The TFPL business information workshop held on May 17th in London turned out to be quite an intense day with plenty of questions and much discussion between the participants regarding the services and resources they use. When it came to the participants nominating their Top Tips at the end of the day there was a bit of umming and ahhing initially but they soon picked up speed and we ended up with eleven. Here they are.
1. BL BIPC industry Guides The British Library Business Information and IP Centre’s industry guides were very popular. You probably already know about the BL Business Essentials wiki Industries pages (http://bl-business-essentials.wikispaces.com/Industries) but these have now been expanded into a series of 30 PDF guides at http://www.bl.uk/bipc/dbandpubs/Industry%20guides/industry.html highlighting relevant industry directories, databases, publications and websites. One of the participants who had been using the guides since they were launched said that they are regularly updated and everyone was impressed that a named person responsible for the guide is clearly shown on each one.
2. Zanranhttp://zanran.com/ A search tool for identifying charts, graphs and tables of data in PDFs and Excel spreadsheets. Run your search and Zanran comes up with PDF and spreadsheet files that match your criteria. Very useful if you are looking for industry statistics.
3. Slidesharehttp://www.slideshare.net/ Looking for a conference presentation, an expert on a particular subject, overview or background on an industry then look in Slideshare. One workshop participant commented that they wished they had known about this a couple of weeks ago.
4. SCOTBIS http://scotbis.nls.uk/ A national information service aimed at Scottish businesses and based on the business resources at the National Library of Scotland but, nevertheless, useful information for those of us not based in Scotland. SCOTBIS provides its users with a free enquiry service and also offers fee-based research and other charged services.
5. Don’t just Google – try other search tools! If you are carrying out a general web search don’t just Google. You may find the information you are looking for more quickly using alternatives such as Bing.com, DuckDuckGo.com, Yandex.com, Blekko.com
6. Advanced search commands. Familiarise yourself with the advanced search commands, in particular ‘site:’ for searching within a single site and ‘filetype:’. Look for PowerPoints for presentations, spreadsheets for data and statistics, or PDF for research papers and industry/government reports. Note that filetype:ppt will not pick up the newer .pptx so you will need to include both in your search, for example.
filetype:ppt OR filetype:pptx
You will also need to include .xlsx if you are searching for Excel spreadsheets and .docx for Word documents.
7. BUSLIB-L – an email based discussion list that addresses all issues relating to the collection, storage, and dissemination of business information regardless of format. To join the list, go to http://list1.ucc.nau.edu/archives/buslib-l.html where there are also searchable archives.
8. Bureau van Dijk’s M&A Portal http://www.mandaportal.com/ A gateway to news, events, research and analysis on mergers and acquisitions worldwide. Some of the information on the portal home page is free of charge and there is a free search option for tracking down deals and rumours contained in BvD’s Zephyr database. The deals can be sorted by value, date or status. Basic information is free but you can purchase the full details from the Zephyr database using a credit card. The cost of the reports varies depending on the amount and type of information available.
10. Official Company Registers. A first port of call for many of us when checking up on a company. Most registers’ sites will offer an English language interface for searching but the information is usually in the local language. To locate searchable online official registers try one of the following:
11. ISI Emerging Markets http://www.securities.com/ Provides news, company information, industry reports and M&A from over 100 emerging markets. Much of the content is unique to ISI Emerging Markets. This was another service that was highly recommended by one of the workshop participants.
Having problems with Google? Fed up with it ignoring your search terms and giving you something completely different? Or confused by irrelevant postings from complete strangers appearing in your results? Personalisation, localisation, social networks and semantic search are all being used by Google in an attempt to “enhance” your results but it can go horribly wrong. Austria suddenly becomes Australia and Google decides that buttercups are really goats! There are many tricks that we can use to make Google return better results and this workshop will look in detail at what is available.
Topics will include:
how Google works – what Google tells us and what we have to guess
recent developments and their impact on search results
how Google customises your results and can you stop it?
how to focus your search and control Google
Google’s specialist tools and databases
what Google is good at and when you should consider alternatives
You will have ample opportunity to experiment and try out the techniques for yourself. Exercises will be provided to help you test out the search features but you are free to explore and try out searches of your own.
This workshop is suitable for all levels of experience. The techniques and approaches covered can be applied to all subject areas.
Date: Thursday, 28th June 2012, 9.30 – 16.30 Venue: Agriculture Building, Reading University, Reading, UK Cost: £150 +VAT (Total £180). A limited number of places for unwaged and students are available; please contact karen.blakeman@rba.co.uk for further details. Further details:http://www.rba.co.uk/training/Google.htm
If you want to make Google behave or learn about alternative search tools, I am running a workshop for SINTO next week in Sheffield. It is a one day hands-on workshop to be held at Sheffield Hallam University on Tuseday 1st May (10 am – 4 pm).
This workshop will start with how Google works, important changes that are affecting search results, and how to make use of Google search features to improve and focus your search. It will then move on to other options for general web search and specialist tools for different types of information (for example statistics, social media, research) and subject areas. This workshop is suitable for all levels of experience and the techniques covered can be applied to all subject areas.
The presentation on advanced web searching that I gave to the Information for Energy Group on April 3rd, 2012 in London is now available. It can be found on:
UKeiG organised a workshop on Google, which was held on 8th February 2012 and hosted by Birimngham University. (My slides for the day can be found on authorSTREAM and on Slideshare). Twenty-two people from a variety of backgrounds and sectors attended the event and their combined Top 10 Tips are listed below.
1. An understanding of how Google works and is messing up “improving” search is vital. Minor changes in functionality and ranking algorithms can cause havoc and are impossible to counter unless you know what is going on. Google’s various official blogs are a starting point but they don’t tell you everything. Identify and monitor blogs from searchers and organisations that monitor what Google and other search engines are up to. (A selection are listed on the final slide of the presentation).
2. “Google assumes that all searchers are stupid and don’t know how to search” said one workshop participant! It takes far too many decisions on their behalf: automatically corrects what it thinks are typographical errors, excludes and adds terms to the search without asking, changes results according to past searching behaviour, and gives priority to network connections. To bring Google to heel, learn how to use advanced search commands and the options available in the menus on the left hand side of the results pages.
3. If you have a Google account investigate your Dashboard (http://www.google.com/dashboard/). This contains all of the information you have given Google about yourself plus data that Google has collected from your various accounts such as Gmail and Google Reader. Clear out anything you don’t need or use (you won’t be able to do this for everything) and make sure you are not sharing anything that you want kept private, for example docs and maps.
4. Order matters. Changing the order in which you type in your search terms will change the order of your results. The pages that contain the terms in the order you specified in your search are usually given a higher weighting. Also keep an eye on any oddities when combining advanced search commands. For example the search allintitle:diabetic retinopathy site:ac.uk comes up with sensible results. Switch the order to site:ac.uk allintitle:diabetic retinopathy and Google totally loses the plot.
5. Be aware that Google no longer searches for all of your terms all of the time. It now does what it calls a ‘soft AND’. See the first comment to my blog posting on this issue at http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2011/11/08/dear-google-stop-messing-with-my-search/#comments. If you want all of your terms to appear in your documents exactly as you typed them in then you have to use….
6. Verbatim. This tells Google to carry out an exact match search. Run your search as normal and then use Verbatim in the menu on the left hand side of your results page. It is normally hidden from view so click on ‘More search tools’ at the bottom of the menu and Verbatim is right at the bottom. It appears that you can use advanced search commands such as filetype:, site:, and the tilde (~) with Verbatim but it cannot be combined with the date options or ‘Pages from the UK’ in the results page menus.
7. Public Data Explorer is one of Google’s many well kept secrets. It can be found at http://www.google.com/publicdata/ and allows you to search data sets from organisations such as the IMF, OECD and World Bank. You can compare the data in various ways and there are several chart options.
8. Google has a habit of hiding and moving links to resources and tools such as the Public data Explorer, Advanced Search and Language Tools. Bookmark them so that you can always find them (unless, of course, Google decides to remove them altogether).
9. Three tools that are intended for people maintaining websites can also be useful to searchers in identifying trends, alternative search terms, and research into key players and competitors in a sector.
Google Trends http://www.google.com/trends/ – can be used to view search trends over time and to compare multiple search terms
Google Trends for Websites http://trends.google.com/websites – looks at search trends for individual websites or you can compare several websites. In addition it shows what people ‘Also visited’ and ‘Also searched for’.
If you are responsible for content on your web pages these tools can help identify terms that could increase traffic to your site.
10. If you have had enough of Google and do not feel secure with the way it monitors your activity and personalises results try DuckDuckGo (http://duckduckgo.com/) as an alternative. DDG does not track, filter or personalise and several people found some of the results to be better than Google’s. Many of the workshop participants had tried Bing but there was little enthusiasm for it. They had found that the results were not as relevant as Google’s and there was concern over Bing’s links with Facebook, personalisation and what it calls “adaptive search”. Google is so often considered the bad guy because of the amount of personal information it gathers but it does at least show users a lot of what has been collected about them. The same cannot be said for Bing.
Well, the proverbial has hit the fan with Google search getting really personal (Official Google Blog: Search, plus Your World http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/search-plus-your-world.html). Good news or bad news? A bit of both. It’s great for tracking down information or a comment made by someone within your personal social networks but a disaster if you are conducting serious, global research. And Google has made so many other changes: dumping the ‘+’ symbol as a way to enforce an exact match search and no longer ‘ANDing’ terms are just two. The results are here, there and everywhere but not necessarily where you want them. Changing your default search engine is one solution but there are times when Google’s extensive coverage is required. There are ways of switching off Google’s improvements and options that you can use to improve results.
I am running a workshop for UKeiG on how to make Google behave – at least some of the time! – in Birmingham on February 8th. The areas we’ll be covering will include:
how Google works – what Google tells us and what we have to guess
recent developments and their impact on search results
how Google customises your results and can you stop it?
how to use existing and new features to focus your search and control Google
how and when to use Google’s specialist tools and databases
what Google is good at and when you should consider alternatives
There will be time to experiment and try out the techniques for yourself. Exercises will be provided to help you test out the search features but you are free to explore and try out searches of your own.
The slides for my workshop “Searching without Google”, 28th November 2011, are available at:
http://www.rba.co.uk/as/ – please note that this is a temporary location for the presentation and it will be removed after 2-3 months. Archive copies will remain on authorSTREAM and Slideshare
There is also an addendum to the presentation that summarises some of the questions and answers covered throughout the day together with “top tips” and sites that the participants themselves suggested. This is also available at http://www.rba.co.uk/as/.
Several people said they will investigate setting up a custom search engine for their preferred sources and frequently used web sites. Google’s custom search engine is at http://www.google.com/cse/ and Blekko.com lets you set up ‘slashtags’ to create lists of sites for searching. One person said that they are going to try both and compare ease of use and results.
What can one do when the link to the Google’s advanced search screen disappears altogether?
The link to Google’s advanced search screen has been moved to the drop down menu underneath the cogwheel in the upper right hand corner of your screen, but several reported that it had even vanished from there for a couple of days last week. Next time you use the screen bookmark its URL so that you can go directly to it (of course Google can always change that!). Also learn the advanced search commands e.g. filetype: site: etc. so that you can type them into the standard search box.
Tools for monitoring social media and alerting you when a subject is mentioned
Although Google and Bing both include social media in their search results it is often better to use a tool designed specifically for the job. All three of the following offer RSS alerts for searches.
Topsy.com – searches tweets, videos and photos on Twitter, and now Google+
SocialMention.com (can be slow at times) – blogs, Twitter, bookmarks, video, audio
Are there still some directories alive and updated e.g. DMOZ? Or is the war of directories vs search engines over?
The Yahoo directory is still online although it is not easy to find and it has not been updated for several years. Similarly, some sections of DMOZ appear not to have been updated for at least a year and the entries under some headings look like advertising. The day of the mega-directory may be over but specialist and subject specific listings are still being developed. They do, though, require considerable time and effort to maintain and inevitably some are forced to close because of a lack of funding e.g. Intute.
Are there good tools for events search by subject, region, date?
The events databases that some of us accessed via services such as DataStar have long gone so it is not possible for example to search for events on nanotechnology taking place next year between June and September in Europe. Possible alternative search strategies include:
– identifying major events venues and their calendars
– locating relevant trade and industry newsletters, portals, magazines that may list events in their sectors
– relevant trade and professional bodies and associations
Are there tools that search the live web rather than using indexes of cached pages?
Biznar.com, Mednar.com and some social media search tools search the “live” web but they are limited to searching a small number of sites and are slower than Google and Bing in returning results. There are no free public search tools that search the entire web live – it would take far too long – and by the time the search engine would have finished the information would be out of date!
Searching for scientific publications that are not published in major English language journals
Google and Google Scholar are still a good starting point for this type of search, but it was suggested by several of the workshop participants that Open Access journals could also be investigated as well as national digitised collections and subject specific listing and portals.
Searching news in other languages (alternatives to Google News)
Country versions of Google News give priority to local content but you can identify news sources in individual countries at the Newspaper & News Media Guide http://www.abyznewslinks.com/. You cannot search the publications from this site but it will tell you what is available and the language of publication.
What will be the trend of the next 5 years? More competition? More takeovers of the smaller search engines? More specialist tools?
All of that! Many smaller specialist search tools continually emerge and many of them quickly disappear or are bought up by the competition. It is impossible to predict exactly what will happen, or even if Google will remain the dominant search tool on the web. If Google’s popularity starts to wane it probably will not be because a “Google-killer” arrives on the scene but because Google goes too far in trying to take control and automatically “improve” results for users. Many of us feel that it is already going in that direction.
Top tips and tools to try back at work
Custom Search Engines – use Google CSE (http://www.google.com/cse/) or set up a ‘slashtag’ on Blekko.com so that you can quickly and easily search those sites you regularly use. Note: they will not include password protected sites or sites where you need to conduct a database search
Biznar.com – real time federated search of selected key business resources
Chemspider.com – brings together chemical information from a wide range of resources. Maintained by the Royal Society of Chemistry
Paper.li – gather together tweets and/or Google+ posts containing links based on keywords or from a user and their twitterstream. Results are presented in an easy to read newspaper style.
http://www.zanran.com/ – searches for data and statistics contained in graphs, charts and tables
http://duckduckgo.com/ – alternative search engine that does not customise or personalise your web results
http://www.coremine.com/ – Norwegian initiative providing an interesting visual interface to the biomedical literature
Central Index of Digitized Imprints (zvdd) http://www.zvdd.de/ Access to and search options for German digitized works from the 15th Century to the present. Collections are listed at http://www.zvdd.de/dms/browsen/. See also http://www.europeana.eu/portal/ “to explore the digital resources of Europe’s museums, libraries, archives and audio-visual collections”
The presentations I gave at International Librarian International this week in London are now available on my Advanced Search page at http://www.rba.co.uk/as/. They are also available on authorSTREAM and Slideshare.
Searching without Google
Presentation given as part of the main conference on Friday, 28th October 2011
