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.

UKeiG (UK eInformation Group) is running a one day event on desktop search entitled “Desktop Tools - managing the flight deck”.

Date: 14th June 2006

Venue: Bloomsbury Suite, Brunei Gallery, School of Oriental and African Studies, Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG

Whether we like it or not, desktop search will be landing on our PCs in the very near future. It will play a central role in Microsoft’s new operating system, Vista, and will enable users to quickly locate files and search the content of documents stored on their computers. The other major players in the search market have already entered the fray with their own versions of desktop search, the serious contenders being Google, Yahoo, Ask, Copernic, Exalead, Blinkx and ISYS.

It is essential that we understand and are aware of what is happening in this area. It is no longer just about web search with an option to install and use desktop search for those of us who are geekishly inclined. The two will become inextricably entwined and we need to know who is doing what and understand the implications for both our users and ourselves.

The programme includes speakers from Copernic, Microsoft and ISYS, and I will be presenting the users point of view with a session on “Desktop search tools compared: the good, the bad and the ugly”.

The event costs £80 + VAT (total £94.00) for UKeiG members, and £100 + VAT (total £117.50) for non-members. Further information can be found on the UKeiG web site and on their blog.

If you are involved in email management, database management, 0r collection and storage of e-information in any form, the UKeiG one day training course Electronic Information Risk Management being held on 16th May may of interest to you.

Every organisation is now required to ensure that the use of electronic information and e-systems comply with legal, regulatory and best practice requirements. This training course will provide a sound understanding of electronic information risks and how to manage them. It will be a combination of presentations, group tasks, discussions of best practice and practical problem solving sessions. A practical case study will be used to highlight typical areas of e-information risks.

Topics to be covered include:

• e-mail Management
• Collection and Storage of E-Information
• Metadata
• Protection of Personal Information
• e-Database Management
• e-Information Incident Handling
• e-Information Access Management
• Retention and Disposal of e-Information

The course presenter is Dr Rita Esen, a Cyber Law Consultant.

The course is being held at CILIP in London and costs (including lunch and refreshments) are
UKeiG members £130 + VAT (£152.75), others £160 + VAT (£188.00)

Further details and a booking form are on on the UKeiG web site.

At the end of every advanced search workshop that we run, the delegates vote on their 10 top search tips. The latest course was run for UKeiG (UK eInformation Group) on Friday, October 28th and was held at CILIP in London. A summary of the tips is given below but a more detailed explanation will appear in the UKeiG members newsletter eLucidate, and in the members area on the UKeiG web site.

1. Use domain/site search to limit by type of site and to search individual sites that are difficult to navigate.

2. Trovando.it for a quick way to run your search in different search tools one by one.

3. Use Yahoo for complex nested Boolean searches.

4. Think about the format that the information might be in and use the filetype options to narrow down your search.

5. “Disappearing” pages: use the search engines’ cached pages for recently disappeared pages or the Wayback Machine for older pages and sites.

6. Use the Google numeric range when searching for ranges of prices, distances, weights, temperatures, years etc.

7. Don’t give up! If your favourite search engine is not working, try another one or a different type of resource.

8. Graball for comparing the results from 2 search engines side by side.

9. Copernic Desktop for desktop search.

10. Yahoo Mindset to adjust the ranking of results (”shopping” versus “research”)