Phil Bradley's weblog

APRIL 1st is THE ANNUAL DAY WITHOUT GOOGLE!

APRIL 1st is the annual day without Google.

Do you think you can manage for a day without Google? This is the challenge being set out by Alt Search Engines, and they're providing you with a a list of different options. I've got a couple of collections of my own you could take a look at - there's the 'Which Search Engine When?' page or the collection of 130+ search engines on my Web Search Engines page.

I'd be really interested to see what sort of experience you have, or indeed if you simply can't cope with the idea of not using the Big G for a day.

Picollator - Image search engine

Picollator - Image search engine. Nice idea in theory. Upload an image of a person, or point to a specific URL of an image (of a person) and the search engine will toddle off and find other similar pictures. I'm doubtful because it's very much in beta - I tried uploading a picture of me, but it couldn't find any matches (not sure if I should be pleased or not!), then I tried an image of an American general, again with no luck. Finally I chose an image on their 'Most popular' listing and got back the message 'the server is overloaded' and that my friends, was that. No further progress, though I tried several times. One to be aware of I guess, and to revisit in 6 months...

Can Social Bookmarking Improve Web Search?

Can Social Bookmarking Improve Web Search?. This is something that I discuss on most of the courses that I run nowadays - if you want to get a different view of search results, don't rely on traditional algorithm-led search engines.  Instead, start looking at the  results produced by (shock horror!) real live human beings. Now, I don't mean the social  search engines,  as I'm still far from convinced about their  value,  but instead, think about using something like delicious. 

Did you know that you can type in a URL such as http://del.icio.us/tag/librarians and get a listing of pages that have been tagged with that term? If you want more terms, just whack in a + between each word like+this and you'll get some useful stuff. It'll be useful because when people tag pages they want to remember them, so the pages and tags will pretty well relate well to each other.

Anyway, I'm pleased to see that some work has been done in this area by Paul Heymann et al for a conference paper. I've not been able to read the entire thing, but the abstract is very useful:
"Social bookmarking is a recent phenomenon which has the potential to give us a great deal of data about pages on the web. One major question is whether that data can be used to augment systems like web search. To answer this question, over the past year we have gathered what we believe to be the largest dataset from a social bookmarking site yet analyzed by academic researchers. Our dataset represents about forty million bookmarks from the social bookmarking site del.icio.us. We contribute a characterization of posts to del.icio.us: how many bookmarks exist (about 115 million), how fast is it growing, and how active are the URLs being posted about (quite active). We also contribute a characterization of tags used by bookmarkers. We found that certain tags tend to gravitate towards certain domains, and vice versa. We also found that tags occur in over 50 percent of the pages that they annotate, and in only 20 percent of cases do they not occur in the page text, backlink page text, or forward link page text of the pages they annotate. We conclude that social bookmarking can provide search data not currently provided by other sources, though it may currently lack the size and distribution of tags necessary to make a significant impact."

My emphasis there of course, and I'd certainly agree with their findings.

Twitter roundup from Library clips

If you're not into Twitter, then you'll probably want to just skip this. :ibrary Clips has done a great roundup of things like Twitter teams, treats, lights, soap, network browser and so on. Really useful if you want to explore the service in more detail.

reCAPTCHA: Stop Spam, Read Books

reCAPTCHA. is one of those really worthwhile things you find on the net now and again, and this should particularly appeal to those of us with an interest in digitizing books. You all know about Captcha programs, Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart - the box where you type in the word before you can submit some form.

Well, what reCaptcha is doing is providing access to resources that allow you to add a program to your website - such as a captcha program for your email address or some such. They use two words - one previously identified and another one. If you get the one right, it assumes you've got the other right as well, and this is then tested by trying it out on different people. It's a great way to help!

HowDoYa.com - Learn how to do anything!

If you need to learn how to do something, you might find it worthwhile to take a look at  HowDoYa. It's a search engine based on Exalead, which is interesting enough. Basically you just ask how to do something - like 'whistle' for example. The engine goes off and finds pages that give you that sort of information, and it also provides various ways of narrowing the search down, such as 'what do you need, who can help, why do it and where should you go'.

It's currently in beta, and is scheduled for a full release on April 1st, which is a very brave date to choose!

Twing - Search and Discover Communities

Link: Twing "aims to be the most comprehensive and highly targeted forum search engine for real people seeking real discussions and real information in real time. And of course, the information we index - content-rich discussions in numerous forums worldwide - is provided by real people. As a result, what Twing offers that traditional search engines don't is the ability to more completely identify important information in the deep discussions enabled by the many-to-many communication format of forums."

I've played around with it, and it's not at all bad. Lots of results, which can be arranged by date or relevance. I would like to see an indication of which and how many forums Twing searches - that information may be available on the site but I couldn't see it. Nice option to limit results with additional terms, categories, filters (forum, people, company, language, media) and a date range.

Worth taking a look at if you're having difficulty getting the information you need elsewhere.

Healia Communities - health social networking

Link: Healia Communities - health social networking.

Healia Communities is an online health community that helps consumers make better health decisions by enabling them to:

· Share health knowledge, experiences, and favorite resources with others

· Connect with others who’ve experienced similar situations

· Ask questions of the community, peers, and health professionals

 

Healia Communities is different from other social networking sites because it is focused on helping people through a health situation or decision. Through matching algorithms, Healia Communities guides users to others who are in a similar situation and who are best able to support them. In addition, Healia Communities is built to encourage higher quality interactions and user content than other sites, and provides access to health professionals who have the knowledge and expertise to help.

I've been poorly! :(

Just a brief note - I've had a few kind emails commenting on the lack of posts and checking to see if I was ok. I've had this flu/cold/cough thing that's been doing the rounds and it basically knocked me out for a good two weeks. I'm just getting back on my feet now, though I'm still coughing away. Hopefully normal service will be resumed over the next few days...

MetaCarta GeoSearch News

This is a really nice mashup example: MetaCarta GeoSearch News. It pulls stories from AP, Reuters and so on for the last 24 hours back to this month which are presented in the left hand side of the pane, with a Google Map on the right hand side. Searchers can also search for a place and or subject and link them together. Clicking on the results either in the list pane or in the map takes the searcher to the story. Most recent news story that I've seen was produced in the last 25 minutes or so.

Nice and straightforward, though I'd really have liked to have seen a little more breakdown of the stories on the maps - only one icon is used and it would have been good to have had a few, even basic options such as politics or technology for example. Irritatingly this is almost available, since you can filter stories by various categories. No RSS either.

Worth a look if you're a bit of a news junkie and you want to have a slightly different visual approach.