30 Tips in 45 Minutes Mary Ellen Bates

30 Tips in 45 Minutes Mary Ellen Bates Information Services mbates@Bates. Info. com 1

1. n Simply Google ¨Excellent overview site of all Google's features and sites, downloads, blogs ¨www. usabilityviews. com/ simply_google. htm 2

2. n Ask. X. com ¨New interface for Ask. com ¨Good clustering ¨Highlights Wikipedia ¨Images, news items, blogs, etc. highlighted 3

3. n Search The Web 2. 0 ¨Lets you narrow the search using popular terms (trendy) or obscure terms (long tail) ¨Overlay on Google search engine ¨www. searchtheweb 2. com 4

4. n Google Search History ¨Limit your search to what you've searched before ¨Is Google Big Brother? ¨google. com/searchhistory 5

5. Consider the Q&A services ¨answers. yahoo. com ¨qna. live. com ¨askville. ask. com ¨linkedin. com/answers n Use with caution! n 6

6. n Use search engines' quick-answer feature ¨Ask. com's Smart Answers ¨Google's One. Box ¨Yahoo's Shortcuts ¨MSN's Instant Answers 7

7. n Squidoo ¨Hybrid of a web page, interactive poll, Flickr-like photos, notes from readers, and a blog ¨Great way to share resources with colleagues 8

8. n Build customized search engine ¨Rollyo. com ¨Yahoo Search Builder ¨Google Co-Coop ¨Live. com's Macros ¨ Gigablast's Custom Topic Search 9

9. n Yahoo's Search Subscriptions ¨Non-subscribers can search Factiva, Lexis. Nexis, Wall Street Journal, Forrester, IEEE, FT. com, etc. ¨Pay with credit card ¨Limited versions of some databases ¨search. yahoo. com/subscriptions 10

10. n Kosmix. com ¨Vertical search engine on steroids ¨Excellent clustering n Health, Video games, Finance, Travel, US politics, Autos 11

11. n Nation. Master. com ¨Source for national stats ¨Cool tool for presenting graphical info ¨Data from WHO, World Bank, CIA World Factbook, World Resources Institute, UNESCO, OECD, etc. 12

12. n Use Yahoo's Mindset feature ¨mindset. research. yahoo. com ¨Are you researching or shopping? 13

13. n MSN's cool synonym-suggestion tool ¨Intended for helping search engine advertisers identify similar words and common misspellings ¨snurl. com/zqyd 14

14. n MSN's misspelling-suggestion engine ¨snurl. com/zqyl 15

15. n Consider 37 signals. com ¨Great collaborative resources ¨Project management, to-do lists, file sharing, time slips, etc. 16

16. n Ask's maps ¨Both driving and walking directions ¨Takes local topography into account ¨maps. ask. com 17

17. n Use Exalead's NEAR/n operator ¨(solar OR sun) NEAR/3 power 18

18. Live Academic search ¨Great search results page ¨Sort options ¨Slider bar for verbosity ¨Endless scroll of results! n academic. live. com n 19

19. n Compare search engines ¨Compare. Search. Engines. dogpile. com ¨jux 2 ¨ranking. thumbshots. com ¨Twin. Gine. com ¨Yahoo. Google. MSN. com 20

20. n Data visualization arrives to the valueadded online services ¨Factiva's Discovery Pane in Search 2. 0 21

21. n Touch. Graph ¨Finds relationships among URLs n Uses ¨Finds Google's "Similar pages" function related books in Amazon n Uses subject terms 22

22. n Gigablast ¨Limit to multiple sites ¨Gigabits clustering ¨Extremely cool complex search and ranking tools (see Help file for syntax) 23

23. n Snap Search ¨Easy to navigate ¨Visual search results ¨Can interact with site within Snap ¨Based on Gigablast ¨snap. com 24

24. n Goo. Fresh ¨Limits Google search to only sites recently added or updated in the index ¨Great for doing repeated searches! ¨Props to Tara Calishain ¨www. researchbuzz. org/2003/09/ goofresh. shtml 25

25. n Check out podcast lectures from ¨Yale ¨Princeton ¨UC Berkeley ¨Stanford ¨Johns Hopkins 26

26. n Search. Mash ¨Unbranded Google site ¨Cool interface ¨Results sorted by web page, images, blogs, videos, Wikipedia ¨Infinite scroll 27

27. n Google's Topic Search ¨Health, Destination Guides, etc. ¨Info pros can contribute ¨www. google. com/coop/topics/? show=all 28

28. n Page. Bull ¨Metasearch tool ¨Entirely visual ¨Good for right-brained searchers 29

29. n Watch Google's Librarian Center ¨Blog, newsletter, teaching tools ¨Tips of the Trade ¨librariancentral. blogspot. com 30

30. n One. Look ¨Reverse dictionary! ¨Better than a thesaurus! ¨onelook. com/reverse-dictionary. shtml 31

Mary Ellen offers two free email bulletins: “Search Tip of the Month” and "Info-Entrepreneur Tip of the Month" If you would like to subscribe to either, just ask (mbates@Bates. Info. com) Also, check out her blog at Librarian. Of. Fortune. com 32

Mary Ellen Bates Information Services www. Bates. Info. com mbates@Bates. Info. com 303. 772. 7095 33