Knowledge Leadership Associates » Search Tools

Secure searching with DuckDuckGo!

Peter G. Underwood — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 08:23:55 +0000

Many search engines, including Google, track and record searches, including search terms used and the location and IP address from which the search originates. Potentially, it would be possible to identify an individual from such information. The data is used, supposedly, to assist in monitoring search quality and, also, to provide a profile of recent searches so that targeted advertising information can be displayed on subsequent search pages. This approach, benign though it is claimed to be, is disturbing, to say the least, and could constitute a serious security risk to a company that is searching for strategically-important information.

So, if you are not happy to be monitored, try a new search engine, DuckDuckGo. The site provides a comprehensive list of special features and searches offered by the engine and also explains its privacy policy. Searches are quick and the results exclude “scraper” sites and those offering advertising of dubious relevance to the search being conducted. The usual range of search features are available, including phrase searching and the so-called !bang syntax, which allows one to force the engine to conduct a search on a particular site for a specific type of medium — !i “Knowledge Leadership Associates” will, for example, find images on the KLA website through an interface with the Google search engine.

Secure searching with DuckDuckGo! is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

The year of searching

Peter G. Underwood — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 04:56:58 +0000

Thom Craver has provided an interesting review of the year 2010 from the perspective of search engine development: The year in search: a re-cap of the biggest changes and a look ahead (SearchEngineWatch 6 January 2011). He comments on the changes introduced in Google and its competitors and suggests that 2011 may well be dominated by a contest between Yahoo and Google for market dominance. What is particularly interesting (but, perhaps, unsurprising) is the extent to which changes and development are driven almost exclusively by marketing rather than considerations of achieving better search results — all of which serves to confirm the need to consider choice of search engines in terms of search performance within particular search domains.

The year of searching is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

The Web: getting deeper and more invisible

Peter G. Underwood — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 04:36:16 +0000

On 3 November 2010, Gabe Elliott published a very useful account of the development of the World Wide Web in his regular Web column, The Internet Vision, and commented on the increasing “invisibility” of many important sources to general search engines, such as Google. His article, “The un-Googled Deep Web”, comments that “Estimates based on extrapolations from a study done at University of California, Berkeley speculate that the deep Web consists of about 91,000 terabytes. By contrast, the surface Web (which is easily reached by search engines) is only about 167 terabytes; the Library of Congress, in 1997, was estimated to have 3,000 terabytes”. On the Knowledge Leadership Associates Internet Information Retrieval and Web 2.0 Tools & Techniques (KL-IIRW) course, discussion and demonstration of the Deep, or invisible, Web is an important component. Elliott also discusses various services, such as the Subject Based Information Gateway, Intute, and specialized search engines that facilitate exploration of the Deep Web.

The Web: getting deeper and more invisible is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

Google Books: how does it work?

Peter G. Underwood — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 08:00:17 +0000

Alexis Madrigal, writing in the The Atlantic (1 November 2010), outlines how the searching algorithm used for Google Books has recently been improved. The article indicates that the algorithm is somewhat different from that used for Google’s web search and is being “tweaked” as the design team gains more experience in the kind of searching that is used to locate titles of books. Google’s web search makes extensive use of the Page Rank process, whereby full account is taken of the number of pages linking to a site when assessing its likely relevance. This, however, does not happen with the digitized copies of books that Google has stored, so some experimentation was necessary in order to develop a set of some one hundred predictive indicators of “title” relevance, such as how often the title is searched for on the web, recent book sales, the number of libraries that hold the title, and how often an older book has been reprinted. The result was released as “Rich Results” and commenced on 1 November 2010. Why not try it now?

Google Books: how does it work? is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

Are you working too hard?

Peter G. Underwood — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 16:09:49 +0000

Independent Online’s Business Report for 20 October 2010 reports the results of the 2010 LexisNexis International Workplace Productivity Survey conducted in the United States, United Kingdom, China, Australia and South Africa. It has important implications for Knowledge Management. According to the results of the survey, South African professional workers spent, on average, 9.5 hours a day of the working week at their workplace, longer than any other country group included in the study. In addition, “the survey found that the amount of information workers have to manage for their jobs continues to increase at an alarming rate, with much of it irrelevant to employees getting their jobs done”. Not surprisingly, 82% of the South African respondents wished to be able to spend more time in using the information rather than organizing it; 88% indicated that the inability to find relevant information was a major time-waster and that this was having a deleterious effect on their productivity. The survey concluded that “Workers believe they could be more productive at work if the tools they had access to were designed to work the way that they worked.”

Are you working too hard? is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

Displaying and linking search results

Peter G. Underwood — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 13:49:19 +0000

Pearltrees (http://www.pearltrees.com) offers an attractive way of mapping sites and creating links between sites that you use. A “pearl” is a web site that you have discovered and found to be useful; a “pearltree” is a collection of such sites. Having created a “pearltree”, it can be shared with others, thus providing a quick and convenient way of conveying the results of a search. It is simple to use: the main benefits become available by registering and opening a free account. Phil Bradley, an Internet consultant who writes a monthly column for Library and information update (the official journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals <http://www.cilip.org.uk/update>), has created a web tutorial illustrating the use of Pearltrees — < http://bit.ly/cL6Wjh >. In it, he shows how to set up an account, build and share a “pearltree”. This approach to sharing of web resources is typical of a social networking approach to information use and one that has great potential benefits for all types of library and information service.

Displaying and linking search results is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates

Developments in search engines: Wolfram|Alpha

Peter G. Underwood — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 09:33:13 +0000

Wolfram|Alpha was launched in May 2009 as a computational or “answer engine”, which may point to the future of searching. It was developed by Wolfram Research as a completely different approach to presentation of search results — the results of a search are intended to be a set of answers rather than a set of documents that might contain answers. In this, it begins to move beyond the pattern-matching approaches used by search engines towards the intelligent, “inference” engine, which has been the goal of artificial intelligence. Thus, a search on Wolfram|Alpha for “what is the current population of Uganda?” provides an answer of 31.7 million people, based on 2008 population estimate, graphs showing short and long-term population trends, demographic information and comparisons with world population. The developers warn that it takes some experimentation to become familiar with the approach to searching and that the development of the search engine and its algorithms is very much a “work in progress”. Maybe this is the future of searching! Try it.

Developments in search engines: Wolfram|Alpha is a post from: Knowledge Leadership Associates