April 2007 Archive

Book Searching Page Added

I've been meaning to add a page to help keep track of some of the book search engines -- those that search the full text of digitized books, not book store searches -- and now I have finally added a book searching page. You can also view my presentation on book searching that I gave last week at the Computers in Libraries 2007 conference in DC. I plan on expanding the analysis and trying some more in-depth comparisons of these tools in the future.

Google CSE Interview and Complaints

There's an interview today with the product leader for the Google Custom Search Engine (CSE). I always find numbers interesting:

We have more than 100K registered Custom Search Engines, and that's growing pretty rapidly.

(Although it will be far more interesting to see how many of these are getting any traffic several months from now.) Since I just put up my Customize Your Own Search Engine page and built a State Libraries: Custom Search page, I might as well mention a few of my complaints with Google's CSE.

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Customizing Search Engines and Searching State Libraries

For one of my upcoming columns in Online, I compared the various custom search engines and other tools for building a topical search engine from a subset of a major search engine's database. Tools like Gigablast Custom Topic Search, Google Custom Search Engine, Live Search Macros, Swickis, Rollyo, and Yahoo! Search Builder. I compared a number of features (including the maximum number of sites, whether they support subdirectories, and if they have usage statistics). This information can now be seen on my new Customize Your Own Search Engine page.

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