Librarian of Fortune

I hate change

Oh, [insert bad word here]. Furl.net has just been acquired by Diigo. And I was JUST THIS MINUTE getting ready to Furl my umpty-billion URLS for my upcoming talks.

From all I can tell, it's got the same or more functionality. That's not the point.

They did not consult with me, personally, before making this switch. I just sent in all my handouts, that touted Furl.net. And right this moment, I am waiting for them to do whatever they do behind the scenes to move my bookmarks over.

This transition better go smoothly, or someone's going to get hurt.

Searching the deep web

We've heard for years about the invisible, hidden, deep or dark web -- that portion of the web that resides in databases and other formats not accessible to search engine spiders. One of the latest attempts to make this content searchable is DeepDyve, formerly known as Infovell.

DeepDyve offers a federated search of a wide variety of content, some of which is free and some requires payment to the publisher. Sources include MEDLINE, Clinical Trials, PubMed Central, BioOne and SAGE Publications - some heavy-hitters. Searchers can limit their search to various slices of this content, such as legal, business & finance, life sciences, or clean tech and energy.

What sets DeepDyve apart is how it handles text and queries. The founders of the company worked on the Human Genome Project prior to starting Infovell, and they approach search differently than most. For DNA research, scientists must take small snippets of genetic material and match them together. To the information processing algorithm, the actual meaning of the terms didn't matter; it's looking for patterns. DeepDyve takes that same language agnosticism to offer a very different approach to textual analysis than the usual syntactic analysis.

Like Yahoo's Y!Q, DeepDyve is designed to work with a block of text rather than just a few search terms to find useful information. Given its founders' background, it's not surprising that DeepDyve can even handle searching for chemical formulas; in fact, you can point it to a collection of articles you have selected from a prior search and say, in essense, "These are all helpful. Find me more like them."

DeepDyve requires (free) registration for its basic version; the Pro version, which costs $45/month, includes additional search and display features but no additional content.

Today's Front Pages

Ever wonder how papers -- around the country or around the world -- are covering a topic? The Newseum has a web page with the front pages of over 650 newspapers from 63 countries. For those of you who haven't heard, the Newseum is an interactive museum focused on the news industry, located in Washington DC.

Click on any of the images, and you get the image of the front page, along with a link to that newspaper's web site, if you want to read more.

They also offer a bit of an archive -- you can see a collection of front pages for selected historically significant events, but it's fairly limited. I'd use this site more for getting a quick look at how a news event was covered in the next day's news than for in-depth research.

Legal Research Engine

If you want to search the best of the legal web (OK, I mean that portion of the web that has law-related content), a nice tool I use is the Legal Research Engine, created by the Cornell Law Library.

You can limit your search to legal research guides, the best of the legal web, and/or academic blawgs from law professors.

What I really like about this site is that it's clear, easy to use, and a great example of what any information center or independent info pro could do for a client group. These are "just" Google custom search engines -- very well-designed, well-tuned search engines, but the capacity is there for anyone to build a similar resource on a topic they are equally familiar with.

Another Wikipedia tool

One of the challenges of using Wikipedia is that your topic may be mentioned in a number of articles, and Wikipedia's interface doesn't make it easy to jump from one article to another. Wikipedia Roll is one more tool for enabling readers to explore the full range of a concept in Wikipedia. It's intuitive and easy to use, once you get used to the elephant that periodically runs across the screen.

WorldWideScience

First, note that I'm not primarily a sci-tech researcher; I've been a business researcher almost all my adult life. That said, WorldWideScience.org sure is cool. It offers a one-stop metasearch in 50 national science portals, ranging from the Indian Academy of Sciences to Science.gov, Canada Institute for Scientific & Technical Info, CERN, and a host of others. I find this an easy first stop when I'm looking into something I suspect would be in the public literature, searching for something that I think a government agency is likely to have studied, or trying to identify the leading voices in a field.

Yeah, it's not perfect. Its advanced search option isn't advanced; since it's a metasearch engine, it dumbs down each query to the lowest common denominator. There's no way to limit your search to only free sources and yes, a good amount of the content in WorldWideScience isn't free. When you click through on a title, you're dropped immediately into that database. If that file is hosted in a non-English speaking country, you may have trouble using the interface.

That said, their search results screen gladdens my heart. There's clustering on the left, sorting and limiting features, and the ability to export the citations. It also shows how many results you got from each of the portals, which might prompt you to go straight to that portal and search it directly.

LexiQuo

I've been doing a lot of searching in non-English languages, and I appreciate how simple English word structure is when I look at German, for example. And it figures that it would be Germans who would figure out how to help searchers expand their search terms meaningfully to catch all the linguistic variants.

Enter Lexiquo.net, brought to you by Weitkämper Technology. It jumps through hoops if you're searching in German, but right now I'm impressed by what it does for plain old English language searches.

So, what is Lexiquo? Well, it lets you:

• search in Yahoo, Google, MSN, Exalead and Wikipedia, individually or clustered (although the clustering feature is only in German)
• add variants and synonyms for my search terms to my search
• get my search terms translated into German, Spanish, French or Italian.
• see results in images, videos, and people as well as the web

It's in beta and it shows... I sometimes get strange results, all the error messages are only in German, and the help files are written by someone for whom English is clearly not the native language.

That said, for help with finding alternate ways of expressing a search, Lexiquo is worth a try.

Google VP has some interesting thoughts

On Feb. 16, Johnathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President, Product Management, Google, wrote an interesting essay, looking forward to the future of the Internet. What I found most striking was his observation that "When data is abundant, intelligence will win". I hope that all info pros tattoo that on their palms. Our job is to provide that intelligence... that's what we have over an algorithm.

"Putting the power to publish and consume content into the hands of more people in more places enables everyone to start conversations with facts. With facts, negotiations can become less about who yells louder, but about who has the stronger data. [...] But as powerful as it can be in politics, data has the potential to be even more transformational in business. Oil fueled the Industrial Revolution, but data will fuel the next generation of growth."

Twitter: Why You Should Care

Randy Cassingham, the compiler of the inimitable This Is True newsletter, wrote last month about Twitter: Why You Should Care. He doesn't say anything new, but he's got a great way of expressing the basics.

And he doesn't mince words:

The main problem, I think, is that Twitter's founders didn't really "get" what would make it useful. That's made clear on your Twitter home page, where the little box that you type your updates into asks you to answer the question, "What are you doing?" Twitter's power users have disregarded that, and made the site useful by applying their own ideas as to what it's all about.

This is the secret to making Twitter really useful: No one cares what it is you're doing.When people put in there that they're "Waking up to face the day." or "Eating a bologna sandwich for lunch.", it means they have no clue as to the power of Twitter -- and no respect for their friends' time.

SEO for the rest of us

In the course of some writing, I came across Google's Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide, published last November. It's clearly written and the advice looks sound, particularly for us small business owners who aren't interested in heavy-duty SEO.