Assignment #22

I explored Webware and found a search engine called YoName which lets you search for people in FaceBook, MySpace, LinkedIn and a couple of other social networking sites. I found myself and a couple of friends in MySpace and FaceBook and a college friend on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a social networking site for adult professionals. Exploring Google Labs earlier in the week, I found a tool called Google Notebook. I think it will be very useful. I downloaded the browser extension so that I can keep the Notebook open while I search Web sites and work on my blog. I do most of my kcls27things assignments and work on my blog at home so I think it is very cool to keep my notes on the Web instead of on two computers.

The dog ate my homework

... and other excuses could be a thing of the past with Web-based office tools that allow users to create and save their work online. I hope our patrons are already using Google Documents and Spreadsheets or Zoho because these services are really user-friendly and they are good for the environment (less printing, no need for floppy disks). I plan to use these tools for collaborating on documents with other people in my department.

Google Mars was neat and I pitted certain authors against J.K. Rowling in Google Trends. Rowling garnered a healthy amount of interest compared to other authors in my research set.

I stumbled upon a road trip planning tool that seems like a rather nifty alternative for getting somewhere: http://trippish.com/

Rollyo Ho Me Hearties! Finding Buried Treasure with Custom Search Engines

I searched for rss in the KCLS & Neighbors Rollyo and Google Co-op custom search engines and the results could not have been more different. Try it yourself by selecting "KCLS & Neighbors" and typing "rss" in My Rollyo search box on my blog.

In Rollyo, Tacoma Public Library's RSS feed service dominated the search results while KCLS was absent from the results list.

In Google Custom Search Engine, the same search produced hits for KCLS, but none for Tacoma Public Library's RSS feed service.

Then I searched "interlibrary loan" and was happy to see the KCLS Interlibrary Loan Request Form at the top of the results list in Google Custom Search. However, SPL topped the result list in Rollyo. KCLS was the fourth result down.

If there were time, it would be interesting to study how the "search robots" work in both of these services. How do they harvest or tag website content for retrieval? What criteria do they use for sorting results?

What I like about this kind of service, at least in theory, is the ability to quickly extract pertinent data from websites that contain a lot of information, some of it buried, like treasure. That brings me to my own experiment with creating custom search engines.

I'm not certain that my Rollyo custom search engine for "Stargate Atlantis TV" is more helpful than doing a regular Google search but I found creating a search roll to be a remarkably satisfying kcls27things exercise.