Phil Bradley's weblog

Bosses 'should embrace Facebook'

. No surprise for those of us who actually use Facebook professionally, but the Beeb is commenting here on a new report which says that bosses 'should embrace Facebook'   Peter Bradwell, one of the authors said "Using technology to build closer links with ex-employees and potential customers could also boost productivity, innovation and create a more democratic working environment". A copy of the report is going to be available on the Demos website.

This report follows on from another recent one coming out of Cambridge University, as researchers discovered Facebook gave people more choice on how they conduct relationships and was "a way of storing biography and enhancing social memory". Again, reported by the BBC.

Google extends quotes search option

In Quotes. is a Google lab experiment that I've blogged about in the past. They've now increased the quotes coverage to 5 years, which you can acccess via the labs page - it's not in the regular search option yet.

Lijit - create your own search engine

Lijit | Home. This is an interesting resource. It's very similar to a personalised search engine in that you provide it with links to your blog, flickr account and so on. In turn it provides you with a seach box widget that you can install where you want. Searching will then search your stuff and your contacts. It's a little like Delver in the whole social search/community idea.

Soovle - Let the web help.

Soovle. Interesting approach this. You have a search box surrounded by logos frm Google, Wikipedia, Answers, YouTube, Ask, Yahoo and Amazon. Start typing and you begin to pull up a bunch of suggestions from each engine which you can click on to search. Change the default search engine by using the keyboard right arrow key. Works very well, quite fun and a genuinely different approach! Thanks to Charles for bringing this one to my attention.

Online English Encyclopedia UK

I was sent an email about the Online English Encyclopedia UK   resource - until then I hadn't been aware of it. I've now taken a look and I'm slightly puzzled by it. The 'about' page says " encyclo.co.uk is an independent website, started on the 1st of February 2008." which isn't exactly that helpful. The URL is apparently registered to a Dutch company (or at least it has a Dutch address). Still no clearer. It says of itself: "Encyclo brings together lists of hundreds of word definitions from a wide variety of sources on one site making your search quicker and easier. Encyclo lets you see the first few lines of the definition and points you in the right direction to read more."

It seems to do this reasonably well from the few checks that I ran, although there were a few oddities - the first reference for 'weblog' was a BBC definition from 2001 and now hopelessly out of date, though 'Twitter' linked me to a Wikipedia entry which was ok.

There's an online spell checker which has a box (the way they do), but if you type in your term it takes you to another site and you have to do it all again, which was irritating. The synonym function took me to a Dutch website and it really wasn't clear how I could use it correctly, and the Merriam-Webster search box again just took me to the site and it was necessary to put in the term again. Irritating and pointless.

Search comes in three flavours - a search box which works fine, an index that takes me to the resources used - over 30 in the Technical and IT section, 22 in Hobbies and crafts. Many of the resources are UK based, but not all, so I'm still not entirely clear on the geographical coverage. Finally there's an alphabetic option which was odd. To look up 'confederate' I had to start with C, move to Co, and then page through about 750 definition links a page. 46 clicks later I finally got to my entry. Another entry that I looked up had two definitions, both the same one and both from Wikipedia.

To be honest, I'm not impressed with this resource in the slightest; I don't have any feeling of confidence using it and it's not one that I'd feel happy recommending.

Twitter for teachers

If you're a teacher and are using, or thinking of starting to use Twitter you might find this resource useful - twitter4teachers  - it's a PBwiki listing teachers of different subjects, grades and countries who use the microblogging resource.

Second most popular search engine in the world is...?

 If you're going to say Yahoo, you'd be wrong. No, it's not MSN either, or the Ask train wreck. According to this report it's YouTube. (Link leads to report). YouTube fetched over 2.6 billion search queries that month, beating Yahoo's 2.4 billion—though Google itself still reigns supreme with 7.6 billion queries. This is going to win you a few bets I reckon!

Techcrunch helps nail the lid on Bloglines.

Destruction Of Bloglines Now Complete; Founder Prepares To Switch To Google Reader. This is the title of a post from TechCrunch which makes for damming reading. Mark Fletcher, who sold Bloglines to Ask in 2005 said in Twitter that he was considering going to Google Reader.

I've mentioned my dissatisfaction with Bloglines a few times, and I know that several of my readers and colleagues are similarly fed up with it, or have already moved across to Google Reader, and I've done the same thing. I think this is just symptomatic of the way that Ask is falling to pieces - they've dumbed down the web interface, made it more difficult to use, and given us less flexibility in the latest incarnation. The writing was of course on the wall when they dumped Gary Price earlier this year along with other key employees. Their position in the top 4 search engines is now looking very fragile indeed, and I don't really regard them as being a credible resource any longer.

How to limit a search by date

There was a discussion on LIS-UKEIG recently about how to limit a 
search by date. I posted my response to the list but thought it 
might be useful for others as well.

One of the problems with searching for material in a specific date
range is that it's hard for a search engine to know exactly what is 
required. For example, if you add the date limit 'last 3 months' 
that doesn't necessarily mean 'new' pages that have been created in 
the last three months - if a search engine finds a page written 5 
years ago that they've only just included in their database that 
could be included as a 'new' page (depending on engine of course).

There used to be a reasonable number of search engines that allowed 
you to limit by date, but this functionality is become rarer, oddly 
enough. However, there are a few places that you can go:

With Google you could try a resource called 'GooFresh' which attempts
to limit the search to material added to the database today, 
yesterday, last 7 days or the last month. Of course you'll still have 
the problem of winnowing out older material that's only just been 
added, but this should help. Google labs is also running a 
'timeline' experiment which allows you to view content over a time 
period - it's not brilliant, and not exactly what you're after, but 
it's worth mentioning when we're looking at time related searching. 
Another Google specific trick is to run your search, click into the 
address bar and add &as_qdr=d to the end of the URL, then hit enter. 
This will create a new little search box with a drop down time based 
menu.

Exalead at is doing excellent work in this area. If you run a search 
one of the immediate options that you have is to limit to recent 
material, though they take rather a broad view of 'recent'. However, 
in the advanced search function you can add in a search option to 
view content modified after OR before a specific date which may be 
just what you're looking for.

Remember Altavista? Thought that it was dead? Think again. if you go 
to the advanced search function there's actually 2 date options - by 
timeframe (week, two weeks, month, 4 months, 8 months, year) and by 
data range. I've not tried this one, but give it a go, see if it does
what it's supposed to do.

Ask has been doing their very best to wreck their search engine 
recently - and doing a pretty good job of it too I might add - but 
they do have a 'page last modified' advanced search option that you 
could try out. This may well return stuff that's about something that's 
years old but that has been recently changed, but it should help reduce 
the stuff you don't want to see.

Grokker uses the Yahoo and Wikipedia content and has a date slider 
going from 'all' to 'most recent'.

I'd also be inclined to consider other approaches if you want really 
recent material. Obviously there are the usual news sites that you 
could use, but if your subject of interest isn't that newsworthy those 
will be of very limited value. Instead I'd be inclined to use any of 
the blog search engines to see if people are talking about the subject 
that interests you, or perhaps go for Twitter search which I'm finding 
is increasingly useful when it comes to really recent stuff (ie. in the
last hour or so).

All Conferences

All Conferences. This is a search directory that provides information on conferences, conventions, trade shows, meetings and so on. It's arranged by subject area, with advanced search functions allowing searches for titles, city, country, date and so on. Covers a very wide variety of subject areas - just grabbing science and technology for example we've got oceanography, paleontology, physics, space, vibrations and so on.
Not entirely convinced of it's worth though - it didn't find the few library based conferences that I put in, but it does appear that conference organisers have to go to it, rather than them looking for conferences, which is a slight weakness I think. However, if you need to know about events, this might be worth taking for a spin.