Group items tagged

This article describes the benefits of search engine alternatives to the mighty Google. In doing so, it also reveals how much information Google keeps on you every time you do a search. 

after reading this article my first thought was "Awesome, new sites I can Google on!"

Link to Google's hidden Advanced Search ... useful for narrowing your searches.

I came across this as I was looking for history of search engines and its pretty crazy that the site Topsy has been able to save every single tweet since twitter launched! that's 300 billion tweets!!! and you can search them all as it is open to the public. I hadn't heard about Topsy but it seems like they are gaining a good reputation and going against big search engines like Yahoo and Bing.

Another good Common Craft video about search engine optimization -- says that "Google and Bing are the librarians of the Internet." Interesting, and a total coincidence, that this video also uses the notion of a "recipe" to explain how to make your website more searchable -- the same analogy I used to explain an algorithm.

Big news today: a ten-year-old lawsuit about Google Book Search has been resolved in Google's favor -- basically, the law has ruled that it was okay for Google to scan in-copyright books because it had no plans to publish the whole version of those in-copyright books online in http://books.google.com. Compare this to what we've heard about celebrity photographs and Pinterest. Here's a quotation from the story: "When Google started work on its book search engine a decade ago, the company realized that getting the approval of copyright holders would be a logistical nightmare. Not only would major publishers likely demand high fees for permission to scan their books, but for many older works, it would be difficult to even figure out who the appropriate copyright holder was. So Google took a gamble, scanning library books without seeking copyright holders' permission and relying on copyright's fair use doctrine as a justification."

Since we were talking about search engines last class, I found this interesting. Heres a list of different types of search engines and what they are mainly used for.

The list that has all possible search engines for almost anything.

This article goes over tips that can be helpful when doing research online. I think some of these were discussed in class but some of them are new too.

This website provides a list of 20 shortcuts you can use google for. This list explains how you can maximize the google search engine in order to find a wide variety of information quickly. Enables the user to use google to answer everyday questions easily.

There have been a couple of occasions when my Dad has been looking for an obscure book - this is the site he usually uses when he's searching.

Another one is AbeBooks, which was not created by but is now owned by Amazon: http://abebooks.com

Its Google's Birthday today and It seems like the giant among search engines is still continuing to push for better service. I noticed that my google format had changed and I found out it was because Hummingbird, its new search algorithm that gives better search results.

if you had Google Chrome, now you can use the voice search on it.

AP Late this month, Google went "dark" in terms of providing publishers with free information on which words led people searching in Google to click on their sites. The move came as Google seeks to reassure users following the NSA/PRISM domestic surveillance scandal.

Wow, I hadn't even heard about that, Emily. Terrific story. That's a bummer, though -- I use Google Analytics on some of my sites, though I probably should make more use of it, and it was always interesting to see what keywords people were using to get to my site. Sometimes the keywords were weird.

A nice little video from A New Zealand library explaining the difference between a search engine and a database. I noticed a bit of confusion about this on exam 2.

This article shows the traffic before and after the whole NSA scandal to Google and DuckDuckGo. It gives visual representation to prove that while traffic did go up on DuckDuckGo, it in no way came close to competing with Google.

Do you like privacy? Do you shun surveillance and eschew spam? Do you like simplicity? If you answered yes to any of those questions, you'll love DuckDuckGo. DuckDuckGo is the brainchild of everyday American Gabriel Weinberg, and until news of the National Security Agency's widespread spying program broke last month, it was a baby brainchild.

A visualization of the latest hot searches from Google Trends portrayed as sliding tiles.

A few weeks late to be that relevant but I thought this was really kind of cool.

You can use Google to search for magazines and magazine articles that date all the way back to the 1960's.

Hey, that's super-useful, Talia, thanks! When Google scanned things from research libraries, that included a lot of magazines. Or maybe Google made deals with the publishers directly for these. There are some weird titles in there, though -- no Time, no Newsweek, but you can search through _Torque_, "Singapore's best homegrown car magazine" :)

This is an interesting interview because you get to hear from the founders of Endeca and DuckDuckGo. They explain their purpose for creating them. It also mentions a lot of things we've talked about it class including WorldCat.org and Wolfram Alpha.