Editor’s Note: A handful of SCALL members attended the Internet Librarian 2008 conference in Monterey, California last October 20-22, 2008. Among their number were Gina Catalano and Tina Jagerson, Reference Librarians at the San Diego County Public Law Library. Gina and Tina graciously permitted me to reprint their articles here, after they first appeared in the November 2008 issue of the SANDALL News. Enjoy!
BECOME A SUPER SEARCHER By Gina Catalano, San Diego County Public Law Library
While at the Internet Librarian Conference I attended Mary Ellen Bates’ class on Super Searcher Shares: Search Tips Spectacular! I was very impressed with her presentation, and want to share the following search tips and websites with you.
Google Translator
http://www.google.com/translate_s
OK, so Google is not new to any of us. But, did you know that you can enter in your search terms and then Google will translate the search terms into a language that you specify and then translate the retrieved web pages for you? So, I entered in the search terms, vacations in Madrid in English and wanted to search pages written in Spanish. Google searched through Spanish web pages for my terms and then translated the Spanish pages into English for me. Are you traveling to a foreign country for vacation or researching a foreign country? Try it out and see what happens!
Google Archive Search
www.news.google.com/archivesearch
This is a cool feature that puts your search into a news timeline that is easy to scan and read for trends. Most of you probably haven’t tried searching for information on Britney Spears, but what if you wanted to find info on the Web about her early career and not the less than flattering stuff that has surfaced in the past year or so? Performing a search on Britney Spears using this site breaks down the results into a timeline, so you can just select the results from 1980-1981 and read about the more innocent times. This site is great for narrowing search results to a specific time period or seeing trends on a specific topic.
Yahoo’s [Brackets] Search
A neat search feature in Yahoo is using your search terms in brackets. Yahoo will retrieve words in the order specified within the brackets. However, unlike the more common phrase search enclosed in quotation marks, the bracket search will retrieve words in that order, but not necessarily in a phrase. Mary Ellen Bates used the following example: [subprime crisis] retrieves subprime mortgage crisis, subprime lending crisis, and subprime mortgage industry in crisis. This could be useful when you know keywords to use in a search but not a specific phrase.
Yahoo Glue
http://in.search.yahoo.com
Yahoo describes this new search results feature as uniting the “Classic Search Results with visual information from the best sites anywhere on the Web.” This feature is in beta, and you may notice it is based in India. It is interesting because it breaks down the search results into the regular text results that we are accustomed to seeing, but also gives results based on specific types of pages, such as News, Wikipedia, YouTube, blogs, images, RSS feeds, etc. For example, I searched for Barack Obama and the regular text results showed up in a box on the left hand side, but then there were results with images from news sources, blog entries, and YouTube videos with the video right there in the search results! I believe this is an important website to look at for how it presents search results. I think more search engines will be moving to a similar format for their results page.
Silo Breaker
http://www.silobreaker.com
This is an interesting news search engine that provides ‘intelligent’ search results by allowing the user to see relationships between people, and between people and places. Like Yahoo’s Glue, it shows results clustered according to type and with visuals. However, it has the added feature of showing a “network” that relates the search query to people, places and things. Click on the network graph feature and news articles that show relationships to your search query will appear. There is also a ‘hotspot’ feature that shows geographic associations to your original search query. This search engine is very interesting for showing relationships and could potentially be useful when searching for unusual connections between people/companies. Law firm librarians may find this to be a useful tool when searching for information on potential clients or opposing parties.
Looking for the scoop on a particular person or organization? Mary Ellen Bates suggested the following three search engines:
This is a metasearch engine that searches blogs, social media sites, social news sites and social bookmarking sites. It is a great way of finding out where to take your search, depending on what hits you retrieve.
This search engine mines discussion forums and online communities. It basically searches for detailed information on discussion boards.
This search engine aggregates updates from social websites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Amazon wish list, etc. It will search for the people listed in your email contacts and keep you up to date on what your contacts are posting in the many social sites it searches.
I hope you find these search engines and search tips useful and can see possible applications. I sure did learn a lot at this presentation. Now we can all be Super Searchers!
