Searching without

Internet Librarian International, 2011Karen Blakeman

karen.blakeman@rba.co.uk Twitter: @karenblakeman

http://www.rba.co.uk/

This presentation is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License

How Google works

• “Dear Bing, We Have 10,000 Ranking Signals To Your 1,000. Love, Google” – http://searchengineland.com/bing-10000-ranking-signals-google-55

473

– over 200 hundred “signals”

– many have over 50 variations

• 2010 Revenues $29 billion (net income $8.5 billion)

• 2011 Q1+Q2+Q3=$27 billion (net income $7) (unaudited)

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Google can seriously damage your news

• Experiment by Mary Ellen Bates

• Is Google really filtering my news? - Librarian of Fortune

– http://www.librarianoffortune.com/librarian_of_fortune/2011/09/is-google-really-filtering-my-news.html

• Highlights

– More than a quarter of the stories showed up in only one

searcher’s results

– Almost one in five searchers saw a story that no one else saw

– Only 12% of searchers saw the same three stories in the same

order

• And it’s about to get worse - Google News Launches "Standout" Tag

for Featured Content

http://searchengineland.com/google-news-launches-standout-tag-for-featured-content-94256

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Google knows us so well

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Google personalises and tailors

your results depending on your

location, computer, browser, past

searches, what you have looked at

in the past, your +1s, your blocked

sites, Google experiments, your

Google+ account, your other social

networks, what you do on your

android phone, what you had for

breakfast...and anything else it can

find by rummaging around

in your Google dashboard.

Check your dashboard at http://www.google.com/dashboard/

Google knows best

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Hewish mild

Google decided to change my search to Jewish mild

=Google decides that coots are lions – changed a search for coots mating behaviour to lions mating behaviour

Google is doing its own thing:

• assuming typos without giving you the option to refuse the so-called “correction”

• looking for obscure variations and synonyms

• ‘+’ sign to enforce exact match has been removed

• sometimes ignores quotation marks around phrases

• not including all of your terms in the search

What I see on my screen for a search is not what you’ll see on yours for the same search

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Time to REBEL!

Yahoo!?

• Now uses Bing’s web and image databases and generates the same results– except in Japan and Korea

• Losing its unique commands

• Up for sale?

• Is there any point in using it for general searching?

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Bing.com

• Often more up to date and some unique content

• Results tend to be more consumer/retail oriented

• But Bing advanced search screen minimalist - need to use commands– detailed list at Advanced Operator Reference

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff795620.aspx (some no longer work)

• Bing Adds Adaptive Search, Customized by Your Search History - Search Engine Watch– http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2109647/Bing-Adds-Adapti

ve-Search-Customized-by-Your-Search-History

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Bing Maps

• http://www.bing.com/maps/

– “Classic”

• http://www.bing.com/maps/explore/

– uses Sliverlight

– more interactive

– automatically changes type of view as you zoom in

• Multimap, Birdseye, Aerial, Streetside (not available for all towns or countries), Ordnance Survey Map view

• “After Little Resistance in Germany, Bing Expands Streetside Photos Across Europe”

– http://searchengineland.com/after-little-resistance-in-germany-bing-expands-streetside-photos-across-europe-96351

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Bing Maps

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??

DuckDuckGo

• http://duckduckgo.com/

• No tracking, no “filter bubble”

• site: inbody: intitle: filetype:

• sort:date to sort by date (uses results from Blekko)

• region:cc (e.g. de) to boost a country

• Syntax and keyboard shortcuts at http://duckduckgo.com/goodies.html

• Maths, conversions, programming syntax and shortcuts http://duckduckgo.com/tech.html– answer at top of results usually from Wolfram Alpha

• !bang commands https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html

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Blekko

• http://blekko.com/

• slashtags for sorting by date (/date), searching for images (/images) and videos (/videos)

• Use public slashtags to search a group of web sites covering a particular topic or type of site e.g. /library

• Or create your own to search your specified list of sites (similar to Google Custom Search Engines)– wind turbine electricity generation /karenblakeman/renewable

• “Musings about librarianship: Using Blekko to search across thousands of library sites” http://musingsaboutlibrarianship.blogspot.com/2010/11/using-blekko-to-search-across-thousands.html

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Blekko

• Does not always search for all of your terms

• Cannot do filetype, inurl, intitle searches

• Drop down menu next to page in results list for– site search (or use /site)

– similar pages (or use /similar)

– inbound links to the page (or use /links)

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

• “Computational Knowledge Engine”

• Very good for calculations and conversions

• Curated information

• Can be very out of date

• Sometimes very wrong

• No references to original source

• Have to ask the question in the right way

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Zanran

• http://www.zanran.com/

• Zanran – a new data search engine– http://awareci.wordpress.com/2011/04/21/zanran-a-new-data-search

-engine/

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Microsoft Academic Search

• http://academic.research.microsoft.com/

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Microsoft Academic Search

• Problems– coverage– sometimes gets the author completely wrong

• “Will the Real Scott Wilson Please Stand Up, Please Stand Up”–

http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2011/09/20/will-the-real-scott-wilson-please-stand-up-please-stand-up/

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M Edwards should be Martin Edwards not Maria-Benedicta Edwards

News - Silobreaker.com

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Selected specialist tools - URLs

• http://www.chemspider.com/

• http://biznar.com/

• http://www.techxtra.ac.uk/

• http://philpapers.org/

• http://www.mednar.com/

• http://www.scirus.com/

• http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/

• http://www.healthmash.com/

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A few specialist tools

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A few more specialist tools

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Statistics http://www.offstats.auckland.ac.nz/

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The Guardian

Guardian data store - data journalism and data visualizationhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/data

Data and analysis on topics that are in the news, links to the original datasets are provided

Guardian World Government Data

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world-government-data

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Topsy.com

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Socialmention.com

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Blogpulse.com – ‘Trend this’

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Create your own search engine

• Blekko.com– Create a slashtag

– Musings about librarianship: Using Blekko to search across thousands of library sites

– http://musingsaboutlibrarianship.blogspot.com/2010/11/using-blekko-to-search-across-thousands.html

• Gigablast Custom Topic Search – http://gigablast.com/cts.html

– up to 500 sites

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Want to explore other stuff? Zuula.com

• Type in your search once and work your way through the search tools

• Can edit the order of the search tools and remove unwanted ones

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