CIL2007 Wednesday - 30 Search Tips in 45 Minutes
April 19th, 2007Another session I attended during the day were Mary Ellen Bates’ “30 Search Tips in 45 Minutes,” and she wasn’t kidding. Mainly she pointed out relatively unknown or underused search tools, and some of the 30 were:
- Q&A websites - you post a question on a website and real people volunteer answers (i.e.: answers.yahoo.com, qna.live.com, askville)
- Quick Answers - ask a search engine a question and it will give you an answer instead of search results (i.e.: Ask.com’s Smart Answers, Google’s OneBox, MSN’s Instant Answers)
- search engines you can customize (Rollyo.com, Yahoo Search Builder, Google Coop)
- Kosmix.com - search engine with excellent topic clustering
- NationMaster.com - source for national statistics on world countries, with data from government sources
- Yahoo Mindset - search features a slider bar to weight results towards “shopping” or towards “research” [pretty neat]
- Ask.com’s Maps - gives both driving and walking directions, taking paths, walkways and topography into account
- Academic web searches (Google Scholar, Live Academic)
- Search engine comparison (Dogpile.com’s CompareSearchEngines -
- Google’s searchmash - search all Google engines, and results from each are expandable on a single page
- OneLook.com’s reverse dictionary - you type in a definition and it suggests words (i.e.- throwing someone out of a window
- answers.com - free search website that pulls in answers from many other web resources
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