Internet Resources for the Information Professional - Jeremy Hunsinger's Homepage

This looks to be a very good course with most of the course material online and links included. Expected that it will take fifteen weeks to complete.

Internet Resources for the Information Professional - Jeremy Hunsinger's Homepage: "The course will focus on Social Software for Information Professionals, Library 2.0 applications, and the transformation of information professionals that occurs with informationalization. We will be dealing significantly with blogs, wiki's, social searching, social bookmarking, and related information systems that address information users as social, political, communal."

Hopefully blogging this will make it easier to find and get back to than just one more bookmark in the swarm.

I have been reading about Google's Custom Search Engine. This evening added one to this blog. Right now the only URL that it searches is WinnowingCyberspace. I will add more URLs. I also added Google Marker to my browser toolbar. With Google Marker I can add the current site in the window to the custom engine.

I have been thinking about Custom search engines for three months or so. Every time I use Google's full search engine and get a bunch of irrelevant off topic stuff I think how nice a more focused engine would be. Currently my answer to the problem is to look for a pattern of irrelevancy and use minus with keywords to start to weed out unwanted returns.

A real weakness of a Custom Search Engine is that with a small number of URLs to search there is less chance of the serendipitous find.

Yahoo Comes Through Today

Todays search string is lathe -"milling machine" tool preset .

The first page of google yields only one page that really applies.

Yahoo supplied two good links and one that is off topic but very interesting.

Ask.com first page has one unique result that is close but slightly off tangent.

Dmoz had zero returns.

WindowsLive in the first page of results there is one very interesting and off tangent link.

Clusty.com has no usable links on first page. The CNC cluster has two pages that cover in machine tool setting but not presetting tools.

Dmoz is worthless for a drill down narrow search with several terms. A small data base and several boolean AND terms are not a workable combination.

The other engines are giving as good of results as page two through six on google. By results page six on google new relevant links have disappeared.

Multiple Engines Not Magic

Yesterday I did one search with multiple search engines with less than stellar results.

The research term I used was– micropropagation peony - . I brought up each of the six search engines in a separate instance of Firefox and then followed links to tabs on that instance. This allowed me to go back and review the results from each engine and do a quick easy count/comparison.

The first two pages or twenty results on google yielded thirteen likely looking pages.

Went to yahoo and the first page or ten results yielded two good unique pages.

Ask.com first page had no new, unique results.

Dmoz had zero returns.

WindowsLive in the first page of results there was one unique non useful result.

Clusty.com had one unique and interesting result on the second page. The clusters listed in the left column looked interesting so I followed up with them. The links mostly lead to spam pages and link farms. Idea looks interesting, I will check out the clusters with other topics and see if I get better results.

I will do more trial comparisons this coming week. The comparing takes a bit of time. I need to also try going through the five lesser engines and opening any likely links without taking the time to tally every thing up. Might give a feel for whether quick run through of the lesser five are worth spending a little time on.

Using Multiple Search Engines

I do my research/surfing on a Linux (Ubuntu) system, with FireFox as my browser. I use and love the tab feature in FireFox. When you are bookmarking one of the choices is bookmarking all the tabs you have open into a new folder. As you are surfing you can open every page in a folder onto a separate tab with one click. I have one folder with twelve search engines and two wikipedia pages. The plan was that at the start of a search I would pop open the folder, enter my search terms in Google, copy and paste into the other eleven plus wikipedia, and magically get better results than with one engine alone.

It doesn't happen that way. Twelve engines is a lot of pasting. Six of the engines are meta search engines which combine the results of two or three other primary engines. I have used the group search folder the way I planned a few times. Starting with twelve pages open, then opening every interesting result in a new tab. I quickly run up to thirty to fifty tabs open. This was two, maybe three months ago. Today I couldn't tell you if search engine two through twelve had any fantastic results that I would have hated to miss. I don't think so.

My habit was and is to start with Google only and if I need better/different results then refine the search string. Yesterday I setup a folder with the five primary engines and Clusty a meta search engine. We will see if I use it any more than the twelve engine folder. I will use the folder a few times this weekend and write up and post the results.

Search Engine Relationships

Search Engine Relationships
Search engines come and go, get bought by other companies, and are powered by other engines. I have read articles about search engine optimization saying don't bother submitting to this or that search engine because it is the same as X. Usually only one or two engines are covered per article. I did find one chart that gives the relationships for twenty one engines. http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum5/1234.htm Unfortunately it is dated 2003 which means some of the info is outdated.
I plan a two prong attack. Refine my search terms and find more current pages. The second approach will be to go to the search engines, then their about page and poke around. We will see which is faster.
I wish I had written down the time when I started the search for charts approach. Fast! The first step was to look at the page I had and find terms that would be in any similar page that I want to check out. Search Engine Relationship Chart “ Copy and paste into Google and one million plus results. The top result is to Bruceclay.com http://www.bruceclay.com/searchenginerelationshipchart.htm He has registered Search Engine Relationship Chart™ as a registered Trademark. The chart looks to be current as of March of 2006. Do check out the histogram on
http://www.bruceclay.com/serc_histogram/histogram.htm Push the slider back to November 2000 and see how crowded the field use to be. Way cool.
Refining the search probably took all of five minutes. Before I started writing this I looked around on the about pages for Altavista and for Ask. I think I spent fifteen minutes looking and reading. For Altavista you go from the about page to the business page to the submit a site page before you find out that they are powered by yahoo. I guess I wouldn't tell all my potential customers that someone else provides the same or more complete results either.

Five engines power todays web search. Ask.com, Google.com, Domz.org, Yahoo.com, and MSNsearch.com. The rest use the results of one or more of the five.

First Post

The Internet has millions of pages of information. Finding the page or facts that you need can be a daunting challenge. I will be using this blog to document the successes and the frustrations of my self guided journey toward being an information expert.