A new look and a number of new features are now available. Worth a look and something to share with students, parents, and educators.

Search Engine Watch Blog has an in-depth look.

From the Pandia article:

Del.izzy is a search engine that supplements the search options available at Delicious.

From the NLM Technical Bulletin:

The PubMed Summary results page [now shows] results from other high-quality resources in a column to the right of the PubMed search results.

The first example of this new feature will be the Drug Sensor developed at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). This sensor detects whether a drug name is present in a user’s search, and if so, presents exerpts of information from other resources that you can link to to read more. The summary consists of a title (created from the drug name in the search query), some content from the linked resource, and an attribution line. At this time, about 200 drug names are included.

Source: NLM Tech Bulletin

From the article:

A new visual search engine could help photographers track where their photographs appear on the internet.

The TinEye search engine, developed by Canadian company Idee, allows users to search by uploading a picture rather than typing in a keyword. It then conducts a pixel-by-pixel search across the internet, flagging up all instances of that image even if it’s been cropped, merged or digitally altered in some way.

“TinEye does for images what Google does for text,” said Leila Boujnane, the chief executive of TinEye. “We are not limited by words, Google can only find an image if a particular search word is in proximity to it. We have the ability on a large scale to tell somebody where one of their images has appeared and how it’s being used.”

Source: ITPRO

From the EContent article:

Lalisio, a social knowledge network, introduced a search and presentation engine from its parent company Q-Sensei. To further expand its offering, Lalisio has integrated arXiv and PubMed Central, two scholarly databases into its literature search service.

Source: EContent

See Also: Science 2.0 Gains Another Search Engine: Q-Sensei From Lalisio (via Info Today)

From the web site:

The NIDDK Image Library is a searchable database of original full-color and black-and-white illustrations produced by the NIDDK Information Clearinghouses that are available copyright free to the public at no cost.* The Library makes available anatomical and medical, instructional, and lifestyle and activity illustrations presented in high, medium, and low resolutions

Source: National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, National Institutes of Health

Hat Tip: Pete W.

From The Deal article:

Searching for information on venture capital firms and their professionals? Give this new database, designed by Chrysalis Ventures associate Matt Winn, a spin. He says the service, simply called Venture Capital Database, or VCDB, can be useful, among other things, for entrepreneurs looking for funding, VCs seeking info on an entrepreneur’s prior startups, limited partners researching potential investments, and aspiring VCs hunting for jobs.

The NewsNow team is now providing a non-stop ticker of Beijing Olympics news from over 30,000 sources. Pages auto-refresh every five minutes. Event specific feeds as well as Olympic “related” news feeds are also available. You’ll find them on the lower left side of the primary page.

UPDATE: Brewster Kahle Comments on the End of Microsoft’s Book Digitization Program

As Danny Sullivan writes on Search Engine Land, so much for an alternative to Google’s products in the academic and scholarly arenas. Very sad. Of course, one has to wonder how many searchers knew about and used Microsoft’s offerings in this area. Our guess, not that many. Again, a sad moment. Building it doesn’t mean they will come and use it. Databases are not a field of dreams.

Of course, many other full text online book search guides and databases exist. Just because Microsoft is leaving doesn’t mean that there aren’t other places to turn.

In this post, we list several of them.

In terms of “scholarly articles” as found in Live Academic Search or Google Scholar, many libraries in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and elsewhere provide FREE full text access to databases containing this type of material. Access is available remotely, in other words, access from any web computer. No need to visit the library. All you need is a library card (also free) from that specific library. Here’s an example of the many FREE databases (again, all you need is a library card) from the:

+ San Francisco Public Library

+ Chicago Public Library

+ Library of Virginia

+ Vancouver (B.C.) Public Library (Canada)

and thousands more. Contact your local library and see what you have access to. Of course, those with access to an academic library (let’s say, University of California-Irvine) have the ability to use (remotely, 24×7x365) even more databases.

Finally, more and more public and academic libraries now offer free downloadable access to audiobooks and movies. Again, all you need is a library card.

Check out (no pun intended) and gain access to thousands (if not more) articles, books, recordings, and more from the comfort and privacy of your home or any web computer.

See Also: Libdex
Take a look at what you can access with your library card. Here’s a great database to find contact info and web pages for thousands of libraries around the world.

PubChemSR: A search and retrieval tool for PubChem

Background: Recent years have seen an explosion in the amount of publicly available chemical and related biological information. A significant step has been the emergence of PubChem, which contains property information for millions of chemical structures, and acts as a repository of compounds and bioassay screening data for the NIH Roadmap. There is a strong need for tools designed for scientists that permit easy download and use of these data. We present one such tool, PubChemSR. Implementation PubChemSR (Search and Retrieve) is a freely available desktop application written for Windows using Microsoft .NET that is designed to assist scientists in search, retrieval and organization of chemical and biological data from the PubChem database. It employs SOAP web services made available by NCBI for extraction of information from PubChem. Results and Discussion: The program supports a wide range of searching techniques, including queries based on assay or compound keywords and chemical substructures. Results can be examined individually or downloaded and exported in batch for use in other programs such as Microsoft Excel. We believe that PubChemSR makes it straightforward for researchers to utilize the chemical, biological and screening data available in PubChem. We present several examples of how it can be used.

+ Full Paper (PDF; 670 KB)
Source: Chemistry Central Journal

The effects of mercury on human health are a common concern. The new NLM Enviro-Health Links page, “Mercury and Human Health ,” includes links to sites about mercury reduction, occupational exposure, compact fluorescent light bulbs, mercury in health care, regulations and state legislation, and preformed TOXLINE and MEDLINE/PubMed searches.

Direct to the site: http://sis.nlm.nih.gov/enviro/mercury.html

NLM also offers other Enviro-Health Links on topics such as:

+ Children’s Environmental Health
+ Indoor Air Pollution
+ Keeping the Artist Safe: Hazards of Arts and Crafts Materials
+ Outdoor Air Pollution
+ Lead
+ Arsenic

Source: National Library of Medicine

The team at NewsNow has built page, updated every 5 minutes, with news from Myanmar/Burma. Tens of thousands of sources (global in scope) are visited and the page will auto-refresh every 300 seconds.

+++ Burma Cyclone +++

Source: NewsNow

See Also: Hundreds of Other Topical Collections Can Be Found in the Left Rail of All NewsNow Pages

SpotSigs: Robust and Efficient Near Duplicate Detection in Large Web Collections
8 pages; PDF.

From the abstract:

Motivated by our work with political scientists who need to manually analyze large Web archives of news sites, we present SpotSigs, a new algorithm for extracting and matching signatures for near duplicate detection in large Web crawls. Our spot signatures are designed to favor natural language portions of Web pages over advertisements and navigational bars.

The contributions of SpotSigs are twofold: 1) by combining stopword antecedents with short chains of adjacent content terms, we create robust document signatures with a natural ability to filter out noisy components of Web pages that would otherwise distract pure n-gram-based approaches such as Shingling; 2) we provide an exact and efficient self- tuning matching algorithm that exploits a novel combination of collection partitioning and inverted index pruning for high-dimensional similarity search. Experiments confirm a increase in combined precision and recall of more than 24 percent over state-of-the-art approaches such as Shingling or I-Match and up to a factor of 3 faster execution times than Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH), over a demonstrative Gold Set” of manually assessed near-duplicate news articles as well as the TREC WT10g Web collection.

Source: Stanford InfoLab

+ Google Maps Now Offers Traffic Predictions (via SEL)

+ Google News Makes Quotes More Discoverable (via SEL)

Barry Schwartz writes:
Live Search News takes a more linear view of news, when you compare it to the Yahoo News home pages. Live Search News looks more like a Techmeme style news approach, but it obviously uses a different algorithm.

Direct to Live Search News

Source: Search Engine Lande

See Also:
Two More Excellent News Resources:

1) NewsNow

2) Topix