Two items from two of the major search players.

First, Bing is now including Twitter results from “more prominent and prolific Twitterers from a variety of spheres” for certain types of searches. Learn more via the Bing blog and Search Engine Land.

Second, word from Google Book Search that they’ve added tag clouds for some titles in their database.

From a Blog Post:

Starting today, you’ll find a cloud of “Common Terms and Phrases” on the Book Overview page for some of our books. This cloud represents the distribution of words in a book: big terms are more common in the book, while small terms are rarer.

Here’s an example.

See Also: Amazon’s “Look Inside the Book” program continues to provide a concordance/tag clouds for some titles. They’re found under the heading “concordance” on a book overview page. Here’s an example.

UPDATE: Want More Web Search News? We’ve got it!
++ Google Blog and News Search has added several new features (via Search Engine Roundtable.

++ Google Blog Search Sees Twitter Trends & Raises With Blog Search ‘Hot Queries’ (via Search Engine Land)

++ Bing gets a favorable review from USA Today.

See Also: On a related note, if you’re a Firefox user you can now create tag clouds from Twitter, Google, and Yahoo results via a tool named Search Cloudlet.

Here at ResourceShelf we’re big fans and users of Zotero. If you’ve never used this great tool we suggest taking a look. It’s free to download and use with your Firefox browser.

From the Article:

With Zotero, you can build up a collection of digital documents, cataloging and sorting it as you go. You can gloss the material so harvested, attaching your notes as you go. Zotero is particularly useful for gathering bibliographical data, and allows you to export it in a wide range of standard scholarly citation formats.

Source: Inside HigherEd

From a Summary:

As far back as the mid-1600s, philanthropy was in play in Western society. Nancy K. Herther examines the growth of foundations and granting organizations and looks at the problems institutes of higher learning, powerhouses of research production within the U.S., are encountering using the evolving funding process.

Direct to Full Text Article

Source: Searcher

Rafe Needleman takes a look at a number of Twitter search tools. This is an excellent primer for those new to searching Twitter.

Here are the search tools discussed:

+ Twitter’s Own Search Engine

+ Twazzup

+ Collecta

+ Scoopler

+ OneRiot

+ Tweetmeme

+ Monitter

+ Topsy

+ CrowdEye

+ Itpints

+ Twitority

+ Twitalyzer Search

+ Twitmatic

+ Yauba

+ Tweefind

Source: News.com (Webware)

From a Press Release:

New Stuff Follows:

+ The most comprehensive global video index: With more than 350 million online videos from thousands of sources across the Web.

+ Quicker and easier discovery of online video content: Offering a cleaner, redesigned homepage with improved search, browsing functionality and upgraded loading times.

+ More personalized control over search: Navigation that lets users browse their searches by channel, category, show, popularity and most followed on Twitter. Users can also easily filter results to find videos on their favorite websites and channels.

+ The broadest coverage of videos: Providing a greater emphasis on helping users easily find the professional videos they want, whether it’s popular TV shows, music videos, sports highlights, news or more. A new page dedicated to TV show listings found on the Web lets users browse for shows alphabetically or by network.

+ Extended share features: New tools let users save and send their favorite videos and search terms to friends and share them on Bebo, Facebook, MySpace and StumbleUpon.

In addition, all the Truveo sites use localized ranking algorithms to deliver the most relevant results to each country’s Truveo users. For example, a search on Truveo’s France portal, http://fr.truveo.com, will be more likely to turn up French language videos from French media companies.

Direct to Truveo:

+ Australia: http://au.truveo.com
+ Brazil: http://br.truveo.com
+ France: http://fr.truveo.com
+ Germany: http://de.truveo.com
+ Hong Kong: http://hk.truveo.com
+ India: http://in.truveo.com
+ Italy: http://it.truveo.com
+ Japan: http://jp.truveo.com
+ Korea: http://kr.truveo.com
+ Mexico: http://mx.truveo.com
+ The Netherlands: http://nl.truveo.com
+ Russia: http://ru.truveo.com
+ Spain: http://es.truveo.com
+ Taiwan: http://tw.truveo.com
+ Turkey: http://tr.truveo.com
+ United Kingdom: http://uk.truveo.com
+ United States: http://www.truveo.com

Source: AOL (via Search Engine Land)

A new, 7 page article, from Technology Review is now online.

It’s an in depth (7 web pages) look at the days leading up to and the launch of Wolfram|Alpha.

You’ll find comments from:

+ Stephen Wolfram

+ Prabhakar Raghavan, Yahoo Labs

+ Ivan Herman, Semantic, Head of Semantic Web for W3C

+ Daniel Weld, Semantic Web Researcher at the U. of Washington

+ Peter Norvig, Google

+ Marti Hearst, UC Berkeley

Direct to Complete Article

Source: Technology Review

From a OSTI Posting:

Librarians were provided opportunities to test drive efficient ways to share DOE, federal agency, and global research information at two SLA Conference booths supported by OSTI June 13-17. OSTI exhibited the DOE Science Accelerator, a science information portal that provides single-query search of 10 DOE databases. Also at this booth, OSTI showcased its MARC records capability, which allows records of DOE technical report literature to be downloaded in a format suitable for library catalogues everywhere, expanding access to a variety of scientific research. OSTI also planned and helped staff a Science.gov exhibit in coordination with CENDI, the interagency group of senior information managers. The exhibit provided live demonstrations of the Science.gov search engine as well as WorldWideScience.org, the global science gateway. The search engines are maintained and hosted at OSTI.

Source: Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI), U.S. Dept. of Energy

Search Engine Land is reporting that Google News is now using Wikipedia as a news source.

From a Blog Post:

Google’s “experiment” in using Wikipedia as a news source on Google News is over, at least in the U.S. and Canada. The experiment was obviously a success, because Google has confirmed for us that the idea has been expanded.

Source: SEL

See Also: Google News Hyperlinks Author Names (via SEL)

From the Article:

Real-time search is among the hottest, or most hyped, trends in the Internet industry today. At technology conferences, the term is repeated like a mantra, although the idea is still nascent and its definition fuzzy.

Source: San Francisco Chronicle

This is a “Best of ResourceShelf” posting.

Nozasearch is a massive database–over 41 million records–offers both free and fee-based access.

The free service (registration required) allows you to search information (by name or by cause) on nearly 1.3 million charitable foundations. The fee-based portion of the service provides records on over 40 million charitable donations by people and companies. A 24 hour free trial to the fee-based side of the database is also available.

Results are available in either list form or as a .XLS spreadsheet.

+ Direct to Nozasearch

+ Direct to Noza Blog

See Also: Nozasearch offers (free) a searchable database (Beta) of Form 990-PF (private foundation) tax returns (about 800,000 records).

Source: Noza Search

As word of a new Google News feature (it’s a test, not available to the public) breaks, it’s worth noting that this week The New York Times updated their “Skimmer” service that allows users (this service is a prototype) to skim multiple articles on a single web page, similar to skimming the print version of a newspaper.

The First Look Blog has more about “what’s new” with this update.

Direct to Skimmer

It’s also worth mentioning that the NY Times launched a new service about a month ago named Times Wire. The page automatically updates itself in real-time as new stories are published. You can even personalize the types of articles that appear on your web page. Cool!

Direct to Times Wire

From a Search Engine Land Blog post by Greg Sterling:

This morning there are two new entrants in the “real-time” search derby, run by two search veterans. They are CrowdEye and Collecta. CrowdEye is from Ken Moss, who ran search engineering at Microsoft and built the new engine himself. At the helm of Collecta is Gerry Campbell, who was a search executive at AOL and Reuters, as well as an adviser to Summize (now Twitter Search). He recently stepped into the CEO role at the company.

The bog post goes on to offer an in-depth overview of both services.

Direct to Collecta

Direct to Crowd Eye

Source: Search Engine Land

From a Story:

With the launch of DukeMobile 1.1, the Duke University Libraries now offers the most comprehensive university digital image collection specifically formatted for an iPhone or iTouch device. It includes thousands of photos and other artifacts that range from early beer advertisements to materials on San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury scene in the 1960s. Although a growing number of scholarly institutions offer images and other material online, Duke is the first to offer collections that take advantage of the iPhone’s design, navigation and other features.

Duke University Libraries offers mobile users digital materials from 20 collections — about 32,000 images overall — covering women’s history, early American sheet music, Duke history and other topics. The libraries will add new collections regularly as they become available.

See Also: Download App from iTunes

See Also: Visit Duke University’s Mobile Web Site (http://m.duke.edu)

Source: Duke Today
Hat Tip: G.M.

From the News Release:

CrocTail provides an interface for browsing information about several hundred thousand U.S. publicly traded corporations and their many foreign and domestic subsidiaries. Information from company Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings has been parsed and annotated by CorpWatch to highlight specific corporate accountability issues.

[Snip]

Although the SEC provides a search interface for locating company filings (EDGAR / IDEA), the subsidiary information is not standardized. The CorpWatch developers wrote parsers to “scrape” the subsidiary relationship information from Exhibit 21 of the 10-K filings, and then built an “API” (Application Programming Interface) to provide a well-structured interface for web programs to query and process the subsidiary data.

Direct to CrocTail

Source: CorpWatch (Sunlight Foundation Blog)

From Greg Sterling’s Article:

Hunch is not a “search engine” insists Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, one of the people behind the new site. But you’ll probably start seeing it show up in (Google) search results, just like Wikipedia or Yahoo Answers. And in some ways it’s like a mix of both of those concepts, as Matt McGee discusses in his companion piece on Hunch.

Source: Search Engine Land

Source: Search Engine Land