Search Engines

No One Starts at Your Website

by David Lee King on March 31, 2011

Guess what? Your patrons aren’t starting their information searches at your library’s website. In fact, OCLC checked that out. In their Perceptions of Libraries, 2010: Context and Community report, they found that … NO ONE … started their info search at a library website. Yep – that’s a big, fat 0%.

And you know what? That’s ok.

Here are a couple of thoughts about that:

1. Your site isn’t built for that, and probably will never be. Sure, you have a link to your catalog. And links to a variety of databases. But those aren’t your website. On your actual website, you have a lot of information up about your library, like your policies and info on your board of trustees. But that’s not really what the majority of your patrons are interested in.

You do have some information that your patrons want, like hours, locations, etc – those are used a lot on my library’s website. But that’s not really the start of someone searching for information, is it?

2. There are other tools already set up that do that whole “let’s start an info search” much better than us. Think Google, Bing, or even Wikipedia. They are made to find little nuggets of info. In years past, actual librarians did that great – and there weren’t many other options. But now, the web owns that ready reference type stuff.

So what are our websites for?

Well – that should depend on your library’s strategic plan. But generally speaking, our websites serve a variety of purposes, including:

  • point to info sources. Catalog, databases, useful local organizations
  • we’re set up to answer questions (that’s not necessarily connected to beginning that info search)
  • some of us enhance learning, entertainment, and local community stuff via blog posts or posts/reminders about events at the library
  • all that normal stuff about the library – hours, locations, board members, policies.

But start info searches? That doesn’t really make sense in today’s web environment anymore (not to me, anyway).

Instead, point your patrons to the best places to go to start their searches – then, when they get confused … make sure they know that you are there, ready to expand, reshape, and redefine those searches so they’re actually useful.

That’s our job.

pic by jakeandlindsay

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Social Mentions with socialmention

by David Lee King on September 16, 2010

check out socialmention.com

One social media tracking tool I’ve been using for the library lately is SocialMention, at socialmention.com.

From their about page – “Social Mention … allows you to easily track and measure what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors 100+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.”

So how do I use it? In the search box, I did a search for topeka library – that search catches most of the variations of my library’s name (Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library). Most people tend to tweet or Facebook phrases like “headed to Topeka to visit the library” or “Topeka has a great library.” Or they might mention “Topeka Public Library.”

I don’t narrow the search, though you can. If you want, you can create separate searches for blogs, microblogs, networks, bookmarks, comments, etc. And this becomes more important in the next paragraph…

… because each search has an RSS feed and/or an email alert that goes along with it. So what I do is this – I do that topeka library search, then subscribe to the email alerts.

What’s this get me? Every morning, I get an email from Social Mention with a list of mentions of the library with links to the original. I usually get tweets and Facebook status updates, some Foursquare checkins, and some blog mentions. Honestly, there’s a lot of blog spam mentions that appear as well. Also any time we’re mentioned in the media, that comes through, too.

Then I click through each link, answer any questions that appear (not too many), sometimes add a comment to a discussion, and send any interesting media mentions to our marketing manager and maybe our deputy director. I also copy/paste the more interesting mentions into a semi regular staff intranet blog post, so staff can see who’s saying what about us.

So… why am I doing this? I’m a digital branch manager – it helps me keep track of what people are saying about the library via their favorite digital spaces. It also lets me quickly see just what digital spaces people are using (Topekans definitely favor Twitter and Facebook right now).

I recommend checking out socialmention.com – there’s probably a whole lot more you can do with it!

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Facebook vs Google?

by David Lee King on September 14, 2010

Just saw this post and a couple others that commented on it – Facebook Passes Google in “Time Spent” – What Does it Mean?

What does it mean? Honestly, it could mean any number of things. But let’s take a peek at the accompanying graphic first:

Here’s what I think it might mean:

  1. Well, duh. Facebook is a social place where you connect with people you like. Google’s a search engine. Apples and oranges. ‘Nuf said.
  2. Related to #1 – Google’s main thing – their search engine – has been #1 for a long time. But the web has been morphing from primarily a place you surf and search for content to a place where you connect with people. You can see that in the graphic above – look at the mix of search engines, social places, email, etc.
  3. #2 leads to my last point – not certain the percentages are an accurate reflection of reality. Why? Well – they’re comparing Facebook – where you can do lots of stuff, like chat, watch videos, see pics of people, leave status updates, do Facebook PM emails, etc – to only Google’s search engine. But if you add up all the Google properties in this top 20 list – Google, YouTube, Gmail, and Google Maps – Google still clearly comes out on top.

Just picky this morning!

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Finding and Saving Those Tweets

by David Lee King on August 19, 2010

After I posted Twitter Search Engines a couple days ago, Gary Price chatted with me about TwapperKeeper. Basically, Twapperkeeper can save tweets and hashtags, and creates an archive of them for you… so you, say, don’t lose track of a hashtag you created a couple of weeks ago.

What other similar tools are out there? Check out these useful posts:

Hope you find these useful!

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Twitter Search Engines

by David Lee King on August 17, 2010

Twenty two days ago, I asked readers to tweet how they get permission to do stuff using the #getpermission hashtag in Twitter. Yesterday, I remembered that I needed to copy/paste some of those tweets into my How YOU Get Permission post … and failed miserably! Why? Because tweets pretty much disappear after about a week and a half. Technically the tweets are still there – they’re just not found by most search engines, Twitter’s included.

So I did some furious searching, and actually found a few of those hashtag tweets! Which search engines worked?

Here’s a list of Twitter search engines and what they found. Thankfully, there’s one #getpermission tweet out there right now, so theoretically, every search should at least find that recent tweet. Let’s see what happens!

Found the most recent tweet plus something else:

  • Topsy – found it, plus three others (including the ones I quoted in my last post). You have to click “all time” to get those. It’s obviously NOT all time, or it would have found everything else, too. Not sure what’s up with that. But hey – it’s something!
  • twazzup – found it, plus found my last post, a news article that mentioned “get permission”
  • crowdeye – found it plus one other, plus my blog post.

Found the most recent tweet only:

And finally, search engines that found nothing – not even the most recent tweet:

  • Tweetmeme
  • twitority
  • twitalyzer – this one didn’t search at all – they claimed that Twitter was acting up again, and said “come back later!”
  • yauba
  • tweefind
  • cloud.li
  • trendistic
  • twittertroll – Interestingly, they said “no results. We suck” when nothing was found. Well … yes, you do!
  • twitterment – This one doesn’t seem to search hashtags. It took my hashtag, separated the words, and ran a search for “get permission”
  • oneriot – this search stripped out the hashtag and found something completely unrelated.
  • twitmatic – dunno. still waiting for the search to complete its “first time indexing” …

So there you have it! Want to find an “ancient” tweet (as in, older than 10 days)? I’d suggest using Topsy or Crowdeye (probably both).

Fun Twitter bird by Marc Benton

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CIL2009: A Super Searcher Shares 25 Search Thoughts

by David Lee King on March 30, 2009

Speaker: Mary Ellen Bates

links are at batesinfo.com/cil2009

Alltop.com

  • online magazine rack
  • she’s comparing alltop to early yahoo, just add rss!
  • rss aggregator
  • built by “2 guys and a gal”
  • highly selective, well-done

Think about how you can use this in your own organization…

Viewzi.com

  • visualization and clustering and metasearch…
  • one of those silly swirly visual search thingies (not a fan)
  • claims it’s more immersive feeling
  • You eventually DO get text
  • gives you a choice – viaual, clustered, text, etc… good.

lexiquo.net

  • adds lexical variants
  • on the fly, you can get:
  • synonym suggestions
  • singular/plural
  • translate terms into other languages
  • does clustering, but only in German
  • interface a bit squirrely

keotag.com

  • a way to skim across web 2.0
  • query example – she did a GTD search…
  • ok. sort of a metasearch for 2.0-ish sites like blogpulse, youtube, twitter, technorati, etc

carrot2.org

  • clustering on demand
  • with a choice of sorting algorithms
  • and a choice of search engines
  • cool graphic display
  • looks like the old northern lights search engine! With the folder clustering thing
  • but allows you to choose HOW you want to cluster

Live.com

  • add prefer:word to query
  • ranks these search results higher
  • a cool way to change the relevance ranking – doesn’t narrow the search

awesome highlighter

  • highlight text on a page
  • saves a copy of the page with a new URL
  • then you can direct others to that page with the highlighted text

textrunner search

  • looks for assertions
  • information mining
  • ex: what kills bacteria in google – lots of stuff. In textrunner, it looks for a sentence with an answer.
  • so it’s looking at the web in a different way. It’s looking at sentence structure instead of focusing on different words

Google Translate

  • translates text into other languages
  • shows text side by side
  • so you drop in search results, it translates your words into words in other languages, then shows the results side by side

Twitter Venn

  • snipr.com/cemmn
  • compare frequency of words in twitter
  • generates venn diagram
  • visual way to see this

viswiki.com

  • searches all wikipedia articles
  • does a more visual search of it
  • it structures the wikipedia article in a more user-friendly way
  • gives a tag cloud for similar articles
  • lists out recommended articles
  • gives a visual mindmap display of related stuff

wikipedia-roll

  • another visual thing
  • it’s doing clustering

worldwidescience.org

  • federated search (she sped through this one)

readwriteweb

  • a tutorial
  • learn to love social media
  • can you:
  • ID the most popular blogs on a topic
  • rank the blog posts
  • eliminate content overload
  • check out the hotness of each post
  • etc
  • Cool – I’ll have to find this and pass it around

How to build a social media cheat sheet for any topic

  • also from readwriteweb

Legal Research Engines

  • cornell law library
  • google custom search engines
  • searches legal stuff

Newseum

  • newseum.org
  • aggregated the front pages of newspapers around the world
  • [me - hee. this won't last much longer]

wordle

  • makes a visual tag cloud from text
  • good way to visually see the underlying message or tone of soemthing you read

Google’s search wiki

  • you can comment on search results
  • you can move things around
  • it’s public – your annotations, anyway
  • you can customize your search of google…

deepdyve

  • skipped it

searchme

  • it automatically clusters and starts asking you questions

powerset

  • looks at wikipedia
  • it’s a sense-making search engine
  • does clustering, looks for sentences similar to your search

searchcloud.net

  • beta search engine
  • lets you weight your search results
  • looks like a search/tag cloud – you can change the weights visually by changing the weight of the font. Nice.

get conference buzz

  • bloggers live blog, live tweet, etc
  • So check those things out – technorati, google blog search, twitter search, etc

Google audio indexing

  • speech to text indexing

Google Maps Mashups

  • very interesting map mashups!

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The ReadWriteWeb needs Sexy Librarians

by David Lee King on January 9, 2008

In December, the awesome blog ReadWriteWeb posted a couple of great articles about how librarians are needed (and even linked to Michael Porter’s flickr photo of Michael and yours truly battling it out on Guitar Hero). That’s all dandy!

But the ReadWriteWeb just posted Deconstructing Real Google Searches: Why Powerset Matters … I’d add “real BAD Google searches” to that title. Sure, the point of the article was to point out the perils of current search engine searches/results, and to show why a semantic-based or a natural language search engine would be better. And ultimately, that really might be the case.

But my librarian self kicked in as I was reading the post, because the author obviously needed the help of us sexy librarians! Here are the search examples given:

  1. what are movie spears made out of?
  2. car hit by bicycle
  3. Famous science fiction writers other than Isaac Asimov

Librarians… I ask you. Are these good Google queries? Hmm… I’m hearing a resounding “not.” :-)

And this is a great example of why we’re still needed. Yes – there’s the web. Yes – there’s Google. And yes – there are extremely smart people that write great blogs like the ReadWriteWeb. But does that mean everyone knows how to search? What happens if the semantic web or true natural language searching kicked in tomorrow – would that negate us? No – we’d still encounter people asking why they get 50 million hits when they type “I need to find stuff on cars” or whatever into search engines.

I’m thinking we can improve the ReadWriteWeb‘s search examples mentioned in the article – let’s have some fun and help them out (not that they’ll notice, but heck – we can try, can’t we?). So – here are my “better” suggestions on structuring the three search queries:

  1. what are movie spears made out of? Why not try zulu extras spears instead?
  2. car hit by bicycle – how about “bicycle accident” “hitting car” or car “hit by bicycle” or even “car damage” bicycle?
  3. Famous science fiction writers other than Isaac Asimov – hmm… why not try “science fiction author” famous -”isaac asimov” instead?

I found better results … but I don’t consider myself to be an expert searcher by any means. What do you think? How can we improve those searches? Librarians, show your awesome search skills! How would YOU do the three searches?

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Alternative Search Engines List

by David Lee King on March 28, 2007

This, of course, SHOULD be coming from a librarian… but whatever. The Read/Write Web has a great list of alternative (as in, not Google) search engines. It looks like it’s a monthly feature on the blog.

This month includes some cool stuff, like:

  • FindSounds, an audio search engine
  • PureVideo, and video search engine
  • A variety of clustering search engines

And towards the end of the article, there’s a “Top 100″ list of search engines. Check out the article!

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Quintura, a Visual Search Engine

by David Lee King on December 5, 2006

searchI just discovered Quintura, a new visual search engine interface (found via Robert Scoble’s blog). On the surface, it looks similar to Grokker or KartOO (two other better-known visual search engines).

You can play with Quintura’s online demo, but the real deal is downloading their Quintura Search product. It offers a visual map of searches done using an impressive number of search engines, including Google, Amazon, Ask, MSN search, etc.

The biggest downside for me? Sorta silly, really… but I got extremely excited in a geekd-out way when I read their “What is Quintura” description. Why? Because they mentioned LIBRARIES. Here’s what they said:

“Have you ever raked through the paper card index of a big library? You have to find the necessary letter (or their combination), take the correct drawer, and start sorting through the cards. Ring any bells?” (ok – they obviously haven’t been in a library for at least 10 years – I’d be surprised if most of their customers have seen a CARD catalog. But oh well…).

Then they go on… “But on the web, what do you do? You are on your own. Until now. Quintura is the very know-all librarian!” (ahem… Yikes!).

Then, they have an imagined conversation with a “favorite search engine,” which I think is supposed to be the search engine you usually use (ie., Google, Yahoo, etc.). And the conversation is about finding … books on physics. Hmm…

OK – besides not having stepped into a library in awhile, they also don’t get that Google, Yahoo, etc. can’t REALLY find books in your library. Or maybe this thing was written by those college students who actually think you CAN find books in a local library using a search engine.

Anyway… I was really hoping, with all this library/search engines comparison text, that the search software I downloaded would interface with, say, MY LIBRARY’S CATALOG. Now, that’d be really cool. But no luck – it only gives me that list of search engines I mentioned earlier.

Hopefully, they’ll create a version of their product that can interface with localized search engines, OPACs, etc. here’s hoping!

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Youtube and Finding Video Tagged IL2006

by David Lee King on October 27, 2006

Anyone else tried hunting for videos from Internet Librarian 2006 in Youtube? It can be done… but it’s not easy!

Here’s the easy way: just click one of the links below (send me your youtube URL if I have left you out!):

Or do a search in Youtube. I did – I entered the tag il2006 in the Youtube search box, pressed enter… and found MUCH MORE than just il2006 tags. Other things I found?

Apparently, when you do a search for a tag in Youtube, it looks in the tag fields… but also looks for a partial match in other fields, too – hence finding many instances of “il” in the From field. It also found “il” in the title field a few times… I wonder if it’s because of the number in the il2006 tag?

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