Super searchers fly to the rescue Google is universally recognised as the first port of call when searching the web. If you’re seeking specific areas of information, however, you may discover that Google cannot offer the precision of a specialised engine. Here is a crack team of search tools, each with the skills for performing a different task.
BUSINESS
www.hoovers.com/global/uk
Good for: people who want information on public companies
The dickens here is in the details: current details. Hoover’s Online is a great example of a site that gives one-search access to reams of helpful information, without the “noise” delivered by a full-text search on Google — company mentions and advertisements, for example. A search for WHSmith, for example, on Hoover’s finds a precise, up-to-date listing on the plc, including address, overview, financial information and management names. There are other business inquiries here, too. You can search by stock quote, executive name or industry keyword. So, if I wanted to know about competitors to WHSmith, an industry keyword search — “books” — would yield a list of relevant companies, as well as news specific to that industry. Once information is generated, Hoover’s offers business-oriented ways to organise the site, by building company lists, executive lists and so on. However, this precision and business relevance comes at a price. Though Hoover’s provides some free content, this is mainly a subscription service, with pricing plans ranging from Lite to Premium (cost varies depending on several factors, so is not available on the website). The value lies in the time saved.
SHARING RESULTS
www.nextaris.com
Good for: the professional who wants to organise, share and publish websearch results
If you are a scholar or researcher who habitually turns to the web for data, you may have trouble trying to catalogue your findings and disseminate them among colleagues. Nextaris provides these “postprocessing” functions in a single web-based service. It is free, but there is a charge for additional web space beyond the standard 20MB. Information-trawling options include regular search engines (Yahoo!, Google), news searches (Reuters, BBC) and medical resources (NIH, PubMed). If you don’t like these sources, Nextaris offers “bookmarklets” — small bookmarks containing JavaScript that enable you to search external engines and bring back the results. Say you are interested in Scottish lighthouses: with Nextaris, you could search for and gather a variety of relevant pages and images. You can then save findings (with annotation or without) in folders that can be shared selectively with others or posted to a public website. Internal messaging helps information-sharing groups to communicate and build folders.
METASEARCH
www.vivisimo.com
Good for: the enthusiast who wants results to be categorised into easily manageable groups
One of the problems in creating a search engine that understands human language is the nature of language itself: it’s far too ambiguous. If you’re searching for chips, for example, you could be interested in french fries, poker chips, wood chips or computer processors. The metasearch engine Vivisimo does not try to anticipate your intentions. Instead, it divides your search results into “clusters”, groups based around a single topic (a dozen different kinds of chip, for example). Furthermore, subtopics enable you to zero in not only on, say, poker chips, but collectable poker chips or casino supplies. In addition to internet searches, Vivisimo applies this technology to specialised inquiries at eBay and PubMed, a search engine for medical research. This is where the site really shines, helping to group your results when you might lack the vocabulary to do so. Vivisimo should not be considered a competitor to regular search engines (it doesn’t comb through Google), but is a clever sieve for filtering a wide-ranging query.
CURRENT EVENTS
www.feedster.com
Good for: the media fiend who wants a timeline view of rolling news
One of the criticisms of full-text search engines such as Google and AltaVista is that they generally cannot sort results by their date of creation. Feedster does not suffer from this limitation. It indexes only Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds, which normally include the date content was created, and it also enables narrow date searching. Feedster is therefore a valuable tool for monitoring current affairs. A search for “‘Tony Blair’ parliament” returns about 1,600 results, listed in date order. From these, it’s a simple matter of scanning for significant events: increased security for the House of Commons, the powder attack in parliament and so on. Similarly, if you search for a well-known figure, such as David Beckham, your results amount to a timeline of his recent life. There are three disadvantages to searching RSS feeds, as opposed to the entire internet. First, Feedster has not existed for as long as Google, and so does not reach back as far. Second, much RSS content is commentary, not primary material. Finally, some RSS feeds do not provide full internet pages, publishing instead excerpts or summaries found in their entirety only on the original web pages.
MEDICINE
www.medic8.com
Good for: the layman looking for medical information
If you’ve ever tried to search for drug or medical information on a full-text search engine, you know how frustrating that can be. The results will always contain thousands of online stores, for example. While there are search tricks that can eliminate commercial links, the issue of credibility remains. Who can you trust online? While Medic8 admits that it is no substitute for a doctor (few web- sites are), its board is populated by doctors, its pages deliver original content and it searches other medical sites that are considered trustworthy. Results generally prove helpful to the non- specialist. Putting the term “heart disease” into a full-text search engine could yield millions of results; Medic8 produces only a handful, including an article on preventing heart disease in women. If that is not sufficient, a search of Medic8’s collection of trusted medical websites then finds 410 results — considerably more manageable than going through regular engines. This site also features a searchable subject index, including an A-Z of medical resources by subject, pointers to medical databases and patient-support groups, and even a medical job search.
Tara Calishain is editor of ResearchBuzz.com, a weekly newsletter on internet searching, and author of Web Search Garage
