Phil Bradley's weblog

Anagram search engine

I’ve mentioned the Stands4 network in the past – they are a company that specialises in creating small, very niche search tools, such as Lyrics, Poetry, Biographies and Symbols. Their latest is Anagrams and Scrambles at http://www.anagrams.net/ and they have listed a lot of anagrams by subject. So for example in the category of ‘Classic writers anagrams’ we learn that an anagram of Thomas Hardy is ‘shy hot drama’ and for Mark Twain is ‘twin karma’. It’s also possible to search ‘back to front’ as it were to see that ‘midnight kicks’ is an anagram for Dick King Smith. As well as searching their database for anagrams you can of course input your own words to see if the service can create them for you. It’s a nice tool for crossword puzzlers and for the rest of us when we need the perfect piece of trivia.

Post code searching

Need to find a postcode from somewhere around the world? I was asked this question the other day and so I thought I'd share a nice resource that I've found. It's called - surprise surprise, Postal Codes. Very simple to use - just find the country you're interested in and type in the location that you need a code for. You then get a really nice long and comprehensive listing of post codes and their areas. It also works the other way around - you can type in a code that you know, and it will show you where it comes from, plus link you into the Google map page for the area. 

Nice, quick, simple and free. 

MedNexus: "Google for Medicine"

If you're into medical information, take a look at MedNexus, which claims to be the Google for Medicine. I can't pretend to any great medical knowledge, so please take that into account when reading this post. Their 'about us' page says: "Through our search engine, you can find the most relevant content from a variety of sources: medical journals, patient forums, government health sites, etc. We want to empower patients to educate themselves and cut through the noise and pseudo-science of typical online health information. No more WebMD scares, no more endless Googling"

MedNexus is designed for patients to use, and it provides information in a clear, concise and non threatening manner. This will doubtless be helpful to those people who have Googled their symptoms and believe that they're 5 minutes away from death. When typing in a condition such as migraine, the engine provides instant suggestions such as 'What is Migraine' 'How do you treat it?' and lifestyle tips, treatments and so on. Clicking on results will give you a very wide range of information, such as common treatments, articles, explanations, published research, and forum discussions. Information is pulled from a variety of different sources such as Healing Well, MedHelp, American Journal of Medicine, JAMA and so on. 

This engine won't be of much use to medical professionals, since they have their own resources to hand of course, but it's certainly a tool that I think is worth pointing out to members of the public, who simply want to explore a medical condition in more detail, and from a reliable resource.

Character database

I had high hopes when I first saw news of the CharacTour database. They say of themselves "We want to be your virtual tour guide to the world of characters so you can find a new favorite movie, TV show, book, video game, or webcomic." Perhaps it's unfair, but I was hoping for rather more on the side of books, but the emphasis is very much on movies. However, having got that out of the way, it's not a bad search tool at all. You can search for people by name, by profession (librarian is not listed however!), location, time period, ethnicity and so on. Once you have located the character that interests you the site provides a good profile, which is spoiler free, suggestions of other similar characters, where you can find the character (books and movies for example), related characters and user generated comments. 

It gets interesting when you search for real people, who shouldn't in theory be in the database, but they are. So Jane Austen gets her own mention, since she's a character in a movie but there's also a list of other key characters created by her. 

The database is still very small, some 45,000 characters. Consequently there are lots of gaps; Elizabeth Bennet is only to be found in one movie and one book for example. However, this is balanced by the great deal of amusing stuff that is to be found - you can match yourself against different characters by taking a quiz. (Unfortunately I have no idea who the top half dozen matches I got, since I'm not really into modern teenage culture!) You can get quotes, rankings for funny things such as 'characters who we would trust to avenge our death' and so on.

This tool is going to appeal to librarians who get asked about movies, characters, 'oh, can't remember their name but they were in so and so film' etc. Hopefully as more data gets added the resource will become ever more useful, and once it's got a lot of fictional characters in it, hopefully it will really take off. 

PDF search engine.

PDFfetch.com will, unsurprisingly, find you PDF files.

They say of themselves "No matter you are looking for .pdf files, ebooks, digital publications, presentations or electronic documents - with an exclusive technology, PDFfetch gives you access to a huge library of documents instantaneously." It's very simple - you run your basic search in their search box, look at the results in title, URL and summary form and off you go. It's created with Yahoo! Search, and I couldn't get a real indication as to how many results it returned, so it's not easy to compare it to other engines that offer a filetype: search function. However, I did manage to do a very specific search that returned 7 results for me, but when I repeated the search on Google I got over 900. So I do have to wonder slightly at just how comprehensive it is!

How Long Does Food Last?

Shelf Life & Expiration Date Guide This is a useful search engine which tells you how long you can safely eat food for past its sell by date. Simply type in the food item that you're interested in (yoghurt, bacon etc) and this site gives you an interesting new perspective. As well as providing information on the varieties of food (canned, fresh, opened) it tells you how to tell if something shouldn't be eaten, how to store it to extend its life and other useful information.

This is an interesting search engine which does one simple job very well. I'd like more information on the qualifications of the people putting the information together however since "We are a group of contributors from the kitchen and classroom communities" isn't really sufficient. That aside, it's a helpful engine and one I'll be using in the future.

Findthatfile

Search Files from Internet, Educational & Library Resources and more. findthatfile was founded in 2009 and has grown to become the "most extensive file search on the Internet". Common searches are for PDFs, Documents, Excel, Powerpoint, Audio, Video, RAR and ZIP compressed files, Fonts, and much much more. They go on to say: "We search as deeply as possible to identify the most relevant data from over 300 million files. This means we open each file, identify its author, title, contents, text extracts and all kinds of goodies that nobody else does.We also search more places than anyone else including 47 file types and 558+ file extensions including over 70 million domains."

You can try it out here:

find that file

the largest file/media search engine on the Internet

BuzzBundle; no thanks, not at any price

I got an invitation inviting me to take out a trial subscription to BuzzBundle: the smartest of the social media management tools so naturally enough I went along and had a look at it. To say that I was a little taken aback would be a fair summary. Basically, as far as I can make out from the blurb, it's designed to let you cheat your way in social media marketing. Try this section out for size: "Create up to 100 personas with dozens of social accounts each. This can be your company's representative or a Joe from the street – join the talks as different personalities." Any company that tries doing this and gets found out is going to be crucified within the hour. There have been instances in the past of companies and invididuals trying to pretend to be other people, and it's such a seriously bad idea I can't begin to tell you.

Let's try another section: "Create hundreds of active social profiles. Grow authority for your profiles and easily influence your brand awareness and reputation." Same thing. I don't know about your world, but in mine this is usually referred to as lying and cheating, and I'll bet you any money you like that it's going to be against the terms and conditions of any social media resource that you care to name.

Now, they make the point that sometimes you have to post to say Twitter using different profiles. I certain have two profiles that I use, but it's quite clear who I am, and what I'm saying under each. However, with this tool the whole idea is to cloak yourself under different names, positions and locations. It also makes the point that if you have 10 personas working with 10 different accounts, that's 100 people talking about your brand. Actually it's not - it's one person trying to fool other people out there.

Really nasty and cynical. Let's hope that they fail miserably, but I don't think that's going to happen.

Forum Search Engine

Boardreader The tagline for this one is 'Connecting communities through search' but to be honest, the only communities that I can see it connecting are those of snails. A search for CILIP on Twitter brought back 4 results, months old, and when I did the same search in their boards/topics/forums section the results were similarly months old. Really can't recommend this one, so I'm just mentioning it so that you don't waste your time looking at it if you find it yourself.

search[code]

via searchco.de

This is a code specific search engine. API documentation, code snippets and open source (free sofware) repositories are indexed and searchable.

Most information is presented in such a way that you shouldn't need to click through, but of course you always can. Makes little sense to me, since I'm not a programmer, but it seems to do what it should do! Any comments, please make 'em.