Librarian of Fortune

newsletter updates

If you want to read more of my thoughts, ramblings and rants, I just published the June issues of my InfoTips research newsletter and my Info-Entrepreneur Tip of the Month.

Google can see in your window

As has been widely reported elsewhere, Google rolled out Street View in its Maps service. In a nutshell, Google sent out cars with multi-lens cameras mounted on them, taking a stream of photos while driving down the streets of major US cities. (for more info, read Google's help file)  Yes, it gives some people the creeps that there may be photos of their very own window on the web, but I'm not going there right now.

What I love about Street View is that I can actually find out what my destination looks like before I go there. I am notorious for getting lost easily. Really, really easily.  Now, not only can I get any number of web sites to give me turn-by-turn directions, but I can even see what the intersection looks like, what the building I'm going to looks like, and whether there is a parking garage nearby.

If you're looking for a new time sink on the web, check out some of the sites that have collected (and annotated) noteworthy images here, here, and here.

Dialog's little-known TARGET command

I was talking with Marcy Phelps about Dialog searching (yes, we're geeks, OK?) and she reminded me that no one remembers the TARGET command. That probably includes you, too, unless you actually RTFM, which is available in all its 277 pages of glory here. It's actually a pretty cool command for those times when you want what I call "squishy Boolean" - that is, when you want to search for articles that include most of the search terms specified.

For example, if I wanted to find articles that looked at the personal care market, I might want to find articles that mention the main players. I could AND all the names together, but that would require that all the names appear in each article. All I really want are articles that mention several of the players. At any command prompt, I could type:
target gillette avon revlon
This would retrieve up to 50 articles that have either all or most of the search terms, ranked by relevance.

You can also specific words that must appear in every article; you can include phrases; you can even include nested logic. TARGET automatically executes a CURRENT command in the background but, as I just blogged, that's not working for at least one file.

You can read more about TARGET here.

Is Dialog CURRENTly broken?

If you're not a regular Dialog user, just skip this post...

I was running a search on Dialog last week and used the CURRENT command in file 148, Trade & Industry, to limit my search to content from the last two years. (b 148 CURRENT) It confirmed my command ("CURRENT started"). However, my searches turned up lots of stuff from years, heck, decades, past. It sure was annoying, since I had to manually limit each search set by year, and we all know that this consumes CPU time (er, DialUnits), and that equals $$$.

I haven't gotten a response from my Dialog rep; will post when I hear something.

June 20 update: I'm told that the problem has been fixed; no idea what caused the problem.