA and Vatican Edit Wikipedia Entries," TheAge.com, August 18, 2007 --- Click Here

Jensen Comment
Wikipedia installed software to trace the source of edits and new modules.

Bob Jensen's threads on tools of education technology are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm


"Can Google's New Open Encylopedia Best Wikipedia?" by Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, December 17, 2007 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2619&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en  

On Wikipedia, you never really know who wrote the article you're reading. Some are written by experts, but others are written by people with time on their hands who may or may not know what they're talking about. Actually, most Wikipedia articles are written by a combination of the two. But Google's new Web encyclopedia, announced last tweek, will put the authors of articles front and center, so you'll always know who is talking and what their qualifications are. The question is, which model will produce a better quick-reference guide? Daniel Colman, director and associate dean of Stanford University's continuing-studies program and author of the blog OpenCulture, picks Wikipedia to win this face off. He thinks that Google's planned encyclopedia will have a hard time attracting experts to write articles, whereas Wikipedia works by letting everyone write articles that are then often corrected by experts. "Take my word for it," writes Mr. Colman. "I’ve spent the past five years trying to get scholars from elite universities, including Stanford, to bring their ideas to the outside world, and it’s often not their first priority. They just have too many other things competing for their time." Others have pointed out that Google's project, called knol, is similar to other efforts to create authoritative topic pages, like Squidoo. There is at least one key factor in Google's favor though. Knol authors stand to make money for their efforts. "At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads," Google's Udi Manber, said in a statement announcing the service. "If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads." Those ad dollars would be more than professors make for writing journal articles, which are usually written for no compensation at all.

. . .

There is at least one key factor in Google’s favor though. Knol authors stand to make money for their efforts.

“At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads,” Google’s Udi Manber, said in a statement announcing the service. “If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads.”

Those ad dollars would be more than professors make for writing journal articles, which are usually written for no compensation at all.


Santa Clara University Virtual Library --- http://campustechnology.com/articles/48506 .

Carnegie Mellon Libraries: Digital Library Colloquium (video lectures) --- http://www.library.cmu.edu/Libraries/DLColloquia.html

Other Scholarly Search Engines (CrossRef and Scirus.) --- http://privateschool.about.com/b/a/116956.htm
Also see http://www.library.uq.edu.au/internet/scholsearch.html

Scholarly search tools

  • CiteBase
    Citebase is a trial service that allows researchers to search across free, full-text research literature ePrint archives, with results ranked according to criteria such as citation impact.

     

  • Gateway to ePrints
    A listing of ePrint servers and open access repository search tools.

     

  • Google Scholar
    A search tool for scholarly citations and abstracts, many of which link to full text articles, book chapters, working papers and other forms of scholarly publishing. It includes content from many open access journals and repositories.

     

  • OAIster
    A search tool for cross-archive searching of more than 540 separate digital collections and archives, including arXiv, CiteBase, ANU ePrints, ePrintsUQ, and others.

     

  • Scirus
    A search tool for online journals and Web sites in the sciences.
 

Scribd Wants to Become the YouTube for Documents --- http://www.scribd.com/categories
It has a long way to go, although it now has over 350,000 archived documents --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribd
There are many tutorials such as those in basic accounting.

"A YouTube for Documents?" by Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 21, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2762&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Borrowing a page from the popular video-sharing site YouTube, a new online service lets people upload and share their papers or entire books via a social-network interface. But will a format that works for videos translate to documents?

It’s called iPaper, and it uses a Flash-based document reader that can be embedded into a Web page. The experience of reading neatly formatted text inside a fixed box feels a bit like using an old microfilm reader, except that you can search the documents or e-mail them to friends.

The company behind the technology, Scribd, also offers a library of iPaper documents and invites users to set up an account to post their own written works. And, just like on YouTube, users can comment about each document, give it a rating, and view related works.

Also like on YouTube, some of the most popular items in the collection are on the lighter side. One document that is in the top 10 “most viewed” is called “It seems this essay was written while the guy was high, hilarious!” It is a seven-page paper that appears to have been written for a college course but is full of salty language. The document includes the written comments of the professor who graded it, and it ends with a handwritten note: “please see after class to discuss your paper.”

There’s plenty of serious material on the site, too — like the Iraq Study Group Report and an Educause report about the future of technology at colleges.

Bob Jensen's threads on free online documents are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on general education tutorials are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch


Librarian's Index to the Internet --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm#Librarian'sIndex

Google Book Search --- http://books.google.com/advanced_book_search 

Searching the Deep Web --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm#DeepWeb

UCLA Library Scholarly Search Helpers --- http://www2.library.ucla.edu/googlescholar/searchengines.cfm

University of Kansas Scholarly Search Helpers --- http://www.lib.ku.edu/technology/searchengines/scholar.shtml

Social scientists and business scholars often use SSRN (not free) --- http://www.ssrn.com/

If you have access to a college library, most colleges generally have paid subscriptions to enormous scholarly literature databases that are not available freely online. Serious scholars obtain access to these vast literature databases.

Open Access Shared Scholarship --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

University Channel (video and audio) ---  http://uc.princeton.edu/main/

Bob Jensen's links to electronic literature, including free online textbooks and other learning materials --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

Bob Jensen's search helpers are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm

 

Zotero software for  storing, retrieving, organizing, and annotating digital documents --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zotero
Zotero is a free, open source extension for the Firefox browser, that enables users to collect, manage, and cite research from all types of sources from the browser. It is partly a piece of reference management software, used to manage bibliographies and references when writing essays and articles. On many major research websites such as digital libraries, Google Scholar, or even Amazon.com, Zotero detects when a book, article, or other resource is being viewed and with a mouse click finds and saves the full reference information to a local file. If the source is an online article or web page, Zotero can optionally store a local copy of the source. Users can then add notes, tags, and their own metadata through the in-browser interface. Selections of the local reference library data can later be exported as formatted bibliographies.

The program is produced by the Center for History and New Media of George Mason University and is currently available in public beta. It is open and extensible, allowing other users to contribute citation styles and site translators, and more generally for others who are building digital tools for researchers to expand the platform. The name is from Albanian language "to master".

It is aimed at replacing the more cumbersome traditional reference management software, originally designed to meet the demands of offline research

"Mark of Zotero,"  by Scott McLemee, Inside Higher Ed, September 26, 2007 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/09/26/mclemee 

Zotero is a tool for storing, retrieving, organizing, and annotating digital documents. It has been available for not quite a year. I started using it about six weeks ago, and am still learning some of the fine points, but feel sufficient enthusiasm about Zotero to recommend it to anyone doing research online. If very much of your work involves material from JSTOR, for example – or if you find it necessary to collect bibliographical references, or to locate Web-based publications that you expect to cite in your own work — then Zotero is worth knowing how to use. (You can install it on your computer for free; more on that in due course.)

Now, my highest qualification for testing a digital tool is, perhaps, that I have no qualifications for testing a digital tool. That is not as paradoxical as it sounds. The limits of my technological competence are very quickly reached. My command of the laptop computer consists primarily of the ability to (1) turn it on and (2) type stuff. This condition entails certain disadvantages (the mockery of nieces and nephews, for example) but it makes for a pretty good guinea pig.

And in that respect, I can report that the folks at George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media have done an exemplary job in designing Zotero. A relatively clueless person can learn to use it without exhaustive effort.

Still, it seems as if institutions that do not currently do so might want to offer tutorials on Zotero for faculty and students who may lack whatever gene makes for an intuitive grasp of software. Academic librarians are probably the best people to offer instruction. Aside from being digitally savvy, they may be the people at a university in the best position to appreciate the range of uses to which Zotero can be put.

For the absolute newbie, however, let me explain what Zotero is — or rather, what it allows you to do. I’ll also mention a couple of problems or limitations. Zotero is still under development and will doubtless become more powerful (that is, more useful) in later releases. But the version now available has numerous valuable features that far outweigh any glitches.

Suppose you go online to gather material on some aspect of a book you are writing. In the course of a few hours, you might find several promising titles in the library catalog, a few more with Amazon, a dozen useful papers via JSTOR, and three blog entries by scholars who are thinking aloud about some matter tangential to your project.

Continued in article

 

 

 

Using Speech Recognition in a Search Engine
Boston-based startup EveryZing has launched a search engine that it hopes will change the way that people search for audio and video online. Formerly known as PodZinger, a podcast search engine, EveryZing is leveraging speech systems developed by technology company BBN that can convert spoken words into searchable text with about 80 percent accuracy. This bests other commercially available systems, says EveryZing CEO Tom Wilde.
Kate Greene, "More-Accurate Video Search:  Speech-recognition software could improve video search," MIT's Technology Review, June 12, 2007 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/18847/

 

University Channel (video and audio) ---  http://uc.princeton.edu/main/

 

The University Channel makes videos of academic lectures and events from all over the world available to the public. It is a place where academics can air their ideas and present research in a full-length, uncut format. Contributors with greater video production capabilities can submit original productions.

The University Channel presents ideas in a way commercial news or public affairs programming cannot. Because it is neither constrained by time nor dependent upon commercial feedback, the University Channel's video content can be broad and flexible enough to cover the full gamut of academic investigation.

While it has unlimited potential, the University Channel begins with a focus on public and international affairs, because this is an area which lends itself most naturally to a many-sided discussion. Perhaps of greatest advantage to universities who seek to expand their dialog with overseas institutions and international affairs, the University Channel can "go global" and become a truly international forum.

The University Channel aims to become, literally, a "channel" for important thought, to be heard in its entirety. Television has become so much a part of the fabric of our world that it should be more than an academic interest. It should be an academic tool.

The University Channel project is an initiative of Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, which is leading the effort to build university membership and distribution partners. Technical support, advice and services are provided through the generosity of Princeton University's Office of Information Technology. Digital video solutions courtesy of Princeton Server Group.

Search for University Lectures Available as Podcasts ---  http://uc.princeton.edu/main/
Bob Jensen's threads on podcasting, Apple's iPod U, RSS, RDF are at http://www.trinity.edu/~rjensen/245glosf.htm#ResourceDescriptionFramework

Also see http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm#Video

Advanced RSS Mixer Personal 3.1.58 --- http://www.advancedrssmixer.com/software.asp#compare 

For those users who are finding their current RSS feed software a bit unruly, they may wish to check out this latest version of the Advanced RSS Mixer. The application can be used to combine different RSS feeds into one aggregate feed, and it also contains a built-in RSS keyword filter. The basic interface is quite easy to use, and for keeping track of RSS feeds, this application is most handy. This version is compatible with computers running Windows 95 and newer.

FindSounds Search the Web for Sounds (audio) --- http://www.findsounds.com/

The Future of Search (with RDF, RSS, and something new from IBM)

The Taxonomy Warehouse is a fantastic search engine in terms of helpful categories --- http://www.taxonomywarehouse.com/ 

Blinkx finds links of possible interest to you based upon what you are reading.

Magellan Metasearch Tool for the Techie Types and Other Meta Search Tools 

Copyright Information and Dead Links

Cognitive Science ePrint Search Engine 

Health, Medical and Science Searching

Current state of scholarly cyberinfrastructure in the humanities and social sciences

Social Networking  

What search engines know about you when you search.   

CatsCradle 3.5 --- http://www.stormdance.net/software/catscradle/overview.htm 
Many websurfers enjoy going to sites that might be based in other countries, and as such, they might very well encounter a different language. With CatsCradle 3.5, these persons need worry no more, as this application can be used to translate entire websites in such languages as Thai, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian. This version is compatible with all computers running Windows XP or 2000. (Scout Report, September 1, 2006)

Message Aware's Online Directory of Acrobat PDF Files --- http://www.messageaware.com/information.html

Portal to Asian Internet Resources --- http://webcat.library.wisc.edu:3200/PAIR/index.html 

Business Finders (yellow pages), Knowledge Experts, and Other People (including biographical material)

The above link includes search helpers for missing persons

(also see USA People Search

Weblogs and Blogs 

Domain Names  

How does your site rate in terms of popularity among large numbers of users?

Foreign Language Translation Software  

Maps, Travel Information, and Local Area Searches for Businesses and Places of Interest

Search for Pictures and Images and Satellite Geographic Locator Imaging 

Quick link to Google's image search engine --- http://images.google.com/ 

From the Scout Report on June 3, 2011

Compfight --- http://compfight.com/ 

Compfight describes its purpose as "a search engine tailored for visual inspiration." It is a bit different than other mainstream photo search engines, and visitors can get started by clicking on the "Show me what compfight can do" link. Compfight returns grids of images organized by license type, text tags, and those that are "safe" for all audiences. Visitors can also sign up for their Twitter feed and also send them feedback. Compfight is compatible with all operating systems.

Pinterest is already the Visual Web’s most notable search engine—just not a very good one ---
http://readwrite.com/2014/01/06/why-pinterest-needs-to-upgrade-visual-search-stat#awesm=~ostdNJvHTObQYy


(This includes a link to Google's Public Transit Planning Guide)

Accounting and Other Topic Searches

Safe Sites for Kids

Live Person Search Help and Other Fee Consulting from Google Brokers 

AllTheWeb 

OAIster is a Mellon-funded project of the University of Michigan Digital Library Production Services. The goal is to create a wide-ranging collection of free, useful, previously difficult-to-access digital resources (what are digital resources?) that are easily searchable by anyone.

Search for Education Websites (including finding a college that's right for you)

Search for Library and Reference Databases  

Amazon.com offers a text search of books

Search for Internet, e-Business, and e-Commerce Websites

Search for Government Sites 

Search for Images on the Web

Use Images to Search for Websites 

Search for Products and Marketing on the Web

Search for Discussion Groups, Newsgroups, and Chat Room

Accounting Professional Site Links 
The CPA Team http://www.cpateam.com/  
Also see http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob.htm 

Search the InvisibleWeb  

Search Tips and Helpers (including how to limit searches by language and other filters)

Search for Education Organizations

Search for People and Missing Persons

Searching for Companies (Business Firms)

Searching for Training and Education Providers 

Advanced Search Systems 

Forum and Message Board Searching 

Open Content Sites Allow You to Add and Edit Content and Share  

Librarian's Index to the Internet

Library Spot

Searching for Book Table of Contents

How to find (Swap) Books and Compare Prices 

Searching for Audio Books, Clips, Lectures, Speeches, and Books

Search for Patterns in Text

Electronic Books, Poems, Videos, and Journals

Free audio book downloads --- http://www.freeclassicaudiobooks.com/

Dictionaries and encyclopedias --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries

Database Searching (including literature searches and knowledge portals)

Search for Online Communities on Over 700,000 Topics

Search for facts and statistics --- http://www.factmonster.com/ 
For economic statistics, go to http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm#EconStatistics 

Getting an Answer Is One Thing, Learning Is Another  

Helpers When Searching for News and Events 

Helpers in Attracting the World to Your Website

Newer Searching Ideas

Searching the Deep Web  

Subject Index to Literature on Electronic Sources of Information http://library.usask.ca/~dworacze/SUBJIN_A.HTM 

What are the search terms most frequently used in search engines?

Craigslist:  Popular Online Classifieds
"Wanted: Just About Everything," by Daniel Terdiman, Wired News, February 8, 2005 --- http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,66530,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_2 
To go to Craigslist, click on http://www.craigslist.org/ 
Bob Jensen's shopping helpers are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob3.htm 

Legal Searching and Government Search Sites  

Accounting Software Vendors

Newspapers --- http://ejw.i8.com/newsweb.htm

Search for Quotations --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/default.htm#quotations 

Bob Jensen's overview of electronic books and custom publishing --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm

Electronic Sources of Information: A Bibliography http://library.usask.ca/~dworacze/BIBLIO.HTM 

Web Search Engines FAQS:  http://www.infotoday.com/searcher/oct01/price.htm 

Bob Jensen's Links to Glossaries  --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/245gloss.htm 

Encyclopedias, Dictionaries, and Glossaries --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob3.htm 

How to report a crime or deal with a lost wallet --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud.htm#ThingsToKnow 

The Bible With Hot Links (God's Yellow Pages) --- http://web2.airmail.net/dpelc/yellow/

Fun and Useful Stuff --- http://ejw.i8.com/fun.htm 

KidStuff                        Movies                                    Credit Bureaus NEW
About the Home            Inspiration                                Electronic Directories                     
Home Journals              Time and Weather                    Electronic Greetings       
Travel and Tourism        Numbers & Measurements      Books                           
Travel Coupons             Information, Please                  Hoax Sites 
Vehicles                         Free Stuff                                Dead Links Archive

          Bob Jensen's helpers on similar items are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob3.htm 

Bob Jensen's Bookmarks --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob.htm 

Over 30,000 Free Academic Literature and Multimedia Items from EServer (including some "Bad Subjects") --- http://eserver.org 

The EServer, founded in 1990, is now based at Iowa State University. We are increasing efforts to publish new works (31846 so far). 

The Academy miscellaneous resources for students and faculty
Art/Architecture links to art, architecture, and aesthetic theory
Audio and Video audio recordings of scholarly presentations
Bad Subjects political education for everyday life
Books book-length nonfiction and miscellaneous literatures
Calls for Papers calls for conference papers and journal articles
Cultronix a journal of contemporary art and cultural theory
Cultural Logic an electronic journal of marxist theory and practice
Cultural Theory readings in cultural studies and critical theory
Cyber Tech/Culture discussing links between technology and culture
Drama a collection of plays, modern works and classics
Early Modern Culture works and discussions in Renaissance studies
Education resources for both students and teachers
Eighteenth Century a site for eighteenth-century cultural history
Electronic Labyrinth a study of the implications of hypertext for writers
Feminism select resources in feminism and women's studies
Fiction novels and short fiction, classics and new works
Film & Television works in film, television and other media studies
Gender/Sexuality some resources on gender, sex and sexuality
Government materials in government, law, and their social implications
History works and links in history and historiography
Home Pages the personal home pages of EServer members
Internet resources about the internet: guides, essays and articles
 Journals links to academic journals and popular magazines
Languages resources in language studies and theory
Libraries links to worldwide library catalogues
Literary Events events for any date from literature and the arts
The Mamet Review the journal of the David Mamet Society
Marx & Engels a collection of writings in economic and social theory
Multimedia a small collection of artwork, audio, graphics and video
Music a vast collection of works in music and music theory
Philosophy writings by modern and classical philosophers
Pittsburgh information about the city and its neighborhoods
Poetry original and classic verse, literary and poetic theory
Race materials on race and ethnicity in the U.S.
Recipes vegetarian recipes, and links to good related sites
Reference select reference materials useful for research
Rhetoric scholarly and pedagogical resources for rhetoricians
Software freeware and shareware for your computer
Sparks a publisher of fiction, poetry, music, art and spoken word
Sudden original poetry that reflects imagination and intelligence
 Tech Comm Library a web portal for tech, sci and professional communication
Thoreau Reader the works of American philosopher Henry D. Thoreau
Web Design a site for discussion of new media design
Zine375

Specialized Search Engines

Searching for Knowledge on the Web
Finding Dulcinea --- http://www.findingdulcinea.com/home.html
Tries to be your "Librarian on the Web"

Question
What new online people finders are making it easier to find the whereabouts of people in your past?
Hint:  One of the sites has very large and pointed ears.

Zaba Search free database of names, addresses, birth dates, and phone numbers. Social security numbers and background checks are also available for a fee --- http://www.zabasearch.com/

"Searching for Humans:  Various websites are trying to make it easier to find friends and colleagues online," by Erica Naone, MIT's Technology Review, August 20, 2007 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19270/ 

Jaideep Singh, cofounder of the new people-search engine Spock, says he wants to build a profile for every person in the world. To do this, he plans to combine the power of search algorithms with online social networks.

Singh says he got the idea for Spock while looking for people with specific areas of expertise among his contacts in Microsoft Outlook. Although he has two or three thousand people listed, he could only find people he was already thinking about.

Spock is designed to solve that problem by allowing users to search for tags--such as "saxophonist" or "venture capitalist"--and then view a list of people associated with those tags. Singh could have manually entered tags for each of his contacts into Microsoft Outlook, but capturing every interest of each particular individual would be time-consuming. Spock uses a combination of human and machine intelligence to automatically come up with the tags: search algorithms identify possible tags, and users can vote on their relevance or add new tags. Registered users can add private tags to another person's profile to organize their contacts based on information that they don't want to share. For example, a contentious associate might be privately labeled as such.

The social-network component of the website introduces an element of crowd commentary into the search process. George W. Bush is tagged "miserable failure," with a vote of 87 to 31 in favor of the tag's relevance as of this writing. Users aren't allowed to vote anonymously, and the tag links to the profiles of people who voted.

Singh hopes social networks will also help with one of the main problems in people search: teaching the system to recognize that two separate entries refer to a single person--a problem called entity resolution. For example, a single person might have a MySpace page, a Linked In profile, and a write-up on a company website. Steven Whang, an entity-resolution researcher at Stanford University, says that there are several aspects to the problem: getting the system to compare two entries and decide whether they are related, merging related entries without repetition, and comparing information from a myriad of possible sources online. Finally, Whang says, there is a risk of merging two entries that should not be merged, as in the case of a name like Robin, which is used by both men and women.

Many of the people-search engines try to get around these problems by encouraging people to claim and manage their own profiles, although Whang notes that this is a labor-intensive approach. Although there are many sites where people could claim their profiles, Singh says he thinks one engine will eventually dominate, and people will make the effort to claim profiles there. Bryan Burdick, chief operating officer of the business-search site Zoominfo, says that 10,000 people a week claim their profiles on Zoom, in spite of having to provide their credit-card numbers to do so.

Singh has also introduced the Spock Challenge, a competition to design a better entity-resolution algorithm. He says that 1,400 researchers have already downloaded the data set, and they will compete for a $50,000 prize, which will be awarded in November.

Continued in article

The Accoona Super Target search engine is at http://www.accoona.com/
That being said, Accoona looks, at first glance, not much different than other search engines — including Google itself. Its bare-bones initial interface follows the same design: A central search field with buttons that let you search the entire Web or confine your search to news or business sources. Searching On Scott I started with a general Web search on "Scott Joplin" on Accoona and Google, and found quite a bit of disparity in the results (112,393 for Accoona and 4,130,000 for Google). When I did a search on the phrase "mp3 players," I got similar results: Accoona came up with 6,031,343 results, while Google boasted 187,000,000. Quite frankly, while I appreciated Google's higher numbers, that alone wouldn't have made Google my preferred search engine — how many people go past the fifth page of results, anyway? There was also some variation in which sites came up in what order, but again, there were no really important differences.
Barbara Krasnoff, "Accoona: A New Google Alternative? The latest search engine to hit the Web, Accoona offers additional business info and a nice filtering ability. But is that enough? InternetWeek, March 20, 2006 ---  http://internetweek.cmp.com/handson/183700172

Academics should remember that Google Scholar greatly narrows down the search hits --- http://scholar.google.com/

Also see Google Knol --- http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/encouraging-people-to-contribute.html

A good place to start if you're looking for something http://www.melissadata.com/Lookups/
(Addresses, People, Zip Codes, Maps, etc.)

Google (Shopping) Catalogs --- http://catalogs.google.com/cathp

Yahoo (Shopping) Catalogs --- http://snipurl.com/YahooCatalogs

Bethuman Database --- http://gethuman.com/us/
credit finance government hardware insurance internet mobile pharmacy products shipping software stores telco travel tv/satellite utilities

O'Keefe Accounting Library Searches http://library.sau.edu/bestinfo/Majors/Accnt/accindex.htm

The Bible With Hot Links (God's Yellow Pages) --- http://web2.airmail.net/dpelc/yellow/

Fee Based Google Specialized Services (including an enterprise-level search appliance)
Google Inc. added two beefier Minis to its line of business search appliances.
The Mountain View, Calif.company said Minis are now available with capacities of 200,000 documents and 300,000 documents for $5,995 and $8,995, respectively. The new versions were in addition to the current 100,000-document appliance that sells for $2,995. Google also sells an enterprise-level appliance that can search up to 15 million documents. The device starts at $30,000 for searching up to 500,000 documents.
Antone Gonsalves, "Google Unveils Two Search Appliances," InternetWeek, January 12, 2006 --- http://www.internetweek.cmp.com/showArticle.jhtml?sssdmh=dm4.163237&articleId=175804113

 

Question
What is Boxxet (box set) and why might it be the next big thing when searching on the Web in your discipline?

At the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego this week, a new software application was introduced, called Boxxet (pronounced "box set"), which allows online interest groups to form by aggregating content from users, instead of the more traditional way of networking around a person or event. The software is meant to build communities by allowing users to gather and rate search information. It operates on the assumption that in a group of 100 people, at least three will rate items for relevance. Boxxet won't be available to the public for another couple of months, but free invitations to try it out are available on their website. The software is meant to build communities by allowing users to gather and rate search information. It operates on the assumption that in a group of 100 people, at least three will rate items for relevance. Boxxet won't be available to the public for another couple of months, but free invitations to try it out are available on their website.Conference organizer Tim O'Reilly, who cited Boxxet in his keynote address, says he's big on the company because it solves a fundamental issue with social software. "The problem with social networks is they're artificial -- they aren't 'your' network," he says. "Boxxet is an infrastructure to let you develop your own social network."
Michael Fitzgerald, "Beyond Google: Collective Searching A new kind of search engine could make the act of Web searching more sociable," MIT's Technology Review, March 9, 2006 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/InfoTech/wtr_16526,258,p1.html

 

Beyond Google with Specialized Search Engines
Instead of trawling through billions of Web pages to find results, the way the big engines do, vertical engines limit their searches to industry-specific sites. And they usually serve up lists of actual things -- such as houses for sale or open jobs -- instead of links to pages where you might find them. So you spend less time skimming through irrelevant links to find what you want. On top of that, the sites let you filter the results by factors such as salary, price or location. "Often, a specialized database can take you directly" to the most useful information and save you time, says Gary Price, news editor of the Search Engine Watch site. "Every useful result can't be in the first few results from a major Web engine, and that's where most people look."
Kevin J. Delaney, "Beyond Google:  Yes, there are other search engines. And some may even work better for you," The Wall Street Journal, December 19, 2005; Page R1 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113459260842822579.html?mod=todays_us_the_journal_report

Here's a look at some common search tasks -- and a sampling of specialized search engines that will get you what you're looking for.

YOU'RE LOOKING FOR
a book

SEARCH TOOLS
isbn.nu,   BookFinder,   RedLightGreen,   NetLibrary

 

YOU'RE LOOKING FOR
job listings

SEARCH TOOLS
Simply Hired,   Indeed,   Yahoo HotJobs

 

YOU'RE LOOKING FOR
information from your industry

SEARCH TOOLS
GlobalSpec,   Scirus,   IT.com,   LawCrawler

 

YOU'RE LOOKING FOR
a home to buy or rent

SEARCH TOOLS
Trulia,   HomePages,   Oodle

 

YOU'RE LOOKING FOR
airline flights, hotels

SEARCH TOOLS
SideStep,   Kayak,   FareChase,   Mobissimo

 

YOU'RE LOOKING FOR
a person's phone number and postal or email address

SEARCH TOOL
Argali White & Yellow

 

YOU'RE LOOKING FOR
entries from reference sources

SEARCH TOOL
Answers.com

If you go to a big search engine looking for background on a certain topic, you'll usually get a series of links to other pages -- which means more surfing to get what you want. Answers.com, formerly known as GuruNet, cuts out the middleman by collecting all the information and organizing it into a Web page.

Type "Internet" into the site, for example, and it displays a comprehensive history and explanation of the Internet, with entries culled from the Computer Desktop Encyclopedia, Columbia University Press Encyclopedia, Wikipedia and other sources. The top results from Google on a recent day, by contrast, included the sites of Microsoft's Internet Explorer software and an online movie database.

"We see ourselves as complementary to search engines," says Bob Rosenschein, chairman and chief executive of Answers Corp. in Jerusalem, which offers the service. Indeed, Google's results page for some queries includes a "definition" link that takes users to the Answers.com results for the same query.

Also see
Business Finders (yellow pages), Knowledge Experts, and Other People (including biographical material)

Crime Maps
National Institute of Justice’s MAPS Program --- http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/maps/  

From The Washington Post on December 19, 2005

What government organization recently revamped its Web site to make searching its public databases easier?

A. Department of Health and Human Services
B. Environmental Protection Agency
C. National Archives
D. Library of Congress

December 20, 2005 reply from Richard J. Campbell [campbell@RIO.EDU]

Think of this site as a collection of links for those few subjects that Bob Jensen can’t cover.

http://del.icio.us/ 

Richard J. Campbell

 

 


Touch User Interface Links Podcasts To Printed Text
Somatic Digital LLC said Friday it has developed technology that lets publishers integrate podcasts into their paper and ink content. The tool is offered through the BookDesigner software suite. The software tool allows publishers tie a podcast to a paper-based text, supplement or magazine, the company said. The reader touches the page in a printed book and a podcast is directed to the reader’s computer or download to an MP3 player through Bluetooth technology. The podcast can serve as a supplement to the paper-based product bringing new revenue opportunities to publishers and authors, the company said.
Laurie Sullivazn, "Touch User Interface Links Podcasts To Printed Text," Information Week, December 16, 2005 --- http://www.internetweek.cmp.com/showArticle.jhtml?sssdmh=dm4.161133&articleId=175004719
 


Question
How do you get a great Wikipedia module about yourself?

Reply from Bob Jensen on August 20, 2014

Hi David,

There are a few academic accountants written up in Wikipedia, but the modules are generally sparse.

For example, first look up the Wikipedia module for Bill Beaver ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Beaver

Then look up the Accounting Hall of Fame Module for Bill Beaver ---
http://fisher.osu.edu/departments/accounting-and-mis/the-accounting-hall-of-fame/membership-in-hall/william-henry-beaver/

Then compare the Wikipedia module of Bill Beaver with that of some Wikipedia modules that go on and on such as the Wikipedia module for Steven Pinker ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Pinker
Especially note the cross referencing of Pinker to other parts of Wikipedia.

People are not allowed to write their own Wikipedia modules. I think the great Wikipedia modules for people like Steven Pinker are initially written by their publishers who consider a great Wikipedia module of an author important to selling that author's books.

The AICPA published the book of Bob Herz. I think as a publisher the AICPA is missing the boat by not writing a fantastic Wikipedia module for Bob.

Some universities are better at PR than other universities. For example, the University of Georgia has a Wikipedia module for "its people" ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_University_of_Georgia_people

Here are my main points in this message:

  1. If you published a book, have your publisher write a fantastic Wikipedia module about you.
     
  2. If you work for a university, have your university take a careful look at the University of Georgia's Wikipedia module for "its people."
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_University_of_Georgia_people
     
  3. I think the University of Georgia's modules can be improved upon. I would have senior faculty write their own modules and then have the PR department launder those modules before submitting them to Wikipedia.

 

 


 

Wolfram Alpha --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfram_Alpha

Wolfram Alpha: Computational Knowledge Engine --- http://www.wolframalpha.com

Bob Jensen's Illustrations on the Use of Wolfram Alpha in Cost Accounting ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theorylearningcurves.htm

"23 Ways To Make Money Using The Nerdiest Site (Wolfram Alpha) On The Internet," by Walter Hickey, Business Insider, July 9, 2013 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-use-wolfram-alpha-for-finance-2013-7

Developed by the "Smartest Guy on the Planet"
"32 Tricks You Can Do With Wolfram Alpha, The Most Useful Site In The History Of The Internet," by Walter Hickey, Business Insider, July 9, 2013 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/awesome-things-you-can-do-with-wolfram-alpha-2013-7

Some Things You Might Want to Know About the Wolfram Alpha (WA) Search Engine:  The Good and The Evil
as Applied to Learning Curves (Cumulative Average vs. Incremental Unit)
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theorylearningcurves.htm

Video:  Wolfram Alpha has gotten much better --- http://www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html
 It is best described as a search engine that will perform complicated computations


Wolfram Alpha --- http://www.wolframalpha.com/
Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfram_Alpha

This is an amazing innovation from one of the all-time geniuses of mathematics and computing
"Computer Genius Builds Language That Lets Anyone Calculate Anything," by Andy Kiersz, Business Insider, March 10, 2014 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/wolfram-language-demo-2014-3 

Controversial mathematician Stephen Wolfram is about to release a programming language with the goal of being able to quickly do just about any calculation or visualization on just about any kind of data a person could want.

Wolfram, creator of the widely used mathematical software Mathematica and the "computational knowledge engine" Wolfram|Alpha, has announced the forthcoming release of the Wolfram Language, the underlying programming language powering those two pieces of software.

Wolfram describes and demos the language in a video posted late last month:---
http://blog.wolfram.com/2014/02/24/starting-to-demo-the-wolfram-language/

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's illustrations about how to use the traditional Wolfram Alpha for both computing and printing of equations ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theorylearningcurves.htm

Jensen Comment
Increasingly professors complain that Wolfram Alpha inhibits learning in mathematics unless assignments, quizzes, and examinations are administered in tightly controlled conditions where students cannot gain access to Wolfram Alpha.

 


"Wolfram Alpha's Second Act Following a sharp drop in interest, the "computational knowledge engine" pins hopes on API--and homework," by David Talbot, MIT's Technology Review, October 16, 2009 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/24254/?nlid=2439&a=f

The summer months saw a sharp drop in user interest in Wolfram Alpha, the online "computational knowledge engine" that calculates everything from planetary distances to cholesterol levels and generates (from the topics it knows) customized charts and graphics not available from general search engines. In the peak days after the May 15 launch, traffic soared to around 2.8 million daily visitors--but then hit a trough of 200,000 in July, according to the company. But now, with traffic now drifting back toward the 300,000 mark, the site is pinning its hopes partly on a new application programming interface (API) to leverage the online tool in websites, online publishing, desktop applications and mobile devices. An iPhone app will be one of the early examples.

It will be interesting to see how third-parties leverage the depth of Wolfram Alpha's knowledge in math, science, geography, and engineering beyond the simple search-engine-like interface that now confronts users. Right now, the engine has a ways to go to meet the goal of its brainchild, the physicist Stephen Wolfram, to "make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone."

The rebound toward 300,000 visitors may reflect a back-to-school bump, with students seeing the engine as a great tool for doing their math and science homework, according to Schoeller Porter, who heads up Wolfram's API program. (Indeed, the engine is throwing a homework day event next week to promote further such use.) "We had an enormous launch with a huge amount of interest and a lot of traffic. The traffic fell off, and we fully expected that; it was a nice relaxation for us, and it let us fix code and put in new features," he told me this morning. "It followed a kind of---I won't say overhyped--but a well-hyped launch." Wolfram Alpha is built on Mathematica--Stephen Wolfram's comprehensive repository of mathematical and scientific formulae--and fed by datasets curated by Wolfram Research.

Tags: Internet, search, Web 2.0, search engine, wolfram alpha

Comments

Looking the gift horse in the mouth I have a great personal and potential professional interest in Wolfram Alpha, but I have a significant amount of uncertainty about the commercial terms of the yet to be determined business model that will eventually be settled on. I'm sure many others share this concern, and it will limit adoption of Wolfram Alpha and its API until clarified.

Bob Jensen

Bob Jensen's search helpers are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on tricks and tools of the trade ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm


 "What's the Best Q&A Site?" by Wade Roush, MIT's Technology Review, December 22, 2006 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/InfoTech/17932/ 

 

Everyone knows a lot about something, whether it's quasars, quilting, or crayons. But the converse is also true: there are a lot of things that most people know nothing about. And unfortunately, that doesn't seem to stop them from sharing their opinions.

That's one lesson I took away from my recent survey of the growing collection of social question-and-answer websites, where members can post questions, answer other members' questions, and rate other members' answers to their questions--all for free. The Wikipedia-like, quintessentially Web 2.0 premise of these ventures--which include Yahoo Answers, Microsoft's Live QnA, AnswerBag, Yedda, Wondir, and Amazon's new Askville--is that the average citizen is an untapped well of wisdom.

But it takes a lot of sifting to get truly useful information from these sites. Each boasts a core of devoted members who leave thorough and well-documented answers to the questions they deem worthy. And most of the sites have systems for rating the performance or experience of answerers, which makes it easier to assess their reliability, while also inspiring members to compete with one another to give the best answers. But not all of the Q&A sites do this equally well; after all, the companies that run these sites are selling advertising space, not information.

In an attempt to flush out the best of the bunch, I've spent the past few days trying to identify what unique advantages each one offers. I also devised a diabolically difficult, two-part test. First, I searched each site's archive for existing answers to the question "Is there any truth to the five-second rule?" (I meant the rule about not eating food after it's been on the floor for more than five seconds, not the basketball rule about holding.)

Second, I posted the same two original questions at each site: "Why did the Mormons settle in Utah?" and "What is the best way to make a grilled cheese sandwich?" The first question called for factual, historical answers, while the second simply invited people to share their favorite sandwich-making methods and recipes. I awarded each site up to three points for the richness and originality of its features, and up to three points for the quality of the answers to my three questions, for a total of 12 possible points.

The Results:
1. AnswerBag --- http://www.answerbag.com/ 
2. Askville --- http://askville.amazon.com/askville/Index.do#answers
3. Live QnA --- http://qna.live.com/
4. Wondir --- http://www.wondir.com/wondir/jsp/index.jsp
5. Yahoo Answers --- http://answers.yahoo.com/
6. Yedda --- http://yedda.com/

AnswerBag

Features: Launched in 2003, AnswerBag is one of the oldest Q&A sites. Members get points for asking and answering questions as well as for rating other members' questions and answers. After earning a certain number of points, members "level up" from Beginner to Novice, Contributor, Wiz, Authority, Expert, and ultimately Professor. Bloggers or webmasters can embed customized AnswerBag "widgets" in their own pages, so that visitors to a site about restoring antiques, for example, can ask AnswerBag members questions about restoration. Points: 1

Is there any truth to the five-second rule? All of AnswerBag's answers about the five-second rule pertained to basketball. Points: 0

Why did the Mormons settle in Utah? By press time--two and a half days after I posted the question--I had received only one answer at AnswerBag. Here it is, edited for brevity (like all the answers quoted here): "The church believes that God directed Brigham Young, Joseph Smith's successor as President of the Church, to call for the Mormons to organize and migrate west, beyond the western frontier of the United States to start their own community away from traditional American society." That's more or less in line with the best answers to this question at other sites. Points: 1

What is the best way to make a grilled cheese sandwich? I rated the answers to this question purely according to their mouthwateringness. The best AnswerBag answer, out of six: "Grate cheddar cheese or similiar [sic] and then add about a quarter of the same amount of Lancashire, cheshire or similiar [sic] crumbly white cheese. Mix them together with a couple of spoonfuls of milk until the consistency goes like thick cottage cheese. Add lots of black pepper. Spread on lightly toasted buttered bread and put back under the grill until the cheese melts and is golden brown. Delish." Points: 2

Continued in article

 

Jensen Comment
None of these free services is very good for accounting questions. For me, Wondir did better with accounting questions than the other alternatives, but none of these sites would be very helpful in answering questions about accounting and tax rules.


Magellan Metasearch  --- http://sourceforge.net/projects/magellan2/ 
Metasearch Tool for the Techie Types 

 

Magellan is a perl, CGI-based meta search engine, aimed at being highly evolutive. It provides an extended query language that enables it to perform complex requests and check the results before showing them.

Bob Jensen's threads on OLAP, XML, and XBRL --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/XBRLandOLAP.htm 

 


Current state of scholarly cyberinfrastructure in the humanities and social sciences

 

From the University of Illinois Issues in Scholarly Communication Blog

 

"Our Cultural Commonwealth"

The American Council of Learned Societies has just issued a report, "Our Cultural Commonwealth," assessing the current state of scholarly cyberinfrastructure in the humanities and social sciences and making a series of recommendations on how it can be strengthened, enlarged and maintained in the future.

John Unsworth, Dean and Professor, Graduate School of Library and Information Science here at Illinois, chaired the Commission that authored the report.

The report is at http://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/

 


 

Deep Linking Explained: The differences between basic deep links, deferred deep links and contextual deep links ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-deep-linking-deferred-deep-links-vs-contextual-deep-links-2016-7

. . .

What Are Deep Links?

Deep links are mobile links that operate much like hyperlinks, but instead of directing users to a web page, deep links send them to a specific screen within a mobile application. There are three types of deep linking technology in use today: basic deep links, deferred links, and contextual deep links.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's Search Helpers ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm

 

 


The Wall Street Journal increased the billing rate for me to $26 per month. This is reasonable considering that this thick thing is delivered to my mailbox six days each week.

However, if I choose only the digital electronic version with no hard copy delivery, I only save $4 per month --- which is now a bummer price, especially for students.

However, there is a simple way to read very current articles in the WSJ electronically for free using Google Advanced Search using the "All the words" search box ---
http://www.google.com/advanced_search .
Instructions are given at
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-read-the-wsj-for-free-online-2009-6
Thank you Chris Nolan for the heads up.

Those of you who have access to your campus library electronic databases can probably access archived WSJ articles using database subscriptions paid for by your college or university.

The New York Times has a different free-access policy. I think you get something like 15 articles free per month. However, for me this seems to increase if I change Web browsers --- say from Firefox to Internet Explorer. Please don't ask me why this works or if it is totally ethical.

Students and faculty of a college might be able to able to have free access to NYT archives using databases subscribed toy by their college. One such database is IfnoTrac Newstands.


Questions
How can you search for text embedded in stored images, especially books and articles downloaded as images rather than text?

What if you could collect, in one well-organized, searchable, private digital repository, all the notes you create, clips from Web pages and emails you want to recall, dictated audio memos, photos, key documents, and more?

Evernote ---  http://www.evernote.com/
Perhaps the real "killer" feature of the program is that it has optical character recognition (OCR), which allows users to search for text within stored images.
(there are free and fee options)

Features for Windows

  • Create notes containing text, webclips, snapshots, to-dos, PDFs, and more
  • Take photos of everything from whiteboards to wine labels and Evernote will make them searchable
  • Premium users can attach any type of file to their notes
  • Windows User Guide | PDF

 

From the Scout Report on February 12, 2010

Evernote 3.5.1.1410 --- http://www.evernote.com/ 

Looking to remember an image you found? Or perhaps a helpful email link? Evernote makes this all possible, and it can be used with a range of mobile devices as well. The program works as a note-taking application as well, and everything a user does with the program is automatically synchronized to their Evernote account. Perhaps the real "killer" feature of the program is that it has optical character recognition (OCR), which allows users to search for text within stored images. This version of Evernote is compatible with computers running Windows XP and Vista or Mac OS X 10.5 or 10.6.

"Digital File Cabinet You Can Bring With You Anywhere," by Walter S. Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal, January 20, 2010 ---
http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20100120/evernote-review/

What if you could collect, in one well-organized, searchable, private digital repository, all the notes you create, clips from Web pages and emails you want to recall, dictated audio memos, photos, key documents, and more? And what if that repository was constantly synchronized, so it was accessible through a Web browser and through apps on your various computers and smart phones?

Well, such a service exists. And it’s free. It’s called Evernote. I’ve been testing it for about a week on a multiplicity of computers and phones, and found that it works very well. Evernote is an excellent example of hybrid computing—using the “cloud” online to store data and perform tasks, while still taking advantage of the power and offline ability of local devices.

The idea behind Evernote is to be a sort of digital file cabinet. It allows you to create “notebooks” containing items called notes. These notes can range from text to photos to many kinds of attached files. You can locate, group and peruse them quickly, without having to dig through a computer’s file system. When I first reviewed the product, back in 2005, Evernote was a Windows-only, purely local information organizer. Now it’s a multi-platform, Internet-savvy, synchronized place for your ideas.

You can sign up for Evernote free at evernote.com, and use it entirely as a Web-based application, through any of the major Web browsers. But Evernote also comes in customized versions for a staggering array of devices: Windows and Macintosh computers, and for all the major smart phones, including the iPhone; the BlackBerry; phones running Google’s Android operating system; the latest Palm (PALM) phones; and Windows Mobile phones.

This week, Evernote, which is made by a small Silicon Valley company of the same name, is introducing a totally revamped Windows version that brings the platform into parity with the company’s previously more advanced Macintosh version.

I tested Evernote on two Macs and two Windows PCs, as well as an iPhone, a Palm Pre phone and the new Nexus One phone from Google (GOOG). I also tried free plug-ins the company offers that make it easy to insert all or part of a Web page or email into an Evernote note. These are available for the Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Chrome Web browsers, and for the Outlook email program. There are also system-wide Evernote buttons, which make capturing notes quicker, for Windows and the Mac.

I found Evernote works well for gathering ideas for business or personal projects, hobbies, or events you’re planning. When you see something or think of something you want to add, you can do it from whatever computer or phone is handy, and it will shortly appear on all of them.

Here are a few examples of how I used Evernote. I typed notes to myself on my desktops and laptops. I dictated a reminder to myself using the Evernote app on my iPhone. I used the Nexus One’s camera to take a picture of a person’s business card. I also copied text from Web pages, emails, and Word documents, and pasted them as notes. I even attached whole files to notes.

Within a few minutes, all of these notes were available on my personal Evernote Web site and from within all the Evernote apps on my computers and phones. I could search through them, email them, print them, group them with related items, or edit and annotate them.

Every Evernote user also gets a unique Evernote email address, and anything you email to that address goes into your repository as a new note. You also can use Twitter to get a note into Evernote.

The program has a few extra-cool features. If you create a note from a photo that includes printing, Evernote’s servers will try to figure out the words and make them searchable. This worked well in my tests with photos of business cards. And some smart-phone apps can save items directly into Evernote notes. One example I tested successfully was the Associated Press news app on the iPhone.

There are a few minor downsides to Evernote. While there’s no overall limit to the amount of data you can store, you can only upload 40 megabytes a month with the free version, attach certain types of files to notes, and you are forced to view ads. A premium version, which costs $5 a month, or $45 a year, increases the quota to 500 megabytes monthly, removes the ads, allows attaching any file type, and adds more features.

Also, I found the Evernote programs and apps, while similar, differ slightly depending on the capabilities of the platform they run on. Among the phone versions, for instance, the iPhone app is by far the most full-featured, and is currently the only one that can store whole notebooks offline, though the Android version is due to get that feature soon. Finally, the Evernote plug-in crashed Outlook on one of my Windows computers.

But, all in all, I found Evernote to be a valuable, easy-to-use tool that simplified my work and made good use of both the Internet and all my devices.

Jensen Comment
The video video introduction and links to a video library are at http://www.evernote.com/about/video/
This is a product that I am probably going to install.

Bob Jensen's technology bookmarks are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob4.htm

Bob Jensen's links to free electronic literature (some of which download as images rather than text) are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/electronicliterature.htm

Bob Jensen's search helpers are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm


Standardized Test Helpers

I received this message on March 26, 2010

I am a academic volunteer in website TestPrepPractice.net. Our website is related with various standardized tests like GMAT, GRE, TOEFL, MCAT, LSAT, SAT and 50 other major tests. We offer ample information through detailed articles regarding each aspect of these tests. Our website also contains free practice tests, customized according to the format and syllabus of the respective tests. The content of the website is prepared by our efficient team of academic volunteers.

This is in reference to the

page:http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2007/tidbits070605.htm

In the above-mentioned page, there are  links and resources helpful for the students. We would be obliged if you could add our website TestPrepPractice.net's free practice test page link in the above-mentioned page. Students gathering authentic information and practice material online shall greatly benefit from the link.

You are humbly requested to assess the quality of free information and free practice tests offered to students by us for different tests and then decide to place a link in your article.

You shall agree that a link to the following pages would be highly beneficial to students preparing for standardized tests and for students looking for good quality test prep information online.

 

http://www.testpreppractice.net/

http://www.testpreppractice.net/LSAT/Free-Online-LSAT-Practice-Tests.aspx

http://www.testpreppractice.net/GRE/Free-Online-GRE-Practice-Tests.aspx

http://www.testpreppractice.net/GMAT/Free-Online-GMAT-Practice-Tests.aspx

http://www.testpreppractice.net/TOEFL/Free-Online-TOEFL-Practice-Tests.aspx

http://www.testpreppractice.net/MCAT/Free-Online-MCAT-Practice-Tests.aspx

http://www.testpreppractice.net/SAT/Free-Online-SAT-Practice-Tests.aspx

 

Kindly, let me know if you have any queries or concerns; I shall be glad to assist you in every way possible. Thank you for your time and consideration.

Regards,
XXXXX
Lead Volunteer, http://www.TestPrepPractice.net

 


Bob Jensen's Favorite Encyclopedias

Free pass to the "most comprehensive online research storehouse"
It's a lofty ambition -- the Internet equivalent of nonprofit public television: a user-supported resource that pays top academics to create authoritative maps, articles, and links to third-party content related to virtually any scholarly topic. But the vast scope of the project hasn't stopped former high-flying Silicon Valley entrepreneur Joe Firmage from building Digital Universe, a commercial-free storehouse of information four years in the making.
"A Free Online Encyclopedia:  Digital Universe, a nonprofit website, aims to be the most comprehensive online research storehouse," MIT's Technology Review, March 6, 2006 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/TR/wtr_16512,323,p1.html

The Digital Universe site is at http://www.digitaluniverse.net/

Of course never forget the open sharing encyclopedia blockbuster called Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Chinese-language version of Wikipedia
China's biggest Internet search site, Baidu.com, has launched a Chinese-language encyclopedia inspired by the cooperative reference site Wikipedia, which the communist government bars China's Web surfers from seeing. The Chinese service, which debuted in April, carries entries written by users, but warns that it will delete content about sex, terrorism and attacks on the communist government. Government censors blocked access last year to Wikipedia, whose registered users have posted more than 1.1 million entries, apparently due to concern about its references to Tibet, Taiwan and other topics. The emergence of Baidu's encyclopedia reflects efforts by Chinese entrepreneurs to take advantage of conditions created by the government's efforts to simultaneously promote and control Internet use.
"Baidu, the most popular search engine in China, has launched a Chinese-language version of Wikipedia," MIT's Technology Review, May 18, 2006 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=16896

"Co-Founder of Wikipedia Starts Spinoff With Academic Editors," University of Illinois Issues in Scholarly Communications blog, October 18, 2006 --- http://www.library.uiuc.edu/blog/scholcomm/

Can scholars build a better version of Wikipedia? Larry Sanger, a co-founder who has since become a critic of the open-source encyclopedia, intends to find out.

This week Mr. Sanger announced the creation of the Citizendium, an online, interactive encyclopedia that will be open to public contributors but guided by academic editors. The site aims to give academics more authorial control -- and a less combative environment -- than they find on Wikipedia, which affords all users the same editing privileges, whether they have any proven expertise or not.

The Citizendium, whose name is derived from "citizen's compendium," will soon start a six-week pilot project to determine many of its basic rules and operating procedures.

Mr. Sanger left Wikipedia at the end of 2002 because he felt it was too easy on vandals and too hard on scholars. There is a lot to like about Wikipedia, he said, starting with the site's open-source ethics and its commitment to "radical collaboration."

But in operation, he said, Wikipedia has flaws -- like its openness to anonymous contributors and its rough-and-tumble editing process -- that have driven scholars away. With his new venture, Mr. Sanger hopes to bring those professors back into the fold.

He plans to create for the site a "representative democracy," in which self-appointed experts will oversee the editing and shaping of articles. Any Web surfer, regardless of his or her credentials, will be able to contribute to the Citizendium. But scholars with "the qualifications typically needed for a tenure-track academic position" will act as editors, he said, authorizing changes in articles and approving entries they deem to be trustworthy.

A team of "constables" -- administrators who must be more than 25 years old and hold at least a bachelor's degree, according to the project's Web site -- will enforce the editors' dictates. "If an editor says the article on Descartes should put his biography before his philosophy, and someone changes that order, a constable comes in and changes it back," said Mr. Sanger.

Continued in article

The Citizendium link is at http://www.citizendium.org/

Of course the Wikipedia link to an unbelievable (nearly 1.5 million articles to date) database in information (and some misinformation) is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

 

And then if you want to know who stuff really works, go to http://www.howstuffworks.com/

Other encyclopedias http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries

Bob Jensen's links to electronic literature http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm


"The Dangerous Side of Search Engines:  Popular search engines may lead you to rogue sites. Here's what you need to know to avoid dangerous downloads, bogus sites, and spam," by Tom Spring, PC World via The Washington Post, May 27, 2006 --- Click Here

Who knew an innocent search for "screensavers" could be so dangerous? It may actually be the riskiest word to type into Google's search engine. Odds are, more than half of the links that Google returns take you to Web sites loaded with either spyware or adware. You might also face getting bombarded with spam if you register at one of those sites with your e-mail address.

A recently released study, coauthored by McAfee and anti-spyware activist Ben Edelman , found that sponsored results from top search engines AOL, Ask.com, Google, MSN, and Yahoo can often lead to Web sites that contain spyware and scams, and are operated by people who love to send out spam.

The study concluded that an average of 9 percent of sponsored results and 3 of organic search results link to questionable Web sites. The study was based on analysis of the first five pages of search results for each keyword tested.

According to the results of the study, the top four most dangerous searches on Google are:

The study defined dangerous sites as those that have one or a combination of the following characteristics: its downloads contain spyware and/or adware; its pages contain embedded code that performs browser exploits; the content is meant to deceive visitors in some way; it sends out inordinate amounts of spam to e-mail accounts registered at the site.

These results are a sobering wake-up call to Web surfers, and they illustrate the changing nature of Internet threats today. It used to be that most viruses and scams made their way to our PCs via our inboxes . But thanks to security software that's getting better at filtering out viruses, spam, and phishing attacks from our e-mail, rogue elements are having a difficult time booby-trapping our PCs.

"Scammers and spammers have clearly turned to search engines to practice their trade," says Shane Keats, market strategist for McAfee.

McAfee says that of the 1394 popular keywords it typed into Google and AOL alone, 5 percent of the results returned links to dangerous Web sites. Overall, MSN search results had the lowest percentage of dangerous sites (3.9 percent) while Ask search results had the highest percentage (6.1 percent).

Given the study's findings, it shouldn't come as a big surprise that the company has a free tool, called McAfee SiteAdvisor, for tackling the problems. In my tests I found it does a great job of protecting you from the Web's dark side.

Since March McAfee has been offering a browser plug-in that works with Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer. SiteAdvisor puts a little rectangular button in the bottom corner of the browser. If a site you're visiting is safe, the SiteAdvisor button stays green. When you visit a questionable Web site the button turns red or yellow (depending on the risk level) and a little balloon expands with details on why SiteAdvisor has rated the site as such.

SiteAdvisor ratings are based on threats that include software downloads loaded with adware or spyware, malicious code embedded in Web pages, phishing attempts and scams, and the amount of spam that a registered user gets.

SiteAdvisor takes it a step further with Google, MSN, and Yahoo. With these search engines, it puts a rating icon next to individual results. This is a great safety feature and time saver, steering you clear of dangerous sites before you make the mistake of clicking on a link.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on computer and networking security are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce/000start.htm

 


Sex-Filtered Searching

"Kid-Friendly Search Engines Filter Content," by Akeya Dickson, The Washington Post, May 8, 2006 --- Click Here

It's not unheard of these days for a child doing online research for a school project to accidentally stumble into a porn site or someplace else that's too dicey for a parent's comfort level.

Between e-mail filters, parental controls and special software, there are plenty of tools meant to help parents keep their children safe. The next target for fed-up parents: Internet search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

The upside of the modern-day search engine -- an index of Web sites on the Internet -- is also the downside. And when kids research a report by tapping search words in Google or Yahoo, chances are good that they may run across something they shouldn't see.

Christine Willig, president of Cincinnati-based Thinkronize, said that one in four children across the country is exposed to pornography by age 11 -- often over the Internet.

Her company's flagship product, NetTrekker, a child-safe search engine featuring 180,000 sites that are regularly reviewed by 400 volunteer teachers, has been in schools since 2000, including many in Virginia, Maryland and the District.

Now, the product is being made available for home users for $9.95 ( http://www.netrekker.com/ ).

Willig, the mother of seven, said children's potential exposure to questionable Internet content was the primary reason she left her job as a textbook publisher and joined the start-up Thinkronize.

"My decision to leave was driven by my own experiences with my own children and stories I've heard from other parents and teachers," she said.

Since then, the product has been used in 12,000 schools across the United States -- reaching an estimated 7 million students. School administrators and parents in other countries -- including Hong Kong, Turkey and Nigeria -- also have expressed an interest in the product, she said.

In Pennsylvania, the search engine was adopted in school districts across the state.

Exposure to inappropriate sites "was definitely a huge concern with teachers," said Mary Schwander, a library media specialist at New Hope-Solebury High School in New Hope, Pa. "Some kids did a comparison between Google and NetTrekker and found that NetTrekker was more favorable to use and quicker."

Willig acknowledges that offensive and inappropriate sites have been found -- but usually by teachers and specialty software that constantly scan the sites, not the students.

"With our tools in place, we have found porn sites, and we have found them before users," Willig said. "There's a Martin Luther King site that's now a hate site, really a KKK thing in disguise. There are those things that we have to look out for with a combination of technology and human review."

That is the main challenge constantly facing John Stewart and Ryan Krupnik, the guys behind the family-safe search engine RedZee. The site filters out pornographic results and delivers targeted searches.

"Ryan and I have put a great deal of time and money to make sure things are blocked, but we're really coming to a point where we need the general public to help us," said Stewart. "We can't possibly catch all of it. I would love to say we're 200 percent, but we're not."

Continued in article

 


Baidu --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidu

Baidu Is a Better Version of Google (maybe) --- Click Here
http://247wallst.com/media/2013/07/25/baidu-is-a-better-version-of-google/?utm_source=247WallStDailyNewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=JUL252013A&utm_campaign=DailyNewsletter

Cool Search Engines That Are Not Google --- http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/06/coolsearchengines


Google Hacks (smarter search like the geeks search) --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Hacks

"Please Do Not Use These Programs for Illegal Purposes:  Powerful new tools let you search for free software and music, zoom in on landmarks and buildings, and add comments to news stories," by Steve Bass, PC World via The Washington Post, August 21, 2007 --- Click Here

I don't know what Google was thinking when it allowed Google Hacks to be posted on the Google Code site. But it's a sure bet most people won't abide by the "Please do not use this program for illegal uses" disclaimer you'll find on thedownload site.

Google Hacks is a front-end GUI you can use as a stand-alone app or as a browser toolbar. It performs searches you can already do--if you know the syntax. For instance, if I wanted to search for Dave Brubeck, I could pop the following into Google's search field:

But it's obviously a heck of a lot easier to type into Google Hacks and choose the music category.

Google Hacks lets you search in any one of 12 categories--music, applications, video, books, lyrics, and others. But there's a catch. The searches are indexes--Web site directories that haven't been protected. Translation: You have to sort through lists of files and some, if not most, could be unrelated to what you're searching for.

At the same time, you might hit the jackpot--loads of files with just the content you're looking for. The showstopper is that the content belongs to someone else who doesn't know how to hide it from prying eyes. (And yes, I know, that person may have downloaded the music illegally as well.)

BTW, credit for this masterpiece goes to Jason Stallings, the author of Google Hacks. Jason doesn't work for Google, but his program was released using Google'sfree code hosting service. You can find more of Jason's code onhis Web site.

Dig This:Microsoft's entryinto the mobile phone arena is sure to give Apple a run for the money--and promises to take the nerd world by storm.

Microsoft's Photosynth is awesome--and addictive. You can travel to Rome, zoom in on St. Peter's Basilica, and see details--and I mean close, close up--that I guarantee will amaze you. (The hardware requirements are stringent--more in a sec.) Don't believe me? Watch this7-minute demonstration.

But wait a minute: Unless you have a heavy-duty PC--you need Windows XP and the hardware needs to be Vista ready--save your time. You just won't be able to use Photosynth. (My wife's out of luck; she's been playing with Photosynth on my machine.) If you have the system requirements, you'll also need to download a small ActiveX plug-in available at the Photosynth site.

Photosynthis now up and running. (My friend Bill Webb has a goodwrite-up about it.)

Continued in article


Google Hummingbird

"Why 'Hummingbird' – Google's First New Search Algorithm Since 2001 – Is A Huge Deal," by Gerry Brown, Business Insider, October 3, 2013 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/google-hummingbird-algorithm-2013-10

Google's new Hummingbird algorithm could create a more even playing field for ‘the long tail’ of website publishers, and help Google to rival Apple Siri in voice search, says Ovum analyst Gerry Brown.

Last week, Google announced a brand new algorithm for its search engine, called Hummingbird. Although Google often produces updates and enhancements (such as the “Caffeine Update” in 2010, and “Penguin” and “Panda” since), the last time Google introduced a brand new algorithm was 2001, so it is a big change.

Although Google has not given away many details, it said that Hummingbird is focused on ranking information based on a more intelligent understanding of search requests. As Internet data volumes explode we increasingly have to type more and more words into Google Search to gain greater accuracy of results. Often we need to conduct multiple searches to find the information we are looking for, which is frustrating and time consuming.

This is because the Search results we currently receive reflect the matching combination of key words that a search phrase contains, rather than the true meaning of the sentence itself. Search results produced by Hummingbird will reflect the full semantic meaning of longer search phrases, and should in theory produce more accurate results.

For example Hummingbird will more greatly consider question words like “how” “why”, “where” and “when” in search phrases, in addition to content keywords. Hence Hummingbird moves the emphasis of search from “results” to “answers”.

Google also has acknowledged that the number of mobile and voice-based searches is increasing. Such voice searches are in natural language, and may not therefore contain the keywords we might finesse on a computer keyboard. These ‘on the fly’ searches are likely to return poor results using a keyword search system.

The semantic search capabilities of Hummingbird aim to address this need. It should be noted however that the most-used medium for mobile voice-based search is Apple iPhone’s Siri, which uses Yelp and WolframAlpha rather than Google for semantic search. WolframAlpha has had a semantic search capability since 2012, so there is undoubtedly a competitive response angle to the Hummingbird move.

The future is therefore “conversational search” or “hot wording” as Google refers to it. By this Google means that a user can simply voice prompt the Google search engine by saying "OK, Google". The latter is also the voice catch-phrase used to operate the wearable Google Glass spectacles.

In a separate move announced by Google in September 2013, the company will seek to accelerate the movement from Google keyword search to Google semantic search. Google will encrypt all future Search results, which means that keywords used by publishers will increasingly produce ‘not provided’ results in Google Analytics.

This means that publishers will have less idea where the web traffic to their website comes from. An underlying commercial motivation maybe that Google’s premium products will continue to provide some keyword detail, hence encouraging upgrades from free to paid-for Google products.

Continued in article

 


"Search Google and Wikipedia at the Same Time With Googlepedia:  Browser Add-on Instantly view Wikipedia articles for your Google searches," by Danny Allen, PC World via The Washington Post, May 29, 2009 --- Click Here  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/27/AR2009052703653.html?wpisrc=newsletter

If you're a serious search hound who often clicks through to Wikipedia pages that Google digs up, then you'll love Googlepedia. This free Firefox add-on splits your Google page in half: On the left are your regular Web results, and on the right (where AdWords would normally appear), you're presented with a Wikipedia article based on Google's top result.

Of course, typing "Wikipedia"--followed by a subject--directly into Firefox's Location Bar is just as easy, but you don't get to scroll through Google links at the same time. And usefully, Googlepedia also lets you expand, shrink or hide the area that an article is viewed in.

By default, the add-on presents internal Wikipedia links as clickable Google searches, though you can toggle this in its preferences. You can also change the default Wikipedia language.

Articles from the open source encyclopedia appear surprisingly soon after Google's own always-speedy results. A good thing, as Firefox seems to take a slight performance hit for the second or so an article takes to load.

The author has recently released an early port of the add-on for Google's Chrome browser, and mentions that Safari and Konqueror versions are planned.


"Wikipedia Comes of Age," by Casper Grathwohl, Chronicle of Higher Education's Chronicle Review, January 7, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Wikipedia-Comes-of-Age/125899/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en

The key challenge for the scholarly community, in which I include academic publishers such as Oxford University Press, is to work actively with Wikipedia to strengthen its role in "pre-research." We need to build stronger links from its entries to more advanced resources that have been created and maintained by the academy.

It is not an easy task to overcome the prejudices against Wikipedia in academic circles, but accomplishing that will serve us all and solidify an important new layer of knowledge in the online-information ecosystem. Wikipedia's first decade was marked by its meteoric rise. Let's mark its second decade by its integration into the formal research process.

Continued in article

Casper Grathwohl is vice president and publisher of digital and reference content for Oxford University Press.

"What Wikipedia Deletes, and Why," by Alexandra Rice, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 26, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/what-wikipedia-deletes-and-why/33930?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en 

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, famously allows anyone to write or revise its entries, and the history of each item is open for anyone to review. Except for material that leaders of the effort consider too “dangerous” to leave online.

The fine print of its stated practices notes that in some cases, material is completely spiked from the record. Or, as the policy reads: “a revision with libelous content, criminal threats or copyright infringements may be removed afterwards.”

These total redactions are what a University of Pennsylvania research team has been mining for the past year in the hopes of shedding some light on what Wikipedia deletes forever and why. In 2010 redactions accounted for more than 56,000 of the 47.1 million revisions, according to the research team.

The researchers, Andrew G. West and Insup Lee, wondered what content on the enormously popular Web site could be so troubling that Wikipedia administrators would decide to remove it forever. “Wikipedia is at that paramount example of open-source transparency,” Mr. Lee said. “So when you see them behaving in a nontransparent manner, you want to see what motivates them to do this.”

Copyright infringement was the most common reason Wikipedia stated for deleting material, Mr. West and Mr. Lee found.

The Wikimedia Foundation has been sued over copyright and privacy issues in the past. While only 0.007 percent of page views in 2010 to the English Wikipedia site resulted in content that was later redacted, that’s enough to land the organization and its operators in hot water. That’s why leaders of the encyclopedia refer to the material it redacts as “dangerous content.”

“We’ve identified that on the surface these copyright cases are the worst,” said Mr. Lee.

“The research goal for us is, how can we provide some automated way to detect the problems so they can be removed immediately?” Mr. West added. “It’s very difficult to stop people from adding something, but we can find a way to get rid of it quickly.”

The difficulty in identifying instances of plagiarism, the pair said, is evident in the numbers. Most “dangerous content,” such as libel or invasions of privacy, is taken down within two minutes, on average. But copyright-related issues stayed up for an average of 21 days, they found.

Wikipedia’s leaders have recently increased the number of people with the ability to permanently delete text, including entries in the history pages. In May 2010, approximately 40 people held these rights; now more than 1,800 people do, Mr. West and Mr. Lee said.

The larger work force has helped to reduce the amount of dangerous content found on the site, the researchers said. But humans alone won’t solve the problem in its entirety. Sometimes they even introduce problems when trying to delete dangerous content and removing beneficial revisions in the process, which the research team refers to as “collateral damage.” This brings up the question, then, of who even gets to make the call when something is dangerous content or not.

“For all the problems on Wikipedia,” Mr. West said, “I feel strongly that the solutions have to be automatic in nature because these attackers increasingly have these machines doing their bidding for them.”

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's search helpers are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm


 

Are we witnessing the birth of a new challenger to Google?

Data from monitoring service StatCounter suggests that Bing, Microsoft's new search decision engine, has overtaken Yahoo Search as the number two search service in the U.S. and worldwide in large part thanks to stealing market share from leader Google . . . Are we witnessing the birth of the first true Google challenger or is this nothing but launch momentum bound to fade away?
Robin Wauters, "Did Bing Just Leapfrog Yahoo Search?" The Washington Post, June 4, 2009 --- Click Here

Jensen Comment
When I first saw the title to this article I thought it was referring to the new Mayor of Detroit (Dave Bing). Shows what I know about Microsoft's Bing up to now. Many of Microsoft's late entries to the market fail to compete such as when it belatedly attempted to compete with IPOD.

Microsoft Bing --- http://www.bing.com/


Microsoft's Bing search engine gains an edge over Google in the search wars

"Bing Goes Real-Time with Twitter and Facebook Updates:  ," by Kristina Grifantini, MIT's Technology Review, October 21, 2009 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/24283/?nlid=2451&a=f

In two separate, non-exclusive deals, Microsoft will partner with Facebook and Twitter to show status updates in its search site, Bing. Microsoft officially announced the deals at the Web 2.0 Summit today.

While rumors of the Microsoft-Twitter deal have been circulating for a few weeks, integrating Facebook updates is a surprise twist, although not entirely unexpected, given Microsoft's $240 million investment in Facebook two years ago. Google is said to be in talks with Twitter and Facebook as well.

*(It didn't take Google long to respond. An official blog post reveals that the company has also signed a deal to index real-time information from Twitter).

Twitter has been gaining notice as a valuable source of real-time information. For example, news often breaks on Twitter before hitting major media outlets and well before showing up in search engines. In January Yahoo announced TweetNews, which ranks Yahoo News stories based on Twitter posts.

The integration seems to be a win-win situation: social networking sites will presumably help search engines capture trending news topics more quickly, while the search engines can offer
needed revenue streams to the social networking sites and help solidify their legitimacy. It also makes it harder for businesses to ignore social media: with the integration, having Facebook and Twitter accounts can also help a company gain prominence in the much-coveted top spots on search results.


"Bing Goes Sleek And More Social," by Katherine Boehret, The Wall Street Journal, May 15, 2012 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304371504577406200439109664.html

If you've ever cleaned off a cluttered desk, replacing messy stacks of paper with framed photos of people who really matter, you have a rough idea of what Microsoft MSFT -0.03% did with its new Bing search engine this week. Gone are the distracting, multicolored search results. Gone are the lists of recently searched terms that you never looked at anyway. Gone are the search results mingled with Facebook FB -3.39% "likes."

What's left? A lot of white space, which creates a calmer environment for reading and digesting information. A new middle column, which Microsoft calls Snapshot, displays task-oriented content to help people do things like making restaurant reservations, getting directions or seeing movie times. And Bing's most unusual new feature is a flush-right column called Sidebar designed to automatically surface names of relevant Facebook friends and others around the Web who could best help you with a specific query.

Image Here

Bing's Snapshot column helps users do things like make a hotel reservation. Its Sidebar column, far right, shows friends who may have answers to help with a person's current search.

The new Bing is automatically available to about 20% of users starting Tuesday. If you're not one of the 20%, you can see the new interface and Sidebar on Bing.com/new. By June 1, all features will be automatically available to everyone.

I've had access to this revamped Bing for the past week, and its prospects are promising. It feels cleaner and clearer. Sidebar's integrated social knowledge of friends linked to Bing through a person's Facebook account—or people from Twitter and blogs who are suggested by Bing—can turn the solitude of Web searching into a group activity. For example, a search for Napa Valley restaurants smartly brings up the name of a friend who recently posted a photo album from Napa, a colleague who lists Napa Valley as his hometown as well as a well-known blogger who reviews restaurants in that area. Sidebar maintains a neat list of your queries and the responses, saving you the trouble of hunting through past Facebook posts.

Compared with the way Google integrated Google+ "personal results" with regular search results—which ruffled a lot of feathers—Sidebar is more sophisticated.

But Bing's Sidebar faces a challenge: People aren't used to searching like this.

As fun as it is to poll people—even specifically suggested people—in queries, we usually search alone. Many of the things I type into Bing are quick ask-a-question-get-an-answer searches, and Sidebar's format requires waiting for someone's response. It's possible that it just takes time to adjust to this new way of searching, but I'm comfortable with the Web sources that I already know and trust. (No offense, Facebook friends.)

Additional partners, including LinkedIn, Foursquare and Quora, will eventually be included to help with queries in Bing's Sidebar. Some of these will work later this summer. For now, Twitter provides the biggest source of people from around the Web who might know the answer to your query.

Bing will continue to make improvements, according to Stefan Weitz, senior director of Bing search. By late June or early July, you'll be able to tag friends in queries even if Bing doesn't suggest those people as relevant to a query. This would have helped me when I searched for restaurants in Boston, where my foodie sister has lived for 11 years, though she didn't automatically appear as a suggested source. Then again, when I searched for a Mexican restaurant in Kirkland, Wash., called Cactus, a friend who "liked" another Mexican restaurant in nearby Seattle popped up in my Sidebar.

I didn't realize this friend had ever visited Seattle or that he enjoyed one of Seattle's Mexican restaurants enough to "like" it on Facebook. These helpful, serendipitous experiences may be enough to keep people using the Bing Sidebar.

Bing's Sidebar queries currently have a clumsy way of working with Facebook. If I query three people who are auto-suggested as friends who might know the answer to my question, the query only shows up on my Facebook page, not on the pages of people who were questioned. They must visit my Facebook page to see responses, an extra step that may discourage ongoing conversations. An Activity feed in the Bing Sidebar shows all Facebok friends' query activity, but people look at Facebook more often.

The middle column of the rebuilt Bing, called Snapshot, doesn't always display content. When it does, it is geared toward helping people accomplish specific tasks, like booking a hotel room or restaurant table. In a search for the Oval Room, a Washington, D.C., restaurant, Snapshot showed a map of its location, four ratings from websites like TripAdvisor, hours of operation and a link to OpenTable for making a reservation.

Continued in article


Binging, but not cha chaing, Fraud Updates

For nearly eight years I’ve updated (usually daily) a log on fraud. This is like a chronological journal from which I also posted to various sites that I maintain on fraud.

The September 30, 2009 log has been added to http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

One of the best ways to search these logs is via Bing (or Google, Yahoo, etc.). For example, suppose you are interested in Bill and Hold fraud. You can enter the search terms [“Bob Jensen” AND “Fraud Updates” AND “Bill and Hold”] (without the square brackets) at http://www.bing.com/

It may seem surprising, but I’m having better results in most cases these days using Microsoft’s Bing search engine than either Google or Yahoo --- http://www.bing.com/

Bob Jensen's threads on fraud are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud.htm

Bing Update:  When I recommended Bing I was not aware of the following:
"Bing! So That's What A Swizzle Stick Is," by Michael Arrington, Tech Crunch via The Washington Post, October 7, 2009 --- Click Here

Microsoft's new Bing search engine just can't seem to stay out of the red light district, no matter how hard they try.

There's no denying it is hands down the best porn search engine on the planet (although ChaCha is pretty good too). But Bing also had a snafu with Google ads that showed the search engine for "pornography" queries. Google took the blame for that one (see updates to that post), and at least it only showed up for people actually querying the adult term.

Now, a new controversy has popped up around a Microsoft ad unit that scrapes a page for content and then shows relevant Bing queries. The ads normally work fine. But last week Bing started showing an ad unit that contained sexually explicit terms, including at least one that I had never heard of before (the swizzle stick). Best of all, the ads were displayed on a WonderHowTo web page showing only Home & Garden content.

You can see the queries that were self-generated by Bing for the ad unit in the image. This isn't just R-rated run of the mill porn stuff. This is stuff that's still illegal in some states. Particularly that top query.

Microsoft is saying this is a bug, and they've taken down all of these ad units on all sites until they understand what happened. The unit is supposed to scrape only the page being viewed. In this case, WonderHowTo has sexually explicit content on other areas of the site, which may be triggering the ad content.

Said Microsoft's Senior Director Online Audience Business Group Adam Sohn, who wasn't too happy with the ad: "We are very cognizant of what we want the Bing brand to stand for, and this is not it."

My response ¿ "well, at least it's educational."

Jensen Comment
Nevertheless Bing is a good search engine, and you can avoid the porn by not looking for it and ignoring advertisements (that I never look at anyway in Google or Bing or Yahoo). Google still has the huge advantage of cached documents that can be found after they are no longer posted at their original Websites. I assume that all the major search engines will step up controls on the appropriateness of advertising for the general public (that includes children using search engines).

But Cha Cha is not a major search engine and may lag in such controls. I really don't cha cha on the dance floor or on the computer.

But instead of a computer spitting out answers (see Google, etc.), real (cha chaing) human beings answer instead.
"The Mystery Of The ChaCha Eiffel Tower Fail Pic," by Michael Arrington, Tech Crunch, October 29, 2008 ---
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/29/the-mystery-of-the-chacha-eiffel-tower-fail-pic/

I’ve aimed a lot of criticism at human powered search engine ChaCha over the last couple of years. The service lets users ask questions, just like a normal search engine. But instead of a computer spitting out answers (see Google, etc.), real human beings answer instead.

The ChaCha service was absurd in its original web version, which has since been discontinued. The mobile version is actually very useful, although we questioned its scalability when it launched. New information from the company suggests they’re keeping costs low enough to make a business model out of it. More on that soon.

Now about this image.

Some fairly funny answers occasionally come back from the human guides, who early on at least had to deal with a lot of prank queries. But none of the ones we’ve seen compare to the one to the right, which is a Digg favorite tonight. It describes the Eiffel Tower sexual position (yes, you learn something new every day) in response to a completely unrelated query about a Randy Newman show in Seattle.

I contacted the company about it and got the following message:

I appreciate your reaching out to me regarding this iPhone prank. We researched this as soon as it came to our attention and our logs indicate that the answer displayed was definitely to a question previously asked by this same user. So yes, this is a fake as this person is misrepresenting what actually occurred. They actually asked one question (to which the answer was sent) and then a second question shortly thereafter and then received the answer to the first question which, due to the way messages are threaded on an iPhone display, the answer is appearing below a different question than the one that was asked to spawn the answer that is displayed.

So in the end this was a bit of a trick apparently used to misrepresent what happened in order to get some laughs – which appears to be working as this is getting some serious play across the Web!

Ok that sounds more than reasonable. But when I go to the URL in the image, it shows the question and answer linked (see below). I understand how text messages back and forth can get out of order, but not how the wrong answer can be linked to the wrong question in ChaCha’s own database. I also note the guide was on the job for one whole day before this happened. I’ve emailed the company for further clarification.

I still recommend Bing when you’re not fully satisfied with your Google hits. I can't say I recommend Cha Cha, but then I've never tried it.


Google is a great search engine, but it's also more than that. Google has tons of hidden features, some of which are quite fun and most of which are extremely useful— if you know about them. How do you discover all these hidden features within the Google site?
See http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=675528&rl=1


Question
Is Google becoming Skynet?  And is Aishwarya Rai the world's most beautiful woman?

Answer (Well sort of)

January 3, 2005 message from Glen Gray [glen.gray@CSUN.EDU

Maybe my mind is drifting—or maybe 2 plus 2 does equal 4.

Terminator 3 has been playing recently on cable. [Don’t read further if you don’t want to know the ending!]

At the end of Terminator 3, we learn that Skynet (which takes over the world in the future and tries to kill all humans) is not controlled by just one major computer as we thought in Terminators 1 and 2, but instead, Skynet is all the computers on earth connected together—acting as one giant computer brain.

Tonight I was watching 60 Minutes on TV and they dedicated 30 minutes to Google. Google is able to search all computers connected to the Internet. Recently Google released software that will search all the computers on LANS. Now you can Google on your cell phone, search libraries, etc. etc. etc. Now they are working on a universal translator (Start Trek anyone?) that will automatically search and translate any document in any language.

Is Google Skynet? Think about it.

Glen L. Gray, PhD, CPA
Dept. of Accounting & Information Systems
College of Business & Economics
California State University, Northridge
Northridge, CA 91330
http://www.csun.edu/~vcact00f  

January 3, 2005 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Glen,

I also watched the excellent 60 Minute module.   Google is amazing in almost every aspect, including how it is managed.  I think that all business policy and organization behavior students should watch this module.  It will be interesting to see how long the company can continue to grow at an exponential pace and maintain its long-standing motto to “Do No Evil.”   These guys really believe in that motto.  Google is probably the most cautious firm in the world about who gets hired and promoted.

There has never been anything quite like Google in terms of management, except SAS probably comes a little bit close.

Yes I think Google could become Skynet if it were not for the serious policy of Google to not be a monopolist (except by default) which is the antithesis of Microsoft Corporation.  Also there is the black cloud of Microsoft hanging over Google to pull down Google’s Skynet even if it takes a trillion dollars.  

There were some very fascinating things that I learned from the 60 Minutes module.  For one thing, Google is getting closer to scanning the documents in alternate languages around the world and then translating each hit into a language of choice (probably English to begin with).  Secondly, I knew that Google bought Keyhole, but I had not played in recent years with the amazing keyhole (not Google Views) ---  http://www.keyhole.com/

Readers interested in the wonderful “Defining Google” 60 Minutes module should go to http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/12/30/60minutes/main664063.shtml

I might also add that this module was followed by another module on The World’s Most Beautiful Woman --- http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/12/29/60minutes/main663862.shtml
She’s very articulate and a pure delight in this world of sinking morality even though her movie roles to date have been
Bombay frivolous.

 Bob Jensen

CatsCradle 3.5 --- http://www.stormdance.net/software/catscradle/overview.htm 
Many websurfers enjoy going to sites that might be based in other countries, and as such, they might very well encounter a different language. With CatsCradle 3.5, these persons need worry no more, as this application can be used to translate entire websites in such languages as Thai, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian. This version is compatible with all computers running Windows XP or 2000. (Scout Report, September 1, 2006)

"Is Stupid Making Us Google?"  By James Bowman, The New Atlantis, no. 21, Summer 2008, pp. 75-80 ---
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/is-stupid-making-us-google

Generally speaking, even those who are most gung-ho about new ways of learning probably tend to cling to a belief that education has, or ought to have, at least something to do with making things lodge in the minds of students--this even though the disparagement of the role of memory in education by professional educators now goes back at least three generations, long before computers were ever thought of as educational tools. That, by the way, should lessen our astonishment, if not our dismay, at the extent to which the educational establishment, instead of viewing these developments with alarm, is adapting its understanding of what education is to the new realities of how the new generation of 'netizens' actually learn (and don't learn) rather than trying to adapt the kids to unchanging standards of scholarship and learning.

A prominent librarian utters dire warnings about new media
"Mass Culture 2.0," by Scott McLemee, Inside Higher Ed, June 20, 2007 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/06/20/mclemee

 

Jensen Comment
Yikes! When I'm looking for an answer to most anything I now turn first to Wikipedia and then Google. I guess James Bowman put me in my place. However, being retired I'm no longer corrupting the minds of students (at least not apart from my Website and blogs --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
I would counter Bowman by saying that Stupid is as Stupid does. Stupid "does" the following:  Stupid accepts a single source for an answer. Except when the answer seems self evident, a scholar will seek verification from other references. However, a lot of things are "self evident" to Stupid.

Scholars often forget that Google also has a scholars' search engine --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm#ScholarySearch
For example enter the search term "bailout."
How experts/scholars search the Web are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm#Scholars

There is a serious issue that sweat accompanied with answer searching aids in the memory of what is learned --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
But must we sweat to find every answer in life? There is also the maxim that we learn best from our mistakes. Bloggers are constantly being made aware of their mistakes. This is one of the scholarly benefits of blogging --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListservRoles.htm

 


"Google's Cloud Looms Large: How might expanding Google's cloud-computing service alter the digital world?," by Kate Greene, MIT's Technology Review, December 3, 2007 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/19785/?nlid=701 

To know how you'll be using computers and the Internet in the coming years, it's instructive to consider the Google employee: most of his software and data--from pictures and videos, to presentations and e-mails--reside on the Web. This makes the digital stuff that's valuable to him equally accessible from his home computer, a public Internet café, or a Web-enabled phone. It also makes damage to a hard drive less important. Recently, Sam Schillace, the engineering director in charge of collaborate Web applications at Google, needed to reformat a defunct hard drive from a computer that he used for at least six hours a day. Reformatting, which completely erases all the data from a hard drive, would cause most people to panic, but it didn't bother Schillace. "There was nothing on it I cared about" that he couldn't find stored on the Web, he says.

Schillace's digital life, for the most part, exists on the Internet; he practices what is considered by many technology experts to be cloud computing. Google already lets people port some of their personal data to the Internet and use its Web-based software. Google Calendar organizes events, Picasa stores pictures, YouTube holds videos, Gmail stores e-mails, and Google Docs houses documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. But according to a Wall Street Journal story, the company is expected to do more than offer scattered puffs of cloud computing: it will launch a service next year that will let people store the contents of entire hard drives online. Google doesn't acknowledge the existence of such a service. In an official statement, the company says, "Storage is an important component of making Web apps fit easily into consumers' and business users' lives ... We're always listening to our users and looking for ways to update and improve our Web applications, including storage options, but we don't have anything to announce right now." Even so, many people in the industry believe that Google will pull together its disparate cloud-computing offerings under a larger umbrella service, and people are eager to understand the consequences of such a project.

To be sure, Google isn't the only company invested in online storage and cloud computing. There are other services today that offer a significant amount of space and software in the cloud. Amazon's Simple Storage Service, for instance, offers unlimited and inexpensive online storage ($0.15 per gigabyte per month). AOL provides a service called Xdrive with a capacity of 50 gigabytes for $9.95 per month (the first five gigabytes are free). And Microsoft offers Windows Live SkyDrive, currently with a one-gigabyte free storage limit.

But Google is better positioned than most to push cloud computing into the mainstream, says Thomas Vander Wal, founder of Infocloud Solutions, a cloud-computing consultancy. First, millions of people already use Google's online services and store data on its servers through its software. Second, Vander Wal says that the culture at Google enables his team to more easily tie together the pieces of cloud computing that today might seem a little scattered. He notes that Yahoo, Microsoft, and Apple are also sitting atop huge stacks of people's personal information and a number of online applications, but there are barriers within each organization that could slow down the process of integrating these pieces. "It could be," says Vander Wal, "that Google pushes the edges again where everybody else has been stuck for a while."

Continued in article


"A Search Engine With a Real Eye for Videos," by Katherine Boehret, The Wall Street Journal, November 19, 2008 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122705795052039617.html

Web video has transformed the way the Internet is used, but finding the exact clip you want can be incredibly hard. And it's no wonder, considering that sites like YouTube conduct their hunts by looking at a clip's "contextual metadata" -- tags, video title and description -- and thus can often be misled by false information. For example, a homemade video about cooking might be inaccurately tagged with a popular search word like "Obama" so as to get more traction.

This week I tested VideoSurf.com, a site that claims to be the first to search videos by "seeing" images that appear in these videos. The company says its technology can analyze a clip's visual content, as well as its metadata -- especially when searching for people. VideoSurf has analyzed and categorized more than 12 billion visual moments on the Web to understand who the most important characters and scenes are in a video, and it uses this knowledge to sort clips according to relevancy.

Search results on VideoSurf spread out videos in a filmstrip-like format, distinguishing one scene from the next. Users can choose an option to show only faces, which helps if you're looking for a specific person in a long video or movie. And when looking at videos from certain sources, you can select a scene from the filmstrip and jump ahead to that scene rather than sit through the entire clip.

When it works, VideoSurf is one of those technologies that make you wonder why someone didn't think of it sooner. The site aggregates content from about 60 sources, including YouTube, CNN Video, Hulu, ESPN and Comedy Central, and a sorting tool weeds out unwanted results like the irksome slideshows that are labeled as videos. VideoSurf can find videos on all kinds of subjects, but it really shines when it finds well-known people.

But VideoSurf has some rough edges and doesn't always work as it should. In its defense, the site is still in its public beta, or trial, stage, and plans to be full-blown by early next year. Right now, one of its best features, the ability to jump ahead to specific scenes, works with video from only a handful of sources including YouTube, MetaCafe, DailyMotion and Google Video. Videos from Hulu.com confusingly allow jumping ahead only from certain screens.

Additionally, I came across a couple of videos that were no longer available, though they were listed in search results. And a customizable VideoSurf home page for users with accounts on the site saves searches but not specific clips; VideoSurf plans to fix this next week by adding a favorites page where users can store and share favorite videos with others.

Still, I really grew to like VideoSurf's clear way of displaying content that would be otherwise buried within videos. Rather than trying to guess a video's contents by looking at a single representative image, VideoSurf's filmstrip views showed me exactly what I'd be watching. In many cases, I viewed a video I might not have otherwise watched because its filmstrip showed shots of scenes that looked interesting.

On the left-hand side of the search-results page, VideoSurf users can narrow results according to Content Type, Categories and Video Sources to see just what they're looking for -- or, often more important, what they're not looking for. Content Type, for example, includes slideshows, Web series, full television episodes and full movies; a search can include only videos in a particular category (say, slideshows) or exclude that category altogether by unmarking the box beside it.

Most search-results pages include tiled still images at the top representing the characters in the videos. By selecting one of these characters, users can refine search results to show only videos with that character. For example, I typed the title of a favorite television show, "Brothers and Sisters," into the search box and saw the names and images of seven actors on the show at the top of the screen. I selected Sally Field and was redirected to results of videos featuring only the mother she plays on the show.

I used VideoSurf to search for Beyonce's "Single Ladies" music video, and then changed the date parameters to find only videos posted this week. This retrieved a Saturday Night Live skit in which the pop singer spoofs her own video with help from three men in tights -- including Justin Timberlake. While the SNL skit ran, a list of related videos appeared in a column on the right, including clips of J.T.'s past SNL skits.

Occasionally, annotations appear on videos, but these come from the source -- not VideoSurf. If overlaid text appears on YouTube videos, it can be turned off using an icon in the bottom right of the YouTube screen. Video-sharing sites that use introductory pages such as pre-rolls before each video will still show those pages.

VideoSurf makes it easy to send specific clips of videos to friends. I did so by selecting a Share option and adjusting slide bars to trim the clip to start and end at scenes I preferred. Clips shared with friends via email are sent with the VideoSurf filmstrip, giving others the ability to also know what the video will include so that they, too, can discern whether or not they want to watch it.

Clips can be shared on social-networking sites like del.icio.us, MySpace and Facebook, though VideoSurf's helpful filmstrip didn't show up on these sites like it did in emails.

I also tested an add-on for the Mozilla Firefox browser called Greasemonkey that works with VideoSurf. When installed, this displays VideoSurf's helpful filmstrip beneath search results from Google Video, YouTube, Yahoo or CBS.com. Once installed, filmstrips illustrating important scenes appear along with the normal text results for videos, and some of the filmstrips enable jumping ahead to specific scenes. This somewhat techie Greasemonkey extension can save people the extra step of making a separate visit to VideoSurf.com to watch a specific clip.

VideoSurf uses smart technology that can save people the aggravation of watching videos that aren't what they appear to be. Since so much Web content now includes videos, a visual search tool that can better assess videos like VideoSurf is a good idea. When this site improves its now-flaky ability to jump ahead to specific scenes in videos, it will be even more valuable.

 

How to search for academic videos

Answer
First go to YouTube and search for professors or courses if you have the names.

"Thanks to YouTube, Professors Are Finding New Audiences," Jeffrey R. Young, Inside Higher Ed, January 9, 2008 --- http://chronicle.com/free/2008/01/1159n.htm

One Web site that opened this week, Big Think,  hopes to be "a YouTube for ideas." The site offers interviews with academics, authors, politicians, and other thinkers. Most of the subjects are filmed in front of a plain white background, and the interviews are chopped into bite-sized pieces of just a few minutes each. The short clips could have been served up as text quotes, but Victoria R. M. Brown, co-founder of Big Think, says video is more engaging. "People like to learn and be informed of things by looking and watching and learning," she says.

YouTube itself wants to be a venue for academe. In the past few months, several colleges have signed agreements with the site to set up official "channels." The University of California at Berkeley was the first, and the University of Southern California, the University of New South Wales, in Australia, and Vanderbilt University soon followed.

It remains an open question just how large the audience for talking eggheads is, though. After all, in the early days of television, many academics hoped to use the medium to beam courses to living rooms, with series like CBS's Sunrise Semester. which began in 1957. Those efforts are now a distant memory.

Things may be different now, though, since the Internet offers a chance to connect people with the professors and topics that most interest them.

Even YouTube was surprised by how popular the colleges' content has been, according to Adam Hochman, a product manager at Berkeley's Learning Systems Group. Lectures are long, after all, while most popular YouTube videos run just a few minutes. (Lonelygirl, the diary of a teenage girl, had episodes that finished in well under a minute. Many other popular shorts involve cute animals or juvenile stunts). Yet some lectures on Berkeley's channel scored 100,000 viewers each, and people were sitting through the whole talks. "Professors in a sense are rock stars," Mr. Hochman concludes. "We're getting as many hits as you would find with some of the big media players."

YouTube officials insist that they weren't surprised by the buzz, and they say that more colleges are coming forward. "We expect that education will be a vibrant category on YouTube," said Obadiah Greenberg, strategic partner manager at YouTube, in an e-mail interview. "Everybody loves to learn."

To set up an official channel on YouTube, colleges must sign an agreement with the company, though no money changes hands. That allows the colleges to brand their section of the site, by including a logo or school colors, and to upload longer videos than typical users are allowed.

The company hasn't exactly made it easy to find the academic offerings, though. Clicking on the education category shows a mix of videos, including ones with babes posing in lingerie and others on the lectures of Socrates. But that could change if the company begins to sign up more colleges and pay more attention to whether videos are appearing in the correct subject areas, says Dan Colman, director and associate dean of Stanford University's continuing-studies program, who runs a blog tracking podcasts and videos made by colleges and professors.

In many cases, the colleges were already offering the videos they are putting on YouTube on their own Web sites, or on Apple's iTunes U, an educational section of the iTunes Store. But college officials say that teaming up with YouTube is greatly expanding their audiences because so many people are poking around the service already.

Continued in article

UC Berkeley and other major universities now offer hundreds of courses on YouTube --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

Question
What is the YouTube for Intellectuals?

"'YouTube for Intellectuals' Goes Live," by Andrea L. Foster, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 8, 2008 --- http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/2646/youtube-for-intellectuals-goes-live?at

'YouTube for Intellectuals' Goes Live Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania, talks about the importance of racial, socioeconomic, and religious diversity at colleges in a video on bigthink, a new Web site that is meant to be a YouTube for intellectuals. In addition to featuring academics, the site includes one- to two-minute videos from politicians, artists, and business people.

According to an article in Monday’s New York Times, the site was started by Peter Hopkins, a 2004 graduate of Harvard University. He said he hopes bigthink becomes popular among college students. David Frankel, a venture capitalist, put up most of the money for the enterprise. Lawrence H. Summers, a former president of Harvard, has invested tens of thousands of dollars as well.

Bob Jensen's video search helpers are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm#Video

 

 


Put most anything in the search box at http://www.youtube.com/


How many videos are on YouTube at this moment?
How many new videos are added (uploaded) on average each day?

The content on both YouTube.com and YouTube.ca will be the same, but the Canadian site will highlight homegrown material, said international product manager Luis Garcia. The site becomes the 15th country-specific site, Garcia said. ''The only thing that's different is that this is just a Canadian lens into that content, so if a user wants to get the Canada point of view into that global body of content, then they're able to do that,'' Garcia told reporters at the YouTube.ca launch event Tuesday in Toronto. That means that content uploaded by users in Canada will show up as ''top favorites'' and ''recommended content'' on the site. . . . YouTube, which was founded in February 2005, hosts more than 100 million video views every day with 65,000 new videos uploaded daily. Within a year after its launch, YouTube made headlines when Google Inc. acquired the company for US$1.65 billion worth of stock.
"Popular video-sharing site YouTube launches Canadian version," MIT's Technology Review, November 6, 2007
http://www.technologyreview.com/Wire/19682/?nlid=653
Recall that UC Berkeley has over 300 lectures (mostly in science) on YouTube --- http://www.youtube.com/ucberkeley
Other Open Courseware videos --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Jensen Comment
With 15 or more nations having their own YouTube videos, it will make it more difficult to search for given topics since the videos will not be maintained in a single archive. Hopefully, YouTube will one day have a search engine for searching all of its archives at the same time. Of course this will not overcome language barriers.


SpiralFrog.com, an ad-supported Web site with a terrible name that allows visitors to download music and videos free of charge, commenced on September 17, 2007  in the U.S. and Canada after months of "beta" testing. At launch, the service was offering more than 800,000 tracks and 3,500 music videos for download ---  http://www.spiralfrog.com/

"The Best Way To Search Videos On the Internet," by Katherine Boehret, The Wall Street Journal, August 22, 2007; Page D1 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118773008539604389.html

This week, I tested four video-search engines, including revamped entrant Truveo.com, a smartly designed site that combs through Web video from all sorts of sources ranging from YouTube to broadcasting companies. Truveo, a subsidiary of AOL, is stepping out on its own again after spending three years in the background, powering video search for the likes of Microsoft, Brightcove and AOL itself. It unveiled its new site last week, though I've been playing with it for a few weeks now.

 

This Web site, www.truveo.com, operates under the idea that users don't merely search for video by entering specific words or phrases, like they would when starting a regular Web search. Instead, Truveo thinks that people don't often know what they're looking for in online video searches, and browsing through content helps to retrieve unexpected and perhaps unintended (but welcome) results. I found that, compared with other sites, Truveo provided the most useful interface, which showed five times as many results per page as the others and encouraged me to browse other clips.

In effect, Truveo combines the browsing experience of a YouTube with the best Web-wide video-search engine I've seen.

The other video-search sites I tested included Google's (www.google.com/video) and Yahoo's (www.video.yahoo.com), as well as Blinkx.com (www.blinkx.com). None of these three sites do much to encourage browsing; by default they display as many as 10 results per search on one page and display the clips in a vertical list, forcing you to scroll down to see them all. The majority of clips watched on Truveo, Yahoo and Blinkx direct you to an external link to play the video on its original content provider's site -- which takes an extra step and often involves watching an advertisement.

Searching on Google video almost always displays only content from Google and its famously acquired site, YouTube. The giant search company is working on improving its search results to show a better variety of content providers. Still, the upside here is that clips play right away in the search window rather than through a link to the site where the video originated. YouTube works this way because its clips are user-generated -- either made by users and posted to the site or copied from original host sites and posted to YouTube, saving a trip to the original content provider's site.

Yahoo's video-searching page looks clean and uncluttered, with a large box for entering terms or phrases with which to conduct searches. Two options -- labeled "From Yahoo! Video" and "From Other Sites" -- help you sort results in one step. But the clips that I found on Yahoo video seemed less relevant, overall, and included more repeated clips. One search for the Discovery Channel's "Man Versus Wild" show returned seven clips, four of which were identical.

Blinkx, a three-year-old site, distinguishes itself with its "wall" feature -- a visually stimulating grid of moving video thumbnails. It is like Truveo in that it also works behind the scenes for bigger companies, including Ask.com. Blinkx says it uses speech recognition and analysis to understand what the video is about, while the others stick to text-based searching. And this seemed to hold true: I rarely got results that were completely off-base using Blinkx.

But Truveo's focus on browsing and searching worked well. It repeatedly displayed spot-on results when I was looking for a video about a specific subject, or provided a variety of other videos that were similar, requiring less overall effort on my part. Its most useful feature is the way it shows results: by sorting clips into neatly organized buckets, or categories, such as Featured Channels, Featured Tags and Featured Categories. These buckets spread out on the page in a gridlike manner, giving your eye more to see in a quick glance.

. . .

With so many videos added to the Web each day, the search for online clips can be fruitless and tiresome. Truveo starts users out with enough relevant clips right away so that they can more easily find what they're looking for. And its organizational buckets encourage browsing and, therefore, entertainment -- one of the reasons for Web video's popularity.

Truveo takes a refreshing look at video search, and as long as you have the patience to travel to sites where content originated, you'll find it useful. It stands apart from other search engines in looks and functionality.

 

 

 


Cognitive Science ePrint Search Engine --- http://cogprints.org/

Welcome to CogPrints, an electronic archive for self-archive papers in any area of Psychology, neuroscience, and Linguistics, and many areas of Computer Science (e.g., artificial intelligence, robotics, vison, learning, speech, neural networks), Philosophy (e.g., mind, language, knowledge, science, logic), Biology (e.g., ethology, behavioral ecology, sociobiology, behaviour genetics, evolutionary theory), Medicine (e.g., Psychiatry, Neurology, human genetics, Imaging), Anthropology (e.g., primatology, cognitive ethnology, archeology, paleontology), as well as any other portions of the physical, social and mathematical sciences that are pertinent to the study of cognition.

Search National Public Radio (NPR) Archives

"NPR's New Pandora-Style "Infinite" Radio Player Now Available," by John Paul Titlow, ReadWriteWeb, November 15, 2011 ---
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/npr_pandora-style_infinite_radio_player.php

The digital product team over at NPR is always busy tinkering away and creating new ways for people to consume the news organization's rich library of content. Their latest innovation, called the Infinite Player, is a stripped-down, browser-based tool for listening to NPR content in a serendipitous, yet personalized fashion.

If the player's interface reminds you of Pandora, it's no accident. The team deliberately borrowed from personalized media services like Pandora, Flipboard and Zite when building out the Infinite Player. Its controls are sparse, containing only a few buttons. Among them are a pair of icons for voting stories up and down, much as one would on Pandora. In time, the player learns what you're interested in and plays back content accordingly.

 
The Infinite Player gets its name from the fact that it plays content endlessly, or at least until the user tells it to stop. In that sense, it's sort of like a real radio station. The modern twist comes in its ability to deliver audio content based on the listener's preferences.

This experience provides more of an opportunity what the NPR team calls "distracted listening" - that is, consuming content while doing other things and not necessarily having to make any decisions about it (aside from voting it up or down, if you're so inclined). This is in contrast to the type of "engaged listening" experience that podcasts and audio clips offer.

The player, which launched yesterday, is in beta mode and currently works only in Safari and Chrome. Its functionality is driven by HTML5 and JavaScript, rather than relying on Flash for playback. It doesn't appear to be optimized for the iPad just yet, but it is a brand new feature and presumably the team is working on cross-device compatibility. You can give it a shot here.

Jensen Comment
The Infinite Player is great for seeking archived NPR content, but for most browsing needs I use Firefox. For music I'm a slacker who stays with Slacker.

Bob Jensen's search helpers are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm

 


How Faculty Search Electronic Publications

May 3, 2006 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

RESOURCES FOR RESHAPING SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION

". . . the crisis in the scholarly communication system not only threatens the well being of libraries, but also it threatens our academic faculty's ability to do world-class research. With current technologies, we now have, for the first time in history, the tools necessary to effect change ourselves. We must do everything in our power to change the current scholarly communication system and promote open access to scholarly articles."

Paul G. Haschak's webliography provides resources to help effect this change. "Reshaping the World of Scholarly Communication -- Open Access and the Free Online Scholarship Movement: Open Access Statements, Proposals, Declarations, Principles, Strategies, Organizations, Projects, Campaigns, Initiatives, and Related Items -- A Webliography" (E-JASL, vol. 7, no. 1, spring 2006) is available online at http://southernlibrarianship.icaap.org/content/v07n01/haschak_p01.htm

E-JASL: The Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship [ISSN 1704-8532] is an independent, professional, refereed electronic journal dedicated to advancing knowledge and research in the areas of academic and special librarianship. E-JASL is published by the Consortium for the Advancement of Academic Publication (ICAAP), Athabasca, Canada. For more information, contact: Paul Haschak, Executive Editor, Board President, and Founder, Linus A. Sims Memorial Library, Southeastern Louisiana University, Hammond, LA USA;
email: phaschak@selu.edu 
Web:
http://southernlibrarianship.icaap.org/

November 2, 2006 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

OPEN SOURCE IN HIGHER EDUCATION

The October/November 2006 issue (vol. 3, issue 1) of INNOVATE is devoted to open source and the "potential of open source software and related trends to transform educational practice." Papers include:

"Getting Open Source Software into Schools: Strategies and Challenges" by Gary Hepburn and Jan Buley

"Looking Toward the Future: A Case Study of Open Source Software in the Humanities" by Harvey Quamen

"Harnessing Open Technologies to Promote Open Educational Knowledge Sharing" by Toru Iiyoshi, Cheryl Richardson, and Owen McGrath

The complete issue is available at http://www.innovateonline.info/ .

Innovate [ISSN 1552-3233] is a bimonthly, peer-reviewed online periodical published by the Fischler School of Education and Human Services at Nova Southeastern University. The journal focuses on the creative use of information technology (IT) to enhance educational processes in academic, commercial, and government settings. Readers can comment on articles, share material with colleagues and friends, and participate in open forums. For more information, contact: James L. Morrison, Editor-in-Chief, Innovate; email: innovate@nova.edu ; Web: http://www.innovateonline.info/ .

Bob Jensen's threads on open sourcing are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

......................................................................

HOW FACULTY SEARCH FOR ELECTRONIC PUBLICATIONS

Is the increasing availability of documents diminishing our reliance on colleagues for resource information? In 2004, Pertti Vakkari and Sanna Talja surveyed 900 faculty members and PhD students in Finnish universities to answer the question, "How are academic status and discipline associated with the patterning of search methods used by university scholars for finding materials for teaching, research, and keeping up to date in their field?" They report their findings in "Searching for Electronic Journal Articles to Support Academic Tasks. A Case Study of the Use of the Finnish National Electronic Library (FinELib)" (INFORMATION RESEARCH, vol. 12 no. 1, October 2006). One interesting discovery was that, in contradiction to earlier studies, colleagues were considered "unimportant sources for discovering needed [electronic] materials." However, the authors believe that, while this role for colleagues is diminishing, their role as "discussion partners concerning matters of research is considerably more important than their role as providers of information about literature."

The paper is available online at http://informationr.net/ir/12-1/paper285.html .

Information Research [ISSN 1368-1613] is a freely available, international, scholarly journal, dedicated to making accessible the results of research across a wide range of information-related disciplines. It is privately published by Professor T.D. Wilson, Professor Emeritus of the University of Sheffield, with in-kind support from the University and its Department of Information Studies. For more information, contact: Tom Wilson, Department of Information Studies, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10 2TN, UK; tel: +44 (0)114-222-2642; fax: +44 (0)114-278-0300;
email: t.d.wilson@shef.ac.uk ; Web: http://informationr.net/ir/ .


"U. of Richmond Creates a Wikipedia for Undergraduate Scholars," by Steve Kolowich, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 7, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3703/u-of-richmond-creates-a-wikipedia-for-undergraduate-scholars

At what point does the volume of historical scholarship get in the way of our ability to make sense of history?

At The Chronicle Technology Forum on Monday, Andrew J. Torget, director of the digital scholarship lab at the University of Richmond, argued that we have already exceeded that point. He said that if a person were to read one book a day for the rest of his life, he would not even begin to approach the number of books that Google has already scanned into its database from college libraries. There is just too much information out there.

The current model for teaching and learning is based on a relative scarcity of research and writing, not an excess. With that in mind, Mr. Torget and several others have created a Web site called History Engine to help students around the country work together on a shared tool to make sense of history documents online. Students generate brief essays on American history, and the History Engine aggregates the essays and makes them navigable by tags. Call it Wikipedia for students.

Except better. First of all, its content is moderated by professors. Second, while Wikipedia still presents information two-dimensionally, History Engine employs mapping technology to organize scholarship by time period, geographic location, and themes. “When you’ve got too much information to be able to process it all, you’re not sure how to find meaningful patterns within it,” Mr. Torget told The Chronicle. “The idea is to build a digital microscope that allows students to focus in on what’s most useful and relevant for the question they’re asking.”

Also, the essays (called “episodes”) that compose the History Engine database are short in comparison to traditional scholarly essays—typically about 500 words. “The challenge of a digital age is that that writing assignment hasn’t changed since the age of the typewriter,” Mr. Torget said. “The digital medium requires us to rethink how we make those assignments.”

While some academics might groan about the perils of reining in scholarly commentary according to the standards of reader patience established by Twitter and text messaging, Mr. Torget said that the essay-length restrictions help focus students on what is most important and relevant when writing about their research. But the larger aim of the project is to encourage students to create and view their work in context of a larger body of scholarship—one that accounts for a wide community of scholars but is organized in a way that is manageable.

So far, Mr. Torget says that professors at eight colleges have agreed to use and contribute to the History Engine in their classes. The engine is free to any who wish to join.


How to tag Websites using Yahoo

From Technology Review on July 1, 2005
Yahoo's Search Reinvention
Yahoo tries to upend Google with a new 'social' search engine that allows people to tag websites -- like leaving posty notes. http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/07/wo_070105hellweg.asp?trk=nl 


DuckDuckGo and Searching Privacy

"I'm Being Followed: How Google—and 104 Other Companies—Are Tracking Me on the Web," by Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic, February 29, 2012 ---
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/12/02/im-being-followed-how-google-and-104-other-companies-are-tracking-me-on-the-web/253758/

This morning, if you opened your browser and went to NYTimes.com, an amazing thing happened in the milliseconds between your click and when the news about North Korea and James Murdoch appeared on your screen. Data from this single visit was sent to 10 different companies, including Microsoft and Google subsidiaries, a gaggle of traffic-logging sites, and other, smaller ad firms. Nearly instantaneously, these companies can log your visit, place ads tailored for your eyes specifically, and add to the ever-growing online file about you.

There's nothing necessarily sinister about this subterranean data exchange: this is, after all, the advertising ecosystem that supports free online content. All the data lets advertisers tune their ads, and the rest of the information logging lets them measure how well things are actually working. And I do not mean to pick on The New York Times. While visiting the Huffington Post or The Atlantic or Business Insider, the same process happens to a greater or lesser degree. Every move you make on the Internet is worth some tiny amount to someone, and a panoply of companies want to make sure that no step along your Internet journey goes unmonetized.

Even if you're generally familiar with the idea of data collection for targeted advertising, the number and variety of these data collectors will probably astonish you. Allow me to introduce the list of companies that tracked my movements on the Internet in one recent 36-hour period of standard web surfing: Acerno. Adara Media. Adblade. Adbrite. ADC Onion. Adchemy. ADiFY. AdMeld. Adtech. Aggregate Knowledge. AlmondNet. Aperture. AppNexus. Atlas. Audience Science.

And that's just the As. My complete list includes 105 companies, and there are dozens more than that in existence. You, too, could compile your own list using Mozilla's tool, Collusion, which records the companies that are capturing data about you, or more precisely, your digital self.

While the big names -- Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, etc. -- show up in this catalog, the bulk of it is composed of smaller data and advertising businesses that form a shadow web of companies that want to help show you advertising that you're more likely to click on and products that you're more likely to purchase.

To be clear, these companies gather data without attaching it to your name; they use that data to show you ads you're statistically more likely to click. That's the game, and there is substantial money in it.

As users, we move through our Internet experiences unaware of the churning subterranean machines powering our web pages with their cookies and pixels trackers, their tracking code and databases. We shop for wedding caterers and suddenly see ring ads appear on random web pages we're visiting. We sometimes think the ads following us around the Internet are "creepy." We sometimes feel watched. Does it matter? We don't really know what to think.

The issues the industry raises did not exist when Ronald Reagan was president and were only in nascent form when the Twin Towers fell. These are phenomena of our time and while there are many antecedent forms of advertising, never before in the history of human existence has so much data been gathered about so many people for the sole purpose of selling them ads.

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads," my old friend and early Facebook employee Jeff Hammerbacher once said. "That sucks," he added. But increasingly I think these issues -- how we move "freely" online, or more properly, how we pay one way or another -- are actually the leading edge of a much bigger discussion about the relationship between our digital and physical selves. I don't mean theoretically or psychologically. I mean that the norms established to improve how often people click ads may end up determining who you are when viewed by a bank or a romantic partner or a retailer who sells shoes.

Already, the web sites you visit reshape themselves before you like a carnivorous school of fish, and this is only the beginning. Right now, a huge chunk of what you've ever looked at on the Internet is sitting in databases all across the world. The line separating all that it might say about you, good or bad, is as thin as the letters of your name. If and when that wall breaks down, the numbers may overwhelm the name. The unconsciously created profile may mean more than the examined self I've sought to build.

Most privacy debates have been couched in technical. We read about how Google bypassed Safari's privacy settings, whatever those were. Or we read the details about how Facebook tracks you with those friendly Like buttons. Behind the details, however, are a tangle of philosophical issues that are at the heart of the struggle between privacy advocates and online advertising companies: What is anonymity? What is identity? How similar are humans and machines? This essay is an attempt to think through those questions.

The bad news is that people haven't taken control of the data that's being collected and traded about them. The good news is that -- in a quite literal sense -- simply thinking differently about this advertising business can change the way that it works. After all, if you take these companies at their word, they exist to serve users as much as to serve their clients.

Continued in article

March 4, 2012 message from Aaron Konstam

If you are tired of Google tracking, try the duckduckgo search engine at
duckduckgo.com.

My observation is Google can't track you if you don't log on to a Google
AP like gmail.

Bob Jensen's search helpers are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm

 

 


 

Search for Terms on Book Pages
The Absolutely Fantastic New Search Tool From Amazon

Google now has a new service (Google Print) for reading parts and searching among pages of new books that is both similar to and different from the groundbreaking Amazon free service.

"THE MEDIA BUSINESS; New Google Service May Strain Old Ties in Bookselling," by Edward Wyatt, The New York Times, October 8, 2004 --- http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F50E12FC3E5F0C7B8CDDA90994DC404482 

DISPLAYING FIRST 50 OF 790 WORDS - Google Print, the new search engine that allows consumers to search the content of books online, could help touch off an important shift in the balance of power between companies that produce books and those that sell them, publishing executives said here on ... Google announced the introduction of the...

Continued in the article

You can read more about Google's many new services at http://www.google.com/options/index.html 

In particular, you can read about Google Print at http://print.google.com/ 

Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Since a lot of the world's information isn't yet online, we're helping to get it there. Google Print puts the content of books where you can find it most easily; right in Google search results.

To use Google Print, just search on Google as you normally would. For example, do a search on a subject such as "Books about Ecuador Trekking," or search on a title like "Romeo and Juliet." Whenever a book contains content that matches your search terms, we'll show links to that book in your search results. Click on the book title and you'll see the page that contains your search terms, as well as other information about the book. You can also search for other topics within the book. Click "Buy this Book" and you'll go straight to a bookstore selling the book online.

Frequently Asked Questions 
How does it work? What types of books are available? Can I read an entire book online? Where does the book content come from? What can I do with a book that I find using Google Print? Does Google keep track of the pages I'm viewing? I'm searching for a specific book – why can't I find it? Does Google profit when I buy a book from a Google Print page? I think I found a bug – who can consign it to oblivion?

Google provides examples here!

You can read more about the competing Amazon book search and sample page reading service below.

I find the Google service a bit easier to use, but I found that Amazon gave me greater coverage of new books.  Google will probably get better and better over time.  Neither service covers books that publishers have not allowed surfers to search inside.  In many instances this is a mistake on the part of the publishing firms since finding a book by searching for a phrase may greatly improve sales of the book.  


Amazon’s ability to search through millions of book pages to unearth any tidbit is part of a search revolution that will change us all.
Steven Levy, MANBC, November 10, 2003 --- http://www.msnbc.com/news/987697.asp?0dm=s118k 

Hints from Bob Jensen

Beginning October 23, 2003, Amazon.com offers a text search of entire contents of millions of pages of books, including new books ---
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/10197021/ref%3Dsib%5Fmerch%5Fgw/104-3984945-7813514 

How It Works --- http://snurl.com/BookSearch 
A significant extension of our groundbreaking Look Inside the Book feature, Search Inside the Book allows you to search millions of pages to find exactly the book you want to buy. Now instead of just displaying books whose title, author, or publisher-provided keywords that match your search terms, your search results will surface titles based on every word inside the book. Using Search Inside the Book is as simple as running an Amazon.com search. 

Soon to be the largest scholarly library in the world:
Google Book Search --- http://books.google.com/advanced_book_search 

 

"Amazon's Text Search Feature Helps Boosts Sales of Some Books," bu Nick Wingfield, The Wall Street Journal, October 31, 2003 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB106755615055816900,00.html?mod=technology_main_whats_news 

Amazon.com Inc. said a new program that allows customers to search the contents of some books has boosted sales growth by 9% for titles in the program above other titles that can't be searched.

The news from the Seattle-based Internet retailer suggests that concerns among some book publishers that the search service might hurt sales haven't materialized. Amazon last Thursday introduced the service, called Search Inside the Book, which gave its customers a way to scour complete copies of 120,000 books from 190 publishers, a major advance over the searches customers were previously limited to, such as searches by title and author name.

Some book publishers have stayed out of the new Amazon search service because of concerns that users can easily scan Amazon's electronic copies instead of buying the books. In the days since the service launched though, Amazon monitored sales of 120,000 book titles that can be searched through its new service and says growth in sales of those books significantly outpaced the growth of all other titles on the site. Amazon said 37 additional publishers have contacted the company since the search service launched asking to have their books included in the program.

"It's helping people find things they couldn't otherwise find," Steve Kessel, vice president of Amazon's North American books, music and video group, said in an interview. "There are people who love authors and who are finding things, not just by the author, but about the author."

Although its customers can search entire books with the new service, Amazon has restrictions that limit the ability to browse entire books online. Once a user clicks to a book page containing terms that they've search for -- "Gulf War," for instance -- Amazon doesn't let them browse more than two pages forward or back. Users may jump to other pages containing the terms, but the same restrictions on browsing apply.

Search technology is becoming an increasingly important focus for Amazon and for online shopping in general. The company recently established a new division in Silicon Valley, called A9, which is developing searching technology for finding products to purchase on the Internet. (See article.) The project is getting underway at a time when more shoppers are using search engines like Google and comparison shopping sites like BizRate.com to locate products.

Amazon has a head start on another big Internet company in the book search department. Google Inc. is also talking to publishers about allowing searches of the contents of books, according to people familiar with the matter. A Google spokesman declined to comment.


Google's Scholarly Search Engine and Some Publisher Ripoff Reasons Why It Has Big Problems

Be sure to bookmark  http://scholar.google.com
Note the caveats at SEARCH ENGINE WATCH, November 18, 2004 http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3437471

"Google to Launch Scholarly Search," The Wall Street Journal, November 18, 2004, Page A8 --- 

Google Inc. today is set to introduce a service allowing computer users to search the content of scholarly publications. The free service, called Google Scholar, searches academic literature available on the Web or through Google's agreements with publishers. Search results will include dissertations, peer-reviewed papers, articles and books. To rank the results, Google will consider such factors as where a document was published and how many other scholarly works cite it, factors that aren't a part of its usual ranking system for Web pages. In some cases, publishers require consumers to pay a fee to see the full text of a document. In Google's current test version, the service doesn't include advertisements.

"Google introduces new tool for scholarly research," The Miami Harold, November 18, 2004 --- http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/business/national/10209308.htm?1c 

Online search engine leader Google Inc. is setting out make better sense of all the scholarly work stored on the Web.

The company's new service, unveiled late Wednesday at http://scholar.google.com, draws upon newly developed algorithms to list the academic research that appears to be most relevant to a search request. Mountain View-based Google doesn't plan to charge for the service nor use the feature to deliver text-based ads - the primary source of its profits.

"Google has benefited a lot from scholarly research, so this is one way we are giving back to the scholarly community," said Anurag Acharya, a Google engineer who helped develop the new search tools.

Although Google already had been indexing the reams of academic research online, the company hadn't been able to separate the scholarly content from commercial Web sites.

By focusing on the citations contained in academic papers, Google also engineered its new system to provide a list of potentially helpful material available at libraries and other offline sources.

The scholarly search effort continues Google's effort to probe even deeper into content available online and offline. Just last month, Google expanded a program that invites publishers to scan their books into the search engine's index, enabling people to peek at the contents online before deciding whether to buy a copy.

November 19, 2004 reply from Roger Debreceny [roger@DEBRECENY.COM

I did a search on XBRL and found that Google did an excellent job of finding research on this specialist area. I will be recommending this site to my students in future,

Roger

November 19, 2004 reply from Clifford Budge  

I have just screened through its offerings in relation a a single topic: Cash Flow. 100 screens full of references - must be 800 or more. It took over an hour to screen through all the titles!

Let me give a very rough impression of what came out of screening through the topic.

For a Google search approach, there are very few ref's that seem to be totally irrelevant to the title "Cash Flow".

Most of the articles are from journals with a wide, business interest.

Many report possibilities to implement academic studies for practical use, on topics probably of interest to the financial markets, specific industries.

Some focus on developing methods of forecasting cash flows - for control, or calculating investment opportunities etc.

There are at least a dozen articles of academic research in the area, up to 12 or so years old. Most of them discuss theory of applying various aspects of CF in investing/business situations.

Academics looking for a research area in the field might well locate something with a potential for closer consideration.

OVERALL, this topic has probably been well-served by Google.

Clifford Budge 
Macquarie University, 
Sydney Australia
Email: cbudge@efs.mq.edu.au 

November 26, 2004 message from Cliff Budge [cbudge@EFS.MQ.EDU.AU

As you may have read on AECM, I've aready used this new Google search to assess it against my own interests in Cash Flow Statements.

It would be wise for us "wise men" to put Google to the test:

Could a number of readers, in different aspects of accounting research, put the system to the test?

My own very quick test on Cash Flow research presented a huge majority of articles from magazines without a research focus. - Some of them considered the possible application of research articles to business situations - which isn't the same thing, is it? - I was mystified at the low proportion of articles from the "recognised" research journals: perhaps someone might correlate the "hit rate" for their topic of interest back to the journals? (I have records of articles over the period reported that did not reach their site).

The whole job took me less the two hours! What about some other analyses to spread our knowledge?

Clifford Budge 
Email: cbudge@efs.mq.edu.au 

November 26, 2004 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Cliff,

You raise some very good points.

One of the real problems of scholarly research is that scholarly research journals think the only way they can make money and control copying losses is to restrict publications to hard copy.  This prevents Internet search crawlers like Google from finding key words buried in text.

Pogo got it right.  "The enemy is us."  In particular our worst enemies are faculties who still insist on publication in "elite" journals that shut out easy searches for literature via the Internet.  What is worse is that scholarly journal publication has become a monopoly of the worst kind (rip off pricing of libraries) that some universities and virtually all librarians are fighting as best they can.

For details see http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#ScholarlyJournals 

Bob Jensen

November 26, 2004 reply from Jagdish Gangolly [JGangolly@UAMAIL.ALBANY.EDU

Ted Bergstrom, an economist at UCSB expains this phenomena (where free entry and existence of free or cheaper non-profit journals does not preclude monopoly profits by academic journal peddlers) via a parable that illustrates the well known co-ordination game in the Theory of Games. The equilibrium is a situation where everyone is worse off. You can see the paper at http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Journals/jeprevised.pdf . I am giving below just a snippet that explains the concept through a parable.

Bob, we do not have to go very far to find the effects of this. Look at AAA and how it extracts monopoly rents by restricting knowledge, if there is much of it, in its journals.

Jagdish

_______________________________________________ 
The Anarchists' Annual Meeting: A Parable

This tale is intended to illustrate the workings of coordination games, and to show that in such games, the presence of potential competitors does not necessarily prevent monopoly pricing.

A large number of anarchists find it valuable to attend an annual meeting of like-minded people. The meeting is more valuable to each of them, the greater the number of other anarchists who attend. A meeting attended by only a few is of little value to any of them. At some time in the past, the anarchists started to gather on a particular day of the year in one hotel in a certain city. Other hotels in this and other cities would have served equally well for the meeting, but since each anarchist expects the others to appear at the usual hotel, they return every year to the same hotel on the day of the meeting.

A few years after the anarchists had established their routine, the hotel that served as their meeting-place increased its prices for the day of their annual meeting. Most anarchists valued the annual meeting so highly that they continued to attend, despite the price increase. A few decided that at the higher price, they would rather stay home. The hotel owner observed that although attendance was slightly reduced, the fall in attendance was less than the proportional to the price increase and thus his revenue and his profits increased. In subsequent years, after some experimentation, the hotel owner learned that he could maximize his annual profit by setting a price on the anarchists' meeting day that was much higher than that of other hotels. After setting this price, the hotel owner proclaimed that he was offering a uniquely valuable service to the anarchists.

The anarchists were annoyed at having to pay tribute to the hotel owner for services no better than other hotels offered more cheaply. Moreover, since all of the anarchists prefer larger attendance to smaller, they were all made worse off by the fact that high prices caused some of their number to stay home. But what else could they do? Each anarchist was aware that he or she would be better off if they could all meet at one of the many other hotels offering equal physical facilities at a lower price. Given their beliefs and temperaments, the anarchists were resistant to making and obeying centralized decisions. Lacking central direction, the anarchists were unable to coordinate a move to another hotel. No individual, nor even any small group of anarchists, could gain by moving to another hotel because small meetings, however cheap, are not worth much to any of them.

Pessimistic anarchists speculated that even if they were somehow able to re-coordinate at a cheaper hotel, this victory would be shortlived. The new hotel like its predecessor would raise its prices to take advantage of the anarchists' disorderly ways. More optimistic anarchists suggested that the problem of organizing a meeting at a new hotel is not insurmountable, even for anarchists. Therefore, argued the optimists, once it is demonstrated that the anarchists will move their meeting if prices become excessive, the hotel at which they settle will moderate its prices rather than provoke another mass defection.


The Keepers Registry (back issues of journals in large libraries) --- http://thekeepers.org
For example search for "Accounting"

Subject Guides at Dalhousie University --- http://dal.ca.libguides.com/


"Content Discovery Demystified," by Scott McLemee, Inside Higher Ed, November 21, 2012 ---
 http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/11/21/essay-study-how-researchers-get-access-scholarly-articles

Scholarly publishing consultants Tracy Gardner and Simon Inger recently concluded a large-scale study of how researchers navigate the flood of digitized scholarly content. Renew Training, the British company they run, will sell you the complete data set for a mere £1000 (that's $1,592), or the same information in a deluxe Excel spreadsheet, outfitted with specially designed an analytic features, for £2,500 (a cool $3,981). Anyone whose curiosity is merely idle or penniless must settle for the “survey edition” of the consultants' own analysis, in PDF, which is free.

As you would expect, it's more of an advertisement than a report, with graphs that hint at how much data they have, and how many kinds of it, from around the world. Gardner and Inger’s own report, “How Readers Discover Content in Scholarly Journals,” is available in e-book format at a reasonable price – so I sprang for a copy and have culled some of their findings for this week’s column.

The key word here being some, because even the consultants’ non-exhaustive crunching of the numbers is pretty overwhelming. Between May and July of this year, they collected responses from more than 19,000 interview subjects spanning the populated world. The questions covered various situations in which someone might go looking for scholarly articles in a digital format and the considerable range of ways of going about it. Two-thirds of respondents were from academic institutions – with a large majority (three out of four) identifying themselves as researchers.

Roughly two-thirds of the respondents were from North America and Europe, and the interview itself was conducted in English. But enough participants came from the medical, corporate, and government sectors, and from countries in Africa, Oceania, and South America, to make the study something other than a report on Anglo-American academe. In addition, Gardner and Inger conducted a similar survey in 2008 (albeit with a much smaller harvest of data, from around 400 respondents). They also draw on a study they conducted in 2005 as consultants for another group.

The trends, then. The range and size of digitally published scholarship keep growing, and a number of tools or approaches have developed for accessing material. Researchers rely on university library sites, abstracting and indexing (A&I) services, compilations of links assembled by learned societies or research teams, social networks, and search engines both general (Yahoo) and focused (Google Scholar). You might bookmark a favorite journal, or sign up for an e-mail alert when the table of contents for a new issue is out, or use the journal publisher’s website to find an article. 

The survey questions cover three research “behaviors” common across the disciplines: (1) following up a citation, (2) browsing in the core journals in a given field, and (3) looking for articles on a specific subject. As indicated, quite a few ways of carrying out these tasks are now available. Some approaches are better-developed in one field than another. The survey shows that researchers in the life sciences use the National Institutes of Health's bibliographical database PubMed “almost exclusively,” while the e-mailed table-of-contents (ToC) notifications for chemistry journals are rich enough in information for their readers to find them valuable.

And ease of access to sorting-and-channeling methods varies from one part of the world to the next. A researcher in a poor country is likely to use the search feature on a publisher’s website (bookmarked for just that purpose) for the simple reason that doing so is free – while someone working in a major research library may have access to numerous bibliographical tools so well-integrated into the digital catalog that users barely notice them as such.

North American researchers “are most likely to use an academic search engine or the library web pages if they have a citation,” the reports notes, “whilst Europeans are more likely to go the journal’s homepage.” Humanities scholars “rely much more on library web pages and especially aggregated collections of journals” than do researchers in the life sciences.

Comments made by social scientists reveal that they use “a much more varied list of resources” for following up citations, including one respondent who relied on “my husband’s library because mine is so bad.”

When browsing around the journals in their field, researchers in the field of education “are greater users of academic search engines and of web pages maintained by key research groups” than are people working in other areas. “Social scientists appear to use journal aggregations less than those in the humanities for reading the latest articles.” And all of them rank “library web pages and journal aggregations more highly” than do people in medicine and the physical and life sciences. One respondent indicated that it wasn’t really necessary to look through recent issues of journals in mathematics because “nowadays virtually all leading research in math is uploaded to arXiv.”

Specialized bibliographical databases “are still the most popular resource” for someone trying to read up on a particular topic, “and allowing for a margin of error [this preference] shows no significant change over time.” The web pages compiled by scholarly societies and research groups “have both shown a slight upward trend” in that regard, “which may be due to changes in publisher marketing strategies resulting in readers becoming more familiar publisher and society brands.”



Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/11/21/essay-study-how-researchers-get-access-scholarly-articles#ixzz2CrbCVYNO
Inside Higher Ed
 
Scholarly publishing consultants Tracy Gardner and Simon Inger recently concluded a large-scale study of how researchers navigate the flood of digitized scholarly content. Renew Training, the British company they run, will sell you the complete data set for a mere £1000 (that's $1,592), or the same information in a deluxe Excel spreadsheet, outfitted with specially designed an analytic features, for £2,500 (a cool $3,981). Anyone whose curiosity is merely idle or penniless must settle for the “survey edition” of the consultants' own analysis, in PDF, which is free.

As you would expect, it's more of an advertisement than a report, with graphs that hint at how much data they have, and how many kinds of it, from around the world. Gardner and Inger’s own report, “How Readers Discover Content in Scholarly Journals,” is available in e-book format at a reasonable price – so I sprang for a copy and have culled some of their findings for this week’s column.

The key word here being some, because even the consultants’ non-exhaustive crunching of the numbers is pretty overwhelming. Between May and July of this year, they collected responses from more than 19,000 interview subjects spanning the populated world. The questions covered various situations in which someone might go looking for scholarly articles in a digital format and the considerable range of ways of going about it. Two-thirds of respondents were from academic institutions – with a large majority (three out of four) identifying themselves as researchers.

Roughly two-thirds of the respondents were from North America and Europe, and the interview itself was conducted in English. But enough participants came from the medical, corporate, and government sectors, and from countries in Africa, Oceania, and South America, to make the study something other than a report on Anglo-American academe. In addition, Gardner and Inger conducted a similar survey in 2008 (albeit with a much smaller harvest of data, from around 400 respondents). They also draw on a study they conducted in 2005 as consultants for another group.

The trends, then. The range and size of digitally published scholarship keep growing, and a number of tools or approaches have developed for accessing material. Researchers rely on university library sites, abstracting and indexing (A&I) services, compilations of links assembled by learned societies or research teams, social networks, and search engines both general (Yahoo) and focused (Google Scholar). You might bookmark a favorite journal, or sign up for an e-mail alert when the table of contents for a new issue is out, or use the journal publisher’s website to find an article. 

The survey questions cover three research “behaviors” common across the disciplines: (1) following up a citation, (2) browsing in the core journals in a given field, and (3) looking for articles on a specific subject. As indicated, quite a few ways of carrying out these tasks are now available. Some approaches are better-developed in one field than another. The survey shows that researchers in the life sciences use the National Institutes of Health's bibliographical database PubMed “almost exclusively,” while the e-mailed table-of-contents (ToC) notifications for chemistry journals are rich enough in information for their readers to find them valuable.

And ease of access to sorting-and-channeling methods varies from one part of the world to the next. A researcher in a poor country is likely to use the search feature on a publisher’s website (bookmarked for just that purpose) for the simple reason that doing so is free – while someone working in a major research library may have access to numerous bibliographical tools so well-integrated into the digital catalog that users barely notice them as such.

North American researchers “are most likely to use an academic search engine or the library web pages if they have a citation,” the reports notes, “whilst Europeans are more likely to go the journal’s homepage.” Humanities scholars “rely much more on library web pages and especially aggregated collections of journals” than do researchers in the life sciences.

Comments made by social scientists reveal that they use “a much more varied list of resources” for following up citations, including one respondent who relied on “my husband’s library because mine is so bad.”

When browsing around the journals in their field, researchers in the field of education “are greater users of academic search engines and of web pages maintained by key research groups” than are people working in other areas. “Social scientists appear to use journal aggregations less than those in the humanities for reading the latest articles.” And all of them rank “library web pages and journal aggregations more highly” than do people in medicine and the physical and life sciences. One respondent indicated that it wasn’t really necessary to look through recent issues of journals in mathematics because “nowadays virtually all leading research in math is uploaded to arXiv.”

Specialized bibliographical databases “are still the most popular resource” for someone trying to read up on a particular topic, “and allowing for a margin of error [this preference] shows no significant change over time.” The web pages compiled by scholarly societies and research groups “have both shown a slight upward trend” in that regard, “which may be due to changes in publisher marketing strategies resulting in readers becoming more familiar publisher and society brands.”



Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/11/21/essay-study-how-researchers-get-access-scholarly-articles#ixzz2CrbCVYNO
Inside Higher Ed
 


Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/11/21/essay-study-how-researchers-get-access-scholarly-articles#ixzz2CrbCVYNO
Inside Higher Ed
 


Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/11/21/essay-study-how-researchers-get-access-scholarly-articles#ixzz2CrbPN9qK
Inside Higher Ed
 
Scholarly publishing consultants Tracy Gardner and Simon Inger recently concluded a large-scale study of how researchers navigate the flood of digitized scholarly content. Renew Training, the British company they run, will sell you the complete data set for a mere £1000 (that's $1,592), or the same information in a deluxe Excel spreadsheet, outfitted with specially designed an analytic features, for £2,500 (a cool $3,981). Anyone whose curiosity is merely idle or penniless must settle for the “survey edition” of the consultants' own analysis, in PDF, which is free.

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/11/21/essay-study-how-researchers-get-access-scholarly-articles#ixzz2Crbk96mO
Inside Higher Ed
 

Scholarly publishing consultants Tracy Gardner and Simon Inger recently concluded a large-scale study of how researchers navigate the flood of digitized scholarly content. Renew Training, the British company they run, will sell you the complete data set for a mere £1000 (that's $1,592), or the same information in a deluxe Excel spreadsheet, outfitted with specially designed an analytic features, for £2,500 (a cool $3,981). Anyone whose curiosity is merely idle or penniless must settle for the “survey edition” of the consultants' own analysis, in PDF, which is free.

As you would expect, it's more of an advertisement than a report, with graphs that hint at how much data they have, and how many kinds of it, from around the world. Gardner and Inger’s own report, “How Readers Discover Content in Scholarly Journals,” is available in e-book format at a reasonable price – so I sprang for a copy and have culled some of their findings for this week’s column.

The key word here being some, because even the consultants’ non-exhaustive crunching of the numbers is pretty overwhelming. Between May and July of this year, they collected responses from more than 19,000 interview subjects spanning the populated world. The questions covered various situations in which someone might go looking for scholarly articles in a digital format and the considerable range of ways of going about it. Two-thirds of respondents were from academic institutions – with a large majority (three out of four) identifying themselves as researchers.

Roughly two-thirds of the respondents were from North America and Europe, and the interview itself was conducted in English. But enough participants came from the medical, corporate, and government sectors, and from countries in Africa, Oceania, and South America, to make the study something other than a report on Anglo-American academe. In addition, Gardner and Inger conducted a similar survey in 2008 (albeit with a much smaller harvest of data, from around 400 respondents). They also draw on a study they conducted in 2005 as consultants for another group.

The trends, then. The range and size of digitally published scholarship keep growing, and a number of tools or approaches have developed for accessing material. Researchers rely on university library sites, abstracting and indexing (A&I) services, compilations of links assembled by learned societies or research teams, social networks, and search engines both general (Yahoo) and focused (Google Scholar). You might bookmark a favorite journal, or sign up for an e-mail alert when the table of contents for a new issue is out, or use the journal publisher’s website to find an article. 

The survey questions cover three research “behaviors” common across the disciplines: (1) following up a citation, (2) browsing in the core journals in a given field, and (3) looking for articles on a specific subject. As indicated, quite a few ways of carrying out these tasks are now available. Some approaches are better-developed in one field than another. The survey shows that researchers in the life sciences use the National Institutes of Health's bibliographical database PubMed “almost exclusively,” while the e-mailed table-of-contents (ToC) notifications for chemistry journals are rich enough in information for their readers to find them valuable.

And ease of access to sorting-and-channeling methods varies from one part of the world to the next. A researcher in a poor country is likely to use the search feature on a publisher’s website (bookmarked for just that purpose) for the simple reason that doing so is free – while someone working in a major research library may have access to numerous bibliographical tools so well-integrated into the digital catalog that users barely notice them as such.

North American researchers “are most likely to use an academic search engine or the library web pages if they have a citation,” the reports notes, “whilst Europeans are more likely to go the journal’s homepage.” Humanities scholars “rely much more on library web pages and especially aggregated collections of journals” than do researchers in the life sciences.

Comments made by social scientists reveal that they use “a much more varied list of resources” for following up citations, including one respondent who relied on “my husband’s library because mine is so bad.”

When browsing around the journals in their field, researchers in the field of education “are greater users of academic search engines and of web pages maintained by key research groups” than are people working in other areas. “Social scientists appear to use journal aggregations less than those in the humanities for reading the latest articles.” And all of them rank “library web pages and journal aggregations more highly” than do people in medicine and the physical and life sciences. One respondent indicated that it wasn’t really necessary to look through recent issues of journals in mathematics because “nowadays virtually all leading research in math is uploaded to arXiv.”

Specialized bibliographical databases “are still the most popular resource” for someone trying to read up on a particular topic, “and allowing for a margin of error [this preference] shows no significant change over time.” The web pages compiled by scholarly societies and research groups “have both shown a slight upward trend” in that regard, “which may be due to changes in publisher marketing strategies resulting in readers becoming more familiar publisher and society brands.”

The rise of academic search engines is a new factor -- and while there are others, such as Microsoft Academic Search, the bar graphs show Google Scholar looming over all competitors like a skyscraper over huts. And that’s not even counting the general-purpose Google search engine, which remains a standard tool for academic researchers.

One interesting point that the authors extract from the comments of participants is that many scholars remain unclear on the difference between a search engine and, say, a specialized bibliographical database. Unfortunately the survey seems not to have included information on respondents’ ages, though it would be interesting to know if that is a factor in recognizing such distinctions.

As I said, the e-book version is reasonably priced, and well within reach of anyone intrigued by this column's aerial survey. The publishers and information managers who can afford the full-dress, all-the-data version, which will allow comparison between the research preferences of Malaysian physicists and German historians, and so forth, will be able to extract from it information on how better to engineer access to their content by the specific research constituencies using it.

Continued in article


How do scholars search for academic references?

Scholarpedia --- http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Main_Page

PLoS One --- http://www.plosone.org/home.action 

Google Scholar --- http://scholar.google.com/
Not to be confused with Google Advanced Search which does not cover many scholarly articles --- http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en

Microsoft's Windows "Live Search" or  "Academic Search" ---
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?scope=academic&q=

Amazon's A9 --- http://a9.com/-/search/advSearch 

Beginning October 23, 2003, Amazon.com offers a text search of entire contents of millions of pages of books, including new books ---
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/10197021/ref%3Dsib%5Fmerch%5Fgw/104-3984945-7813514 

How It Works --- http://snurl.com/BookSearch 
A significant extension of our groundbreaking Look Inside the Book feature, Search Inside the Book allows you to search millions of pages to find exactly the book you want to buy. Now instead of just displaying books whose title, author, or publisher-provided keywords that match your search terms, your search results will surface titles based on every word inside the book. Using Search Inside the Book is as simple as running an Amazon.com search. 

Soon to be the largest scholarly library in the world:
Google Book Search --- http://books.google.com/advanced_book_search 

Answers.com --- http://www.answers.com/

Wikipedia (heavily used by scholars in spite of authenticity risks)--- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s

"U. of Richmond Creates a Wikipedia for Undergraduate Scholars," by Steve Kolowich, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 7, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3703/u-of-richmond-creates-a-wikipedia-for-undergraduate-scholars

At what point does the volume of historical scholarship get in the way of our ability to make sense of history?

At The Chronicle Technology Forum on Monday, Andrew J. Torget, director of the digital scholarship lab at the University of Richmond, argued that we have already exceeded that point. He said that if a person were to read one book a day for the rest of his life, he would not even begin to approach the number of books that Google has already scanned into its database from college libraries. There is just too much information out there.

The current model for teaching and learning is based on a relative scarcity of research and writing, not an excess. With that in mind, Mr. Torget and several others have created a Web site called History Engine to help students around the country work together on a shared tool to make sense of history documents online. Students generate brief essays on American history, and the History Engine aggregates the essays and makes them navigable by tags. Call it Wikipedia for students.

Except better. First of all, its content is moderated by professors. Second, while Wikipedia still presents information two-dimensionally, History Engine employs mapping technology to organize scholarship by time period, geographic location, and themes. “When you’ve got too much information to be able to process it all, you’re not sure how to find meaningful patterns within it,” Mr. Torget told The Chronicle. “The idea is to build a digital microscope that allows students to focus in on what’s most useful and relevant for the question they’re asking.”

Also, the essays (called “episodes”) that compose the History Engine database are short in comparison to traditional scholarly essays—typically about 500 words. “The challenge of a digital age is that that writing assignment hasn’t changed since the age of the typewriter,” Mr. Torget said. “The digital medium requires us to rethink how we make those assignments.”

While some academics might groan about the perils of reining in scholarly commentary according to the standards of reader patience established by Twitter and text messaging, Mr. Torget said that the essay-length restrictions help focus students on what is most important and relevant when writing about their research. But the larger aim of the project is to encourage students to create and view their work in context of a larger body of scholarship—one that accounts for a wide community of scholars but is organized in a way that is manageable.

So far, Mr. Torget says that professors at eight colleges have agreed to use and contribute to the History Engine in their classes. The engine is free to any who wish to join.

 

Other Scholarly Search Engines (CrossRef and Scirus.) --- http://privateschool.about.com/b/a/116956.htm
Also see http://www.library.uq.edu.au/internet/scholsearch.html

Scholarly search tools

  • CiteBase
    Citebase is a trial service that allows researchers to search across free, full-text research literature ePrint archives, with results ranked according to criteria such as citation impact.

     

  • Gateway to ePrints
    A listing of ePrint servers and open access repository search tools.

     

  • Google Scholar
    A search tool for scholarly citations and abstracts, many of which link to full text articles, book chapters, working papers and other forms of scholarly publishing. It includes content from many open access journals and repositories.

     

  • OAIster
    A search tool for cross-archive searching of more than 540 separate digital collections and archives, including arXiv, CiteBase, ANU ePrints, ePrintsUQ, and others.

     

  • Scirus
    A search tool for online journals and Web sites in the sciences.
 

Google Book Search --- http://books.google.com/advanced_book_search 

UCLA Library Scholarly Search Helpers --- http://www2.library.ucla.edu/googlescholar/searchengines.cfm

University of Kansas Scholarly Search Helpers --- http://www.lib.ku.edu/technology/searchengines/scholar.shtml

Social scientists and business scholars often use SSRN (not free) --- http://www.ssrn.com/

If you have access to a college library, most colleges generally have paid subscriptions to enormous scholarly literature databases that are not available freely online. Serious scholars obtain access to these vast literature databases.

Librarian's Index to the Internet --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm#Librarian'sIndex

Searching the Deep Web --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm#DeepWeb

Open Access Shared Scholarship --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

University Channel (video and audio) ---  http://uc.princeton.edu/main/

Bob Jensen's links to electronic literature, including free online textbooks and other learning materials --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

Bob Jensen's search helpers are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm

MIT's Video Lecture Search Engine: Watch the video at --- http://web.sls.csail.mit.edu/lectures/
Researchers at MIT have released a video and audio search tool that solves one of the most challenging problems in the field: how to break up a lengthy academic lecture into manageable chunks, pinpoint the location of keywords, and direct the user to them. Announced last month, the MIT
Lecture Browser website gives the general public detailed access to more than 200 lectures publicly available though the university's OpenCourseWare initiative. The search engine leverages decades' worth of speech-recognition research at MIT and other institutions to
convert audio
into text and make it searchable.
Kate Greene, MIT's Technology Review, November 26, 2007 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19747/?nlid=686&a=f
Once again, the Lecture Browser link (with video) is at http://web.sls.csail.mit.edu/lectures/
Bob Jensen's search helpers are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm

Find free video lectures from free universities at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI


"What is the most underused research technique among lawyers?"

Answer in an email from Brian Garner on February 26, 2013

ANSWER: Undoubtedly it's Google Books.

It's possible to perform extremely literal searches -- word-for-word and character-for-character searches -- on Google Books, and to have at your fingertips the entire corpus of major university libraries' holdings. This means that you can scour all the legal treatises at Chicago, Stanford, Oxford, Columbia, and other major institutions in minutes -- and without ever leaving your chair.

For example, let's say you wanted to learn the history of whether statutes can be repealed by disuse. You could first go to the main Google Books site and type in terms such as repeal statute disuse. A quick scan of the results would lead you to the term desuetude. You could then scroll to the bottom of the page and click on "advanced search," where you'd find powerful options for refining your search. By crafting different searches using the terms desuetude, statute, repeal, disuse, American law, etc., you would find sources discussing desuetude in Scots, Roman, English, and American law. And as with any research project, the more you delve into the sources, the more nuances you'll discover. (By the way, for a full discussion of the desuetude canon and its standing in current law, see Antonin Scalia & Bryan A. Garner, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts 336-39 [2012]).

As with any electronic search, the quality of the results will depend on your research skills. But instead of paying for a legal-research service, as lawyers so commonly do, you have a compilation of answers in treatises with just a few strokes of your keyboard -- and best of all: at no charge.

Granted, for a full-text reading, Google Books is most useful when you're researching historical matters found in works in the public domain (any book published before 1923 is not protected by copyright laws and has passed into the public domain). But even for books still in copyright, it can take you to sources you can purchase or consult in a library. An especially useful feature of Google Books is the advanced-search criterion by publication date. For example, you might ask for books published only from 1976 to 2000.

Mind you, Google Books shouldn't be your sole source for legal research. But you'll be surprised at how handy it can be. So don't let this valuable research tool go untapped. Lawyers everywhere ought to be using Google Books in addition to Westlaw, LexisNexis, and other electronic-search services.

 


"Introducing the Knowledge Graph: things, not strings," Google, May 16, 2012 ---
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/05/introducing-knowledge-graph-things-not.html


"The Launch of Scholrly: new search engine seeks to change the way people find research," by Brian Mathews, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 1, 2012 --- Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/theubiquitouslibrarian/2012/05/30/the-launch-of-scholr-ly-new-search-engine-seeks-to-change-the-way-people-find-research/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

I spent time in California interviewing graduate students about their work processes. Something that stood out to me was how science and engineering students typically looked for people (rather than subject headings) during the information gathering stage. The objective was to find researchers working in particular areas and then mine their websites for additional papers. That’s exactly the approach that Scholrly hopes to improve upon.

 

I first came across Scholrly about a year ago when a friend of a friend liked them on Facebook. I explored and this is what I found:

 

“Scholrly aims to give its users, from the garage inventor to the tenured professor, a single stop for finding research connections and insights faster than ever before.”

 

I spoke with co-founder Corbin Pon last August and followed their development. Over the past year they’ve worked with faculty at Georgia Tech’s College of Computing to build out the idea. And in early June they’ll open up their software to beta testers.

 

People
What’s most interesting to me is
Scholrly’s people-centric emphasis. When you search with a keyword you not only get relevant citations but relevant people as well. The goal is to let users search for people and to figure out who is important within the subject context. And not only that, but what else have those people worked on, who have they worked with, and other related connections.

 

The idea sparked during a conversation with a physician at Emory who expressed frustration at not being able to find people with the skill set he needed. He assumed that researchers at nearby Georgia Tech probably had the expertise, but he wasn’t sure how to identify or contact them.

 

This led the co-founders to thinking about how researchers are connected bibliographically and how they could also be connected through an online tool. They mapped different knowledge networks and built a search engine around the data with the objective of making the people part much more accessible.

 

When searching Scholrly the results are returned on two separate panels: publications & authors. While the author component isn’t too radically different, in fact many databases provide author lists/limiters in the results, Scholrly places a great emphasis on this feature. Author profiles will include career information, affiliations, publication listings, common co-authors, top publishing venues, and impact metrics. Authors are also able to claim their profile, similarly to how twitter verifies celebrity identities, and then edit/upload additional information.

 

Ontological Neighborhoods
Corbin often talks about scholarly neighborhoods:

“When we talk about neighborhoods, we know that there are communities of related research that are not always easy to see and explore. These researchers are reading and contributing to work from all different fields. In one project, someone might be contributing to their own self-defined field, and in another project, there could of experts for all sorts of fields. Scholrly connects papers and researchers based on the citation graph and co-authorship right at this moment, and we are developing other techniques of finding similarities. This makes it easier to identify titles and faces that appear in clusters regardless of their self described field and shows series of related papers that might suggest long term projects worth investigating. This idea of neighborhoods, we feel, better describes the structure of research than strict collections that classify work from the top-down.”

 

And the team doesn’t view academics are their only audience. One of their goals is to make research materials more accessible to people who don’t have access to big libraries or Fortune 500 budgets. “We really want to change the way that people find research materials” But listening to Corbin talk you realize it’s not just search behavior that he hopes will change, but the entire way people think about and approach their research process.

 

Oh and Google Scholar? “Our goal is to compete with Google Scholar, or replace it.”

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
When I searched for "Accounting" on June 1, 2012 there were four categories, including Accounting Issues and Accounting Theory. However, there were no hits available under those categories. It's probably too early to try this search engine for accounting topics.

 


"‘Free-Range Learners’: Study Opens Window Into How Students Hunt for Educational Content Online," by Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 25, 2012 --- Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/free-range-learners-study-opens-window-into-how-students-hunt-for-educational-content-online/36137?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Milwaukee — Digital natives? The idea that students are superengaged finders of online learning materials once struck Glenda Morgan, e-learning strategist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as “a load of hooey.” Students, she figured, probably stick with the textbooks and other content they’re assigned in class.

Not quite. The preliminary results of a multiyear study of undergraduates’ online study habits, presented by Ms. Morgan at a conference on blended learning here this week, show that most students shop around for digital texts and videos beyond the boundaries of what professors assign them in class.

“It’s almost like they want to find the content by themselves,” Ms. Morgan said in an interview after her talk, which took place in a packed room at the 9th Annual Sloan Consortium Blended Learning Conference & Workshop.

It’s nothing new to hear that students supplement their studies with other universities’ online lecture videos. But Ms. Morgan’s research—backed by the National Science Foundation, based on 14 focus-group interviews at a range of colleges, and buttressed by a large online survey going on now—paints a broader picture of how they’re finding content, where they’re getting it, and why they’re using it.

Ms. Morgan borrows the phrase “free-range learning” to describe students’ behavior, and she finds that they generally shop around for content in places educators would endorse. Students seem most favorably inclined to materials from other universities. They mention lecture videos from Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology far more than the widely publicized Khan Academy, she says. If they’re on a pre-med or health-science track, they prefer recognized “brands” like the Mayo Clinic. Students often seek this outside content due to dissatisfaction with their own professors, Ms. Morgan says.

The study should be welcome news for government agencies, universities, and others in the business of publishing online libraries of educational content—although students tend to access these sources from the “side door,” like via a Google search for a very specific piece of information.

But the study also highlights the challenge facing professors and librarians. Students report relying on friends to get help and share resources, Ms. Morgan says, whereas their responses suggest “much less of a role” for “conventional authority figures.”

They “don’t want to ask librarians or tutors in the study center or stuff like that,” she says. “It’s more the informal networks that they’re using.”

Ms. Morgan confesses to some concerns about her own data. She wonders how much students are “telling me what I want to hear.” She also worries that she’s tapping into a disproportionate slice of successful students.

Bob Jensen's search helpers are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on free courses, tutorials, videos, and course materials from prestigious universities and Kahn Academy ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

 


"Projects Aims to Build Online Hub for Archival Materials," by Jennifer Howard, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 13, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Building-a-Digital-Map-of/131846/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

In death, as in life, people don't always leave their papers in order. Letters, manuscripts, and other pieces of evidence wind up scattered among different archives, leading researchers on a paper chase as they try to hunt down what they need for their work.

"It can be hugely frustrating—especially when you make a journey cross-country to an archive, and then discover the piece you really wanted must be somewhere else (or, God forbid, rotting away in a landfill)," says Robert Townsend, deputy director of the American Historical Association, in an e-mail interview. Chasing after distributed historical records is so common that "any historian who has not suffered from that problem can't be working very hard," he wrote.

The Internet has made the hunt easier, as more archives post finding aids for their collections online. "Scholars have at least gotten to the point where they can search over the Internet for these materials," says Daniel V. Pitti, the associate director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, or IATH, at the University of Virginia. But what he calls "hunting and gathering" persists for document-seekers, who "a priori have to have some idea, some hunch, of where to go, because the access systems are distinct and not integrated any way."

Now imagine a central clearinghouse for those records, an online hub researchers could consult to find archival materials.

That vision drives a project of Mr. Pitti's called the Social Networks and Archival Context Project, or SNAC. It's a collaboration between researchers and developers at IATH, the University of California at Berkeley's School of Information, and the California Digital Library. The project recently finished its pilot stage with the help of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Another grant, from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, will support the project through another two years as it adds millions more records and begins beta testing with researchers.

Some people have already found the prototype, which is up and running although not yet widely promoted. The site allows visitors to search for the names of individuals, corporate entities, or families to find "archival context records" for them.

"So if I'm interested in a particular person," Mr. Pitti says, "I can find where all the records are that would be required to understand them." For instance, a search for Robert Oppenheimer turns up a link to a collection of the physicist's papers housed at the Library of Congress, plus links to other collections in which he is referenced, a biographical timeline, and a list of occupations and subjects related to his life and work.

A researcher can explore a person's social and cultural environment with SNAC's radial-graph feature. It creates a web, which can be manipulated, of a subject's connections as revealed in archival records. The radial graph of Oppenheimer's network, for instance, includes George Kennan, Linus Pauling, Bertrand Russell, and Albert Schweitzer, among many other names represented as nodes on the graph.

Not yet fully developed, the radial-graph feature supports one of the project's main goals: to visualize the social networks within which archival records were created. "What you're trying to do is put together the puzzle, the fabric of someone's life, the people that influenced them and the people they influenced," Mr. Pitti says. "One could certainly, in an analog context, piece this together, but it would take years and years of work. What we're demonstrating is that we can go out there and gather all that information and present it to you, which would liberate scholars." Connecting archival data can reveal patterns of association hidden in disparate collections.

Data Quality Important

To work well, SNAC requires good data. Its first phase drew on thousands of finding aids—encoded with a standard known as Encoded Archival Description, or EAD—from the Library of Congress, the Northwest Digital Archives, the Online Archive of California, and Virginia Heritage. A newer standard for encoding archival information, referred to as EAC-CPF, for Encoded Archival Context-Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families, was then applied to those records, making them easier to find and connect.

Archives are idiosyncratic, and it's not always easy to tell whether a name refers to a particular individual or to different people with identical or similar names. One of Mr. Pitti's main collaborators is Ray R. Larson, a professor in the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley. He concentrates on what Mr. Pitti calls the "matching and merging" required to winnow out duplicate names, find variants of the same name, and so on. To do that Mr. Larson has tested several approaches, including machine learning, in which a computer is programmed to recognize, for example, common variations in spelling.

The job is about to get much tougher, though, because SNAC is about to get much bigger. As part of the second phase of the project, supported by the Mellon grant, 13 state and regional archival consortia and more than 35 university and national repositories in the United States, Britain, and France will contribute records. The British Library "is giving me 300,000 names associated with their manuscript collections," going back to before the Christian era, says Mr. Pitti.

The project will also ingest as many as 2 million standardized bibliographic records, in the widely used MARC format, from the online OCLC collaboration in which libraries exchange research and cataloging information. OCLC has its own centralized archival search function, called ArchiveGrid; Mr. Pitti describes it as complementary to SNAC. Unlike SNAC, though, "ArchiveGrid does not foreground the biographical-historical data, nor does it reveal the social networks that interrelate the archival resources," he says.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on archived databases ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on electronic literature ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm


Wikipedia Online --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Britannica Online --- http://www.britannica.com/

The End of History on Library Reference Shelves:  Bound Volumes of Britannica are Frozen in Time in the Early Decade of the 21st Century

"Can Britannica Rule the Web? Despite Wikipedia, more people pay to access the encyclopedia website annually than paid for the print edition in any year," by L. Gordon Crovitz, The Wall Street Journal, March 18, 2012 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304692804577285411517536598.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_t

How would you have written the encyclopedia entry about last week's news that the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which was first published in 1768, has stopped putting out a printed version? The media naturally focused on this fact alone—the loss of the printed volume. The more interesting story is whether Britannica can survive online.

Those of us who grew up with the leather volumes tend toward nostalgia. In the pre-digital era, Britannica was the definitive way to impart and search information. The surprise is that for many people Britannica remains a key way to find authoritative knowledge online at a time when Wikipedia is a top-10 website.

In the peak year of 1990, 120,000 sets of the printed Britannica were sold; only 8,000 sets of the 2010 edition have been sold. Yet a company representative says 500,000 subscribers pay some $70 a year for unlimited access to its website. This means that despite the free alternative of Wikipedia, more people pay to access Britannica online annually than paid for the print version in any year. The company estimates that "tens of millions of people around the world" also have access to the online version through their library, school or college.

This is remarkable considering the great success of Wikipedia, which covers many more topics—in English, four million versus the Britannica's fewer than 100,000—by letting anyone post or update entries, with mostly volunteer editors vetting the results. Britannica hopes there is a place for a brand that claims to be authoritative instead of crowd-sourced.

Britannica has 100 full-time editors who have worked with contributors over the years such as Albert Einstein, Milton Friedman and Alfred Hitchcock (who replied "98.6" when asked by Britannica to list his degrees on its contributor information form). Britannica's marketing division says, "There's no such thing as a bad question—but there are bad answers." In 2008, company president Jorge Cauz told the New Yorker, "Wikipedia is to Britannica as 'American Idol' is to the Juilliard School." (This quote appears in the Wikipedia entry on Mr. Cauz.)

An anecdotal comparison of Britannica and Wikipedia shows the value of the premium source, but also the generally high quality of the crowd-sourced edition. The Britannica entry on itself comes to 30 pages when printed out, while Wikipedia has 23 pages; Britannica covers Wikipedia in three pages while Wikipedia has 39 pages on itself. The Wikipedia entry on the solar system, at 23 pages, is twice as long as the Britannica version. Evolution has a 61-page entry in the Britannica, by a University of California scholar, while Wikipedia has 44 pages, including an exhaustive 288 footnotes.

Still, length is not always the best indicator of value. Britannica has a well-crafted, six-page entry on economist Friedrich Hayek, for example, compared with a 15-page Wikipedia entry that includes random anecdotes alongside more serious analysis, reflecting the group wiki-effort based on consensus rather than a unified approach to a topic.

On the other hand, if you're more interested in actress Salma Hayek, Britannica has less than one page ("known for her sultry good looks and intelligence"), compared with Wikipedia's 11 pages, which include exhaustive detail on her films, TV appearances and charitable work. If you're interested in the foot ailment Morton's Neuroma, Wikipedia has a more complete entry than the Mayo Clinic's, and Britannica has none.

The Wikimedia Foundation that oversees Wikipedia has its own worries. Its strategic plan, posted online, says its biggest risk is the declining number of volunteer editors. Many entries include cautions that the reliability of information hasn't been confirmed. "Declining participation is by far the most serious problem facing the Wikimedia projects," the group says. "The success of the projects is entirely dependent upon a thriving, healthy editing community."

Another related issue: "Risk of editorial scandal can't be mitigated; there is an inherent level of risk that we cannot sidestep." This is especially true as Wikipedia adds new languages and countries, including many that censor results. It's not clear that the volunteer model is sustainable, though few would have imagined that Wikipedia could grow to have a goal for this year of serving one billion online readers with 50 million articles in some 280 languages.

Britannica remains a profitable business, especially after dropping its print version, but to survive it will have to be the most accurate source—and make the case that authoritative sources matter. For Wikipedia, the challenge is whether volunteers can sustain what has become the world's largest compendium of facts and sometimes knowledge.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
Hurried scholars should begin with Wikipedia and then do a fact check in the online Britannica. However, this can be disappointing since there are millions of topics covered in Wikipedia that are not covered in Britannica, particularly biographies of contemporary people. Of course serious scholars should also dig much deeper than what can be found in encyclopedias. Hopefully, such scholars will also contribute their findings to both Wikipedia and Britannca. This includes language translations.

 



Question
What is Amazon's search site that it expects to eventually be better than Google?

 

Answer
Click on http://a9.com/-/search/advSearch 

 

The web is easy to use, but using it well is not easy. We are inventing new ways to take search one step farther and make it more effective. We provide a unique set of powerful features to find information, organize it, and remember it—all in one place. A9.com is a powerful search engine, using web search and image search results enhanced by Google, Search Inside the Book™ results from Amazon.com, reference results from GuruNet, movies results from IMDb, and more.

A9.com remembers your information. You can keep your own notes about any web page and search them; it is a new way to store and organize your bookmarks; it even recommends new sites and favorite old sites specifically for you to visit. With the A9 Toolbar all your web browsing history will be stored, allowing you (and only you!) to retrieve it at any time and even search it; it will tell you if you have any new search results, or the last time you visited a page.


I don't think A9.com will be the search engine of choice for some time to come.  It also has a long ways to go in terms of luring advertising revenue.

 

From the Scout Report on June 3, 2011

Compfight --- http://compfight.com/ 

Compfight describes its purpose as "a search engine tailored for visual inspiration." It is a bit different than other mainstream photo search engines, and visitors can get started by clicking on the "Show me what compfight can do" link. Compfight returns grids of images organized by license type, text tags, and those that are "safe" for all audiences. Visitors can also sign up for their Twitter feed and also send them feedback. Compfight is compatible with all operating systems.

 

Features of the Amazing Google

Did you know that Google will calculate equations?

Actually it will do this and and a whole lot more --- http://www.google.com/help/features.html 

Google Web Search Features

Google Book Search --- http://books.google.com/advanced_book_search 

In addition to providing easy access to more than 4 billion web pages, Google has many special features to help you to find exactly what you're looking for. Click the title of a specific feature to learn more about it.

  Cached Links

View a snapshot of each page as it looked when we indexed it.

  Calculator

Use Google to evaluate mathematical expressions.

  Definitions

Use Google to get glossary definitions gathered from various online sources.

  File Types

Search for non-HTML file formats including PDF documents and others.

  Froogle

To find a product for sale online, use Froogle - Google's product search service.

  I'm Feeling Lucky

Bypass our results and go to the first web page returned for your query.

  Local Search - New!

Search for local businesses and services.

  News Headlines

Enhances your search results with the latest related news stories.

  PhoneBook

Look up U.S. street address and phone number information.

  Search By Number

Use Google to access package tracking information, US patents, and a variety of online databases.

  Similar Pages

Display pages that are related to a particular result.

  Site Search

Restrict your search to a specific site.

  Spell Checker

Offers alternative spelling for queries.

  Stock Quotes

Use Google to get stock and mutual fund information.

  Street Maps

Use Google to find U.S. street maps.

  Travel Information

Check the status of an airline flight in the U.S. or view airport delays and weather conditions.

  • Web Page Translation 

Provides English speakers access to a variety of non-English web pages.

 

Google has a News Alert System that includes news alerts about scams in various regions of the U.S. --- http://www.google.com/newsalerts?q=%22Better+Business+Bureau%22&hl=en


Forwarded on March 23, 2004 by Elliot Kamlet SUNY Account [ekamlet@BINGHAMTON.EDU

A man in Southern California is irate over the results of “Googling” his name. Mark Maughan, certified public accountant of the Brown & Maughan firm, believes the search results for “Mark Maughan” contained “alarming, false, misleading and injurious results.”

Maughan discovered that Google’s results about him and his company made false claims that, according to NBC4News, “the search results falsely represent that plaintiffs Maughan and/or Brown & Maughan have been disciplined for gross negligence, for failing to timely submit a client's claim for refund of overpayment of taxes, and for practicing as a CPA without a permit.”

Plaintiff attorney John A. Girardi believes that Google’s PageRank system is what caused this misinformation. In the suit, Giradi states that Google PageRank “reformats information obtained from accurate sources, resulting in changing of the context in which information is presented.”

While it’s true that Google results pages alter the context of information, PageRank does not actually determine search result descriptions.

The attorney stated that a literal reprint would be suitable, but that the reformat gives misinformation. He is asking that Google discontinue using PageRank. Girardi is asking for unspecified monetary damages, as well.

Also named in the lawsuit are Yahoo, AOL, and Time Warner.

For more details, go to http://www.nbc4.tv/news/2937016/detail.html 


Google Will Generate a Map to An Address From a Telephone Number

As I see the new Google service (see below), its main attraction to me is in finding a quick map when I know a person's home or a business phone number.  Often I have a phone number but do not have an address.  Even if I have an address, it takes more time to bring up a mapping service (like Mapquest) and then type in an address.  

Google has implemented an address/map service.  If you type a phone number in the format (210)555-5555 you will then be given the address and links to a map of where this phone number is located.  Scary!  But this type of service has been available from some other services for years (although not necessarily with the quick map service).

It works for home phones and most business phones.  It will give you an address and map for some business phone numbers but not others.  It did not work for the main Trinity University phone number (210)999-7701.  It also does not work for my office phone or my cell phone.  It also does not work for unlisted numbers.

The phone numbers are  not extremely up to date.  When I type in a phone number (210)653-5055 that I cancelled in June, it still brings up my former address where I no longer live.  My wife and I had got a new phone number in New Hampshire in June.  It does not find our NH address, but other services like Switchboard are also not up to date in terms of "new" listings.

Note that if you have online documents with your phone number on them (e.g., a resume), Google will also find those documents like it does with any other search term.

The empire of Google Inc. is officially going interplanetary.
Working with researchers from NASA at Arizona State University, the search engine has compiled images of Mars on a map Web site, making it possible to view the dunes, canyons and craters of the red planet as easily as the cul-de-sacs and cityscapes of Earth. Infrared images at http://mars.google.com  even pull up things normally invisible to the naked eye. Having mapped the Earth and the relatively nearby moon, Google said seeking out farther-flung planetary conquests is a natural progression.
"Need to Find Your Way on Mars? Google It," by Yuki Noguchi, The Washington Post, March 14, 2006 --- Click Here

Google added historic map overlays to its free interactive online globe of the world to provide views of how places have changed with time.
"Google Earth maps history," PhysOrg, November 14, 2006 --- http://physorg.com/news82706337.html

Google Earth --- http://earth.google.com/  


Google Searching by Sending Google Email Messages 

Aaron Konstam informed me that you can now tap Google via email --- http://capescience.capeclear.com/google/index.shtml 
CapeMail - Asynchronous Google Access or Google by Email

Google recently published its Web Services interface at http://www.google.com/apis (tech explanation). We've built an email interface to Google. Actually, the folks in Marketing built it, which says a lot about the simplicity of Web services. Just email google@capeclear.com  and put the text of your query in the "Subject" line. You'll receive your search results via email.

It's not going to take the world by storm, but maybe it'll kick start some thought processes on the power of Web Services. It might be useful for PDAs, mobile phones, offline laptop users, and generally people who have infrequent, low quality access to the Internet. Some people may find it easier to use email rather than launch a browser, or maybe you could just use it to remind yourself to do something on the Internet...

There are some interesting queries that you can do on google, that transfer nicely to CapeMail. One trick is to do the query " site:www.capeclear.com ceo " to find out Cape Clear's CEO. Send this query to CapeMail - and find out who our CEO is...

International: Are your French, Dutch, Russian or outside the general '.com' arena? To see sites in just your region, append the text "site:.XX" to the end of your subject query, where XX is your domain of interest. For example to see all occurences of CapeClear in Denmark do the following query: CapeClear site:.dk, for a similar query on French Websites try this

Shortcut: More useful is the following idea: Store this link on your desktop. (How?: hover over this link, right mouse click->'Copy Shortcut', then on your Windows desktop, right mouse click->'Paste Shortcut'). A handy shortcut for CapeMail access.

Discuss CapeMail in the CapeScience forum or email ed@capeclear.com  and check out our sister offering CapeSpeller


Tutorials and Books on How to Use Google 

Book--- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookselling

Center for History of the Book --- http://www.hss.ed.ac.uk/chb/

Find Books to Read

Bob Jensen's threads on free electronic literature --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

Best Selling Books --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_selling_books

"Amazon Lights the Fire With Free BooksL  Today, Amazon unveiled something radical: the Kindle Lending Library," by David Pogue, The New York Times, November 2, 2011 ---
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/03/amazon-lights-the-fire-with-free-books/ 

Especially for Children --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Children

Choices Reading Lists --- http://www.reading.org/resources/booklists.aspx

Goodreads --- http://www.goodreads.com/

The Book Cover Archive --- http://bookcoverarchive.com/

Lesson Planet: Poetry Lesson Plans --- http://www.lessonplanet.com/search?keywords=poetry&media=lesson

Reading Rockets: Literary Resources for Teachers --- http://www.readingrockets.org/audience/teachers/

Frequently Challenged Books --- http://www.ala.org/advocacy/banned/frequentlychallenged

The Harvard Classics: A Free, Digital Collection --- Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2011/07/the_harvard_classics_a_free_digital_collection.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

The University of Michigan Digital Humanities Series ---
 http://www.digitalculture.org/books/book-series/digital-humanities-series/

Free eBooks
"How to Download Free Ebooks With just a little searching, you can find and download free, legal ebooks for your e-reader, smartphone, or tablet," by Michael King, PC World,  Oct 15, 2011 ---

http://www.pcworld.com/article/241717/how_to_download_free_ebooks.html#tk.nl_wbx_t_crawl2

Digital Public Library of America --- http://dp.la/

Google Book Search --- http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/08/books-of-world-stand-up-and-be-counted.html

"Google's Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars," by Geoffrey Nunberg, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 31, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Googles-Book-Search-A/48245/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Hundreds of Other links --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

Lost Titles, Forgotten Rhymes: How to Find a Novel, Short Story, or Poem Without Knowing its Title or Author --- http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/lost/

"QuickWire: Top 10 Trends in Academic Libraries," by Jennifer Howard, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 16, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/quickwire-top-10-trends-in-academic-libraries/31796?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

eBook Readers --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Ebooks.htm


Frequently Challenged Books --- http://www.ala.org/advocacy/banned/frequentlychallenged
Note the "Statistics" link --- http://www.ala.org/advocacy/banned/frequentlychallenged/stats

The ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) receives reports from libraries, schools, and the media on attempts to ban books in communities across the country. We compile lists of challenged books in order to inform the public about censorship efforts that affect libraries and schools. Explore the 30 Years of Liberating Literature timeline, Banned/Challenged Classics, Frequently Challenged Books of the 21st Century, 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books by Decade, and the Most Frequently Challenged Authors pages of the 21st Century. The ALA condemns censorship and works to ensure free access to information. For more information on ALA's efforts to raise awareness of censorship and promote the freedom to read, please explore Banned Books Week.

We do not claim comprehensiveness in recording challenges as research suggests that for each challenge reported there are as many as four or five that go unreported. In addition, OIF has only been collecting data about banned banned books since 1990, so we do not have any lists of frequently challenged books or authors before that date.

How is the list of most challenged books tabulated?

The Office for Intellectual Freedom collects information from two sources: newspapers and reports submitted by individuals, some of whom use the Challenge Reporting Form. All challenges are compiled into a database. Reports of challenges culled from newspapers across the country are compiled in the bimonthly Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom (published by the ALA, $50 per year for a digital subscription); those reports are then compiled in the Banned Books Week Resource Guide. Challenges reported to the ALA by individuals are kept confidential. In these cases, ALA will release only the title of the book being challenged, the state and the type of institution (school, public library). The name of the institution and its town will not be disclosed.

Where can you find more information on why a particular book was banned?

  • Visit your local public library and ask your librarian.
  • Find or purchase the latest Banned Books Week Resource Guide, updated every three years, which may be available at or through your local public library.
  • E-mail the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom to ask about a specific book. A staff member will reply with any information the office has on file. Please limit your inquiry to one book. If you would like information on more than one book, please consider purchasing the Banned Books Week Resource Guide.
  • See Banned and Challenged Classics.
  • Check out the Banned Books Week > Ideas & Resources > Free Downloads page where you can find the yearly Books Challenged or Banned Lists that contain more information on why a book was challenged.

If the information you need is not listed in the links to the left, please feel free to contact the Office for Intellectual Freedom at (800) 545-2433, ext. 4220, or oif@ala.org.

Bob Jensen's threads on free electronic literature ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

 


Google has become so huge, that learning about what you can do and/or remembering to use what you once learned how to do something is as complex as running a Microsoft Office product. How many of us know and or use all of the features in MS Word? How many of us know and use all of the features in Excel such as Goal Seek, Solver, Pivoting, and 3D graphing? How many of us know how to use the new exotic features of PowerPoint?

There are books, videos, and online tutorials that will illustrate how to use MS Office features.

Although I have not yet found online video tutorials on Google features, there are now books that you can buy such as How to Do Everything With Google by Fritz Schneider Nancy Blachman Eric Fredricksen (McGraw-Hill, 2004) --- http://books.mcgraw-hill.com/cgi-bin/pbg/0072231742.html 

There are also quite a few tutorials.  Insert the phrase "Google Tutorial" in the search box at http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en 

A drawback of books and tutorials for Google vis-a-vis MS Office products is that Google seems to add new features monthly whereas Microsoft adds new features at a slower pace.  


Barry Rice tells us how to search for PowerPoint and other file types
July 15, 2007 message from Barry Rice [brice@LOYOLA.EDU]

I just read in PC Magazine that you can Google by file type by entering in the search box
"filetype: filetype and search term"
 
e.g., entering the following in the search box returns 374,000 hits [quotes left out to minimize confusion]:
filetype:ppt accounting
 
I get 27,800 links to PowerPoint files when I search for:
filetype:ppt accounting auditing
 
I get 969 links to PowerPoint files when I search for:
filetype:ppt accounting derivatives
 
I get 15 links to PowerPoint files when I search for the following, a couple of which, amazingly, are not Bob:
filetype:ppt accounting derivatives jensen
 
Barry Rice
AECM Founder
 
E. Barry Rice, MBA, CPA
Director, Instructional Services
Emeritus Accounting Professor
Loyola College in Maryland

BRice@Loyola.edu
410-617-2478
www.barryrice.com
Facebook me! www.facebook.com/p/Barry_Rice/20102311

April 15, 2007 reply from Bob Jensen

Hi Barry,

When I typed the phrase "filetype:ppt accounting derivatives" (without quote marks)  into the "Advanced Search" box it would not work properly. The phrase must be typed in the "All the words" search box to work properly. This makes sense since in retrospect --- Dahh!

When I typed the phrase "filetype:ppt accounting derivatives AND Jensen" (without quote marks)  into  the "All the words" search box I got some but not all of my PowerPoint files on derivatives that are listed at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/Calgary/CD/JensenPowerPoint/

When I typed the phrase "filetype:ppt "accounting derivatives" AND Jensen" without the outer quote marks it reduced the number of hits, but it also missed more of my PowerPoint files on this topic.

When I typed the phrase "filetype:ppt accounting derivatives AND Jensen" I did find some of my Excel workbooks on this topic but not all Excel workbooks under the following URL ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/Calgary/CD/

My conclusion is that if you want your PowerPoint ppt files or other file types like xls on some topic like "accounting derivatives" it is best to be very careful to use that phrase in the title or in a listing of key words for each PowerPoint file.

By the way, I just taught a workshop last week in California on Fair Value Accounting. My files on this topic are available at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/Calgary/CD/FairValue/

When I typed the phrase "filetype:ppt accounting "FAS 157" AND Jensen" (without the outer quote mark) I find my most recent PowerPoint file on FAS 157 --- Click Here

This is great searching advice from Barry.

Thanks Barry

Bob Jensen

Google Search Engine --- http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en


Google offers new searching hardware as well as software

"Google Unveils New Search Product," The Wall Street Journal, January 13, 2005, Page B5 
January 13, 2005; Page B4 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB110557822746424884,00.html?mod=todays_us_marketplace 

Google Inc. announced a low-cost hardware and software package that small- and medium-size organizations can use for searching their own Web sites and other information.

The Internet search company is selling the $4,995 Google Mini, which includes a computer server and software, exclusively through its online store. Organizations can use the Google Mini to let staff search for shared documents and information on internal Web sites and permit the public to search their external Web sites.

Google says it has over 800 customers for the Google Search Appliance, a more powerful but similar product. The Google Search Appliance, with a minimum price tag of $32,000, represented less than 2% of Google's $2.2 billion in revenue during the first nine months of 2004.

The link for Google's new "Search Appliance" is at http://www.google.com/enterprise/ 


Google Directory and Other Key Google Links

Google's Directory (Domestic and Global) is at http://directory.google.com/ 

Google's Business Solutions page is at http://www.google.com/services/ 

The link for Google's "Search Appliance" is at http://www.google.com/enterprise/ 


Custom Google Searches --- http://google.com/coop/cse/

Link forwarded by

Build and customize your own search engine
  • Specify the sites you want to include in searches.
  • Place a search box and search results on your website.
  • Customize the look and feel to match your website.
  • Invite your community to contribute to the search engine.
  • Make money from relevant ads in your search results.
  • Learn more: FAQ and featured examples.

Bob Jensen's search helpers are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm

 


eBay. Click Fraud, and Other Online Frauds

Question
What can you do to prevent being taken on eBay?
(Word of Caution:  Never open an email message that pretends to be from Pay-Pal)

Two brothers have published a book of "true tales of treachery, lies and fraud" from eBay. "Dawn of the eBay Deadbeats" contains stories written by eBay buyers and sellers. From stories of disappointing purchases to out-and-out fraud, the book is a manual of what can go wrong when buying and selling on auction sites. Brothers Stephen and Edward Klink co-wrote the book, illustrated by Clay Butler. The idea for the book sprung from a website Stephen Klink had created. A New Jersey police office, he founded eBayersThatSuck.com - a site that aims to help people avoid auction scams - after he himself was ripped off online.
Ina Steiner, "Dawn of the eBay Deadbeats: New Book Uncovers Online Auction Treachery,"  AuctionBytes.com,  December 28, 2005 --- http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y05/m12/i28/s01

 

"Beware of eBay deadbeats, author warns," PhysOrg, March 1, 2006 --- http://physorg.com/news11295.html

Imagine buying vintage Spiderman comics for $16,000 and receiving instead, a box of printer paper or losing a whopping $27,000 in purchasing a big rig that didn't exist in the first place. These are just many of the online auction fraud horror stories that brothers Edward and Steve Klink compiled from their eBay watchdog Web site eBayersThatSuck.com (E.T.S.).


In their book "Dawn of the eBay Deadbeats," some 70 strange-but-true stories were collected and retold with the help of illustrator Clay Butler.

The December 2005 publishing of the book comes just in time as the online auction giant has been criticized by consumer groups, most recently by the U.K. magazine "Computing Which?" for its passive and sometimes delayed approach in handling fraud reports.

At any given time, the site has 78 million listings, and 6 million new listings are added each day.

And while, eBay maintains that less than .01 percent of all listings end in a confirmed case of fraud, that could mean that of the 1.9 billion listings reported by eBay in 2005, that 190,000 cases were confirmed frauds in the last year.

Currently there are almost 900 horror stories from eBay fraud victims are on the E.T.S. site whose motto is "Winning the war on deadbeats."

And already the brothers are working on the next volume of horror stories, encouraging victims who want to get their tales to be told to get into contact with them.

United Press International spoke with Edward Klink about the recent book, their watchdog
Web site, and the current state of eBay.

"We had collected hundreds of stories
on the Web site and figured it was time to take these stories to a wider audience and let the victims have their say," Edward Klink said. "Plus with our combined backgrounds, Steve is a police officer and I'm a business writer, we felt we were ideally suited to get the job done."

Fraud on eBay can take on many forms including items paid for that vary from the description in the sale, unpaid items, and spoof eBay or Pay-Pal e-mails.

And like the many victims on their site, the brothers too have encountered the problem of auction fraud.

In 2003, Steve, a New Jersey police officer, won a set of "new" speakers, only to find that it looked as if they were "gnawed on by a wild animal."

"The seller said they weren't that way when mailed, and eBay said there was nothing they could do," Klink said. "Annoyed that he was stuck with the merchandise and given no recourse, Steve started www.ebayersthatsuck.com and stories began pouring in from around the world."

And the site has received a positive response since it's been up and running.

"People love it," Klink said. "On eBay, their official boards are closely monitored and talk about problems and scams and eBay's failings are not generally tolerated. So E.T.S. gives them an outlet. When it first came out Ebayersthatsuck.com was featured on Courttv.com and newspapers as far away as South Africa."

According to Klink, while eBay has what could be considered --"the ultimate
business model" -- of collecting fees and delegating the marketing, selling, packaging, shipping, and customer service to eBay users, it's very easy for these same users to fall victim to fraud.

"I think consumers let their guard down when they are sitting at home and surfing the Web with their coffee," he said. "If a stranger offered them a $1,400 antique vase on the street they'd most likely walk away, but when that same vase is on
the Internet for some reason the reaction is more, 'Say, now that looks interesting.'"

And have the brothers seen any improvements in eBay's handling of the fraud issue?

"eBay says it is a tiny fraction of all auctions," Klink said, "but the hundreds of people who told us their stories hate being in that tiny group and never thought they would be. Lots of fraud is underreported, too. EBay encourages users to settle it among themselves, and if they can't, then they are directed to pay $20.00 to have SquareTrade, a third party, mediate the dispute. But it's not often a scammer shows up for mediation!"

. . .

"We want people on eBay to have a good buying and selling experience - transparent, well-lit, and safe," the spokesperson said. "Fraud on all levels is something we take seriously."

The company also has a team dedicated to working with law enforcement rather it be educating them on fraudulent cases and working proactively taking information on specific cases to them or cooperating with investigations.

"We would invite anyone to visit the site and read more," said the spokesperson, who also emphasized that the no. 1 issue for online shoppers is to pay safely using Pay-Pal or a credit card than any other form of payment.

In many cases, consumers are able to get their money back, Pay-Pal offers up to $1,000 back with buyer protection and credit card programs usually have a pay back program in cases of fraud. In many cases, Pay-Pal offers a way for consumers to make purchases without providing personal information and at the same time protecting money.

"Dawn of the eBay Deadbeats" ($12.95) is available on Amazon, eBay, and in select bookstores.


Click Fraud Gets Smarter
Internet ad-traffic scams could be ripping off as much as $1 billion annually. Are Web companies like Google doing enough to foil them?

"Click Fraud Gets Smarter," by Burt Helm, Business Week, February 27, 2006 --- Click Here 

Internet ad-traffic scams could be ripping off as much as $1 billion annually.  Are Web companies like Google doing enough to foil them?

Web consultant Greg Boser has an ingenious method for sending loads of traffic to clients' Internet sites.  Last month he began using a software program known as a clickbot to create the impression that users from around the world were visiting sites by way of ads strategically placed alongside Google search results.  The trouble is, all the clicks are fake.  And because Google charges advertisers on a per-click basis, the extra traffic could mean sky-high bills for Boser's clients.

But Boser's no fraudster.  He cleared the procedure with clients beforehand and plans to reimburse any resulting charges.  What's he up to?  Boser wants to get to the bottom of a blight that's creating growing concern for online advertisers and threatens to wreak havoc across the Internet: click fraud.

BILLION-DOLLAR QUESTION.  The practice can wildly skew statistics on the popularity of an ad, drain marketing budgets, and enrich the scam artists behind it.  While click fraud isn't new, the methods for carrying it out--take Boser's clickbot software--are getting increasingly sophisticated.  And some advertisers, analysts and consultants question whether Web companies such as Google (GOOG) and Yahoo (YHOO) are doing enough to nip click fraud in the bud.  "No one has any idea how much of this is actually going on," says Boser.  "So we're going to see how well [the search engines] actually try to protect advertisers."

One of Boser's biggest challenges is putting a finger on exactly how widespread the practice is.  Some search consultants say click fraud accounts for upwards of 20% of all traffic, and may generate more than $1 billion in dubious sales a year.  Others say those stats vastly overstate the problem.

Now, one of the biggest players in fraud detection aims to end the guessing.  Fair Isaac (FIC), which analyzes 85% of U.S. credit card transactions, in partnership with Web search consultancy Alchemist Media, will unveil plans at this week's Search Engine Strategies Conference for what it says is the most rigorous study ever of click fraud.  Fair Issac will invite companies to submit traffic data that can be mined for aberrations that may signify fraud.  "We've seen indications that the overall losses due to click fraud could equal more than $1 billion [a year]--larger than the total magnitude of credit card fraud in the U.S.," says Kandathil Jacob, Fair Issac's director of product marketing.  "It's certainly worth our effort to look at it."

MORE CLICKS, MORE DOLLARS.  A rising number of companies would agree.  The percentage of advertisers listing click fraud as a "serious" problem tripled in 2005, to 16%, according to a survey by the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization.  Advertisers have filed at least two class-action suits saying Google, Yahoo, and other search engines ought to be more up-front about methods for combating the practice.  Google says the suits are meritless.  Yahoo declines to comment.

And in January, Standard & Poor's equity analyst Scott Kessler downgraded Google stock in part because he considers click fraud a "notable risk" (see BW Online, 1/17/06, "S&P Downgrades Google to Sell").  Among his concerns: the prospect of false clicks may sour companies from placing ads on Google.  He too says Google needs to be more forthcoming on the issue.  "No one has any idea as to what Google assesses [as] its own percentage of clicks that are generated by fraud, no idea what that process consists of, and all the things that are being done to battle it," he says.

Bob Jensen's threads on consumer fraud are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm


Semantic Web Searching

Spanish scientists develop the first intelligent financial search engine ---
http://www.uc3m.es/portal/page/portal/actualidad_cientifica/noticias/financial_search_engine
Link forwarded by Glen Gray

Researchers from the Carlos III University of Madrid (UCM3) have completed the development of the first search engine designed to search for information from the financial and stock market sector based on semantic technology, which enables one to make more accurate thematic searches adapted to the needs of each user.

Unlike conventional search engines, SONAR -so named by its creators- enables the user to perform structured searches which are not based solely on concordance with a series of key words. This corporate financial search engine based on semantic technology, as described on the project website (www.proyecto-sonar.org), was developed by researchers from the UC3M in partnership with the University of Murcia, el Instituto de Empresa (the Business Institute) and the company Indra. According to its creators, it has two main advantages. First, its effectiveness in a concrete domain- that of finance- which is closely defined and has very precise vocabulary. According to Juan Miguel Gómez Berbís, from the Computer Department of the UC3M “This verticality distinguishes SONAR from other more generic search engines, such as Google or Bing” Second, its capacity to establish relations between news, share valuations and prices via logical reasoning.

The first prototype works by making use of semantic web elements. Basically, the system collects data from both public information sources (Internet) and private, corporate ones (Intranet), adds them to a repository of semantically recorded data (labelled and structured) and allows intelligent access to this data. To achieve this, the platform incorporates an inference engine, a mechanism capable of performing reasoning tasks on the recorded information, as well as a natural language processor, which helps the user to perform the search in the simplest way possible. In this way the results obtained are matched to requests, eliminating ambiguities in polysemic terms, for example in searches carried out by users on stored data. “SONAR enables us to establish relations between different sources of information and discover and expand our knowledge, while at the same time it allows us to classify them so that users can get much more benefit from the experience”

Potential users

This search tool is designed for both private investors and large financial concerns. Its creators anticipate that it will be a very useful tool for analysts and stockbrokers. “It will be especially useful to the finance departments of banks and saving banks or to add to an existing search engine added value over its competitors” Gómez Berbís points out. And the search for accurate, reliable, relevant information in this business area has become a key factor in a domain where speed and quality of data are critical factors with an exceptional impact on business processes.

According to the researchers, this project aims to respond to a need from the financial sector, that is, the analysis of a large volume of information in order to take decisions. In this way, the execution of this project will allow the financial community to have access to a set of intelligent systems for the aggregated search of information in the financial domain and enable them to improve procedures for integrating company information and processes. Researchers are currently incorporating new functions into the search tool and also receiving requests to adapt it to other domains, such as transport and biotechnology. In any case, the project is constantly evolving in order to enhance accuracy and reliability. “In SONAR2 we are working on two Intelligent Decision Support Systems for Financial Investments, one based on Fundamental Analysis and the other on Technical Chartist Analysis, which assists the work of the trader and average investor”, reveals professor Gómez Berbis.

SONAR is a research project carried out by the UC3m’s SoftLab group, directed by professors Juan Miguel Gómez Berbís and Ángel García Crespo. It is an intelligent, financial search engine and is part of the Ministry of Industry, Tourism and Trade’s AVANZA I+D Program. The University of Murcia and the Instituto de Empresa (Business Institute) have also collaborated in this project, together with Indra.


"The Semantic Web in Education," by Jason Ohler, Educause Quarterly, October-December 2008 --- http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Quarterly/TheSemanticWebinEducation/47675

The mantra of the information age has been “The more information the better!” But what happens when we search the web and get so much information that we can’t sort through it, let alone evaluate it? Enter the semantic web, or Web 3.0. Among other things, the semantic web makes information more meaningful to people by making it more understandable to machines.

Consider a simple example. If you want to know my mailing address, currently you need to go to my web page and root around until you find it. That’s because the current coding system used to build web pages, largely HTML, displays information without identifying it in any meaningful way. That is, my address is not coded as “an address,” it is simply presented as a series of characters on the screen. Contrast this with a database about your friends that contains a specific column called “mailing address.” Even if your database included millions of entries, locating my address is easy.

Web 3.0 makes the leap from “display only” to meaningful information by tagging information with descriptors like “mailing address.” Further, it allows users to find relationships between tagged information using inference rules and data organizational tools called “ontologies” that provide logic and structure to the information embedded in web pages. As a result, machines can do a lot of the information grunt work currently required of humans. When it comes to a web search, for example, the semantic web makes a reasonable pass at collating, synthesizing, and cross-referencing the results for you. It does this by employing software agents that can locate and combine information from many sources to build meaningful information collages. Simply tell your agent the focus of your interest—whether a person, subject, activity, question, or whatever—and set it to roam the web, finding and distilling information and exchanging information with other agents.

Ultimately, the goal of Web 3.0 is, in a phrase, data integration.1 Because the semantic web understands the concept of a mailing address, it can relate my address to other web-defined concepts like walking distance, postal rates, climate, or driving directions to the nearest airport. Thus, if I ask my agent to help me prepare for a trip to the Bahamas, it can make assumptions about the clothes and flights I need, and so on. Because I live in Alaska, it might tell me to order clothing online soon because it takes longer to get here. It may even tell me the names of friends (who have made themselves semantically available) who have visited the Bahamas.

While some websites currently understand my address as an address, this understanding is not shared with other websites. That is, there is no universal definition for “address” that any website could use to talk to my web page about addresses. It is the use of common definitions, inference rules, and ontologies that will turn the web from a series of information containers into an ecosystem in which the parts of the web are interrelated.

Web 3.0 in Education The implications for education are profound. Let’s consider three areas of impact: knowledge construction, personal learning network maintenance, and personal educational administration.

Knowledge Construction Imagine you are a student researching a topic, like global warming. You might begin by searching Wikipedia, but inevitably you turn to searching the vast information storehouses of the entire web using a tool like Google.2

Currently, Googling the term “global warming” returns a gazillion hits, many of which link to complex data resources that link to other resources and so on. Unless the topic is supremely important to you, you won’t explore much beyond the first 10 to 20 hits returned in a Google search. The presumption of knowledge in this approach to information gathering and evaluation is faulty, if not potentially dangerous in its limitations.

One vision of a well-developed semantic web includes a search feature that would return a multimedia report rather than a list of hits. The report would draw from many sources, including websites, articles from scientific repositories, chapters in textbooks, blog dialogue, speeches posted on YouTube, information stored on cell phones, gaming scenarios played out in virtual realities—anything appropriate that is accessible by the rules of Web 3.0. The report would consist of short sections that coalesce around knowledge areas that emerged naturally from your research, with keywords identified and listed conveniently off to one side as links.

The information in the report would be compared, contrasted, and collated in a basic way, presenting points of agreement and disagreement, and perhaps associating these with political positions or contrasting research. Because the web knows something about you, it also alerts you to local lectures on related topics, books you might want to read, TV programs available through your cable service, blog discussions you might find relevant, and even local groups you can contact that are also focused on this issue. Unlike a standard report, what you receive changes as the available information changes, and you might have wiki-like access to add to or edit it. And because you told your agent that this topic is a high priority, your cell phone will beep when a significant development occurs. After all, the semantic web will be highly inclusive, providing a common language for many kinds of media and technologies, including cell phones. The net result, ideally, is that you spend less time searching and sifting and more time absorbing, thinking, and participating.

Personal Learning Network Maintenance Each one of us sits at the hub of a personal learning network (PLN) that connects us to our interests. Unfortunately, much of our time is spent finding useful information rather than interacting with it and thinking about it. We troll blogs, search the web, wade through long podcasts, and converse with friends in the hopes of finding something we can use. Some services, like iGoogle, make a modest attempt to streamline this process by allowing us to automatically log into web services we have selected, like news services or various podcasting sources. But we still need to pick through that day’s offerings to determine whether they contain anything relevant to our interests. This approach to collecting information is at best clumsy and inefficient, and it can lead to inaccuracies simply because we run out of the time or motivation to do a thorough job.

Under Web 3.0, PLNs are built primarily around subjects, not services. Personal learning agents identify relevant information from any source that is semantically accessible and provide an information synthesis tailored to our personal learning objective. The result is similar to the one described in the “global warming” search example, but applied to an educational goal. Again, the objective is to spend less time searching for information and more time trying to understand, critically assess, and creatively expand it. The semantic web makes it possible for the web to become an effective and focused information resource that can be tailored for specific content area objectives.

Personal Educational Administration Most of us use a multi-source approach to resource gathering. If we want to develop a wardrobe, feed ourselves, or stock a tool shop or music library, we go to several providers to do so, including local stores, online vendors, garage sales, eBay, and even friends. Currently, it is very difficult to use this multi-source approach in obtaining an education and particularly in earning a degree. Educational institutions tend to be stand-alone entities that don’t facilitate working with each other.

There is no question that economics and turf drive the lack of inter-institutional cooperation. However, even if these impediments were to disappear, crafting a multi-institutional education from a student perspective would still be logistically very difficult because schools and other education providers for the most part do not share common languages in describing course or degree requirements. Transfer students can bear witness to how difficult it can be to do something as basic as transfer credit for Philosophy 101 from one institution to another.

The Semantic Web has the potential to challenge this kind of institution-centeredness in the same way that distance learning technologies challenged place-centric education. At some point, institutions will describe courses and degrees semantically, probably just to help their own internal functioning, but with the secondary effect of making many of the components of education at least somewhat comparable across institutions. It is a short leap from that point to students being able to identify comparable coursework and experiences from several educational providers and, in the process, even meet the graduation requirements of yet another. Smart schools will get ahead of this and figure out just what the inevitable institutional inter-connectedness will mean for them.

The Inevitability of the Semantic Web Is the Semantic Web inevitable? Absolutely. I don’t make this assertion based on advanced technological knowledge, which I most assuredly do not possess. Rather I make it because I have come to respect what Michael Dertouzos called “the ancient human in each of us” as a primary force in the evolution of our tools.3 As ancient human beings, we want to connect, share ideas, maintain relationships, understand the world around us, and sustain ourselves physically and emotionally regardless of—and sometimes despite—technological advancement. Those in the 1980s who told me e-mail would never catch on ignored the ancient human, as did those who told me just a few years ago that the world would come to see blogging as superfluous.

Remember, 15 years ago the web was science fiction to most. Today it is taken for granted. Eventually, we will take the Semantic Web for granted as well. Our thirst to make sense of the information available to us and to broaden and deepen our relationships with the world and each other will most certainly urge us on through whatever complex and challenging development period awaits us. The ancient human will see to it.

Continued in article

 

FactSpotter and AskOnce from Xerox

Question
What is so special about the new FactSpotter semantics-based search engine from Xerox?

Xerox Rolls Out Semantics-Based Search
Xerox Corp. says its new search engine based on semantics will analyze the meaning behind questions and documents to help researchers find information more quickly. Developing the search engine is similar to understanding how brains process information, said Frederique Segond, manager of parsing and semantics research at Xerox Research Center Europe in Grenoble, France. "Many words can be different things at the same time. The context makes the difference," she said. "The tricky things here are not the words together but how are they linked." For example, common searches using keywords "Lincoln" and "vice president" likely won't reveal President Abraham Lincoln's first vice president. A semantic search should yield the answer: Hannibal Hamlin. Segond, whose background is in math and linguistics, said Stamford-based Xerox has been working on the project for four years. FactSpotter was introduced in Grenoble on Wednesday and will launch next year, initially to help lawyers and corporate litigation departments plow through thousands of pages of legal documents. Xerox expects the technology to eventually be used in health care, manufacturing and financial services. Xerox's technology is part of a growing field in which researchers are trying to adapt to a computer the complex workings of the brain.
Stephen Singer, PhysOrg, June 21, 2007 --- http://physorg.com/news101560663.html

The Older AskOnce Search Engine from Xerox
Stuck in a search rut? Online search engines aren't your only option. AskOnce from Xerox (www.xerox.com) aims to refine searching by allowing access to all the information available to you via a single query. The program's simple and advanced searches scour the Internet, your intranets, DocuShare (Xerox's Web-based storage space), tech magazines and specific databases. The simpie search resembles a typical search engine but accesses mare information. The advanced search is less intuitive but more robust-- offering tools such as scheduled searches. For finding documents buried in your network, AskOnce is handy, but its online capabilities fall short of a good Web meta-search engine. The price for 50-user licenses starts at $7,000 (street).

Liane Gouthro, "Search Me - AskOnce from Xerox - search service,"   LookSmart, Sept, 2001 --- http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0DTI/is_9_29/ai_79756063 


Question
How can you locate students who fail to show up for class, children who seem to have disappeared, and untrustworthy husbands?

"Do you know where your kid is? Check Google's maps," MIT's Technology Review, February 5, 2009 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/wire/22072/?nlid=1752&a=f

With an upgrade to its mobile maps, Google Inc. hopes to prove it can track people on the go as effectively as it searches for information on the Internet.

The new software released Wednesday will enable people with mobile phones and other wireless devices to automatically share their whereabouts with family and friends.

The feature, dubbed "Latitude," expands upon a tool introduced in 2007 to allow mobile phone users to check their own location on a Google map with the press of a button.

"This adds a social flavor to Google maps and makes it more fun," said Steve Lee, a Google product manager.

It could also raise privacy concerns, but Google is doing its best to avoid a backlash by requiring each user to manually turn on the tracking software and making it easy to turn off or limit access to the service.

Google also is promising not to retain any information about its users' movements. Only the last location picked up by the tracking service will be stored on Google's computers, Lee said.

The software plots a user's location -- marked by a personal picture on Google's map -- by relying on cell phone towers, global positioning systems or a Wi-Fi connection to deduce their location. The system can follow people's travels in the United States and 26 other countries.

It's left up to each user to decide who can monitor their location.

The social mapping approach is similar to a service already offered by Loopt Inc., a 3-year-old company located near Google's Mountain View headquarters.

Loopt's service is compatible with more than 100 types of mobile phones.

To start out, Google Latitude will work on Research In Motion Ltd.'s BlackBerry and devices running on Symbian software or Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Mobile. It will also operate on some T-Mobile phones running on Google's Android software and eventually will work on Apple Inc.'s iPhone and iTouch.

To widen the software's appeal, Google is offering a version that can be installed on personal computers as well.

The PC access is designed for people who don't have a mobile phone but still may want to keep tabs on their children or someone else special, Lee said. People using the PC version can also be watched if they are connected to the Internet through Wi-Fi.

Google can plot a person's location within a few yards if it's using GPS, or might be off by several miles if it's relying on transmission from cell phone towers. People who don't want to be precise about their whereabouts can choose to display just the city instead of a specific neighborhood.

There are no current plans to sell any advertising alongside Google's tracking service, although analysts believe knowing a person's location eventually will unleash new marketing opportunities. Google has been investing heavily in the mobile market during the past two years in an attempt to make its services more useful to people when they're away from their office or home computers.

 

 


The Semantic Web

"Walmart.com's Semantic Search Promises Edge Against Amazon," by Brian Proffitt, ReadWriteWeb, August 31, 2012 ---
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/walmartcoms-semantic-search-is-edge-against-amazon.php

How much of a difference can better search tools make for an e-commerce site? Wal-Mart is betting on a 10% -15% improvement in sales following the launch of its new Polaris search engine on Walmart.com, developed by its @WalmartLabs division.

Location, Location, Location

In the business of retail, it's all about location, That's true for which aisle in the grocery store you display the milk, and its even true for ecommerce sites, which rely on product placement on pages and better search tools to make the difference between a sale and no sale.

The $487.94 question is: will a better search engine bring more sales for Walmart.com?

The new semantic search engine is based on technology from a number of @WalmartLabs acquisitions, including social media startup Kosmix, which was acquired by Wal-Mart in April 2011. Kosmix' Semantic Web platform, called the Social Genome, organized social media data with algorithms that score social media content and help deliver results for shoppers that are more in line with what the customer wants.

This varies from the usual method of determining a customer's potential likes and dislikes: mining transaction data. For example, if you buy a pink flamingo from the home and garden division, then you might be tagged as someone who likes kitschy lawn decorations.

That's all well and good, unless you were buying that lawn ornament as a gag gift for your neighbor down the street. Retailers that are mining your transaction data will send you the coupons for garden gnomes, not your neighbor.

The idea behind semantic search is that by expanding a search engine's knowledge to include social media content, the search engine can better determine the context of what you're looking for. This form of social discovery, coupled with better query parsing and synonym mining, should deliver a more tightly focused set of results to a customer.

Are Semantics Enough?

Looking at Walmart.com in isolation, it's a no-brainer that a more efficient search engine that can deliver a wider range of choices around a simple search term will up the odds of completing a sale.

The key here is how Polaris works with global Internet search. If consumers are running their searches for goods from search engines like Google or Bing, or using comparison sites like BizRate or PriceGrabber to get started, it is not yet clear how well the new Polaris technology will interact with Internet-based queries. If the semantic search advantage is lost, then Wal-Mart's Polaris advantage will be moot, and the company will have to compete not on search results but on price, availability and delivery - just like everyone else.

Availability and delivery are advantages that Wal-Mart has been able to hold against Amazon, even through the odd price wars that occastionally break out over certain hot items. Some shoppers seem to be willing to pay a little more if they know they can go down to the store today and pick up an item they've ordered online.

But Amazon is starting to explore same-day delivery, a move that should challenge Wal-Mart's edge in local availability.

Price as the Ultimate Decider

Wal-Mart's focus on improving its edge in ecommerce could be seen as sandbagging before the coming Amazon flood. Because once Wal-Mart and Amazon share a more level playing field on availability (at least in the U.S.), price becomes a bigger comparison point for shoppers again.

This could be a problem for Wal-Mart, which has 2.2 million employees to keep paid versus Amazon's 69,100, not to mention the upkeep of Wal-Mart's store locations. With less overhead, Amazon could be more nimble than Wal-Mart in selling goods for lower prices over the long-term.

Jensen Comment
If price is the "ultimate decider," then Amazon may have an edge as long as Wal-Mart does not have a used-item service comparable to Amazon's tremendous and vast network of used item vendors where items are shipped by those vendors directly to customers and Amazon guarantees both delivery and product satisfaction. I doubt that Wal-Mart will ever compete in terms of price on things like books and DVDs (including software) where most of us do not care if a book saving 95% if the price is a used copy. For example, I was recently able to obtain a virgin installation disk of FrontPage 2003 from somebody who apparently saves up these new (albeit old) editions that larger software vendors (including Microsoft) no longer sell.

But the above article is interesting from the standpoint of the future of semantic searching.

Semantic Web --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

DBPedia --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dbpedia

Freebase --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebase_(database)

"Wikipedia to Add Meaning to Its Pages The online encyclopedia is exploring ways to embrace the semantic Web," by Tom Simonite, MIT's Technology Review, July 7, 2010 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/web/25728/?nlid=3210&a=f

As a global resource built from the spare time of millions of volunteers, Wikipedia may be the epitome of Web 2.0. But the Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit organization that runs Wikipedia, among other projects, is now thinking about how to make it a linchpin of Web 3.0, or the semantic Web.

That means making some of the data on Wikipedia's 15 million (and counting) articles understandable to computers as well as humans. This would allow software to know, for example, that the numbers shown in one of the columns in this table listing U.S. presidents are dates. That could, in turn, allow applications that draw on Wikipedia to automatically generate historical timelines or answer the kind of general knowledge questions that would usually entail a person finding and reading a relevant entry on the site.

At the 2010 Semantic Technology conference in San Francisco last month, the foundation's deputy director, Erik Möller, and colleague Trevor Parscal, a user-experience developer for Wikimedia, showed some first steps taken by the foundation to explore how more semantic structure might be added to Wikipedia. They also appealed to the semantic Web community to help develop ways to make Wikipedia's knowledge more accessible to computers and software.

"Semantic information already exists in Wikipedia, and people are already building on it," says Möller. "Unfortunately, we're not really helping, and they have to use extensive processing to do so."

One example is DBPedia, a semantic database built using software collect data from the site's pages, and maintained by the Free University of Berlin and the University of Leipzig, both in Germany. Another is Freebase, a for-profit knowledge database, much of which was also sourced by scraping Wikipedia. Freebase is the data source used by question-answering search engine PowerSet, which was acquired by Microsoft to be part of its Bing search engine

"Opening Search to Semantic Upstarts: Yahoo's new open-search platform is giving semantic search a helping hand," by Kate Greene, MIT's Technology Review, September 8, 2008 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/21342/?nlid=1322&a=f 

 

LinkedIn and the Sematic Web ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm#LinkedIn

Bob Jensen's search helpers ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm

 

LinkedIn Home Page --- http://www.linkedin.com/

History of LinkedIn --- http://www.linkedin.com/

Biomed Experts Networking --- http://www.biomedexperts.com/

Facebook History --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook

The New LinkedIn Platform Shows Facebook How It's Done
A social network showdown is coming. LinkedIn, which aims to track your business and professional connections, has rolled out a new developer platform and already the majority of the web press is comparing LinkedIn's efforts Facebook's platform. It's a fair comparison, but there's one key difference between the two — LinkedIn's platform is actually useful. Where Facebook’s platform provides a proprietary programming language for developers to build applications that run inside the site (so you can send you friends a fresh pair of virtual diapers or whatever), LinkedIn has created a platform in the sense of what the word used to mean — a way of mixing, mashing, repurposing and sharing your data. Think Flickr, not Facebook. The LinkedIn platform, known as the LinkedIn Intelligent Application Platform, consists of two parts, a way for developers to build application that run inside your LinkedIn account (via OpenSocial) and the far more useful and interesting part — ways to pull your LinkedIn data out and use it elsewhere . . . As an example of the second half of LinkedIn’s new platform, the company has announced a partnership with Business Week which will see LinkedIn data pulled into the Business Week site. For instance, if you land on a Business Week article about IBM, the site will then look at your LinkedIn profile (assuming you’ve given it permission to do so) and highlight the people you know at IBM. Call it six degrees of Business Week, but it does something Facebook has yet to do — it connects your data with the larger web.With Beacon having recently blown up in Facebook’s face — something that’s become a trend for the site, violate privacy, weather user backlash, violate privacy, weather user backlash, violate privacy, weather user backlash — LinkedIn’s new platform couldn’t come at a better time. Frankly, it reminds us of the good old days when the data you stored on websites was actually yours and you could pull it out and do interesting things with it.
Scott Gilbertson, Wired News, December 10, 2007 --- http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/12/the-new-linkedi.html


Semantic Web --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

DBPedia --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dbpedia

Freebase --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebase_(database)

"Wikipedia to Add Meaning to Its Pages The online encyclopedia is exploring ways to embrace the semantic Web," by Tom Simonite, MIT's Technology Review, July 7, 2010 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/web/25728/?nlid=3210&a=f

As a global resource built from the spare time of millions of volunteers, Wikipedia may be the epitome of Web 2.0. But the Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit organization that runs Wikipedia, among other projects, is now thinking about how to make it a linchpin of Web 3.0, or the semantic Web.

That means making some of the data on Wikipedia's 15 million (and counting) articles understandable to computers as well as humans. This would allow software to know, for example, that the numbers shown in one of the columns in this table listing U.S. presidents are dates. That could, in turn, allow applications that draw on Wikipedia to automatically generate historical timelines or answer the kind of general knowledge questions that would usually entail a person finding and reading a relevant entry on the site.

At the 2010 Semantic Technology conference in San Francisco last month, the foundation's deputy director, Erik Möller, and colleague Trevor Parscal, a user-experience developer for Wikimedia, showed some first steps taken by the foundation to explore how more semantic structure might be added to Wikipedia. They also appealed to the semantic Web community to help develop ways to make Wikipedia's knowledge more accessible to computers and software.

"Semantic information already exists in Wikipedia, and people are already building on it," says Möller. "Unfortunately, we're not really helping, and they have to use extensive processing to do so."

One example is DBPedia, a semantic database built using software collect data from the site's pages, and maintained by the Free University of Berlin and the University of Leipzig, both in Germany. Another is Freebase, a for-profit knowledge database, much of which was also sourced by scraping Wikipedia. Freebase is the data source used by question-answering search engine PowerSet, which was acquired by Microsoft to be part of its Bing search engine


"Opening Search to Semantic Upstarts: Yahoo's new open-search platform is giving semantic search a helping hand," by Kate Greene, MIT's Technology Review, September 8, 2008 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/21342/?nlid=1322&a=f 

Even if you have a great idea for a new search engine, it's far from easy to get it off the ground. For one thing, the best engineering talent resides at big-name companies. Even more significantly, according to some estimates, it costs hundreds of millions of dollars to buy and maintain the servers needed to index the Web in its entirety.

However, Yahoo recently released a resource that may offer hope to search innovators and entrepreneurs. Called Build Your Own Search Service (BOSS), it allows programmers to make use of Yahoo's index of the Web--billions of pages that are continually updated--thereby removing perhaps the biggest barrier to search innovation. By opening its index to thousands of independent programmers and entrepreneurs, Yahoo hopes that BOSS will kick-start projects that it lacks the time, money, and resources to invent itself. Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Research and a consulting professor at Stanford University, says this might include better ways of searching videos or images, tools that use social networks to rank search results, or a semantic search engine that tries to understand the contents of Web pages, rather than just a collection of keywords and links.

"We're trying to break down the barriers to innovation," says Raghavan, although he admits that BOSS is far from an altruistic venture. If a new search-engine tool built using Yahoo's index becomes popular and potentially profitable, Yahoo reserves the right to place ads next to its results.

So far, no BOSS-powered site has become that successful. But a number of startups are beginning to build their services on top of BOSS, and Semantic Web companies, in particular, are benefiting from the platform. These companies are developing software to process concepts and meanings in order to better organize information on the Web.

For instance, Hakia, a company based in New York, began building a semantic search engine in 2004. Its algorithms use a database of concepts--people, places, objects, and more--to "understand" concepts in documents. Hakia also creates maps linking together different documents, such as Web pages, based on these concepts in order to understand their relevance to one another. Riza Berkan, CEO of the company, says that focusing on the meaning of pages, instead of simply on the links between them, could serve up more relevant search results and help people find content that they didn't even know they were looking for.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's sadly neglected threads on the semantic Web are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/XBRLandOLAP.htm

 


A rising tide of companies are tapping Semantic Web technologies to unearth hard-to-find connections between disparate pieces of online data

"Social Networks: Execs Use Them Too Networking technology gives companies a new set of tools for recruiting and customer service—but privacy questions remain," by Rachael King, Business Week, September 11, 2007 --- Click Here 

Encover Chief Executive Officer Chip Overstreet was on the hunt for a new vice-president for sales. He had homed in on a promising candidate and dispensed with the glowing but unsurprising remarks from references. Now it was time to dig for any dirt. So he logged on to LinkedIn, an online business network. "I did 11 back-door checks on this guy and found people he had worked with at five of his last six companies," says Overstreet, whose firm sells and manages service contracts for manufacturers. "It was incredibly powerful."

So powerful, in fact, that more than a dozen sites like LinkedIn have cropped up in recent years. They're responding to a growing impulse among Web users to build ties, communities, and networks online, fueling the popularity of sites like News Corp.'s (NWS) MySpace (see BusinessWeek.com, 12/12/05 "The MySpace Generation"). As of April, the 10 biggest social-networking sites, including MySpace, reached a combined unique audience of 68.8 million users, drawing in 45% of active Web users, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.

Of course, corporations and smaller businesses haven't embraced online business networks with nearly the same abandon as teens and college students who have flocked to social sites. Yet companies are steadily overcoming reservations and using the sites and related technology to craft potentially powerful business tools.

PASSIVE SEARCH.

Recruiters at Microsoft (MSFT) and Starbucks (SBUX), for instance, troll online networks such as LinkedIn for potential job candidates. Goldman Sachs (GS) and Deloitte run their own online alumni networks for hiring back former workers and strengthening bonds with alumni-cum-possible clients. Boston Consulting Group and law firm Duane Morris deploy enterprise software that tracks employee communications to uncover useful connections in other companies. And companies such as Intuit (INTU) and MINI USA have created customer networks to build brand loyalty.

Early adopters notwithstanding, many companies are leery of online networks. Executives don't have time to field the possible influx of requests from acquaintances on business networks. Employees may be dismayed to learn their workplace uses e-mail monitoring software to help sales associates' target pitches. Companies considering building online communities for advertising, branding, or marketing will need to cede some degree of control over content.

None of those concerns are holding back Carmen Hudson, manager of enterprise staffing at Starbucks, who says she swears by LinkedIn. "It's one of the best things for finding mid-level executives," she says.

The Holy Grail in recruiting is finding so-called passive candidates, people who are happy and productive working for other companies. LinkedIn, with its 6.7 million members, is a virtual Rolodex of these types. Hudson says she has hired three or four people this year as a result of connections through LinkedIn. "We've started asking our hiring managers to sign up on LinkedIn and help introduce us to their contacts," she says. "People have concerns about privacy, but once we explain how we use it and how careful we would be with their contacts, they're usually willing to do it."

BOOMERANGS.

Headhunters and human-resources departments are taking note. "LinkedIn is a tremendous tool for recruiters," says Bill Vick, the author of LinkedIn for Recruiting. So are sites such as Ryze, Spoke, OpenBc, and Ecademy

Continued in article

"Taming the World Wide Web A rising tide of companies are tapping Semantic Web technologies to unearth hard-to-find connections between disparate pieces of online data," by Rachael King, Business Week, April 9, 2007 --- Click Here

When Eli Lilly scientists try to develop a new drug, they face a Herculean task. They must sift through vast quantities of information such as data from lab experiments, results from past clinical trials, and gene research, much of it stored in disparate, unconnected databases and software programs. Then they've got to find relationships among those pieces of data. The enormity of the challenge helps explain why it takes an average of 15 years and $1.2 billion to get a new drug to market.

Eli Lilly (LLY) has vowed to bring down those costs. "We have set the goal of reducing our average cost of R&D per new drug by fully one-third, about $400 million, over the next five years," Lilly Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Sidney Taurel told the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan last August.

As part of its cost-cutting campaign, the drugmaker is experimenting with new technologies designed to make it easier for scientists to unearth and correlate scattered, unrelated morsels of online data. Outfitted with this set of tools, researchers can make smarter decisions earlier in the research phase—where scientists screen thousands of chemical compounds to see which ones best treat symptoms of a given disease. If all goes according to plan, the company will get new pharmaceuticals to patients sooner, and at less cost.

Found in Space

Those tools are the stuff of the Semantic Web, a method of tagging online information so it can be better understood in relation to other data—even if it's tucked away in some faraway corporate database or software program. Today's prominent search tools are adept at quickly identifying and serving up reams of online information, though not at showing how it all fits together. "When you get down to it, you have to know whatever keyword the person used, or you're never going to find it," says Dave McComb, president of consulting firm Semantic Arts.

Researchers in a growing number of industries are sampling Semantic Web knowhow. Citigroup (C) is evaluating the tools to help traders, bankers, and analysts better mine the wealth of financial data available on the Web. Kodak (EK) is investigating whether the technologies can help consumers more easily sort digital photo collections. NASA is testing ways to correlate scientific data and maps so scientists can more efficiently carry out planetary exploration simulation activities.

The Semantic Web is in many ways in its infancy, but its potential to transform how businesses and individuals correlate information is huge, analysts say. The market for the broader family of products and services that encompasses the Semantic Web could surge to more than $50 billion in 2010 from $2.2 billion in 2006, according to a 2006 report by Mills Davis at consulting firm Project10X.

Data Worth a Thousand Pictures

While other analysts say it will take longer for the market to reach $50 billion, most agree that the impact of the Semantic Web will be wide-ranging. The Project10X study found that semantic tools are being developed by more than 190 companies, including Adobe (ADBE), AT&T (T), Google (GOOG), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Oracle (ORCL), and Sony (SNE).

Among the enthusiasts is Patrick Cosgrove, director of Kodak's Photographic Sciences & Technology Center, who is, not surprisingly, also a photo aficionado. He boasts more than 50,000 digital snapshots in his personal collection. Each year he creates a calendar for his family that requires him to wade through the year's photos, looking for the right image for each month. It's a laborious task, but he and his colleagues aim to make it easier.

One project involves taking data captured when a digital photo is taken, such as date, time, and even GPS coordinates, and using it to help consumers find specific images—say a photo of mom at last year's Memorial Day picnic at the beach. Right now, much of that detail, such as GPS coordinates, is expressed as raw data. But Semantic Web technologies could help Kodak translate that information into something more useful, such as what specific GPS coordinates mean—whether it's Yellowstone National Park or Grandma's house up the street.

Continued in article

A new natural-language system is based on 30 years of research at PARC.
"Building a Better Search Engine," by Michael Reisman, MIT's Technology Review, July 27, 2007 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/19109/?a=f 

Powerset, Inc., based in San Francisco, is on the verge of offering an innovative natural-language search engine, based on linguistic research at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). The engine does more than merely accept queries asked in the form of a question. The company claims that the engine finds the best answer by considering the meaning and context of the question and related Web pages.
"Powerset extracts deep concepts and relationships from the texts, and the users query and match them efficiently to deliver a better search," Powerset CEO Barney Pell says.

Even though attempts have been made at natural-language search for decades, Powerset says that its system is different because it has solved some of the fundamental technological problems that have existed with this kind of search. It has done so by developing a product that is deep, computationally advanced, and still economically viable.

Pell says that it's difficult to pinpoint one particular technological breakthrough, but he believes that Powerset's superiority lies in the three decades of hard work by
scientists at PARC. (PARC licensed much of its natural-language search technology to Powerset in February.) There was not one piece of technology that solved the problem, Pell says, but instead, it was the unification of many theories and fragments that pulled the project together.

"After 30 years, it's finally reached a point where it can be brought into the world," he says.

A key component of the search engine is a deep natural-language processing system that extracts the relationships between words; the system was developed from PARC's Xerox Linguistic
Environment (XLE) platform. The framework that this platform is based on, called Lexical Functional Grammar, enabled the team to write different grammar engines that help the search engine understand text. This includes a robust, broad-coverage grammar engine written by PARC. Pell also claims that the engine is better than others at dealing with ambiguity and determining the real meaning of a question or a sentence on a Web page. All these innovations make the system more adaptable, he says, so that it can extract deep relationships from text.

Continued in Article


Online Networking Site for Scientists Debuts
BiomedExperts.com, a social-networking Web site for health-care and life-science experts, was unveiled today at the American Library Association’s midwinter meeting, in Philadelphia. The site includes profiles of more than 1.4 million biomedical experts in 120 countries. Researchers can gain access to the site for free and search for colleagues based on their areas of expertise, where they live, or other variables. The site also allows scientists to share data and analyses, and view summaries of their colleagues' research papers. The site is a collaboration between Collexis Holdings Inc., a Dutch software company, and Dell, a computer manufacturer.
Andrea L. Foster, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 11, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2656&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en


Infotopia (search engine for homeschoolers) --- http://www.infotopia.info/

Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASE_%28search_engine%29

BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) is a multi-disciplinary search engine to scholarly internet resources, created by Bielefeld University Library in Bielefeld, Germany. It is based on search technology provided by Fast Search & Transfer (FAST), a Norwegian company. It harvests OAI metadata from scientific digital repositories that implement the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), and are indexed using FAST's software. In addition to OAI metadata, the library indexes selected web sites and local data collections, all of which can be searched via a single search interface.

It allows those who use the search engine to search metadata, when available, as well as conducting full text searches. It contrasts with commercial search engines in multiple ways, including in the types and kinds of resources it searches and the information it offers about the results it finds. Where available, bibliographic data is provided, and the results may be sorted by multiple fields, such as by author or year of publication.

 

Conduct a BASE Search --- http://www.base-search.net/
For example, conduct a search in "Interest Rate Swaps"

Jensen Comment
This could be useful for searches of international academic literature.


Sci-Hub --- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub

Sci-Hub Home Page --- https://sci-hub.io/
For example, enter the search term "Accounting" and then be very patient until 10 pages of hits appears on the screen.

"The Research Pirates of the Dark Web," by Kaveh Waddell, The Atlantic, February 9, 2016 ---
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/02/the-research-pirates-of-the-dark-web/461829/

There’s a battle raging over whether academic research should be free, and it’s overflowing into the dark web.

Most modern scholarly work remains locked behind paywalls, and unless your computer is on the network of a university with an expensive subscription, you have to pay a fee, often around 30 dollars, to access each paper.

Many scholars say this system makes publishers rich—Elsevier, a company that controls access to more than 2,000 journals, has a market capitalization about equal to that of Delta Airlines—but does not benefit the academics that conducted the research, or the public at large. Others worry that free academic journals would have a hard time upholding the rigorous standards and peer reviews that the most prestigious paid journals are famous for.

Some years ago, a university student in Kazakhstan took it upon herself to set free the vast trove of paywalled academic research. That student, Alexandra Elbakyan, developed Sci-Hub, an online tool that allows users to easily download paywalled papers for free.

. . .

But the investigation that took down the Silk Road took up countless government resources. It’s unlikely the new Sci-Hub website would attract the same amount of negative attention, so the website is likely safe behind the many layers of encryption that protect sites on the dark web.

"Online Piracy of Academic Materials Extends to Scholarly Books," by Goldie Blumenstyk, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 12, 2016 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Online-Piracy-of-Academic/236078?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=28f19c218db84e999bae67908ac03371&elq=a2d406052f3444338ab3c7cd8c38fdcf&elqaid=8627&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=2891

University presses have become aware in recent weeks that unauthorized copies of hundreds and, in some cases, thousands of their books are available on pirate websites, and officials are still struggling with how to respond.

Several press leaders said they wanted to be sure any stance they take against piracy isn’t perceived as an attack on the open-access movement, which is gaining popularity among some academics and librarians. It also appears that few, if any, presses have formally notified their authors that digital copies of their books are available free on an illicit website.

"Many of these books are our best sellers," said Dean J. Smith, director of Cornell University Press. "This is really painful to a university press."

The unauthorized copies are available through a site called Library Genesis, which also offers more than a million popular books from commercial publishers.

The site appears to be a sister site to Sci-Hub, an unauthorized collection of scholarly-journal articles created by Alexandra Elbakyan, a graduate student in Kazakhstan. While the workings of the two sites aren’t exactly clear, several press directors said they believed Sci-Hub is the tool that also powers the Library Genesis database.

Both sites were ordered shut down last year as a result of a lawsuit filed by a commercial journal publisher, Elsevier.

Other versions of the sites, which feature instructions in both Russian and English, subsequently reappeared under slightly different web addresses. A kind of manifesto posted on the sites argues that the information in the articles and books should be free from commercial restraints.

A Dawning Awareness

The Cornell press publishes about 100 new books a year. Nearly 500 of its titles were listed on the Library Genesis site as of Monday. The site also listed more than 800 books from the Johns Hopkins University Press, nearly 2,000 from Harvard University Press, and more than 4,800 from MIT Press.

The New Education Landscape

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Re:Learning project provides stories and analysis about this change moment for learning. •Sign up for our weekly newsletter •Join the discussion on Facebook •Listen to the podcast

More than 17,000 items from the biggest of all university presses, Oxford University Press, are on the site (including a book by this reporter), but it could not be immediately determined if that count also tallies some of the 380 journals it publishes.

 

"Librarians Find Themselves Caught Between Journal Pirates and Publishers," by Corinne Ruff, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 18, 2016 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Librarians-Find-Themselves/235353 

 


Search Among Blogs

In April the blog search engine Technorati reported that it was tracking 70 million blogs, with 120,000 new ones arriving every day --- http://technorati.com/weblog/2007/04/328.html
Technorati --- http://technorati.com/

 

New search tool from Google:  Putting order into the wild west of the blogosphere

It's tough to make money in a chaotic environment, and things don't get more rough-and-tumble then in today's blogosphere. The universe of blogs has everything from little Johnny's web diary to serious journalism and corporate marketing. Nevertheless, there's money to be made, and Google is taking the first step to finding that pot of gold. The Mountain View, Calif., company has launched a blog-search tool that looks to bring order to the unruly blogosphere. Experts say some blogs, such as those doing credible work in journalism and commentary, are beginning to show commercial potential. The problem, however, is to find and categorize them, which is something Google does better than anyone.
InternetWeek Newsletter, September 15, 2005

Also see http://www.internetweek.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleId=170703264

Google's blog search tool is at http://blogsearch.google.com/

Bob Jensen's threads on Weblogs and blogs are at http://www.trinity.edu/~rjensen/245glosf.htm#Weblog


It's Been Ten Years Since the Blog Was Born Out of Something Called a Weblog --- http://www.trinity.edu/~rjensen/245glosf.htm#Weblog

I fit into the category of an original NWAL blogger category meaning that I'm a Nerd Without A Life blogger. Now of course there are millions of bloggers who also have a life. I'm still stuck in the NWAL category.

To celebrate this tenth "blogiversary" on July 14, 2007, The Wall Street Journal on Pages P4-P5 ran a special column by Tunku Varadarajan that highlighted some of the leading blogs ---
http://blogs.wsj.com/onlinetoday/2007/07/14/pursuits-extras-for-saturday-july-14-2/

The WSJ blogiversary highlights the impact of some of selected blogs.

Christopher Cox, Chairman of the SEC, recommends searching for blogs at Google and Blogdigger ---  http://www.blogdigger.com/index.html
He points out that Sun Microsystems CEO Jack Schwartz in his own blog challenged the SEC to consider blogs as a means of corporate sharing of public information.

Christopher Cox, a strong advocate of XBRL,  gives a high recommendation to the following XBRL blog:
For fast financial reporting, a recommended blog is Hitachi America, Ltd XBRL Business Blog --- http://www.hitachixbrl.com/

One of the great bloggers is one of the all time great CEOs is Jack Bogle who founded what is probably the most ethical mutual fund businesses in the world called Vanguard. He maintains his own blog (without a ghost blogger) called The Bogle eBlog --- http://johncbogle.com/wordpress/

Nobel laureate (economics) Gary Becker runs a blog with Richard Posner called the Becker-Posner Blog --- http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/

Actress and humanitarian Mia Farrow maintains blogs on her visits to troubles pars of the world.
See  http://www.miafarrow.org/
One of her favorite blogs (not one that she runs) is BoingBoing.net --- http://www.boingboing.net/
She is also a heavy user of satellite phones --- http://www.gpsmagazine.com/

James Toranto discusses the powerful impact that blogs have had on politics and government.
He recommends the following political blogs:
KausFiles.com from the liberal/progressive UK media outlet called Slate --- http://www.slate.com/id/2170453/
InstaPundet.com from a liberatarian law professor --- http://www.instapundet.com/
JustOneMinute.typepad.com --- http://www.justoneminute.typepad.com/

Jane Hamsher founded a political blog at http://www.firedoglake.com/
She recommends the following leftest-leaning blogs:
CrooksAndLiars.com --- http://www.crooksandliars.com/
TBogg.blogspot.com --- http://www.tbogg.blogspot.com/
DigbysBlog.blogspot.com --- http://www.digbysblog.blogspot.com/

General Kevin Bergner is a spokesman for the Multi-National Force in Iraq and generally gives straight talk a world of distorted and biased media --- http://www.mnf-iraq.com/
Some of his favorite blogs are as follows:
Small Wars Journal --- http://smallwarsjournal.com/index.php
Blackfive --- http://www.blackfive.net/
The Mudville Gazette --- http://www.mudvillegazette.com/

Newt Gingrich recommends the following conservative-politics blogs:
RedState,com --- http://www.redstate.com/
Corner.NationalReview.com --- http://corner.nationalreview.com/
Powerline Blog --- http://www.powerlineblog.com/

Dick Costolo is a Group Product Manager at Google. He likes the following blogs:
The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs by an imposter --- http://www.fakesteve.blogspot.com/
New Media and the Future of Online Publishing --- http://publishing2.com/
Photo Blogs --- http://www.photoblogs.org/

Tom Wolfe (popular novelist) grew "weary of narcisstic shrieks and baseless information."

Xiao Qiang, the founder of Chna Digital Times, recomments the following blogs:
ZonaEuropa for global news with a focus on China --- http://www.zonaeuropa.com/weblog.htm
Howard Rheingold's tech commentaries on the social revolution at http://www.smartmobs.com/
DoNews from Keso (in Chinese) --- http://blog.donews.com/keso
(Search engines like Google will translate pages into English)

Jim Buckmaster, CEO of Craigslist recommends the following blogs:
One of the first tech blogs --- http://slashdot.org/
Metafilter (a wiki community blog that anybody can edit) --- http://www.metafilter.com/
Tech Dirt --- http://www.techdirt.com/

Elizabeth Spiers is the founding editor of the news/gossip blogs called Gawks/Jossip and the financial blog Dealbreaker.. She recommends the following blogs:
The liberatarian Reason Magazine blog --- http://www.reason.com/blog/
MaudNewton blog on literature and culture (and occasional political rants) --- http://maudnewton.com/blog/index.php
Design Observer --- http://www.designobserver.com/

How did they fail to overlook the following NWAL blogs?
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
New Bookmarks --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm
Tidbits --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TidbitsDirectory.htm
Fraud Updates --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

Bob Jensen's favorite free blogs (other than major newspaper, magazine, and  accountancy blogs that I track):
Aljazeera --- http://english.aljazeera.net
Commentary --- http://www.commentarymagazine.com/
New Republic --- http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/browse
Inside Higher Ed --- http://www.insidehighered.com/ 
The Finance Professor --- http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/
Financial Rounds --- http://financialrounds.blogspot.com/
Consumer Reports Web Watch --- http://www.consumerwebwatch.org/
Issues in Scholarly Communication --- http://www.library.uiuc.edu/blog/scholcomm/
Knowledge@Wharton --- http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/
Multi-National Force --- http://www.mnf-iraq.com/
NPR --- http://www.npr.org/
PC World --- http://www.pcworld.com/columns/
PhysOrg --- http://physorg.com/ (Good coverage of happenings in science and medicine)
WebMD --- http://www.webmd.com/
Wired News --- http://www.wired.com/  (not as good as it used to be)
WorldNetDaily --- http://www.worldnetdaily.com/  (watch for bias and the mixing of adds with news)
Y-Net News --- http://www.ynetnews.com/home/0,7340,L-3083,00.html

I will probably be adding the following blogs on a less regular basis:
The Bogle eBlog --- http://johncbogle.com/wordpress/
Becker-Posner Blog --- http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/
CrooksAndLiars.com --- http://www.crooksandliars.com/
Small Wars Journal --- http://smallwarsjournal.com/index.php
Blackfive --- http://www.blackfive.net/
The Mudville Gazette --- http://www.mudvillegazette.com/
The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs by an imposter --- http://www.fakesteve.blogspot.com/
New Media and the Future of Online Publishing --- http://publishing2.com/
Photo Blogs --- http://www.photoblogs.org/
Tech Dirt --- http://www.techdirt.com/

For Newspapers and Magazines I highly recommend Drudge Links --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/DrudgeLinks.htm
In particular I track Reason Magazine, The Nation, The New Yorker, Sydney Morning Herald, Sky, Slate, BBC, Jewish World Review, and The Economist

For financial news I like The Wall Street Journal and the Business sub-section of The New York Times

For Book Reviews I like --- http://www.booksindepth.com/period.html

Much more of my news and commentaries comes from online newsletters such as MIT's Technology Review, AccountingWeb, SmartPros, Opinion Journal, The Irascible Professor, T.H.E. Journal, and more too numerous too mention.

And I also get a great deal of information from various listservs and private messages that people just send to me, many of whom I've never met.

I would love to learn about your favorite blogs!

 


Search for Websites, PDF Files, and Pictures

Better, More Accurate Image Search
By modifying a common type of machine-learning technique, researchers have found a better way to identify pictures," by Kate Greene,  MIT's Technology Review, April 9, 2007 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/18501/

 


HooRay for Google!  Down With Yahoo!

 

Yahoo is expanding a program that lets advertisers pay to ensure that their sites are included in its search results.

 

Is this new Yahoo policy an abuse of advertising?  I don't seem to mind the tiny advertising boxes that appear on many Google searches, because I know they are advertisements, and they are not obtrusive.   But I can't say that I go along with the following new policy of Yahoo.  It's just one step away of the highly abusive policy of listing all advertiser sites before listing the most relevant sites in a search outcome.  That is really abusive in what I call CFO --- Crap First Out.

 

The new Yahoo policy is CAO --- Crap Always Out

The most abusive in what I call CFO --- Crap First Out.

 

You may or may not like Google's search results. You may disagree with its search methods. But with Google, the search results you see are strictly those that its search methodology yields. By contrast, at major competitors like Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN, the first search results you see are there, at least in part, because companies paid to place them there.
Walter Mossberg (see below)

Microsoft and Ask Jeeves are dropping paid-inclusion links from their search engines, a move that's winning praise. Yahoo is the last major search engine that champions paid inclusion, but for how much longer?
"Paid Inclusion Losing Charm?" by Chris Ulbrich, Wired News, July 5, 2004 --- http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,64092,00.html?tw=newsletter_topstories_html 

"Say Cheerio to Jeeves," by Arik Hesseldahl, Business Week, February 27, 2006 --- Click Here

AskJeeves' signature butler, borrowed from novelist P.G. Wodehouse, is being dropped, as the search site switches names to Ask.com and revamps its format

After nearly a decade as the search engine with a human face, AskJeeves.com is dumping the cheerful visage of the butler that has graced its pages.  Starting on Feb. 27, the site will become known simply as Ask.com.

The character had been used under an agreement reached in 2000 with the estate of the late British novelist, P.G. Wodehouse, who penned a series of novels involving the adventures of the butler Jeeves and his master Bertie Wooster.  When initially launched, AskJeeves.com allowed users to phrase their search terms as questions, such as "What is the capital of Ohio?" or "How many cups are in a gallon?"

Those days are over, says Daniel Read, vice-president for consumer products at the new Ask.Com, which for nearly a year has been part of IAC Search & Media, a unit of IAC/Interactive (IACI), Barry Diller's $5.7 billion (2005 sales) Internet concern: "The old name hearkened back to what we were five to seven years ago and not what we are now.  And while we found there were some customers who were loyal to the AskJeeves name, most of our users were ambivalent about it."  IAC paid $1.85 billion for the site, which first launched in 1996.

PHASED OUT.  The question approach worked for a few years, and initially the company found a business building customer-support Web sites that would allow customers to ask questions on the Web.  The business model changed when in 2001, AskJeeves acquired Teoma.com itself once dubbed a "Google-killer," and built the Teoma search technology into the AskJeeves site.  Starting on Feb. 27, Teoma.com will redirect users to Ask.com.

Jeeve's "retirement" hasn't been much of a secret.  Diller has been quoted several times over the last year as saying that the character would be phased out.

"Lycos Europe's Survival Instincts," by Jack Ewing, Business Week, February 24, 2006 --- Click Here

The Web outfit is relying on a new, more focused, search engine and cost cuts to deliver growth.  Does it stand a chance against Google?

By most conventional financial measures, Lycos Europe should probably not exist.  The Internet portal, search engine, and Web services provider, part owned by German media giant Bertelsmann and Spanish telco Telefónica (TEF), has had only two profitable quarters in its six-year history.  It's competing in a business dominated by Google (GOOG) and Yahoo! (YHOO).  And it must cope with the European market, where economies of scale are undercut by the need to offer content tailored to national tastes and languages.

Yet on Feb. 22, Lycos Europe Chief Executive Christoph Mohn stood bravely before a handful of reporters and analysts and explained why he believes the company will finally be profitable in 2006.  "In a couple of years people will see that we're one of the few global players," said Mohn, while standing before a laptop at a Frankfurt hotel conference room and paging through a PowerPoint presentation on the company's 2005 results.  Lycos' loss narrowed to $24 million on sales of $149 million last year, vs. a loss of $54 million in 2004.

Somebody believes Mohn.  Shares of Lycos Europe, which is a separate company from US.-based Lycos, rose more than 60% last year.  True, the recent price of 1.07 euros ($1.27) was still a long way from the 2000 Internet bubble price of more than 23 euros.  And the shares fell sharply after the 2005 results were announced.  But long after most highfliers from those days have been forgotten, Lycos still employs almost 700 people, primarily in Gütersloh, Germany, and offers services in eight European countries, plus the former Soviet republic of Armenia.  It's also the largest chat service in Europe, with 5 million users.

WORLD AT YOUR FINGERTIPS.  Mohn is clearly true believer No. 1.  With an enthusiasm that recalls the Internet euphoria of a few years ago, he describes the new technologies that he argues will someday allow Lycos to earn a decent return.  The newest service, just introduced in Germany and currently being rolled out across Europe, is a search engine called Lycos iQ that's supposed to give more focused results than Google does.

Users can type in a question, which other users answer.  Users rank answers the same way that eBay (EBAY) users rate sellers of goods.  The idea is to build a database of questions and answers, with the best answers rising to the top of the list.  (It works: This writer asked for advice on the best places to cross-country ski around Frankfurt, and within a few minutes received an e-mail with a link to a Web site devoted to the topic.)  "Lycos allows you to tap into the knowledge of the whole population," Mohn said in an interview.

Will that be enough to compete against the huge resources of Google?  "I don't think [Lycos Europe has] a chance, to be honest," says Hellen K. Omwando, an analyst at Forrester Research in Amsterdam.  "Look at Yahoo and MSN--even they can't manage to siphon away Google users."

"ONE OF THE SURVIVORS."  Omwando praises Lycos' cost-cutting measures, which included eliminating more than 200 jobs last year.  She also has kudos for some of Lycos' business-to-business services, such as software that allows small businesses to easily set up online shops.  But Omwando says the individual assets don't add up to long-term growth.  "Lycos is one of those players waiting to be sold," she says.

"Clean Image Is So Key To Google's Success, Why Take Gmail Risk?," Walter Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal, May 6, 2004, Page B1 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,personal_technology,00.html 

Truckloads of ink and gigabytes of Internet space are being devoted these days to discussing the merits of Google, the Web's leading search engine. Most of these articles aren't focusing on how Google functions for its users but on its value as an investment in light of the company's announcement last week that it is going public.

I don't give stock tips, and I have no idea whether investing in Google is a good idea. But I want to focus for a few moments here on why Google's stock offering is a big deal in the first place: It's because the company has created a service that works brilliantly for consumers.

Google's initial success was built on its breakthrough search technology, which produced more useful search results, much more quickly, than anyone else. Some analysts believe that edge is waning or is gone. I still think Google is the best, but in any case, there's another secret to Google's success: honesty.

Of all the major search engines, Google is the only one that's truly, scrupulously honest. It's the only one that doesn't rig its search results in some manner to make money.

You may or may not like Google's search results. You may disagree with its search methods. But with Google, the search results you see are strictly those that its search methodology yields. By contrast, at major competitors like Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN, the first search results you see are there, at least in part, because companies paid to place them there.

Google makes money in a traditional way that users understand. It sells ads. These ads are clearly labeled and easily distinguished from the real, unbiased search results. They are triggered by whatever search term a user enters, and they run down the side of the page and, occasionally, across the top. The ones across the top are shaded in color, just to make extra sure nobody confuses them with search results.

This separation of advertising and editorial content is the same one that has been used for a couple of hundred years in newspapers and magazines. People get the distinction.

Continued in article

 

"Yahoo Search Results To Include Paid Links," by Mylene Mangalindan, The Wall Street Journal, March 2, 2004 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB107817895456643322,00.html?mod=technology_main_whats_news

Approach Means Surfers Won't Be Able to Tell
Which Sites Made Payments to Be Included

Yahoo Inc., the nation's second largest search engine, is aggressively expanding a program that lets advertisers pay to ensure that their sites are included in search results.

Yahoo executives say the payments won't improve a site's ranking on the list of results that appear after a search. But at the same time, Yahoo acknowledged that there will be no distinguishing marks to alert Web surfers that a company had paid to be included.

Yahoo's new approach is expected to begin Tuesday. The Sunnyvale, Calif., Internet company has already been using a similar approach on its shopping-oriented Web pages, but it's now expanding the program to its entire site.

The move is likely to add fuel to the growing battle between Yahoo and its main rival, Google Inc., which has surpassed Yahoo to become the nation's most popular search site.

Google (www.google.com), of Mountain View, Calif., says it doesn't let advertisers pay to be included in its traditional search results. Google does allow advertisers to pay for promotions that appear alongside search results, but these are clearly labeled as "sponsored links." Google executives say their users favor this neutral, technology-driven approach. (Yahoo also continues to have a separate "sponsored" section for advertisers.)

Google co-founder Larry Page said Google separates and labels advertising, much the way newspapers distinguish between news stories and advertising. He questioned whether Yahoo would prevent advertisers from influencing search rankings, as well as results. "It's really tricky when people start putting things in the search results," he said.

The problem for Yahoo users is that they won't be able to tell which results are paid for and which aren't. Currently, search results are divided into two parts: For example, type in "dog walkers" and hit "return." At the top of the page that then pops up -- and also in the right-hand column -- are "sponsored" links, listing dog walkers or related businesses that paid for the premium position. Below that are what until now have been unsponsored findings listed under the heading, "Top 20 Web Results."

Under the new system, that second layer of findings will include both paid and unpaid links. But there is no way to find out if a specific company that comes up has paid or not. Yahoo will include only a general disclosure about the new program, on a separate page. (To read it, Web surfers must click on the phrase "What's this?")

If Web site operators want to be included in the new program, they must pay an annual subscription fee of $49 to list one Internet address and $29 each for their next nine addresses. On top of that, companies must pay Yahoo a fee for each person that clicks on their search listing.

The move comes two weeks after Yahoo dropped search technology from Google in favor of its own technology. Google is the top-ranked site that Internet users visit when conducting Web searches. About 35% of all Web searches in the U.S. are conducted on Google's sites, while 28% of them are done on Yahoo's sites, according to comScore Media Metrix, a unit of comScore Networks Inc., a market-research firm.

Analysts say Yahoo's move may arouse suspicions among computer users that the search results, and rankings, are being influenced by advertisers. It's a "trust issue," said Charlene Li, an analyst at market-research firm Forrester Research Inc. "Is this really the most relevant result or not?"

Yahoo says the program helps users by delivering information that its own or other search technology might miss. "Our goal is to deliver the highest quality search results," said Tim Cadogan, Yahoo's vice president of search. "We're going to gain users," he says, because "we're delivering better results."

Under Yahoo's "content acquisition program," advertisers pay to have their sites surveyed by Yahoo software that "crawls" the Web periodically, looking for new or updated Web pages.

Forrester's Ms. Li said she thinks consumers ultimately will accept the program, because they will come to understand Yahoo's policy of including advertisers in searches, but not allowing advertising to influence search rankings.  (Do you really think this constraint will remain?) 

Continued in the article

 

For Pictures, click the image button at  http://www.google.com/ 

Search Engine Watch 2003 Award Winners, Part 1 
ClickZ's sister site, Search Engine Watch, released its annual list of outstanding Web search services for 2003. Your favorites are among them, but there were also surprises and controversial predictions for the coming year. http://nl.internet.com/ct.html?rtr=on&s=1,pvi,1,ctxf,667h,3zob,3pvb 

Guardian's great tips on using Google --- http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,1117818,00.html 

The Complete Guide to Googlemania

They named it after the biggest number they could imagine. But it wasn't big enough. On the eve of a very public stock offering, here's everything you ever wanted to know about Google. A Wired Magazine special report --- http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.03/google.html 

February 25, 2004 reply from Jim Borden

Bob,

Here is another good article on Google from Fast Company (April 2003):

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/69/google.html 

and here is another one from Wired (January 2003):

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.01/google_pr.html 

Search Engines 101 --- http://www.searchengines.com/ 
This website provides some broad categories for searching.  It also provides a tutorial on how search engines work and how to improve your searches.

How do search engines work?
Search engines help people find relevant information on the Internet. Major search engines have huge databases of web sites that surfers can search by typing in some text. Learn more about search engines and effective searching here.

Search engines send out spiders or robots, which follow links from web sites and index all pages they come across. Each search engine has its own formula for indexing pages; some index the whole site, while others index only the main page.

Search engines decide the amount of weight that will be placed on various factors that influence results. Some want link popularity to be the most important criterion, while others prefer meta tags. Search engines use a combination of factors to devise their formulas.

Directories - a whole different ballgame
Often confused with search engines, directories are completely different. Unlike search engines, directories use "human indexing;" people review and index links. Directories have rigid guidelines that sites must meet before being added to their index. Therefore, they have a smaller, but cleaner index.

Yahoo!, LookSmart, MSN, Go and others are directories. Factors that influence search engine rankings are irrelevant to directory rankings. Since people review sites, more attention is placed on the quality of a site: its functionality, content and design. Directories strive to categorize sites accurately and often correct categories suggested by a site's webmaster.
You can learn more about directories here.

Hybrid search engines: The new generation
Hybrid search engines combine a directory and a search engine to give their visitors the most relevant and complete results. The Top 10 search engines/directories today are hybrid. Yahoo!, for example, is a directory, which uses results from Google (a search engine) for its secondary results.

At the same time, Google uses Open Directory Project's directory to supplement its own search engine. Other search engines work the same way. Learn more about search engine partnerships here.

Your mission, if you choose to accept it
As someone trying to achieve higher rankings, it's your goal to learn more about influencing factors and how each engine uses them. After completing your research, you will have a better understanding of search engines and directories. You will also have a better understanding of what it takes to achieve a Top 20 ranking on major search engines.

This section offers detailed explanations of factors used by search engines and directories, as well as tips for their implementation.

An Overview

Search engines and directories


All the Internet (a classified index) --- http://www.alltheinternet.com/
 



ZDNet's Software Library rounded up the 10 best Internet search tools! Take your pick at http://www.zdnet.com/swlib/hotfiles/findall99.html 


ManagementFirst.com (a management vortal)  http://www.managementfirst.com/what_makes_us_different/index.htm 

An Internet/Web portal with 14 channels on marketing and e-Commerce --- http://www.internet.com/home-d.html 

  • Internet Technology
  • Ecommerce/Marketing
  • Web Developer
  • Windows Internet Tech.
  • Linux/Open Source
  • Internet Resources
  • ISP Resources
  • Internet Lists
  • Download
  • International
  • International News
  • International Investing
  • ASP Resources
  • Wireless

Other examples of portals and vortals can be found at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/portals.htm


FindSame --- http://www.findsame.com/ 

FindSame is an entirely new kind of search engine that looks for content, not keywords. You submit an entire document, and FindSame returns a list of Web pages that contain any fragment of that document longer than about one line of text. Enter a URL or paste some text in one of the boxes below, or upload a file. Then click the "search" button and FindSame will show you where on the Web any piece of the text at that URL appears.


Search engine for education sites --- http://www.searchedu.com/   
My gosh, there were 421 hits for "Bob Jensen," 52 hits for "FAS 133," and 109 hits for "SFAS 133!  I am truly impressed.

Over 20 million university and education pages indexed and ranked in order of popularity.

Search for finance and investor news.
TheLion.com http://www.thelion.com/ 
This is a search engine focused on financial and investment news. 

Library of Links for Business http://epinc.com/Links/LINKLIB1.htm 

Investment search by Powerize --- http://www.powerize.com/ 

Hoover's, Inc. has acquired Powerize, Inc. and is pleased to welcome you to the benefits of Hoover's Online. Your favorite Powerize search features are now available to you in this Archived News section. Questions? View our FAQ.

We invite you to explore the Hoover's Online site for company and industry information, business news and helpful business travel planning resources.

 

The Journal of Electronic Publishing --- http://www.journalofelectronicpublishing.org/

VYOM eBooks Directory --- http://www.vyomebooks.com/

Search for electronic books --- http://www.searchebooks.com/ 
There were 293 hits for accounting books.

Bob Jensen's threads on electronic books are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm

Search helpers from the Harvard Business School http://www.library.hbs.edu/ 

Economicsearch.com http://www.economicsearch.com/ 

Research Links. Language Translators, etc. ---  http://sls-partnership.com/Research_Links.htm 
(Links to research, dictionary, thesaurus, dictionaries, thesauri, references, glossaries, online, language translators, researchers, technical, financial, medical, engineering, multi-lingual, bilingual --- Japanese and English)

Bob Jensen's dictionary bookmarks are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries

Bob Jensen's accounting, finance, economics, and technology glossaries are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/245gloss.htm

Neal Hannon states the following:

My favorite search engine today is Google.com.   Google consistently produces results that are on target with the context of my Internet searches, which puts the tools heads above the other search engines.   Here's what Iconocast recently had to say about Google:

"With the entrance of Google, which greatly improves search effectiveness and which was recently anointed by Yahoo! as the Net's definitive search technology, the search-engine game once again looks promising [we particularly like the "I'm feeling lucky" button]. Google claims to have cataloged 1.06 billion Web pages, no mean feat." Source: 2000 ICONOCAST  http://www.iconocast.com

 


The Global Accountancy Search Engine --- http://www.ifacnet.com
or http://www.aia.org.uk/InternationalAccountant.htm?News/IAfullStory.php?id=51337

International Accountant, April 5, 2007 ---
http://www.aia.org.uk/InternationalAccountant.htm?News/IAfullStory.php?id=51337

IFACnet, the global, multilingual search engine developed by the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC), has expanded its resources to address the needs of small and medium accounting practices (SMPs), in addition to professional accountants in business. IFACnet enables SMPs to easily locate information on a wide range of technical, marketing, human resource and other matters, including such topics as succession planning, managing a small firm, staff recruitment and retention, and promoting firm services.

IFACnet has also added three new features to help accountants worldwide stay current on technical, professional and marketplace issues and to make the search engine more user friendly. These include a "Latest News" page with links to a variety of business, management and accounting media and other websites; a search box that enables users to search IFACnet directly from their Internet browser; and a "What's News" section to inform visitors of new IFACnet features and content.

"There are many high quality resources available from within IFAC as well as through collaboration with our members that can help the global accountancy community carry out their professional responsibilities," states Ian Ball, IFAC Chief Executive Officer. "IFACnet's customised search features provide an efficient means to give professional accountants, including SMPs and professional accountants in business, in every part of the world, access to these timely and relevant resources."
Launched in October 2006, IFACnet provides one-stop access to free, high quality guidance, management tools and articles developed by professional accountancy bodies from around the world. Since its launch, IFACnet has attracted nearly 42,000 individuals from more than 190 countries worldwide. Currently, IFAC and twenty-three of its members (see attachment) provide IFACnet with access to information from their websites. In the coming months, new content will continue to be added to IFACnet as it expands the number of participating organisations.

IFACnet can be accessed free-of-charge at
http://www.ifacnet.com and on the websites of participating organisations.

IFAC is the worldwide organisation for the accountancy profession dedicated to serving the public interest by strengthening the profession and contributing to the development of strong international economies. IFAC is comprised of 155 members and associates in 118 countries, representing more than 2.5 million accountants in public practice, education, government service, industry and commerce. Through its independent standard-setting boards, IFAC sets ethics, auditing and assurance, education, and public sector accounting standards. It also issues guidance to encourage high quality performance by professional accountants in business.

Bob Jensen's guide to accounting glossaries (Scroll Down) --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/245gloss.htm

 


Search Inside a Given Computer:  Google vs. Yahoo vs. Microsoft

What desktop search is best for you?

November 18, 2005 message from Scott Bonacker [AECM@BONACKER.US]

Microsoft released a new desktop search tool this week. You can learn more about it and download the 9MB installation file from:

http://desktop.msn.com/ 

Several add-ins are available, and are a necessity to be able to search the files most of us work with.

I've tried it on a workstation, and unlike the Google product it will index and search large files - I was able to find a phrase in page 388 of a 37.6 MB PDF file with it. There is even some control over which folders are included in the search indexes.

The only recommendation may be that it is free, however. As you might expect it steers you towards using more Microsoft products, although you can turn some of those features off.

The X1 search tool has it beat in being useful, though. The default view when searching lets you specify several characteristics simultaneously including filename, type, date/time, path and size. At the same time you can search for words or other information within the files that are indexed. You can set limits on what folders are indexed, and the size of the files that are indexed as well.

If your files are organized into folders, no matter what criteria you use, you can narrow the search to folders at any level in the directory tree. When searching for common words that helps immensely in preventing an overwhelming list of results.

Even for the money, I still prefer X1. http://www.x1.com/ 

Scott Bonacker, CPA
Springfield, Missouri


The MSN new toolbar's Windows Desktop Search feature is better than Google's Desktop Search toolbar
Windows won't have integrated desktop search until the fall of 2006, and IE won't have built-in tabbed browsing until this summer. But Microsoft has just released a free product that adds both features to Windows computers. These add-on versions of desktop search and tabbed browsing aren't as good as their built-in counterparts, but they get the basic job done. Microsoft's new, free utility goes by the ridiculously long name of MSN Search Toolbar With Windows Desktop Search, and it can be downloaded at http://toolbar.msn.com/  . When you download the toolbar, it adds a new row of icons and drop-down menus to the IE browser. Many of these are aimed at driving users to other MSN products, like its Hotmail email service. But you can also use the toolbar to turn on tabbed browsing and to perform desktop searches . . . The MSN toolbar's Windows Desktop Search feature is better. It beats the most popular add-in desktop search product for Windows, Google Desktop Search, but it's slower and more cumbersome than the integrated search in Apple's new operating system.
Walter Mossberg, " Free Microsoft Stopgap Offers Tabbed Browsing And Desktop Searching," The Wall Street Journal, June 16, 2005 --- http://ptech.wsj.com/ptech.html

Search Inside a Given Computer (Google's Web Desktop Search)

The glitch, which could permit an attacker to secretly search the contents of a personal computer via the Internet, is what computer scientists call a composition flaw - a security weakness that emerges when separate components interact. "When you put them together, out jumps a security flaw," said Dan Wallach, an assistant professor of computer science at Rice in Houston, who, with two graduate students, Seth Fogarty and Seth Nielson, discovered the flaw last month. "These are subtle problems, and it takes a lot of experience to ferret out this kind of flaw," Professor Wallach said.
John Markoff, "Rice University Computer Scientists Find a Flaw in Google's New Desktop Search Program," The New York Times, December 20, 2004 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/20/technology/20flaw.html 
The glitch only applies to the Web Desktop search tool for internal documents.  It does not apply to other Google search tools.

There are noted phishing dangers and related security risks --- http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1682396,00.asp 
You can listen to some of NPR's concerns at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4120489 
With great respect too Google, I might note that the links to these risks came up first when I Google-searched Web Desktop Search.  You can read the following at http://www.vnunet.com/news/1158908 

Google's newly released desktop search application creates profound security and privacy risks for any companies with public access PCs, security experts have warned.

"In a shared environment people can use this powerful Google search tool to deeply mine data from public access terminals," John McIntosh, managing consultant with IT and security consultancy Heulyn, told vnunet.com.

"Firms need to be aware of ways in which this type of software is used and what impact it may have. Credit card details can be easily unearthed, together with other personal data.

"This can easily lead to identity theft and this is clearly a fast-growing problem. There is no skill needed to do it, and it makes it very easy to gain access to potentially sensitive data."

Unveiled last week in a beta test version, the free Google Desktop search application is designed to enable users to search local email, files, web history and chat details.

In spite of all the concerns, I think I am going to download the beta version.

You can download the beta version free from http://desktop.google.com/ 

Google's summary of Web Desktop Search is at http://desktop.google.com/about.html 

Google Desktop Search is how our brains would work if we had photographic memories. It's a desktop search application that provides full text search over your email, computer files, chats, and the web pages you've viewed. By making your computer searchable, Google Desktop Search puts your information easily within your reach and frees you from having to manually organize your files, emails, and bookmarks.

After downloading Google Desktop Search, you can search your personal items as easily as you search the Internet using Google. Unlike traditional computer search software that updates once a day, Google Desktop Search updates continually for most file types, so that when you receive a new email in Outlook, for example, you can search for it within seconds. The index of searchable information created by Desktop Search is stored on your own computer.

In addition to basic search, Google Desktop Search introduces new ways to access relevant and timely information. When you view a web page in Internet Explorer, Google Desktop Search "caches" or stores its content so that you can later look at that same version of the page, even if its live content has changed or you're offline. Google Desktop Search organizes email search results into conversations, so that all email messages in the same thread are grouped into a single search result.

We're currently working to fine tune our algorithms and to add more capabilities to Google Desktop Search, including the ability to search for more types of information on your computer. Your opinions and feedback can help us with this process. What types of files or other information would you like to be able to search? What new features would be helpful? Please contact us and let us know.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does Google Desktop Search do? Why is this useful? Where do I go to do a Desktop Search? What are the system requirements for running Google Desktop Search? How long will the download take? How easy is it to install? After installing, how soon can I search my computer? Will Google Desktop Search affect my computer's performance? What about my privacy? Does Google Desktop Search share my content with anyone? How come Google Desktop Search doesn't search all my communications and files? Is Google Desktop Search available in languages other than English? How do I uninstall?

Yahoo's Desktop Search (for searching text in files within a single computer)  information is at http://desktop.yahoo.com/ 

Searching by Name

"Google Goes Browsing By Name:  Toolbar now lets users navigate the Web without 
using URLs," by Scarlet Pruitt, PCWorld, July 15, 2004 --- http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,116910,00.asp 

Google Goes Browsing By Name

Toolbar now lets users navigate the Web without using URLs.

Scarlet Pruitt, IDG News Service Thursday, July 15, 2004 In its constant quest to court Web surfers, Google added a new feature to its toolbar this week that allows users to navigate the Web by typing in a name instead of a URL.

With the new Browse By Name feature, users of the Google's Toolbar can, for example, type "Grand Canyon" into their Internet Explorer browser window and land on the Grand Canyon homepage without having to type the somewhat cumbersome www.nps.gov/grca/ URL for the national park.

If users type in name that isn't specific or well recognized, the toolbar automatically performs a Google search on the subject, giving users a choice of destinations to choose from, the company says.

Typing "bicycles" in the browser window, for instance, brought up a litany of bicycle-related search results. Google says that the tool is aimed at helping users save time when browsing the Web.

Using the browser window as a convenient search bar may not always be the approach when searching for general terms, however, because the most specific or obvious destinations tend to appear first. Typing "apple" takes users directly to Apple Computer's homepage, for instance, and does not bring up results on the fruit.

Automatic Updates

Google's Toolbar automatically updates to include new features without users having to install new versions, though as of Thursday, not all users had received the update.

A spokesperson for the company in London says that it would take a few days for the update to be delivered to all toolbar users, and recommends that users hungry for the new feature uninstall their toolbar and reinstall the updated version for Google's site.

The new Browse By Name feature is available in 12 languages, including French, Russian, German, Italian, Chinese, and Japanese, Google says.

The toolbar update is just the latest tool introduced by the Mountain View, California, search company, which has been rolling out new products and services at a clipped rate over the last year, as it prepares for a much anticipated IPO.

Audio, Video, Movie, and Television Show Dialog Search Services from Google and Yahoo

YouTube --- http://www.youtube.com/

Hulu's Large Library of Contemporary Videos --- http://www.hulu.com/

Online Audio, Video, and Movie Finders --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Multimedia

Free Video, Movie and Music Links --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm

Google Video and Television Segment Search --- http://video.google.com/ 

Yahoo Video and Television Segment Search --- http://video.search.yahoo.com/ 

Yahoo Movies --- http://movies.yahoo.com/

All About Audio (a Digital Duo Video) --- http://www.pcworld.com/digitalduo/video/0,segid,186,00.asp 

Search for Music Equipment (Devices) --- http://www.zzounds.com/

LocateTV will search over 3 million TV listings across all channels in your area
Type in the name of a TV show, movie, or actor
Locate TV will find channels and times in your locale
http://www.locatetv.com/


You can search video and start the video when a particular word crops up
YouTube's Interactive Transcripts --- http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2010/06/youtubes-interactive-transcripts.html

YouTube added a cool feature for videos with closed captions: you can now click on the "transcript" button to expand the entire listing. If you click on a line, YouTube will show the excerpt from the video corresponding to the text. If you use your browser's find feature, you can even search inside the video. Here's an an example of video that includes a transcript.

Bob Jensen's search helpers are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm


"A Search Engine With a Real Eye for Videos," by Katherine Boehret, The Wall Street Journal, November 19, 2008 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122705795052039617.html

Web video has transformed the way the Internet is used, but finding the exact clip you want can be incredibly hard. And it's no wonder, considering that sites like YouTube conduct their hunts by looking at a clip's "contextual metadata" -- tags, video title and description -- and thus can often be misled by false information. For example, a homemade video about cooking might be inaccurately tagged with a popular search word like "Obama" so as to get more traction.

This week I tested VideoSurf.com, a site that claims to be the first to search videos by "seeing" images that appear in these videos. The company says its technology can analyze a clip's visual content, as well as its metadata -- especially when searching for people. VideoSurf has analyzed and categorized more than 12 billion visual moments on the Web to understand who the most important characters and scenes are in a video, and it uses this knowledge to sort clips according to relevancy.

Search results on VideoSurf spread out videos in a filmstrip-like format, distinguishing one scene from the next. Users can choose an option to show only faces, which helps if you're looking for a specific person in a long video or movie. And when looking at videos from certain sources, you can select a scene from the filmstrip and jump ahead to that scene rather than sit through the entire clip.

When it works, VideoSurf is one of those technologies that make you wonder why someone didn't think of it sooner. The site aggregates content from about 60 sources, including YouTube, CNN Video, Hulu, ESPN and Comedy Central, and a sorting tool weeds out unwanted results like the irksome slideshows that are labeled as videos. VideoSurf can find videos on all kinds of subjects, but it really shines when it finds well-known people.

But VideoSurf has some rough edges and doesn't always work as it should. In its defense, the site is still in its public beta, or trial, stage, and plans to be full-blown by early next year. Right now, one of its best features, the ability to jump ahead to specific scenes, works with video from only a handful of sources including YouTube, MetaCafe, DailyMotion and Google Video. Videos from Hulu.com confusingly allow jumping ahead only from certain screens.

Additionally, I came across a couple of videos that were no longer available, though they were listed in search results. And a customizable VideoSurf home page for users with accounts on the site saves searches but not specific clips; VideoSurf plans to fix this next week by adding a favorites page where users can store and share favorite videos with others.

Still, I really grew to like VideoSurf's clear way of displaying content that would be otherwise buried within videos. Rather than trying to guess a video's contents by looking at a single representative image, VideoSurf's filmstrip views showed me exactly what I'd be watching. In many cases, I viewed a video I might not have otherwise watched because its filmstrip showed shots of scenes that looked interesting.

On the left-hand side of the search-results page, VideoSurf users can narrow results according to Content Type, Categories and Video Sources to see just what they're looking for -- or, often more important, what they're not looking for. Content Type, for example, includes slideshows, Web series, full television episodes and full movies; a search can include only videos in a particular category (say, slideshows) or exclude that category altogether by unmarking the box beside it.

Most search-results pages include tiled still images at the top representing the characters in the videos. By selecting one of these characters, users can refine search results to show only videos with that character. For example, I typed the title of a favorite television show, "Brothers and Sisters," into the search box and saw the names and images of seven actors on the show at the top of the screen. I selected Sally Field and was redirected to results of videos featuring only the mother she plays on the show.

I used VideoSurf to search for Beyonce's "Single Ladies" music video, and then changed the date parameters to find only videos posted this week. This retrieved a Saturday Night Live skit in which the pop singer spoofs her own video with help from three men in tights -- including Justin Timberlake. While the SNL skit ran, a list of related videos appeared in a column on the right, including clips of J.T.'s past SNL skits.

Occasionally, annotations appear on videos, but these come from the source -- not VideoSurf. If overlaid text appears on YouTube videos, it can be turned off using an icon in the bottom right of the YouTube screen. Video-sharing sites that use introductory pages such as pre-rolls before each video will still show those pages.

VideoSurf makes it easy to send specific clips of videos to friends. I did so by selecting a Share option and adjusting slide bars to trim the clip to start and end at scenes I preferred. Clips shared with friends via email are sent with the VideoSurf filmstrip, giving others the ability to also know what the video will include so that they, too, can discern whether or not they want to watch it.

Clips can be shared on social-networking sites like del.icio.us, MySpace and Facebook, though VideoSurf's helpful filmstrip didn't show up on these sites like it did in emails.

I also tested an add-on for the Mozilla Firefox browser called Greasemonkey that works with VideoSurf. When installed, this displays VideoSurf's helpful filmstrip beneath search results from Google Video, YouTube, Yahoo or CBS.com. Once installed, filmstrips illustrating important scenes appear along with the normal text results for videos, and some of the filmstrips enable jumping ahead to specific scenes. This somewhat techie Greasemonkey extension can save people the extra step of making a separate visit to VideoSurf.com to watch a specific clip.

VideoSurf uses smart technology that can save people the aggravation of watching videos that aren't what they appear to be. Since so much Web content now includes videos, a visual search tool that can better assess videos like VideoSurf is a good idea. When this site improves its now-flaky ability to jump ahead to specific scenes in videos, it will be even more valuable.

Question
What is the YouTube for Intellectuals?

"'YouTube for Intellectuals' Goes Live," by Andrea L. Foster, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 8, 2008 --- http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/2646/youtube-for-intellectuals-goes-live?a
The selection is very limited at this site.

 


Cuil has demonstrated very well, it doesn't help you to look through the entire haystack
if it gets dumped on your head, and all you can see is a bunch of hay out there --- http://www.cuil.com/info/

"A Google Killer Stumbles Cuil's rough launch shows the difficulty of challenging major search engines," by Erica Naone, MIT's Technology Review, July 31, 2008 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/21151/?nlid=1244&a=f

Boasting big plans, startup search engine Cuil (pronounced "cool") launched on Monday. The company sold itself on having indexed more pages than Google, ranking based on context rather than on popularity, and displaying results organized by concept within a beautiful user interface. There was just one problem: when the search engine launched, it didn't work very well.

Cuil's site was down intermittently throughout the day on Monday, and even when the site was up, it sometimes returned no results for common queries, or failed to produce the most relevant or up-to-date results. For example, as of Wednesday morning, searching Cuil for its own name returns nothing on the first results page that is related to the engine itself, in spite of the buckets of press it got this week.

"I've seen these sorts of things for all sorts of startups that get launched," says search-engine expert Danny Sullivan, who runs Search Engine Land. "You have issues with how it's displaying results; you have spam showing; you have a lot of duplicate results." But Cuil wasn't supposed to suffer from the common problems that all sorts of startups encounter. Its founders have impressive credentials: Anna Patterson and Russell Power both had major roles in building Google's large search index, and Tom Costello researched search architecture and relevance methods for Stanford University and IBM. On top of the company's talent, Cuil raised a reported $33 million in venture capital. "In many ways, Cuil was the exception," Sullivan says. "They were one of the few people or companies out there where you would say, 'Well, all right, I'd be dubious about anyone else, but if anyone's going to have a chance, you should have a chance.' But they didn't deliver, and I think that makes it even harder now for startups to come along."

One of Cuil's main selling points is the size of its index. Claiming to have indexed 120 billion Web pages, which it states is three times more than any other search engine, the company says, "Size matters because many people use the Internet to find information that is of interest to them, even if it's not popular." But Sullivan notes that relevance may be the most important quality of search. "When you come into the idea of size, that starts getting into the question of obscure search," he says. "The needle-in-the-haystack search sounds so very compelling--the idea that if you don't have a lot of pages, you can't search through the entire haystack. But, as Cuil has demonstrated very well, it doesn't help you to look through the entire haystack if it gets dumped on your head, and all you can see is a bunch of hay out there."

Investor Azeem Azhar, who incubated the startup search engine True Knowledge, notes that while it's useful to have a large base of knowledge, sometimes the sample that's selected matters more. "There are certain things that people expect to have, and there are certain facts that are more useful than others," he says. True Knowledge, which aims at the subset of searchers who are looking for answers to direct questions, is currently working on building up a database of relevant facts that can be used to answer questions such as, "Who was president when Barack Obama was a teenager?" The company hopes that by focusing on facts of broad interest, such as those relating to famous people and places, it will be useful to people even as it solicits responses for them by way of rounding out its database. When a user asks a question that the system can't answer, it returns, "If there are any answers, I couldn't find any"; invites the user to add to the database; and points to traditional search results.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
I'm still upset that Cuil adds its own pictures to hits that have nothing whatsoever to do with the author or the documents. Jagdish is probably correct in saying that Cuil scans part of the document and tries to link a photo from its own archives that might possibly relate to content of the document. In this respect Cuil is doing a poor job picking relevant photographs. If I were a fundamentalist Christian or Muslim, I'd really be upset when Cuil added a bikini-clad porn star or an aardvark to my serious document about my religion. As for me I have a sense of humor, but I still contend that adding such useless pictures is a waste of bandwidth.

The theory is probably that, relative to text, a picture is worth a thousand words. But the wrong picture on a search hit relates to the wrong thousand words. And when it comes to searching, trying to search through a million photographs is certainly not as efficient as trying to search through a billion words for needles called "key words" or "search phrases." One can't search through a million pictures for such a thing as "FAS 133." It's pretty difficult to even sort a million faces for those with big noses. In Internet Explorer when I have a search page outcome listing 20 hits, I can quickly search the text on the page by hitting Edit, Find and typing in a search word. I cannot search the attached pictures for FAS 133. I suppose I could try to scan by eyesight for big noses. But what would this have to do with my search for FAS 133?

The only real answer to searching for needles in haystacks is indexing in a way that certain words in different terminologies (e.g., "cash" versus "money" versus "currency") or certain pictures (e.g., pictures with mountains) are given useful index magnets. More importantly, a good index system allows you to search for derivative financial instruments without getting millions of unwanted hits about mathematics derivatives or chemical derivatives.

We're already getting the highly useful index system for business financial reports. It's called XBRL --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/XBRLandOLAP.htm#TimelineXBRL
Especially note the illustrations at http://www.tryxbrl.org/

The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, has been trying for years to launch a more general indexing system called RDF but that has a long, long way to go --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/XBRLandOLAP.htm#TimelineRDF

The Future of Search according to IBM --- See below

 


"The Future of Search The head of Google Research talks about his group's projects," by Kate Greene, MIT's Technology Review, July 16, 2007 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/19050/?a=f 

TR: Which research has the most people and funding?

PN: The two biggest projects are machine translation and the speech project. Translation and speech went all the way from one or two people working on them to, now, live systems.

TR: Like the Google Labs project called GOOG-411 [a free service that lets people search for local businesses by voice, over the phone]. Tell me more about it.

PN: I think it's the only major [phone-based business-search] service of its kind that has no human fallback. It's 100 percent automated, and there seems to be a good response to it. In general, it looks like things are moving more toward the mobile market, and we thought it was important to deal with the market where you might not have access to a keyboard or might not want to type in search queries.

TR: And speech recognition can also be important for video search, isn't it? Blinkx and Everyzing are two examples of startups that are using the technology to search inside video. Is Google working on something similar?

PN: Right now, people aren't searching for video much. If they are, they have a very specific thing in mind like "Coke" and "Mentos." People don't search for things like "Show me the speech where so-and-so talks about this aspect of Middle East history." But all of that information is there, and with speech recognition, we can access it.

We wanted speech technology that could serve as an interface for phones and also index audio text. After looking at the existing technology, we decided to build our own. We thought that, having the data and computational resources that we do, we could help advance the field. Currently, we are up to state-of-the-art with what we built on our own, and we have the computational infrastructure to improve further. As we get more data from more interaction with users and from uploaded videos, our systems will improve because the data trains the algorithms over time.


"Video Searching by Sight and Script:  Researchers have designed an automated system to identify characters in television shows, paving the way for better video search," by Brendan Borrell, MIT's Technology Review, October 11, 2006 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=17604&ch=infotech

Google's acquisition this week of YouTube.com has raised hopes that searching for video is going to improve. More than 65,000 videos are uploaded to YouTube each day, according to the website. With all that content, finding the right clip can be difficult.

Now researchers have developed a system that uses a combination of face recognition, close-captioning information, and original television scripts to automatically name the faces on that appear on screen, making episodes of the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer searchable.

"We basically see this work as one of the first steps in getting automated descriptions of what's happening in a video," says Mark Everingham, a computer scientist now at the University of Leeds (formerly of the University of Oxford), who presented his research at the British Machine Vision Conference in September.

Currently, video searches offered by AOL Video, Google, and YouTube do not search the content of a video itself, but instead rely primarily on "metadata," or text descriptions, written by users to develop a searchable index of Web-based media content.

Users frequently (and illegally) upload bits and pieces of their favorite sitcoms to video-sharing sites such as YouTube. For instance, a recent search for "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" turned up nearly 2,000 clips on YouTube, many of them viewed thousands of times. Most of these clips are less than five minutes and the descriptions are vague. One titled "A new day has come," for instance, is described by a user thusly: "It mostly contains Buffy and Spike. It shows how Spike was there for Buffy until he died and she felt alone afterward."

Everingham says previous work in video search has used data from subtitles to find videos, but he's not aware of anyone using his method, which combines--in the technical tour de force--subtitles and script annotation. The script tells you "what is said and who said it" and subtitles tell you "what time something is said," he explains. Everingham's software combines those two sources of information with powerful tools previously developed to track faces and identify speakers without the need for user input.

What made the Buffy project such a challenge, Everingham says, is that in film and television, the person speaking is not always in the shot. The star, Buffy, may be speaking off-screen or facing away from the camera, for instance, and the camera will be showing you the listener's reactions. Other times, there may be multiple actors on the screen or the actor's face is not directly facing the camera. All of these ambiguities are easy for humans to interpret, but difficult for computers--at least until now. Everingham says their multimodal system is accurate up to 80 percent of the time.

A single episode of Buffy can have up to 20,000 instances of detected faces, but most of these instances arise from multiple frames of a single character in any given shot. The software tracks key "landmarks" on actor's faces--nostrils, pupils, and eyes, for instance--and if one of them overlaps with the next frame, the two faces are considered part of a single track. If these landmarks are unclear, though, the software uses a description of clothing to unite two "broken" face tracks. Finally, the software also watches actors' lips to identify who's speaking or if the speaker is off screen. Ultimately, the system produces a detailed, play-by-play annotation of the video.

"The general idea is that you want to get more information without having people capture it," says Alex Berg at the Computer Vision Group at University of California, Berkeley. "If you want to find a particular scene with a character, you have to first find the scenes that contain that character." He says that Everingham's research will pave the way for more complex searches of television programming.

Computer scientist Josef Sivic at Oxford's Visual Geometry Group, who contributed to the Buffy project, says that in the future it will be possible to search for high-level concepts like "Buffy and Spike walking toward the camera hand-in-hand" or all outdoor scenes that contain Buffy.

Timothy Tuttle, vice president of AOL Video, says, "It seems like over the next five to ten years, more and more people will choose what to watch on their own schedule and they will view content on demand." He also notes that the barrier to adapting technologies like Everingham's may no longer be technical, but legal.

These legal barriers have been coming down with print media because companies have reaped the financial benefits of searchable content--Google's Book Scan and Amazon's search programs have been shown to boost book sales over the last two years.

Continued in article


I really like the Digital Duo show that appears weekly once again on PBS.  I found that you can bring up prior shows on your computer by going to http://www.pcworld.com/digitalduo/index/0,00.asp

"Searching the Web for Video Clips" by Walt Mossberg and Katherine Boehret, The Wall Street Journal, March 1, 2006, Page D4 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB114117478467285971.html?mod=todays_us_personal_journal

Video on the Web is all the rage now, the subject of an endless stream of articles and speculation that it's the next big thing. And there's some evidence to back that up. Apple Computer Inc. sold 12 million video clips at $1.99 each from its popular iTunes Music Store in just a few months. Google has made a splash with a similar video download store. According to AccuStream iMedia Research, about 18 billion video streams were online in 2005 and that number is expected to grow by more than 30% in 2006.

But how do you find the video clips you'd like to see, or download? Normal search engines like Google's can sometimes point you to video clips, but they aren't optimized for that task.

So, this week, we dived into the world of online videos, looking for the best ways to find clips. We were impressed by how much material is out there -- much of it free. We used about 10 different video searching/hosting sites to find videos related to TV shows, including "Grey's Anatomy," Hollywood actors, like Matthew McConaughey, and musicians, like Brad Paisley. We also searched for news videos, ads and amateur videos. We even looked for a famous "Saturday Night Live" mock music video, and its imitators.

Our results: AOL Video Search, Yahoo Video Search, and Blinkx TV earned our appreciation because each searches the entire Internet for material, and does a decent job.

Google Video and iTunes also perform video searches, but they search only among the material they host on their own servers, and which they offer for sale, or for free downloading. They don't search across the entire Web. Sites like YouTube.com and GoFish.com have sprung up as central download sites for all sorts of video clips, some by amateurs and some by pros. But they, too, search only the material they offer themselves.

The technology for searching the actual spoken words in a video exists, but is in its infancy. So, most video searches are done by looking for words in a video's title text, or in descriptions or other information embedded in a video file in the form of "metadata" or "tags" -- kind of like the embedded title, artist and album information in a music file. Some TV shows stored on the Web also contain closed captioning data, and that can be searched in some cases.

AOL Video Search (www.aol.com/video) uses the search engines of two smaller, yet powerful, companies that it owns: Truveo.com and Singingfish.com. As you use AOL Video Search, your past search topics are saved in a left-hand column and videos can be saved into a special AOL playlist. An adult content filter is used on AOL's server, meaning users can't turn the filter on or off.

Using AOL, we found and watched the "Saturday Night Live" mock music video called "Lazy Sunday," set in New York, and its West Coast response, "Lazy Monday," set in Los Angeles.

Yahoo Video Search (http://video.search.yahoo.com) can display results in a visually attractive grid of images from each video clip. Unlike AOL, which displays advertisements on its search start and results page, Yahoo doesn't show ads on either page -- though ads will display if they're linked to videos from outside sources. A SafeSearch filter can be used for blocking adult material as you search videos.

Using Yahoo's video search, we turned up clips of a forgettable 1998 appearance Walt made in an East Coast vs. West Coast computer trivia contest held in Boston. Not only was his East Coast team crushed, but they wore puffy colonial shirts while being crushed.

Blinkx TV (www.Blinkx.tv) uses a simple interface and makes searching easy -- an empty box placed on the left of the screen with a collage of 100 tiny clip images playing on the right. After results are returned, you can adjust a horizontal slider between "date" or "relevance," depending on your preference. Our results weren't always as accurate with Blinkx as they were with other video-search sites -- one search returned spreadsheets rather than videos -- but we liked how the results page played animated clips of each video in the same window. Blinkx offers a prominent filtering button to hide adult results.

Google Video (http://video.google.com), which is still in its beta (or prerelease) version, also offers video searching through free videos -- but allows you to search only through material that Google hosts, or streams from its servers. This site eliminates ads -- including Google's word-only ads -- entirely, which is refreshing.

Bob Jensen's links to online video are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm#Video


"Google and Yahoo Are Extending Search Ability to TV Programs," by Saul Hansell, The New York Times, January 25, 2005 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/25/technology/25google.html 

Google and Yahoo are introducing services that will let users search through television programs based on words spoken on the air. The services will look for keywords in the closed captioning information that is encoded in many programs, mainly as an aid to deaf viewers.

Google's service, scheduled to be introduced January 25, does not actually permit people to watch the video on their computers. Instead, it presents them with short excerpts of program transcripts with text matching their search queries and a single image from the program. Google records TV programs for use in the service.

Google's vice president for product management, Jonathan Rosenberg, said offering still images was somewhat limited but was a first step toward a broader service.

"The long-term business model is complicated and will evolve over time," Mr. Rosenberg said. Eventually, Google may offer video programming on its site or direct people to video on other Web sites. But for now, the issues relating to the rights and business interests of program owners are very complex, he said.

A Google spokesman, Nate Tyler, said the service would include "most of the major networks," including ABC, PBS, Fox News and C-Span. Mr. Rosenberg said Google did not think it needed the permission of network and program owners to include them in the index but would remove any program or network if the owner requests it. He declined to discuss any business arrangements between the program owners and Google.

Brian Lamb, the chief executive of C-Span, said he met with representatives of Google and approved of their service but no money changed hands between the two organizations.

Yahoo introduced a test version of a different sort of video search last year, available from a section of its site, that lets users comb through video clips from various Web sites.

Today, Yahoo will move the video search to its home page. In the next few weeks, it will introduce the ability to search the closed-captioning text for programs from some networks, including Bloomberg and the BBC. Unlike the Google service, Yahoo's offering will let users watch 60-second video clips.

David Ives, the chief executive of TV Eyes, which is providing that part of Yahoo's service, said some broadcasters were paying to have their programs included in the search. In other cases, he said, the broadcaster and TV Eyes will split revenue from advertisements placed next to the video clips.

Online Audio, Video, and Movie Finders --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Multimedia


Find FAQs Online

Internet FAQ Archives --- http://www.faqs.org/faqs/


Yahoo's Y!Q

"Yahoo to Release Service Aimed At Making Web Searches Easier," by Kevin J. Delaney, The Wall Street Journal, February 3, 2005, Page B6 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB110739746773644562,00.html?mod=todays_us_marketplace 

Yahoo Inc. plans to release today (February 3) a service designed to make it easier to conduct Web searches, its latest sally in the heated battle with Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp. to make search results more relevant for individual users.

The service, dubbed "Y!Q," uses keywords automatically extracted from Web pages to conduct Web searches and also to find related content on Yahoo's own Web sites. The search companies have long complained about the difficulty of delivering exactly the search results users want since the average search query a user enters is just a few words long. Yahoo's new service, which it plans to release on its site for test services ( http://www.next.yahoo.com/ ), partly addresses that problem by creating a list of search keywords itself based on the text a user is looking at.

. . . 

If an individual is reading a news article on Yahoo's site about plans for changing Social Security, for example, clicking on a button marked "Search Related Info" generates links to several Web sites discussing the same topic. In that case, the service extracts a string of keywords including "President Bush" and "Social Security" from the original article and uses them as the basis for the new search. The service works on sites other than Yahoo's own and allows users to add or exclude search terms from those generated automatically.


StumbleUpon and KartOO

StumbleUpon --- http://www.stumbleupon.com/about.html

StumbleUpon is an intelligent browsing tool for sharing and discovering great websites. As you click Stumble!, you'll get high-quality pages matched to your personal preferences. These pages have been explicitly recommended (rated I like it) by friends and other SU members with similar interests. Rating these sites shares them with your friends and peers – you will automatically 'stumble upon' each others favorites sites.  In effect,

StumbleUpon's members collectively share the best sites on the web. You can share any site by simply clicking I like it. This passes the page on to friends and like-minded people – letting them "stumble upon" all the great sites you discover.

Selecting Your Interests
After you join you will be asked to select topics which are of interest to you. Nearly 500 topics are available and you can select as many as you wish to help determine your preferences in web content. The more interests you select, the better StumbleUpon will be able to determine which sites you will like best. This lets StumbleUpon provide you with sites rated highly by other members with similar interests. You can also add, remove or modify your interests at any time.

 

Jensen Comment:  I found this site a little confusing to use, but I think I got the hang of it.  Now I find it quite useful for finding good sites.  Many of the hits are commercial sites.  It does clutter your browser window with yet another toolbar, although if you click on the View option in your browser you can choose to hide this and other browser toolbars. 

When learning StumbleUpon, it really helps to got to Menu, FAQs at http://www.stumbleupon.com/help.html
There is also an unofficial listing of FAQs at http://stumbleupon.theprawn.com/ 

*******************

KartOO is a metasearch engine with visual display interfaces. When you click on OK, KartOO launches the query to a set of search engines, gathers the results, compiles them and represents them in a series of interactive maps through a proprietary algorithm
KartOO Searching --- http://www.kartoo.com/
Jensen Comment:  As the name StumbleUpon suggests in the module above, StumbleUpon more or less randomly brings up "good" sites under a give topic area.  Another search engine called KartOO brings up "good" sites a little less randomly due to the ability to fine tune with subtopics. 

For example, enter "Accounting" and note the many subtopics.  This is a very good search site when you want to drill down to details on a topic.  Try it again with "Accounting Education."  However, I find StumbleUpon a bit more imaginative in terms of interesting and varying sites.


Speegle:  Listen to Your Search Outcomes

Human eyes can scan a page is a fraction of the time it takes to hear the page read aloud.  I can't for the life of me see much advantage to having a search page read aloud except for blind people or for other people who are focusing on other things such as driving a car.  You can choose a male or female voice without a heavy Scottish accent. See http://www.speegle.co.uk/ 

It's fun to try this out.  I did so using the search term Enron and found some interesting outcomes that I had not found on other search engines.  Hence I might use Speegle more as a visual search engine.

"Speech takes on search engines," BBC News, December 21, 2004 --- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4079005.stm 

A Scottish firm is looking to attract web surfers with a search engine that reads out results. Called Speegle, it has the look and feel of a normal search engine, with the added feature of being able to read out the results.

Scottish speech technology firm CEC Systems launched the site in November.

But experts have questioned whether talking search engines are of any real benefit to people with visual impairments.

'A bit robotic'

The Edinburgh-based firm CEC has married speech technology with ever-popular internet search.

The ability to search is becoming increasingly crucial to surfers baffled by the huge amount of information available on the web.

Continued in the article


Cell Phone Search Engines

From The Washington Post on October 13, 2005

Three search engines now allow cell phone users to text-message queries from their cell phones. Which of the following is not one of the three?

A. 4Info
B. AltaVista
C. Google
D. Yahoo

Answer:  Only AltaVista does not allow cell phone queries.

Reverse Phone Number Search ---
http://www.ivycall.com/


 

Free People Search --- http://www.ivycall.com/

Free Reverse Phone Number Search ---
http://www.ivycall.com/

Also you can enter a phone number into major search engines like Google to get a name and address

People who visit www.intelius.com  can enter a person's name to get a cell phone number, or do the reverse by entering a number to get the subscriber's name. Each search costs $15. They can also download a raft of personal information about the subscriber. This was a feature on ABC evening news, August 14, 2007.

"Free Cell Phone Number Search - How To Find Free Cell Phone Numbers," --- Click Here
The freebies are not really very worthwhile relative to the fee-based services.

Jensen Comment
This will be terribly frustrating if telemarketers and crank callers begin to use up your allotted free minutes of cell phone time each month.

You may enter your cell phone numbers into the "Do Not Call" registry the same as you probably did for your landline phone --- https://www.donotcall.gov/default.aspx
However, telemarketers are not supposed to call cell phones with automatic dialers --- https://www.donotcall.gov/default.aspx
This is no protection, however, from crank callers or telemarketers who take the trouble to dial in your cell phone number. Of course, being in the "Do Not Call" registry does not protect you from telemarketing charitable organizations that are typically the biggest nuisance these days. Also the "Do Not Call Register" provides no guarantee that you will not get calls from commercial telemarketers, especially those who fly by night.

It might just pay to get the cell phone numbers of your state Senators and local Congressional representative and call them late at night at home on their supposedly "personal" cell phones. Better yet, call their children and ask them to tell their parents how you got their phone numbers.

Note that if you've never given a cell phone number out to any organization other than your phone company, Intelius may not have your cell phone number in its dastardly database. You should make your children aware of this.  Even emergency calls to 911 may result in Intelius getting your cell phone number according to the fine print in my Verizon Wireless contract.

To my knowledge there's no unlisted phone service for cell phones like the one that you can pay for monthly on your landline number

 


Using Google to "define" versus define: words

Question:  
How can you troll the Web for the definition of a word?

Answer:
Go to Google --- http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en 
In either the "Type all the words" box or the "With the exact phrase" box, type the word "define" with the quotation marks, then a space, and the word or phrase you want defined.  At the top of all the search hits, you will get the definition you were seeking plus a link to additional definitions.

For example, type "define" love

Interestingly, Google suggests typing "define" carcooning
However, Google cannot seem to find a definition of that word  (which appears to mean customizing one's car for travel comfort).

Note that you get a different result in Google when you use “define” with quotation marks versus define: with a colon.

It does not matter whether you are in Google’s main page or in Google’s Advanced Page.


"Google Further 'Defines' Search," by Colin C. Haley, Boston Internet.com, October 21, 2003 --- http://boston.internet.com/news/article.php/3096291 

Baffled by bling-bling? Perplexed by prairie-dogging? Confused by carcooning? Google can help.

The search engine powerhouse has introduced a glossary feature to troll the Web for definitions. The Mountain View, Calif., company says its particularly well-suited for slang and newer terms such as "search engine," that are likely to appear online before they do in print.

The technology was developed by Google Labs, a unit dedicated to new technology, and has been in testing for 18 months. International versions will be introduced in coming months.

"(A search command) emerges from testing when we feel it's ready for prime time," a Google spokesman told internetnews.com. "Certainly, the quality and reliability have to be there."

Users type the word "define," then a space, and the word or phrase they want defined into the Google.com search pane. If Google has seen a definition on the Web, it retrieves and display it on a results page. The commands "what is" and "definition" also work.

Results are highlighted as "Web Definition" followed by the text of the Web-generated definition. If Google finds several entries, users are presented with a link to a complete list.

Google still has a deal with dictionary.com to provide its content. On the results page, users can click on the word they entered in the blue results bar and access the dictionary.com definition.

Of course, rival search engines routinely include definitions as part of their results. And there are other sites specializing in slang and new terms, including Urban Dictionary, which allows users to submit their own words, and Word Spy, which compiles and defines words and phrases popping up in the media.

Earlier this year, Word Spy ran afoul of Google's intellectual property lawyers who wanted to be sure when people "use 'Google,' they are referring to the services our company provides and not to Internet searching in general."

Lawyers weren't as upset with the definition as they were the lack of mention of the corporate entity. Word Spy's editor modified the entry by inserting trademark information, which satisfied Google.

 


GOOGLE expands services for the following:   

  • area codes, product codes, 
  • flight information, 
  • vehicle identification numbers 
  • U.S. Postal Service tracking numbers.

"Google Expands Search Features," by Mylene Mangalindan, The Wall Street Journal, January 13, 2004 --- 

Google Inc. expanded the types of information that Internet users can search for on its Web site to include such things as area codes, product codes, flight information, vehicle identification numbers and U.S. Postal Service tracking numbers.

The closely held Web-search technology company introduced the new features to its Web site Monday. Google (www.google.com) sees its mission as connecting Internet users to the world's information, which it hopes to organize and make more accessible.

The Mountain View, Calif., company, which is the leading destination for Internet users on the Web for search, has been in the news lately because it is expected to sell shares to the public this year, according to people familiar with the situation. Many bigger public companies such as Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. have also made it clear that they intend to challenge the start-up in search technology.

Google's announcement Monday introduces several new innovations. Computer users, for example, can type in an area code in the search query bar and the top result will show a map of that geographic area. Users can also plug in a vehicle identification number into the search query box to get a link for a Web page with more information about the year, make and model of a specific type of car.

 

Google's main directory is at http://www.google.com/dirhp?hl=en&edition=us&q= 

Google's daily world news highlights are at http://news.google.com/ 

Google goes local Search giant to tap into huge local advertising market," by Stephanie Olsen, MSNBC News, March 17, 2004 --- http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4547867/ 

Internet darling Google is taking search to the streets, helping Web surfers find cafes, parks or even Wi-Fi hot spots in their area.

On Wednesday, the Web search company unveiled Google Local, which has been tested in the company's research and development lab for the last 8 months. Type a keyword along with an address or city name into the search box at Google.com or at its newly designated site, Local.google.com ( http://www.local.google.com/ ), to find maps, locally relevant Web sites and listings from businesses in the area.

"A lot of times when people are looking for something, they want to do it on a local level...This is a core search promise," said Marissa Mayer, Google's director of consumer Web products, who helped build the service with a team of engineers from Google's New York office.

Prime real estate Mountain View, Calif.-based Google is giving prominence to local search at a time when it's one of the most hyped areas of development in the industry. Financial analysts and industry executives say geographically targeted search listings are prime real estate for local advertising, an estimated $12 billion annual business in the United States. In 2004, less than $50 million of that market will go toward ads related to local Net searches, but over time, the dollars will find their way to the virtual world, analysts say.

It will be "worth a lot more online. That is, merchants will pay more," said Safa Rashtchy, Piper Jaffray's Internet analyst. "Integration of that with search will make it very convenient for searchers and extremely useful for local merchants."

For now, search engines including Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, MSN and CitySearch are working to perfect local search for consumers.

Google's chief rival, Yahoo, recently improved visitors' chances of finding local restaurants, ATMs, shops and bus routes through its map service. With its new SmartView feature, Yahoo now incorporates points of interests like restaurants into local maps, allowing Web surfers to refine what they're looking for (for example, Italian or Indian food) and see where a particular spot is located in the neighborhood.

Google, which fields about 200 million queries a day, said its local service improves people's access to relevant information, its long-time mission. Using the local service, people will find business addresses, phone numbers and "one-click" driving directions to places of interest.

To deliver the results, Google draws on business listings provided by third-party companies. It also uses technology to collect and analyze data on the physical location of a Web page and then matches that data to specified queries and their designated addresses.

For now, Google will not display local advertisements on the service, but it plans to do so in the future. However, the company currently sells advertisers the ability to target people by region on the main Web site. Google makes money by letting advertisers bid for placement on results pages for related search terms. Ads appear adjacent to or atop search results.


The Google Site Map has a lot of quick links --- http://www.google.com/sitemap.html 

Google offers many services for free and some services for a fee --- http://www.google.com/options/ 

Froogle - froogle.google.com  
Find products for sale from across the Web. More... 

Google Answers - answers.google.com  
An open forum where Researchers answer your questions for a fee. More...
Note from Bob Jensen:  I worry about this service --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm#GoogleAnswers 

Google Catalogs - catalogs.google.com 
Search and browse mail-order catalogs online. More...

Google Groups - groups.google.com 
Post and read comments in Usenet discussion forums. More...

Google Image Search - images.google.com 
The most comprehensive image search on the web with 425 million images. More...

"A Research Paper Introduces Better Google Image-Search Technology," by Hurley Goodall, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 28, 2008 --- Click Here

Google unveiled a prototype algorithm at a conference in Beijing last week that will add precision to the search engine’s image-search technology, The New York Times says.

Two Google researchers presented a paper describing the prototype, which is called VisualRank. It uses image-recognition technology to help rank the relevance of images found in a search.

Currently, Google Image Search results are ranked using the text around the image on the page. The new method will use the visual characteristics of the image itself, and rank search results by comparing similarities among them.

Also see a slightly more detailed news announcement at http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/080428-095720

Google Image Search is at http://images.google.com/imghp?hl=en&tab=wi
 

Google Labs - labs.google.com 
Prototypes and projects in development by Google engineers, including: Google Viewer - Google WebQuotes - Google Glossary - Google Sets - Voice Search - Keyboard Shortcuts. More... 

Google News - news.google.com Search and browse 4,500 continuously updated news sources. More...

Google Special Searches - www.google.com/options/specialsearches.html Narrow your search to a specific topic, such as BSD, Apple, and Microsoft.

Google University Search - www.google.com/options/universities.html 
Narrow your search to a specific school website.

Google Web Directory - directory.google.com 
The web organized by topic into categories. More...

Google Web Search - www.google.com  
Relevant results fast from searching more than 3 billion web pages.

Google Wireless - www.google.com/options/wireless.html  
Access Google's adaptable search technology from any number of handheld devices.

Google tools include the following:

Google Browser Buttons - www.google.com/options/buttons.html  
Access Google's search technology by adding our buttons to your browser's personal toolbar.

Google in Your Language - services.google.com/tc/Welcome.html  
Volunteer to translate Google's help information and search interface into your favorite language.

Google Toolbar - toolbar.google.com 
Take the power of Google with you by adding the toolbar to your IE browser. More...

Google Translate Tool - www.google.com/language _tools 
Translate text or entire web pages.

Google Web APIs - www.google.com/apis/ 
A tool for software developers to automatically query Google. More

Google makes a lot of money from its services to advertisers and other business firms:

Google Advertising
Getting Started
 • Contact sales
 • Worldwide offices
Learn More
 • Overview
 • Industry metrics
 • Success stories
 • Premium Service FAQ
 • AdWords FAQ
 • In-depth look
 • Glossary of terms
 • Preview your ad
Login
 • Campaign login

There are also "search appliances" 

Search Appliance
 • Overview
 • Product Info
       - Features
       - Hardware
 • FAQ
 • Customers
 • News
 • Support
 • Request Info

Google Fun Facts --- http://www.google.com/press/funfacts.html 

Google Fun Facts

Google sorts billions of bits of information for its users. Here are some little-known bits of information about Google:

  • Google's name is a play on the word googol, which refers to the number 1 followed by one hundred zeroes. The word was coined by the nine-year-old nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner.
  • Google receives more than 200 million search queries a day, more than half of which come from outside the United States. Peak traffic hours to google.com are between 6 a.m. and noon PST, when more than 2,000 search queries are answered a second.
  • Google started as a research project at Stanford University, created by Ph.D. candidates Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were 24 years old and 23 years old respectively (a combined 47 years old)..
  • Google's index of web pages is the largest in the world, comprising more than 3 billion web pages, and which if printed, would result in a stack of paper 130 miles high. Google searches this immense collection of web pages often in less than half a second.
  • Google receives daily search requests from all over the world, including places as far away as Antarctica and Ghana.
  • Users can restrict their searches for content in 35 non-English languages, including Chinese, Greek, Icelandic, Hebrew, Hungarian and Estonian. To date, no requests have been received from beyond the earth's orbit, but Google is working on a Klingon interface just in case.
  • Google has a world-class staff of more than 1000 employees known as Googlers. The company headquarters is called the Googleplex.
  • Google translates more than 3 billion HTML web pages into a display format for WAP and i-mode phones and wireless handheld devices, and has made it possible to enter a search using only one phone pad keystroke per letter, instead of multiple keystrokes.
  • Google Groups comprises more than 800 million Usenet messages, which is the world's largest collection of messages or the equivalent of more than a terabyte of human conversation.
  • The basis of Google's search technology is called PageRank™, and assigns an "importance" value to each page on the web and gives it a rank to determine how useful it is. However, that's not why it's called PageRank. It's actually named after Google co-founder Larry Page.
  • Googlers are multifaceted. One operations manager, who keeps the Google network in good health is a former neurosurgeon. One software engineer is a former rocket scientist, while another's first job title at Google was the Spiderman. And the company's chef formerly prepared meals for members of The Grateful Dead and funkmeister George Clinton.
  • 3 billion web pages translates to approximately 3 trillion words in Google’s index. If a person averages about 1 page per minute, it would take 6,000 years to read the Google index. If this person reads on an 8-hour daily schedule, it would take 18,000 years. Want weekends off? Add another 2,000 years.

What a lot of folks do not know about is the commercial Google Search Appliance --- http://www.google.com/appliance/features.html 
Among other things this allows management to track employee searches and track incoming data when the outside world seeks employee Web pages.  Universities are now using this (by paying $28,000 or more per year) to track information about searches of university Web servers.  See the following reference:

"Universities Discover a New Use for Google:  Finding Out What People Want," by Dan Carnevale, The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 24, 2003, Page A37.


New tutorial detailing 20 ways to get more out of Google

Find out how to search with a date range (which avoids all those dead dot-com pages cluttering up the web) and what intext means.
"20 Great Google Tips," by Tara Calishain, PC Magazine, October 28, 2003 --- http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,1306756,00.asp 

Syntax Search Tricks --- http://www.google.com/help/operators.html 

Calculator --- http://www.google.com/help/features.html#calculator 

Extended Googling --- 

Google offers several services that give you a head start in focusing your search. Google Groups (http://groups.google.com) indexes literally millions of messages from decades of discussion on Usenet. Google even helps you with your shopping via two tools: Froogle (http://froogle.google.com), which indexes products from online stores, and Google Catalogs (http://catalogs.google.com), which features products from more 6,000 paper catalogs in a searchable index. And this only scratches the surface. You can get a complete list of Google's tools and services at www.google.com/options/index.html.

You're probably used to using Google in your browser. But have you ever thought of using Google outside your browser?

Google Alert (www.googlealert.com) monitors your search terms and e-mails you information about new additions to Google's Web index. (Google Alert is not affiliated with Google; it uses Google's Web services API to perform its searches.) If you're more interested in news stories than general Web content, check out the beta version of Google News Alerts (www.google.com/newsalerts). This service (which is affiliated with Google) will monitor up to 50 news queries per e-mail address and send you information about news stories that match your query. (Hint: Use the intitle: and source: syntax elements with Google News to limit the number of alerts you get.)

Google on the telephone? Yup. This service is brought to you by the folks at Google Labs (http://labs.google.com), a place for experimental Google ideas and features (which may come and go, so what's there at this writing might not be there when you decide to check it out). With Google Voice Search (http://labs1.google.com/gvs.html), you dial the Voice Search phone number, speak your keywords, and then click on the indicated link. Every time you say a new search term, the results page will refresh with your new query (you must have JavaScript enabled for this to work). Remember, this service is still in an experimental phase, so don't expect 100 percent success.

In 2002, Google released the Google API (application programming interface), a way for programmers to access Google's search engine results without violating the Google Terms of Service. A lot of people have created useful (and occasionally not-so-useful but interesting) applications not available from Google itself, such as Google Alert. For many applications, you'll need an API key, which is available free from www.google.com/apis. See the figures for two more examples, and visit www.pcmag.com/solutions for more.

Thanks to its many different search properties, Google goes far beyond a regular search engine. Give the tricks in this article a try. You'll be amazed at how many different ways Google can improve your Internet searching.

Online Extra: More Google Tips --- http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,1335407,00.asp 

Search Within a Timeframe

Daterange: (start date–end date). You can restrict your searches to pages that were indexed within a certain time period. Daterange: searches by when Google indexed a page, not when the page itself was created. This operator can help you ensure that results will have fresh content (by using recent dates), or you can use it to avoid a topic's current-news blizzard and concentrate only on older results. Daterange: is actually more useful if you go elsewhere to take advantage of it, because daterange: requires Julian dates, not standard Gregorian dates. You can find converters on the Web (such as http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/JulianDate.html), but an easier way is to do a Google daterange: search by filling in a form at www.researchbuzz.com/toolbox/goofresh.shtml or www.faganfinder.com/engines/google.shtml. If one special syntax element is good, two must be better, right? Sometimes. Though some operators can't be mixed (you can't use the link: operator with anything else) many can be, quickly narrowing your results to a less overwhelming number.

More Google API Applications

Staggernation.com offers three tools based on the Google API. The Google API Web Search by Host (GAWSH) lists the Web hosts of the results for a given query (www.staggernation.com/gawsh/). When you click on the triangle next to each host, you get a list of results for that host. The Google API Relation Browsing Outliner (GARBO) is a little more complicated: You enter a URL and choose whether you want pages that related to the URL or linked to the URL (www.staggernation.com/garbo/). Click on the triangle next to an URL to get a list of pages linked or related to that particular URL. CapeMail is an e-mail search application that allows you to send an e-mail to google@capeclear.com with the text of your query in the subject line and get the first ten results for that query back. Maybe it's not something you'd do every day, but if your cell phone does e-mail and doesn't do Web browsing, this is a very handy address to know.


April 7, 2003 from Wired News
Rolling out a souped-up search engine Monday, Yahoo makes a bid to supplant its business partner, Google, as the most popular place to find things on the Internet. The company says its search engine will be more useful and simpler to use than Google --- http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,58368,00.html 

According to the industry newsletter, Google handles an average of 112 million searches a day and Yahoo handles about 42 million. Most of Yahoo's results are generated by Google's software.

With its success, Google has introduced other services, such as news and shopping pages, that traverse Yahoo's turf.

To lessen its dependence on Google, Yahoo last month bought search engine specialist Inktomi for $279.5 million. Yahoo plans to incorporate Inktomi's tools in to its search engine by year's end.

Success also has thrust privately held Google into the cross-hairs of Microsoft, which last week said it would improve its online search prowess.


"For Google, innovations withstand downturn," by Dan Gillmor, The Mercury News, October 15, 2002 --- http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/business/columnists/4293569.h 

Ask Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google, when Silicon Valley and the technology industry will return to robust growth. All he knows is it won't be in the immediate future, and he makes a persuasive case.

That's the big picture. But Schmidt's smaller picture, Google itself, is one of those grand exceptions that proves the valley's longstanding rule -- that technological innovation continues no matter what the larger economy is doing.

I caught up with him at the annual Agenda conference, a gathering that has been a staple of the tech elite's autumn schedule. This year's gathering, a drastically downsized affair, reflected overall industry trends.

A grim, confused mood prevailed here, and the momentary pleasure of Tuesday's market surge was doused by Intel's disappointing earnings report after the market's close. Few people here seemed willing even to speculate on when technology spending would rebound.

Schmidt isn't predicting any immediate boosts.

Is the current gloom overdone? That depends, Schmidt says, on ``whether you think we are at a bottom.'' Are we? ``We're nearing one.''

Not Google, which has become one of the Internet's essential services. A couple of years ago, when I spoke publicly, I started asking people in the audience who was not using Google as their primary search engine. It has been a long time since more than several people in any crowd raised their hands.

One smart idea has followed another at the Mountain View company. Recently, Google created a news-oriented search, culling and ranking news stories from a variety of sources. Google works in teams of three people, and one of those teams created Google News (http://news.google.com), which is rapidly becoming one of my online addictions.

Innovation happens no matter what markets do, Schmidt says, a common refrain. ``Innovation comes from universities,'' he says, ``and it's producing enormous step-ups in wireless, chip design, Linux and information mining,'' among other areas. But most of the innovations he sees tend to be interesting technologies without a persuasive business case.

Google gets its share -- its pick, really -- of smart university graduates, Schmidt says. The company is doing cool projects. It's probably at the beginning, not the end, of its serious growth.

Google doesn't give out the precise numbers, but Schmidt says it has been profitable since March 2001. Its principal business is what he calls a ``positive surprise'' -- the effectiveness of the little advertisements that appear on the pages showing the result of users' searches.

A fascinating wrinkle is how the company sells the ads it places on the right side of the Web page. These are auctioned off, unlike the ads that show up above the search results. It would not surprise me to learn that Google is making more money on the Web than any auction site except eBay. Google sells fewer items, but it keeps all the money from these auctions.

Many have wondered how long it will take for Google to do what so many other valley companies have done in recent years -- sell shares to the public. Schmidt has bad news for those who want it to be soon: ``We have no plans to go public,'' he says. Is Google even talking with investment banks? ``No.''

This is a lousy time for an initial public offering. The economy is stagnant, and a couple of weeks of stock-market surges should meet more suspicion than joy. The murky financial landscape gets worse when you consider problems that transcend the economy.

War is one, Schmidt notes. ``The papers are writing about war as opposed to the economy,'' he says. ``As long as that goes on, there is a sense of not being focused on the problems at hand.''

Only when America gets beyond its showdown with Iraq will government and businesses refocus on economic matters. And only then will businesses start buying technology again in a serious way, he says.

But don't imagine that they'll restore the industry to the joy ride of the late 1990s. The tech sector is maturing, Schmidt says, and maturing businesses cannot sustain rates of growth that younger growth businesses expect. Large sectors can't continually grow faster than the overall economy, because -- as is happening with tech -- they effectively become the economy. Regulatory and political influences, for good and bad reasons, become a larger part of the action.

Continued at http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/business/columnists/4293569.h 


"Google's Brave New World," by Vincent Ryan, Newsfactor.com, April 15, 2003 --- http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/21267.html 

Search engine Google is virtually revered by the Internet community and is often profiled as a pure technology company that does not take commercial interests to heart. But those days are over. In the past two years, Google has inked revenue-generating deals with almost every major player on the Internet, stepped up efforts to secure the lion's share of Internet advertising dollars, and tested the waters in the news and e-commerce sectors.

Where are these ventures taking Google, and where is Google taking the Internet? It is more than an academic question: Google processes more than 150 million Web searches per day. By some accounts, 75 percent of the outside traffic to any given Web site originates on Google. Where Google goes, so goes the Web.

Searching for Advertising

Google's primary emphasis in the past year has been on developing its offerings and reach in Internet advertising. The company's text-based AdWords program has been a big success since its inception a year ago. And it is easy to see why: For text-based ads related to searches, click-through rates tend to be four to five times higher than for traditional banner advertising.

To place a text ad, advertisers choose which keywords they want to target. On Google, keywords are auctioned off: The higher the bid, the higher the ad will appear on the search results page. Click-through performance also factors in. The higher the click-through rate, the less costly the text link. "Irrelevant ads are dropped down the page, and advertisers who are more relevant will save money," Andrew Goodman, principal at search engine optimization firm Page Zero Media, told the E-Commerce Times.

But for revenue, nothing beats Google's premium sponsorship program, in which advertisers purchase prime real estate at the top of a search results page. "Google's probably looking to get 40 percent to 50 percent of [its] revenue [by] targeting big companies with those premium spots," Goodman said.

Eye off the Ball?

In addition, the company has expanded its advertising offerings by placing cost-per-click advertising on content-targeted Web pages. So far, the program has been piloted on such sites as HowStuffWorks and Knight-Ridder properties the San Jose Mercury News and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN)  is the latest partner to sign up, giving Google advertisers a prime high-traffic site on which to attract customers. But the jury is still out on how effective this marketing program will be.

"I think the content targeting will be less lucrative because click-through rates are much lower," Goodman said.

Google also has moved into syndicating ads to ad networks such as FastClick and Burst Media, which serve smaller clients. With all this activity, Google and its competitors actually are running out of spots to place ads, according to Goodman. "There's a finite pie they're all fighting over."

Google was unavailable for comment

Bob Jensen's bookmarks on advertising are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm#Marketing 

 


Google and the 'Democratic' Enterprise By Sean Doherty 
A recent brouhaha over search inaccuracies at Google may have some organizations reconsidering the contextually aware and relevance-savvy search appliance. http://update.networkcomputing.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eKUI0BboXO0qh0BqIN0An 


Alternatives to Google

I doubt that anything soon will replace Google as the main search engine for the world.  However, on August 12, Time Magazine featured some interesting alternatives.

"Searching for Perfection:  Google's still great, but newer search engines make finding things on the Web easier — and more fun," by Anita Hamilton, Time, August 12, 2002, Page 66   She gives her highest grade to altheweb.com

altheweb.com --- http://www.alltheweb.com/ 

Not only does ALLTHEWEB index more pages (2.1 billion!) than any other site, but it may have the smartest approach to turning up relevant results.

Whereas Google runs a virtual popularity contest that pushes to the top of its list pages that are most frequently and prominently linked to by other sites, AlltheWeb, based in Oslo, Norway, further tries to decipher the intent of the query by analyzing its language patterns and identifying common phrases.

kartoo.com --- http://www.kartoo.com 

If there were a beauty contest for search engines, Kartoo--developed in France by cousins Laurent and Nicolas Baleydier--would win the crown.  Rather than display its result in the usual dreary list format, Kartoo scatters them across a pretty blue background like stars dotting the evening sky.  (Color-coded links suggest how the results interconnect.)  Each dot represents a relevant Web page; when you rest your mouse over a site, it displays a brief description of the contents.

teoma.com --- http://www.teoma.com/ 

Wouldn't it be great if a search engine could read your mind and understand that when you type the word Madonna, you mean the pop star, not the mother of Jesus?  Teoma, which means "expert" in Gaelic, attempts to do just that by breaking queries into categories grouped by theme.  A search on seals, for example, returned results clustered in 15 categories, from Easter Seals to elephant seals.


 

Top dog among search engines in the Net's early years, AltaVista wants that distinction back. A new look and a promise to provide more relevant results could be steps in the right direction --- http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,56335,00.html 

November 13, 2002
In a bid to recapture its former status as the Web's top-ranked search engine, the Palo Alto, California, company rolled out a dramatic overhaul of its site and indexing methodology this week.

Executives said the revamped site, which includes a pared-down front page and more frequent updates of indexed links, is part of a broader effort to restructure the company.

"The company tried to become a portal too late in the game, and lost focus," said Jim Barnett, AltaVista's CEO. "What we've done over the past year is focus the company back on our core strength and our roots, which is search."

The redesign comes amid a difficult period for AltaVista, a company that SearchDay editor Chris Sherman said "was once considered the king of search engines."

While the company enjoyed a brief spell of Internet stardom in the late 1990s, its fortunes abruptly reversed when the dot-com bubble burst. Over the past two years, AltaVista has weathered multiple rounds of layoffs and withdrew a stock offering once expected to net $300 million.

Meanwhile, the company's popularity among search engine users is also slipping. Although AltaVista still has a large following, with an estimated 33 million visitors a month worldwide, it trails behind rivals Google and Yahoo.

In the November ranking of most-visited U.S.-run Internet sites, tabulated by NetRatings, AltaVista did not make the top 25.

Still, search engine experts say it's not too late for AltaVista to make a comeback.

"They've had a history of making changes and hyping the changes and not really living up to the hype," Sherman said. "But this time it feels different. I get the impression they really are serious about getting back to being a serious player in the search industry."

Sherman said that while he's only done a few searches on the new AltaVista, he's getting better results than he used to. AltaVista now does a better job separating paid listings from genuinely relevant search results, he added.

AltaVista's Barnett believes the revamped site will help bring back many of the search engine's former fans.

In addition to a feature that refreshes more than half of its search results daily, the company is offering an established advanced search tool, Prisma, in four additional languages: French, German, Italian and Spanish.

AltaVista also claims to have vastly improved its ability to weed out duplicate pages, spam and dead links.

But Shari Thurow, marketing director at Grantastic Designs and author of the upcoming book Search Engine Visibility, isn't so sure.

"The look and feel is a million times better," Thurow said. "But I'm hoping their search results are more relevant, too, because the look and feel doesn't change that."

Like many early Web junkies, Thurow was an avid user of AltaVista. She claims that back in 1997 it was her favorite site.

Nowadays, Thurow says she usually prefers to conduct searches on Google, Fast and AskJeeves. She still uses AltaVista, but largely for software-related research and to find images, for which the site has a dedicated search function.


Web Ferret 5.0 http://www.zdnet.com/ferret/download.htm 

 

Key New Features: 

NEW INTERFACE is more compact (the ad banner space has been completely removed) allowing users to view more results and matches Microsoft's new WindowsXP interface. 
SUGGESTED KEYWORDS based on the original query provides users with follow-up search suggestions. COLUMNS are adjustable / selectable including showing abstracts with results. 
VALIDATION and RANKING allows users to verify the page exists and/or query is on page before visiting it. [PRO only feature] 
DEEP SEARCH has been added to allow users searching for example 'truck' with an initial search to then re-search (1-all) of the results for 'red' independent of the search engines. The second follow up search goes directly to each page selected and checks the page for 'red'. [PRO only feature] 
RIGHT CLICKING on mouse provides quick access to options and advanced features.
 MANY MORE tweaks and features have been added. Go to view -> options on the menu for advanced configuration. Reading the help file provides full explanations of features and provides tips for efficient searching.


 

Blinkx finds links of possible interest to you based upon what you are reading.

Blinkx is free at http://www.blinkx.com/overview_us.php 

Whenever you browse a website, read a news story, check your e-mail or write a document, blinkx automatically delivers suggestions from the Web, news or your local files; which you can view by simply clicking the links or rolling over to get a summary of the information found. If you want to search, blinkx understands your question and presents you with links as you search.

In every case, blinkx provides an answer that is appropriate, faster than using a search engine and personalized just for you.

 


 

See Q&A Sites --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm#QandASites

 

 


 

Health and Medical Searching

 

WebMD  --- http://www.webmd.com/ 

 

Department of Health and Human Services

 

eHealth Forum's Physician Guides to Diagnostics and Treatment --- http://ehealthforum.com/health/health_forums.html

 

Bob Jensen's Health and Science Bookmarks --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm

 



 

Current state of scholarly cyberinfrastructure in the humanities and social sciences

 

From the University of Illinois Issues in Scholarly Communication Blog

 

"Our Cultural Commonwealth"

The American Council of Learned Societies has just issued a report, "Our Cultural Commonwealth," assessing the current state of scholarly cyberinfrastructure in the humanities and social sciences and making a series of recommendations on how it can be strengthened, enlarged and maintained in the future.

John Unsworth, Dean and Professor, Graduate School of Library and Information Science here at Illinois, chaired the Commission that authored the report.

The report is at http://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/

 

 

Bob Jensen's bookmarks for humanities and social sciences are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm

 


Google Eyed Social Networking
Google tip-toed into the hot market of online social networks with the quiet launch of Orkut.com 

"Google spawns social networking service," byy Stefanie Olsen, CNET News.com, January 22, 2004 --- http://news.com.com/2100-1026-5146006.html 

The search company, which is expected to go public this year, is flexing its power with its Internet fans by constantly offering new services, including comparison shopping and news search. Orkut could be the clearest signal that Google's aspirations don't end with search.

"Orkut is an online trusted community Web site designed for friends. The main goal of our service is to make the social life of yourself and your friends more active and stimulating," according to the Web site, which states that the service is "in affiliation with Google."

A Google representative said that the site is the independent project of one of its engineers, Orkut Buyukkokten, who works on user interface design for Google. Buyukkokten, a computer science doctoral candidate at Stanford University before joining Google, created Orkut.com in the past several months by working on it about one day a week--an amount that Google asks all of its engineers to devote to personal projects. Buyukkokten, with the help of a few other engineers, developed Orkut out of his passion for social networking services.

Google spokeswoman Eileen Rodriquez said that despite Orkut's affiliation, the service is not part of Google's product portfolio at this time. "We're always looking at opportunities to expand our search products, but we currently have no plans in the social networking market."

Still, Google owns the technology developed by its employees, Rodriquez said.

Orkut is a "trusted" social network, meaning that you must be invited to join. The service sent out thousands of invitations Thursday to welcome individuals, according to Google.

Google regularly throws out new products and services to see if they stick. Google News, for example, began as the personal project of Google engineer Krishna Bharat in 2002. While Google still runs news search in "beta" form, it is gaining a wide audience on the Internet and is prominently promoted on Google's home page.

Continued in the article

 


 

What search engines know about you when you search. Part one of a two-part series. http://www.clickz.com/search/opt/article.php/2207951 
ClickZ Today, May 21, 3003
By Danny Sullivan

Some scary statements have been made about the privacy of search requests. You may have heard Google was nominated for a Big Brother Award award. You may also have read Google knows everything you ever searched for. Should you be afraid? Is it time to boycott Google, as blogger Gavin Sheridan called for?

Relax. Yes, there are privacy issues when you do a search at Google. These are concerns at other search engines, too. Fear that you, personally, will be tracked isn't realistic for the vast majority of users.

What exactly does Google know about you when you come to search? You needn't be worried -- for the moment. Next week, we'll continue the privacy discussion with a look at Yahoo! and search engine privacy policies.

Fact or Fiction?

No wonder people worry about search privacy after reading statements like these:

Google builds up a detailed profile of your search terms over many years. Google probably knew when you last thought you were pregnant, what diseases your children have had, and who your divorce lawyer is. --BBC technology commentator Bill Thompson, February 21, 2003

I don't like that its cookies expire 35 years from now, and that it records all my searches, including the embarrassing ones. --Technology writer and blogger Chris Gulker, March 7, 2003

Reality: Google doesn't know who you are as an individual. Its use of cookies, hardly unique, doesn't give it a magical ability to see your face and know your name through your monitor.

All Google knows is specific browser software, on a particular computer, made a request. A cookie gives it the ability to potentially see all requests made by that browser over time. Google doesn't know who was at the browser when the request made.

When I search at Google, this is how it identifies me: 740674ce2123e969.

No name, no address, no phone number. If someone else is at my computer, Google can't tell someone new is searching.

What Does Google Record?

Here's how that unique cookie number is given to you and why it tells Google nothing about who you are.

Assume you've never been to Google before. You visit the site and search for "cars." What's recorded?

As stated in its privacy policy, Google records the time you visited, your Internet address, and your browser type in a log file. It's standard practice for Web servers to keep track of this information.

Here's a simplified example of how a search for "cars" might appear in Google's logs:

inktomi1-lng.server.ntl.com - 25/Mar/2003 10:15:32 - http://www.google.com/search?q=cars - MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1 - 740674ce2123e969

When broken down:

  • inktomi1-lng.server.ntl.com -- my Internet address, resolved to a domain name

  • 25/Mar/2003 10:15:32 -- date and time I searched

  • http://www.google.com/search?q=cars  -- my search request, containing the word "cars" in it

  • MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1 -- the browser and operating system I used, MS Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP

  • 740674ce2123e969 -- my unique cookie ID, assigned to my browser the first time I visited

My Internet Address

If Google wants to know who I am, the most important element is my IP address. That address says nothing about me as Danny Sullivan. NTL is a large UK Internet access provider. The IP address represents the NTL computer serving my requests. (Inktomi is mentioned probably as a remnant from when it provided Internet caching services to ISPs.)

Continued in the article


THE FUTURE OF SEARCH --- RDF, RSS, and Pluck

 

Search for University Lectures Available as Podcasts
Bob Jensen's threads on podcasting, Apple's iPod U, RSS, RDF are at http://www.trinity.edu/~rjensen/245glosf.htm#ResourceDescriptionFramework

 

December 28, 2004 message from Richard Campbell [campbell@RIO.EDU

 

Check out the following video tutorial on RSS provided by Derek Franklin, one of the most prolific authors on Macromedia Flash.

http://www.rssdomination.com/video.htm 

Richard J. Campbell 
mailto:campbell@rio.edu
 

December 28, 2004 reply from Bob Jensen

 

You can read about the origins of Resource Description Framework (RDF) at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/XBRLandOLAP.htm#TimelineRDF 

 

You can read more about Wiki at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/245glosf.htm#Wiki 


RSS is defined as Rich Site Summary or RDF Site Summary where RDF in this context is a XML markup that allows you to find topics in documents that do not necessarily use your search terminology and exclude documents that use your terminology in a different context.. Unfortunately, the same term in English may have vastly different meanings which leads to getting thousands or millions of unwanted "hits" in traditional HTML text searches. 

 

A RSS site allows user to add content to the site.  In this sense it is like Wiki, but it us much more efficient and popular than a Wiki for news feeds (although Wikipedia has just started a news feed feature.).  But Wiki's do not have the same deep RDF metadata features.   Wikipedia defines RSS as follows at http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/R/RSS.html 

 

Short for RDF Site Summary or Rich Site Summary, an XML format for syndicating Web content. A Web site that wants to allow other sites to publish some of its content creates an RSS document and registers the document with an RSS publisher. A user that can read RSS-distributed content can use the content on a different site. Syndicated content includes such data as news feeds, events listings, news stories, headlines, project updates, excerpts from discussion forums or even corporate information.

RSS was originally developed by Netscape.

 

RSS/RDF feeds are commonly available ways of distributing or syndicating the latest news about a given web site. Weblog (blog) sites in particular are prolific generators of RSS feeds.  Free software that integrates well with Internet Explorer and is very simple to install is Pluck from http://www.pluck.com/ 

The following are RSS search advantages described by Pluck:

For Hunters and Gatherers, a New Way to Compare 
"With one click, users of Pluck can save Web bookmarks into an online folder or email them to others."

Blurring the Line Between Affiliate and Developer 
"Pluck not only integrates eBay searching into the browser, but it improves on features built into eBay.com..."

 

Question
Is RSS really the next big thing on the Internet?

 

Answer
Actually RDF is a long-run huge thing for meta searches, and RSS is probably the next big thing as an early part of RDF.  Major Internet players such as Yahoo, Amazon, and eBay are already providing RSS feeds distributing or syndicating the latest news about their sites. Weblog (blog) sites in particular prolific sources of RSS feeds.

 

There are also anti-spam advantages featured in the video at http://www.rssdomination.com/video.htm  

 

You should probably download Pluck and begin to play around with RSS feeds and searches.  There are, however, drawbacks.

 

If you feed too much too often, there is high risk of information overload.  It is something like email from Bob Jensen magnified 1,000 times. Also be aware that any summarization or abstract of a complete article must by definition omit many things.  What you are most interested in may have been left out unless you go to the main source document.

 

Another limitation is that our libraries are just beginning to learn about RDF and it's helper RSS sites.  This technology is is on the cutting edge and you can still get lost without the help of your friendly librarian.  This is still more into the XML techie domain and is not as user friendly to date as most of us amateurs would prefer.

 

Burnhan's Beat provides quite a lot of information about the history, advantages, and limitations of RSS --- http://billburnham.blogs.com/burnhamsbeat/2004/02/rss_a_big_succe.html 

In particular note j's Scratchpad --- http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/jkbaumga/2004/02/26#a829 

 

I will be interested in reader comments, because I still feel very ignorant in this domain.

 

Bob Jensen

 


THE FUTURE OF SEARCH (or so says IBM)
This may have very serious implications for Internet searching, XBRL, and academe!

I.B.M. says that its tools will make possible a further search approach, that of "discovery systems" that will extract the underlying meaning from stored material no matter how it is structured (databases, e-mail files, audio recordings, pictures or video files) or even what language it is in. The specific means for doing so involve steps that will raise suspicions among many computer veterans. These include "natural language processing," computerized translation of foreign languages and other efforts that have broken the hearts of artificial-intelligence researchers through the years. But the combination of ever-faster computers and ever-evolving programming allowed the systems I saw to succeed at tasks that have beaten their predecessors.
James Fallow (See below)

"At I.B.M., That Google Thing Is So Yesterday," by James Fallows, The New York Times, December 26, 2004 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/26/business/yourmoney/26techno.html 

SUDDENLY, the computer world is interesting again. The last three months of 2004 brought more innovation, faster, than users have seen in years. The recent flow of products and services differs from those of previous hotly competitive eras in two ways. The most attractive offerings are free, and they are concentrated in the newly sexy field of "search."

Google, current heavyweight among systems for searching the Internet, has not let up from its pattern of introducing features and products every few weeks. Apart from its celebrated plan to index the contents of several university libraries, Google has recently released "beta" (trial) versions of Google Scholar, which returns abstracts of academic papers and shows how often they are cited by other scholars, and Google Suggest, a weirdly intriguing feature that tries to guess the object of your search after you have typed only a letter or two. Give it "po" and it will show shortcuts to poetry, Pokémon, post office, and other popular searches. (If you stop after "p" it will suggest "Paris Hilton.") In practice, this is more useful than it sounds.

Microsoft, heavyweight of the rest of computerdom, has scrambled to catch up with search innovations from Google and others. On Dec. 10, a company official made a shocking disclosure. For years Microsoft had emphasized the importance of "WinFS," a fundamentally new file system that would make it much easier for users to search and manage information on their own computers. Last summer, the company said that WinFS would not be ready in time for inclusion with its next version of Windows, called Longhorn. The latest news was that WinFS would not be ready even for the release after that, which pushed its likely delivery at least five years into the future. This seemed to put Microsoft entirely out of the running in desktop search. But within three days, it had released a beta version of its new desktop search utility, which it had previously said would not be available for months.

Meanwhile, a flurry of mergers, announcements and deals from smaller players produced a dazzling variety of new search possibilities. Early this month Yahoo said it would use the excellent indexing program X1 as the basis for its own desktop search system, which it would distribute free to its users. The search company Autonomy, which has specialized in indexing corporate data, also got into the new competition, as did Ask Jeeves, EarthLink, and smaller companies like dTSearch, Copernic, Accoona and many others.

I have most of these systems running all at once on my computer, and if they don't melt it down or blow it up I will report later on how each works. But today's subject is the virtually unpublicized search strategy of another industry heavyweight: I.B.M.

Last week I visited the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, 20 miles north of New York, to hear six I.B.M. researchers describe their company's concept of "the future of search." Concepts and demos are different from products being shipped and sold, so it is unfair to compare what I.B.M. is promising with what others are doing now. Still, the promise seems great.

Two weeks before our meeting, I.B.M. released OmniFind, the first program to take advantage of its new strategy for solving search problems. This approach, which it calls unstructured information management architecture, or UIMA, will, according to I.B.M., lead to a third generation in the ability to retrieve computerized data. The first generation, according to this scheme, is simple keyword match - finding all documents that contain a certain name or address. This is all most desktop search systems can do - or need to do, because you're mainly looking for an e-mail message or memorandum you already know is there. The next generation is the Web-based search now best performed by Google, which uses keywords and many other indicators to match a query to a list of sites.

I.B.M. says that its tools will make possible a further search approach, that of "discovery systems" that will extract the underlying meaning from stored material no matter how it is structured (databases, e-mail files, audio recordings, pictures or video files) or even what language it is in. The specific means for doing so involve steps that will raise suspicions among many computer veterans. These include "natural language processing," computerized translation of foreign languages and other efforts that have broken the hearts of artificial-intelligence researchers through the years. But the combination of ever-faster computers and ever-evolving programming allowed the systems I saw to succeed at tasks that have beaten their predecessors.

Bob Jensen's threads on XML, RDF, and XBRL are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/XBRLandOLAP.htm 


Current state of scholarly cyberinfrastructure in the humanities and social sciences

 

From the University of Illinois Issues in Scholarly Communication Blog

 

"Our Cultural Commonwealth"

The American Council of Learned Societies has just issued a report, "Our Cultural Commonwealth," assessing the current state of scholarly cyberinfrastructure in the humanities and social sciences and making a series of recommendations on how it can be strengthened, enlarged and maintained in the future.

John Unsworth, Dean and Professor, Graduate School of Library and Information Science here at Illinois, chaired the Commission that authored the report.

The report is at http://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/

 


Copyright Information and Dead Links

Copyright Information --- http://ejw.i8.com/copy.htm 

Journals Associations, 
Councils and Organizations 
Education 
General Issues 
Permission 
Intellectual Property 
Government Law 
Publishing Concerns 
Libraries and Copyright 
Mega Sites Music 
Dead Link Archive --- http://ejw.i8.com/copy.htm#dead 

DEAD LINK ARCHIVE 
For Dead Links, use Internet Archive to find a version of these sites. Highlight and copy the URL, then go to the Way Back Machine at http://www.archive.org/index.html  and then paste the URL into the web address box. Often icons are not available and the most recent listed version may not bring up the page. Go to an earlier date on the archive list for that site. Also, if you do not find it archived, try the Google Search Engine at http://www.google.com  and check their archive. Songwriter and Music Copyright Resources, http://www.npsai.com/resources.htm 

Bob Jensen's threads on copyrights are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm#Copyright 


 

Search for Domain Names

Hello Dr. Jensen,

Since you mention greatdomains.com on your Search Helpers, I was wondering if your visitors would also like our site www.Register-DomainNames.com  . We have some awesome domain finder and information tools. Check it out to see if your visitors would like it. You can add your site to our directory if you are interested in exchanging links, at http://www.register-domainnames.com/cgi-bin/links/add.cgi  .

Please email me if you have any questions.

Regards, Dan [dan@register-domainnames.com

 

 


How to find Businesses, Knowledge Experts, and People in General

Digital Universe for finding scientists and other knowledge experts ---  http://www.digitaluniverse.net  

How to find people, places, and databases --- http://www.melissadata.com/Lookups/

Yahoo People Locator --- http://people.yahoo.com/ 

USA People Search --- http://www.usa-people-search.com/

Amazon Elbows Into Online Yellow Pages Hiking the stakes in this hot field, the new service from its A9 unit features photo-rich listings that let you wander around near a destination
January 28, 2005 message from BusinessWeek Online's Insider [BW_Insider@newsletters.businessweek.com
The A9.com home page is at http://a9.com/?c=1&src=a9 

People Search Engine
Amazon.com Inc.'s A9.com search engine has incorporated Zoom Information Inc.'s index of businesspeople as the default source for people information, the companies said Tuesday. The ZoomInfo service can be accessed by selecting the "people" box on the A9.com homepage. ZoomInfo provides summaries describing the person's work history, education and accomplishments. ZoomInfo also allows registered users to monitor and manage their own summaries. "ZoomInfo has collected and organized hundreds of millions of random bits of information about people from across the Web," Florian Brody, director of marketing for A9.com, said in a statement. "This information is useful in lots of different ways, which we are excited to make it available for our users on A9.com." Zoom's search technology scans millions of Web sites, press releases, electronic news services, Securities and Exchange Commission filings and other online sources; and then summarizes the information, the Waltham, Mass., company said.
Antone Gonsalves, "Through a new deal with Zoom Information, Amazon.com's A9 search engine provides free summaries describing a person's work history, education, and accomplishments," Information Week, January 17, 2006 --- http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=177101278

The A9 search engine is at http://a9.com/-/home.jsp?nc=1

How to find lawyers and accountants --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/fees.htm

Yellow Pages
Enter "Yellow Pages" at http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en

Also see Specialized Search Engines

Excite Home

Digital Duo Review --- http://www.digitalduo.com/407_dig.html 

Yahoo! People Search

Classmates.com

Lycos' WhoWhere

KnowX.com

USSEARCH.com

411.com

 
Database Searching For People
Searching For E-Mail Addresses
Searching For Government Offices & Officials
Searching For Home Pages
Searching For People, Addresses, & Phone Numbers
Reverse LookUp Searching

Search for People and Missing Persons

Child Search Start Page
FamilySearch - from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints:  http://www.familysearch.org/
Locate Members of Congress --- http://members.aol.com/BCLEGIS/contact.htm
P.D.I. Investigations
Yahoo Links to Missing Persons --- http://people.yahoo.com/ 

Public Records and Missing Persons Search  --- http://searchenginez.com/public_records.html  

Search for Online Communities on Over 700,000 Topics

Are there topics in life that you would like to discuss with or read about amidst over 700,000 online communities.  An index of these communities is provided at ezboard at http://www.ezboard.com/

[ezboard is the] leading online community service on the Net, consisting of over 700,000 communities and over 5 MILLION registered users!

Miscellaneous Links

Bob Jensen's Bookmarks --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob.htm 

A great listing of links --- http://www.jefferson.lib.la.us/reftestp.htm
Jefferson Parish Library

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Weblog (Blog)

 Weblog = Blog = What?

Answer from Whatis.com ---

A Weblog (which is sometimes written as "web log" or "weblog") is a Web site of personal or non-commercial origin that uses a dated log format that is updated on a daily or very frequent basis with new information about a particular subject or range of subjects. The information can be written by the site owner, gleaned from other Web sites or other sources, or contributed by users. A 

Web log often has the quality of being a kind of "log of our times" from a particular point-of-view. Generally, Weblogs are devoted to one or several subjects or themes, usually of topical interest, and, in general, can be thought of as developing commentaries, individual or collective on their particular themes. A Weblog may consist of the recorded ideas of an individual (a sort of diary) or be a complex collaboration open to anyone. Most of the latter are moderated discussions.

Weblog software use grows daily -- but bloggers abandon sites and launch new ones as frequently as J.Lo goes through boyfriends. Which makes taking an accurate blog count tricky --- http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,54740,00.html 

"Weblogs: a history and perspective," Rebecca Blood, Rebecca's Pocket, September 7, 2000 --- http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html 

In 1998 there were just a handful of sites of the type that are now identified as weblogs (so named by Jorn Barger in December 1997). Jesse James Garrett, editor of Infosift, began compiling a list of "other sites like his" as he found them in his travels around the web. In November of that year, he sent that list to Cameron Barrett. Cameron published the list on Camworld, and others maintaining similar sites began sending their URLs to him for inclusion on the list. Jesse's 'page of only weblogs' lists the 23 known to be in existence at the beginning of 1999.

Suddenly a community sprang up. It was easy to read all of the weblogs on Cameron's list, and most interested people did. Peter Merholz announced in early 1999 that he was going to pronounce it 'wee-blog' and inevitably this was shortened to 'blog' with the weblog editor referred to as a 'blogger.'

At this point, the bandwagon jumping began. More and more people began publishing their own weblogs. I began mine in April of 1999. Suddenly it became difficult to read every weblog every day, or even to keep track of all the new ones that were appearing. Cameron's list grew so large that he began including only weblogs he actually followed himself. Other webloggers did the same. In early 1999 Brigitte Eaton compiled a list of every weblog she knew about and created the Eatonweb Portal. Brig evaluated all submissions by a simple criterion: that the site consist of dated entries. Webloggers debated what was and what was not a weblog, but since the Eatonweb Portal was the most complete listing of weblogs available, Brig's inclusive definition prevailed.

This rapid growth continued steadily until July 1999 when Pitas, the first free build-your-own-weblog tool launched, and suddenly there were hundreds. In August, Pyra released Blogger, and Groksoup launched, and with the ease that these web-based tools provided, the bandwagon-jumping turned into an explosion. Late in 1999 software developer Dave Winer introduced Edit This Page, and Jeff A. Campbell launched Velocinews. All of these services are free, and all of them are designed to enable individuals to publish their own weblogs quickly and easily.

The original weblogs were link-driven sites. Each was a mixture in unique proportions of links, commentary, and personal thoughts and essays. Weblogs could only be created by people who already knew how to make a website. A weblog editor had either taught herself to code HTML for fun, or, after working all day creating commercial websites, spent several off-work hours every day surfing the web and posting to her site. These were web enthusiasts.

Many current weblogs follow this original style. Their editors present links both to little-known corners of the web and to current news articles they feel are worthy of note. Such links are nearly always accompanied by the editor's commentary. An editor with some expertise in a field might demonstrate the accuracy or inaccuracy of a highlighted article or certain facts therein; provide additional facts he feels are pertinent to the issue at hand; or simply add an opinion or differing viewpoint from the one in the piece he has linked. Typically this commentary is characterized by an irreverent, sometimes sarcastic tone. More skillful editors manage to convey all of these things in the sentence or two with which they introduce the link (making them, as Halcyon pointed out to me, pioneers in the art and craft of microcontent). Indeed, the format of the typical weblog, providing only a very short space in which to write an entry, encourages pithiness on the part of the writer; longer commentary is often given its own space as a separate essay.

These weblogs provide a valuable filtering function for their readers. The web has been, in effect, pre-surfed for them. Out of the myriad web pages slung through cyberspace, weblog editors pick out the most mind-boggling, the most stupid, the most compelling.

But this type of weblog is important for another reason, I think. In Douglas Rushkoff's Media Virus, Greg Ruggerio of the Immediast Underground is quoted as saying, "Media is a corporate possession...You cannot participate in the media. Bringing that into the foreground is the first step. The second step is to define the difference between public and audience. An audience is passive; a public is participatory. We need a definition of media that is public in its orientation."

By highlighting articles that may easily be passed over by the typical web user too busy to do more than scan corporate news sites, by searching out articles from lesser-known sources, and by providing additional facts, alternative views, and thoughtful commentary, weblog editors participate in the dissemination and interpretation of the news that is fed to us every day. Their sarcasm and fearless commentary reminds us to question the vested interests of our sources of information and the expertise of individual reporters as they file news stories about subjects they may not fully understand.

Weblog editors sometimes contextualize an article by juxtaposing it with an article on a related subject; each article, considered in the light of the other, may take on additional meaning, or even draw the reader to conclusions contrary to the implicit aim of each. It would be too much to call this type of weblog "independent media," but clearly their editors, engaged in seeking out and evaluating the "facts" that are presented to us each day, resemble the public that Ruggerio speaks of. By writing a few lines each day, weblog editors begin to redefine media as a public, participatory endeavor

Continued at  http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html 

 The Weblog Tool Roundup, by Joshual Allen, Webmonkey, May 2, 2002 --- http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/02/18/index3a.html 

But then personal sites went from being static collections of bad poetry and award banners to constantly updated snippets of commentary, photography, sounds, bad poetry, and links. The popularity of this format grew (for a good primer on where weblogs came from and how they evolved, try Rebecca Blood's Weblogs: A History and Perspective), and people started building applications to simplify the process of maintaining a content-heavy personal site.

These applications have grown in number and sophistication over the years, and with some major upgrades appearing over the past few months (Blogger Pro, Movable Type 2.0, Radio UserLand 8.0), I thought the time was nigh to talk about what they do, why you might care, which one would best suit your needs, and how they can keep you company on those long, lonely nights, so empty since you were abandoned for someone who could write Perl scripts.

Continued at  http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/02/18/index3a.html 

"Will the Blogs Kill Old Media?" by Steven Levy, Newsweek, May 20, 2002, Page 52

From Yahoo Picks of the Week on December 3, 2002

blo.gs http://www.blo.gs/ 

Weblogs continue to grow in popularity, no doubt in part to their immediacy. Denizens of the Internet enjoy the opportunity to drop by and catch an up-to-the-minute account on their favorite blog. However, nothing is more frustrating than encountering a cobwebbed blog that hasn't been updated in weeks. To remedy such situations, this site offers a minute-by-minute account of over 50,000 weblogs. It doesn't get fresher than this! For utility's sake, the site offers a tiny java applet that sits on your desktop and continually refreshes, keeping the weblogs whirring. You can also stop by the most popular blogs to see what kind of content is piquing the interest of others. Whether you're a neophyte or veteran blogger, you're sure to find an intriguing site or two to scour.

Some time ago, Glenn Reynolds hardly qualified as plankton on the punditry food chain.  The 41-year-old law professor at the University of Tennessee would pen the occasional op-ed for the L.A. Times, but his name was unfamiliar to even the most fanatical news junkie.  All that began to change on Aug. 5 of last year, when Reynolds acquired the software to create a "Weblog," or "blog."  A blog is an easily updated Web site that works as an online daybook, consisting of links to interesting items on the Web, spur-of-the-moment observations and real-time reports on whatever captures the blogger's attention.  Reynold's original goal was to post witty observations on news events, but after September 11, he began providing links to fascinating articles and accounts of the crisis, and soon his site, called InstaPundit, drew thousands of readers--and kept growing.  He now gets more than 70,000 page views a day (he figures this means 23,000 real people).  Working at his two-year-old $400 computer, he posts dozens of items and links a day, and answers hundreds of e-mails.  PR flacks call him to cadge coverage.  And he's living a pundit's dream by being frequently cited--not just by fellow bloggers, but by media bigfeet.  He's blogged his way into the game.

Some say the game itself has changed.  InstaPundit is a pivotal site in what is known as the Blogosphere, a burgeoning samizdat of self-starters who attempt to provide in the aggregate an alternate media universe.  The putative advantage is that this one is run not by editors paid by corporate giants, but unbespoken outsiders--impassioned lefties and righties, fine-print-reading wonks, indignant cranks and salt-'o-the-earth eyewitnesses to the "real" life that the self-absorbed media often miss.  Hard-core bloggers, with a giddy fever not heard of since the Internet bubble popped, are even predicting that the Blogosphere is on a trajectory to eclipse the death-star-like dome of Big Media.  One blog avatar, Dave Winer (who probably would be saying this even if he didn't run a company that sold blogging software), has formally wagered that by 2007, more readers will get news from blogs than from The New York Times.  Taking him up on the bet is Martin Nisenholtz, head of the  Time's digital operations.

My guess is that Nisenholtz wins.  Blogs are a terrific addition to the media universe.  But they pose no threat to the established order.


How does your site rate in terms of popularity among large numbers of users?

Google Monitor is a simple application that allows you to find and track the ranking of your Web site or any given URL in Google search results. It offers two modes of operation: you can enter a URL and a keyword to find the top results and where your site ranks among them, or select a URL and find its ranking for several keywords at once. You may store statistics for all URLs and keywords, and keep notes to further track search trends and the performance of your Web site. --- http://download.com.com/3000-2181-1015


Foreign Language Translation Software

"The Military Is Working On A Tablet That Can Translate In Real-Time," by Richard Sisk, Business Insider, May 23, 2014 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/military-tablet-translate-2014-5 

"Translation Apps and Traveling Abroad," by Anastasia Salter, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 30, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/translation-apps-and-traveling-abroad/52643?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

During my last week of being mostly disconnected at a conference in France, I ran into one big challenge: my knowledge of French is limited, and usually involves dictionary-heavy translation of text, not everyday conversation or quickly reading for comprehension and navigation. I relied heavily on phrases picked up from travel guides before my trip. Most street signs were immediately comprehensible: other documents, like menus, descriptions on products at the pharmacy, or signs on art, took much more work.

Throughout the trip, I found myself wishing for better technical solutions to the problem of translation. I started relying on a few apps to make the daily information processing easier.

  • Word Lens. The visual translation app Word Lens, available on Android and iOSis beautiful. It works by taking a picture and attempting to translate the words directly at they appear, which can lead to some very strange interpretations but often is enough to get the gist. It works as well on signs as conference paper titles in printed programs–of course, it may have trouble with discipline-specific terms. It can even translate powerpoint signs if they’re close and clear enough and the font isn’t too small.
  • Google Translate. There are several rival apps for translation, but Google’s (web, iOS, Android) works well for already-digital texts or quickly typed in work and ultimately is the most powerful solution I’ve seen. It requires an active Internet connection, so it isn’t so great on the go, and it can be tedious to type in long phrases on a smartphone for translation. This works best when the specifics really matter.
  • A Pocket Phrasebook. Those of you traveling without tech might rely on some old-fashioned solutions: a phrasebook and a dictionary, whether downloaded or paper, may not be as fast as Google or a translation app, but it’s often organized with attention to terms a traveler needs to reference quickly. Languages has several options for download (each for a fee) in-app.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
A problem with language translation arises when documents or speech to be translated are very technical. For example, a German-to-English translator for the United Nations may be hapless when it comes to translating business and legal contracts. My wife and I ran into this when she recently inherited a small amount of money from a German relative's estate. She could not translate the documents sent to us by a German law firm. We took it down the road to a friend who used to translate German and Russian for the United Nations. He could not translate our legal document. We eventually drove down to the German Consulate in Boston who translated the documents for us because they deal in such inheritances all the time.

The advantage of a Tablet translating machine is that it can, in theory at least, be programmed for increasingly technical translations in various disciplines such as business, law, chemistry, physics, etc.

Bob Jensen's links to language tutorials are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm

Also see http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm#ForeignLanguage

 


My colleagues in the language department in 2001 told me that language translation software leaves a lot to be desired.  Having said this, however, I provide a few links below:

Tango Web Browser  --- http://www.alis.com/en/indexfl.html 

Online Stores for Translation Software --- http://www.allvirtualware.com/ 

IWA Review --- http://www.iwanet.org/languagecentre/resources/ 

Etaco --- http://www.travlang.com/tlstore/gold511/ 

J.B. Miles --- http://www.gcn.com/21_22/software/19500-1.html 

What works?  --- http://www.the-infoshop.com/press/ab3365_en.shtml 

You can get free language translation from search engines like Altavista --- http://www.altavista.com/ 


"Foreign Texts Can Get Lost in Translation," by Armad Ali, The Wall Street Journal, December 20, 2007; Page B1 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119811828316841433.html

As the need for global communication increases, online translation services are in greater demand. Users are attracted to the breakneck speed at which online translation is done and the price. Those that aren't free are still fairly inexpensive.

New languages have been added to the traditional lists and Arabic, in particular, has been in demand recently. I spent the past few weeks tinkering with four free online services, translating various texts from English to Arabic and vice versa to test their speed and accuracy. I tested Google's Language Tools and services from Applied Language Solutions, WorldLingo Translations and Systran.

Customers who have been waiting for such services to be perfected will find improvements are slow in coming. Overall, I found the Arabic-English translations rife with syntactic and semantic errors -- from the merely too-literal to the laughably bad.

For the purposes of my test, I selected different texts: conversation, news stories, and legal and scientific documents. First, I picked an Associated Press story that started with the sentence: "A wintry storm caked the center of the nation with a thick layer of ice Monday..."

I got a variety of imprecise translations into Arabic (which I'm interpreting below).

Applied Language and WorldLingo offered identical translations, which were slightly better than the other two: "A storm covered the center's storm from the nation with a thick layer snow Monday."

Systran: "A stormy storm covered the center for the mother with a thick layer snow Monday."

Language Tools: "The storm grilled bloc in the middle of the nation with a thick layer of snow Monday."

The translations would have been nearly impossible to understand were I not fluent in both languages. It's worse in Arabic than it seems above. Arabic has masculine and feminine nouns, verbs and adjectives that have to agree in a sentence; otherwise, the sentence makes a native speaker wince.

Next, I processed some longer news stories. Only Language Tools didn't set text limits. WorldLingo and Applied Language each had a 150-word limit. Systran didn't specify a limit, but it rendered only a short part of the text.

Language Tools came out ahead this time. It was the only one to translate the word "Taliban" from Arabic to English contextually correct, as a movement. The other services translated it literally from the Arabic as "two students."

The services were better at translating everyday phrases, but even these sometimes came out missing a word, or were scrambled.

In this category, I again found translations by Google's Language Tools closest to the original texts. Still, there is much room for improvement. Google, for example, translated from Arabic to English the simple question, "Do you speak English?" as "Do they speak English?"

Other services got the pronoun right but botched other parts of the sentence. With the exception of Google, all three services, oddly, attempted to write the Arabic word for "English" in the Roman alphabet (aalaanklyzyh) in the middle of an Arabic sentence.

All the services did a terrible job with metaphors and other figurative uses of the language, whether Arabic or English.

The weakest performance by all the services was the translation of legal and scientific texts. Only Language Tools correctly translated the word "noncompliance" in a legal text, for example. Instead of using the proper word in Arabic, the other services transliterated it phonetically into a meaningless word.

All four services have an interface that is easy to use, with a pull-down menu listing several languages. Each has two text boxes, one for the original language and the other for the desired translation. They also translate entire Web sites, but the translation again tended to be awkwardly verbatim.

Google also has a feature that lets you translate search results free. (It also offers users an option to send in a better translation.) The others require you to become a paid subscriber. English and Arabic results appeared side-by-side.

I also liked WorldLingo and Applied Language's email-translation feature. After clicking the email button, a window with two text boxes pops up. You enter your name and email address, and the recipient's name and address. When you send the message with WorldLingo, both recipient and sender see the message in both languages. Neither Google nor Systran has this feature.

Systran has a convenient swap button that lets users easily flip the source and target languages. This saves time when going back-and-forth between two languages. The other services have you use pull-down menus. Systran's interface also allows prompt translation of a text as soon as it's pasted in a text box, without the need to click a "translate" button.

Free online translation tools help travelers or those curious about languages, but I found them unreliable for important documents. Use with caution.


National Capital Language Resource Center --- http://www.nclrc.org/


Lost in Translation --- http://www.tashian.com/multibabel/ 

What happens when an English phrase is translated (by computer) back and forth between 5 different languages? The authors of the Systran translation software probably never intended this application of their program. As of April 2002, translation software is almost good enough to turn grammatically correct, slang-free text from one language into grammatically incorrect, barely readable approximations in another. But the software is not equipped for 10 consecutive translations of the same piece of text. The resulting half-English, half-foreign, and totally non sequitur response bears almost no resemblance to the original. Remember the old game of "Telephone"? Something is lost, and sometimes something is gained. Try it for yourself!


Google Language Tools http://www.google.com/language_tools 

Set the Google homepage, messages, and buttons to display in your selected language via our Preferences page.
Google currently offers the following interface languages:

 

If you don't see your native language here, you can help Google create it by becoming a volunteer translator. 


November 15, 2002 message from lina [lina@smartlinkcorp.com

Please add us on your page: http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm#ForeignLanguage 
Our site is www.smartlinkcorp.com 
Thank you,
Lina Douglas
Smart Link Corp.
www.smartlinkcorp.com
www.paralink.com
800-256-4814
fax 949-552-1699
18401 Von Karman Ave. Ste 450
Irvine, California 92612

Language Translation Device

infoScope from IBM --- http://www.almaden.ibm.com/ 

infoScope is a handheld device equipped with a digital camera that can take snapshots of text in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Chinese and translate the image to another language in a matter of seconds. The device displays characteristics of augmented reality, by presenting the real world in the form of a captured image, such as a restaurant sign, and merging it with virtual data, by providing a translation of the image as an overlay to the PDA's screen. infoScope is not intended for lengthy translations, but more for speedy hits of three or four lines of text.

Details are provided at http://www.almaden.ibm.com/software/user/infoScope/infoscope_2001.pdf 

Abstract. 
We describe an information augmentation system (infoS- cope) and applications which integrates handheld devices, such asper- sonal digital assistants, with color camera to provide enhance information perception services to users. InfoScope uses a color camera as an input device by capturing scene images from the real world and using computer vision techniques to extract information from real world, convert them into digital world as text information and augment them back to original location so that user can see both the real world and information together in display of their handheld devices. We implemented two applications: First one is an automatic sign/text translation for foreign travelers where user can use infoScope whenever they want to see texts or signs in their own language where they are originally written in foreign language in the scene and extracted from scene images automatically by using computer vision techniques, second one is Information Augmentation in the City where user can see information, which is associated with building, places or attraction, overlaid onto real scene images on their PDA's display. We would like to presents our system with 5-minutes presentation with a possible demonstration.


Maps, Travel Information, and Local Area Searches for Businesses and Places of Interest

For your next trip via airplane, train, or bus
Google Transit Trip Planner --- http://www.google.com/transit

"Google Unveils Public Transit Mapping Service," by Antone Gonsalves, InformationWeek, December 8, 2005 --- http://www.internetweek.cmp.com/showArticle.jhtml?sssdmh=dm4.160284&articleId=174907393

Google Inc. on Thursday launched in beta a trip-planning service for people who prefer to take pubic transit rather than drive. The Google Transit Trip Planner, which is initially available only for the Portland, Ore, metro area, provides directions for public transportation from a starting location to a destination. Besides showing a road map of the route, the service provides transportation schedules and other information to help plot a step-by-step itinerary. In addition, the service compares the cost of the trip with the cost of driving.

Use of the service is similar to Google Local, a mapping and local search service that lets users find businesses and other locations in a city, and get driving directions. Locations and directions are shown over a roadmap or an aerial view of the area. The new transit service offers the same views.

Google Transit, which is currently a Google Labs product, has not been integrated with Google Local, because the company said it needed time to develop the product further. Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., did not have any definite plans for which cities would be added or when.

Engineers in San Francisco, New York, and Zurich who use public transportation often started the project, the company said.

Innovative applications of Google maps
Tracking sexual predators in Florida. Guiding travelers to the cheapest gas nationwide. Pinpointing $1,500 studio apartments for rent in Manhattan. Geeks, tinkerers and innovators are crashing the Google party, having discovered how to tinker with the search engine's mapping service to graphically illustrate vital information that might otherwise be ignored, overlooked or not perceived as clearly. "It's such a beautiful way to look at what could be a dense amount of information," said Tara Calishain, editor of Research Buzz and co-author of "Google Hacks," a book that offers tips on how to get the most out of the Web's most popular search engine. Yahoo and other sites also offer maps, but Google's four-month-old mapping service is more easily accessible and manipulated by outsiders, the tinkerers say. As it turns out, Google charts each point on its maps by latitude and longitude - that's how Google can produce.
"Google Maps Make Demographics Come Alive," Forbes, June 8, 2005 --- http://www.forbes.com/technology/ebusiness/feeds/ap/2005/06/08/ap2083551.html
Also see http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/06/ap/ap_060905.asp?trk=nl

Google added historic map overlays to its free interactive online globe of the world to provide views of how places have changed with time.
"Google Earth maps history," PhysOrg, November 14, 2006 --- http://physorg.com/news82706337.html

Google Earth --- http://earth.google.com/

Google Maps (including satellite photo options) are at http://maps.google.com/

For many years the most popular site for maps and travel instructions was MapQuest --- http://www.mapquest.com/ 

Yahoo Maps and Driving Directions --- http://maps.yahoo.com/

SmartView Maps From Yahoo Provides Better Localized Search Capabilities

"The Yahoo Factor," by Maya Dollarhide, MIT's Technology Review, January 27, 2005 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/01/wo/wo_dollarhide012705.asp?trk=nl 

Yahoo was last to the game with its Yahoo! Desktop Search, putting it squarely behind the eight ball. While Microsoft and Google have emerged as the current leaders (see What's Next for Google?), Yahoo has turned its attention to indexing the world by building out its mobile search technologies.

Yahoo!'s SmartView -- a competitor to America Online's MapQuest -- launched last March, and enables users find business locations, phone numbers, and directions.

Squaring off with AOL won't be an easy task. MapQuest has done a good job outflanking Microsoft's MapPoint, which recently made headlines for its odd search queries results.

But Yahoo hopes to hone SmartView, and integrate that into its Web and desktop search capabilities. Recently, a "Real Time" traffic report was added, where people can locate traffic jams, construction sites, speed zones, and accident reports. The service also includes Yahoo! Maps enhancements which include faster panning and zooming, larger views, and turn-by-turn maps with driving directions.

. . .

In the competitive field of search services, Yahoo is gaining ground on its top competitors, according to a survey by Market Researcher Keynote. While Google, Yahoo and MSN were the top choices of the 2,000 consumers surveyed, Yahoo maintained the highest user loyalty, primarily because of its localized search.

All three companies are targeting local search moving into the future, but Google and Microsoft haven't yet found their groove.

Yahoo's localized search for businesses and other sites of interest in a localized area is called Yahoo Local --- http://local.yahoo.com/ 
Keep in mind that Yahoo gives output priority to companies that pay to be listed near the top of a search outcome.

Amazon Elbows Into Online Yellow Pages Hiking the stakes in this hot field, the new service from its A9 unit features photo-rich listings that let you wander around near a destination
January 28, 2005 message from BusinessWeek Online's Insider [BW_Insider@newsletters.businessweek.com
The A9.com home page is at http://a9.com/?c=1&src=a9 
Bob Jensen's search helpers are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm 

Forwarded by Barb Hessel on January 2, 2006

Check out this site.  I've had alot of fun with it.  Enter an address on the top in the right hand search and then see an aerial photo of that address.  The slider on the left lets you zoom in quite a ways.  I just wonder how updated these pictures are.
Barb
http://local.live.com/



 

Quick Link to Google's Advanced Search --- http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en 

Quick link to Google's image (non-satellite) search engine --- http://images.google.com/ 

Satellite and Image Mapping

Better, More Accurate Image Search
By modifying a common type of machine-learning technique, researchers have found a better way to identify pictures," by Kate Greene,  MIT's Technology Review, April 9, 2007 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/18501/


Google Maps (including satellite photo options) are at http://maps.google.com/


See more than rooftops:  Free satellite photos at 45-degree angles (Bird's Eye Images) --- http://local.live.com/
Use the slider to zoom and the arrows to relocate

In battling Google in local search, Microsoft is falling back on its familiar strategy: copy and then go one better. The software giant has released in beta a new online service that's similar to Google Local, but has some impressive innovations. Windows Live Local combines Microsoft's local search engine and Virtual Earth aerial-imaging service. In providing the new tool, Microsoft is going a step further than Google by providing 45-degree aerial views of locations. This so-called "bird's-eye view" is only available for places in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Seattle and Las Vegas, but more cities are expected to be added over time . . . Besides its bird's-eye views, Microsoft is offering step-by-step driving directions using either the angular views or straight-down satellite views, identification of construction areas along a specific route and several print options, such as the ability to only print directions or to include thumbnail pictures of each turn in the route. User also can print directions that include their personal notes.
Antone Gonsalves, InformationWeek Newsletter, December 8, 2005 --- http://www.techweb.com/article/showArticle.jhtml?sssdmh=dm4.160172&articleId=174904438&pgno=2

Also see http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,123847,00.asp
and http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,120968,00.asp# 
and http://www.technologyreview.com//wtr_15987,1,p1.html?trk=nl

Microsoft's preview is at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/nov05/11-01PreviewSoftwareBasedPR.mspx

Microsoft's Live Ideas site is at http://ideas.live.com/

Bob Jensen's threads on satellite mapping services are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm#GoogleDeskbar


 

My digital photographs will always be free online --- http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/PictureHistory/
But some of you who have greater photography skills may be interested in selling your photographs

"Snapixel Lets You Share, Sell Photos," by Robin Waulters, Tech Crunch, October 8, 2009 --- Click Here
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/08/AR2009100800969.html?wpisrc=newsletter

Snapixel is a relatively new photo sharing service combined with a straight-forward buying and selling platform for stock photography. It's almost like Flickr got married to iStockphoto and they had a love child!

Yes, it's yet another photo sharing service. And yes, it's yet another stock photography marketplace. But both of the services rolled into one website results in a pretty decent combined offering, especially considering the fact that the whole thing was built by a completely bootstrapped venture based out of San Francisco.

Update: the company gave us some free coupons for TC readers! (see below where we discuss account types)

So what gives? On the photo sharing side, users get a bunch of features and storage for free. There's no maximum file size (although the only format you can upload is JPEG for now), and you can store up to 5GB of photos without paying a dime. You get multiple upload options, geo-tagging and mapping features, easy organization and management tools and multiple ways to share images with your friends on other social networks in just a few clicks.

If you feel like you've seen this type of design before, it's probably because you have. The screenshots below show that the whole look and feel of the Snapixel website was heavily inspired by Flickr, but frankly I see it as as a good thing because it works. Like Flickr, there's a community aspect to the site, and the service lets you easily organize uploaded images into groups and sets, with the added ability of assigning the appropriate Creative Commons license to them. You can add tags, edit descriptions and titles, assign geo-information to photos and interact with other members.

But what Flickr lacks, Snapixel offers: a marketplace where users can go to buy and sell photos. Sure, Yahoo-owned Flickr once had serious plans for such an embedded service ¿ it made, and still makes a lot of sense ¿ and has a partnership with Getty Images in place that allows the latter company to market select images that Flickr users upload online.

Snapixel offers several account types: Free, Pro and Seller. The Pro account (currently $9.95/year) has all the features of the free offering but removes any advertising and comes with unlimited storage and bandwidth. When you sign up as a Seller, you get a Pro account with the extra ability to participate in the Snapixel Marketplace.

Continued in article


From The Scout Report on January 23, 2009

TinEye Reverse Image Search 0.4 --- http://tineye.com/login 

TinEye is essentially a reverse image search engine that allows users to submit images in order to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions. The site includes a FAQ area and a demonstration video. Visitors will need to sign and create a password, and afterwards they will be able to use the search engine. This version is compatible with computers running all operating systems.

 


Question
What is the Mechanical Turk from Amazon.com?

Aviation adventurer Steve Fossett went missing while flying over Nevada a week ago Monday. The cops can't find him. The Air Force can't find him. (They did spot 6 other previously unknown wrecks, though.) But maybe, just maybe, a geek sitting at his computer succeeded where the government failed. Using an Amazon.com service called Mechanical Turk, web users have been scouring massive amounts of satellite imagery in an effort to assist rescue workers. And one of them may have spotted Fossett's plane, according to AVweb (registration required).
David Axe, "Geeks Spot Fossett?" Wired News, September 12, 2007 --- http://blog.wired.com/defense/


Sky Video --- http://earth.google.com/sky/index.html


"Flickr Taps User Tags to Organize Library of Congress Images," by Scott Gilbertson, Wired News, January 16, 2008 --- http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2008/01/flickr-taps-use.html

Flickr has unveiled a new project, dubbed The Commons, which will give Flickr members an opportunity to browse and tag photos from Library of Congress archives. The goal is to create what Flickr likes to call an "organic information system," in other words, a searchable database of tags that makes it easier for researchers to find images.

The pilot project features a small sampling of the Library of Congress’ some 14 million images. For now you’ll find two collections. The first is called “American Memory: Color photographs from the Great Depression” and features color photographs of the Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information Collection including “scenes of rural and small-town life, migrant labor, and the effects of the Great Depression.”

The second collection is the The George Grantham Bain Collection which features “photos produced and gathered by George Grantham Bain for his news photo service, including portraits and worldwide news events, but with special emphasis on life in New York City.” The Bain collection images date from around 1900-1920.

In effect the Library of Congress has become a Flickr user, complete with its own stream and while it’s great to see these image available to a much wider audience, we’re not so sure how much it’s going to help researchers.

If you’re looking for historical photographs do you want to search through comments from self-appointed experts criticizing the composition skills of photography pioneers or adding the ever insightful “wow?” Then there’s the inevitable comments soliciting photos to be added to whatever banal and increasingly inane groups and pools that Flickr members have come up with.

The tagging aspect will no doubt produce something of value, but pardon our cynicism, this may well turn out to be a good test of whether the positive aspects of the Flickr community outweigh the negative.


Quick Link to Google Views (Keyhole's Satellite Geographic Imaging) --- http://www.keyhole.com/ 

Innovative applications of Google maps
Tracking sexual predators in Florida. Guiding travelers to the cheapest gas nationwide. Pinpointing $1,500 studio apartments for rent in Manhattan. Geeks, tinkerers and innovators are crashing the Google party, having discovered how to tinker with the search engine's mapping service to graphically illustrate vital information that might otherwise be ignored, overlooked or not perceived as clearly. "It's such a beautiful way to look at what could be a dense amount of information," said Tara Calishain, editor of Research Buzz and co-author of "Google Hacks," a book that offers tips on how to get the most out of the Web's most popular search engine. Yahoo and other sites also offer maps, but Google's four-month-old mapping service is more easily accessible and manipulated by outsiders, the tinkerers say. As it turns out, Google charts each point on its maps by latitude and longitude - that's how Google can produce.
"Google Maps Make Demographics Come Alive," Forbes, June 8, 2005 --- http://www.forbes.com/technology/ebusiness/feeds/ap/2005/06/08/ap2083551.html

Google Maps (including satellite photo options) are at http://maps.google.com/

Google Deskbar (Beta) makes searching much faster and easier than anything I’ve ever seen before!  

Google Deskbar:  Search Without Having to Use Internet Explorer or Any Other Internet Browser
A great free download from Google --- http://toolbar.google.com/deskbar/ 

Google Deskbar enables you to search with Google from any application without lifting your fingers from the keyboard. Installs easily in your Windows taskbar. 

  • Key Features: Search using Google, even when your browser isn't running 

  • Preview search results in a small inset window that closes automatically 

  • Access Google from any application by typing Ctrl+Alt+G 

  • Use keyboard shortcuts for multiple Google searches, i.e., Google News (Ctrl+N),Google Images (Ctrl+I), or Froogle (Ctrl+F)

Jensen Comment
The free Beta download is fast and easy.  But there is a confusing part.  After it is downloaded, it will say "Wait, you are not done yet!".  Now you have to jump in and do exactly what the looped instructions tell you to do.  You right click on the clock at the bottom of your screen (hopefully you have a clock showing).  Then you have to click on Toolbars and then Google Search like the looped instructions explain to you.  Then you are done.  It's neat!

When you are done, you will get a permanent Google search box at the bottom of your screen.  You type in or paste in the URL and click the button to the right.  After you type in the first few letters of a site that you have visited before, you will see a pop-up option that allows you to click on the URL without having to type the rest of it in the search box.  

"New Google Web-Search Software Doesn't Need an Internet Browser," The Wall Street Journal, November 6, 2003 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB106817236275821700,00.html?mod=technology_main_whats_news 

SAN JOSE, California -- Internet search engine Google has unveiled free software that lets people search the Web quickly -- without launching a Web browser.

Google Deskbar ( http://toolbar.google.com/deskbar/ ), released Thursday, appears as a search box in the Windows toolbar. After the search words are entered, a resizable miniviewer pops up with the results. Users can jump to the site within the miniviewer or launch their browser.

Unless a program is filling the screen or the user has set the taskbar to automatically hide, the search box is always visible. With a keyboard shortcut, the cursor can be moved to it without moving the mouse.

Though the software is free, Google does get some exposure on the desktop: The company's logo appears faintly in the search box when words aren't being typed into it.

Beyond Google's main search, the box can be set to search Google non-U.S. sites, Google News, Google Images and others. There are options to find stock quotes, movie reviews, word definitions and synonyms. Users can add custom sites to search, too.

The software, which is about 400 kilobytes, requires a personal computer with Windows XP or Windows 2000 software, at least Internet Explorer 5.5 and an Internet connection. Windows 95, 98 and ME aren't supported. Google Deskbar doesn't run on Macintosh or Linux computers.


November 10, 2003 message from Charlie Betts [cbetts@COLLEGE.DTCC.EDU

There's a free (my favorite word) Power Point tutorial on Google available at:

http://netsquirrel.com/classroom/index.html 

Written by a Patrick Crispen, it starts with a basic explanation of how Google works and then goes into some of the advanced features such as boolean searches and ends with explanations of a lot of the special operators. I've quickly looked through it and it seems pretty comprehensive and suitable as supplementary material for students. I'm not familiar with Patrick Crispen, but appartently he has done a lot of writing on internet topics, and he does seem to have a sense of humor, which is a plus when dealing with this type of topic.

There are also other free (that magic word again) downloads on this website.

Charlie Betts 
Delaware Technical & Community College 
Terry Campus 100 Campus Drive Dover DE 19904 
cbetts@college.dtcc.edu 


Questions
What is the literal definition of Googol?  (the source of the trade name Google)
Who were the two Stanford University graduate students who invented Google?
How does Google make its profits by providing a free search engine to the world?  Hint:  It's not the advertising revenue.

Answers:
“Googol” is the mathematical term for the number one followed by a hundred zeros.  

The  geeks who invented Google were the following 22-year old graduate students at Stanford University:

Larry Page was an all-American type (geek variety) whose dad taught computer science in Lansing, Mich. 

Sergey Brin, with the dark brooding looks of a chess prodigy, emigrated from Russia at the age of 6: his father was a math professor.

The main source of revenue is from licensing fees to huge companies like Yahoo and AOL who in turn use Google's licensed corporate services.

Its performance is the envy of executives and engineers around the world ... For techno-evangelists, Google is a marvel of Web brilliance ... For Wall Street, it may be the IPO that changes everything ( again ) ... But Google is also a case study in savvy management -- a company filled with cutting-edge ideas, rigorous accountability, and relentless attention to detail ... Here's a search for the growth secrets of one of the world's most exciting young companies -- a company from which every company can learn.
Keith H. Hammonds --- http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/69/google.html 

"The World According to Google," by Steven Levy, Newsweek, December 16, 2002 --- http://www.msnbc.com/news/844175.asp?0dm=-118K 

THE DESKTOP ORACLE OF DELPHI
     Internet-search engines have been around for the better part of a decade, but with the emergence of Google, something profound has happened. Because of its seemingly uncanny ability to provide curious minds with the exact information they seek, a dot-com survivor has supercharged the entire category of search, transforming the masses into data-miners and becoming a cultural phenomenon in the process. By a winning combination of smart algorithms, hyperactive Web crawlers and 10,000 silicon-churning computer servers, Google has become a high-tech version of the Oracle of Delphi, positioning everyone a mouseclick away from the answers to the most arcane questions—and delivering simple answers so efficiently that the process becomes addictive. Google cofounder Sergey Brin puts it succinctly: “I’d like to get to a state where people think that if you’ve Googled something, you’ve researched it, and otherwise you haven’t and that’s it.” We’re almost there now. With virtually no marketing, Google is now the fourth most popular Web site in the world—and the Nos. 1 and 3 sites (AOL, Yahoo) both license Google technology for their Web searches. About half of all Web searches in the world are performed with —Google, which has been translated into 86 languages. The big reason for the success? It works. Not only does Google dramatically speed the process of finding things in the vast storehouse of the Web, but its power encourages people to make searches they previously wouldn’t have bothered with. Getting the skinny from Google is so common that the company name has become a verb. The usage has even been anointed by an instantly renowned New Yorker cartoon, where a barfly admits to a friend that “I can’t explain it—it’s just a funny feeling I’m being Googled.”

. . .

THE GOOGLE MYSTIQUE
       
When Judge Richard Posner wrote a book recently to identify the world’s leading intellectuals, he used Google hits as a key criterion. When the Chinese government decided that the Web offered its citizenry an overly intimate view of the world outside its borders, what better way to pull down the shades than to block Google? (Within a week the Chinese changed direction; Google was too useful to withhold.) Companies that do business online have become justifiably obsessed with Google’s power. “If you drop down on Google, your business can come to a screeching halt,” says Greg Boser of WebGuerilla, an Internet consultancy. And if two clashing egos want to see whose Google is bigger, they need only venture to a Web site like GoogleFight to compare results.
        Google was the brainchild of two Stanford graduate students who refused to accept the conventional wisdom that Internet searching was either a solved problem or not very interesting. Larry Page was an all-American type (geek variety) whose dad taught computer science in Lansing, Mich. Sergey Brin, with the dark brooding looks of a chess prodigy, emigrated from Russia at the age of 6: his father was a math professor. Brin and Page, who met as 22-year-old doctoral candidates in computer science in 1995, began with an academic research project that morphed into an experiment on Web searching.
        Their big idea was something they called PageRank (named after Larry), which took into account not just the title or text on a Web site but the other sites linked to it. “Our intention of doing the ranking properly was that you should get the site you meant to get,” says Page. Basically, the system exploited the dizzyingly complex linking network of the Web itself—and the collective intelligence of the millions who surfed the Web—so that when you searched, you could follow in the pathways of others who were interested in that same information.

. . .

TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING?
       For researchers, of course, Google is a dream tool. “I can’t imagine writing a nonfiction book without it,” says author Steven Johnson. Some even wonder if Google might be too much of a good thing. “I use it myself, every day,” says Joe Janes, assistant professor in the information school of the University of Washington. “But I worry about how over reliance on it might affect the skill-set of librarians.”

        New uses emerge almost as quickly as the typical 0.3 seconds it takes to get Google results. People find long-lost relatives, recall old song lyrics and locate parts for old MGs. College instructors sniffing for plagiarism type in suspiciously accomplished phrases from the papers of otherwise inarticulate students. Computer programmers type in error-code numbers to find out which Windows function crashed their program. Google can even save your life. When Terry Chilton, of Plattsburgh, N.Y., felt a pressure in his chest one morning, he Googled heart attacks, and quickly was directed to a detailed list of symptoms on the American Heart Association site. “I better get my butt to the hospital,” he told himself, and within hours he was in life-saving surgery.

        Eleven years ago computer scientist David Gelernter wrote of the emergence of “mirror worlds,” computer-based reflections of physical reality that can increase our understanding and mastery of the real world. Google is the ultimate mirror world, reflecting the aggregate brilliance of the World Wide Web, on which is stored everything: cookie-bake results, Weblogs, weather reports and the Constitution. And because Google is now the default means of accessing such information, the contents of Google’s world matter very much in the real world.

Best place to start a search --- Google at http://www.google.com/advanced_search 
Scroll down the entire page to see new features that Google keeps adding, wonderful features!
Note that Google will search databases as well as Webpages.

Also note Google's other options at http://images.google.com/help/features.html 

•Image Search 
•Web Page Translation 
•PhoneBook 
• PDF Files 
• Stock Quotes 
• Cached Links 
• Similar Pages 
• Who links to you? 
• Site Search 
• I'm Feeling Lucky 
• Dictionary Definitions 
• Street Maps

What is the difference between the Google's SiteSearch and Google's WebSearch service?

Go to the FAQ page at http://services.google.com/univ_faq.html 

    Google's WebSearch service searches the Internet to return the best search results for a specific query. Google's SiteSearch service searches only the specific university domain(s) that you listed. You can give your users the option to toggle between these different search options.

Google Offers Free Search Services to Educational Institutions 

You can read the following at http://services.google.com/googleuniv/login 

Google offers free SiteSearch (enables users to search your university website) and optional WebSearch (enables users to search the Internet) to universities and educational organizations worldwide.

Note: This services is intended for educational organizations only. Google reserves the right to terminate accounts used for other purposes.

The features of the service are listed below: 

  • Unlimited queries 
  • Deep crawls 
  • SiteSearch with optional WebSearch 
  • No advertising 
  • High level of customization 
  • Free!* *

"Google's New Look & New File Types" --- http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/01/10-google.html 


Accounting Professional Site Links and Other Business Site by Categories 

Daily News Sites for Accountancy, Tax, Fraud, IFRS, XBRL, Accounting History, and More ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/AccountingNews.htm

Accounting History Libraries at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) --- http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/accountancy/libraries.html
The above libraries include international accounting history.
The above libraries include film and video historical collections.

MAAW Knowledge Portal for Management and Accounting --- http://maaw.info/

Academy of Accounting Historians and the Accounting Historians Journal ---
http://www.accounting.rutgers.edu/raw/aah/

Bob Jensen's bookmarks for online accounting textbooks and cases can be found at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm#BooksAndCases 

Bob Jensen's listing of free online textbooks and other learning materials are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Textbooks
Note that most of these are not repeated below, so please click on the above link.

The CPA Team http://www.cpateam.com/  
Also see http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob.htm

Information Systems Audit and Control Association and Foundation Web (ISACA) site --- http://www.isaca.org/ 

ISWORLD at http://www.isworld.org/isworld/isworldtext.html 

ISTE standards for safe sites for kids --- http://www.iste.org/standards/ 

The Taxonomy Warehouse is a fantastic search engine in terms of helpful categories --- http://www.taxonomywarehouse.com/ 

Business.com:  The leading business search engine and directory designed to help its users find the companies, products, services, and information they need to make the right business decision --- http://www.business.com/ 

Browse our comprehensive business directory . . . .
Accounting
A/R, Budgeting, Payroll, Software...

Advertising & Marketing
Agencies, Customer Service, PR, Site Promotion...

Aerospace & Defense
Aircraft, Defense, Military, Space...

Agriculture
Cattle, Dairy, Fertilizer, Pesticides, Tobacco...

Automotive
Dealerships, Insurance, Manufacturers, Parts...

Chemicals
Petrochemicals, Polymers, Specialty...

Computers & Software
Hardware, PCs, Printers, Software Aps...

Electronics & Semiconductors
Components, LCDs, Microelectronics...

Energy & Environment
Consulting Services, Oil & Gas, Trading...

Financial Services
Asset Mgmt, Insurance, Investment Banking...

Food & Beverage
Beverages, Restaurants, Vending...

Government & Trade
B2G Markets, Int'l Trade, US Federal Govt...

Healthcare
Diagnostic Equip, Medical Devices, Software...

  Human Resources
Attendance, Career Mgmt, Hiring, Salary...

Industrial Goods & Services
Engineering, Machinery, Metals, Tool Leasing...

Internet & Online
ASPs, Ecommerce, ISPs, Site Mgmt, Hosting...

Law
Courts, Federal, Firms, Online Communities...

Management
Consulting, Change Mgmt, Supply Chain...

Media & Entertainment
Music, Publishing, Streaming Media, TV...

Pharmaceuticals & Biotechnology
Biotechnology, Clinical, Pharmacies...

Real Estate & Construction
Foreclosure, Property Listings, Surveillance...

Retail & Consumer Services
Apparel, Office Supplies, Travel Reservations...

Small Business
Getting Started, Managing Growth, Small/Home Office...

Telecommunications
Broadband, Carriers, Call Centers, Wireless...

Transportation & Logistics
Inventory Mgmt, Logistics, Warehousing...


Internet Robots and Spiders --- http://www.granby.k12.ct.us/MSMedia/mc7searchtools.html 

 
AllTheWeb
    A very fast search engine which aims to index the entire Web. Includes sites that are very up-to-date and is easy to use. Good for distinctive phrases or terms. Also has pictures, audio and video.
AltaVista
    One of the largest, most comprehensive engines. Includes audio, video and pictures.
Amazing Picture Machine
    An engine to use when pictures are needed.
Ask Jeeves
     A human powered directory which aims to direct you to the exact page that answers your question. If it can't find an answer within its own database, it will search other search engines. Queries can be entered in common language question form.
CompletePlanet
    A directory which searches the "Deep Web" where most other search tools do not and rates the results according to relevance and popularity.
Daypop
    Searches 7000 news sites and weblogs for current events and breaking news.
 
Top of page
 
Dog Pile
    An excellent metasearch engine which searches several search engines at once.
Excite
    A popular portal which searches for web sites containing search terms entered as well as for sites with terms closely related to the search terms entered. Also has pictures. One of the best places on the Web to find news articles.
Find Articles
    A site which has news articles from more than 300 magazines dating back to 1998.
Google
    Considered by many to be the best search tool which has comprehensive searching across the Web and returns high quality, relevant results. Search both singular and plural forms of a search term to get the best results. All words entered are searched automatically. Look in advanced search for pictures.
Lor
    An excellent search engine which is quick, efficient and very user friendly.
iTools
    A ready-reference site with several search forms including web, dictionary and encyclopedia searching.
Ixquick
    A very powerful metasearch engine. Well regarded by researchers and librarians. Easy to read search results page.
Lycos
    A portal which lists the top 50 search topics which help searchers predict future fads and trends.
MagPortal.com
    A good place to search for free online magazine articles which were printed within the last 4 years.
Search
    Excellent metasearch engine which works by collecting the results of other search engines. Includes 800 search engines which are searched according to subject area. A good tool to locate news articles.
Search Online
    A meta search engine which searches eight search engines and has several search options. Free registration gives full access to all features.
Surfwax
    A meta search engine which provides an easy way to search for and manage information. The Site Snap feature is an excellent feature.
Teachers First
    Excellent web resources which are already sorted by subject and grade level.
Teoma
    A new search engine which groups sites by topics.
Vivisimo
    An excellent metasearch tool which searches 20 search engines and organizes the results in clusters.
Wisenut
    A new search engine which is large and updates web pages often.
Yahoo!
    Most popular search tool even though it is quite small. A directory whose web sites are selected by people who evaluate each site as to relevancy. An excellent place to find news articles. Does not support Boolean searching. Pictures can be found by typing "Picture Gallery" in the search box and then clicking on "Browse Thousands of Pictures on Yahoo! Picture Gallery".

From InternetWeek Newsbreak on June 19, 2002

TODAY'S INTERNET INSIGHT: 
Who doesn't love Google? Most people I know use it incessantly. The Google toolbar has been a godsend. The company's recent geek experiment with a public SOAP interface was the talk of the Web for a few (slow) days. In today's Leading Off, we talk with several enterprise users who have been using the new rack-mounted Google Search Appliance. They have interesting stories to tell. They like its relative low cost and ease of use. More intriguing is the fact that they are finding -- or contemplating -- ways to go under the covers of their Google boxes and work all sorts of magic on its XML data feeds. The earlier excitement about the public SOAP interface into Google was tempered by the fact that no instant killer app emerged (outside of so-called Google boxes that popped up on now-ubiquitous Weblogs). Look for enterprises to find even better ways to interact with their Google search results internally, blending Web services and knowledge management in intriguing new ways.

Google Takes Aim At The Enterprise By focusing on what it does best -- search -- Google is winning IT converts with its new search appliance. The flexibility of open standards and XML data feeds is just icing on the cake. -- Richard Karpinski http://update.internetweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eHkA0Bdl6n0V30BeQZ0Ai 

Plus: Google Rolls Out Updated Search Appliance http://update.internetweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eHkA0Bdl6n0V30BeN30A1 


Search Warning

Beyond HTML: Security concerns with Google Now that Google is indexing a wide range of document types beyond HTML and plain text formats, potential security concerns are cropping up, both for searchers and webmasters. http://www.newmedia.com/default.asp?articleID=3297 

Bob Jensen's security threads are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce/assurance.htm 


April 13, 2002 message from David R. Fordham [fordhadr@JMU.EDU

Since Bob, myself, and a few others on the list appear to be fans of Google searches, I thought some on the list might appreciate knowing the technology behind Google searches and rankings.

If you're curious and have a few idle minutes, check it out at:

http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html 

Perhaps this technology might find some application in auditing circles? ... possibly smoothing the ruffled feathers of congressional investigators and SEC members? ;-)

David Fordham 
James Madison University


LinksNet --- http://www.linxnet.com/ 
What I like about LinksNet are the categories (Directories)

LinxNet Directories
News

Sports

Weather

Magazines

Television

Web Exploration

Library

Science

U.S. Government

Amiga

LinksNet --- http://www.linxnet.com/ 
What I like about LinksNet are the categories (Directories)

LinxNet Directories
News

Sports

Weather

Magazines

Television

Web Exploration

Library

Science

U.S. Government

Amiga

Another site with similar categories is LookSmart at http://www.looksmart.com/ 

Metacrawler has the following categories at http://www.metacrawler.com/index.html 

Google, LookSmart, Metacrawler, Northern Light, Alta Vista, Go.com, and various other search engines are compared in "So Much Information, So Little Time:  Evaluating Web Resources With Search Engines," by K.A. Killmer and N.B. Koppel, T.H.E. Journal, August 2000, pp. 21-29 --- http://www.thejournal.com/magazine/vault/A4101.cfm 
The above article reveals the search engine preferences of students at Montclair State University.  Interestingly, Google is not mentioned in the comparison table on Page 28 (Figure 2).  Without Google in the running, Alta Vista
was the most popular.


Live Person Search Help and Other Fee Consulting from Google Brokers

Google Answers https://answers.google.com/answers/main 

Google is operating as a broker between the questioner and researcher, taking commissions in return for providing an information service much like eBay offers for items and collectibles.  In order to get a question answered, users must pay a price that they deem sufficient (between $4 and $50), with 75 percent going to the researcher and 25 percent going to Google. Google also provides online facilities for researchers to get paid answering questions. 

Want to answer a question? Become a paid Researcher.
Questions currently being asked   
Software Engineering and Maths
family
school song
Medical: Spinal Block vs General Anethesia
software development pda's
making secret decoder rings
right index finger knuckle
Customers who bought... programming in PHP
Federal government R&D opportunities

 


Vivisimo

A colleague of mine recently showed me a great new search engine called Vivisimo ( http://www.vivisimo.com ). I use Google most of the time . . ., but I now use Vivisimo when the first few Google hits are not fruitful. I find that the classification structure (similar to file explorer) really helps me to "zero-in" on relevant links.

Rick ------------------------- 
Richard Newmark Assistant Professor of Accounting University of Northern Colorado Kenneth W. Monfort College of Business Campus Box 128 Greeley, CO 80639 (970) 351-1213 Office (801) 858-9335 Fax (free e-mail fax at efax.com) richard.newmark@PhDuh.com    http://PhDuh.com 

 


The Art of Selecting Good Keywords Keywords are important in determining which users a search engine sends to your Web site, so care should be taken with their selection. http://www.newmedia.com/default.asp?articleID=3363 


OAIster Search Interface http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/index.html 

OAIster is a Mellon-funded project of the University of Michigan Digital Library Production Services. Our goal is to create a wide-ranging collection of free, useful, previously difficult-to-access digital resources (what are digital resources?) that are easily searchable by anyone.

You can now search for digital resources in OAIster!

The novelty of our service is multi-fold:

  • Our service will reveal digital resources previously "hidden" from users behind web scripts (how are they hidden?). The OAI harvesting protocol we're using makes this possible.

  • There won't be any dead ends. Users will not be retrieving merely information (metadata) about resources -- they will have access to the real things. For instance, instead of just the catalog records of a slide collection of Van Gogh's works, users will be able to view images of the actual works.

  • The service will provide one-stop "shopping" for users interested in useful digital resources.

  • Digital resources will be easily findable and viewable through our service. The middleware we use to index these resources makes this possible.

If you're interested in making your collection available for harvesting, please contact Kat Hagedorn.


Search engines and directories for education sites

 

The easiest way to find a college's home page is to use Google at http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en 

College-HQ --- http://www.college-hq.com/

You can search for key words on a college's server using http://www.google.com/options/universities.html 

Bob Jensen's links to distance education training and education pages are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm 

Boston College Center for International Higher Education --- http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/soe/cihe/ 

College is Possible --- http://www.acenet.edu/AM/Template.cfm?Section=CIP1

College Is Possible (CIP) is the American Council on Education's K–16 youth development program that motivates middle and high school students from underserved communities to seek a college education. As the umbrella organization for higher education and a presidential association, the American Council on Education (ACE) is uniquely positioned to build a bridge between colleges and universities and their local K-12 community with commitment at the executive level. Resources

  • Paying for College
  • A Brief Look at Student Financial Aid Programs
  • Basic Facts About College Prices and Student Aid
  • Financial Aid Glossary
  • Myths and Realities About Paying for College
  • Recommended Web sites, Books, and Brochures
  • Preparing for College
  • A Guide for Parents: Ten Steps to Prepare Your Child for College
  • Courses Students Should Take in Middle, Junior, and High School to Prepare for College
  • Recommended Web sites, Books, and Brochures
  • Choosing the Right College
  • Search for Colleges
  • College Admissions and Financial Aid Calendar
  • College and University Web sites
  • Recommended Web sites, Books, and Brochures

For distance education programs go to http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm 

A Comprehensive Guide to Universities, Colleges, and Schools Worldwide --- http://www.internationaleducationmedia.com

Bob Jensen's higher education helpers are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm

 

Distance Education Websites --- http://ejw.i8.com/distweb.htm 

Bob Jensen's threads on the shocking future of distance education are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm 

Bob Jensen's threads on alternatives for distance education and training are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm 

Bob Jensen's threads on technology in education are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm 

Probably the best way to search for a college, university, or any other school is to enter the name into the Advanced Search  box at http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en 

You can search within a college or university using the search engine at http://www.google.com/options/universities.html 

International (Cross-Border) Education Links --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm 

From The Scout Report on November 2, 2001

AltaVista Education Search http://www.altavista.com/sites/search/edu 
This new page from AltaVista allows users to search for terms from within the university and college sites in AltaVista. Searches from this page will cover the more-than-20 million university and college sites held here. Users can also browse the three categories, Education, Colleges & Universities, and K-12 Education, though admittedly the links here, while annotated, are not extensive.

How to Find a College That's Right for You

"Going to College? First, Go to the Web," by Anne Field, The New York Times, November 25, 2004 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/25/business/25sbiz.html?oref=login  

Two months ago, Gregory Waldorf and his mother, Toby, began a start-up whose time, they hoped, had come.

The company, Destination-U.com, helps high school students identify the colleges that might be best for them. For $39.95, students fill out a 10-minute questionnaire that focuses on matching their personalities with colleges and also considers grades and extracurricular activities. In seconds, the students receive a list of about 15 four-year colleges they might want to consider.

In devising the questionnaire, the Waldorfs relied on three things - the expertise of Ms. Waldorf, a longtime independent college counselor for high school students; interviews with some 18,000 college juniors and seniors; and the insights of eight college counselors.

Mr. Waldorf, a venture capitalist with an interest in businesses that provide Web-based matching services, says the company, based in Menlo Park, Calif., can take advantage of overlapping social trends: the fluency of teenagers in using the Web and the competitive frenzy among students to get into the best colleges

Continued in the article

For a Fee:  The Odds of Admission Among 80 Elite Universities
"Thick Envelope," The New York Times --- http://thickenvelope.com/ 

There are many free helpers for finding colleges.

US News has a comprehensive set of helpers --- http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/cohome.htm 

Bob Jensen's helpers for finding online colleges and training programs --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm 

Randall Hansen provides helpers at http://www.quintcareers.com/choosing_major.html 

Thomas Sowell has some outspoken views at http://www.amatecon.com/etext/cac/cac.html 

Petersen's College Bound guide --- http://www.petersons.com/ugchannel/ 

The Princeton Review --- http://www.princetonreview.com/college/research/articles/find/specifics.asp 

Search helpers from the Harvard Business School http://www.library.hbs.edu/ 


Search for Internet, e-Commerce, or e-Business Phrases

When you want to search for an Internet, e-Commerce, or e-Business phrase, it may be best to start at http://search.internet.com/ 

Bob Jensen's ecommerce threads are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce.htm 


Cool Sites (Timelines) as Forwarded by Chris Nolan

-----Original Message----- 
From: Richard Wiggins [mailto:rich@richardwiggins.com]  
Sent: Friday, December 21, 2001 11:23 AM 
To: Multiple recipients of list 
Subject: [WEB4LIB]  Google timeline and zeitgeist, 2001

This is very cool:

http://www.google.com/press/timeline.html 

http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html 


A Good Place to Look for Search Helpers in Products and Marketing

Bob Jensen's bookmarks for marketing are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm#Marketing 

 

Product Search With Options to Rent of Buy It Cheaper?  
That plus much more!

"Amazon: Giving Away the Store,"  by Wade Roush, Technology Review,  January 2005 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/01/issue/roush0105.asp?trk=nl 

Visit Amazon Light at www.kokogiak.com/amazon4, and you’ll see a plain search box that allows you to locate any product in Amazon.com’s database. Click on an item, and you’ll be taken to a page with the usual product image, price information, and customer reviews, and, of course, the familiar “Buy This” button. Amazon Light’s pages are deliberately less cluttered than those at Amazon itself, but the family relationship is obvious.

Look closer, however, and you’ll spot some distinctly non-Amazonian features. If the item you’re viewing is a DVD, for example, there will be a button that lets you see in a single click whether the same disc is for rent at Netflix. If it’s a CD, you can check whether Apple’s iTunes music store has a downloadable version. And if it’s a book, Amazon Light will even tell you whether it’s on the shelf at your local public library.

What’s going on here? Surely, executives at Seattle-based Amazon would never condone an online service that encourages people to buy things from sites other than Amazon?

Actually, they would. Amazon Light, created by former Amazon programmer Alan Taylor and hosted on his personal website, kokogiak.com, is one of thousands of independent sites incorporating the product data and programming tools that Amazon has been sharing freely since July 16, 2002. That’s the day Amazon celebrated its seventh anniversary—and unveiled a startling new project, called Amazon Web Services, that promises to change, once again, the way retailers of all stripes think about reaching their customers.

While companies such as Google and Microsoft are also experimenting with the idea of letting outsiders tap into their databases and use their content in unpredictable ways (see “What’s Next for Google?”), none is proceeding more aggressively than Amazon. The company has, in essence, outsourced much of its R&D, and a growing portion of its actual sales, to an army of thousands of software developers, who apparently enjoy nothing more than finding creative new ways to give Web surfers access to Amazon merchandise—and earning a few bucks in the process. The result: a syndicate of mini-Amazons operating at very little cost to Amazon itself and capturing customers who might otherwise have gone elsewhere. It’s as if Starbucks were to recruit 50,000 of its most loyal caffeine addicts to strap urns of coffee to their backs each morning and, for a small commission, spend the day dispensing the elixir to their officemates.

“Amazon is pouring so many resources into their Web services that it’s almost frightening,” says Paul Bausch, one of the inventors of the well-known weblogging tool Blogger and, more recently, the author of O’Reilly Media’s Amazon Hacks, a collection of tips for tapping into Amazon’s rich database. “They are extremely aggressive, and that separates them from Google and from other people who are still just experimenting with the technology. They really believe that this is where their business is heading.”

Continued for three more pages in the article

Marketing and Purchasing Searches
ClickZ's Search Engine Watch released its annual list of outstanding Web search services for 2003. Your favorites are among them, but there were also surprises and controversial predictions for the coming year --- http://www.clickz.com/experts/search/opt/article.php/3319991 
Note that Yahoo is Number One for marketing searches.

As if there wasn't enough to find on Google, the search engine offers a service that allows users to peruse the goods from more than 600 catalogs --- http://catalogs.google.com/ 

"A Catalog to Catalog All Catalogs," by Katie Dean, Wired News, December 18, 2001 ---  http://www.wired.com/news/holidays/0,1882,49187,00.html  

Anyone who's ever marked a page in a catalog to remember to buy that perfect sweater -- only to lose that sweater among dozens of catalogs with dog-eared pages strewn on the living room floor -- will appreciate this:

Google's catalog search combs the pages of more than 600 current catalogs -- 1,500 including back issues –- to help both consumers and corporations find everything from apple butter to zipper doodles.

"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," said David Krane, a spokesman

Pages were fed into a bulk scanner -- similar to a copy machine -- then run through an optical character recognition process, which extracts the text from each page. Google then crawls and indexes the text from the pages.

Both consumer and corporate catalogs are accessible through the search. Catalogs were initially collected by Google staff members, but vendors and users may also suggest a catalog.

"The sheer comprehensiveness of the service makes it incredibly useful," Krane said.

For example, a search for "root beer" brought up a list that includes a kids brew-your-own root beer kit from the Grandparent's Toy Connection catalog; a ProLine premium monofilament fish line in root-beer brown from Cabela's; and handsewn moccasins from Nordstrom in root-beer suede.

A beta version of the site launched last Thursday. There's no link to the catalog search from the Google homepage, but it's accessible through Google's advanced search page or catalogs.google.com.

The catalog company's URL, phone number and catalog code are listed at the top of each page, as well the catalog page number. People may also search within a particular catalog using the Google search.

Several catalog companies support the new feature.

"Google is just a great search engine, and we're happy to be there," said Bill Ihle, a spokesman for gourmet food purveyor Harry and David. "Any exposure that we can get is good exposure. It's an additional way to reach the customers."

"I would think that a few more people will find us," said Michael Beard, managing partner of Raven Maps. "We do one big mailing per year, so in that regard that will extend the life of the catalog."

But will holiday shoppers find a use for it at this late date?

"There was no strategic effort to time the beta release of this service for the holiday shopping season," Krane said. "It's more the inverse of that: The tail end of the shopping season provides us a good opportunity to secure feedback."

Continued at http://www.wired.com/news/holidays/0,1882,49187,00.html 

 

The Google search catalog is at http://catalogs.google.com/ 

See also:
Google's Gaggle of Discussions http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,49016,00.html 
Toys, Toys, Toys, Toys, Toys http://www.wired.com/news/holidays/0,1882,48707,00.html 
Shippers Wrestle With Box Issues http://www.wired.com/news/holidays/0,1882,48151,00.html 
There's no biz like E-Biz http://www.wired.com/news/ebiz/ 


Daypop (a search site for links to daily newscasts) --- http://www.daypop.com/ 
Search 5800 News Sites and Weblogs for Current Events and Breaking News


Many of the top search engines now accept payment for improved listings or fast appraisal of your site for inclusion in their directories. One expert believes the payments are commercially worthwhile. Here he looks at the options for six top search engines. http://www.newmedia.com/default.asp?articleID=2527 

Google --- http://www.google.com/ 

Google.com is one of the largest and most used engines. It is fast, accurate, and one of the most visited Web sites today. Literally thousands of searches are conducted on Google every day for your keywords related to your site. You can now advertise on Google very affordably using their AdWords program. Your AdWords text ads appear on search result pages for the keywords you buy, and can be targeted by language and country. So, to reach collectors of tin toys you might buy the keywords "toy collector," "tin toys," etc.

Pricing for AdWords is based on the position in which they're shown. Google positions your ad based on how many users click on it over time. Current rates are $15, $12, $10 (per thousand ads shown) for positions 1, 2, and 3 respectively, and $8 per thousand for positions 4 through 8. Accounts are opened with a credit card and no minimum deposit is required.

The trick is to choose very targeted keywords that will trigger your ad (yes, you can do that). Which means that only very targeted buyers will ever see your ad and your conversion ration will be incredibly high. You can set how much you wish to spend. Google takes the money from your credit card after you owe $50, by which time your ad will have been displayed roughly 5,000 times. If your keywords are highly targeted, many of the people who see your ad will become buyers and you will get your return before you even pay Google!

Because there are thousands of searches a day, Google alone can be one of your biggest sales drivers with its great AdWords program. For more details, see the Google AdWords pages - they have plenty of tips. Your listing shows up in about an hour. Remember, it is more effective to target about 20 keywords, specific and related to your site, than it is to use just one.

Goto --- http://www.goto.com/ 

Goto.com is another powerful pay-per-listing search engine. The trick is to pay for the top position, or at least a top three position. Depending on your product, how much gross profit you make out of it and what your conversion ratio is, you may be able to profit from the top spot.

Why is the top spot so important? Goto.com is actually a relatively small search engine compared to the others. Its power does not come from people searching the Goto.com site itself. It comes from the Goto.com partners. Their top search results reach 75% of all Internet users through their affiliate partner network, which includes America Online, Microsoft Internet Explorer, EarthLink, Lycos, and AltaVista. But these partner sites only show Goto.com's top one to three results for any search. So look for the top spot if your gross margin can allow it.

The good thing about Goto.com is that they only charge you for a click-through, so you only pay when someone clicks on your link. Top spots can cost you anything from 0.01 cents to over $4 depending on the keyword. Your listing shows up in about 3 days. Again, it is more effective to have about 20 keywords than just one.

DMOZ --- http://www.dmoz.org/ 

Although strictly speaking it is a directory rather than an engine, DMOZ.org, or the open directory project, powers the search results of several of the top search engines. It is free to get listed and takes about 3 weeks to get indexed once you submit, then a couple of months for your listing to start showing up on the engines that use DMOZ. The most important thing to try to do is to have a domain name that is high on the alphabetic order (starts with a number or an 'a') and also include your primary keyword phrase - the one most people use to find your site - in your Web site name (title) and its description.

Yahoo --- http://www.yahoo.com/ 

Yahoo has immense reach. Without doubt, you must be in Yahoo. It can bring you up to 50% of your traffic or more! Fortunately, you can now get listed in Yahoo in seven days for a cost of just $199 - often worthwhile. You should get back your investment in a matter of days. The most important thing is to have a domain name that is high on the alphabetic order (starts with a number or an 'a') and also to include your primary keyword phrase - the one most people use to find your site - in your Web site name (title) and its description.

Once you get listed, you should also sign up to have your site become a sponsored site within Yahoo. It costs $25 to $300 or more a month at the time of writing, depending on the category. Sponsored sites appear in a separate, clearly demarcated listing box, located on appropriate category pages in the Directory at the top - which means more traffic.

LookSmart --- http://www.looksmart.com/ 

LookSmart may not be used much directly, but its listings reach over 83% of the Internet through its partner network. Its listings actually reach a much wider audience than Yahoo!. LookSmart currently provides its search solutions to leading Internet portals, 370 ISPs and 600,000 Web sites including the Microsoft Network, AltaVista, Excite@Home, iWon, Time Warner, Sony, British Telecom, US West, AltaVista, Netscape Netcenter and NetZero. Now that is power! Again, without doubt, you must be in LookSmart, and being in it can bring up to 50% of your traffic or more.

Fortunately, you can now be listed in LookSmart in 2 days for a cost of $199 - very worthwhile for what LookSmart will give you. Its partner sites will pick your listing up shortly after you are listed, usually within a few days or weeks. Again it's best to have a domain name that is high on the alphabetic order (starts with a number or an 'a') and also to include your primary keyword phrase in your Web site name and its description.

DirectHit/AskJeeves --- http://www.ask.com/ 

DirectHit/AskJeeves also has a paid text ads system similar to Google's. Your link appears alongside their search results for every search topic you sponsor, right where Ask Jeeves users are looking for the best link to follow. Your link also appears alongside search results on Web sites that participate in the Jeeves Text Sponsorship Network, including MSN, Searchalot, Bomis.com, SuperCyberSearch, and Direct Hit. Your ads appear in a few days and you just need a minimum deposit of $25 to start.


Common Search Links

Bob Jensen's links to electronic literature --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

Free online tutorials in various academic disciplines --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Tutorials

Open Source and Knowledge Sharing Links --- --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

 

Top ranked search engines and meta search engines reviewed at http://www.searchiq.com/ 

Artificial Intelligence Ask Jeeves Artificial Intelligence MIT AI Lab Artificial Intelligence Shallow Red
Products to Companies
Organization Web Addresses
Business Firm Directories
Find and compare book prices
    Glenn Fleishman's ISBN Search

New and used textbook finder DIRECTTEXBOOK --- http://www.directtextbook.com/

Bob Jensen's Bookmarks

Agriculture Search Engine --- Web-agri http://www.web-agri.com/ 


Paid search engines are faring well during our soft online ad market because they are among the few that have successfully aligned the needs of both consumers and marketers, according to new research. http://www.newmedia.com/default.asp?articleID=2893 


The Taxonomy Warehouse is a fantastic search engine in terms of helpful categories (including companies) --- http://www.taxonomywarehouse.com/ 

Professor Tom Hicks offers up the following at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~thicks/  

Database Searching For People
Searching For E-Mail Addresses
Searching For Government Offices & Officials
Searching For Home Pages
Searching For People, Addresses, & Phone Numbers
Reverse LookUp Searching
 
Database Searching For Companies
Searching For Businesses ( Yellow Page)
Searching For E-Mail Addresses
Searching For Government Offices & Officials
Searching For Home Pages
Reverse LookUp Searching
Searching For Toll Free Numbers
When searching for companies, Bob Jensen recommends http://web.realnames.com/Eng/Eng_Corporate_RealNamesHomepage.asp 
Database Searching For General Information
Searching For Area & Country Codes
Searching For E-Mail Addresses
Searching For Employment Opportunities
Searching For Free E-Mail Providers
Searching For Health Care
Searching For Maps & Directions
Searching For Reference Information 
Searching For Software (Freeware, Shareware, Information, etc.)
Searching For Travel Information 

Search for Images on the Web

My favorite search engine, Google, launched an image search engine (in Beta test mode) at http://images.google.com/ 

Also note Google's other options at http://images.google.com/help/features.html 

•Image Search 
•Web Page Translation 
•PhoneBook 
• PDF Files 
• Stock Quotes 
• Cached Links 
• Similar Pages 
• Who links to you? 
• Site Search 
• I'm Feeling Lucky 
• Dictionary Definitions

For example, the search term "accounting" led me (using http://images.google.com/ ) to exciting images of accountants, spreadsheets, etc.

The phrase "Bob Jensen" led me to a picture of me (along with 25 images that were not about me).  One of the images not about me was a page from the Cedar Falls 1959 High School Yearbook.  This suggests how far Google has gone to put images in the image database.

Try the term "Rembrandt" and see what pops up.

The term "porn" leads to the Seal of the President of the United States --- which in context has a link to pledge to protect children from pornography.  There are also some soft porn images even when Google's Mature Content Filter is turned on (the default setting is to turn on this filter).  Google warns that the filter will not necessarily block all pornographic images.

What I am impressed with is how much faster it is to search hits in image form rather than text hits.  A picture is worth 1,000 words.


Use Images to Search for Websites

Search the Web Using Pictorial Images at Ditto.com --- http://www.ditto.com/default.asp 

Ditto's visual search is easy, fun and fast. Through images, Ditto has always provided you an excellent way to visually navigate the richness of the Web. Now we would like to announce a fabulous way to visually find products and services.

It's quite simple. At the top of selected search results pages you will see Featured Products and Services listings from an extraordinary variety of merchants. We think this is a great new way to shop the web. Go ahead, search and give it a try. On Ditto you see what you want to buy!

Our Company -- The Ditto site is a TLS Technologies property. We are the world’s leading visual search engine. Ditto enables people to navigate the Web through pictures. It is far easier for people to find what they are looking for when they are looking at it! Pictures are fun, fast and intuitive.

The premise behind our company is twofold; deliver highly relevant thumbnail images AND the highly relevant web sites underlying these images. In accomplishing this task we have compiled the largest searchable index of visual content on the internet via proprietary processes. These are accessible on our standalone web site or via the web sites of our Visual Search Partners.

Our Market -- The internet is increasingly becoming a visual medium as millions of images are being posted by businesses, schools, organizations and individuals. Visuals provide a unique and well-understood method of accessing information around the world. In addition to providing more relevant information for many searches, visual searching is often more intuitive, interesting and enjoyable to work with than traditional based text search engines. Therefore, as more information is displayed visually, there is a greater need to enhance traditional text-based searches with visually enhanced search. That is where we come in. Market research reveals that experienced Internet users, when exposed to visual search, have an extremely positive response and would refer the site to their friends at a rate substantially above average.

Our Business -- Our web site is a hugely popular destination for visual searching among all age groups, offering advertisers the opportunity to reach their audiences with targeted keyword or category placement. Additionally, our search technology is offered commercially to other sites through licensing partnerships in what we term our "Visual Search Partnerships".

Our Technology -- We believe relevancy is the key difference in our technology, and the following 3 elements are equally important in the overall makeup of that technology:

Indexing: We identify websites containing media via our automated crawler. We then select, rank, weight, filter and rate pictures, illustrations, clipart, photographs, drawings and other image-related material. Next, we index the images from these websites. Finally, these results are ranked and displayed in order of relevance.

Relevance: In order to achieve an exceptional level of relevance to a user’s search, we have developed a proprietary filtering process that combines sophisticated automated filtering with human editors.

Verification: Highly relevant results require ongoing maintenance. We continually review current images and links to ensure that our database contains accurate and up-to-date results.


"Upstream: Video Searching," By David Voss, Technology Review, July/August 2001

With text documents, you can type in a query, and a piece of software finds the matching text strings. Searching video is much tougher. Unless someone has gone back and somehow marked the video data, it's now nearly impossible to find a specific image. A content provider like CNN has more than a hundred thousand hours of tape in its video archive—far too much for any human to view and annotate manually. Now a small but growing number of labs are searching for novel ways to better navigate the video glut.

These are still early days for video indexing and retrieval. A few existing Web search engines like AltaVista can find some video clips, but they only return those that are on Web pages with text that can be searched by keywords. Likewise, San Mateo, CA-based Virage has developed a search engine for ABCNews.com that allows the transcript of a broadcast to be searched; the search, however, is also by keywords, and the video is played from the point at which the specified word occurred. None of these systems provides direct image searches—in other words, a video answer to the command "give me all the clips of an astronaut outside the space station Mir."

Video-search and database tools that directly find images can be far more powerful than keyword searches. At Columbia University, a team led by Shih-Fu Chang is developing software that can search a video for particular features in the images—such as shape, color and motion. For example, you could select a static image from a catalogue and have the software find close matches in the video frames. Or you could make a simple sketch of a blob, with a few arrows to show how it moves, and the system finds video segments that match these features. For instance, you could roughly sketch the shape of the Mir space station and a human figure moving outside it.

This kind of direct image query could be especially useful for large databases of video records. Chang's group has been researching ways to extract information from medical-exam videos. Every year at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, "ten thousand echocardiograms [ultrasound movies of the heart] are performed," he explains. "Each is about a half-hour long, and they get put into a tape library." A cardiologist then has to look up the ultrasound to make a diagnosis, wasting a lot of time fast-forwarding and rewinding through the tape. Much better would be an automatic way of detecting signs of heart ailment in the video stream. Chang's software first parses the ultrasound video into segments by looking for sharp changes in image content—when the view on the ultrasound display is switched to another angle, for instance. Each segment is then processed by a "view recognizer" that matches the images to known images of abnormal events and flags any suspected heart conditions.

At Carnegie Mellon University, researchers are creating a digital library that combines natural-language processing, speech recognition and image analysis. "The integration of these different technologies is the key," says Howard D. Wactlar, director of the Informedia Digital Video Library Project at Carnegie Mellon. A prototype captures news broadcasts from around the world and stores them, along with summaries or storyboards. Someone can then type in a question, or just utter the question aloud: "Tell me about oxygen problems on the Russian space station Mir." All the relevant news clips are displayed as frame icons you can click on. The system is also incorporating face recognition to make it possible to call up all the clips of a particular person (see graphic above).

It will be some time before direct video searches become routine. But if today's research pays off, finding a video needle in the immense multimedia haystack will be no more difficult than typing in a few words—or maybe sketching out a simple image.


Advanced Search Systems

"A Cure for What Ails Search Engines," by Ellen McCarthy, The Washington Post, August 6, 2001 --- http://www.washtech.com/news/emerging/11666-1.html 

Starpond was founded by Terry Bowers and Tom Folkes, a brother-sister team who pooled their talents to bring a functional product to market in under a year. The company's flagship Collaborative Use Research Engine (CURE) is the brainchild of Folkes, an independent computer consultant who had been knocking the idea around in his head for nine years.

CURE operates within a preestablished field of data, professional journals in the student's case, that is customized to fit the needs of a group. When a topic is searched, the system produces a list of results and ranks them by how frequently each is used by others in the group. So, the student would see which journal articles are used most often by other students and professors researching immigration cases.

CURE costs $400 to $5,000 a month to lease, depending on the number of users, range of data sources and amount of customer support the client requires.

Folkes and Bowers believe the system surpasses most research and analysis tools now in use and that it eventually will be used in settings ranging from government think tanks to junior high science classes.

"This so accelerates research and knowledge sharing," said Bowers, the president and chief executive. "We've already seen germs of its ability to affect public policy and foster growth."

"Starpond and WebSurveyor Team to Deliver Next Generation Research Capabilities to WebSurveyor Customers," Web Surveyor, May 8, 2001 --- http://www.websurveyor.com/about_news.asp#SP 

Chevy Chase, MD and Herndon, VA. Starpond, Inc, a leading developer of next generation search technologies and applications, and WebSurveyor, the leading provider of online customer research software and services, today announced a strategic partnership to provide WebSurveyor customers with access to Starpond's newest research tools, including the soon to be released Collaborative Use Research Engine (CURE)™.

WebSurveyor's online services provide business consumers innovative and effective survey technology to acquire actionable knowledge from customers, prospects, employees, partners, students, constituents, and web site visitors. Through its partnership with Starpond, WebSurveyor will add the search capabilities of the CURE™, giving business consumers even more versatility in conducting customer research.

"The CURE™ will help WebSurveyor clients in two significant ways," said WebSurveyor CEO Bruce Mancinelli. "First, it will speed up analyzing responses from open-ended questions, which, depending on the amount of data, may be very time-consuming. Second, by using the technology to discover relationships within and between text responses, WebSurveyor clients will find open-ended responses an even more valuable source of business intelligence. Besides creating added-value to our survey applications, there are endless opportunities for StarPond and WebSurveyor to work together in developing additional unique solutions and services."

Starpond's first product, the CURE combines an advanced search application with high-level knowledge management functionality. This combination provides the ability to create real time parabolic knowledge available from tacit and explicit sources as well as aggregate data that have been mined from the web.

The Starpond homepage is at http://wwwhttp://www.starpond.com/.starpond.com/ 

To enable organizations to gain competitive advantage one needs to have access to relevant comprehensive information and analysis tools to make better decisions, faster.
  • Provide the ability to extract, cleanse, and aggregate data from multiple operational systems into a separate data mart or warehouse.
  • Store data repository to enable rapid delivery of summarized information and drill-down to detail.
  • Deliver personalized, relevant informational views, querying, reporting and analysis capabilities that go beyond the standard reporting capabilities of transaction based systems-a requirement for gaining better business understanding and making better decisions, faster.

A more efficient way to search  the Web's forums and message boards
BoardReader --- http://www.boardreader.com 

BoardReader.com was developed to address the shortcomings of current search engine technology to accurately find and display information contained on the Web’s forums and message boards. Founded in May 2000 by engineers and students from the University of Michigan, Boardreader.com uses proprietary software that allows users to search the forums and message boards in a particular topic area, thus allowing users to share information in a truly global sense...


Search for Library and Reference Databases 

From UC Berkeley
Free Digital Library of Books, Audio, and Films (Thank you Richard Campbell for leading me to this great site)
WayBack Machine --- http://www.archive.org/ 

The Internet Archive, working with Alexa Internet, has created the Wayback Machine. The Wayback Machine makes it possible to surf more than 10 billion pages stored in the Internet Archive's web archive. The Wayback Machine was unveiled on October 24th, 2001 at U.C. Berkeley's Bancroft Library. Visit the Wayback Machine by entering an URL above or clicking on specific collections below

Browse the Internet Archive --- http://www.archive.org/mediatypes-browse.php 

The Internet Archive is collaborating with various collectors, community members, and film-makers to provide easy access to a rich and fascinating core collection of archival films.

  • Prelinger Archives
  • Computer Chronicles  (This is one of my favorite TV shows)
  • Net Café
  • Orphan Films at USC
  • World at War

  • Google Book Search --- http://books.google.com/advanced_book_search 

    Bob Jensen's links to electronic literature  --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm


    New York Public Library's Internet Library --- http://www.ipl.org/ 


    Thousands of reference links from Yahoo --- http://picks.yahoo.com/picks/Reference/ 


    ibrary Journal --- http://www.libraryjournal.com/ 


    Jagdish Gangolly informed me about the free Open Source book links shown below:

    1.  Online books at the Digital Library of U Pennsylvania
    (a real treasure trove) http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/index.html

    2.  If you are interested in old grammar books, Latin & Greek classics and e-books: http://www.textkit.com/index.php


    ComputerScienceWeb http://www.compsciweb.com/compsciweb/show/Index.htt 

    - An integrated search of journal articles and preprints 
    - Services to facilitate research in twelve categories in computer science

    Evaluation of Information Sources --- http://www.vuw.ac.nz/~agsmith/evaln/evaln.htm 

    American Library Association (ALA) --- http://www.ala.org/ 

    Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education --- http://www.ala.org/acrl/ilcomstan.html 

    Association of College and Research Libraries --- http://www.ala.org/acrl/ 

    LibraryThing --- http://www.librarything.com/

    Catalog your books online

    • Easy. Catalog your books online (example); no software required.
    • Powerful. Search the Library of Congress and over thirty major libraries around the world.
    • Free. Enter 200 books for free; lifetime membership $10 (beta special).
    • Tagged. Tag your books as on Flickr and Del.icio.us (example).
    • Shared. Show everyone your library, or keep your library private. You can even put a widget on your blog to show people what you're reading.
    • Safe. LibraryThing's not going away, but you can export your data.
    • Limber. Import data from Delicious Library, Readerware, Amazon Wishlists—virtually anywhere.

    See how it works

     

     

    Legal Searching

    www.legal-definitions.com
    CPAs who need help deciphering “lawyerspeak” can find concise definitions of legal terminology at this e-stop as well as the meaning of general business terms such as bankruptcy.

    www.commerce-database.com
    Need to know the difference between an act of God and an act of nature? The legal terms section of this online business dictionary defines them as one and the same. The Commerce Database categorizes words into separate business and legal dictionaries: The business one offers categories such as accounting.

    www.computer-acronyms.com
    This Web site offers visitors short definitions for technical terminology such as, for example, cable modem. Also users can find brief explanations of acronyms for high-speed Internet concepts such as DSL—digital subscriber line.

    www.legal-database.com
    CPAs interested in legal topics such as bankruptcy, civil rights, employment, labor and tax laws can find various terms explained in the articles section for each category at this Web stop. In addition visitors can register for free monthly newsletters on bankruptcy, employment, family and tax law.

    Also see FindLaw --- http://www.findlaw.com/ 

    Legal Information Databases --- http://www.wlu.ca/~wwwlib/subject/legal/databases.html 

     

    Government

    LinksNet (Government) --- http://www.linxnet.com/gov.html 

    Tom Hicks' Government Links --- http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~thicks/Links/GovtSearch.html 

    Library of Congress Online Catalog --- http://catalog.loc.gov
    FedWorld --- http://www.fedworld.gov/ 
    FirstGov (over 30 million government Web pages) --- http://www.fedworld.gov/firstgov.html 
    U.S. Government Information --- http://www2.lib.udel.edu/subj/godc/database/govdb.htm 
    Government Documents --- http://lib.trinity.edu/servcols/govdocs/ 
    Government Information and Maps --- http://www.lib.ucdavis.edu/govdoc/  
    U.S. Federal Government Gray Literature --- http://www.osti.gov/graylit/ 
    Public Records and by State --- http://www.pac-info.com/ 
    Politics and Government --- http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/multidb.html  
    Also see Yahoo at http://dir.yahoo.com/Government/ 

    Census Information --- http://www.peoplefind.com/frames/freeresources/govdataindex.htm 
    Also see http://www.trinity.edu/mkearl/ 

    Trinity University Library --- http://lib.trinity.edu/ 

    Quest --- New Databases --- http://www.trinity.edu/mkaminsk/new_databases.htm  

    Databases for Trinity Students, Faculty, and Staff --- http://lib.trinity.edu/dbs/dbs.asp 

    eJournals, Electronic Journals --- http://www3.tdnet.com/trinity/ 
    Also see http://sharewareconnection.com/play/402000index.html 

    Ulrich's Periodicals Directory --- http://lib.trinity.edu/dbs//dbs.asp#U 

    Michael Kaminski --- http://www.trinity.edu/mkaminsk/ 

    Research Tips --- http://www.trinity.edu/mkaminsk/research_tips.htm 

    New Databases --- http://www.trinity.edu/mkaminsk/new_databases.htm 

    Information Databases

    Free Database Links --- http://www.docx.com/freedb.htm 

    Multiple International and Historical Databases (including Encyclopedias and Photographs) --- http://www.slco.lib.ut.us/databases.htm 

    Global (Music, Literature, etc.)--- http://www.isop.ucla.edu/lac/bibliography-databases.htm 

    Academic Gateway --- http://datalib.ed.ac.uk/sources.html 

    University of Wisconsin Core Databases and Journals --- http://www.library.wisc.edu/guides/coreguide/corelist.htm 
    Also see http://www.library.wisc.edu/libraries/Instruction/jaid.htm 

    Baker Library (Harvard Business School) Electronic Resources --- http://www.library.hbs.edu/abouta.htm 

    Business Information Databases --- http://www.ficci.com/ficci/Databases/databases.html 

    Biographical Databases --- http://www2.lib.udel.edu/subj/biography/ 

    Biomedical --- http://www.nlm.nih.gov/databases/databases.html 
    Drug Information --- http://matweb.hcuge.ch/Medical_search/Drugs_pharmacology_pharmacy.html 
    Drug Information --- http://www.coreynahman.com/medicalinfodatabases.html 
    Drug Information --- http://library.pbac.edu/drug_information_databases.htm 
    UNC Health Sciences --- http://www.hsl.unc.edu/lm/degrant/introduction.htm 
    Health --- http://chid.nih.gov/ 
    Dorland Healthcare Information --- http://www.healthcare-info.com/database.htm 
    Pesticides --- http://ace.orst.edu/info/npic/tech.htm 

    Business Databases --- http://dir.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Business_to_Business/Information/Databases/ 

    Internet and Information Systems --- http://idrinfo.idrc.ca/ 

    Public Records and by State --- http://www.pac-info.com/ 

    Government Information and Maps --- http://www.lib.ucdavis.edu/govdoc/ 

    Politics and Government --- http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/multidb.html 

    Restaurants and Diets --- http://businesstravel.about.com/cs/restaurants/ 

    Country of Origin and Legal Information --- http://www.unhcr.ch/research/rsd.htm 

    Internet Public Library (from the University of Michigan) --- http://www.ipl.org/ 
    20,000 electronic texts, and an annotated guide to web sites

    Bob Jensen's Guide to Economic Statistics --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm#EconStatistics 
    Economic and Demographic Statistics --- http://www.pac-info.com/ 
    From New Zealand (Statistical Information Databases) --- http://www2.auckland.ac.nz/lbr/stats/webpages/statsdb.htm 
    Baker Library (Harvard Business School) Electronic Resources --- http://www.library.hbs.edu/abouta.htm  

    Sociology Databases and Other Great Links --- http://www.trinity.edu/mkearl/ 

    Bob Jensen's Bookmarks --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob.htm 

    Primary Sources 

    Enter "Primary Sources" into Exact Phrase at http://www.google.com/advanced_search 

    ORB --- http://orb.rhodes.edu/library.html 

    Gray Literature (hard to find documents)

    Enter "Gray Literature" into Exact Phrase at http://www.google.com/advanced_search 

    U.S. Federal Government Gray Literature --- http://www.osti.gov/graylit/ 

    Shareware and eBooks ---  http://sharewareconnection.com/play/402000index.html 

    Some Other Free Sites Noted at http://www.techlearning.com/db_area/archives/TL/2002/03/inservice.html 

    Encyclopedia.com --- http://www.encyclopedia.com 
    contains more than 50,000 articles. In addition, it links to Electric Library, mentioned above.

    Internet Public Library --- http://www.ipl.org 
    or IPL, was one of the first public libraries "of and for the Internet community." Some available collections are general reference, associations, literary criticism, newspapers, youth, and teens.

    Library of Congress Online Catalog --- http://catalog.loc.gov 
    records represent the holdings of the library, including books, computer files, manuscripts, cartographic materials, music, sound recordings, and visual materials; it also includes searching aids for users.

    Yahoo --- http://www.yahoo.com/ 


    Search for Terms on Book Pages
    The Absolutely Fantastic New Search Tool From Amazon

    Amazon’s ability to search through millions of book pages to unearth any tidbit is part of a search revolution that will change us all.
    Steven Levy, MANBC, November 10, 2003 --- http://www.msnbc.com/news/987697.asp?0dm=s118k 

    Hints from Bob Jensen

    • Be sure you note the Previous Page and the Next Page options when you bring up a page of text.

    • Note the option at the top to "See all references" to your search term within a given book (this is a wonderful search utility).

    • When you hit the end of the allowed pages of reading, you might be able to find a phrase on that last page that you can enter as a search term.  I've done this and have been able to bring up another five pages, etc.  This is a cumbersome way that one might read large portions of the book.  However, soon Amazon puts up a message that you have reached a limit of your searches on the book and will deny you further searches.  This software is amazingly sophisticated.

    • The pages are scanned pages and will sometimes show images as well as text in the original colors.  For example, search for "gnp graph" and note the second hit to The Third World Atlas by Alan Thomas.

    Beginning October 23, 2003, Amazon.com offers a text search of entire contents of millions of pages of books, including new books ---
    http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/10197021/ref%3Dsib%5Fmerch%5Fgw/104-3984945-7813514 

    How It Works --- http://snurl.com/BookSearch 
    A significant extension of our groundbreaking Look Inside the Book feature, Search Inside the Book allows you to search millions of pages to find exactly the book you want to buy. Now instead of just displaying books whose title, author, or publisher-provided keywords that match your search terms, your search results will surface titles based on every word inside the book. Using Search Inside the Book is as simple as running an Amazon.com search. 

    Note from Jensen
    Be sure you note the Previous Page and the Next Page options when you bring up a page of text.


    Soon to be the largest scholarly library in the world:
    Google Book Search --- http://books.google.com/advanced_book_search 

    "Amazon's Text Search Feature Helps Boosts Sales of Some Books," bu Nick Wingfield, The Wall Street Journal, October 31, 2003 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB106755615055816900,00.html?mod=technology_main_whats_news 

    Amazon.com Inc. said a new program that allows customers to search the contents of some books has boosted sales growth by 9% for titles in the program above other titles that can't be searched.

    The news from the Seattle-based Internet retailer suggests that concerns among some book publishers that the search service might hurt sales haven't materialized. Amazon last Thursday introduced the service, called Search Inside the Book, which gave its customers a way to scour complete copies of 120,000 books from 190 publishers, a major advance over the searches customers were previously limited to, such as searches by title and author name.

    Some book publishers have stayed out of the new Amazon search service because of concerns that users can easily scan Amazon's electronic copies instead of buying the books. In the days since the service launched though, Amazon monitored sales of 120,000 book titles that can be searched through its new service and says growth in sales of those books significantly outpaced the growth of all other titles on the site. Amazon said 37 additional publishers have contacted the company since the search service launched asking to have their books included in the program.

    "It's helping people find things they couldn't otherwise find," Steve Kessel, vice president of Amazon's North American books, music and video group, said in an interview. "There are people who love authors and who are finding things, not just by the author, but about the author."

    Although its customers can search entire books with the new service, Amazon has restrictions that limit the ability to browse entire books online. Once a user clicks to a book page containing terms that they've search for -- "Gulf War," for instance -- Amazon doesn't let them browse more than two pages forward or back. Users may jump to other pages containing the terms, but the same restrictions on browsing apply.

    Search technology is becoming an increasingly important focus for Amazon and for online shopping in general. The company recently established a new division in Silicon Valley, called A9, which is developing searching technology for finding products to purchase on the Internet. (See article.) The project is getting underway at a time when more shoppers are using search engines like Google and comparison shopping sites like BizRate.com to locate products.

    Amazon has a head start on another big Internet company in the book search department. Google Inc. is also talking to publishers about allowing searches of the contents of books, according to people familiar with the matter. A Google spokesman declined to comment.



    Open Content Sites Allow You to Add and Edit Content and Share

    Bob Jensen's links to electronic literature --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

    Free online tutorials in various academic disciplines --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Tutorials

    Open Source and Knowledge Sharing Links --- --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

    Aaron Konstam mentioned the following open source (search, encyclopedia, history, culture, science) link --- http://www.wikipedia.org/ 

    Wikipedia is a multilingual project to create a complete and accurate open content encyclopedia. We started on 15 January 2001 and are already working on 99391 articles in the English version. Visit the help page and experiment in the sandbox to learn how you can edit any article right now 

    Philosophy, Mathematics, Natural Science

    Astronomy and astrophysics - Biology - Chemistry - Earth science - Mathematics - Philosophy - Physics - Statistics

    Applied Arts and Sciences

    Agriculture - Architecture - Business and industry - Communication - Computer science - Education - Engineering - Family and consumer science - Health science - Law - Library and information science - Public affairs - Technology - Transport

    Social Sciences

    Anthropology - Archaeology - Economics - Geography - History - History of science and technology - Language - Linguistics - Political science - Psychology - Sociology

    Culture

    Classics - Cooking - Dance - Entertainment - Film - Games - Handicraft - Hobbies - Literature - Music - Opera - Painting - Recreation - Religion - Sculpture - Sports - Theater - Tourism - Visual arts and design

    Other Category Schemes

    About our category schemes - Library of Congress catalog - Dewey Decimal System - Wikipedia arranged by topic - Historical timeline - Calendar - Reference tables - Biographies - Current events

    Bob Jensen's search helpers are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm 


    Librarian's Index to the Internet --- http://lii.org/ 

    Arts - Architecture | Museums | Performing | more...
    Automobiles - Motorcycles
    Business - Investing | Taxes | more...
    California - Government & Politics | - San Francisco Bay Area | - Southern California | - more...
    Computers - Software | Viruses | more...
    Cultures (World) - Anthropology | Africa | Asia | Europe | LatA | MidE | NorA
    Disabled - more...
    Education - Distance | K-12 | Colleges | Aid | more...
    Families - Best places | Homes
    Food - Recipes | Restaurants | more...
    Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual
    Geography - more...
    Government - Federal | International | more...
    Health - Diseases | Nutrition | more...
    History - Genealogy | Ancient | Medieval | Military | U.S.
    Images - Clip Art, Graphics, Pictures
    Internet - E-mail | Evaluating | Filtering | Training | more...
    Jobs - Listings | Resumes | more...
    Kids - Fun | Health | Homework | Net Safety | Parents | Teachers
    Language - English | Spanish | more...
    Law - Censorship | Copyright | Crime | more...
    Libraries - Public | for Librarians
    Literature - Authors | Genres | Publishers | more...
    Media - News | Newspapers | Periodicals | Radio | TV
    Medicine - Diseases | more...
    Men - Health
    Music - Jazz | Lyrics | Rock | more...
    Organizations - Associations | Nonprofits
    People - Collected Biographies
    Politics - Elections | more...
    Recreation - Games | Gardening | Movies | Outdoor | Pets | more...
    Reference Desk - Almanacs | Dictionaries | Holidays | Phone Books | Statistics | more...
    Religion & Philosophy - Christianity | Islam | Judaism | Mythology | Philosophy | more...
    Science - Animals | Astronomy | Environment | Math | Technology | more...
    Searching the Internet - more...
    Seniors
    Sports - Baseball | Olympics | Tennis | more...
    Travel - Lodgings | Places | Transportation | more...
    Weather - Tides | more...
    Women - Health | History | Politics | Studies

    Library Links from EServer --- http://eserver.org/library/ 


    Bob Jensen's threads on electronic books and electronic libraries --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm 

    LibrarySpot:  Your gateway to knowledge --- http://www.libraryspot.com/ 
    Many links to free encyclopedias, dictionaries, statistics, and much more

    ebrary  (full-text search of hundreds of business and economics books) --- http://learningnetwork.ebrary.com/

    ebrary's solutions include:

    eContent Distribution – We give publishers the ability to tap the Internet to increase sales and distribution.

    ebrarian™ – Our ebrarian solution helps online community aggregators retain customers, create eCommerce opportunities and build brands.

    ebrarian Pro – Fast and accurate, ebrarian Pro helps libraries and information professionals make the business of performing research easy and cost effective.

    ebrarian A+ – For eLearning properties, ebrarian A+ makes word-level content interaction a reality, generating new comprehension and commerce opportunities.
      

    Bob Jensen's threads on electronic books http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm 

    Search helpers from the Harvard Business School http://www.library.hbs.edu/ 

    Real humans will also help you find what your looking for at Ask an Expert http://www.libraryspot.com/askanexpert.htm 

    Dear Professor Jensen:

    Hello from LibrarySpot.com. Thanks for your links to our site! I realize that you have a multitude of links on your pages, but I wanted to let you know that we have updated our Maps and Medical sections and they now have new URLs in case you'd like to update - http://www.libraryspot.com/maps/  and http://www.libraryspot.com/medical/  respectively. The links are on your page here: http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm .

    If you haven't been to LibrarySpot lately, you should stop by for a visit. We've added many new resources. Also, you might be interested in several of our other "spots" - GovSpot.com ( http://www.govspot.com ) simplifies the search for government resources online and our new "spot" HeadlineSpot.com ( http://www.headlinespot.com ) is a one stop shop for thousands of the best U.S. and international news sources online.

    Anyway, thanks again!

    Have a great weekend.

    Stephanie Benes LibrarySpot.com   http://www.libraryspot.com 


    From Syllabus News on July 31, 2001 --- ebrary

    ebrary and Learning Network Launch Public Beta

    ebrary and Learning Network recently launched the first public beta of ebrarian, ebrary's new e-content solution for partners and customers. The co-branded site is available now at http://learningnetwork.ebrary.com . Using a model similar to photocopying, Learning Network visitors pay only to print or copy the information they need. Searching and browsing are free, and there are no membership or subscription fees. Learning Net- work has also customized ebrary InfoTools to link users to relevant information on the Infoplease site. With InfoTools, any word or phrase a user selects can link to research mater- ials such as articles, definitions, biographical information, and statistics.

    Bob Jensen's threads on electronic libraries and books can be found at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm 


    From Syllabus e-News on August 21, 2001

    Questia 2.0 Nearly Doubles the Size of Its Collection

    Recently, Questia—provider of an online library complete with search and writing tools--launches its version 2.0. Version 2.0 includes a collection of more than 60,000 full-text titles— nearly double the size of its version 1.0 collection launched January 2001. Version 2.0 also improves Questia's tools, which enable users to personalize books by electronically highlighting and making notes in them and to write better papers by automatically creating footnotes and bibliographies in various for- mats. New features include new tools for subscribers, including an automatic view of the most recently used books, a personal bookshelf for storing and retrieving favorite books, and a customizable home page; re-organization of tools and functions around the three main areas of search, read, and work to improve the site's usability; and faster search and navigation between books and within books. The Questia service is also useful, both as a source for teaching materials and as an effective anti-plagiarism tool. Using the search function to look for a phrase, professors can check a student's paper for material copied but not cited.  For more information, visit http://www.questia.com .

    As of November 2002,  Questia claims to be "The World's Largest Online Library."


    LiveRef(sm): A Registry of Real-Time Digital Reference Services 
    http://www.public.iastate.edu/~CYBERSTACKS/LiveRef.htm
     


    Foster Business Library --- http://www.lib.washington.edu/business/bizweb/ 


    Searching for Book Table of Contents
    I like to search for book contents at http://www.lib.uwo.ca/newalpha.shtml 

    Electronic Books, Poems, Videos, and Journals


    Thank you Paula.  The links at refdesk.com look great.  It even has an "Ask Bob" form to provide expert help in finding reference material.  This is a great alternative to LibrarySpot.  

    Bob,

    You may already know about this, but I couldn't find it on your website of search helpers.

    http://www.refdesk.com  The single best source for facts on the Net 

    In addition to the website, you can subscribe to "Today's Reference Pick of the Day" which is always interesting (see example below).

    Paula

    Paula Kelley Ward Development Information Systems Manager Trinity University, San Antonio Texas Phone 210.999.7432 FAX 210.999.7433 Benefactor 5.0, Colleague 16.0 PWard@Trinity.edu 

    A tremendous listing of glossaries can be found at http://info.uibk.ac.at/c/c6/c613/termlogy/lspgloss.html 

    Bob Jensen's links to glossaries can be found at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/245gloss.htm 


    Hi Professor Jensen!

    I have just visited your site http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/acrobat.htm  and liked it very much, especially your list of international search engines.

    Here is another search engine for your page:

    Multimeta: ( http://www.multimeta.com/ )

    This is a fast meta search engine (simultaneous searches in the major search engines, free URL submission service).

    There is even an e-mail feature that allows to receive the search results by e-mail.

    Best regards,

    Mehul Trivedi
    mehul_trivedi@yahoo.com  


    Hello Dr. Jensen,

    I would appreciate it if you would consider ABYZ News Links for inclusion as a link on your website on the page http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob3.htm   under the heading  "Newspapers/Magazines".

    ABYZ News Links at http://www.abyznewslinks.com/  contains links to more than 17,000 newspapers and other news sources from around the world.

    Some of the notable features of ABYZ News Links follow: -It is large, well organized, detailed, and accurate. -The emphasis is on strong content. -It is particularly strong in non-English news media. -Simple design aids quick downloading of the site. -Links are checked regularly with a link checking program resulting in a much lower than average link failure rate. -The site is worked upon and updated daily.

    I believe ABYZ News Links would be a very useful resource for your website visitors. Thank you for considering it for inclusion on your site.

    Sincerely, 
    Marv Carlson 
    ABYZ News Links
    Marv Carlson
    [marvcarlson@home.com

    Reply from Janet Flatley

    Dear Mr. Carlson:

    I was intrigued by your letter to Professor Robert Jensen (published in http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book01q3.htm concerning ABYZ News Links. I thought it might be a link I could use in my work. Before I checked the links, however, I tried the search engine. Unfortunately, it had less than impressive results. When I asked for "George Bush," the following were representative results. Although I will bookmark you site for the news links, I was disappointed that the search engine was less than useful.

    Sincerely,

    Janet Flatley, CPA


    Audio Searching

    Bob Jensen's links to electronic literature (including audio and video) --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

    From MIT:  New Video Lecture Search Engine --- http://web.sls.csail.mit.edu/lectures/ 
    Watch the video demo at
    --- http://web.sls.csail.mit.edu/lectures/

    "Searching Video Lectures A tool from MIT finds keywords so that students can efficiently review lectures," by Kate Greene, MIT's Technology Review, November 26, 2007 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19747/?nlid=686&a=f

    Researchers at MIT have released a video and audio search tool that solves one of the most challenging problems in the field: how to break up a lengthy academic lecture into manageable chunks, pinpoint the location of keywords, and direct the user to them. Announced last month, the MIT Lecture Browser website gives the general public detailed access to more than 200 lectures publicly available though the university's OpenCourseWare initiative. The search engine leverages decades' worth of speech-recognition research at MIT and other institutions to convert audio into text and make it searchable.

    The Lecture Browser arrives at a time when more and more universities, including Carnegie Mellon University and the University of California, Berkeley, are posting videos and podcasts of lectures online. While this content is useful, locating specific information within lectures can be difficult, frustrating students who are accustomed to finding what they need in less than a second with Google.

    "This is a growing issue for universities around the country as it becomes easier to record classroom lectures," says Jim Glass, research scientist at MIT. "It's a real challenge to know how to disseminate them and make it easier for students to get access to parts of the lecture they might be interested in. It's like finding a needle in a haystack."

    The fundamental elements of the Lecture Browser have been kicking around research labs at MIT and places such as BBN Technologies in Boston, Carnegie Mellon, SRI International in Palo Alto, CA, and the University of Southern California for more than 30 years. Their efforts have produced software that's finally good enough to find its way to the average person, says Premkumar Natarajan, scientist at BBN. "There's about three decades of work where many fundamental problems were addressed," he says. "The technology is mature enough now that there's a growing sense in the community that it's time [to test applications in the real world]. We've done all we can in the lab."

    A handful of companies, such as online audio and video search engines Blinkx and EveryZing (which has licensed technology from BBN) are making use of software that converts audio speech into searchable text. (See "Surfing TV on the Internet" and "More-Accurate Video Search".) But the MIT researchers faced particular challenges with academic lectures. For one, many lecturers are not native English speakers, which makes automatic transcription tricky for systems trained on American English accents. Second, the words favored in science lectures can be rather obscure. Finally, says Regina Barzilay, professor of computer Science at MIT, lectures have very little discernable structure, making them difficult to break up and organize for easy searching. "Topical transitions are very subtle," she says. "Lectures aren't organized like normal text."

    To tackle these problems, the researchers first configured the software that converts the audio to text. They trained the software to understand particular accents using accurate transcriptions of short snippets of recorded speech. To help the software identify uncommon words--anything from "drosophila" to "closed-loop integrals"--the researchers provided it with additional data, such as text from books and lecture notes, which assists the software in accurately transcribing as many as four out of five words. If the system is used with a nonnative English speaker whose accent and vocabulary it hasn't been trained to recognize, the accuracy can drop to 50 percent. (Such a low accuracy would not be useful for direct transcription but can still be useful for keyword searches.)
     

    Once again, the Lecture Browser link (with a video demo) is at http://web.sls.csail.mit.edu/lectures/

    Find free video lectures from leading universities at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

    MIT's Video Lecture Search Engine: Watch the video at --- http://web.sls.csail.mit.edu/lectures/
    Researchers at MIT have released a video and audio search tool that solves one of the most challenging problems in the field: how to break up a lengthy academic lecture into manageable chunks, pinpoint the location of keywords, and direct the user to them. Announced last month, the MIT
    Lecture Browser website gives the general public detailed access to more than 200 lectures publicly available though the university's OpenCourseWare initiative. The search engine leverages decades' worth of speech-recognition research at MIT and other institutions to
    convert audio into text and make it searchable.
    Kate Greene, MIT's Technology Review, November 26, 2007 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19747/?nlid=686&a=f
    Once again, the Lecture Browser link (with video) is at http://web.sls.csail.mit.edu/lectures/
    Bob Jensen's search helpers are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm

    Find free video lectures from free universities at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

    Listen to the classics:  Download audio books from the NY Public Library
    The New York Public Library announced Monday that it is making 700 books _ from classics to current best sellers _ available to members in digital audio form for downloading onto PCs, CD players and portable listening devices.
    "N.Y. Public Library Starts Digital Library," The Washington Post, June 13, 2005 ---
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/13/AR2005061301093.html?referrer=email

    Audio Speeches from Past Leaders and Famous People (the entire set of recordings is too large to make available online)
    The voices include every U.S. president since Herbert Hoover, foreign leaders from Charles de Gaulle to Corazon Aquino, scientists like Jacques Cousteau and Carl Sagan, entertainers like Joan Baez and Cecil B. DeMille. They are all part of a collection of speeches spanning nearly 100 years recently acquired from the Commonwealth Club by the Hoover Institution
    "Commonwealth Club archives feature key 20th-century voices," Stanford Magazine --- http://www.stanfordalumni.org/news/magazine/2004/marapr/show/archives.html 
    Some audio clips are available at http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/06/17/MN157028.DTL 
    Other links about these recordings are available at http://www-hoover.stanford.edu/hila/cwclub.htm 

     

    I found an excellent search engine for audio and video clips called singingfish - http://www.singingfish.com  I did a search for "Worldcom accounting" and found an interview by an NPR commentator and Denny Beresford. It would be easy to supplement an accounting lecture with appropriate sound bites from a variety of sources.
    Richard Campbell, e-Mail Message on March 25, 2004
    Bob Jensen's audio search helpers are at 

    Audio and Video Lectures on Demand --- http://eserver.org/lectures/  

    Listen to past arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court 
    Years ago I made the Wow Site of the Week the Oyez site at Northwestern University.  Under funding from the U.S. Government, the Oyez site enabled anyone in the world to download the audio of actual oral arguments of lawyers standing before the U.S. Supreme Court --- http://www.oyez.org/oyez/frontpage 

    Messages and helpers for audio electronic books can be found at various points in http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm 


    Question
    How and where can you download audio electronic books?

    Answer
    The Guardian has a nice March 18, 2004 summary --- http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,1171197,00.html 

    Links

    Audible
    www.audible.com
    PayPerListen
    www.payperlisten.com
    Time Warner Digital Audio Books
    www.mytimewarneraudio.com
    Audio books free
    www.audiobooksforfree.com
    Richmond-Upon-Thames libraries: eBooks
    http://www.richmond.gov.uk/depts/opps/eal/leisure/libraries/pn/ebooks/eaudio/default.htm  


    That sound you hear is audio e-books, magazines and newspapers clamoring for attention.

    "Audio E-Books Seek a Buzz," by M.J. Rose, Wired News, November 27, 2001 --- http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,48620,00.html 

    Audible's on-demand audio files include top national newspapers and magazines, and both classic and best-selling novels. They offer more than 32,000 hours of audio programs and 165 content partners.

    Audible hopes the campaign, appropriately called Spread the Word, will increase its customer base by 60,000 to 90,000 users.

    To achieve this goal, Audible has sent marketing kits to about 30,000 of its most dedicated customers. In return for their customers' free marketing efforts, Audible will give away free audio files and $5,000 worth of tech prizes.

    Spread the Words builds on the customer-referral volume the company has experienced informally.

    "Our current customers have already played an essential role in our rapid growth, which has almost tripled our customer base within a year," said Donald Katz, CEO of Audible, Inc.

    Customers who spread the word about Audible deserve to be rewarded, Katz said. In fact the kernel of the Spread the Words idea came from a customer and shareholder.

     


    Search for Patterns in Text

    TextArc: An Alternate Way to View a Text http://www.textarc.org/ 

    TextArc is a visual represention of a text—the entire text (twice!) on a single page. Some funny combination of an index, concordance, and summary, it uses the viewer's eye to help uncover meaning. A more detailed overview is available.

    Rarely do value, aesthetics and innovation come together so effectively. It shows what can happen when designers go beyond thinking about displays as just electronic paper. —Bill Buxton Chief Scientist, Alias|Wavefront & SGI [TextArc] frees you to see the text in a nonlinear way, and to make connections that you would not have otherwise made. It makes a text richer and more interpretable. —Bruce Ferguson Dean, Columbia University School of the Arts

    TextArc evolves from an academic tool into a full-fledged work of digital art. ... This is the reading process made visible. As the eye arrives at each word, it glows in the mind while generating a skein of other associations, similar to what happens when one reads a book. Then it lingers a bit before receding from consciousness. And all the while, the greater whole of the story is present in the imagination and beautifully vivid on the screen. (Here's the whole article.) —Matthew Mirapaul Arts Columnist, The New York Times

    Really enjoyed hearing your ideas and seeing your work. Your multivalent approach is rare and welcome. I look forward to seeing more anytime. —Larry Rinder Curator, The Whitney Biennial & Bitstreams

    TextArc is just taking its first steps with the site launch on Monday, April 15. There are major new releases just around the corner, including the ability to search for word associations in any text, some real-world applications, and fine art prints that make it possible for you to live with what's been called a "mindprint" of your favorite work. Please drop a note to email-list@textarc.org and we'll keep you informed. (This list will never be sold or used for purposes unrelated to TextArc; and the e-mail update is free, of course.)

     


    A review of accounting software (commercial not academic apps) http://www.cfo.com/buyers_guide/index_article.html 


    High-End Accounting Software Vendors http://www.cfo.com/buyers_guide/high_end_chart_1.html 
    Search the high-end packages that generally target companies with revenues over $100 million. Vendors are listed by the integrated functions, integrated manufacturing, Internet functions, platform, and pricing.

    Midrange Accounting Software Vendors http://www.cfo.com/buyers_guide/mid_range_chart_1.html
    Search the midrange packages that generally target companies with revenues under $100 million, and find which vendors offer the right mix of functions and compatibility.

    For other accounting software links, go to http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm 


    PERSONALIZED TECH SEARCH SERVICE http://cgi.zdnet.com/slink?90948:270084


    Electronic Books s

    Electronic Books, Poems, Videos, and Journals

    Bob Jensen's links to electronic literature --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

    e-Book devices --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm 

    Bob Jensen's threads on electronic books are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm

    Glossaries, Dictionaries, Encyclopedias, Thesauruses, and Writing Helpers --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries

    Video Poetry --- http://www.favoritepoem.org/thevideos/index.html
    Includes Hillary Clinton reading The Makers --- http://www.favoritepoem.org/thevideos/hclinton.html
    Click down hard on the picture to commence the video reading!

    Folkstreams.net (Videos) --- http://www.folkstreams.net/
    Film Titles --- http://www.folkstreams.net/pub/FilmsByTitle.php

    Open Source Movies (free downloads) http://www.archive.org/details/opensource_movies

     

    The University of Virginia's E-Book Library --- http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/ebooks/subjects/subjects.html

    Carnegie Mellon University's Universal Library --- http://www.ulib.org/html/

    University of Adelaide Library’s collection of Web books --- http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/

    Project Gutenberg --- http://www.promo.net/pg/
    Project Gutenberg is the brainchild of Michael Hart, who in 1971 decided that it would be a really good idea if lots of famous and important texts were freely available to everyone in the world. Since then, he has been joined by hundreds of volunteers who share his vision. Now, more than thirty years later, Project Gutenberg has the following figures (as of November 8th 2002): 203 New eBooks released during October 2002, 1975 New eBooks produced in 2002 (they were 1240 in 2001) for a total of 6267 Total Project Gutenberg eBooks. 119 eBooks have been posted so far by Project Gutenberg of Australia.

    All Free Magazines (links to free magazines) --- http://www.all-freemagazines.com/mag.html
    These are classified by subject matter.
    Many are offer free trial subscriptions for one year.

    knowledgerrush (a variety of online literature categorized by topic) --- http://www.knowledgerush.com/kr/jsp/db/directory.jsp

    LiteratureMania.com --- http://www.literaturemania.com/

    Audio Resources for Literature --- http://www.nt.armstrong.edu/audio.htm

    Altered Books --- http://www.logolalia.com/alteredbooks/
    Altered Books --- http://www.art-e-zine.co.uk/alteredbook.html
    Altered Books Index --- http://karenswhimsy.com/altered-books/index.htm

    New Online Dictionary ---  http://www.elook.org/dictionary/ 

    Enter "Rare Books" into the exact phrase box at http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en

    Rare Book Room --- http://www.rarebookroom.org/  

    Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America --- http://www.abaa.org/books/abaa/index.html

    BookFinder online textbook aggregator http://www.bookfinder.com
    Compares prices and shipping costs of alternative sellers of hard copy textbooks.

    Find rare and used books on BiblioFind ---
    http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/subst/books/misc/bibliofind.html/104-2407774-3526314

    G.J. Askins Bookseller --- http://www.abebooks.com/home/ASKINSBOOKSTORE/


    Trade In Your Books for Other Books

     

     

    Donating Used Textbooks --- http://www.nationalserviceresources.org/node/17645
     

    Swap Books Online
    USA Today, February 14, 2006 --- http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-02-14-book-sharing_x.htm
    BookMooch --- http://www.bookmooch.com/
    Also see the message blog at http://1389moblog.blogspot.com/2007/10/bookmooch-social-network-for-people-who.html
     

    BookMooch allows you to trade books on your shelf for other books --- http://bookmooch.com/

    "Only minutes after creating a list of books I am willing to give away on Bookmooch, I already had enough points to request free books from others. Tomorrow, I am mailing two complete strangers some old books. And four strangers have promised to send me books I was planning to buy on Amazon. An excellent trade! Bookmooch works!"
    - Solana Larsen (a BookMooch member)
    See Joanne Kaufman, "Clear the Bookshelf and Fill It Up Again, All Online," The New York Times, October 15, 2007 --- Click Here


    Paperback Swap --- http://www.paperbackswap.com/press_media/press_media_detail.php?id=30
    Campus Book Swap --- http://www.campusbookswap.org/index.asp
    Bookins Book Exchaznge --- http://www.airnyc.org/info/Bookins-Book-Exchange-61303.html
    There are many, many other "Book Swap" alternatives on a Google search

    March 27, 2007 message from Tina Bungert [tina.bungert@hitflip.de]

    . . . I would like to introduce you to our service and web site Hitflip that might be an interesting addition to your links for books and education. Hitflip is a community to swap used books and other original media. It is therefore an easy and cheap alternative to the existing online book stores. You can find hitflip at http://www.hitflip.de  .
    The just recently launched English version can be found at
    http://www.hitflip.co.uk

    You can also sell used books and other products on Amazon.com ---
    http://www.amazon.com/gp/seller-account/mm-summary-page.html?ie=UTF8&topic=200257910

    And there's eBay --- http://hub.ebay.com/buy

    And there's CraigsList --- http://www.craigslist.org/about/sites.html

     




    Books

    Book--- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookselling

    Center for History of the Book --- http://www.hss.ed.ac.uk/chb/

    Find Books to Read

    Bob Jensen's threads on free electronic literature --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

    Best Selling Books --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_selling_books

    "Amazon Lights the Fire With Free BooksL  Today, Amazon unveiled something radical: the Kindle Lending Library," by David Pogue, The New York Times, November 2, 2011 ---
    http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/03/amazon-lights-the-fire-with-free-books/ 

    Especially for Children --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm#Children

    Choices Reading Lists --- http://www.reading.org/resources/booklists.aspx

    Goodreads --- http://www.goodreads.com/

    The Book Cover Archive --- http://bookcoverarchive.com/

    Lesson Planet: Poetry Lesson Plans --- http://www.lessonplanet.com/search?keywords=poetry&media=lesson

    Reading Rockets: Literary Resources for Teachers --- http://www.readingrockets.org/audience/teachers/

    Frequently Challenged Books --- http://www.ala.org/advocacy/banned/frequentlychallenged

    The Harvard Classics: A Free, Digital Collection --- Click Here
    http://www.openculture.com/2011/07/the_harvard_classics_a_free_digital_collection.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29

    The University of Michigan Digital Humanities Series ---
     http://www.digitalculture.org/books/book-series/digital-humanities-series/

    Free eBooks
    "How to Download Free Ebooks With just a little searching, you can find and download free, legal ebooks for your e-reader, smartphone, or tablet," by Michael King, PC World,  Oct 15, 2011 ---

    http://www.pcworld.com/article/241717/how_to_download_free_ebooks.html#tk.nl_wbx_t_crawl2

    Digital Public Library of America --- http://dp.la/

    Google Book Search --- http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2010/08/books-of-world-stand-up-and-be-counted.html

    "Google's Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars," by Geoffrey Nunberg, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 31, 2010 ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/Googles-Book-Search-A/48245/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

    Hundreds of Other links --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

    Lost Titles, Forgotten Rhymes: How to Find a Novel, Short Story, or Poem Without Knowing its Title or Author --- http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/lost/

    "QuickWire: Top 10 Trends in Academic Libraries," by Jennifer Howard, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 16, 2011 ---
    http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/quickwire-top-10-trends-in-academic-libraries/31796?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

    eBook Readers --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Ebooks.htm


    Frequently Challenged Books --- http://www.ala.org/advocacy/banned/frequentlychallenged
    Note the "Statistics" link --- http://www.ala.org/advocacy/banned/frequentlychallenged/stats

    The ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) receives reports from libraries, schools, and the media on attempts to ban books in communities across the country. We compile lists of challenged books in order to inform the public about censorship efforts that affect libraries and schools. Explore the 30 Years of Liberating Literature timeline, Banned/Challenged Classics, Frequently Challenged Books of the 21st Century, 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books by Decade, and the Most Frequently Challenged Authors pages of the 21st Century. The ALA condemns censorship and works to ensure free access to information. For more information on ALA's efforts to raise awareness of censorship and promote the freedom to read, please explore Banned Books Week.

    We do not claim comprehensiveness in recording challenges as research suggests that for each challenge reported there are as many as four or five that go unreported. In addition, OIF has only been collecting data about banned banned books since 1990, so we do not have any lists of frequently challenged books or authors before that date.

    How is the list of most challenged books tabulated?

    The Office for Intellectual Freedom collects information from two sources: newspapers and reports submitted by individuals, some of whom use the Challenge Reporting Form. All challenges are compiled into a database. Reports of challenges culled from newspapers across the country are compiled in the bimonthly Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom (published by the ALA, $50 per year for a digital subscription); those reports are then compiled in the Banned Books Week Resource Guide. Challenges reported to the ALA by individuals are kept confidential. In these cases, ALA will release only the title of the book being challenged, the state and the type of institution (school, public library). The name of the institution and its town will not be disclosed.

    Where can you find more information on why a particular book was banned?

    • Visit your local public library and ask your librarian.
    • Find or purchase the latest Banned Books Week Resource Guide, updated every three years, which may be available at or through your local public library.
    • E-mail the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom to ask about a specific book. A staff member will reply with any information the office has on file. Please limit your inquiry to one book. If you would like information on more than one book, please consider purchasing the Banned Books Week Resource Guide.
    • See Banned and Challenged Classics.
    • Check out the Banned Books Week > Ideas & Resources > Free Downloads page where you can find the yearly Books Challenged or Banned Lists that contain more information on why a book was challenged.

    If the information you need is not listed in the links to the left, please feel free to contact the Office for Intellectual Freedom at (800) 545-2433, ext. 4220, or oif@ala.org.

    Bob Jensen's threads on free electronic literature ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

     

     


    Donate or Swap Books --- Click Here

    2009 WebWise Conference on Libraries and Museums in the Digital World http://www.tvworldwide.com/events/webwise/090226/

    FindBook --- http://www.ufindbook.com/tags/Electronic Literature-1.html


    Book Finders

    Lost Titles, Forgotten Rhymes: How to Find a Novel, Short Story, or Poem Without Knowing its Title or Author ---
    http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/lost/


    Google Books --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Book_Search

    Google's Book Search --- http://books.google.com/

    "Google's Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars," by Geoffrey Nunberg, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 31, 2010 ---
    http://chronicle.com/article/Googles-Book-Search-A/48245/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

    Whether the Google books settlement passes muster with the U.S. District Court and the Justice Department, Google's book search is clearly on track to becoming the world's largest digital library. No less important, it is also almost certain to be the last one. Google's five-year head start and its relationships with libraries and publishers give it an effective monopoly: No competitor will be able to come after it on the same scale. Nor is technology going to lower the cost of entry. Scanning will always be an expensive, labor-intensive project. Of course, 50 or 100 years from now control of the collection may pass from Google to somebody else—Elsevier, Unesco, Wal-Mart. But it's safe to assume that the digitized books that scholars will be working with then will be the very same ones that are sitting on Google's servers today, augmented by the millions of titles published in the interim.

    That realization lends a particular urgency to the concerns that people have voiced about the settlement —about pricing, access, and privacy, among other things. But for scholars, it raises another, equally basic question: What assurances do we have that Google will do this right?

    Doing it right depends on what exactly "it" is. Google has been something of a shape-shifter in describing the project. The company likes to refer to Google's book search as a "library," but it generally talks about books as just another kind of information resource to be incorporated into Greater Google. As Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, puts it: "We just feel this is part of our core mission. There is fantastic information in books. Often when I do a search, what is in a book is miles ahead of what I find on a Web site."

    Seen in that light, the quality of Google's book search will be measured by how well it supports the familiar activity that we have come to think of as "googling," in tribute to the company's specialty: entering in a string of keywords in an effort to locate specific information, like the dates of the Franco-Prussian War. For those purposes, we don't really care about metadata—the whos, whats, wheres, and whens provided by a library catalog. It's enough just to find a chunk of a book that answers our needs and barrel into it sideways.

    But we're sometimes interested in finding a book for reasons that have nothing to do with the information it contains, and for those purposes googling is not a very efficient way to search. If you're looking for a particular edition of Leaves of Grass and simply punch in, "I contain multitudes," that's what you'll get. For those purposes, you want to be able to come in via the book's metadata, the same way you do if you're trying to assemble all the French editions of Rousseau's Social Contract published before 1800 or books of Victorian sermons that talk about profanity.

    Or you may be interested in books simply as records of the language as it was used in various periods or genres. Not surprisingly, that's what gets linguists and assorted wordinistas adrenalized at the thought of all the big historical corpora that are coming online. But it also raises alluring possibilities for social, political, and intellectual historians and for all the strains of literary philology, old and new. With the vast collection of published books at hand, you can track the way happiness replaced felicity in the 17th century, quantify the rise and fall of propaganda or industrial democracy over the course of the 20th century, or pluck out all the Victorian novels that contain the phrase "gentle reader."

    But to pose those questions, you need reliable metadata about dates and categories, which is why it's so disappointing that the book search's metadata are a train wreck: a mishmash wrapped in a muddle wrapped in a mess.

    Start with publication dates. To take Google's word for it, 1899 was a literary annus mirabilis, which saw the publication of Raymond Chandler's Killer in the Rain, The Portable Dorothy Parker, André Malraux's La Condition Humaine, Stephen King's Christine, The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, Raymond Williams's Culture and Society 1780-1950, and Robert Shelton's biography of Bob Dylan, to name just a few. And while there may be particular reasons why 1899 comes up so often, such misdatings are spread out across the centuries. A book on Peter F. Drucker is dated 1905, four years before the management consultant was even born; a book of Virginia Woolf's letters is dated 1900, when she would have been 8 years old. Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities is dated 1888, and an edition of Henry James's What Maisie Knew is dated 1848.

    Of course, there are bound to be occasional howlers in a corpus as extensive as Google's book search, but these errors are endemic. A search on "Internet" in books published before 1950 produces 527 results; "Medicare" for the same period gets almost 1,600. Or you can simply enter the names of famous writers or public figures and restrict your search to works published before the year of their birth. "Charles Dickens" turns up 182 results for publications before 1812, the vast majority of them referring to the writer. The same type of search turns up 81 hits for Rudyard Kipling, 115 for Greta Garbo, 325 for Woody Allen, and 29 for Barack Obama. (Or maybe that was another Barack Obama.)

    How frequent are such errors? A search on books published before 1920 mentioning "candy bar" turns up 66 hits, of which 46—70 percent—are misdated. I don't think that's representative of the overall proportion of metadata errors, though they are much more common in older works than for the recent titles Google received directly from publishers. But even if the proportion of misdatings is only 5 percent, the corpus is riddled with hundreds of thousands of erroneous publication dates.

    Google acknowledges the incorrect dates but says they came from the providers. It's true that Google has received some groups of books that are systematically misdated, like a collection of Portuguese-language works all dated 1899. But a very large proportion of the errors are clearly Google's own doing. A lot of them arise from uneven efforts to automatically extract a publication date from a scanned text. A 1901 history of bookplates from the Harvard University Library is correctly dated in the library's catalog. Google's incorrect date of 1574 for the volume is drawn from an Elizabethan armorial bookplate displayed on the frontispiece. An 1890 guidebook called London of To-Day is correctly dated in the Harvard catalog, but Google assigns it a date of 1774, which is taken from a front-matter advertisement for a shirt-and-hosiery manufacturer that boasts it was established in that year.

    Then there are the classification errors, which taken together can make for a kind of absurdist poetry. H.L. Mencken's The American Language is classified as Family & Relationships. A French edition of Hamlet and a Japanese edition of Madame Bovary are both classified as Antiques and Collectibles (a 1930 English edition of Flaubert's novel is classified under Physicians, which I suppose makes a bit more sense.) An edition of Moby Dick is labeled Computers; The Cat Lover's Book of Fascinating Facts falls under Technology & Engineering. And a catalog of copyright entries from the Library of Congress is listed under Drama (for a moment I wondered if maybe that one was just Google's little joke).

    You can see how pervasive those misclassifications are when you look at all the labels assigned to a single famous work. Of the first 10 results for Tristram Shandy, four are classified as Fiction, four as Family & Relationships, one as Biography & Autobiography, and one is not classified. Other editions of the novel are classified as 'Literary Collections, History, and Music. The first 10 hits for Leaves of Grass are variously classified as Poetry, 'Juvenile Nonfiction, Fiction, Literary Criticism, Biography & Autobiography, and, mystifyingly, Counterfeits and Counterfeiting. And various editions of Jane Eyre are classified as History, Governesses, Love Stories, Architecture, and Antiques & Collectibles (as in, "Reader, I marketed him.").

    Here, too, Google has blamed the errors on the libraries and publishers who provided the books. But the libraries can't be responsible for books mislabeled as Health and Fitness and Antiques and Collectibles, for the simple reason that those categories are drawn from the Book Industry Standards and Communications codes, which are used by the publishers to tell booksellers where to put books on the shelves, not from any of the classification systems used by libraries. And BISAC classifications weren't in wide use before the last decade or two, so only Google can be responsible for their misapplications on numerous books published earlier than that: the 1919 edition of Robinson Crusoe assigned to Crafts & Hobbies or the 1907 edition of Sir Thomas Browne's Hydriotaphia: Urne-Buriall, which has been assigned to Gardening.

    Google's fine algorithmic hand is also evident in a lot of classifications of recent works. The 2003 edition of Susan Bordo's Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (misdated 1899) is assigned to Health & Fitness—not a labeling you could imagine coming from its publisher, the University of California Press, but one a classifier might come up with on the basis of the title, like the Religion tag that Google assigns to a 2001 biography of Mae West that's subtitled An Icon in Black and White or the Health & Fitness label on a 1962 number of the medievalist journal Speculum.

    But even when it gets the BISAC categories roughly right, the more important question is why Google would want to use those headings in the first place. People from Google have told me they weren't included at the publishers' request, and it may be that someone thought they'd be helpful for ad placement. (The ad placement on Google's book search right now is often comical, as when a search for Leaves of Grass brings up ads for plant and sod retailers—though that's strictly Google's problem, and one, you'd imagine, that they're already on top of.) But it's a disastrous choice for the book search. The BISAC scheme is well-suited for a chain bookstore or a small public library, where consumers or patrons browse for books on the shelves. But it's of little use when you're flying blind in a library with several million titles, including scholarly works, foreign works, and vast quantities of books from earlier periods. For example the BISAC Juvenile Nonfiction subject heading has almost 300 subheadings, like New Baby, Skateboarding, and Deer, Moose, and Caribou. By contrast the Poetry subject heading has just 20 subheadings. That means that Bambi and Bullwinkle get a full shelf to themselves, while Leopardi, Schiller, and Verlaine have to scrunch together in the single subheading reserved for Poetry/Continental European. In short, Google has taken a group of the world's great research collections and returned them in the form of a suburban-mall bookstore.

    Such examples don't exhaust Google's metadata errors by any means. In addition to the occasionally quizzical renamings of works (Moby Dick: or the White Wall), there are a number of mismatches of titles and texts. Click on the link for the 1818 Théorie de l'Univers, a work on cosmology by the Napoleonic mathematician and general Jacques Alexander François Allix, and it takes you to Barbara Taylor Bradford's 1983 novel Voice of the Heart, while the link on a misdated number of Dickens's Household Words takes you to a 1742 Histoire de l'Académie Royale des Sciences. Numerous entries mix up the names of authors, editors, and writers of introductions, so that the "about this book" page for an edition of one French novel shows the striking attribution, "Madame Bovary By Henry James." More mysterious is the entry for a book called The Mosaic Navigator: The Essential Guide to the Internet Interface, which is dated 1939 and attributed to Sigmund Freud and Katherine Jones. The only connection I can come up with is that Jones was the translator of Freud's Moses and Monotheism, which must have somehow triggered the other sense of the word "mosaic," though the details of the process leave me baffled.

    For the present, then, scholars will have to put on hold their visions of tracking the 19th-century fortunes of liberalism or quantifying the shift of "United States" from a plural to singular noun phrase over the first century of the republic: The metadata simply aren't up to it. It's true that Google is aware of a lot of these problems and they've pledged to fix them. (Indeed, since I presented some of these errors at a conference last week, Google has already rushed to correct many of them.) But it isn't clear whether they plan to go about this in the same way they're addressing the scanning errors that riddle the texts, correcting them as (and if) they're reported. That isn't adequate here: There are simply too many errors. And while Google's machine classification system will certainly improve, extracting metadata mechanically isn't sufficient for scholarly purposes. After first seeming indifferent, Google decided it did want to acquire the library records for scanned books along with the scans themselves, but as of now the company hasn't licensed them for display or use—hence, presumably, those stabs at automatically recovering publication dates from the scanned texts.

    Continued in article

    Jensen Comment
    I think the phrase "disaster for scholars" is very misleading. Google's Book Search has certainly been a delight for me. Also Google had the resources and stamina to fend off all the court challenges. In general, the major universities have been in favor of this project from get go.

     A project this massive is bound to have startup problems, but Google is adaptive and will listen to its critics. It's better to have the world's largest digital library than a bunch of decentralized smoke stacks of from the previous century.

    Bob Jensen's search helpers ---
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm

    Bob Jensen's links to finding free online books
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

    National Digital Stewardship Alliance --- http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/ndsa/index.html


    Find Books --- http://www.bookfinder.com/


    BookFinder online textbook aggregator http://www.bookfinder.com
    Compares prices and shipping costs of alternative sellers of hard copy textbooks.

    Locate and Compare Book Prices --- http://www.bookase.com/

    Swap Books Online
    March 27, 2007 message from Tina Bungert [tina.bungert@hitflip.de]

    . . . I would like to introduce you to our service and web site Hitflip that might be an interesting addition to your links for books and education. Hitflip is a community to swap used books and other original media. It is therefore an easy and cheap alternative to the existing online book stores. You can find hitflip at http://www.hitflip.de  .
    The just recently launched English version can be found at
    http://www.hitflip.co.uk .

     

    Best Book Purchasing Deals --- http://www.bestbookdeal.com/

    FetchBookInfo --- http://www.fetchbook.info/

    AddAll --- http://www.addall.com/

    Rare Book Room --- http://www.rarebookroom.org/

    February 1, 2008 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

    OVERVIEW OF INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORIES

    Charles W. Bailey, Jr., compiler of SCHOLARLY ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING BIBLIOGRAPHY (now in its 70th edition), has recently published "Institutional Repositories, Tout de Suite", a work "designed to give the reader a very quick introduction to key aspects of institutional repositories and to foster further exploration of this topic though liberal use of relevant references to online documents and links to pertinent websites." The document covers definitions of institutional repositories, why institutions should have them, and the issues authors face when contributing to repositories.

    "Institutional Repositories, Tout de Suite" is available at http://www.digital-scholarship.org/ts/irtoutsuite.pdf. The work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License, and it can be freely used for any noncommercial purpose in accordance with the license.

    You can access all of Bailey's publications on scholarly communication at http://www.digital-scholarship.org/.

     

    From the Scout Report on January 21, 2005

    Manybooks.net
    http://www.manybooks.net/ 

    There are a number of places to get books online, but this recent addition to that cadre of websites is definitely worth a look. The staff members at Manybooks.net have adapted the e-texts created by the Project Gutenberg DVD and placed them online in a host of formats, including pdf, eReader, and as Palm document files. Visitors can begin by browsing by author, title, category, or language. Some of the languages covered in the database include Dutch, Esperanto, Swedish, Tagalog, and Welsh. Satisfied visitors can also submit a list of five of their favorite books so that other users may take advantage of their favorite reads. Some of the recently recommended titles include Jude the Obscure, Silas Marner, Ecce Homo, and New Grub Street. Persons attracted to this site should also take a look at the ebook cover page, where they can peruse the covers of some of the many books contained within the archive. Some of the more compelling covers include those for As a Man Thinketh authored by James Allen and a rather lovely cover for Under the Lilacs by Louisa May Alcott.


    May 22, 2006 message from lucy@booksprice.com

    Dear Bob,

    My name is Lucy. I would like to inform you regarding a new web site that I hope you will find interesting for you and for the 'Bob Jensen's Links to Electronic Literature' page, and to ask you to add our link to the other book related links on the 'Online Book and Table of Contents Finders' section.

    http://www.booksprice.com  is a free innovative service of finding the best price on a purchase of several books together. This service is more useful than the standard services which perform one book comparison at a time: acquiring several books together may reduce the total price of shipping the books, as usually the shipping rate for the second book is lower than the cost for the first book.

    I will really appreciate adding a link to our site. You can use this html to create the link to our site:

    I hope that you find the service interesting. If you have any queries or you'd like more information, kindly contact me.

    Sincerely,

    Lucy Orbach Webmaster lucy@booksprice.com 
    www.booksprice.com 

    July 14, 2006 message from Ivy Banaag [ibanaag@ECNext.com]

    Hello Bob,

    My name is Ivy Carla, and I work for ECNext, Inc. After reviewing your website, specifically the Helpers for Searching the Web section,
    http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm, I wanted to propose you consider adding a new online textbooks site, iChapters.com.

    iChapters.com offers brand new textbooks, in electronic & print formats. Electronic versions of college textbooks, including individual chapters, are available for immediate download at affordable prices. Only at iChapters.com can you choose to buy just what you need at the price you want to pay.

    Students who frequent your website, especially those with a tight budget, will surely benefit from iChapters. I am hoping that you can help them find us by including iChapters
    (http://www.iChapters.com) on your Helpers for Searching the Web section.


    Please don’t hesitate to contact me (ivy@ecnext.com) if you have any questions.

    Ivy Carla
    iChapters.com



    Children's Books Online ---  http://www.childrensbooksonline.org/ 

    A good  place to find a book --- http://www.bookfinder.com/ 

    FindBook --- http://www.ufindbook.com/tags/Electronic Literature-1.html

    A great book finding service --- http://www.bookfinder.com/ 

    A site that lists over 4,000,000 new and used books --- http://www.GetCheapBooks.com 

    New and used textbook finder DIRECTTEXBOOK --- http://www.directtextbook.com/ 

    BookBrowse.com --- http://www.bookbrowse.com/ 
    This site is very efficient for finding the latest and greatest books on a wide range of topics.

    Before seeking the best deals on a book, look up its ISBN and Barnes Nobel price at www.bn.com 
    Then use the ISBN to compare new and used prices at the following sites:

     www.amazon.com (This is a great site because you can download sample pages of text and pictures)

    www.AAABookSearch.com  

     http://www.chambal.com/ 

    http://isbn.nu/ 

    www.CampusBooks4Less.com

    Glossary of Book Collecting Terms --- http://hardyboys.bobfinnan.com/bookterms.htm 


    Free Electronic Books --- http://www.awriteshop.com/e_reading.html 
    Many of the books are scanned photographs of actual book pages.

    Locate and Compare Book Prices --- http://www.bookase.com/

    The best places to find electronic books --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm#ElectronicBooks  

    Rare, second hand, and out-of-print books --- http://shop.barnesandnoble.com/oopbooks/oopsearch.asp?sourceid=00382445673057253564&bfdate=04-13-2001+09:18:42 

    Online Bookstores

    http://www.amazon.com/ 
    http://www.bn.com/ 
    http://www.efollet.com/ 
    http://www.buy.com/ 

    Other Online Textbooks

    Other Online Publishers

    Taxpoint: http://taxpoint.swcollege.com/taxpoint_2001/taxpoint.html 
    StudyLive: http://www.swcollege.com/acct/studylive/studylive.html 
    INTACCT: http://www.swcollege.com/acct/rama/intacct/intacct.html 
    Computerized Principles of Accounting:  http://www.swcollege.com/acct/klooster_introacct/klooster.html 

     Also see my Wizeup discussion at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm#051500 

    Indexing Services

    http://www.back2college.com/text.htm 
    http://home1.gte.net/mcorphan/books.html 

    Metasearch Services

    http://www.pricescan.com/ 
    http://www.addall.com/ 
    And my favorite http://isbn.nu/  

    Trinity University Library Helpers 

    Trinity University Library Holdings (Quest) http://quest.trinity.edu/ 

    Bob Jensen's bookmarks for online accounting textbooks and cases can be found at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm#BooksAndCases 

    Helper Site if You Are Looking for a Book to Read
    Whichbook --- http://www.whichbook.net/index.jsp 
    Categories include the following (Note that you click on a category and then slide a pointer):

    Happy - Sad
    Funny - Serious
    Safe - Disturbing
    Expected - Unpredictable
    Larger than Life - Down to Earth
    Beautiful - Disgusting
    Gentle - Disturbing
    No Sex - Sex
    Conventional - Unusual
    Optimistic - Bleak
    Short - Long


    Bob Jensen's overview of electronic books and custom publishing --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm


    Eye on Books (included photographs and audio) --- http://www.eyeonbooks.com/ 
    Read and listen to reviews of top books --- separate the wheat from the chaff.

    A good  place to find a book --- http://www.bookfinder.com/ 

    A good place to find books and compare prices --- www.AAABookSearch.com  .

    You can also compare prices and shipping costs at www.CampusBooks4Less.com

    A good place to find the best price (including shipping) if you know the ISBN number --- http://isbn.nu/ 

    The best places to find electronic books --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm#ElectronicBooks 

    Free service for book search and price comparison from among over 40 bookstore, www.AAABookSearch.com .

    Rare, second hand, and out-of-print books --- http://shop.barnesandnoble.com/oopbooks/oopsearch.asp?sourceid=00382445673057253564&bfdate=04-13-2001+09:18:42 

    Barnes & Noble Textbook Home Page The price all of our books below suggested retail price. Look for books that have our Guaranteed Buy Back stamp and save even more! http://www.gis.net/~catb/textbooks.html 

    Guardian Unlimited Books: Top 10s (Definitely British) http://books.guardian.co.uk/top10s 
    There are a lot more than 10 listed.


    August 22, 2008 message from Nathan Letourneau [Nathan@CampusBooks4Less.com]

    Dear Professor Jensen,

    My name is Nathan letourneau and as a U of M student I created a no cost textbook price comparison service for students (It's like Expedia, but for textbooks). It allows students to find the cheapest prices on college books by comparing prices across online retailers. I see you have Amazon.com listed on your website ( http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm  ). Amazon is one of the many sites I search to find the cheapest prices. Would you be willing to add a link to my site on your website or tell your class about it.

    You can see a price comparison by visiting:

    http://www.campusbooks4less.com/cgi-bin/bookSearch/bookstoreSearch.cgi?searchBy=isbn&searchVal=061852844X&func=submit

    Also you can add your own small price comparison right on your website by adding a small snippet of code. You can see what it looks like by visiting http://www.campusbooks4less.com/professors.html 

    If you would like me to send you a reminder next semester, please reply back with the email you would like me to send the reminder to.

    Thanks for your consideration and time!

    Nathan Letourneau Nathan@CampusBooks4Less.com  leto0023@tc.umn.edu  I did not buy your email or contact information. I found it myself on the web by looking through current syllabi and emailed you on my own. I am not going to distribute or sell your email address in any way. I am providing the following information to comply with current regulations.

    To unsubscribe (even though you haven't been signed up for anything), please send an email to campusbooks4less@campusbooks4less.com. Please provide your email address in the message along with the word "unsubscribe" and I will make sure to never email you again.

    Campus Books 4 Less --- http://www.campusbooks4less.com/professors.html  
    808 Carmichael Road #162
    Hudson, WI 54025


    Hungry Minds --- http://www.hungryminds.com/
    Over 17,000 training and education courses (Mostly from top universities) and links to books

    Our online campus, hungrymindsuniversity.com , offers up to 17,000 courses from top universities like UC-Berkeley, UCLA, NYU, as well as leading training companies and subject experts.

    Our famous brands including For Dummies, CliffsNotes, and Frommerís are all more than books. When you want to know, or know-how, you can get immediate answers by visiting cliffsnotes.com, dummies.com, and frommers.com. You can even subscribe to free e-newsletters filled with tips delivered direct to your desktop. Our 42 Dummies Daily newsletters make over 14.5 million deliveries per month.

    And for all our books -- including the award-winning series that have made us the best-selling computer books publisher -- check out our online bookstore.

    Hungry Minds is here to feed your appetite for knowledge with a full range of trusted, timely content. Whether it's to find a restaurant on a wireless Palm, to study Shakespeare at 2 a.m. with a downloaded Cliffs Note, to solve a computing problem with Dummies Answer Network, to fulfill an ambition via the UC Berkeley certificate program -- with Hungry Minds it's all possible!

    Yahoo --- http://shopping.yahoo.com/books/ 

    Indexing Services

    http://www.back2college.com/text.htm 
    http://home1.gte.net/mcorphan/books.html 


    Great electronic "books" from the University of Texas and Princeton University
    Dante Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise (a multimedia learning experience) --- http://danteworlds.laits.utexas.edu/
    Also see Princeton University's contribution (in Italian or English) --- http://etcweb.princeton.edu/dante/pdp/
              Princeton's versions has both lectures and multimedia!

    Poetry of Sara Teasdale 1884 - 1933 --- http://www.bonniehamre.com/Personal/Sara.htm

    THE MYSTERY OF RENNES-LE-CHATEAU --- http://www.rennes-le-chateau.co.uk/html/mystery1.htm

    Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (History of Economic Thought) --- http://www.frbsf.org/publications/education/greateconomists/

    Online Economics Textbooks --- http://www.oswego.edu/~economic/newbooks.htm

    Economics Principles and Practices --- http://econsources.com/EconSourcesBook.asp?PageID=1
    Economics Net-Textbook --- http://nova.umuc.edu/~black/pageg.html 
    Economy Professor (with a great glossary) --- http://www.economyprofessor.com/

    Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith --- http://geolib.pair.com/smith.adam/woncont.html

    Glossary of Book Collecting Terms --- http://hardyboys.bobfinnan.com/bookterms.htm 

    Questia (fee-based huge library of electronic books) --- http://www.questia.com/

    The Literature Network of online books --- http://www.online-literature.com/

    The Free Library --- http://www.thefreelibrary.com/

    Free Electronic Books --- http://www.awriteshop.com/e_reading.html 
    Many of the books are scanned photographs of actual book pages.

    More Free Electronic Books --- http://www.wordtheque.com/pls/wordtc/new_wordtheque.main?lang=EN&source=author

    Free Australian electronic books --- http://www.e-book.com.au/freebooks.htm

    BiblioMania --- http://www.bibliomania.com/0/0/frameset.html

    Ralph Waldo Emerson --- http://www.rwe.org/comm/

    DH Lawrence --- http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/l/lawrence/dh/

    Edgar Allen Poe --- http://eserver.org/books/poe/

    Modern literature links --- http://www.themodernword.com/themodword.cfm

    Children's Books Online ---  http://www.childrensbooksonline.org/ 

    Free audio book downloads --- http://www.freeclassicaudiobooks.com/

    Free Audio Books from Harper Audio --- http://town.hall.org/Archives/radio/IMS/HarperAudio/

    Search for electronic books --- http://www.searchebooks.com/ 

    The 1,000 Journals Project, University of New Orleans --- http://1000journals.com/

    Internet Book List --- http://www.iblist.com/

    Authors Directory --- http://authorsdirectory.com/title.shtml

    Free eBooks for your PDA (or iPod) --- http://manybooks.net/

    George Orwell --- http://www.k-1.com/Orwell/site/about/pictures.html

    Literature Project --- http://www.literatureproject.com/

    The Essays of Francis Bacon --- http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/mike_donnelly/bacon.htm

    The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe --- http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/Texts/Marlowe.html

    Online Books Library (including some banned books) --- http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/banned-books.html
    The above site is not a free book site.  You might identify something like a banned book and then find it free at another search site --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm#ElectronicBooks

    Barnes and Noble Book Browser --- http://www.barnesandnoble.com/bookbrowser/Welcome.asp?

    Story Code Book Finder --- http://www.storycode.com/

    A Small Anthology of Poems from the English Department of Western Michigan University --- http://unix.cc.wmich.edu/~cooneys/poems/

    Poetry Connection --- http://www.poetryconnection.net/

    HAIKU for PEOPLE --- http://www.toyomasu.com/haiku/

    Subject Index to Literature on Electronic Sources of Information http://library.usask.ca/~dworacze/SUBJIN_A.HTM 

    The Short Literary Life of Sylvia Plath --- http://www.sylviaplath.de/

    Oriah Mountain Dreamer --- http://www.oriahmountaindreamer.com/other.html

    Belfast Poets --- http://www.belfastpoets.com/

    T.S. Eliot Poems --- http://www.coldbacon.com/poems/eliot.html

    Beautiful Words Poems --- http://www.beautifulwords.com/

    The Kenyon Review (Journal) --- http://www.kenyonreview.org/

    William Gibson's Neuromancer famous science fiction novel with graphics --- http://www.antonraubenweiss.com/gibson/gallery/neuromancer-graphicnovel/gn00.html 

    The works of Oscar Wilde --- http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/w/wilde/oscar/

    Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray --- http://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/dorgray/chapter02.htm

    Mystery Net --- http://www.mysterynet.com/

    THE COMPLETE SHERLOCK HOLMES (includes drawings) --- http://www.bakerstreet221b.de/canon/
    The Chronicles of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle --- http://www.siracd.com/work_bell.shtml

    F. Scott Fitzgerald --- http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/

    LibraryThing --- http://www.librarything.com/

    Catalog your books online

    • Easy. Catalog your books online (example); no software required.
    • Powerful. Search the Library of Congress and over thirty major libraries around the world.
    • Free. Enter 200 books for free; lifetime membership $10 (beta special).
    • Tagged. Tag your books as on Flickr and Del.icio.us (example).
    • Shared. Show everyone your library, or keep your library private. You can even put a widget on your blog to show people what you're reading.
    • Safe. LibraryThing's not going away, but you can export your data.
    • Limber. Import data from Delicious Library, Readerware, Amazon Wishlists—virtually anywhere.

    See how it works

     

     

    TheFreeDictionary.com:  2,000,000 articles and definitions from leading dictionaries and encyclopedias --- www.thefreedictionary.com
    Instructions --- http://www.thefreedictionary.com/lookup.htm 

    Electronic Sources of Information: A Bibliography http://library.usask.ca/~dworacze/BIBLIO.HTM 

     

    An electronic library that teaches children how to read better
    The $40 annual subscription provides families with unlimited access to the site and to several dozen books for children ages 2 to 9. The company plans to unveil the complete 108-book library next year. "They're beautifully illustrated with interesting stories that hold a child's attention," Teitelbaum says. "The original illustrations with text and 3-D figures reinforce that this is a book, not a video game or TV. We want kids to feel inspired to go from reading the screen to reading the hard copy." While not designed as a reading instruction program, One More Story does have features for emerging readers, such as the "I can read it" function, in which the words will be read aloud only when the child clicks the mouse there. By highlighting narrated words, the site can help children make the link between written and spoken language, Roth says.
    Chelsea Waugaman, "Read the story again? Sure. Computers don't get tired," The Christian Science Monitor, July 11, 2005 --- http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0711/p12s01-stin.html

    One More Story is an interactive online library for children that was founded in 2000 --- http://www.onemorestory.com/

    University of Adelaide Library’s collection of Web books --- http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/

    Beowulf in Hypertext --- http://www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/~beowulf/main.html

    Charles Baudelaire (1821 - 1867), and in particular to Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) --- http://fleursdumal.org/

    Poetry Connection --- http://www.poetryconnection.net/

    HAIKU for PEOPLE --- http://www.toyomasu.com/haiku/

    Glossary of Hard Boiled Slang --- http://www.miskatonic.org/slang.html

    Poetry Archive --- http://www.poetry-archive.com/

    Poets Corner --- http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/

    Arabian Nights by Sir Richard Francis Burton --- http://mfx.dasburo.com/an/a_index.html

    The Beast In The Jungle - Henry James (1843 - 1916) --- http://www.wordtheque.com/pls/wordtc/new_wordtheque.w6_start.doc?code=11509&lang=EN

     

    TheFreeDictionary.com:  2,000,000 articles and definitions from leading dictionaries and encyclopedias

    August 31, 2005 message from Valerie Schaeffer [Valerie.Schaeffer@Farlex.com]

    Dear Bob Jensen,

    I like your website. While I was exploring it, I noticed that you had an excellent collection of online reference links located at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob3.htm . Would you consider adding www.thefreedictionary.com  to the list?

    TheFreeDictionary.com has about 2,000,000 articles and definitions from leading dictionaries and encyclopedias. Please take a look at our site and help your visitors find out about us.

    Thank you in advance for taking a look at our website.

    Sincerely,

    Valerie Schaeffer

    P.S.

    Also, if you are interested, we recently created a new "dictionary search" box and “Word of the Day” feature that can be used on your web page. The instructions can be found at http://www.thefreedictionary.com/lookup.htm 

     

    Electronic Sources of Information: A Bibliography http://library.usask.ca/~dworacze/BIBLIO.HTM 

    A Write Shop --- http://www.awriteshop.com/e_reading.html 
    Many links to free books and other readings online.

    Famous Farewells --- http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/6537/fareidx.htm
    Famous Last Words --- http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/6537/

    Book download frequencies --- http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top

    Full 'Text Classics --- http://www.bookspot.com/features/fulltextfeature.htm

    Great Books Index --- http://books.mirror.org/gb.titles.html

    The University of Virginia's E-Book Library --- http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/ebooks/subjects/subjects.html

    Carnegie Mellon University's Universal Library --- http://www.ulib.org/html/

    Page by Page Books --- http://www.pagebypagebooks.com/

    May 5, 2005 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

    NEW WEBLOG ON SCHOLARLY ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING

    Charles W. Bailey, Jr., compiler of SCHOLARLY ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING BIBLIOGRAPHY (now in its 57th edition), has a new publication. DigitalKoans is a weblog that provides commentary on scholarly electronic publishing and digital culture issues. It is available at http://www.escholarlypub.com/digitalkoans/ .

    Since 2001, Bailey has also published another weblog, The Scholarly Electronic Weblog, an exhaustive compilation of citations to articles dealing with all aspects of scholarly communication. The weblog is online at http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepw.htm .

    Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography is a searchable resource that cites selected articles, books, electronic documents, and other sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet and other networks. The latest version is available at http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepb.html .

    Bailey is the Assistant Dean for Digital Library Planning and Development at the University of Houston Libraries. In 1989, Bailey established PACS-L, a mailing list about public-access computers in libraries, and The Public-Access Computer Systems Review, one of the first scholarly electronic journals published on the Internet. For more information, contact Charles W. Bailey, Jr., University of Houston, Library Administration, 114 University Libraries, Houston, TX 77204-2000 USA; tel: 713-743-9804; fax: 713-743-9811; email: cbailey@uh.edu; Web: http://info.lib.uh.edu/cwb/bailey.htm .

    A great index of electronic journals (although admittedly not comprehensive)--- http://ejw.i8.com/ 

    Supporting Campus, Community, and Distance Education

     
    Accounting
    Electronic Journals
    Websites & Tax Info
    Botany
    Electronic Journals
    Websites
    Environmental
    Electronic Journals
    Websites
    Literature
    Electronic Journals
    Websites
    Physics
    Electronic Journals
    Websites
    Agriculture
    Electronic Journals
    Websites
     Business & Economics
    Electronic Journals
    Websites
    Geography
    Electronic Journals
    Websites
    Mathematics
    Electronic Journals
    Websites
    Political Science 
    Electronic Journals
    Websites
    Anthropology
    Electronic Journals
    Websites
    Chemistry
    Electronic Journals
    Websites
    Goverment Documents
    Electronic Journals
    Websites
    Medical & Health
    Electronic Journals
    Websites
    Psychology
    Electronic Journals
    Websites
    Archaeology
    Electronic Journals
    Websites
    Communication 
    Electronic Journals
    Websites
    History
    Electronic Journals
    Websites
    Music
    Electronic Journals
    Websites
    Religion
    Electronic Journals
    Websites
    Architecture 
    Electronic Journals
    Websites
    Computer Science 
    Electronic Journals
    Websites
    Journalism
    Electronic Journals
    Websites
    Nursing
    Electronic Journals
    Websites
    Sociology
    Electronic Journals
    Websites
    Art 
    Electronic Journals
    Websites
    Earth Science 
    Electronic Journals
    Websites
    Language
    Electronic Journals
    Websites
    Nutrition
    Electronic Journals
    Websites
    Theatre
    Electronic Journals
    Websites
    Astronomy
    Electronic Journals
    Websites
    Education
    Electronic Journals
    Websites
    Law
    Electronic Journals
    Websites
    Philosophy
    Electronic Journals
    Websites
    Zoology
    Electronic Journals
    Websites
    Biology
    Electronic Journals
    Websites
    English
    Electronic Journals
    Websites
    Library Information
    Electronic Journals
    Websites
    PhysEd & Recreation
    Electronic Journals
    Websites
    Gender Studies
    Electronic Journals
    Websites
     
    Search Engines Primary Sources Distance Learning Ethnic Studies Teaching Tools
    Genealogy Dictionaries Plus Career Information Grant Sources Web Site Evaluation
     Kansas Sites  Radio & TV Stations  Newspapers  Fun & Useful Stuff  Copyright Information
    If you cannot find information herein, you are encouraged to use a mega search engine such as 37.com, profusion.com, search.com, Google, or Alltheweb.
    The Following Sites provide access to free journal articles online.
    Find Articles.Com at http://www.findarticles.com where articles can be accessed using a subject search. For a mega-site of free e-journal sources.
    Ejournal SiteGuide : a MetaSource http://www.library.ubc.ca/ejour/abc.html,
    Electronic Journal Miner, http://ejournal.coalliance.org/
    Highware Press, http://highwire.stanford.edu,
    Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepb.html
    Australian Journals Online, http://www.nla.gov.au/ajol/,
    Journals - QQQ Research, http://www.qqqresearch.com/journals/
    An Archive of Life Science Journals, http://www.pubmedcentral.gov/
    GoArticles.com, http://www.goarticles.com  Over 7,200 articles that can be sent via e-mail
    ArticleCity.com,http://www.ArticleCity.com Indexed collection of copyright-free articles on various subjects neatly organized by category.
    To Translate This Site into another Language go to http://www.freetranslation.com/web.htm or http://babel.altavista.com/
    and enter the address of this page http://ejw.i8.com
    They do not do the best job but should help with any one of several languages
    About Web Based Resources
    Lewis' Curriculum Vit

    From the Scout Report on January 21, 2005

    Manybooks.net
    http://www.manybooks.net/ 

    There are a number of places to get books online, but this recent addition to that cadre of websites is definitely worth a look. The staff members at Manybooks.net have adapted the e-texts created by the Project Gutenberg DVD and placed them online in a host of formats, including pdf, eReader, and as Palm document files. Visitors can begin by browsing by author, title, category, or language. Some of the languages covered in the database include Dutch, Esperanto, Swedish, Tagalog, and Welsh. Satisfied visitors can also submit a list of five of their favorite books so that other users may take advantage of their favorite reads. Some of the recently recommended titles include Jude the Obscure, Silas Marner, Ecce Homo, and New Grub Street. Persons attracted to this site should also take a look at the ebook cover page, where they can peruse the covers of some of the many books contained within the archive. Some of the more compelling covers include those for As a Man Thinketh authored by James Allen and a rather lovely cover for Under the Lilacs by Louisa May Alcott.


    "HarperCollins Private Reserve Houses E-Books," T.H.E. Journal, April 2002, Page 26 --- http://www.thejournal.com/magazine/vault/A3964.cfm 

    Book publisher HarperCollins and OverDrive have created HarperCollins Private Reserve, a digital warehouse for HarperCollins e-books worldwide. Using OverDrive servers and technology, HarperCollins Private Reserve allows the publishing company's divisions in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand to manage and distribute e-book titles and marketing information directly.

    The warehouse supplies online retailers with e-book catalog information, and fulfills e-book purchases to their customers in Microsoft Reader and Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader formats. In addition, OverDrive's technology allows HarperCollins to use its growing e-book library to promote the sale of both print and electronic titles. For example, HarperCollins can now offer electronic review copies or e-books bundled with print titles. The initiative includes HarperCollins' e-book imprint, PerfectBound, and e-books from its Christian publishing group, Zondervan. HarperCollins Publishers, New York, NY, www.harpercollins.com .


    Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography ---  http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/sepb.html 

    This bibliography presents selected English-language articles, books, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding scholarly electronic publishing efforts on the Internet. Most sources have been published between 1990 and the present; however, a limited number of key sources published prior to 1990 are also included. Where possible, links are provided to sources that are freely available on the Internet.

    Announcements for new versions of the bibliography are distributed on PACS-P and other mailing lists.

    An archive of prior versions of the bibliography is available.


     

    Here is another search engine for your page:  
    Multimeta: ( http://www.multimeta.com/ )  
    This is a fast meta search engine (simultaneous searches in  the major search engines, free URL submission service).   There is even an e-mail feature that allows to receive the  search results by e-mail.  
    Best regards,  
    Mehul Trivedi

    LibraryThing --- http://www.librarything.com/

    Catalog your books online

    • Easy. Catalog your books online (example); no software required.
    • Powerful. Search the Library of Congress and over thirty major libraries around the world.
    • Free. Enter 200 books for free; lifetime membership $10 (beta special).
    • Tagged. Tag your books as on Flickr and Del.icio.us (example).
    • Shared. Show everyone your library, or keep your library private. You can even put a widget on your blog to show people what you're reading.
    • Safe. LibraryThing's not going away, but you can export your data.
    • Limber. Import data from Delicious Library, Readerware, Amazon Wishlists—virtually anywhere.

    See how it works

     

     


    Dear Prof Jensen:

    I was browsing your site with interest, and wondered if you might be interested in adding our Web-site, at http://www.bublos.com  to your list of resources. Bublos is primarily a book price comparison site, though also offers many other useful resources as well, including a growing book-review archive, and lots of other literary bits and pieces. We also have useful information regarding used and rare books at http://www.bublos.com/library/rare.books.html 

    I hope you'll have a few moments to pay us a visit, and would be very grateful for your consideration in adding our Web-site to your list of other resources.

    Many thanks,

    David Benham 
    http://www.bublos.com
     

     


    WindowsMedia.com http://www.windowsmedia.com/ 
    A search engine for online audio and video.

    FindArticles.com - search through an archive of articles from over 300 magazines and journals -- http://www.findarticles.com/ 

    Bob Jensen's "Napster/Wrapster/Gnutella/Pointera/FreeNet Paradigm Shift" http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/napster.htm 

    Searching for Book Table of Contents

    How to find Books and Compare Prices 

    Searching for Audio Clips, Lectures, Speeches, and Books

    Search for Patterns in Text

    Electronic Books

     



    Finding Colleges, College Rankings, Financial Aid, and Online Programs

    Bob Jensen's Finder Bookmarks --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm#EducationInGeneral 

    Bob Jensen's Finders for Online Training and Education Programs --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm 

    Guides to Distance Education Courses and Programs --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/245progs.htm 

    Search helpers from the Harvard Business School http://www.library.hbs.edu/ 


    From the Scout Report --- Business.com http://www.business.com/ 

    The owners of this lucrative URL address have sponsored a Web directory created by a "team of 50 research analysts [that] has sifted through the Web to find relevant sites for our handcrafted Directory." All Websites in this 30-category directory have been annotated. The annotations, however, tend to be very terse and a bit vague. First time users are encouraged to skim over the excellent site guide, which gives a step-by-step manual for using the site as well as in-depth explanations of the terminology and taxonomy.


    Adobe needs to improve its PDF search engine.  It misses far more than it hits. I tried the above search service by entering "FAS 133"  with the quote marks into the Search box at http://searchpdf.adobe.com/.  I only got nine hits, and the search engine failed to detect many PDF documents that I know are available on the web, particularly PDF documents from the FASB and IASC.  The link to "Help With Searching" was of no help since it only links to AltaVista Help.  For threads on this topic, go to http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/acrobat.htm 


    Other search links

    Electronic book threads http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm 

    There is a great website called Internet Essentials at  http://www.internetessentials.com/ 

    Search engines for grants --- http://www.schoolpositions.com/grants/engines.html 

    Colleges and universities

    University and College Directories (American) --- http://www.clas.ufl.edu/CLAS/american-universities.html 


    University and College Directories (Yahoo) --- http://dir.yahoo.com/Education/Higher_Education/ 


    Online Accounting Faculty Directory (Hasselback) --- http://rarc.rutgers.edu/hasselback/ 

    Business Firm Directories 

    In you want to learn more about life on the Internet, try Yahoo's Internet Life at
     http://www.zdnet.com/yil/content/surfschool/guru/gurutrouble.html 

    Guru Library
    Searching the Web

    Online Issues

    What the Heck Is...

    Troubleshooting

    Getting Connected

    Weird Wild Web

    Communicating

    Net Basics

    Summary of Present Engines and a Look to the Future

    From Webmonkey Frontdoor [wiredmail-info@lists.wired.com] on May 16, 2000 

    Feeling the pressure from sleek newcomer Google perhaps, or maybe just caught up in 5K fever, AltaVista has unveiled a new, lean, ad-free interface to their powerful search engine at Raging.com. Mysteriously, though, Raging detects and blocks Lynx users.

    You can read the following at http://www.raging.com/ 

    What makes Raging Search results the best on the Web? At Raging Search, we use the most advanced technology to sort through the ever-expanding World Wide Web, and provide you, the user, with only the most relevant Web pages for your query.

    In order to do that, we start with the biggest and freshest index of Web pages. Our index contains every word found on more than 350 million unique Web pages, and we are constantly updating our index by removing dead links and adding new pages. Our goal is to create an index of the entire World Wide Web!

    But having the best index is only half the battle. We also rely on sophisticated technology to sort through that index and find exactly the pages you want. There are many ways to judge whether a Web page is relevant to your query, and Raging Search combines many different factors to find the best matches, including text relevance and link analysis.

    Text relevance searches every Web page for exactly the words you enter. Many factors enter into text relevance, such as how important the words are on the page, how many times the words appear, where on the page they appear, and how many other pages contain those words.

    Link analysis uses the many connections from one page to another to rank the quality and/or usefulness of each page. In other words, if many Web pages are linking to a page X, then page X is considered a high-quality page. In this way, Raging Search technology uses the judgment of actual people across the Web to improve our rankings.

    These and many other factors are combined to insure that you receive the results you need right away. Raging Search is the only search site you will ever need.

    I thought that some of you might be interested in how InfraSearch uses Gnutella. The following appears in the June 1 edition of IWNews. 

    Search Site InfraSearch Tries to Re-Knit the Web
    By Brian Caulfield

    Software that made its mark as a music-sharing utility is now being used to create a potentially powerful search tool by InfraSearch ( http://www.infrasearch.com/  ), a prototype search site launched Tuesday.

    The site's technology is based on file-swapping software Gnutella ( http://gnutella.wego.com/ ), created by NullSoft, the individuals who had created the Winamp MP3 player while working for America Online. Unlike the better-known Napster, the Gnutella software enables users to form ad hoc networks for sharing the contents of their hard drives.

    Although its potential for distributing music online has received the most attention, this only scratches the surface of what the software can do. Users can search for any kind of information other Gnutella users make available -- whether image files or recipes for tamale pie.

    InfraSearch lets users run the software inside their databases and makes the contents searchable at its Web site. InfraSearch makes it possible to index Web pages created on the fly (such as news and shopping sites), something traditional search services find difficult. The developers behind InfraSearch remain unincorporated, but they are actively talking to investors and exploring business models for the technology. Though AOL distanced itself from Gnutella shortly after its release, open-source software enthusiasts outside AOL have continued to improve the software.

    On the InfraSearch Web site, both NullSoft and the University of California Berkeley's Experimental Computing Facility (XCF) are credited with developing the technology behind the site. XCF is an undergraduate group developing open-source technology, such as GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program).

    InfraSearch remains in development, but the idea behind it may have major implications for the future of the Web, according to Gene Kan, a programmer involved with the project. Potentially, users could earmark their content that may be exposed to outside searches, rather than relying on the sometimes arbitrary results of popular search engines. "There is a top-down effect where the only way to get on the Web is AltaVista or Lycos; the Web is not a Web anymore," said Kan.

    Here is another one on the Gnutella paradigm shift --- http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-1983259.html?tag=st Napster-like technology takes Web search to new level
    By John Borland <mailto:jborland@cnet.com>
    Staff Writer, CNET News.com
    May 31, 2000, 4:00 a.m. PT

    It's a big deal," said Andreessen, who met with Gnutella developers last week and quickly became an admirer. "It will be a way for businesses to expose what they want people to find more easily."

    It also is one of the first moves by what has been hugely controversial file-swapping software into the realm of unquestionably legitimate Web business. That's likely to take some of the legal shadows off the technology and could spur a new phase in development.

    In Accounting Education News, Spring 2000, there is a nice summary of search engines.  The Newsletter is at http://www.rutgers.edu/Accounting/raw/aaa/aen/spring00/spring00.htm.   The article "Searching for the Right Search Engine" by Robert Berkman is at http://www.rutgers.edu/Accounting/raw/aaa/aen/spring00/fd01.htm.  A few excerpts are shown below:

    Yahoo (www.yahoo.com) is by no means the only hierarchical index, and some of the many others are aimed specifically at academic users. The latter group includes: AlphaSearch (http://www.calvin.edu/library/as), BUBL Link (http://www.bubl.ac.uk/link), and Infomine (http://infomine.ucr.edu).

    Then there are the standard search engines. Popular ones include AltaVista (http://www.altavista.com), Excite (http://www.excite.com), Go Network (http://infoseek.go.com), and HotBot (http://hotbot.lycos.com). Unlike hierarchical indexes, standard search engines send out software “robots” or “spiders” to search the Web and index the pages in each site they encounter.

    Northern Light (http://www.northernlight.com), for instance, ranks Web pages as a standard search engine does. But instead of displaying all of its results in a single listing, it sorts pages into categories and groups the results into folders. As an example, a search for “alternative energy” creates folders with labels such as “solar power,” “air pollution,” and “National Technical Information Service,” which includes documents from that agency.

    Ask Jeeves (http://www.askjeeves.com) takes an altogether different approach. You don’t enter keywords, but type a question in plain English — perhaps “Is there evidence of life on Mars?” Ask Jeeves has recorded millions of questions that users have asked it, and has found Web sites that answer those questions.

    Google (http://www.google.com) takes yet another tack. Like other search engines, it first matches up your keywords to the pages it has collected in its index. Then, however, it ranks each page based on how many other pages link to it—and how many link to those pages in turn.

    Oingo (http://www.oingo.com) has an even more radical approach. The site’s slogan is “We know what you mean,” and Oingo conducts a “conceptual search” to make sure that it understands your request. Ask it to search for “china,” for example, and it will ask you to choose “porcelain” or any of the various geographical Chinas.

    Search engines that search other engines are called meta search engines. Among the popular ones are Dogpile (http://www.dogpile.com), Inference Find (http://www.inferencefind.com), and MetaCrawler (http://www.metacrawler.com). The concept here is that because no single search engine indexes the entire Web, using a meta search engine allows a researcher to scan more sites. The downside is that such an engine needs to use a “lowest common denominator” search statement, so that all of the search engines that it searches understand the request.

    The many new, free databases on the Web can also be helpful. A site that does an excellent job of identifying and sorting free databases is The BigHub (http://www.thebighub.com). Through its “specialty search categories,” it allows you to search more than 1,500 databases on the Web, many of which are oriented toward academics.

    What new tools for searching the Web are on the horizon? At a recent conference, I heard about “vortals,” vertical portals that provide information from only a designated slice of the Web. For example, a vortal might search only those sites and pages that have to do with health care. VerticalNet (http://www.verticalnet.com) offers portals to industries including communications and advanced technologies. Although the concept is a good one, the jury is still out on vortals’ usefulness.

    Farther down the road are visual representations of search results. Those search tools display their results graphically, allowing you to see at a glance which items are the most relevant. A service called NewsMaps (http://www.newsmaps.com), for example, displays the results of your search as a thematic map. Topographical markers indicate clusters of similar documents—the most similar ones are piled up into little hills. According to Cartia, the company behind the technology, the maps are created automatically by an algorithm that “reads documents, extracts the content, and organizes the collection into a map.” You can view some sample maps at the site.

    Create your own indexed database --- http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,36600,00.html 
    The WebBrain home page is at http://www.webbrain.com/ 

    WebBrain can be placed on top of any indexable and searchable database. It's not limited to HTML links and files, but can also index Microsoft Office documents and other files as well, making it usable on a corporate intranet.

    "Our objective here is to demonstrate a superior navigation, search, and discovery capability," said Peter Fuchs, CEO of Santa Monica, California-based TheBrain.com. "The technology is designed to separate the navigation from the Web pages. Instead of the typical search, where you have long lists of textual information where you could get hundreds or thousands of search results, now you see it in a visual form."

    The WebBrain.com interface is split in half, with the top part completely written in Java. It gives a Star Trek-like visual representation of the search results by category and shows all of the threads and branches from that category. As you select categories, links appear in the lower half of the screen and submenus are drawn in the upper half.

    Instead of building its own database, TheBrain.com used the ODP database to demonstrate its support for others. The technology can work with any database from major vendors, including Oracle and IBM; all that's necessary is to build the connection between the interface and the data. The software is available from the single-user, Windows version, called PersonalBrain, up to enterprise-scale search engines, such as the one powering WebBrain.com.

    RDF will become the DNA of knowledge bases in the future.  You can read more about RDF at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/xmlrdf.htm 


    Introducing SearchNetworking.com , the networking-specific search site focused on enterprise networks issues. Register at http://www.SearchNetworking.com  for FREE and you might win a new Palm Pilot VII. As an added bonus, you can download the 56-page report on virtual enterprise networks -- "The Network Services Model: New Infrastructure for New Business Models" by The Burton Group -- no purchase necessary!

    Networking-related news and technical resources are identified by our expert editorial team led by Paul Gillin, former Editor-in-Chief of Computerworld. SearchNetworking.com  helps you: 1) Efficiently search the Web for enterprise networks info! Search against 2,000+ sites hand-picked by our editorial team so you only get relevant results. 2) Stay current on networking issues and new technologies! Get email newsletters based on your specific interests -- choose from industry news, network administration tips, and career tips newsletters. 3) Learn from the experts! Participate in Live Expert Q&A with industry experts. AND MORE!

    Go to http://www.SearchNetworking.com  NOW and become a registered member -- ABSOLUTELY FREE! We'll enter you to win a PalmVII and you can download The Burton Group's 56-page report on virtual enterprise networks - all FREE! Don't delay. Quantities are limited so register today before it's too late.

    SearchNetworking.com is a TechTarget.com community. Other TechTarget.com sites include:

    http://www.SearchStorage.com  the enterprise storage-specific search engine 
    http://www.Search400.com  the AS400-specific search engine 
    http://www.SearchWin2000 .com the Windows NT/2000-specific search engine 
    http://www.SearchASP.com  the Application Service Provider-specific search engine http://www.SearchDomino.com  the Lotus Domino-specific search engine 
    http://www.SearchVB.com  the Visual Basic-specific search engine 
    http://www.SearchHP.com  the Hewlett-Packard specific search engine 
    http://www.WhatIs.com  the online IT knowledge exploration tool


    Warnings

    Note from Bob Jensen:  In a recent PBS broadcast, the Digital Duo warns that advertising on search engine pages is to be expected if the search engines are free.  Somebody has to pay for the resources needed to construct and maintain a search engine.  However, the warn us to watch out for search engines that give priorities of hits to sources that pay for such priorities.  For example, it would worry me if I searched for "portfolio management" and have the listed hits being only websites that paid to be hits on this topic.  There may be far better sites on this topic that just did not see a need to pay to be hit.  A transcript of the Digital Duo segment on search engines is given at http://www.digitalduo.com/210_dig.html

    Search engines made the Web truly useful. But they're anything but perfect. Sometimes they give you way more than you're looking for; sometimes much less. And often they don't ferret out the information you really need.

    Many people get used to a single search engine and never sample the other ones. The differences are pretty amazing. Nor do most people know all the ways they can make their favorite search engines work better.

    Let's start by telling you where NOT to go. Probably the most useless search engine around is called goto.com . For many searches, the top of the results list shows you sites that have paid to be listed. So when you search "Seattle Mariners," you get an offshore Internet gambling site or a site that sells baseball flags. Even after the paid listings, the Mariners' official Website is nowhere to be found. The only thing to say about goto.com is never go to goto.com.

    As for where you SHOULD go, Steve's personal fave is AltaVista . We recommend taking a few minutes to learn to improve its capability. For instance, when you do a search for your own name, you may get tons of results! That's because each result must contain EITHER your first or last name. But if you put quotation marks around your name, your results will be much closer. That's because you've told it to find BOTH your first and last names together, in that order. AltaVista's advanced search can make things even more manageable by letting you combine and exclude terms, and limit the range of dates.

    It's been reported that AltaVista will also sell their rankings, which is guaranteed to muck up a great service. It's one thing to sell ads that match a search term but selling the actual results is out of bounds.

    Susie likes HotBot. The site's checkboxes make it easy to construct your search, and then make it easy to narrow it down.

    But when you're looking for a general term, Steve's pick is Yahoo. Since Yahoo actually has human beings organizing data into categories, you often find the right general area at the top of the list, with links to the sites you're looking for just a click away.

    Susie also likes about.com (formerly The Mining Company), because its human beings not only organize results into categories, but also rate sites to help you get what you want. And if you still can't find it, you can e-mail their staff for other suggestions. But Steve hasn't gotten good results from about.com.

    Metacrawler searches several popular search engines and delivers the results on one page. But it often delivers fewer results than if you searched just one. Same goes for Dogpile.

    The Duo tried a new engine, google.com, while it was in beta testing. It ranks pages by how many pages point to them. It's sort of like a secret popularity contest. But the amazing thing is that a lot of the time, it actually works.

     


    Internet Essentials

    There is a great website called Internet Essentials at http://www.internetessentials.com/ 

    Search Engines
    Northern Light
    AltaVista
    DirectHit*
    Excite
    Euroseek
    EuroFerret
    Fast alltheweb
    Google
    GoTo

    HotBot

    Go/Infoseek
    *
    The Invisible Web
    Lycos
    Pinstripe
    SearchUK
    Thunderstone
    Web Crawler

    Meta Search
    Profusion
    Metacrawler
    Ask Jeeves
    Beaucoup
    Chubba

    Cyber411

    debriefing
    Dogpile
    Gary Price's
    Direct Search

    HuskySearch
    Inference Find
    Internets.com
    Internet Sleuth
    Mamma
    Metafind
    OneSeek
    Proteus

    PureSearch
    Savvy Search
    Search Spaniel

    Learn Something New
    GMU IT Knowledgebase
    Learn2.com
    ZD University
    UNext
    Blackboard

    My Computer has
    a Virus$%#
    AntiVirus Info
    IBM
    NIST
    Stiller Research
    Symantec

    Web Directories
    About.com
    Argus
    Britannica
    Infomine
    Librarian's Index
    LookSmart
    Lycos Top 5%
    Magellan
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    Snap

    Yahoo
    Gary Price's Lists

    I want a raise!
    Wage Web
    WSJ Careers

    I need a job!
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    Best Jobs USA
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    SpiceGuide
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    Fortune Magazine*

    Government
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    Ethics/Issues

     


    Search Engines for Plagiarism

    All of the search engines above can be used to search for plagiarized phrases or entire works.  Searchers should keep in mind that some search engines require that quotation marks be placed around the phrase being searched.

    This is part of a message sent by a university professor on May 12, 2000 about  plagiarism:

    My second comment concerns the program I used to find conclusive evidence that the paper had been plagiarized. The paper had a number of telltale signs when I read it (no reference to class readings, no page references to sources, a very unstudent-like, encyclopedia-ish prose style, jumping around from one topic to another, etc.). I had received the paper via an email attachment, so I used it to try out a program called EVE2. If you convert a document into plain text format, EVE2 will search the internet to try to find matching text. It then displays the paper with the text it was able to match highlighted and gives a set of links to sites with matching material. It also gives the percentage of the paper for which it found matching material. In my case it found pages at two sites (infoplease.com and britannica.com) from which about a third of the paper had been stolen (combination of word-for-word borrowing and very close paraphrase). (I'm sure the rest of the paper was also plagiarized but it didn't turn up anything for the rest.) (If you don't convert the document to plain text, the program will still find sites with matching material but won't estimate the percentage or display the paper with matching portions highlighted.)

    The program wasn't perfect -- to my puzzlement it highlighted some parts of the paper which I couldn't find in the sites it listed, while other parts of the paper that clearly *were* lifted from those sites weren't highlighted. Nevertheless I found it extremely useful. I had already tried using a couple of the major search engines on bits of text from the paper without finding anything, and I'm not sure I ever would have tracked it down on my own.

    This was a trial version of the program, but I think I'm going to pay the $20 to register it. If anyone's interested it can be downloaded from http://www.canexus.com/eve/
    Signed XXXXXXXXX

    The following appeared in my December 1, 1999 Edition of New Bookmarks at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/book99q4.htm#120199 

    In the November 23 Edition of New Bookmarks, I reported that the following:  Plagiarism.org will soon be an important web site for many educators and many others, including investigators and journal editors, who want to check if any writer's work is authentic.  Entire schools may be interested in paying for this service.  This site was featured on November 22 on CNN television.  I discovered it at breakfast while watching the news.  Go to  http://www.plagiarism.org/  

     

    Paul Myers replied as follows:

     

    The following URL -- with spelling error and all -- provides background on the Berkeley plagiarism-detection program --- http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9911/21/plagerism.detective/index.html 
    J. Paul Myers, Jr. Associate Professor Department of Computer Science Trinity University 715 Stadium Drive San Antonio, Texas 78212


    Database Searching (including literature searches)

    Database searching, including journal searching, in the Business & Company Resource Center --- http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/ProdList?finalAuth=true 

    For example, see. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BCRC?q=txshr2001&p=texas 

    Suggestions for leisure reading --- http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/WDIRN/index.htm?locID=san22873 

    Also see knowledge portals and vortals at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/portals.htm 


    Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, and YouTube as Knowledge Bases

    A professor wrote to me drawing a fine line between information and knowledge. Information is just organized data that can be right or wrong or unknown in terms of been fact versus fiction. Knowledge generally is information that is more widely accepted as being "true" although academics generally hate the word "true" because it is either too demanding or too misleading in terms of being set in stone. Generally accepted "knowledge" can be proven wrong at later points in time just like Galileo purportedly proved that heavy balls fall at the same rate of speed as their lighter counterparts, thereby proving, that what was generally accepted knowledge until then was false. "Galileo Galilei is said to have dropped two cannon balls of different masses from the tower to demonstrate that their descending speed was independent of their mass. This is considered an apocryphal tale, and the only source for it comes from Galileo's secretary." Quoted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaning_Tower_of_Pisa#History

    In my opinion there is a spectrum along the lines of data to information to knowledge. Researchers attempt to add something new and creative at any point along the spectrum. Scholars learn from most any point on the spectrum and usually attempt to share their scholarship in papers, books, Websites, blogs, and online or onsite classrooms.

    That professor then mentioned above then asserted that Wikipedia and YouTube were information databases but not knowledge bases. He then mentioned the problem of students knowing facts but not organizing these facts in a scholarly manner. He conjectured that this was perhaps do to increased virtual learning in their development. My December 5, 2007 reply to him was as follows (off-the-cuff so to speak).

    Although I see your point about information versus knowledge, the addition of the “Discussion tab” in Wikipedia changed the name of the game. As “information” gets discussed and debated and critiqued it’s beginning to look a whole lot more like knowledge in Wikipedia. For example, note the Discussion tab at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_Design

    And when UC Berkeley puts 177 science courses on YouTube (some of them in biology), it’s beginning to look a lot more like YouTube knowledge --- --- http://www.jimmyr.com/free_education.php

    With respect to virtual learning, my best example is Stanford’s million+ dollar virtual surgery cadaver that can do more than a real cadaver. For one thing it can have blood pressure such that a nicked artery can hemorrhage. Learning throughout time is based on models and simulations of sorts. Our models and simulations keep getting better and better to a point where the line between virtual and real world become very blurred much like pilots in virtual reality begin to think they are in reality.

    Much depends on the purpose and goals of virtual learning. Sometimes edutainment is important to both motivate and make learners more attentive (like wake them up). But this also has drawbacks when it makes learning too easy. I’m a strong believer in blood, sweat, and tears learning --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
    When I put it into practice it was not popular with students of this generation who want it to be easy.

    You note that:  “These students have prepared but it is poorly arranged, planned, and articulated.” One thing we’ve noted in Student Managed Funds (like in Phil Cooley’s course where students actually control the investments of a million dollars or more of a Trinity University's endowment) where students must make presentations before the Board of Trustees greatly improves students “planning and articulation.” You can read more about this at the University of XXXXX (December 4) at http://financialrounds.blogspot.com/
    Note that the portfolios in these courses are not virtual portfolios. They’re the real thing with real dollars! Students adapt to higher levels of performance when the hurdles require higher ordered performance.

    I prefer to think of higher order metacognition --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metacognition
    For specific examples in accounting education see http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
    One of the main ideas is to make students do their own discovery learning. Blood, sweat, and tears are the best teachers.

    Much of the focus in metacognitive learning is how to examine/discover what students have learned on their own and how to control cheating when assessing discovery and concept learning --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm

    Higher order learning attempts to make students think more conceptually. In particular, note the following quotation from Bob Kennelly at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#ConceptKnowledge

    We studied whether instructional material that connects accounting concept discussions with sample case applications through hypertext links would enable students to better understand how concepts are to be applied to practical case situations.

    Results from a laboratory experiment indicated that students who learned from such hypertext-enriched instructional material were better able to apply concepts to new accounting cases than those who learned from instructional material that contained identical content but lacked the concept-case application hyperlinks. 

    Results also indicated that the learning benefits of concept-case application hyperlinks in instructional material were greater when the hyperlinks were self-generated by the students rather than inherited from instructors, but only when students had generated appropriate links. 

    Along broader lines we might think of it in terms of self-organizing of atomic-level information/knowledge ---
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organization

    I look forward to your writings on this subject when you get things sorted out. You’re a good writer. Scientist's aren't meant to be such good writers.


    Wikipedia (heavily used by scholars in spite of authenticity risks)--- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s

    Who is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? --- http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/09/who_is_mahmoud_ahmadinejad.html
    The Iranian-born author of the above article invites anybody to contact him with corrections at amil_imani@yahoo.com
    It would be great to see if and how the author tries to defend himself about contentious “facts.”

    Wikipedia --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Ahmadinejad

    It goes without saying that Wikipedia modules are always suspect, but it is easy to make corrections for the world. I think this particular model requires registration to discourage anonymous edits.

    What is often better about Wikipedia is to read the discussion and criticisms of any module. For example, some facts in dispute in this particular module are mentioned in the “Discussion” or “talk” section about the module ---
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Mahmoud_Ahmadinejad

    Perhaps some of the disputed facts have already been pointed out in the “Discussion” section. Of course pointing out differences of opinion about “facts” does not, in and of itself, resolve these differences. I did read the “Discussion” section on this module before suggesting the module as a supplementary link. I assumed others would also check the “Talk” section before assuming what is in dispute.

    Since Wikipedia is so widely used by so many students and others like me it’s important to try to correct the record whenever possible. This can be done quite simply from your Web browser and does not require any special software. It requires registration for politically sensitive modules.

    Wikipedia modules are often “corrected” by the FBI, CIA, corporations, foreign governments, professors of all persuasions, butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers. This makes them fun and suspect at the same time. It’s like having a paper refereed by the world instead of a few, often biased or casual, journal referees. What I like best is that “referee comments” are made public in Wikipedia’s “Discussion” sections. You don’t often find this in scholarly research journals where referee comments are supposed to remain confidential.
    Reasons for flawed journal peer reviews were recently brought to light at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#PeerReviewFlaws

    The biggest danger in Wikipedia in generally for modules that are rarely sought out. For example, Bill Smith might right a deceitful module about John Doe. If nobody’s interested in John Doe, it may take forever and a day for corrections to appear. Generally modules that are of great interest to many people, however, generate a lot of “talk” in the “Discussion” sections. For example, the Discussion section for George W. Bush is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:George_W._Bush

    Bob Jensen's search helpers are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm

     

     

    "Forget the Articles, Best Wikipedia Read Is Its Discussions," by Lee Gomes, The Wall Street Journal, August 15, 2007; Page B1 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118712061199497533.html

    You already know about Wikipedia -- or think you do. It's the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, the one that by dint of its 1.9 million English-language entries has become the Internet's main information source and the 17th busiest U.S. Web site.

    But that's just the half of it.

    Most people are familiar with Wikipedia's collection of articles. Less well-known, unfortunately, are the discussions about these articles. You can find these at the top of a Wikipedia page under a separate tab for "Discussion."

    Reading these discussion pages is a vastly rewarding, slightly addictive, experience -- so much so that it has become my habit to first check out the discussion before going to the article proper.

    At Wikipedia, anyone can be an editor and all but 600 or so articles can be freely altered. The discussion pages exist so the people working on an article can talk about what they're doing to it. Part of the discussion pages, the least interesting part, involves simple housekeeping; -- editors noting how they moved around the sections of an article or eliminated duplications. And sometimes readers seek answers to homework-style questions, though that practice is discouraged.

    But discussion pages are also where Wikipedians discuss and debate what an article should or shouldn't say.

    This is where the fun begins. You'd be astonished at the sorts of things editors argue about, and the prolix vehemence they bring to stating their cases. The 9,500-word article "Ireland," for example, spawned a 10,000-word discussion about whether "Republic of Ireland" would be a better name for the piece. "I know full well that many Unionist editors would object completely to my stance on this subject," wrote one person.

    A ferocious back and forth ensued over whether Antonio Meucci or Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. One person from the Meucci camp taunted the Bell side by saying, "'Nationalistic pride' stop you and people like you to accept the truth. Bell was a liar and thief. He invented nothing."

    As for the age-old philosophical question, "What is truth," it's an issue Wikipedia editors have spent 242,000 words trying to settle, an impressive feat considering how Plato needed only 118,000 words to write "The Republic."

    These debates extend to topics most people wouldn't consider remotely controversial. The article on calculus, for instance, was host to some sparring over whether the concept of "limit," central to calculus, should be better explained as an "average."

    Wikipedia editors are always on the prowl for passages in articles that violate Wikipedia policy, such as its ban on bias. Editors use the discussion pages to report these sightings, and reading the back and forth makes it clear that editors take this task very seriously.

    On one discussion page is the comment: "I am not sure that it does not present an entirely Eurocentric view, nor can I see that it is sourced sufficiently well so as to be reliable."

    Does it address a polarizing topic from politics or religion? Hardly. The article was about kittens. The editor was objecting to the statement that most people think kittens are cute.

    These debates are not the only treasures in the discussion pages. You can learn a lot of stray facts, facts that an editor didn't think were important enough for the main article. For example, in the discussion accompanying the article about diets, it's noted that potatoes, eaten raw, can be poisonous. The National Potato Council didn't believe this when asked about it last week, but later called back to say that it was true, on account of the solanine in potatoes. Of course, you'd have to eat many sackfuls of raw potatoes to be done in by them.

    The discussion about "biography" included random facts from sundry biographies, including that Marshall McLuhan believed his ideas about mass media and the rest to have been inspired by the Virgin Mary. This is true, said McLuhan biographer Philip Marchand. (Mr. Marchand also said McLuhan believed that a global conspiracy of Freemasons was seeking to hinder his career.)

    Remember, though, this is Wikipedia, and while it tends to get things right in the long run, it can goof up along the way. A "tomato" article contained a lyrical description of the Carolina breed, said to be "first noted by Italian monk Giacomo Tiramisunelli" and "considered a rare delicacy amongst tomato-connoisseurs."

    That's all a complete fabrication, said Roger Chetelat, tomato expert at the University of California, Davis. While now gone from Wikipedia, the passage was there long enough for "Giacomo Tiramisunelli" to turn up now in search engines as a key figure in tomato history.

    Wikipedia is very self-aware. It has a Wikipedia article about Wikipedia. But this meta-analysis doesn't extend to "Wikipedia discussions." No article on the topic exists. Search for "discussion," and you are sent to "debate."

    But, naturally, that's controversial. The discussion page about debate includes a debate over whether "discussion" and "debate" are synonymous. Emotions run high; the inability to distinguish the two, said one participant, is "one of the problems with Western Society."

    Maybe I have been reading too many Wikipedia discussion pages, but I can see the point.

    Jensen Comment
    This may be more educational than what we teach in class. Try it by clicking on the Discussion tab for the following"

    Credit Derivative --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_derivative

    Capital Asset Pricing Model --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_asset_pricing_model

    Socratic Method --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_Method

    Moodle --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moodle

    "Seeing Corporate Fingerprints in Wikipedia Edits," by Katie Hafner, The New York Times, August 19, 2007 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/technology/19wikipedia.html?ex=1188532800&en=c387035de4ec887b&ei=5070

    "CIA, FBI Computers Used for Wikipedia Edits," by Randall Mikkelsen, The Washington Post, August 16, 2007 --- Click Here
    "CIA and Vatican Edit Wikipedia Entries," TheAge.com, August 18, 2007 --- Click Here

    Jensen Comment
    Wikipedia installed software to trace the source of edits and new modules.

    Bob Jensen's threads on tools of education technology are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm


    Search for Discussion Groups (Usenet)

    Wow!  Over 20 years of Usenet discussion groups to search, browse, and post messages --- http://groups.google.com/ 

    Example:  A popular search engine (Google) has posted 20 years' worth of Usenet discussion group postings: more than 700 million entries in all. Included: American Taliban John Walker, screen name, "doodoo." --- http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,49016,00.html 

    Bob Jensen's Bookmarks on "Discussion Groups, Newsgroups and Chat Rooms" are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob3.htm#DiscussionGroups 

    Bob Jensen's search helpers are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm 


    Search the InvisibleWeb

    "Getting in Deep: After Google, the Invisible Web," by Dale Vidmar, Syllabus, April 2003, pp. 26-27 --- http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=7477 

    For most of us, Web searching continues to take the form of searching Google. A simple click to Google.com produces relevant results. When Google was first released by two Stanford Ph.D. candidates, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, in 1998, the search tool transformed Internet searching almost immediately. Google incorporated linking structures into its algorithm—the code that determines the ranking of pages within a retrieval list—and, thereby, retrieved better and more accurate information. Since that time Google has added features to an index that now includes more than two billion pages.

    With all this and more, Google has become the search tool of choice for most information specialists and novices alike. So why use any other search tool?

    Google searching became synonymous with Web searching because it works. Brin and Page believed there were no "bad" searches when using Google. Whatever the search, Google could retrieve better information based on the relationship of link structures—in other words, good sites are linked to more often by other sites. Google quickly became the best place to look for top-level Web sites such as business, institutional, and personal homepages.

    But there is more. Google organizes a query within subject categories when applicable, provides links to language translations, maintains cached links to original pages, and lists similar pages. Other features include access to street maps when typing an address with a city or state, dictionary definitions of search terms, and specialized databases, such as Google Uncle Sam for government information and University Search for information from specific institutions. With all these features and added accuracy, it becomes difficult to use anything else but Google.

    What You Don't See is What You Don't Get
    Ah, but there's the rub. Neither Google nor any other search tool can index all the information on the Internet. Conventional search tools such as Google, Yahoo, AltaVista, All the Web, or meta-searchers like Ixquick, Vivísimo, and SurfWax often access more than a couple billion pages in their databases. However, a large portion of available information has been difficult or impossible to search. Material that is not accessible using conventional search tools has become known as the "Invisible Web." Other names for the Invisible Web include the Deep Web, Opaque Web, and searchable databases.

    Such information is not accessible to conventional search tools because it is inside databases such as the U.S. Census, Amazon.com, or a library's online catalog. The locations of these pages can be found through resources such as Gary Price's Direct Search, Complete Planet: The Deep Web, http://www.invisibleweb.com/ , and Invisible-web.net. Or the information can be located via subject directory tools like Infomine, Librarians' Index to the Internet (LII), Best Information on the Net, and AlphaSearch.

    The reality is that many information specialists, as well as the general public, use the Invisible Web already. Most Web surfers have accessed an Invisible Web site at one time or another. However, they access only a portion of the Invisible Web, typically the portion found in three general forms:

    First, the Fee Group, or paid databases, such as EBSCO, OVID, ProQuest, and Medline. These databases have a cost associated with use.

    Second, the Free Group: government databases such as the Census, AskERIC, PublicMed, the Currency Converter, FindArticles, and library online catalogs. These databases are free for anyone to access.

    And the Hybrid Group: UnCoverWeb, online newspapers like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, which currently take this form. These databases have both free portions and fee portions.

    The Not-So-Invisible Web
    For the past two years, the Invisible Web has been the "next big thing" in Internet searching. The truth is, it is still a big thing. When it comes to more than 500 billion Web pages located in searchable databases, how can it be anything but big? But the Invisible Web is still unwieldy for most. Resources such as Infomine, Librarians' Index to the Internet, and Direct Search have been underused by both information specialists and novice searchers in part because they are difficult to use. However, the increasing exposure of the Invisible Web is helping to bring these resources to the surface. As more searchers use them, access will become better, driven by the demand to find and use relevant information.

    Continued in the article.

    The InvisibleWeb can access over 10,000 databases that are generally missed by common search engines --- 
    http://www.invisibleweb.com
     

    What is the InvisibleWeb.com?

    The InvisibleWeb.com is a directory of over 10,000 databases, archives, and search engines that contain information that traditional search engines have been unable to access. InvisibleWeb.com take you to these invisible sources.

    Why would I want this?

    Classic search engines such as Yahoo or AltaVista are just too large. They work just like the index in the back of a book; you give the engine a word to look for and it returns every page it has ever seen that word on. You don’t want to wade through futile, repetitive information; you want targeted, precise information and that's exactly what InvisibleWeb.com delivers!

    Air Fares
    Auctions
    Autos
    Car Rentals
    Computers
    Downloads
    Entertainment
    Find a Business
    Find a Person
    Find Email
    Games
    Health
    Jobs
    Lifestyles
    Lodging
    Maps and Directions
    News
    Real Estate
    Reference
    Restaurants
    Shopping
    Sports
    Stocks
    Weather

    "How to go about digging deeper on the Web," by Jackie Loohauis,  JS Online, May 12, 2001 --- http://www.jsonline.com/enter/netlife/may01/deepweb13051101.asp 

    Traditional search engines have access to only a fraction of 1% of what exists on the Web, according to BrightPlanet, an Internet search company, noting that as many as 550 billion pieces of content are hidden from most search engine scrutiny. These documents make up what is known as "The Deep Web."

    Undercover and undercovered, the vast reservoir of the Deep Web is estimated to be 500 times larger than the "surface" World Wide Web. And, according to BrightPlanet, the Deep Web is the largest growing category of new information on the Net.

    "There's a huge amount of information you can't find entirely or easily via a search engine," says Net search guru Gary Price, a librarian at George Washington University, and co-author of the upcoming book "The Invisible Web" (CyberAge Books, $29.95). "The material on the Web is unorganized, very ephemeral. There's no rhyme or reason, no language control. The Web is a huge directory that's very hard to get at."

    What's hidden? What makes up the depths of The Deep Web? The biggest part of this invisible Web is information stored in databases - massive libraries of Web content unsearchable through such tools as Yahoo! and Google. You have to know they exist before you can search them.

    Such a database would be the Government Printing Office listings at www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/aces/aaces002.html . There are thousands more.

    Other aspects of the Net remain hidden in deep waters, too.

    "There are tons of things out there," says Tara Calishain of Researchbuzz.com, an online Internet guide. "Pay content sources, lots of genealogy sources. The Library of Congress ( www.loc.gov ) has fabulous collections you can't find on Alta Vista."

    Several types of information are most elusive for search engines - bibliographies, multimedia files, information that comes in .pdf files (Adobe's portable document format). "News is dreadful, says Calishain. "Search engines don't cover it. It's tough to find breaking news."

    Some sites, such as Amazon.com have sections so far from the surface of their home pages that they, too, can be classified as Deep Web, says David Crane, a spokesman for search engine Google ( www.google.com ). An example, says Crane, is "the section that specifically offers a 'portable compact disc player by Sony.'"

    But the deepest Deep Web drop-off is in the category of government, and it's getting deeper.

    "More and more city and county governments are putting their offerings on the Web. The State of Pennsylvania has a new crime reporting database ( www.ucr.psp.state.pa.us/UCR/ComMain.asp  ), and more and more of that kind of thing is coming up now," says Calishain.

    . . .

    Two groups of Web experts are also making it their business to provide searchers with information on Deep Web sources.

    Calishain's Researchbuzz.com (www.researchbuzz.com) chronicles search engines, new data collections ("Online Legal Information in Denmark, Norway and Sweden"), browser software and other Deep Web mining tools that "a research librarian, journalist, educator and others would find helpful, from the perspective of someone who's really going to use it."

    And in the early '90s at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Internet Scout Project ( www.scout.cs.wisc.edu  ) was started with funding from the National Science Foundation to "inform the higher education and research communities about resources on the Internet," says Scout Director Rachael Bower. The project posts detailed reports each Friday to keep searchers, including the general public, "up to speed" on Deep Web sources.

    The Scout Project is driven by five editors who have spent years creating bookmarks and automatically checking changes in existing sources; there's a searchable archive of 11,500 sites available.

    "We do supply Deep Web information. A lot of the things you get from Scout an Alta Vista search wouldn't get, or it's buried. Think of it as being a card catalog with information about information," says Bower. "It's one of the first attempts to get librarians to catalog Web resources. All of the editors doing the cataloging are graduate students in the subject or in library science."

     

    "RTFM: A Guide to Online Research,"  by Steve Champeon, Webmonkey, February 23, 2001 --- http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/00/08/index2a.html 

     

    So, then, why do so many feel the need to ignore the vast resources available to them, publicly and repeatedly offer up disinformation, and generally offend the basic tenets of the liberal arts education? What can be done to help these people, so obviously confused by their encounter with a badly constructed tutorial, or ruined by unmonitored self-study? I mulled the problem over a strong cup of Kenya AA and suddenly struck my fist into my palm, shouting, "Eureka! We must introduce them to the primary sources!"

     

    One of the great things about being a Web designer or developer is that you have access to an enormous collection of tutorials, documentation, specifications, and related materials, no matter what part of the Web you work with.

     

    . . . 

    The IETF produces several different kinds of "standards":
    • Internet Drafts (I-D)
      Like the Bill from everyone's favorite Schoolhouse Rock episode, even an Internet standard has to go from one stage to another on its way to glorious worldwide acceptance. The first step on this path is an Internet draft, which represents an RFC's larval stage. Anyone can write an Internet draft, as long as they follow the IETF guidelines for doing so.

     

    • For Your Information (FYI)
      FYI documents are handy primers for newbies of all ages, ranging from discussions of Netiquette to "why it's bad to spam." They are great resources to force on people who just don't get it. There are about 35 of these handy documents at present.

       

    • Requests for Comments (RFC)
      These are informal documents that discuss, at varying levels of detail, anything from proposed to existing protocols, processes, infrastructure, and the like. There's even an RFC that documents the IETF standards process, though technically it is also a BCP (see below). At any rate, RFCs have different classifications, including informational, experimental, and historic, and not all RFCs become Internet standards. In fact, some are elaborate practical jokes.

       

    • Best Current Practice (BCP)
      These document best current practices, as you might expect. There are only 36 of these at the time of this writing.

       

    • Internet Standards
      These are generally recognized as documenting those protocols and practices that have proved the test of time. By way of illustration, there are, at the time of this writing, more than 2,500 RFCs but only 58 Internet standards (mostly related to low-level networking, like TCP/IP or PPP or the Post Office Protocol).

    . . .

    Armed with this knowledge, go forth and uphold the social contract of the Internet: "Be conservative in what you do, and liberal in what you accept from others." The conservatism is the natural result of having a good reference library at your fingertips. The liberalism extends only so far and doesn't include accepting an uninformed line of bull from somebody on a mailing list.

    Related links on the invisible web:

    direct search is a growing compilation of links to the search interfaces of resources that contain data not easily or entirely searchable/accessible from general search tools like Alta Vista, Google, or Hotbot. Although these "general" tools are essential for the retrieval of Internet based data, searchers often fail to realize that a massive amount of information is not easily or entirely searchable/accessible via these search tools.  Material "hidden" from the general search tools is said to reside on the Invisible Web.

    Learn more about the Invisible Web.
    Learn more about the OPAQUE/ALMOST INVISIBLE WEB.

    Search Engine Submission Tips
    This area covers search engine registration and submission tips, such as using meta tags, improving placement and how to submit URLs.
    Formerly called "A Webmaster's
     Guide To Search Engines"


    Web Searching Tips
    Learn how to search better and how the major search engines work from a searcher's perspective. Also see how people search and other fun stuff.

    Search Engine Listings
    Find all the major search engines; popular meta search engines; MP3 search engines; kid-safe services and much more.

    Reviews, Ratings & Tests
    Read comparison reviews, see which search engines are most popular, and check out various tests and statistics.

    Search Engine Resources
    If it is related to search engines in 
    some way, you'll find it here.

    Search Engine Newsletters
    Over 165,000 readers depend on our free newsletters to keep up with search engines. Sign-up or learn more.


    AllTheWeb.com http://www.alltheweb.com/ 

    AllTheWeb has had a face lift and added several new features. Now when users perform a search using any of the five major search options (Web pages, Pictures, Videos, MP3 files, or FTP files), a sidebar shows helpful results in other categories. So, for example, a search for "Internet Scout" in the pictures index brought up our staff picture, but also offered a listing of Websites such as our front page and our Weblog. Users can also now limit their searches in a variety of ways directly from the search box, which offers a handy pull-down menu to limit by language. The help page explains the various search options, including searching for words in the title or domain name, searching pages on a specific site, searching for pages with a link to a specific site, and more. AllTheWeb has always been this scout's favorite workhorse search engine because it's big and fast. It's nice to see more functionality as well.

    AllTheWeb --- http://www.alltheweb.com/ 

    "FAST and Fresh," by Paul J. Bruemmer, NewMedia, May 7, 2002 --- http://www.newmedia.com/nm-ie.asp?articleID=3563 

    How would you like a snapshot of the past year's trends and a glimpse into the search engine future? To gather the information needed to take such a look, I've interviewed some of the major engines: AllTheWeb, AltaVista, Google, LookSmart, Lycos, and Yahoo! I'll be sharing what I've learned, beginning with AllTheWeb, a site owned by Fast Search & Transfer (FAST) --- http://www.fastsearch.com/ .

    By offering AllTheWeb as a public search engine, FAST aims to provide users with comprehensive results while using the engine as a demonstration piece for its original equipment manufacturer (OEM) partners. The public search engine enables the company's corporate partners to evaluate the technology before rolling it out on their own sites.

    "FAST attacks the four pillars of search: relevancy, freshness, size, and speed," said Rob Rubin, FAST general manager, Internet business unit. "This year, FAST introduced its linguistics tool kit to automatically detect phrases and provide accurate search results." (Check this out by entering "Who is Little Richard?" or "What is the weather in New York?")


    Handbook for Online Volunteers http://www.serviceleader.org/vv/handbook/08news.html 

    Finding News Articles on a Particular Subject

    The Internet has provided a great way to search for news articles relating to a particular subject..... if you can figure out how to find such articles.....

    It's been said that Internet search engines can be the most useful--or useless--tools on the Internet. As one writer put it: "the Internet is an enormous library in which someone has turned out the lights and tipped the index cards all over the floor." There is so much information on the Internet that it can be overwhelming (for most users) to try to find what (they) are looking for. Finding information is easy...finding the article that you're looking for is more challenging.

     
    What's Out There?
    The first instinct may be to use one of the many search engines online. However, search engines are generally poor sources for current news. Some have developed separate engines and directories for news postings and these tend to work the same way as search engines. Examples include: Yahoo News, Excite, CNN.COM, ABCNews.COMand Lycos Top News. But if you're looking for topics that are not in the newspaper headlines, these may not necessarily be the best search options for you.

     
    Where Should I Start?
    There are many good places to search for the latest news stories from hundreds of sources on the web. The following sites provide good results for current event searching. And because they search only news sites, the results are usually focused and timely (see Online Research Advice for how they work).

     

    1. American Journalism Review News Search Engine
      This online tools allows you to search various news sources, including Excite News Tracker, Associated Press (via the Washington Post), Infoseek Wires, NewsBot, News Index and Total News.

       

    2. Yahoo Daily News
      Searches a variety of news databases.

       

    3. The Wired Cybrarian
      of the most extensive collection of search engines can be found at the Wired Cybrarian. In addition to having links to some of the best reference sites, the Wired Cybrarian acts as a multi-engine search for news articles broken out into eight topic areas: Technology, Current Affairs, Business, Recreation, Investing and Finance, Media, Culture and Health and Science.

       

    4. NewsBot
      Developed by HotBot, NewsBot's greatest strength is that it allows you to filter your search by date, so you can receive only the most current information. Newsbot then takes all of the documents that fit your criteria, sorts them according to their relevance, and returns a list of documents in the form of abstracts and links.

       

    5. Ixquick Metasearch
      Ixquick Metasearch finds the news you're looking for by intelligently searching top newspapers simultaneously.
     Once you have a feel for the keywords being used in the articles, some other good resources include:
    • Librarian's Index to the Internet
    • Newshub
    • NewsTracker
    • Paperboy

       

    • FindArticles.com
      A partnership between LookSmart and the Gale Group, a publisher of research and reference materials for libraries, businesses, and information technologists. Offers free access to the full-text of articles published in more than 350 magazines and journals dating from 1998. Search returns include article title, periodical, and short description, with a link to the full-text, which is conveniently and quickly displayed at the FindArticles site, though with numerous advertising banners. Visitors can also view a list of the publications indexed, alphabetically or by subject. Periodical listings include a one-sentence description and a link to their Website. A very useful reference source, indexing many leading journals and magazines.
    • NewsLinx
      To many this is the best site to keep up-to-date on any technology beat. It's a page of deep links, updated in real-time, to a host of newspapers, trade magazines and websites covering e-commerce (and other topics.) You can also search the database to get real-time news on any technology topic you like. The ads follow the copy, and the stories aren't "framed," so they're not stealing from copyright holders.
    • NewsMaps
      "Explore thousands of news articles and discussions, organized by topic onto an information landscape." You can click on data "points" on the maps to link to actual news articles. Works best at 56KB and faster, and your browser must support Java."
    • Periodicals.net
      A search engine by the Library Technology Alliance.
     
    What's Best?
    Finding what is best depends on what you're looking for. Sometimes searches on a general search engine may prove to hold the best information for your search, sometimes you may have to use multiple sources. As with any search, the more sources that you use, the more information you will be able to retrieve.

     
    Citing Internet Sources
    When you are given an assignment to gather news articles, provide the assigning organization the name of the article, the date of the article, and the direct URL of the article, so that they can then access the article themselves. This is also important so the article can be properly cited if it is used.

     
    Another great resource for learning to find news articles is the Information Research FAQ at http://cn.net.au/faq.txt

     

     

    Internet Research Articles --- http://www.virtualchase.com/articles.shtml 

    Bogus Information and Evaluative Skills

    Get Smart About Web Site I.Q., SearchDay, 4 April 2002 (off site)

    Honest Mistakes, Deceptive Facts, Legal Assistant Today, March/April 2000. Request a print copy.

    (How To) Assess the Quality of Information at a Web Site (2002)

    Companies and Business Research

    (How To) Find Employer Identification Numbers (2001)

    (How To) Find Sales Leads and Other Prospect Lists (2002)

    (How To) Locate a Company's EDGAR Filings without Searching the SEC's EDGAR Database (2000, 2001)

    In Pursuit of Company Secrets, Law Practice Management, April 2002, pgs. 9, 12-14 (off site)

    Investigating Private Companies (2002)

    Minding the Web, Law Office Computing, Dec/Jan 2001

    Factual Research

    (How To) Determine Where to Conduct Research (Internet vs. Library) (2002)

    Just the Facts! (2001)

    How To Articles

    Find brief articles on how to accomplish specific research tasks.

    Legal Research

    Build Your Own Electronic Library (2001)

    Finding Meaning in Law (2002)

    (How To) Find a Statute by its Popular Name, Or Finding the Interstate Commerce Act (2000, 2001)

    (How To) Find a Treaty Ratified by the U.S. (2000, 2001)

    (How To) Find Regulations under a Particular Federal Code Section (2000, 2001)

    (How To) Monitor Federal Regulations (2000, 2001)

    People Finding, Investigative Research

    (How To) Discover Vehicle Ownership with a Plate Number (2001)

    (How To) Find Employer Identification Numbers (2001)

    (How To) Find Property Records Online (2000, 2001)

    In Pursuit of Company Secrets, Law Practice Management, April 2002, pgs. 9, 12-14 (off site)

    Investigating Private Companies (2002)

    Mission Possible: Investigating the Background of an Expert Witness (2002)

    Reach Out and Find Someone, Law Office Computing, Oct/Nov 2000. Request a print copy.

    News Searching

    (How To) Find News Articles about People (2001)

    You Have News! (2001)

    Research Tools

    Browser Power (2001)

    Build Your Own Electronic Library (2001)

    Sow the Data, Reap the Knowledge, Law Practice Management, 22-25, October 2001. Request a print copy.

    Search Engines

    Engine Power, Legal Assistant Today, 68-75, Jul/Aug 2001. Request a print copy.

    It's Tough to Get a Good Date with a Search Engine, SearchDay, 5 June 2002 (off site)

    (How To) Pick a Search Engine (2000, revised 2001)

    Tyburski Files

    This Law Office Computing column covers electronic resources and strategies for accomplishing various types of legal and business research. Request print copies.

    Web Search Techniques

    Browser Power (2001)

    (How To) Determine Where to Conduct Research (Internet vs. Library) (2002)

    It's Tough to Get a Good Date with a Search Engine, SearchDay, 5 June 2002 (off site)

    (How To) Retain My Research Starting Point (2000, 2001)

    The Skill of the Hunt, Law Practice Management, 23-24, Nov/Dec. 2000. Request a print copy.

    Tips for Conducting Internet Research (1999, revised 2001)

    A Topical Change of Habits, Law Practice Management, 26-27, May/June 2001. Request a print copy

     

     


    Search for Education Organizations

    Bob Jensen's suggested links --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm 

    Education Resource Organizations Directory (EROD) from the U.S. Department of Education at http://www.ed.gov/Programs/EROD/ 

    The Directory is intended to help you identify and contact organizations that provide information and assistance on a broad range of education-related topics.

    This is mostly a site designed to help you search for help and other information on most any education-related topic, including education technology.

    Yahoo is always a good place to start in education searches --- http://dir.yahoo.com/Education/Higher_Education/ 

    "The College Search Game, Spam Included," The New York Times, September 28, 2001
    Related Articles
    Online Application Forms Add to College Admission Frenzy
    (December 23, 1999)

    Students See Risk in Online College Applications
    (July 6, 2000)

    For students who are starting their college searches, several Web sites offer one-stop shops that include searchable databases of college information, test preparation aids, virtual tours and online applications. Here are some of the leading sites and some of the additional features they contain:

    THE COLLEGE BOARD: www.collegeboard.com Features online registration for the SAT and help with essay preparation. Plans to offer soon a search feature called LikeFinder, which will enable students to find colleges similar to the ones they are reading about, and a feature that will generate side-by-side comparisons of selected colleges.

    COLLEGELINK: www.collegelink.com Offers a month-by-month planner and articles about financial aid.

    COLLEGENET: www.collegenet.com The CollegeBot search engine looks at college-related Web sites.

    PETERSON'S COLLEGEQUEST: www.collegequest.com Includes a personal organizer, practice tests for the SAT and ACT and discussion groups.

    EMBARK: www.embark.com Offers online "lockers" where students can store applications in progress and results of searches.

    XAP: www.xap.com Gives students a head start on the admissions process, starting in eighth grade, by leading them through questions about high school courses and the types of colleges they would like to attend.

    Some Web sites, like the ones below, focus on specific aspects of the college search:

    CPNET AND U-WIRE: www.cpnet.com, www.uwire.com News from college newspapers around the country.

    FAFSA ON THE WEB: www.fafsa.ed.gov An online version of the federal financial aid form.

    FASTWEB: www.fastweb.com A database of scholarships and grants.

    FINAID: www.finaid.org Calculators and resources to help demystify the financial-aid process.

    NATIONAL CENTER FOR EDUCATION STATISTICS/IPEDS COLLEGE OPPORTUNITIES ON-LINE: www.nces.ed.gov/ipeds/cool A database of 9,000 colleges. Students can search for colleges based on a profile of the types of schools they are interested in.

    USNEWS.COM: www.usnews.com/usnews/edu Annual rankings of colleges according to U.S. News & World Report, and a database that can be searched for specific criteria.

    UNESCO - Studying Abroad  --- http://www.unesco.org/education/studying_abroad/index.shtml 

    Peterson's.com Distance Learning --- http://www.petersons.com/dlearn/ 

    John Bear's Degree.net --- http://www.degree.net/ 

    Yahoo --- http://dir.yahoo.com/Education/ 

    Bob Jensen's Links to Online International Training and Education Courses --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm 

    Reply from David Pugsley [dpugsley@juliet.stfx.ca

    Bob,

    These are the best sources that I have found which allow you to evaluate by category/degree: http://www.graduatebusiness.com/ 

    http://www.gradschools.com 

    http://www.degree.net/index.html  (not updated often)

    David Pugsley 
    St. Francis Xavier University 
    Antigonish, NS Canada

     


    Helpers When Searching for News and Events 

    Rocketinfo's Search Engine http://www.rocketnews.com/2corporate/searchengine.html 

    Daypop (searches over 7,000 news sites and weblogs) for current and breaking news.

    Power Search --- http://support.lexis-nexis.com/nexis/record.asp?articleid=1nex_ps_tips&vcRef=1 

    Handbook for Online Volunteers http://www.serviceleader.org/vv/handbook/08news.html 

    Find Articles --- http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/PI/index.jhtml 

    Internet Research Articles --- http://www.virtualchase.com/articles.shtml 

    Newspaper Searches --- http://www.midwestparalegal.com/Pages/Links/Newspaper.html 

    Associated Press
    Chicago Sun Times
    Chicago Tribune
    Christian Science Monitor
    Los Angeles Times
    Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
    New York Times
    New York Times Syndicate
    Roll Call Online
    The Hill
    USA Today

    From The Scout Report on February 22, 2002 

    Business 2.0 Web Guide http://www.business2.com/webguide/ 

    According to one of its own brochures, "Business 2.0 is the essential tool for navigating today's relentlessly changing marketplace, particularly as it's driven by the Internet and other technologies." In both print and electronic versions, Business 2.0 does cover an incredible amount of ground, including day-to-day and month-to-month information and offering extensive subject lists of its material, broken down by general subjects -- from management and marketing to Enron and the Internet. Not only clearly in touch with today's business world, Business 2.0 promises to put its readers in touch with it through company links, as well as through straightforward contact lists. While Business 2.0 is open for anyone's consultation, registered readers are granted greater access privileges to archived and premium cont


    Columbia Newsblaster http://www.cs.columbia.edu/nlp/newsblaster/ 

    With a team of researchers headed by Prof. Kathy McKeown, Columbia Newsblaster is an online project at Columbia University's Department of Computer Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Science. Newsblaster currently looks at news reports from thirteen sources, including Yahoo, ABCNews, CNN, Reuters, Los Angeles Times, CBS News, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Virtual New York, Washington Post, Wired, and USA Today. The product uses artificial intelligence techniques to cull through news reports published online and then sorts and summarizes these reports in five different news categories -- US, world, finance, entertainment, and sports. These summaries are based on reflecting factors, such as where a fact is mentioned in the published reports and how often it is repeated across reports dealing with the same event or subject. They are also based on the news value of individual facts, such as how many were killed or injured, or how much damage to property occurred. On the whole, in an age of information overload, this newly developed tool may provide assistance to journalists, executives, and average news consumers.

     

     

    Helpers in Attracting the World to Your Website

    "Search Engine Optimization FREE!" by Paul Boutin, Webmonkey, August 6, 2001 --- http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/01/23/index1a.html 

    Before I landed my cushy job as a magazine editor, I spent three years under the hood at Hotbot as an engineer and manager. Between days reading our log files and nights shmoozing with other search engineers, I learned more than I'd ever wanted to know about where search traffic comes from, and where it goes to. I even wrote an article about it for Webmonkey.

    But I had put all that behind me ... until my lovely wife, Christina, asked me about search engine optimization for Artloop, her fine art research and location service.

    Dozens of companies had pitched their optimization services to her, but Christina, a former MSN manager as smart about database schema as she is about business plans, balked. Why pay someone to set up bogus domains, build huge farms of gateway pages, and cram hundreds of keywords like "britney spears" into Artloop's HTML? The very idea ran contrary to the information architecture and site layout her staff had worked so hard to make as clean and clear as possible for their visitors. Moreover, as a Web user herself, she'd learned to recognize these traffic-grabbing methods and had become wary of sites using tricks to get her to click. Why should she assume her own customers would behave differently?

    And she was right: Trying to fool search engine users with keywords and trick tags makes sense only if your goal is to flash a lot of ad banners, return traffic be damned. That used to be the business model for an entire industry. But most sites in business today hope to convert first-time visitors into loyal customers by building long-term relationships. Sure, searchers need to find your site, but the results on Hotbot's Top Ten lists show that the only results people stick with are the ones that don't try to scam them. Trap doors, redirects, keyword spam, and multiple domains that host the same pages are more likely to make people reach for the back button (a move the Direct Hit technology behind Top Ten results can detect), not their credit cards.

    So, rather than waste money on consultants, Christina and I decided to create our own search optimization spec. Using data gleaned from representatives of leading search engines, insider data, and old-fashioned trial and error, we came up with our own strategy for getting traffic from search engines and portals without having to fake people out. In the process, we encountered so many dubious "experts" with something for sale — software, books, services — that we decided to raise the bar on them and publish our notes for free.

    Imagine our surprise when Google's engineers read this article (when it first published in early June, 2001) and invited us to visit their offices to dig even deeper into the workings of their gigapage Web index. Of course we took them up on the offer, and we've updated this article with our notes from those meetings. We've also included answers to the best questions from the hundreds of emails we've received over the past couple months.

    . . . 

    The Biggest Fish to Fry: Yahoo, Google, and Inktomi

    The Yahoo directory accounts for half the traffic referred to most sites. So get your site listed on Yahoo, and your traffic can literally double overnight. Beyond that, most search engine traffic comes from two places: Google and Inktomi.

    Traffic from Google has increased at an astonishing rate over the past year: Jakob Nielsen's search engine referrals to his Useit site confirm this, as do the unpublished reports from retail sites like Stylata. Google, once considered a niche site for nerds, is the Wall Street Journal's pick for best search engine on the Net, and the traffic numbers seem to agree.

    Inktomi, the number two traffic generator, doesn't run its own search site. Instead, the company provides the technology behind MSN Search and AOL Search, two top referrers, as well as Hotbot and over a dozen more.

    Portal sites like Excite, Lycos, and AltaVista still draw lots of traffic, but together Google and Inktomi outweigh the entire rest of the field. Add it up and it's pretty clear how to maximize your traffic for the least effort:

    • Get yourself into Yahoo's directory.
    • Make sure your site is thoroughly crawled by Google and Inktomi.
    • Get lots of links to your site from domains that a lot of other sites link to — that's how Google and Inktomi determine relevance when ranking search results.
    • For all other search engines, implement a blanket strategy that gets you reasonable results. By not chasing each one of them separately, you can put your company's time and money to more important uses.

    All of this can be accomplished with one, three-step process. And it really is as easy as 1-2-3. 

    There are quite a few things you can do to grab the attention of search engines and directories:

    Clean Up Your URLs

    Frames used to be the biggest roadblock to getting crawled, but no more: Both Google and Inktomi now crawl them (the section of Inktomi's support FAQ that claims this isn't so is out of date, according to the company). Instead, the problem with most e-commerce sites today is that their product pages are dynamically generated. While Google will crawl any URL that a browser can read, most of the other search engines balk at links with "?" and "&" characters that separate CGI variables (such as "artloop.com/store?sku=123&uid=456"). As a result, many individual product pages don't show up outside of Google.

    One way to circumvent this difficulty is to create static versions of your site's dynamic pages for search engines to crawl. Unfortunately, duplicating your pages is a huge amount of extra work and a constant maintenance chore, plus the resulting pages are never quite up-to-date — all the headaches dynamic pages were designed to eliminate.

    A far better strategy is to follow the lead of Amazon and rewrite your dynamic URLs in a syntax that search engines will gladly crawl. So URLs that look like this ...

    amazon.com/store?shop=cd&sku= B00004WFIZ&ref=p_ir_m&sessionID= 107-6571839-6268523

    ... become ...

    amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ref= B00004WFIZ/ref=pd_ir_m/107-6571839-6268523

    Amazon's application server knows the fields in the URL are actually CGI parameters in a certain order, and processes them accordingly.

    J.K. Bowman's Spider Food site explains how to fix URLs for most popular e-commerce servers. One of Artloop's Web programmers learned Apache rewrite rules that tell Apache how to translate slash-separated URLs into a format used by their Netzyme application server. On the back end, Netzyme is passed something like this:

    artloop.com/cgi-bin/CssP.exe?CsspApp= ArtLoopClient1&CssServer=localhost%3A32401&CsspFn =@/details/ArtistDetail.html:@:getForm&ObjectLocation =ART&ArtistID=3918

    But users and search engines see the tidier, Apache-served URLs, which look something like this:

    artloop.com/artists/profiles/3918.html

    Not only are the rewritten URLs crawlable by all search engines, they're also more human-friendly, making them easier to pass around the Net.

    Many readers have written in to to ask if the search engines will begin crawling and indexing Flash content soon. The answer, as you might guess, is no. Unlike PDF files, Flash files rarely contain information in text format. Search developers don't want to clutter up their indexes with a million "Skip Intro" pages.

    Submit your Site

    There are a lot of automated search engine submission services that you can use to submit your site to as many search engines as possible. The one most recommended by people I talked to is Submit It, an early player that did so well, Microsoft bought them — Submit It is now part of MSN bCentral, and it charges a minimum fee of US$59 to keep a few URLs submitted for a year.

    You can avoid the fees by simply submitting to individual search engines on your own. Start with UseIt's list of top referrers — that's where most of the traffic you can get will come from. And while you'd think submitting your site to one Inktomi-powered site would work for all of them, optimization experts have told us it works better if you hit them all.

    Don't Forget the Directories

    Submit It does submit your site to the busiest directory sites, except for the biggies: Yahoo, LookSmart (which MSN serves under its logo), and the Open Directory Project (which powers Lycos, Hotbot, and Netcenter categories). Some of these directories charge for submission, but $400-500 total will get your most important pages into the most trafficked places.

    Yahoo still offers free submissions, except for business categories, which cost $199. But even the fee doesn't guarantee they'll accept your site, just that they'll decide on it within a week — with free submissions, you don't even get the promise that they'll ever get around to evaluating it, given the incredible volume of submissions.

    Once you've submitted your pages, be ready to wait a month, two, or three before they're crawled and indexed. It's frustrating, but processing a billion Web pages takes time — at a nonstop rate of one hundred per second, it would still take almost four months.

    Make a Crawler Page

    It isn't necessary to submit every page on your site to the search engines. Just make sure they can find all the pages that matter by hopping links from your front door. To do that, make a "crawler page" that contains nothing but a link to every page you want search engines to crawl. Use the page's TITLE info as the link text — this helps improve your site score. For an example, check out Artloop's crawler page.

    Basically, the crawler page is a site map that lists all the pages on your site — it may be a bit too big for humans to read through, but it will be no problem for a search engine. Add an obscure link to the crawler page on one of your site's top-level pages, using a small amount of text. MSN used to use 1x1 images for this trick, but the Google geeks warned us to avoid such obviously invisible tags. "Why not just label it 'site map?'" one asked. Search engine spiders will find it as soon as they get to your site, and suck down all the pages it finds on it.

    Don't worry, the crawler page won't show up in search results. It does get pulled into the search engine's index, but because it has no text or tags to match a query, it isn't listed as a result. The pages it links to, however, will appear because the search engine's spider found them right after it visited the crawler page. Wired News, for example, uses hierarchical sets of crawler pages to make sure every story ever published is crawlable from the top of the site.

    For Artloop, we decided to break the crawler pages down into 100KB pages or smaller, just to be careful — we wanted to prevent search spiders from timing out or deciding the pages were too big to crawl.

    For the rest of the article, go to  http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/01/23/index1a.html


    Newer Searching Ideas
    Google is the king of all search engines, but a new generation of upstarts is nipping at its heels --- http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,45905,00.html

    Now there's a whole new generation of search engines trying to find new ways to top Google's accuracy or optimize the way that results are organized to make them easier to go through.

    Some of them want to beat Google at its own game of being the universal search engine; others simply want to be specific research tools, increasing the depth while reducing the scope of a search.

    WiseNut --- http://www.wisenut.com 

    WiseNut, an up-and-coming search engine launched in May, improves upon the relevance of Google's search results through a context-sensitive ranking algorithm, which, according to WiseNut, Google lacks.

    Google ranks pages based on links from other pages: the more links, the higher the page ranks in the results. WiseNut's context-sensitive ranking algorithm examines a page's links and the text on the page, compares the two, and puts the most relevant results first.

    WiseNut also groups Web pages from the same site under one result listing, allowing more results to be shown on the same page.

    WiseNut claims to have the fastest and most cost-effective search technology. It says it can index 50 million pages a day using only 100 off-the-shelf servers, which is faster than any of its competitors, the company said.

    So far, its database has collected 800 million pages (compared to Google's 1 billion).

    "Google's relevance created a lot of popularity among users," said Yeogirl Yun, WiseNut's founder. "But that doesn't mean there's no room for the next better search engine. If you look at search engine history, the leadership has changed every two or three years. First was Yahoo, then AltaVista, then Google."

    Teoma --- http://www.teoma.com 

    Teoma also has its eye on succeeding Google. It claims to return more relevant search results based on the judgment of "peer sites."

    Google's system is based on the structure of the Web: Sites are ranked by popularity. The more hits and links a page enjoys, the higher it is returned in a search.

    Teoma pushes this principle a little bit further by ranking pages according to how many links they have from other sites relating to the query subject. More than a general popularity contest, it measures a website's standing among its peers.

    Teoma works by searching its database for pages that match the search terms. The resulting pool is then organized according to topics, and the engine determines the most popular sites that deal with the same topic.

    Teoma tackles Google's organization problem by presenting search results in three different ways: Normal ranking, which portrays the most "authoritative" sites; by topic; and by experts' links, which are created by topic experts.

    But what Teoma makes up for in organization, it lacks in reach: Teoma's URL database still has less than 100 million pages.

    Lasoo --- http://www.lasoo.com 

    Another way of increasing the relevance of a search is by limiting its scope.

    Toronto-based Lasoo limits the scope of searches geographically, by asking users to select an area on an electronic map using a circular "lasso."

    Unlike Google, Lasoo looks for information -- such as businesses and jobs –- only in the selected geographic area.

    Lasoo selects results according to their physical proximity to the "epicenter" chosen by the user. It doesn't follow administrative or political divisions. Results are displayed on a map.

    "We have a high-speed map server technology that allows us to create detailed maps for the entire world," says Peter Forth, Lasoo's chief technology officer. "And we have a geographic search engine technology that sifts through a database of over 30 million geo-coded businesses to find entries that match a particular keyword and are in a specific geographic area."

    According to Forth, most other geographical search engines such as Yahoo are focused on the United States or on major cities only, whereas Lasoo is worldwide.

    CURE --- http://www.starpond.com 

    CURE limits the scope of searches by limiting the scope of its knowledge.

    Starpond's Collaborative Use Research Engine (CURE) is a subscription service that caters to universities and research institutions.

    Account holders specify the field of knowledge they are interested in, and CURE limits its searches to pertinent academic resources.

    And, not unlike Google, pages are ranked by how frequently they are used by other CURE clients that do research in the same field.

    Vivisimo --- http://www.vivisimo.com 

    Vivisimo, a spin-off company from Carnegie Mellon University, is a meta search engine that uses other search engines and classifies the results.

    Vivisimo categorizes summaries that are produced by other search engines and then groups the pages according to terms that the algorithm deems descriptive.

    Users can pick among several search engines, including Google, AltaVista and Hotbot.

    "Information clustering is a very old problem in computing," says Raúl Pérez Valdés, president of Vivisimo. "We have invented an algorithm that optimizes group formation in such a way that makes groups easier to describe."

    The company plans to sell its cataloging technology to other search engines and corporate websites but it is already getting a lot of attention from end users: Traffic has increased by 43 percent per month.

    See also:
    Tracking Bloggers With Blogdex
    Hot on the Scent of Information
    Ogle Not Google's Top Scientist

    Reply from Larry Gindler

    Go to www.trinity.edu/wtrends  select "Referrers&Keywords" select "Top Search Engines"

    This shows what search engines have been used recently to access the Trinity server. It also shows what words people were using in the search that sent them to a Trinity page.
    Larry

    Reply announcing another search engine

    Hello Dr. Jensen,

    My name is Kris Burke from Slider search engine.

    I was wondering if you would please consider adding our search engine to your search engine links?

    We have a directory of over 2.5 million websites, ftp search, whole web search and a free encyclopedia. We will soon have a shareware section and many more features and content :)

    Slider - Free Search Engine, Encyclopedia and File Search http://www.slider.com 

    Thank-you.

    Regards,
    Kris Burke - Trellian [kris@trellian.com]


    Question:
    What are the search terms most frequently used in search engines?

    Answer:
    The Yahoo! Buzz Index --- http://buzz.yahoo.com/weekly /
    The Buzz Index varies over time.  These are the hot ones this week.

    Last Week Weeks
    on Chart
    1 3 Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone 49
    2 1 Xbox 7
    3 4 Christmas 4
    4 2 Nintendo Game Cube 5
    5 - The Beatles 1
    6 5 PlayStation 2 9
    7 6 Britney Spears 49
    8 7 Morpheus 25
    9 - George Harrison 1
    10 8 Dragon Ball Z 49
    11 12 Lord of the Rings 6
    12 10 National Football League 11
    13 11 WWF 49
    14 - Segway 1
    15 17 NBA 6
    16 22 Shakira 6
    17 15 Linkin Park 21
    18 9 Kazaa 21
    19 18 Jennifer Lopez 49
    20 16 The Sims 9
     

    What has the "Jennifer Lopez" search phrase got that the phrase "Bob Jensen" is lacking?
    Don't answer that!


    "Getting an Answer Is One Thing, Learning Is Another," by Peter Coffee, eWeek, July 29, 2002

    In the process of attempting to inform people via IT, it's ironic that we may be misinforming or disinforming them more than ever before. We're helping people find the most popular sources of what's often inaccurate or misleading data; we're answering people's questions, instead of questioning their implied assumptions. We're applying the ever-more-impressive technologies of Internet search and context-sensitive help toward counterproductive ends.

    What got me thinking along these lines was an incident last week, when someone asked me how a computer actually stores pictures and sounds. I handed him a book on PCs (the one that I wrote in 1998, as it happens) and told him that the answers were in Chapter 8. In fact, that was the entire subject of that chapter. But he came back to me a few minutes later, frustrated, saying: "I don't understand why you said I should read this whole chapter. I just had one little question." (Honestly, it was less than 30 pages, with plenty of white space.)

    I felt as if I were seeing, in that one brief exchange, the combined success and failure of our efforts over the years to devise interactive tools that answer the question the user is asking—and nothing more than that. Microsoft, with its Office Assistant and "Semantic Web" research efforts, is arguably the leader in giving people what they seem to think they want in this regard, but many others have also pursued these goals. Until now, I have thought that this was a completely good thing, but I'm starting to have my doubts.

    The problem, I'm starting to suspect, is that people may have learned to resist the idea of absorbing a foundation of information before they start accumulating details. We've thrown so much complexity at people, during the past 20 years or so, that users have had to develop a defense mechanism: "Just tell me what I need to know!" But when we do this, we wind up with people who are merely following recipes that might as well be magic spells.

    People used to have a chance to learn fundamentals, and maybe even see opportunities to do things in fundamentally different ways, before they were forced to buy in to the existing way of doing things, before they felt in danger of being hopelessly overtaken by minutiae. But look, for example, at the way we've changed our approach to the task of teaching people to write. We used to start children off with simple tools that did no more than they needed: When they were first learning to form letters, we gave them pencils. When they were ready for words and sentences, we gave them typewriters. When they were ready to start rereading and rewriting their own work, we gave them text editors.

    Now, we're giving grade-school children desktop publishing tools, whose use exposes choices that they don't understand—and involves answers to questions that the kids have no idea of how, or why, to ask.

    The problem also strikes in the opposite direction: Sometimes, it's not a question of knowing too little, but rather of "knowing" too much. If you only answer the question that a person chooses to ask, you give up any opportunity to influence the assumptions and beliefs behind that question.

    For example, if someone asked you how to stop excessive bleeding from skin punctures, you could answer that question—and that person could happily go back to treating patients by bleeding them with leeches, now that you had "solved" his "problem." Would his patients appreciate your help?

    We get angry when someone seems to be condescending to us by asking, "Are you sure that's really the question?" But we're done no favor when a tightly focused answer helps us keep doing the same irrelevant things, and lets us continue making "progress" in the wrong direction—instead of getting us out of our rut.

    It's ironic that the vast worldwide knowledge base of the Web is actually helping us stay stupid and uninformed, merely because we can now find the answer that we don't know better than to want—instead of finding the easiest portal to knowledge through a door marked, "Let's begin at the beginning." There's the challenge: to build distance learning systems, knowledge-base search tools, and interactive help technologies that can help us find the trunk, and even the roots, as well as the leaves of the tree of knowledge.


    The Deep Web

    The deep Web search technology of the future --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_web

    "Duo's search engine scours 'hidden' sites," by Michael Bazeley, Mercury News, August 17, 2005 --- http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/12403171.htm

    The Web is made up of hundreds of billions of Web documents -- far more than the 8 billion to 20 billion claimed by Google or Yahoo. But most of these Web pages are largely unreachable by most search engines because they are stored in databases that cannot be accessed by Web crawlers.

    Now a San Mateo start-up called Glenbrook Networks -- says it has devised a way to tunnel far into the ``deep web'' and extract this previously inaccessible information.

    Glenbrook, run by a father-daughter team, demonstrated its technology by building a search engine that scoops up job listings from the databases of various Web sites, something the company claims most search engines cannot do. But there are myriad other applications as well, the founders say.

    ``Most of the information out there, people want you to see,'' said Julia Komissarchik, Glenbrook Networks' vice president of products. ``But it's not designed to be accessed by a machine like a search engine. It requires human intervention.''

    This is particularly true of Web pages that are stored in databases. Many ordinary Web pages are static files that exist permanently on a server somewhere. But an untold number of pages do not exist until the very moment an individual fills out a form on a Web site and asks for the information. Online dictionaries, travel sites, library catalogs and medical databases are few such examples.

    Continued in article

    For Glenbrook technology see http://www.glendor.com/index.php?module=About&action=Index&tpl=tprimer

    For Glenbrook products see http://www.glendor.com/index.php?module=About&action=Index&tpl=products

    Search the deep (password protected) Web
    Yahoo said it had begun testing a service that lets users search information on password-protected subscription sites such as LexisNexis, known as the "deep Web." The move comes as Yahoo (YHOO), Google (GOOG) and Ask Jeeves (ASKJ) rush to give web searchers access to ever more information -- from books, blogs and scholarly journals to news, products, images and video. The service, called Yahoo Search Subscriptions, allows users to search multiple online subscription content sources and the web from a single search box. Users can see content from the sites they subscribe to, while nonsubscribers have the option of paying to see it. Content providers, for their part, get access to the vast audience of web search users.
    "Surfing the Deep Web," Wired News, June 16, 2005 ---
    http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,67883,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_7

    Also see http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/050616/165255.html?.v=1

    The Yahoo Search Subscriptions site is at http://search.yahoo.com/subscriptions


    Question
    What is the deep Web?

    Answer

    "In search of the deep Web," by Alex Wright, Salon, March 9, 2004 --- http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/03/09/deep_web/index_np.html 

    The next generation of Web search engines will do more than give you a longer list of search results. They will disrupt the information economy.

    When Yahoo announced its Content Acquisition Program on March 2, press coverage zeroed in on its controversial paid inclusion program, whereby customers can pony up in exchange for enhanced search coverage and a vaunted "trusted feed" status. But lost amid the inevitable search-wars storyline was another, more intriguing development: the unlocking of the deep Web.

    Those of us who place our faith in the Googlebot may be surprised to learn that the big search engines crawl less than 1 percent of the known Web. Beneath the surface layer of company sites, blogs and porn lies another, hidden Web. The "deep Web" is the great lode of databases, flight schedules, library catalogs, classified ads, patent filings, genetic research data and another 90-odd terabytes of data that never find their way onto a typical search results page.

    Today, the deep Web remains invisible except when we engage in a focused transaction: searching a catalog, booking a flight, looking for a job. That's about to change. In addition to Yahoo, outfits like Google and IBM, along with a raft of startups, are developing new approaches for trawling the deep Web. And while their solutions differ, they are all pursuing the same goal: to expand the reach of search engines into our cultural, economic and civic lives.

     

    Bob Jensen's homepage is at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/