Desktop Search, Exalead

Exalead one:desktop

Exalead is the latest to join the desktop search club, with its preview launch of exalead one:desktop. This has been tested for several months by a selected group of users (I was one of them), but the non-disclosure agreement forbade us to mention that the software even existed! I can’t say that I have tested it exhaustively; I rarely need to use a desktop search program and Exalead’s does not yet index Thunderbird email or Star/Open Office documents. Support for these applications is promised for later in the year.

If your documents are mostly Microsoft, Adobe, html or Wordperfect then exalead one:desktop is worth considering for its unique advanced search options. As well as the standard phrase searching, OR and NOT commands there is a NEAR command which searches for words within 16 words of one another, a phonetic search, approximate spelling and pattern matching. You can also have word stemming switched on by default.

When you install the program, you can specify which directories and areas of your hard disk you want it to index and you can also control when it indexes. The results are displayed with preview thumbnails for some of the formats, but you can switch this off if you prefer to view the results as text only. On the left had side of the screen, there are options that enable you to narrow down your search by folder, author, date, size and document type. This will all be very familiar to users of the Exalead’s web search. For web search Exalead is the default but you can set up shortcuts to other tools.

Overall, definitely worth a try – especially for the advanced search features.

Link: http://www.exalead.com/

Blogs, Google

Google Blog Search

Google is the first of the major web search tools to launch a dedicated Blog Search – in beta of course. It does not search the full text of the postings, only the RSS and Atom feeds generated by the blog. Older posts that were generated before Blog Search started crawling or are not in a current feed are not included. Google says that it covers “every blog that publishes a site feed (either RSS or Atom).” When I ran my test searches, it picked up several pages that are not blogs but do have RSS or Atom feeds. For many of us this is not an issue. I am often looking for feeds on a topic or industry sector and do not care whether they are generated by a blog or by some other means. There may be times, though, when one does want to limit a search to blogs so one needs to bear this in mind.

The indexing is fast. Blog Search picked up one of my postings just 22 minutes after I had published it. Results can be sorted by date or relevance.

The Advanced Search has the usual ‘all the words’, phrase, ‘at least one of the words’, and ‘without the words’. Additional options include ‘words in the post title’, ‘words in the blog title’, ‘at this URL’, ‘blogs and posts written by’, limit by date and language.

You can also set up alerts. Go to the bottom of your results page and you can ask to have 10 or 100 results as an Atom or an RSS feed.

You can access Google Blog Search at http://www.google.com/blogsearch for the Google style interface, or at http://search.blogger.com/ if you prefer the Blogger style.

Search Engines

Business Week Online – Best of the Web Poll

Business Week’s Best of the Web Poll has now entered its second round. There are now 8 search tools under the Work-Search category: Google, Yahoo, Snap, A9, DogPile, Technorati, Clusty and Exalead. All are excellent tools in their own way. I was thinking of voting for Yahoo but eventually went for Exalead, mainly because of the proximity search option and the Advanced Search features of phonetic, approximate spelling and pattern matching. The last is particularly useful for cheating at – ahem, I mean solving crossword puzzles!

ili2005

Internet Librarian International 2005

A reminder that there is still time to register for Internet Librarian International at the discounted rate (up until September 23rd) and that CILIP members receive a 20% discount off the full two day conference fee.

The event is being held at the Copthorne Tara Hotel in London between October 10th and the 11th. Tracks and topics include Blogs, Wikis, E-Learning and Training, Global Best Practices, Digital Libraries & Resources, Web Research Skills and Resources, Technology for Libraries, Information Literacy, Practical Technology Tips and Tools, and Managing Corporate Libraries.

I have to admit that I have a vested interest in this event as I am co-presenting a session on search engines with Yahoo expert Ran Hock. We’ve already had to submit outlines of our presentations to the organisers, but we both suspect that what we finally present will be very different. With so many innovations and product launches happening every week we shall be working on our talks up to the last minute, as I am sure will the other speakers. It promises to be an interesting conference.

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Enterprise Quest

Enterprise Quest – Ideas and know-how for small business.
Although this site is new to me, it has been around for about two years. This is the home of a free weekly bulletin called EnterQuest, published by Cobweb Information and aimed at UK small businesses. As well as tips and ideas on running a small business EnterQuest also keeps you up to date with legal issues, offers IT tips (for example keyboard shortcuts for Windows and Word), and reviews web sites of interest to SMEs. You can read the bulletin on the web site or have it delivered to your email box. A pity there is no RSS feed at present but I’ll make do with the email.

Tales From The Terminal Room

Tales from the Terminal Room, July/August 2005 – Issue No. 64

Tales from the Terminal Room, July/August 2005 – Issue No. 64

The latest issue of Tales from the Terminal Room is now available. This month we look at whether the Yahoo database really is larger than Google’s, try out Google Desktop 2 and there is a review of the new Alacra Store. I’m afraid that Google gets yet another bashing in “These things are sent to try us”; this time it is over the My Search History.

Desktop Search, Google

Google Desktop 2 and Sidebar Launched

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Google Desktop 2 has been launched with a new sidebar. I am not a great fan of Google Desktop – I actually use Yahoo Desktop – but decided to give this latest version a try. The good news is that indexing of secure web pages such as bank statements and of password protected documents is switched off by default. You can even encrypt the cache that Google creates on your PC. The sidebar also looked promising with news, options for RSS feeds, a scratchpad, share price monitor, weather, and a panel where you can have a sort of slide show of your favourite photos.

Now for the bad news. My enthusiasm quickly waned as I discovered that the share prices and weather are US only, and that the news is from Google.com. I would have preferred news.google.co.uk but there seems to be no way to change this. You can ‘train’ it by telling it not to show any more articles “like this”, and if you have the advanced features switched on it is supposed to be able to work out the type of content you prefer to read. After three days, I gave up and removed that panel, as well as the Web Clips/RSS one; I find it much easier to use a proper RSS reader. I also found the Quick View of recently viewed files and doucments irritating.

It did, though, list new emails that appeared in my Thunderbird inbox but I wanted it to alert me to just new Gmail messages. The only way to do that is to create filters to stop the Thunderbird mail being listed. Far too time consuming and tedious to do, so that panel went as well. Which just left me with the scratchpad (actually, quite useful) and my photo slide show. I then occupied the empty spaces with an Adsense plug-in to display how much my web pages are earning and a to-do list. There is a list of plug-ins at http://desktop.google.com/plugins/.

As far as searching my hard drive, it still lags way behind Yahoo Desktop in terms of accuracy, number of documents found, and indexing procedure. Google Desktop works continually in the background. I found it to be a serious resource hog, even when I forced it to pause indexing, and it significantly slowed down the performance of my computer.

I have now uninstalled it 🙁 A pity, because I rather like the sidebar. It has real potential, and I am sure that there will be plenty more useful panel plug-ins along soon.

Search Engines

trovando – search different

trovando – search different

I picked this one up from Phil Bradley’s blog. Think of it as Turbscout with lots more search engines and lots more types of search. The search tools are organised under tabs such as Web, Images, Reference, News, Blogs etc. Click on a tab, enter your terms and click on each tool in turn to run your search. I particulalry like the URL tab which, amongst other things, finds pages that link to your known URL (backlinks), runs a Whois on the domain name, and finds archived copies of the page. And there is a custom tab where you can build your own collection of search tools.

Business Information

Alacra Store – The Premium Business Information Source ™

Alacra Store – The Premium Business Information Source ™

Alacra have launched a pay-per-view version of their priced service. Still in beta, it covers just 30 of the 100 or more databases available via the subscription service. Any half competent researcher should be able to find much of the company information in Alacra free on the net (certainly for publicly traded companies) and the news articles from Business and Industry are a bit pricey compared with the per article pricing of LexisNexis. But there are some good market research sources here and – Oh Joy! – they have Tablebase, one of my favourite databases. It is the quickest way I know of tracking down rankings and market shares in a particular industry/country. I’ve tried accessing it via Dialog’s Open Access and Skyminder but have always had mixed and sometimes rather odd results. Dialog, in particular, I find clunky and slow. In contrast, the Alacra Store interface is much ‘smoother’ and faster, and I seem to get far more sensible results.

I shall be doing a more detailed review in the next Tales from the Terminal Room.

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Our Property Offers Sales Alerts

Our Property repackages Land Registry data and data from the Registrars of Scotland. It enables you to search for properties that have been sold since 2000 by street, town and postcode and displays the price that the property or properties were sold for.

They now offer free sales alerts. You can monitor new sales at up to 10 different locations around the UK. Enter the postcodes that you are interested in, and if a new sale is registered in the database within 500 metres of that postcode you receive an email alert. Very useful if you are buying or selling a house and want to compare prices, or if you are just plain nosey and want to know how much your neighbour paid for their property!

News and comments on search tools and electronic resources for research