The presentation that I gave at the Association of UK Media Librarians on 19th April 2009 is now available. You can find it on my own web site as a PowerPoint (8 MB), on Slideshare and authorSTREAM. As usual, it probably won’t make much sense if you were not at the presentation but at least it gives you an idea of the tools I was highlighting.

Yes, it’s another Business Information workshop Top Tips. This one was a rerun of the UKeiG event held on 2nd April, 2008. The participant mix was half private, half public sector. At the end of the day they were asked to come with a list of top sites and search tips. Between them, those attending the workshop spent half the day trying out hundreds of web sites - some of them not even mentioned by me. This is their collective list of sites that they felt were worth considering as key resources. In some cases I have also included the comments from the people nominating the site. It is interesting that there are only two sources that appear in both lists, and one of them does not really count: it was my own site, from which some of the course notes were derived so you might consider the delegates to have been brainwashed!

1. Silobreaker.com http://www.silobreaker.com/. One of the two sites that appears in both the April 2nd and this list. A relatively new service pulling together information from newspapers, journals, blogs, video and audio. In addition It offers geographical hotspots, trends and a network visualisation tool that was singled out by several workshop participants as being particularly useful.

2. OFFSTATS http://www.offstats.auckland.ac.nz/ The new set of web pages for the University of Auckland Library providing information on Official Statistics on the Web and at a new address. An excellent starting point for official statistics by country and subject/industry. As well as the makeover, there have been many additions to the collection of resources.

3. Research Wikis http://www.researchwikis.com/. This is a wiki covering market and industry data that is in the public domain; several workshop delegates commented that it looks promising. The content is variable in quality. Some reports are highly structured and detailed while others are just a “stub”, many are US biased, and the sources of the data are not always cited. Nevertheless, the reports do give you an idea of the issues affecting the sector and the terminology that is used. One of the University based delegates thought that the site’s recommended structure and headings for a report would be useful to students who are new to carrying out industry and market research.

4. Bureau van Dijk’s (BvD) “A Taste of Mint” http://mintportal.bvdep.com/ A free directory from BvD giving basic information on companies world-wide. Comment from one experienced researcher: “It found the company I have been looking for when every other directory has failed!”

5. Google Finance http://www.google.co.uk/finance/, http://www.google.com/finance/ [This was not covered in the 2nd April workshop. Until now, it has been so awful and unreliable hat I have ignored it]. This is a possible competitor to Yahoo Finance. It has been steadily improving over the last 18 months since its initial launch but still does not quite have the authoritative “feel” of Yahoo Finance. Also it does not appear to have the individual stock exchange coverage of Yahoo. It does, though, beat Yahoo when it comes to the share price graph and historical downloads options. The share price graphs are ‘annotated’ with labels at the appropriate time on the graph and these link to news articles that are listed to the right of the graph. Yahoo Finance’s downloadable historical share price data in figures goes back 5 years: Google’s goes back to 1996.

6. Google News. For the UK go to http://news.google.co.uk/ but there are a plethora of country versions. Good coverage of the last 30 days of free world-wide, national, local and industry news resources. One workshop participant said that Google News found a breaking story that the industry press and her subscription services had not yet picked up.

7. The Wayback Machine - The Internet Archive http://www.archive.org/. The Wayback Machine takes periodic snapshots of the Internet. Ideal for seeing how a company portrayed itself on the Internet in the past and for tracking down sites, pages or documents that have disappeared.

8. Chipwrapper http://www.chipwrapper.co.uk/ a Custom Google Search Engine that searches across the UK’s major national newspapers: The Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Financial Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Sun, The People, News of the World, The Scotsman, Daily Star, The Telegraph and The Times. It also searches the BBC News web site, ITN and Sky. There is a review of Chipwrapper on my blog at http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2007/12/29/chipwrapper-search-uk-newspapers/

9. UK National Statistics http://www.statistics.gov.uk/ We will not go into the confusion users suffered when UK government official statistics web sites were re-organised on 1st April 2008 [No, it was not an April Fool's]. Work your way through the new menus and you will eventually end up on the on the old statistics.gov.uk pages. Even without the frequent design changes, the site can be difficult to navigate. Nevertheless, there is an incredible amount of good quality data here. For the web based ’stuff’ and formatted documents (PDF. DOC, XLS, PPT) it is often easier to go to the Google Advanced Search page, type in your terms in the search box at the top of the page and in the ‘Search within a site or domain’ box type in statistics.gov.uk . If you want to look for specific file formats, select the file extension from the drop down menu under ‘File type’. The ‘Time Series’ data have to be search from within the statistics.gov.uk site itself.

10. Companies House http://www.companieshouse.gov.uk/. The UK official companies registry. This is the closest you can get to the original company documents that a registered company has to file. Some information is provided free of charge (Use the Webcheck service). Documents are charged for on a pay as you go basis.

11. RBA Sources of Business Information http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/. Selected sources of business information organised by type e.g. statistics, share prices, company registers.

CILIPS organised an advanced search workshop in Edinburgh, which I led. The participants were from a variety of types of organisation including academic, publishers, public sector, health and commercial. At the end of the workshop they compiled a group Top 10 Search Tips. This is their list:

1. Yahoo! Finance - http://finance.yahoo.co.uk/ for the UK version. Yahoo! Finance gives an overview of quoted companies on the major stock exchanges around the world. Information includes current share price information, downloadable historical share price figures, charts, recent news, company profiles and director dealings.
2. Make use of the file format search available in Google, Yahoo, Live and Exalead (but not Ask). Use the advanced search screens, the filetype: command in Google, Exalead and Live, or originurlextension: in Yahoo. For example filetype:ppt . Search for ppt or pdf when looking for presentations; PDF for government, official and industry/market reports; xls for spreadsheets containing statistical data; and rss or xml to locate RSS feeds.
3. Looking for papers by an academic? Find out where they currently work, or have worked in the past, and conduct a site search to see if any of their articles are in an institutional repository.
4. People are an invaluable source of information and help. Join discussion lists to tap into their knowledge, for example JISCmail at http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/ has a wide selection of lists covering many different topics.
5. Use the site or domain search to look for difficult to find information on a particular web site, or to limit your search to types of organisation for example gov.uk for UK government or ac.uk for UK academic pages. Use the advanced search screens of the search engines or the site: command for example site:statistics.gov.uk car ownership.
6. Make more use of the advanced search screen options including intitle, inurl and search engine specific features. For example Google’s numeric range search and Exalead’s phonetic and approximate spelling options.
7. Combine commands in the main search box for more complex search strategies, for example: carbon emissions trading ~forecasts site:gov.uk 2012..2015 filetype:xls OR filetype:pdf
8. Use the link commands to find pages that link to a known page or web site. This usually helps you find pages of similar content and type. Live.com’s link commands have been de-activated but Yahoo’s still work. To find pages that link to a specific page on a site use link: followed by the full URL of the page, for example link:http://www.rba.co.uk/sources/stats.htm . To find pages that link to anywhere on a site use linkdomain: followed by the domain, for example linkdomain:rba.co.uk. Live.com’s linkfromdomain command, which is still working, lists all the external links on a site, for examle linkfromdomain:rba.co.uk
9. View the search engines’ cached copies of pages to highlight and locate your search terms in long documents.
10. Try the Wayback Machine at http://www.archive.org/ for lost pages, documents or sites.

My Online 2007 presentation “Tricks and tips for better web search” is now available as a PowerPoint and on Slideshare.

UKeiG held yet another ‘Google and Beyond’ workshop on November 6th 2007, this time in London. As usual, the participants were asked to come up with a list of their Top Search Tips. Here it is!

1. Graball http://www.graball.com/
   Search two different search engines side by side and compare results.
2. Use ’site search’ to search within a specific, individual site or to a particular type of site e.g. UK government sites. Especially useful for sites that have poor navigation or awful internal search engines. Use the site: command, for example site:gov.uk or use the Advanced Search screens of the search engines.
3. Use file format search to limit your search to one or more file formats, for example PDF, PPT, XLS. A good way of focusing your search: many government and industry/market reports are published as PDFs, statistics in spreadsheet format, and PowerPoints are a good way of tracking down experts on a subject. Use the Advanced Search screens or the filetype: command, for example filetype:ppt
4. Intelways http://www.intelways.com/. Type in your search once and then run it through individual search engines one by one. The search engines are grouped together by type, for example Image, News, Reference. A useful reminder of what else is out there other than Google and that perhaps you should be thinking of searching different types of information.
5. Numeric Range Search. Available only in Google and searches for numbers within a specified range. The syntax is 1st number..2nd number. For example:TV advertising forecasts 2008..2015

   or

   toblerone 1..5 kg

6. Alacrawiki Spotlights http://www.alacrawiki.com/. Extremely useful in providing reviews and commentary on industry specific web sites that have statistics, market research and news. Invaluable if you need to get up to speed on key resources in a sector or industry.
7. Panoramio. http://www.panoramio.com/. Now owned by Google. A geolocation-oriented photo sharing service with uploaded photos presented as a mashup with Google Earth.
8. Wayback Machine - http://www.archive.org/. For tracking down copies of pages or documents that have disappeared from the original web site. Type in the address of the web site or the full URL of the document, if you know it. Note: this is not guaranteed but worth a try for older documents that are unlikely to be in the search engine caches.
9. Google Book Search . Useful for searching within books that Google has been allowed to scan, and in particular older text books.
10. Use anything but Google! For example - in alphabetical order - Ask.com, Exalead.com, Live.com, Yahoo.com. For a day, try out other search tools to see if you can survive without Google. You may go back to Google as your first port of call but at least you will have discovered the strengths and key features of the alternatives.
11. For current news try Google News and its alert service (it’s free!). And don’t forget blogs, for example Google Blogsearch, Ask- Blogs, Blogpulse, Technorati.
12. Blogpulse trends. Click on the graph icon on the results page to see how often your search terms have been mentioned in blog postings over time. Used by many of us who monitor competitor or industry intelligence to see what are hot topics and when. Many of the ‘peaks’ will tie in with press announcements: it is those that don’t that are really interesting. Click on the peaks in the graph to see the postings.

Pipl claims to be the most comprehensive people search on the web. Simply type in the first and last names of the person you are looking for, geographic location if known, and Pipl goes off and searches “hidden web” resources as well as the usual Google search. I tried it on myself and it did a pretty good job. The Quick Facts presented at the top of the page were correct, and it pulled in information from blog searches, Google Groups, Linkedin, Flicker and Google Scholar. Pipl also searches electoral rolls, directories, collections of peer reviewed literature such as Scirus and Google Scholar, Hoovers and Zoominfo. A search on my husband, Chris Rhodes, was less successful and I failed to find him amongst the thousands of other Chris Rhodes out there. Google, however, came up with him in the number 1 and 2 positions in a standard web search.

As with all of these types of search engine you still have to differentiate between different people with the same name: I do not work for the Honolulu Advertiser and neither am I the marketing director at Laura’s Lean Beef Company! And the quality of the results is variable. Nevertheless, Pipl is worth adding to your bookmarks for people search.

Technorati Tags: pipl, people search

Those of you who use the link commands in Live.com will have noticed that over the past week link: and linkdomain: have been returning blank results pages. This is not a temporary glitch but has been done on purpose by Live. According to their blog:

” We have been seeing broad use of these features by legitimate users but unfortunately also what appears to be mass automated usage for data mining. So for now, we have made the tough call to block all queries with these operators. We are doing our best to get this back online as soon as possible in a manner that allows folks that use this functionality for real queries.”

The linkfromdomain: command, which lists all the pages that a web site links to, is still working.

While Live makes up its mind about what to do with the commands try link and linkdomain in Yahoo. The results are not always as comprehensive as Live.com’s but will probably suffice in most situations. The syntax for the Yahoo’s link command is slightly different. To find pages that link to a specific page on a site it is:

link:http://www.yoursite.com/pagename.html

Note that you must include the ‘http://’

To find pages that link to any page on a site the syntax is similar to Live’s:

linkdomain:yoursite.com

Google also has a link command but it displays a small fraction of the results.

The following chapters of Search Strategies for the Internet have been updated and are available online:

http://www.rba.co.uk/search/section1.shtml
Chapter 3: Essential Search Techniques (available to subscribers only) - now includes Seekport.co.uk under the search tools that support wildcards and truncation, Live Search link and linkdomain commands, and how to uncluster results.

http://www.rba.co.uk/search/section2.shtml
Chapter 12 Yahoo Search (available to subscribers only) - updated to include the region and originurlextension commands.

Yahoo Factsheet - updated to include originurlextension and region commands.

http://www.rba.co.uk/search/section3.shtml
Chapter 20 Country Specific Information (available to subscribers only) - updated to include Yahoo region command and Seekport.co.uk

If you want to get in some serious practice on the latest Internet search techniques before Christmas there are still some places available on the workshop that I am running at Manchester Business School on December 5th. The event is held in the Eddie Davies Library at Manchester Business School, Booth Street West.

Although it is being held at the business school, the workshop covers sites and techniques relevant to all subject areas and types of research. There is ample time for practical sessions so you can try out some of the tips and tricks yourself. Also, the number of participants is kept small enough for me to discuss with each person the search tools that are relevant to their specific research area.

Details of the workshop and a booking form are on the
MBS web site.

Please contact me if you have a question about the content of the workshop, but for all queries regarding bookings please contact the Business Information Service at MBS on tel: 0161 275 6502/3, Fax: 0161 275 6505 or Email: bis@mbs.ac.uk

Presenter: Karen Blakeman, RBA Information Services
Date: November 8th 2006, half day seminar starting at 1.30 pm
Venue: Manchester Central Library, St Peter’s Square, Manchester M2 5PD
Cost: Aslib members GBP 50; non-members GBP 60

There is still time to book a place on this half day seminar on what is new and what is hot in the search engine world. Find out what is wrong with Google and why other search tools are often better and more reliable. This session will take you through the latest alternative web search engines; blogs and RSS search tools; image, video and audio tools; and specialist tools including evaluated listings.

Further information and a booking form can be found at http://www.aslib.co.uk/members/northern/news.htm or contact Rona Stedman, rona.stedman@hse.gsi.gov.uk, tel 0151 951 3524