December
An article originally posted on Read/WriteWeb
“It’s pretty crazy to think that this service has become as high profile (if not popular) as it has without the ability to search for users by their names. Now that it’s here there are other search functions we still find more useful, though.”
Read the full article at www.readwriteweb.com
It’s Christmas! Now you can search Twitter users by their real names. How great!
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November
An article originally posted on www.ariadne.ac.uk
“If a company doesn’t know what is being said about them, that doesn’t stop it being said; it just means that they are not in a position to contribute to or influence that discussion. Surely it becomes more, not less necessary to be aware of and to search this content - just to keep up to date, if nothing else.”
Read the full article at www.ariadne.ac.uk
I would recommend to try Social Mention. I tried this with a few company names and it is a nice place to start monitoring things. Unfortunately, you can’t subscribe to RSS feeds that warn you when new content is available. Still you need to create feeds directly from sources like Delicious, Digg or Technorati and grab them all in a one place
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October
An article originally posted on googleblog.blogspot.com
“Until now, alerts have been delivered via email only, but those days are over. Now your News, Web, Blog, Video, and Groups alerts are more easily accessible than ever.
Once you sign in to Google Alerts and create an alert, you can opt for feed delivery by clicking ‘Edit’ next to your alert on the ‘Manage Your Alerts’ page and changing your ‘Deliver to’ selection from ‘Email’ to ‘Feed’ (click on the image to see larger).”
Read the full article at googleblog.blogspot.com
If you’ve been wanting to monitor all websites, news, blogs, videos and groups indexed by Google, now is the time to get your Google alerts configured – RSS is up and running!
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October
An article originally posted on Slideshare
Presentation from Karen Blakeman at the ‘Internet Librarian International 2008′ covering advanced search features from search engines and other tools, along with tips and tricks.
Definitely a reference. Thanks Karen for the tips!
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October
An article originally posted on Search Engine Land
Katherine Boehret wrote, “In about a month, Google will begin delivering these alerts to users via feeds, as well as emails.”
Read the full article at searchengineland.com
This is a major enhancement from Google. Allowing people to subscribe to RSS feeds to monitor results is extremely useful.
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July
An article originally posted on Search Engine Land
“Yahoo had little take-up of its social search product. I’ve never seen the company explain why. My own suspicion is that take-up was low because search is NOT a social activity. I believe people tend to search when they have an immediate desire that needs fulfilling, and taking time away from the search activity to “share” with others is a distraction. Consider the person who has a broken water pipe. They might search quickly to find a plumber. They aren’t likely thinking at that moment that they want to tag and classify the search they conducted, much less the plumber they called. They just want the pipe fixed!”
Read the full article at searchengineland.com
This interesting post by Danny Sullivan talks about search 4.0 as the era of human added-value coming back into the relevancy algorithms. Indeed, everyone has an aera of expertise. And if one could use this expertise to surface the good from the bad and the ugly, then users would benefit from it. And while Danny writes that search is not a social activity, I really think that bringing social elements into search results is a great way to avoid inconsistencies. Indeed, what if the person who had a broken water pipe could rate the plumber, and recommend it to his friends? So that when they’ll search one, they’ll be able to find the recommended one, and be confident that he will do a great job? That is what search 4.0 means to me.
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May
An article originally posted on Search Engine Land
You know what you’re doing, right? We are all rational beings. We are all blessed with huge neocortexes and use them on a regular basis. This is especially so when we do something as thoughtful as use a search engine. Our rational loop is kicked into high gear. Right?
Read the full article at searchengineland.com
Very interesting post showing that most of the time, search engine users tend to click on first results unconsciously, while they will give rational explanations on why they did so. When searching for information on the Web, it really has an incidence and our advice would be to spend some more time visualizing results pages before clicking on some. They might learn lots of valuable information already. And choose more relevant results.
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May
An article originally posted on Phil Bradley's weblog
“Now, this is very useful. For pages that don’t have an RSS Page2RSS will basically create one for you. Simply type in the URL of the page that you’re interested in, grab the feed, add it into your favourite reader and you’re done.”
Read the full article at philbradley.typepad.com
It is a great way to monitor static pages.
Though there are many other monitoring tools available on the Web, this one doesn’t require any login, it works well, and it is just as simple as a click.
I found one limitation though: it doesn’t watch the page as regularly as it should. It only checks for updates every 4 hours (well, not so bad I assume). I thought that refreshing my feed would automatically generate an update from Page2RSS, but it is not the case…
So my recommendation: use it for pages where content is not changing too frequently.
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April
An article originally posted on Google Webmaster Central
“Google is constantly trying new ideas to improve our coverage of the web. We already do some pretty smart things like scanning JavaScript and Flash to discover links to new web pages, and today, we would like to talk about another new technology we’ve started experimenting with recently.”
Read the full article at googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com
It’s good to see that Google is still innovating in the web search field. This opens up a world of new possibilities for SEO’s and accessibility of hidden web content. I’m still wondering how they will handle all the corner cases of submitting forms with robots, from looping links to side-effects of posting random content on websites…
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