Archive for the ‘Search Tools’ Category
Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009
From the Article by Greg Sterling:
To “come out” in a manner of speaking and demonstrate its capabilities to a broader public, Netbase has launched vertical search site HealthBase, a kind of “technology showcase” for the company’s “content intelligence” platform and semantic search capabilities. If HealthBase gets a positive response I was told perhaps the company will move into the consumer search business. But that’s not the main point of the site at the moment. Indeed there’s a very “enterprise-y” quality to the look and feel of HealthBase.
To “come out” in a manner of speaking and demonstrate its capabilities to a broader public, Netbase has launched vertical search site HealthBase, a kind of “technology showcase” for the company’s “content intelligence” platform and semantic search capabilities. If HealthBase gets a positive response I was told perhaps the company will move into the consumer search business. But that’s not the main point of the site at the moment. Indeed there’s a very “enterprise-y” quality to the look and feel of HealthBase.
Access HealthBase
Continue Reading the Search Engine Land Article
Source: SEL
A Few Comments from Gary
1) First, a bit of a stickler.
Yes, it’s the first day for HealthBase (and things can change quickly) but it would be useful if the HealthBase would provide a complete list of the sources it’s crawling from. They have a small list on the first page of each section (and that’s a good start) but a complete list would be even more helpful to researchers. We do give kudos to HealthBase for providing a “source list” to show where the results come from. However, the kudos only go so far. Why? If you search for “causes of H1N1 (swine flu),” clicking the source list takes you to the source but makes you rerun the entire search again. Not very helpful.
2) One of the sources not listed on the first page but we did find in results from Wikipedia. We’ll keep the “is Wikipedia useful for health researchers” argument out of it for now. We did a search for “poor posture” in the “causes and conditions” tab. OK, no problem. We then selected “Joint.” The second result was from Wikipedia, dated April, 2009. One of Wikipedia’s strengths (and maybe a weakness in some cases) is it’s currency. It would be useful to let users know that this is (is it?) the most current version of the material available. When we found other Wikipedia material, they contained other dates. Here’s an example. We searched (using the “causes of conditions tab” for diabetes). Under the “infection” tab we found a Wikipedia result from May, 2009.
3) Finally, when searching for journal material (like what you find in PubMed) it takes some clicking around to find the full citation to the abstract (if available) and bibliographic information. HealthBase could and should make this easier. In fact, they could work with database vendors and document delivery services to provide full text access to the article.
Posted in Search Tools | No Comments »
Tuesday, September 1st, 2009
Matt McGee writes:
Surchur has been around for more than a year, but its recent facelift aims to take real-time search toward a new idea: real-time discovery.
[Snip]
…Surchur is going a lot further with its new home page. Founder Todd Hogan calls it a merger of real-time search with real-time discovery.
The home page is now positioned as a “Real-Time Board” that shows trending topics from Google Trends, Yahoo Buzz, Bing xRank, CNN Popular Stories, Twitter, and Technorati. This is the discovery aspect: There’s no need to search for what’s hot when Surchur is doing it already, and ranking what it finds from a number of sites. The hot terms are divided into two categories: Hot Topics, which is based on an overall score, and Catching Fire, which lists the fastest-growing terms. As you’d expect, there’s occasionally some overlap in the two categories.
Hogan says the Real-Time Board is updated every 20-50 minutes. For each term, it ranks the popularity on a scale of 1-10, with separate marks for how hot the term is on Twitter, in the blogosphere, and on Surchur itself. A fourth column reveals where Surchur found the hot term.
Access Surchur
Much more in the review (with screen caps) here.
Source: Search Engine Land
Posted in Real-Time Information, Search Tools, Web 2.0 | No Comments »
Monday, August 31st, 2009
From the Article:
Innovative software developed in Europe that makes it easier to organise, search and navigate collections of digital images will soon be available to media agencies, photographers and, potentially, anyone trying to keep up with photo-happy Facebook or Flickr friends.
The ImageNotion software, which is expected to go on sale next year, takes a user-friendly approach to semantic image annotation and search, a technology that links the content of photos to concepts so as to make the images understandable by computers.
Such systems have typically required end users to use a manually developed ontology – a lexicon of predefined concepts used to assign machine-readable semantic meaning to information – and then train the software to correctly annotate different images. For example, an apple would need to be defined in an ontology for fruit and then photos of apple trees could be tagged as such.
The ImageNotion system strips away much of that complexity for the end user, combining semantic annotation with a variety of other technologies, from text mining and object recognition to face detection and face identification, in order to permit many more images to be accurately annotated with little or no user intervention.
“When you mention ontologies to most people they just switch off. A photographer, an image agency employee or a web user doesn’t want and shouldn’t have to learn how the technology works, they just want to be able to use it,” explains Gabor Nagypal, who oversaw development of the ImageNotion software as technical and scientific coordinator of the EU-funded IMAGINATION project. “Because of that, our goal has been to make the technology transparent and intuitive to use,” he adds.
Demo ImageNotion
Source: ICT CORDIS (via ACM TechNews)
Posted in Info Management and Retrieval, Information Science, Search Tools, Technology and Internet | No Comments »
Thursday, August 27th, 2009
From the Announcement:
The History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine announces the launch of a new image platform for its premier database, Images from the History of Medicine. Using award winning software developed by Luna Imaging, Inc., NLM offers greatly enhanced searching and viewing capabilities to image researchers. Patrons can view search results in a multi-image display, download high resolution copies of their favorite images, zoom in on image details, move images into a patron-defined workspace for further manipulation, and create media groups for presenting images and sharing them via e-mail or posting on blogs. With these new capabilities, NLM greatly enhances usability of its image collection, where inspection and comparison of images is often as important as access to bibliographic data. IHM is available free of charge.
Source: National Library of Medicine Technical Bulletin
Posted in History, Science, Search Tools | No Comments »
Wednesday, August 26th, 2009
From the Article:
Visitors to Univision.com are in for a completely different video-search experience, as they will now be able to browse a comprehensive worldwide library of Spanish-language videos made available thanks to a new partnership between Univision Interactive Media and Truveo, the AOL-owned video-search engine.
Source: MultiChannel News
Posted in Media, Multimedia Search, Search Tools | No Comments »
Tuesday, August 25th, 2009
From the Article:
Officials at the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit in San Francisco that governs Wikipedia, say that within weeks, the English-language Wikipedia will begin imposing a layer of editorial review on articles about living people.
The new feature, called “flagged revisions,” will require that an experienced volunteer editor for Wikipedia sign off on any change made by the public before it can go live. Until the change is approved — or in Wikispeak, flagged — it will sit invisibly on Wikipedia’s servers, and visitors will be directed to the earlier version.
Source: NY Times
Posted in Information Industry, People Search, Reference Tools, Technology and Internet | No Comments »
Saturday, August 8th, 2009
First, congrats to Google on the massive increase (4x bigger but exact numbers were not given) to their newspaper digitization project. Well done and we look forward to more in the future. That said, may we ask a small favor? How about a list, a catalog of sorts, of the newspapers you’re making available via the project. It would be most welcome. As more papers get digitized you can simply add the titles and/or change the run dates. Heck, you can limit by newspaper* on the advanced search interface but where does one go to find the list of papers? How can one limit by date if we don’t know what date range is available? We believe this is info that should be on the search interface home page or if that’s not possible it could be placed on one of your well documented help pages.
* On the newspaper archive advanced search page Google lists NewsBank as a newspaper source. It’s not. NewsBank is an aggregator of newspapers.
Looking for More Digitized Newspapers?
Check out the Chronicling America Project from the Library of Congress. They just digitized their one millionth page. Free.
Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program
4.3 million articles (1.95 million scanned pages) are now available and full-text searchable. Some of the material is accessible via Google’s Newspaper Digitization program.
New Zealand: Papers Past
Over 1.3 million digitized newspaper pages. Free.
NewspaperARCHIVE.com
Fee-based (monthly or yearly subscription) from Heritage Microfilm. According to their documentation NA is adding about 2.5 million pages per month. Recently, they added the Stars and Stripes newspaper from 1948-1999.
UK: The Times of London (1785-1985)
Fee-Based.
British Newspapers 1800-1900
2 million pages. Fee-based.
Many libraries (of all types) provide FREE remote (access from home, office) access to digitized newspapers. Just ask your librarian.
Posted in Digitization Projects, Information Industry, News Search, Search Tools | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009
From the Blog Post:
Whether you are concerned about monitoring your total fat, cholesterol, sodium, sugar, carbohydrates, or other nutrients, Wolfram|Alpha can provide you with this information for an individual food item, a meal, or a comprehensive calculation of your daily diet.
Source: W|A Blog
Posted in Resources, Science, Search Tools | No Comments »
Thursday, July 16th, 2009
Barbara Quint writes:
After a year and a half of planning and development, Springer Science+Business Media , an international scholarly publisher based in Germany but operating in 20 countries, has launched SpringerImages ((www.springerimages.com). The massive collection of 1.6 million scientific, technological, and medical images includes photos, tables and figures, charts, graphs, histograms, and other illustrations. Although covering all scientific subject areas, some 61% of the collection focuses on medical and life sciences. Drawing on its own vast collection of content, Springer provides multilayered, in-depth indexing. Subscribers can use the material liberally as long as they do not use it for direct commercial purposes. In an interesting development, SpringerImages includes a small but growing collection of open access images, which are available to anyone, no registration required. (our emphasis)
Source: Information Today NewsBreaks
Posted in Information Industry, Search Tools | No Comments »
Wednesday, July 15th, 2009
From the Announcement:
The National Institutes of Health and the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that operates the Wikipedia online encyclopedia, are joining forces to make health and science information more accessible and reliable. This collaboration is the first of its kind for both organizations.
“NIH works to ensure that the information it provides on science and health is of the highest quality and reaches the widest audience,” said John Burklow, NIH associate director for communications and public liaison. “We look forward to this opportunity to collaborate with the Wikimedia Foundation and participate in a resource that is used by millions of people around the world.”
After the Wikipedia Academy, NIH subject matter experts will be able to contribute to Wikipedia and also help develop best practices for future sessions. Instructions about how to contribute, including video of the Wikipedia Academy at NIH, will be available on the NIH and the Wikipedia websites for scientists across the country.
Source: National Institutes of Health
Hat Tip: P.W.
Posted in Science, Search Tools, Social Media | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 14th, 2009
From the Article:
USA Today has launched a site called Newsdeck (http://digbig.com/5babef) which aggregates the paper’s top stories in a headline format. The page bears little resemblance to a news site and in fact looks very much like a deck of cards. Each of the eight cards contains headlines on different topics, such as news, travel, money, sport and technology, with each headline linking through to the full story on the paper’s main website.
Direct to NewsDeck from USA Today
The article also mentions the “Skimmer” prototype from the NY Times. We first blogged about Skimmer in March and then again in June.
Source: VIP LiveWire
Posted in News Search, Search Tools | No Comments »
Thursday, July 9th, 2009
A quick guide about many of the health/medical features that Bing offers users.
…looking for health information is a challenging task because the average consumer is not a medical expert. This makes it difficult to know what should be trusted as credible sources of health information, not to mention that the sheer volume of health information available online can be overwhelming. To help consumers make more informed decisions about personal care, Bing provides easy access to medical information from several trusted resources including The Mayo Clinic, The American Cancer Society, MD Consult, Gold Standard, the NIH’s NCCAM and MedlinePlus. This content offers relevant and credible information on symptoms, diagnoses and medical procedures, as well as issues related to drugs and substances, personal health and alternative medicine.
Source: Bing Community
See Also: Bing, the Imitator, Often Goes Google One Better (via NY Times)
Posted in Search Tools, Web Search | No Comments »
Thursday, July 2nd, 2009
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.
Posted in Info Management and Retrieval, News Search, Search News, Web Search | No Comments »
Wednesday, July 1st, 2009
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
Posted in Search Tools, Source File, Technology and Internet | No Comments »
Wednesday, July 1st, 2009
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
Posted in Resources, Search News, Search Tools, Source File | No Comments »
Thursday, June 25th, 2009
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)
Posted in Multimedia Search, Search News, Search Tools | No Comments »
Wednesday, June 24th, 2009
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
Posted in Search News, Search Tools, Semantic Search, Technology and Internet, Web Search | No Comments »
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009
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
Posted in Databases, Directories, and Guides, Science, Search Tools | No Comments »
