Searching without Google

Searching withoutGoogle

Online Information, 2011

#online11

Karen Blakemankaren.blakeman@rba.co.uk

Twitter: @karenblakeman

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

This presentation is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License

Outline for the day

• Overview of how Google (possibly) works, current issues and problems

• Alternative general search tools

• Specialist search tools, including social media

• Your strategies for the future

Please note: the printed slides were created over a week ago and there may have been new developments since then. This means that in the live workshop we may cover additional tools and techniques or that some may no longer be available.

11/04/23 www.rba.co.uk 2

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

No plus sign any more and Google ignores “...”

• Dear Google, stop messing with my search : http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2011/11/08/dear-google-stop-messing-with-my-search/

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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

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-55473

Over 200 hundred “signals”

Each may have over 50 variations

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Google knows us so well

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 is doing its own thing:

Assuming typos without giving you the option torefuse the so-called “correction”

Looks 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

BUT we do now have Verbatim search – exact match search and removes personalisation

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

Google Verbatim search

• Run your search first and then select Verbatim from the left hand menu on your results page

• Appears that you can include advanced search commands in your strategy

• Google: Verbatim for exact match search http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2011/11/18/google-verbatim-for-exact-match-search/

Google searches – zeolites environmental remediation

“Normal” search Verbatim (identical to &pws=0) Chrome Incognito

Google is good at....

• Localisation

• Country versions give priority to local content

• Localisation at town/city level– may have to tell Google where you are based

– don’t have to tell Google my town if I am looking a local restaurant, taxi or plumber

– especially useful when using a mobile device

• Personalisation? Varies from person to person as to whether it is useful

• Image search

• Maps (better than Bing for many countries)

• Google Finance

• Overall coverage and rolling out features worldwide

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

• Losing its unique commands

• Site Explorer gone (along with link and linkdomain commands?)

• Up for sale?

• Is there any point recommending it for general searching?

Bing.com

• Sometimes more up to date than Google and some unique content

• Results tend to be more consumer/retail oriented• Most of the interesting developments and features are only

ever available in the US version• 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

Bing starting to behave like Google and automatically correcting “mistakes”

Need to prefix terms with + signs or use “..” around terms to force exact match

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 for UK

• “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

• Often has problems finding correct location11/04/23 www.rba.co.uk 16

Bing Maps

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

• DuckDuckGo – silly name but a neat little search tool http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2011/11/07/duckduckgo-silly-name-but-a-neat-little-search-tool/

DuckDuckGo

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. /energy

• Or create your own slashtag 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

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)

Blekko link commands

• Find pages that link to a page or website – pages with similar content, what people are saying about a

page, following up a story

• Use slashtags ‘/links’ and ‘/domainlinks’ with a URL or domain me. – http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/registers.htm /links will find

– http://www.rba.co.uk/ /domainlinks

• Yahoo Site Explorer closes – try Blekko instead– http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2011/11/20/yahoo-site-explor

er-closes-try-blekko-instead/

Blekko.com – seo option for links to a page

iSeek - web

• http://iseek.com/

• Uses Google as a source as well as Bing and its own crawler

iSeek - education

Quintura.com

Cluuz.com (uses Yahoo)

Finding country specific search engines

• Difficult to find up to date listings

• Country search engines and Regional Search Engines http://www.philb.com/countryse.htm

• Country versions of main search engines

• China– Baidu

• Russia– Yandex

• Czech Republic– Seznam

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

Google Scholar

• A useful place to start your research or if you are looking for a specific paper but.....

• No source list, not comprehensive and omits many key scientific publications

• Does not use publishers’ meta data

• Author search unreliable, search on year of publication unreliable

• Sometimes does weird things with your search terms

• Peter Jasco - Google Scholar's Ghost Authors, Lost Authors, and Other Problems http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6698580.html

• Even so, better in some ways than the free competition

Microsoft Academic Search

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

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/

M Edwards should be Martin Edwards not Maria-Benedicta Edwards

Mendeley.com

Desktop and web program for managing and sharing research papers

News - Silobreaker.com

Silobreaker - networks

Can change the emphasis using the slider bars

Stock markets and company financials

• Yahoo Finance

– Started long before Google Finance, but how much longer will it last?

– More information provided by Google Finance

– Both use Thomson Reuters, SEC Edgar

Yahoo Finance

Stock markets and company financials

• Share Price and Stock Market Information http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/stocks.htm

• List of Stock Exchanges http://www.wikinvest.com/wiki/List_of_Stock_Exchanges

• Official Company Registers http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/registers.htm

• OpenCorporates: The Open Database Of The Corporate World http://opencorporates.com/ (use with care)

Intute

• http://www.intute.ac.uk/

• Closed in July 2011

• Web site still available but not being updated.

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/

• http://elib.tiho-hannover.de/virtlib/

Chemspider

• Royal Society of Chemistry initiative• Information compiled from multiple sources• Do not need to know any chemistry to search it

Biznar

• Real-time federated search of selected business sources

• Can narrow down by topic

• Includes social media but you may want to remove at least Google Groups from the list – Advanced Search and uncheck the relevant boxes

TechXtra

• Engineering, mathematics and computing

• Good for technical reports and specifications

PhilPapers

“PhilPapers is a comprehensive directory of online philosophical articles and books by academic philosophers.”

Human and editorial input - not just a “bot”

Mednar• By the same people who created Biznar

Scirus

• Elsevier • Both journals and independent web sites• Good advanced search options• Full text of most journal articles priced

Pubmed

Healthmash

• Pulls together information from a variety of health related web sites and social media

Virtuelle Fachbibliothek Veterinärmedizin

COnnecting REpositories - CORE

• http://core.kmi.open.ac.uk/

• “UK’s first open access full-text search engine to aid research JISC” http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2011/09/openaccess.aspx

Yet more.....

• Institutional Repository Search http://irs.mimas.ac.uk/demonstrator/

• BioMed Central | The Open Access Publisher http://www.biomedcentral.com/

• DOAJ -- Directory of Open Access Journals http://www.doaj.org/

Where to find new scholarly research papers: 30 key, free websites Roddy Macleod's Blog http://roddymacleod.wordpress.com/2011/11/10/where-to-find-new-scholarly-research-papers-30-key-free-websites/

Selected resources from the blog and comments

Science Daily: News & Articles in Science, Health, Environment & Technology : http://www.sciencedaily.com

DRIVER Search Portal http://search.driver.research-infrastructures.eu/

NEP: New Economics Papers http://nep.repec.org/

CiteULike: Everyone's library http://www.citeulike.org/home

The DART-Europe E-theses Portal (DEEP) http://www.dart-europe.eu/basic-search.php

HighWire (Stanford University) http://highwire.stanford.edu/

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

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

Open Data Directory

• http://open.mflask.com/

Zanran

• http://www.zanran.com/

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

-engine/

Market research

• Use aggregators as an index to identify likely publishers and go direct to those publishers

• Research and Markets – http://www.researchandmarkets.com/

• Report Buyer – http://www.reportbuyer.com/

• Marketresearch.com– http://www.marketresearch.com/

• MindBranch – http://www.mindbranch.com/

Images - Bing

Options in the left hand sidebar similar to Google

“More sizes” but no “similar” option

Bing – Visual Search

Not available in all country versions – content varies

Bing – Visual Search

Check accuracy of associated information - may be out of date

Flickr

• Flickr Creative Commons http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons or advanced search screen http://www.flickr.com/search/advanced/

• Use Advanced Search for date options

Compfight – http://www.compfight.com/

• Search interface for Flickr

• Can select Creative Commons or photos that can be used commercially

Images - other sources for Creative Commons and public domain images

• Idee Inc Multicolr Search Lab http://labs.ideeinc.com/multicolr/

• Wikimedia Commons http://commons.wikimedia.org/

– check the licence information towards the bottom of the page e.g. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thomas_Beach_by_Thomas_Beach.jpg

• MorgueFile.com http://www.morguefile.com/ - public domain

• Geograph http://www.geograph.org.uk/ Creative Commons 2.0

• Most of the images on US government web sites are public domain (but do check)

• NASA http://www.nasa.gov/ - public domain

11 April 2023 Karen Blakeman www.rba.co.uk 64

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

• Search for up to 5 colours – can adjust proportions of colour

• No key word searching of content

• Flickr creative commons images – clicking on an image takes you to its Flickr page

• YouTube, Google Video search (not the same as YouTube)

• Vimeo.com, DailyMotion.com

• iTunes, iTunes U

• Blinkx - http://www.blinkx.com/

– good for catching up with news

• Zuula - http://www.zuula.com/

– click on the video tab

• Browsys Finder http://www.browsys.com/finder/

– click on the video tab

Bing Videos

Social media as part of search

• Social and professional networks included in both Google’s and Bing’s results – degree of integration depends on whether you are signed in to an account

• It is where many organisations and companies market and promote their services and products

• It is where the conversations about companies, products and services are taking place

• It is where people share information

• People expect organisations to automatically pick up on their complaints and problems

• Now an essential part of search

LinkedIn.com

• For companies as well as people

• Boolean Black Belt-Sourcing/Recruiting http://www.booleanblackbelt.com/

Blogpulse.com – ‘Trend this’

Topsy.com

Socialmention.com

Icerocket

Twazzup.com

Paper.li - create your own newspaper

Paper.li – individual Twitterstreamhttp://paper.li/karenblakeman

Paper.li – keyword http://paper.li/karenblakeman/1321447614

Suffering withdrawal symptoms?

Decide which sites you want to search and design your own Google custom search engine

Create your own search engine using something else

• 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

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

Keeping up to date

• Inside Search http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/

• Official Google Blog http://googleblog.blogspot.com/

• Search Engine Land http://searchengineland.com/

• Search Engine Watch http://searchenginewatch.com/

• Boolean Black Belt-Sourcing/Recruiting http://www.booleanblackbelt.com/

• Karen Blakeman’s Blog http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/

• Phil Bradley's weblog http://philbradley.typepad.com/

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