Web Search AcademyInternet Librarian International

26th October 2011

Alternative Search Tools

Karen Blakeman

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

Twitter: @karenblakeman

karen.blakeman@rba.co.uk

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Why not Google?

• Google mangling your search– correcting correct search terms

– weird automatic synonym searching

– not searching for all of your terms

– “personalisation”

• Best results may be at the bottom of your results list– other search tools rank and order documents in different ways

• Google can’t look inside databases or password protected areas

• Specialist information requires specialist tools

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Bing and Yahoo

• Yahoo now uses Bing’s database and ranking algorithms for most country versions

• Many of the Advanced Search commands are similar to Google’s – see Search Tools Summary and Comparison

http://www.rba.co.uk/search/compare.shtml

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

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

• Also beware – “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 and Yahoo

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Bing and Yahoo starting to behave like Google and automatically “correcting” what they think are mistakes

Need to prefix terms with + signs or use “..” around terms to force exact match (Google now only allows “..”)

Bing

• Most of the interesting developments and features are only available in the US version

• Results tend to be more consumer/retail focused unless using advanced search features

• Coverage not identical to Google’s - sometimes yields important unique content, especially in research and business

• Often more up to date than Google

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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

• Often has problems finding correct location or finding anything at all– have to try various combinations of terms e.g. Portsmouth Central

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Bing Maps

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??

Exalead

• http://www.exalead.com/search/

• Demonstration for their enterprise search

• Small database

• Frequency of update?

• Has NEAR/n command for proximity searching

• Link command that actually works

• Supports full Boolean

• filetype, site, intitle, inurl

• But phonetic and approximate spelling unreliable

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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

• Assumes your location from your IP address

• Available features and search options change depending on your location

• Have to ask the question in the right way

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Wolfram alpha

• Curated data and information

• Can be very out of date

• Sometimes totally wrong!

• No reference to original source - only a list that is intended as a guide to further sources of information

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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

• Both peer-reviewed and un-reviewed articles, pre-prints, institutional repositories, references to books, citations

• 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

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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

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

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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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Selected specialist tools

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And a few more ....

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Yahoo Finance

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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 25% of 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 3 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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News - Silobreaker.com

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Silobreaker - networks

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Can change the emphasis using the slider bars

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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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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Want to explore other stuff? Zuula.com

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

• Can edit search tools order and remove unwanted ones

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Suffering Google withdrawal symptoms?

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

Create your own search engine without Google

• 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

• Rollyo.com– powered by Yahoo

– maximum of 25 sites per Searchroll

– doesn’t work for me most of the time

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