Who's Websites like?- Find similar Websites. Very straightforward - pop in a URL and this resource will find other sites that are similar to it, together with a % of how similar the sites are that it finds. I obviously tried out my site and it reported back with
LibraryThing
Search Engine Watch
Internet Public Library
Librarians Internet Index
and a bunch of others that were right on the money. Useful site! Thanks to AltSearchEngines for this one.
This is a really useful article if you're interested in learning How to Analyze your Site with Del.icio.us. I've mentioned del.icio.us a few times as a search tool, and Ann Smarty has provided some great examples of what can be done. For example, it's possible to use Delicious to search a specific website page using http://del.icio.us/url/ Doing this for my home page shows that it's been saved by 153 people, with the tags Internet, library, resources and search being the most popular ones. On the other hand, my Web 2.0 I want to page has been saved over 6,000 times, with tools and Web2.0 being the most popular tags.
Ann also suggests using Similicio.us to find related sites. Google's done this for a long time of course, but it's always a good idea to have an alternative. Finally, a Firefox plug in, SeoQuake, which provides more information to web authors gives more content as well.
And so the search to get better results continues with TigerLogic's ChunkIt! a personal Search Engine. Basically you download their software which sits in with your browser and you choose your search engine, run the search on the ChunkIt! interface. Then you see the search engine results on the right, and on the left you get to see the page with the keywords in context. It is a bit like a super thumbnail option. There are a few of these out there already, with various Firefox extensions for example.
This kind of resource has been characterised as a 'download and overlay' resource, and for me, it just doesn't work. It ties me to a specific machine, I can get almost the same information I need from a good preview window without downloading anything, and I can pretty much write a search strategy that gets me the content I need in the context I want. Admittedly not everyone can of course, but for those who can't, are they really going to want to go to the level of downloading/installing and then using something like this? I can't see it happening myself.
Interesting article from Search Engine Watch: Blended Search Results Change Searcher Behavior. With the addition of images, video, news stories and so on in the returned results users are more likely to click on such links, rather than the usual web pages. Clearly if you put more options in front of a user they're going to take you up on them.
What's particularly interesting here is on the Search Engine Optimization side. It's no longer any use having a good ranking for a search term - you need to have your site represented on images, in blogs and in the news as well if possible. The more places you can be at one time, the more likely it is that searchers will find you.
The news from MarketingVOX is that Google has hit an all time high with 67.25% of US searches ending March 29. This time last year the figure was 64.13%, so it's an impressive increase. The other figures are?
Yahoo 20.29%
MSN Search 5.25%
Ask 4.09%
This article is worth a look: Six Techniques to Get More from the Web than Google Will Tell You. Some of these are more useful than others (ie. this article was written with bias towards an American readership), but take a look. The techniques are:
Use search engines and Wikipedia to find quality research tools. The emphasis here isn't on *using* Wikipedia directly, but letting it point you in directions of other sources, which makes sense to me. The advice - 'use them to carry you to better places'. Well yes, but that's what we do with search engines anyway in most cases. Search engines don't know the answer to stuff, they just push you to different places or drag content from places to try and answer the query. Interesting reference to Geniusfind which is a search engine directory that categorizes thousands of topic specific search engines and databases. Worth a look. The other reference here was to the Beaucoup engine, which I don't rate highly at all (their geographical section for example is very poor.)
Search blogs for specialists. Yes, makes lots of sense to me. Usual references to Google blog search and Technorati but another suggestion is QuackTrack which lists 6,000+ categories and 150,000+ weblogs.
Study business school websites. Less useful for the non-US readers, but I can see where they're coming from on this - see what research is going on, look to see what's published and follow the links.
Find statistical data on government sources. Makes sense again, though the links given are US government, but everyone else can find their own I'm sure.
Research trade groups and online publications. Good for research in hot topics, and again several references to US associations.
Visit the library! Yay for the library. 'It may sound archaic. But libraries ... have access to subscription databases ... you would be unlikely to find elsewhere. Specific links to the Digital Librarian and the WWW Virtual Library but no reference to Pinakes or the Librarians' Internet Index which surprised me. However, useful stuff all round.
The American Cancer Society has launched a new search engine: Search to Fight. It's powered by Yahoo and is different from other search engines in that when Internet users search and click on sponsored advertisements generated from their specific search results, the Society will receive a significant portion of the income generated from the ad placements.
This is a good idea, and if you tend towards using Yahoo, why not try this one for a while instead, and help raise money for a good cause?
Can social bookmarking improve web search? I'm spending quite a lot of time on my courses these days talking about alternative methods of searching, and social bookmarking and networking systems are increasingly high on the agenda. This is a very interesting paper that points out just how much you can do with these systems. The summary is:
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.
Cloudme Search. This search engine searches Yahoo, Flickr and YouTube, displaying all 3 sets of results next to each other on the page. Was very slow when I tried it, but the results were on topic and I was reasonably satisfied with them. Worth trying if you want a more rounded, multimedia set of results.
The Role of Trusted Human Editors In Filtering The Web. This comes from Publish2 Blog and links to some videos that Robert Scoble (late of Microsoft) talks about how resources such as TechMeme, Mahalo and Facebook will beat Google. There's no doubt that using people to provide content is a good idea, and I've argued on behalf of resources such as Intute for years. However, I don't see any of these resources replacing Google any time soon, for one simple reason - if there's any chance that Google think this is going to happen they'll institute a new resource that does the same thing. Long gone are the days when Google innovated - I can point to any number of resources out there that do a superior job to Google - that's not the point. Google can simply take a concept and run with it, and they have the money to do exactly that.
However, do spend a few minutes with the videos - Scoble is always worth listening to!
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