Review of updates from INFODOCKET: Microsoft Makes Another Major Update to Academic Search Database
Try searching now! You can find apps on
Android, iOS, Mac, Windows, Chrome, Firefox, Facebook, web and more!
NB.This is in beta.
A brief review can be found on Phil Bradley's weblog
It's a nice resource, although I'm not sure how up to date it is. I checked out the links and all the ones that I tried were fine except for the Encarta site, which has been gone for a long time now. Otherwise, good stuff - thanks to Hazel for finding it and alerting me to it.
I have been updating my collections of search engines - adding in new ones that I've previously blogged about and removing ones that no longer exist. It's of course not a complete listing - some I simply have ignored as I really don't rate them, others I just don't know about! However, the majority of them are ones that I think are worth looking at in different subject areas. There's more to search than Google. If you have time, please take a look, and consider trying out some new ones. You can access them all via my 'Which Search Engine When' page and pull down menus, but here's an overview.
Key search engines - Free text, Index, Multi, Visual, Categorised, Blended. (41)
Site based engines - Comparisons, Re-ranking, Site information, Similar (30)
News search engines - News, Trending (33)
Types of data - Thumbnails, Overviews, Factual, Hidden, Fileformats, Local (41)
Types of user - Children, Trusted sources, Academic (48)
Multimedia - Image, Sound, Video (63)
People based - People search, Blogs, Forum, Social, Moderated, Bookmarks (82)
Miscellaneous - Spelling, words, really odd (38)
Alternatively, or as well, I have a general collection of 170+ web search engines that is a bit of a miscellany, and most of them are available in the other lists, but not all. If you find any that I've missed, or think I should delete, change, edit or otherwise fiddle with, PLEASE let me know. Also, and this isn't something I ask very often, please do feel free to retweet, blog, or otherwise reference the lists - I don't get paid for any of this and the reward that I get is seeing that other people use and appreciate the work that I put into them. Thanks!
Zanran helps you to find ‘semi-structured’ data on the web. This is the numerical data that people have presented as graphs and tables and charts. For example, the data could be a graph in a PDF report, or a table in an Excel spreadsheet, or a barchart shown as an image in an HTML page. This huge amount of information can be difficult to find using conventional search engines, which are focused primarily on finding text rather than graphs, tables and bar charts.
Put more simply: Zanran is Google for data. Click on Link to view Examples,
How it works… technology overview
Zanran doesn't work by spotting wording in the text and looking for images – it's the other way round. The system examines millions of images and decides for each one whether it's a graph, chart or table – whether it has numerical content.
The core technology is patented computer vision algorithms that decide whether an image is numerical – and they're accurate (about 98%). But the huge majority of images on the internet are not graphs etc. So even though the accuracy is high, you will still get some non-numerical images.
In comparison, looking for tables is relatively simple. Once we've found a table we then have to decide whether it's essentially numerical - and we have algorithms for that.
Our programmes then take suitable text near that image and build the search engine around that text. At present, we extract tables and images from HTML, PDF and Excel files and will be processing PowerPoint and Word documents in the near future.
It is worth also mentioning that mapping the numerical content on the web would not have been possible without the development of open-source software and the access to vast processing power and cheap storage in cloud computing.
Zanran has crawled most of the internet. But if you think there is a good site we've missed, please let us know.
Summary:
Users increasingly rely on individual pages listed by search engines instead of finding better ways to tackle problems.
... users change search strategy only 1% of the time; 99% of the time they plod along a single unwavering path. Whether the true number is 2% or 0.5%, the big-picture conclusion is the same: users have extraordinarily inadequate research skills when it comes to solving problems on the Web...[more]
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/search-skills.html
From: Alertbox: Current Issues in Web Usability
Bi-weekly column by Dr. Jakob Nielsen, principal, Nielsen Norman GroupFindFiles.net is a rapidly
developing search engine for all types of files, operating its own
crawler. FindFiles database currently contains links to several hundred
Millions of files. FindFiles supports all existing Mime Types (apart
from standard html text-pages). Well known examples are
* mp3 audio and wav sound files
* midi musical instrument interfaces
* mp4, avi and quicktime videos
* jpeg, gif, png and tiff images
* Microsoft doc and Excel documents and exe executables
* pdf and plain text documents
* dwg AutoCAD and wrl virtual reality data files
* archives like zip, gzip and jar
Google Wonder Wheel is a new great feature from Google which allows you to see relevant search results to your query in a unique semantically relevant and graphically design way.
No matter which search engine you use, the quality of your search results depend on how you formulate your search query. A bad search query delivers inadequate search results. And studies show that even the fabled “Google Generation” don’t know how to phrase their searches.
An easy way to learn about the structure of solid, more complex search queries is provided by Google Wonder wheel.
[More] Pandia Search Engine News
Though this article hasn't been updated since 2008, it remains useful. CW
The Web changes constantly, and sometimes that page that had just the information you needed yesterday (or last month or two years ago) is not available today. At other times you may want to see how a page's content or design has changed. There are several sources for finding Web pages as they used to exist.
While Google's cache is probably the best known, the others are important alternatives that may have pages not available at Google or the Wayback Machine plus they may have an archived page from a different date. The table below notes the name of the service, the way to find the archived page, and some notes that should give some idea as to how old a page the archive may contain...[More]
From : Search Engine Showdown
From: http://lselibraryresearch.blogspot.com/
Open Access Journals Search Engine will search in 3627 Open Access
Journals (OAJ). It almost cover all subject areas right from humanities
to pure sciences. The complete list of journals are available at: http://sites.google.com/site/ilisdir/open-access-journals-search-engine
searches sites including: http://www.cepis.org/upgrade, https://www.metodista.br/revist..., https://www.journals.uio.no/ind..., https://sites.google.com/site/j..., https://sites.google.com/site/i...
Every Web site in SweetSearch has been evaluated by our research experts.
Creative Commons has announced the launch of DiscoverEd, a search engine of “open” educational resources. Open as in as having a CC or other license that makes them more available for use. DiscoverEd is available in beta at http://discovered.creativecommons.org.
The materials in the search engine were not gathered from an open Web crawl; rather they were assembled from third-party repositories like the Open Courseware Consortium and the National Science Digital Library. This means that you won’t get as many results from a general search (and that it’s generally okay to do a more general search) and that the results have somewhat better details.
I did a search for physics. Information about the search results was in German (huh?) but the results themselves were in English. Results include the title of the result, a brief summary, education level (which I wish had been more helpful; I didn’t see any levels that were grade- or age- specific) and sometimes information about usage license. Some of the data fields have magnifying glasses next to them; click on the magnifying glass next to an entries field and you’ll get a refined list of results whose information that field matches the one you clicked. For example, I could click on the magnifying glass next to a CC-BY license and get only those results that had a listed CC-BY license (an attribution license.)
Actually considering where this material was gathered from I’m very surprised there were not listings with licenses included. I think this just might be an issue of metadata not being complete or properly indexed. When I did a more specific search (for momentum) there were more results with CC licenses on the front page, and when I did a level-based search (kindergarten) I also got a pretty good number of results with CC licenses.
There is some gunk in the search results (moved pages, indexes, etc.) but not much. There’s an RSS feed icon at the bottom of the search results but when I tried to use it I got an error. The summaries and resource titles are good, and I found all my searches got plenty of results. A nice education resource search, though of course I’d love more metadata.
From Researchbuzz
Posted on September 30, 2011 by Gary D. Price