Gary Price: The Newest and the Best from the One Who Knows

Finally a room almost large enough to contain the hoards of librarians here for Gary's Talk. There were only about 30 people on the floor in the back of the biggest room!

Here's a brief rundown of what he spoke about. I got here a little late and so am sitting on the floor in the back, unable to see the screen. Luckily, Gary is good at describing what’s going on.

Books:
Google print -- Brand new books full text in electronic form from the publishers (similar to Amazon’s search inside the book). Limited amount can be seen. This is really a sales tool for the publishers

Google library -- Digitizing books from major libraries. Public domain book (in U.S. 1920 and up, outside of the US 1900 and up). Not full text either.

Internet archive – 1 million books, can be printed, can see the whole thing.

U Penn’s Online books page – index of full text books available online. Includes NAP and Project Gutenberg

Google Scholar (see Jacso’s review)

Google video (from tv, searchable, but can’t actually watch the video)

Backlinking:
Google: link:www.page.whatever , can’t use an additional syntax with this
Yahoo: link:http://www.page.whatever , CAN use an additional syntax

Yahoo:
Start with http://search.yahoo.com and customize it for your needs. Remove tabs as necessary.
News crawls 7k sources (3k more than Google)
Yahoo images – embedded results. IOW if you’re doing a search for something that it thinks refers to a picture, it will return image results.
Y! Mindset – slider bars like the smart sort product comparison pages to re-rank
Mobile search product – and can export search results directly to cell phone

Ask Jeeves:
Smart answers – natural language tries to answer your question, offers refinements, vertical searches

MSN:
New database, cached pages, instant answers

Exalead:
Proximity search (yay!). Look for Mary Ellen Bates’ review (and my notes from CIL2005)

Gigablast:
Site search also can create a specialized search where it will only search the list of sites you specify

A9:
Meta-search, but tends to be a little complicated for the average users. See, though, the A9 yellow pages, which are cool, and have pictures of the businesses and virtually walk the street. (look at pages jaunes photos de villes – with pictures of 6 European cities

Search Engine Overlap:
Ranking.Thumbshots.com – visualize overlap
Dog Pile

Specialized Databases:
GlobalSpec – engineering.
ZoomInfo – used to be Eliyon, they also sell a commercial product. You can claim your own profile
Scirus – science
Indeed – federated jobs database with alert service (note for CI types!)
Smeal – business, focused crawl of the open web of scholarly business info
CiteSeer – computer science, similar to Smeal, ps or pdf or html full text, link to the author’s home page
Melissa(? Missed this) -- stats lookup, ready reference, home sales in a zipcode
RedLightGreen – from research libraries group, search bibliographic records for books, export citations to certain formats, create login and associate yourself with a library
Reference Extract – meta search ask-a sites from

Dynamic Query Modification:
Google suggest (see the labs page) – works as you type
AOL – current engine is Google. AOL gives smart box suggestions. New shopping service “pinpoint shopping” maps your search to a controlled vocabulary

Meta Search:
Clusty – dynamic taxonomy creation (IOW not mapping to a controlled vocabulary). See the government tab.
Needle search toolbar – can create a toolbar for any other search page. (firefox only)
Copernic – same for IE

Mobile:
Sem@code – hold your camera up to a barcode and it will search for information (cool!)
Mobot – take a picture of something and it will search for it (the idea with this or another service eventually for you to take a picture of a street sign and have it find restaurants)
Bloglines for mobile

Misc:
Podscope – searches podcasts, keyword searches words spoken in podcasts (tv eyes? technology)
Topix.net – news
Rocketnews – 12k sources
Diplomacy monitor
MedlinePlus – weekly update of new sites added to MedlinePlus by NLM.
TV Eyes video from Bloomburg – search and see clips search in Yahoo with site:tveyes
TotalRecorder – record streaming audio on your computer (copyright issues apply)
Cryptome – gov docs that might be removed from the web. Includes an archive of satellite and aerial imagery from USGS, etc.