April 29, 2005

• My experience is that Google remains the most effective search engine on my particular internet. It is fast, easy, returns good information. If I don't find what I need through google it is probably because I didn't craft the search carefully enough. Although I have to admit I miss the little spider from WebCrawler! and... Google is God.
• I was looking for love in all the wrong places. Then I googled it, and now I have a beautiful supermodel wife and three darling children, who I'm keeping tied up in a small basement apartment until "hubby" ponies up the cash. Don't make me cut anyone: use google.
• Ha ha ha! - thanks quidnunc. Y'know, kids - Google can be a wonderful thing when used properly. But it can also be a scary thing too. Some of you may find that so called "friends" want you to look up bad things like the Sports Illustrated swimsuit models, or pictures of men being very friendly with other men - or even the text of various pending legislation. Let's not forget that all of those things are illegal and punishable by many, many years in prison with no lights and only smelly fish to eat. So the next time you take google out for a spin, remember - only search for approved keywords such as "Coca-cola" and "goodyear tires"! It's Americas Internets, and with the proper use, they'll last for the full length of the fourth reich. G'night everyone! And happy Googling!
• Some search engines search by using words - but didn't Hitler also use words? And the commies - yeah, they sure loved to use words alright! Especially when they were torturing American nuns to death. But google isn't even a real word - so use google friends, or you'll be profiting from nazi war cimes.
• That's interesting. I have an essay due in about 96 hours that about something like this. Whether Google, in ten years' time, will actually overtake and render redundant the specialist databases available today. I'm inclined to say yes, not because Google will be better, but because Google will be easier to use.
• Oh, try Alltheweb, it's not too bad a search engine and you can actually specify the type of file you want (audio, picture, video, Word Document, PDF etc...).
• I've found that people don't tend to use all of google effectively. A year ago one of my friends was looking for pictures from a certain film and didn't have much luck. I'm like, "Click on the images link" and there were tons of pictures from the film. Another friend I've noticed that everytime he mistypes a word in google and it says, "Did you mean X?" instead of clicking the link, he retypes the word. Drives me crazy!
• a well used " is sometimes all you need to make the difference in a search. Well, two "'s technicallly.
• Ummm...did you all actually look at the post links? The polling questions I put were slightly rhetorical (only slightly). Google comes in many guises these days what with googlesuggest and 'regular google' being incorporated into things like those turboscout and Xtragoogle links. Personally I think turboscout is the bee's knees atm. More than 90 search engines (including AllTheWeb Alnedra) without having to so much as type the search query again. I don't think google is always the answer to search. It's the best and it does a great job. But like the first and last links in the post suggest, there's better ways to find specific info sometimes. Just sayin'..
• DON'T YOU SAY THAT, PEACAY!!!!! There is NO better way than Google. Google rocks! Google is the best! We love Google!
• Turbo10 is pretty cool, but i just default to tha G y'know wu'Im sayin'?
• yeah yeah......I DO love the goo 2. A LOT.(most of the time) Turbo10 is oooook I guess. TScout seems simpler for mine. Anyway....soon there's prolly gonna be tag crawlers I wouldn't doubt........I'm already using del.icio.us to find stuff 1/2 the time.
• regarding " on google you don't need to close the " if that is the only phrase you are searching for. So "hole in back yard" is the same as "hole in back yard. Of course "hole in" back yard is different than "hole in back yard.
• i dont' wanna try that third one . . .
• Alnedra: I'm not so sure. I've had a fair bit of experience with specialist databases (Medline, Pubmed and Psychinfo for a part-time job; Historical Abstracts and the RHS Bibliographic database for my own research), and I just can't see Google replacing them. Their indexing is very specialised - Medline is especially impressive for its systematic and consistent indexing, which is invaluable for systematic literature reviews. Good historical literature databases, on the other hand, are the ones that can be searched by period covered by the research, which saves so much effort for us, but would be a silly indexing for any science. The kinds of keywords we would look for also wouldn't make much sense to other fields, any more than theirs would to ours. But it's not just the specialist indexing, it's also what they don't include. Lately I've been using the Royal Historical Society (RHS) database, because it only includes British and Irish history, which means I don't have to wade through irrelevent material, the way I have to with J-stor, even when it's restricted to only historical journals. I occassionally use Google on academic work, to turn up interesting things like local history pages or geneology resources (which are useful to me), but Google would always be much much too broad to be really useful for me. And the indexing would reflect that too - it wouldn't be able to help being a Jack of all trades, and a Master of none. But then, I'm the kind of person who only ever searches literature databases through the advanced search menu, but maybe I'm the sort of person they were made for. Sorry - I just realised ou might not have been talking about bibliographic databases (as in teh content), but software for libraries - were you?
• jb, I've used most of the databases you're talking about, and having to teach students and teaching staff how to use them, I usually try as many of the interface options as I can. However, as much as I know that databases are far superior to Google in terms of the relevancy of results, type of material retrieved (peer-reviewed articles, good academic texts and reviews etc...) and coverage of subscription-only material, I have to face the ugly fact that because many of these databases have certain flaws (non-intuitive interface, too many steps to accomplish search, slow connection and so on), many students - and increasingly, research staff - are going use Google Scholar, or plain vanilla Google to find what they want. One cringe-worthy example was a student with an engineering citation she wanted to follow up on. We searched through ScienceDirect, Web of Science, IEEExplore, and about four or five other databases. Nada. Finally, desperation drove me to try Google. Full citation found. It was a reference to an article written in the early 1950s, I believe. I think that student went away thinking that Google was more useful than the other databases. It's not, but it certainly delivered for her. *sigh*.
• Google are presently enhancing their searches especially for news - an interesting change in the ranking algorithm. New Scientist 30.4.05
• "This makes me love Google more." Didn't know where else to put this and not sure it's FPP worthy.