May 2005 Archive

Google Print Search Finally

At last Google Print now has its own search form, and you can get more than three book results at a time. Go to print.google.com for the search form.

Zooming at Ask Jeeves and Web Answers

Ask Jeeves announces the introduction of Zoom and Web Answers. The "Zoom" function is the new name for the implementation of the old Teoma right hand suggestions for narrowing or expanding the search. Ask calls it a "concept navigation tool that offers suggestions to narrow and refine your search ("zooming in"), or expand your search ("zooming out") to explore new ideas." The "Web Answers" are more shortcuts that try to derive answers from indexed Web pages. Triggered when the search query is in a question format or a specific phrase, the "result is labeled as a 'Web Answer,' and the 'answer' is highlighted" in the result's keyword-in-context extract.

Google Goes Portal

After many years of promoting its "laser like focus on search" and success as an anti-portal, Google is making another step towards being a portal. With the new "Personalize Your Homepage" available from Google Labs, you can customize all kinds of additional information on your personalized version of the Google home page. See the Google Blog post for more.

Yahoo! Puts Creative Commons on Advanced Page

Yahoo! Search has added a limit for Creative Commons content on the Advanced Web Search. They had launched their stand alone Creative Commons search on March 24.

Missing Pieces at Dogpile

Dogpile has been redesigned and has added the ability to easily see which results come from Google, Yahoo!, or Ask Jeeves. Clicking the button for one or more of the search engines (in the blue bar at the top) opens up a column with the top results from that search engine and those records not available from the others search engines (at least on their first page) are highlighted. In addition, to demonstrate the lack of overlap between the first page of results at each of the three, Dogpile has introduced a graphic "missing pieces tool." This shows which results are found by three, two, or only one of the search engines. Just remember that it is only looking at the first page of results (including ads). MSN will be added to the tool once it is included in Dogpile this summer.

More OpenURL at Google Scholar

Google Scholar has opened up the ability to add OpenURL link resolvers to Scholar and have them automatically turned on based on campus IP address ranges. According to their blog post, over 100 academic libraries are already included, and the Support for Libraries help page at Scholar has more details. Most libraries should also check with their link resolver company who may be able to create the appropriate files to enable the links.