Computers in Libraries 2014 - Day 1 - Super Searcher Tips

This session for me was kind of a guilty pleasure.  Every year I see the Super Searcher Tips program listed on the schedule but see something somewhere else on the schedule that is probably a little more relevant to my job and go to that instead.  This year I didn't have much of a conflict, so I went to this.

The session is presented by Mary Ellen Bates, who, at the beginning of this very session, was presented with the AIIP Marilyn Levine President's Award.  After receiving the award (she had been unable to attend the actual meeting where it had been officially presented last week) she went straight into her presentation which was a fantastic brain-dump of search tools and tips.  Here they are.

For private search, Bates recommends motherpipe.com which is based on Bing and includes Twitter results. The servers are located in Germany.  You can get different results if you go to the .co.uk address instead of .com.

To find "long tail" results Bates recommends millionshort.com.  This site allows you to drop the first 10,000, 100,000, 1,000,000 etc. results from a Google results list so you see only the stuff that is at the end that normal people will never get to by scrolling through results.  This catches things that might be really good but haven't been optimized for search.  Milliontall.com is the reverse; it retrieves only the top sites.

A tip Bates suggests if you are using Wikipedia as a source is to compare different language versions of an article, for example the English and French articles on tracking.  The different language articles are rarely just translations of one another and you can get Google translate to get you a serviceable translation if you don't know the language.

The site social-searcher.com lets you search social networking sites and limit by the popularity of the posts.  You can search for posts with a certain number of likes/re-tweets/etc.  Also has quick social media analytics.  For example, a search for Obamacare shows generally positive feedback on Twitter and Google+ and slightly more negative feedback on Facebook

Bates also mentioned on this line that Twitter has started improving its search.  Its search results now have nice facet-like limiting.

Also for searching Twitter posts is the site hashtagify.me.   Hashtagify.me finds related hashtags on Twitter so you can find top influencers and see popularity trends.  For instance "sustainability" links to the related tags: eco, car, environment, energy, renewable, green, business, climate change, climate, crowdenergyorg.

Bates suggests using Pocket for storing articles that you want to read later.  I personally use Instapaper for this kind of thing, but Pocket sounds like it has a few nice extra features like tagging and allowing you to export an archive as an HTML list.

Google has added a Library feature to Google Scholar.  This lets you save all of your citations in one place.  You can add labels for sorting.

Searchonymous is a Firefox plugin that allows you to do an anonymous Google while logged into Google.  This can be quite useful as Google makes modifications to your results based on your search history and other stuff they know about you.  Sometimes it can be useful to know what results the average Google user who isn't you is going to get when they do a search.

One interesting tip was for finding lists using Google. If, for instance, you want to find various lists of top anime (a random topic that happens to work pretty well with this example if you try it), but didn't want to limit it to just lists of 10 (or some other arbitrary number) you can search for "top 5...50 anime" and that will find lists ranging between 5 and 50 in length.

If you are looking for mashups of various kinds of data with Google Maps (and who isn't, really) a nice place to look is Google Maps Gallery.  You can browse or search the data (world bank, census, PolicyMap, etc.).  You can even add your own organization's maps.

One tip Bates had that I will admit to having used before this session is using Google Autocomplete to indicate alternatives to a product/service if you don't know what they might be.  Just go into Google and type something like "Roku vs." and then stop and see what shows up in the list of recommended searches that drops down.

Google's new site info card can be a handy feature.  It can be brought up when in search results you see the grey name of an organization followed by a triangle in light grey print.  When you click on this you'll get a brief description of the organization, generally from Wikipedia.  This can give you an idea of the legitimacy of an organization before you click on the link.

A feature to celebrate in Google Images is the ability now to add a number of Creative Commons filters to a search.  This is most helpful if you are looking for an image that you want to reuse in a specific context and you need to know that the licensing will be friendly to the purpose you have in mind.  To use this click on "Search Tools" after performing a search and then use the "Usage Rights" menu.

More an example of how to do something well, rather than a tool in itself (although it certainly could be a useful page), Bates mentioned Google's Media Tools, which are intended for journalists who use Google to get certain kinds of data. - Great way to "package" tools - Google.Com/get/mediatools  - A nice example of how to organize tools for an audience.  Tools are arranged into categories like "Gather & Organize", "Engage", and "Visualize".

Bates final tip was one for doing a job search, in this case most relevant to the corporate world.  It's kind of a hack, but it's an interesting hack to be sure.  It turns out that the company Taleo, owned by Oracle, provides back-end job posting services for many companies.  So even though you can't go to www.taleo.com and see a bunch of job sites (it actually just redirects to Oracle's information page on the Taleo service) you can search the domain and find jobs that have been posted only on the sites of the companies that use the Taleo service.  So the search "site:taleo.net intitle:career keyword(s)" would find jobs that matched the keyword(s). It doesn't work particularly well with phrase jobs ("engineer" would be more successful than "electrical engineer").  One glitch that Bates pointed out, which is actually a bonus tip in itself, is that the Google search engine will work harder against its indexes if you ask more of it.  The above search for "intitle:career" and the above search for "intitle:careers" find fewer searches combined than the search for "(intitle:career OR intitle:careers)", which in a pure system that gave you all of the results every time would not happen. The more complicated search makes Google work harder and gives you more results.