The LibrarianInBlack posted about the Soundogs sound effects search engine. It seems to be pretty cool… But FindSounds is cooler.
FindSounds is a specialized search engine for sound effects and musical instrument samples. You can specify audio resolution, sample rates, file formats, mono/stereo, and file size in the search. And all the sounds found using FindSounds are free (better than Soundogs).
Chris Sherman wrote an article about it awhile back.
Frank Cervone:
70% of all searches are keyword searches and they pretty much get article searches
Students don’t understand the concept of “metasearch” and federated
Federated product – good place to go for starters
students have strong expectations about how results should be displayed: relevance order – it’s the search engine model…
advanced users tend to head towards databses
If it’s not federated, it’s ignored. The hope is that people will click through to the native interface when appropriate
finding the right group of databases for subject areas is important
long lists of databases – students find them confusing and make them feel stupid
they group databases by “best bets” or the three major databases in any given topic area.
It’s critical that they work from the perspective of the patron.
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Jeff Wisniewski:
Webfeat – live since Sept 2004
majority of searches come from the quick find search on their website’s main page
They provide three access points: federated product, a-z list, and subject list
Google has set the speed standard – they get “it’s kinda slow” comments
Speed constraints – be selective – dont’ want a “earch all” when all equals 300+ databases
monitor usage stats, especially turnaways
implement a formal evaluation process
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Ying Zhang: MetaLib Implementations
spoke about her organization’s implementation of MetaLib
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Athena Hoeppner:
Usability aspects of their federated search product
Most users use the quick search feature
They believe customization would help – trying to label things differently
Metalib isn’t an ideal solution for them because of the lack of easy customization
They’d like to add lots of help features, add useful icons, and have the visual design mirror their website
First, for Tom Hogan’s opening remarks:
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Keynote: Search Engine Update, Chris Sherman
Starting to see true differentiation and divergence among the major search engines:
Ask:
Google:
MSN:
Yahoo
Google and Books
Google’s DoJ Request
China and search:
Conclusions:
Wow. Double wow. del.icio.us: y.ah.oo!
Yahoo now owns two of the hottest sites on the planet – del.icio.us and flickr.
2006 should be an extremely interesting year!
Check this out – Google Blog Search. It’s just what it says it is – “Find blogs on your favorite topics.”
How does it work? Well… just like Google! You search just like you’d normally do with Google. There are a couple of differences between this and the normal Google:
And this isn’t just searching blogs. It is searching almost everything (well, everything in Google’s database) with an RSS feed. For example, I searched for “kansas city public library” and picked up articles and events that would have appeared in the RSS feeds on our subject guide pages. Which is even cooler! It doesn’t appear to be searching news site’s RSS feeds (like newspaper websites).
The best thing? This search doesn’t come to a screeching halt like Daypop or some of the other blogish search engines. This is a very cool addition to blog search products!
Another interesting side note: it also appears as an option/feature when I log into Blogger (what I currently use to post blogs). Should be some fun reading over the next few days!
I previously blogged about the Basic Search Engines class I teach once in awhile. So, I thought I’d be thorough and also mention the Intermediate Search Engines class I do.
Both of these classes are taught for the Kansas City Metropolitan Library & Information Network (KCMLIN), a regional library training and resource sharing consortium for the Kansas City area. Library staff take the classes for CEU credits.
The intermediate search engines class goes deeper into digging information out of search engines. I update it in little bits here and there, but probably need to give it an overhaul. What do y’all think? Anyone have some suggestions for me? I’d sure love ‘em!
(found at the Unofficial google Blog):
I saw Google’s Keyhole for the first time at the Computers in Libraries conference, and thought it was pretty cool. Apparently, Google is starting to combine Google Local, Maps, and Keyhole – look at this image…
That little thought bubble thing with the address is pointing at me! Instead of getting the normal drawn map view, Google now has a Satelite view that adds static Keyhole images. Neat, huh?
I still need to play with it, but I ultimately think A9′s version of real images (storefront images while driving down a street) is currently more useful. With the A9 version, you see the actual street at street-level, which might look familiar to me. The satellite view of an area doesn’t help me – I can’t for the life of me recognize my building in Google’s satellite image (although if I zoom out of the image a little, I DO recognize I-35).
Nonetheless, it’ll be cool to see where all this is going.
I just got back from teaching a basic search engines class to nine local library workers. This class is, to me, extremely basic information – I cover topics like “What is the web?”, “differences between search directories and search engines,” and “How to evaluate what you find.” Very basic stuff. While all of my students work in libraries, they have different job duties – I had everything from a circulation clerk to professional, “degreed” librarians. Some of them were there to earn CEUs, some were there to learn about searching the web.
And you know what? Many of them DID learn something today (they told me so). So here are those observations hinted at in the title of this post:
As I was pondering this, I realized this really relates to the whole Gorman “blog people” thing. Obviously, Gorman is not an idiot. He’s an intelligent library director who is not familiar with library-related blogs. Blogs aren’t tools he uses on a daily basis. My guess is that his first experience with blogs stemmed from the negative feedback he received after his discussion of Google’s e-text initiatives – probably not a very pleasant or positive introduction!
I DO use blogs as a tool in my daily job routine – they help me keep up with technology trends, and keep me learning about new things in the library world.
So here’s a thought – are there any “library director” blogs out there? Something that Gorman could actually use as part of his daily job routine? My guess is this – if someone showed him a blog that proved useful to his job, his opinion might change. Much more so than if he reads that some weirdo on Dave’s Blog thinks his opinion is…. well, you get the idea.
Trying out Google Maps. It’s very cool! I tried finding my home address – found it just fine. Then I tried my library.
First, I typed in “kansas city public library.” It did fine – found all but one of our branches, and found our old location for the main library. It also lumped in North Kansas City Public Library, which is another library system (but it’s about 5 miles from us, too).
Google Maps also gave the old version of our URL (www.kcpl.lib.mo.us) to all the branch libraries, but our normal url (kclibrary.org) to our main branch. Hmm…
Now I’m going to play “where’s Waldo” – to try and find the missing branch (Waldo Community branch). If I do this search (“kansas city public library” waldo), I find the Waldo, North-east, and Ruiz branches… and also find Kansas City, Kansas Public Library (yet another close but separate library system across the state line – also a good 5 miles away).
So I sent a “Send Feedback” email giving them the correct address of our new Central Library… we’ll see what happens.
Ok. I’m probably behind the times here, but I was thinking about how people evaluate website credibility (and more to the point, how I teach it in search engine classes). So I did a search to find some examples of best practices, and came across this amazing study done in 2002. It scared me.
Why did it scare me? I freaked because the number 1 thing people looked at (2,684 in this study) was… VISUAL DESIGN (46.1%)! Not the validity of the information presented on the page, not the accuracy of facts mentioned, but … design. “Nearly half of all consumers in the study assessed the credibility of sites based in part on the appeal of the overall visual design of a site, including layout, typography, font size and color schemes” (link to quote page). One participant was even quoted as saying “just looks more credible” (about a website he/she was “evaluating”). My goodness.
You and I both know that the actual information presented on the page, whether that information comes in text, image, sound, etc., is the MOST important part of any website – a pretty website with no content isn’t terribly useful to our customers (well, unless your customer happens to be a web designer hunting for creative visual ideas…). And at the same time, given the same information on two different websites, it just makes sense to go with the better-designed site (easier/faster to download, easy-to-read format, etc.).
But the apparent fact that consumers are judging potential sources of useful information by how visually appealing it is or isn’t IS NOT GOOD! Sounds to me like it’s up to us library-types to continue teaching not only how to search the web, but maybe more importantly – how to evaluate the stuff found while searching the web.
And one other random thought – since our library websites are, in essence, being judged by the clothes they wear – is yours dressed appropriately? Does it have that “I’m useful” look? And what exactly does “I’m useful” look like? Any thoughts/ideas?
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