Tag Archives: people search

iSEEK

iSEEK is a new, neat search engine that as well as coming up with good results also clusters results into topics on the left hand side of your results screen. Clustering is not new: Clusty, for example, is just one of many search tools that have been doing this for several years. For my test searches, though, iSEEK comes up with more meaningful topics and clusters. These include places, people, organisations and date and time.

It passed with flying colours on my first test search – gin vodka sales uk. My “ego-search”  on Karen Blakeman also came up with good results and listed my various profiles on social media such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn on the first page. The results from more test searches on other people’s names suggest that iSEEK gives priority to biographies and social media profiles. All of my test searches came up with relevant sites and in an order that was different from Google’s, so this could be a good Google alternative.

As well as the default “Web” search there is an “Education” option that appears to give priority to more research oriented pages. For some searches, for example “peak oil”, the topics on the left of the screen included US school grade level.

To search you can type in a natural language question or keywords, and use quotation marks around phrases, but that is it. There is no advanced search for searching by filetype for example. Nevertheless, I would recommend that you give it a try.

Hat tip to Peter Guillaume for recommending iSEEK.

The Research Practioner Skills Day Presentation

Those of you who attended The Research Practitioner Skills Day at Chelsea Football Club on 26th November should have received all of our presentations by email. If not, mine (Using the Web) can be viewed or downloaded from either Slideshare or authorSTREAM.


Uploaded on authorSTREAM by karenblakeman

Tinfinger people search

Phil Bradley was not very complimentary in his blog about Tinfinger, a people search tool. His search on Gordon Brown, the current UK prime minister, came up with an entry that had clearly been computer generated and which was full of inaccuracies. Tinfinger’s Paul Montgomery confirmed in a comment to Phil’s posting that a lot of the content is pre-generated, but that the intention is for people to use that raw data to write full profiles.

It seems that Phil’s posting encouraged someone to update and correct Gordon Brown’s profile as the information is now correct – or was when I looked at it. Tony Blair’s is a different matter, though. There is no profile but there is a picture and several “tags”:

“Blair has the name of The Rt Hon. Tony Blair. Blair has the type of Alumni of the Inns of Court School of Law. Blair is on the Sedgefield (UK Parliament constituency) list. Blair is listed with the external id of 0086363. Blair came before “(constituency created)“. Blair is an devotee of the Anglican religion. Blair started in 1983. Blair was preceded by John Major. Blair’s spouse is Cherie Blair. Blair has the order of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Blair’s term started on 1997052. Blair represents the constituency of Sedgefield (UK Parliament constituency). Blair’s deputy was John Prescott. Blair’s job is politician.”

I would love to know from where that information was collected! It is early days for Tinfinger and hopefully people will get on board and start editing and creating more accurate profiles. At present it is an example of how wrong information can be when it is automatically generated, and the importance of being aware of how content is compiled.

Tinfinger Profile of Tony Blair