This page contains all the student notes from the whole semester.
01 Introduction
by samoore (03 Sep 2008 16:04)
Someone is going to put their notes here.
Everyone will be able to see it.
And change as necessary.
02 Web Search
by bryblum (08 Sep 2008 20:24)
Class #2: Google is not enough!
This class is an overview of search - what is there to use other than google?
People look for information all the time - for class, for personal reasons, and in job searches.
Try Cha Cha! Text 242 242 and ask any question you want, and it will respond with the answer.
There has been a big trend in venture capital-backed mobile search programs.
Professor Moore loves to search for random, sometimes pointless pieces of information, like the height of college hockey coaches.
IBM says that by 2015, the amount of data will double every 11 hours - wild fact. Technology (hardware and software) is also increasing at an alarming rate.
What is knowledge? Knowledge used to be just knowing about something. These days, data is increasing so rapidly, that knowledge now means "the ability to learn and the ability to FIND as well". Hence, the importance of searching.
Big point of the semester: you will need many different tools to meet your diverse and changing data searching needs - we constantly need new searching tools!
Back in Professor Moore's day, you needed to talk to a librarian or someone else who knew what they were doing to find information. Nowadays, you can just type a random statement into Google and get what you need.
Changes over time:
- Then —> Now
- Experts —> You & Me
- Well-defined queries —> Ill-defined
- Thousands of documents —> Billions of documents
Search engine capabilities
What exactly does a search engine or search tool do?
- generates structured query results
- provides a way of exploring that structure (ex: google gives you 10 pages, you can click for more than 10 pages)
- helps you monitor changes in search results (ex: google can submit queries every day and tell you the changes in search results)
Categorizing search engines
- query terms (either "and" or "or", most search engines are default "and")
- search targets (HTML, addresses, images, blogs, PDF, books, video, maps, etc.)
- indexed information (information searched is the actual text in the document vs. information searched is the meta-information about the page)
Special search terms
Different search engines have special search terms and operators to search more specifically:
- + means that the word HAS to be in the document
- - means that the word CAN NOT be in the document
- * is a wildcard character
- " gives you the EXACT quote in the exact order
- intitle: gives you the documents that have the exact word in the TITLE of the document. Makes search results more specific.
- inurl: returns pages where the searched term is in the actual URL
- site: searches a specific website
Evaluating a search engine's performance
How do you evaluate a search engine's performance?
- Hope for overlap between the "relevant" search results (what you were looking for) and the "retrieved" search results (what you actually get back). Leaves you with 3 sub-sets: not retrieved but relevant (A), retrieved and relevant (B), and retrieved but not relevant (C).
- Recall = B / (A+B) —> want it to be as high as possible
- Precision = B / (B+C) —> want it to be as high as possible
- Recall and precision used to be equally as important. Nowdays, precision is much more important.
- Recall is impossible to calculate, since you would need to know how relevant the unretrieved documents are, which you don't have.
- Precision can be calculated, because you are looking through all the retrieved results.
- Google only cares about the top 3 search results. They don't have about the precision of the top 1000 documents, just the precision of the top 3. The first assignment will study the precision of different search engines in the top 20 search results. How many are relevant?
- Important point: relevance is VERY subjective and totally user-defined in the very moment he or she is searching.
Search process
How does the process of searching work?
- Person goes to search engine, enters a query
- Search engine goes to the searchable information (documents, meta-information, etc.)
- Search engine creates results for the user to look like
Differences among search engines
How do search engines differ from one another?
- different queries supported
- different types of automation
- content (pages, categories, paid links, etc.)
- format of results
- delivery form
- subset of web (target, quality of coverage, where the information comes from)
- searchable information (how frequently is it updated?
- search engine itself (quality of experience, quality of responsiveness)
Googling isn't always the right thing to do when searching for information! Students in this course will learn how to efficiently and effectively find the right information using the right tool.
04 Search Techniques And Strategies
by BrianHeM10 (16 Sep 2008 03:03)
Introduction
Everyday we search for information - the latest news, research data, random facts, etc. However, we continually struggle to find what we are looking for and search inefficiently, whether we are aware of it or not.
The goal of today's class was to introduce us to different techniques and strategies to help us use search tools more efficiently.
Search Tools and Operators
Simple Queries versus Phrases
- The most basic form of a search is a simple query, such as a word or group of words. Simple queries generally lead to an overabundance of irrelevantresults or relevant results hidden among thousands, sometimes millions, of retrieved sites.
- The first trick to improve our efficiency is to use phrases. Phrases are a combination of words within quotes that instruct search tools to focus on a set of specific words instead of independently searching for a group of words.
- Simple Query - Cheese, Crackers, Computer, etc
- Simple Query - Green Bay Packers (searches for Green, Bay, Packers, Green Bay, Bay Packers, Green Packers, and Green Bay Packers
- Phrase - "Cheese Crackers", "Green Bay Packers"
- How Google Interprets Queries
Operators
- Operators allow us to take a simple query or a phrase and turn it into an advanced query. The goal of operators are to give the searcher greater control over what is found and what is ignored.
- There are two types of operators: a) those that allow us to search for different parts of a website and b) those that allow us to turn the query into a formula.
Operator Type A - Site Attributes
- Operators that search for different site attributes give us to power to restrict search results to different elements of the website or website URL.
- Using these operators, we can further narrow down our search results if we have an idea of the site we are looking for.
- Note: You must not have spaces between the colon and the word(s) you are searching for. When using multiple words, enclose them in " " (discussed later).
- List of Operators
- intitle: (Searches for what's in the page title)
- intitle:Cheese
- intitle:"University of Michigan"
- inurl: (Searches for what's in the page URL)
- inurl:business
- inurl:wolverines
- site: (Searches for domain information)*
- site:wikipedia.org
- site:reviews.cnet.com
- filetype: (Searches for pages/documents with a specific extention)
- filetype:pdf
- filetype:xls
- intitle: (Searches for what's in the page title)
- Advanced Operators
- Important Notes About the site: Operator
- Only works if a high-level domain is included. Let's take bit330f08.wikidot.com for example. We can search for anything uses anyone of these three queries:
- site:com
- site:wikidot.com
- site:bit330f08.wikidot.com
- The site: operator works backwards, starting at a high-level domain (.com, .org, .net, .edu, etc) and can be used to search sub-domains that exist to the left of them. Thus, the following searches will not work:
- site:umich
- site:wikidot
- site:bit330
- Use the inurl: operator to search for any website (regardless of domain) that has your search words in it
- Only works if a high-level domain is included. Let's take bit330f08.wikidot.com for example. We can search for anything uses anyone of these three queries:
Operator Type B - Query Modifiers
- Operators that modify how Google processes the query
- Using these operators, we can create a variety of complex queries that take into considering and/or statements, synonymous words.
- The query modifiers we have learned so far include:
- + / AND (searches for word X & word Y)
- Cheese+Crackers
- Deep+Blue+Sea
- - (excludes word X)
- cheese -cheddar
- michigan -wolverines
- ~ (searches for X and synonyms of X)
- ~bug repellent
- ~fish tank
- | / OR (searches for Y or Y)
- turkey|chicken
- site:edu OR site:org
- * (adds a wild-card word)
- University of * (would look for University of Michigan, University of Alabama, etc)
- - (puts a place holder for dashes, spaces, or no spaces)
- ice-cream (looks for ice cream, ice-cream, and icecream)
- super-good (looks for super good, super-good, and supergood)
- + / AND (searches for word X & word Y)
- Crafting Search Queries Using Special Characters
Unique Phrases
- Unique phrases (and phrases in general) help narrow your search results by focusing on a linked group of words instead of processing each one independently.
- To use a phrase, put quotes (" " or ' ') around the words you want in a phrase.
- Search engines have built-in abilities to help you build good phrases or suggest ones based on what you are typing. The goal is to make queries as detailed as possible early on.
- Yahoo has Search Assist
- Google has Google Suggest
- Examples
- Bad- class on advanced mathematics
- Good- site:edu "~mathematics course" vectors|calculus|integrals
- Bad - Hannah Montana Lyrics
- Good - intitle:"Hannah Montana" lyrics "the bone dance"
- Google Guide for Selecting Search Terms
Searching for a Place
- Places can be pretty tricky if not searched for correctly. For example, if we are looking a list of restaurants in Ann Arbor, we don't want to be taken to a specific restaurants website or a review of a restaurant.
- Tips
- Use addresses, phone numbers, and zip codes when possible when searching for a specific place. This increases the chances of a "directory" type page.
- potbelly 48104
- pizza place 2024328384
- Use catch words like "review", "menu", or "directions" to get specific information about a restaurant
- Also use "official"
- Use addresses, phone numbers, and zip codes when possible when searching for a specific place. This increases the chances of a "directory" type page.
Think About the Different Ways Items Can Be Named
- Names of people and items can exist in many different ways. Be sure to account for this in your search queries.
- Example 1 - Names
- George Bush
- George W. Bush
- George Walker Bush
- Bush, George
- Bush, George W.
- Bush, George Walker
- Walker Bush, George
- W. Bush, George
- Example 2 - CPU
- CPU
- Central Processing Unit
- Processor
- Computer Processor
- Computer Processing Unit
05 More Search Techniques And Strategies
by schmidke (18 Sep 2008 05:20)
Introduction
Everyday people search for information - the latest news, research data, random facts, etc. However, they continually struggle to find what they are looking for and search inefficiently, whether they are aware of it or not. The goal of last class was to introduce you to different techniques and strategies to help you use search tools more efficiently. Today's class builds on this theme with more advanced web search techniques and strategies.
Long-Term Research Projects and Difficult Queries
More difficult Web queries like ones you might have for long-term research projects require another level of effort and analysis. There are additional tools and tips to help you optimize your web searches and find what you are looking for.
- Also remember that when doing in-depth research on a paper, project, etc., you should gather and save as much information as you can for your records and future use.
- Use information from search results, page characteristics, as well as other content.
- Find and record information like names, concepts, URLs, page titles, unique words, dates, places, facts, and whatever else stands out to you.
- One way to record this information and include links is to create and use a wiki site. Don't have a wiki site? Get one here.
- Students in BIT 330 are encouraged to use their personal wikidot page to do this, as it will save time and be quite beneficial when you are working on your term project.
Advanced Search Tools and Other Resources
Google Sets
- Sometimes finding a set of related nouns and unique names can help you find what you need.
- Google Sets is a great tool to use to help you do this.
- The web page for Google Sets can be found here.
- To use Google Sets, simply go to the Web page, type in nouns or things related to what you want to find in the text boxes. Then press the large set or small set icon to generate a list of related items.
- For example, if I want to know the names of other cities in Michigan, I enter the ones I know like "Ann Arbor," "Detroit," "Lansing," and "Flint," into the text boxes, then press the small or large set icon and get back a list like this:
- dearborn
- holland
- jackson
- battle creek
- bay city
- east lansing
- canton
- kalamazoo
- dearborn heights
- howell
- grand blanc
- and others…
Tools for Comparisons
- There are additional types of search queries you may want to use when looking for more information or if you are trying to make a comparison.
- Examples of some useful queries to use are:
- "types of X"
- "there are * types of X"
- "compared to X"
- "X vs." OR "X versus"
- The use of quotes ("") in your search query ensures that the search engines only returns web pages that contain this exact sequence of words.
- The use of a star (*) in your search query provides a "filler" so search engines don't exclude relevant web pages just because the website didn't have the exact phrase you entered in quotes.
- The use of the word OR in your search query makes it so the search engines return all web pages that contain either of the arguments you entered in quotes.
Resources to Use for Evaluation
You should always evaluate the potential validity and background of the Web page from which you get information. This ensures your sources are credible and all the data you gather is actually true. There are many areas you can use for evaluation:
- Location of Web page
- Speaker's or writer's identity
- Speaker's or writer's motivation
- General credibility of sources
- Speaker's or writer's history
- Speaker's or writer's reputation
These are additional resources you can use for evaluation:
- Evaluating information found on the Internet from Johns Hopkins University
- Information evaluation form from the Cal-Berkeley library.
Often times you read or see information on a web page or in everyday life and you wonder if its actually accurate or true. These are several helpful sites to use to check the accuracy of things you've read or heard:
- Snopes
- VMyths (good for computer-related myths)
- Urban Legends at About.com
06 Web Directories
by tmuir (24 Sep 2008 13:41)
Before class stuff
Advice for Assignment due 9/29
- Do it in pieces, look at it today, then again tomorrow and so on.
- There isn't really a "right" answer, only what the data says. Prof doesn't even know!
- There are two different things here:
- What the data says, statistically.
- What the data means, practically
Term Project
- Talk to Professor Moore about your topic, which is due next week 9/29
- It would be ill-advised to turn it in without doing so
- The more interested you are in your topic, the more rewarding the project will be. Both in terms of information and grade!
- Everything we do in class, you will probably find it useful to at least try it in doing your research
- Whether or not you actually find something interesting, DOCUMENT IT. You are trying to educate someone on how to do your job. It is useful to know that something is not useful.
- Two parts to the project
- What is the situation right now. The background information
- How to find information. Give your replacement the tools they need to stay up to date on the topic.
- The exercises may be helpful in helping you pick a topic by taking a cursory glance at what is out there about a potential topic.
Industry Updates
- Google updates can be found here
Lecture
Today in class what we talked about the "Use Others" branch in the what this class is about diagram.
Up until now we have been looking for specific pages people have put up on the net ourselves. What we haven't considered is this question: How can we use the intelligence of others to help us find important information.
Web Directory
A categorized set of resources.
It is a big tree of information.
Start with a very broad topic (Business and Economy) and then continue to pick sub topics, or branches, getting more and more specific until someone else says are good sites.
OR
Enter the topic that you are interested in, and the search results will be the different categories that are most pertinent to your search.
TERM PROJECT INFO BIT If you are just starting to do research on a topic, the Directories are a great place to start. They have already done the work for you! Someone else has already gone through and picked out the most pertinent sites that could be the most helpful to you.
How it Works
- First an author writes a document
- Then, for our purposes, we assume that he saves it electronically and posts it to the internet.
- The author writes a summary of his page and submits it to the directory page to be reviewed
- The summary is reviewed (and accepted) then it gets categorized and placed in the directory at the end of a branch.
Independent of this, regular search engines will probably spider your page in their traversing of the internet.
Why Use a Directory
- Ease of use
- How easy can I get to the information that I am looking for?
- People get involved
- The author has to write a summary and submit it to the directory
- Someone at the directory has to review said summary before it goes up, presumably keeping out bad sites and useless information
- Start a new search
- If you are not looking for a specific piece of information, starting in a web directory category can give you an idea of what specific information you may want
What directories are out there?
- dir.yahoo.com
- dmoz
- A sort of 'open source' directory. Run by people for people. Think of it as a cross between wikipedia and a directory
How Effective is it?
Refer back to the class schedule notes for some good examples on how using a directory instead of a regular search engine can narrow your search immediately.
Other Sources
Groups and Mailing lists
- Groups
- Mostly for getting questions answered. Not necessarily for research purposes.
- Less for finding information, than for getting information. Can't find an answer you are looking for? Find a related group and post your question, there's a good chance that someone will give you the answer you were looking for.
- Not usefully searchable, your question may be in one thread and your answer in a completely different.
- How it works:
- Someone comes up with an idea and names a group
- The group is hosted somewhere.
- This group gets indexed on a group directory
- Someone writes a message to the group
- If it is just a group, the message will just be posted on that site. If it is also a mailing list, then every member of the group will receive an email with the message as well.
- Again, in addition to being on the group directory it will also be scanned by search engine spiders.
This is how it works:
Glossaries
Glossary of terms for specific subjects that may have their own lingo. Again, see the schedule notes for examples of where to find them.
This is exactly what you think it is.
Assembled Pages of Links
Some people out there have assembled their resources on a topic. There are examples of how to find these in the schedule notes.
This tends to be sort of a grab bag of things that may or may not be helpful. Probably most useful if you happen to hit a dead end.
07 RSS Intro
by Caitd (24 Sep 2008 16:24)
RSS Intro:
- You need to do research
- How can you do it in the most time efficient way possible?
- Have the information come to you.
- How can you do it in the most time efficient way possible?
- HTML document: uses all the HTML tags, but can you tell by looking at the HTML document what the most important information is?
- RSS is a text-based, XML-based standard. Tells the meaning of each section of text. <title>, <description><p>…</description></p>
- RSS is an open, relatively mature standard developed for the purpose of tracking site updates.
- There are four standards: RSS0.9* RSS 1* RSS 2* Atom*
- All four do the same things. RSS is about tracking site changes
- There are four standards: RSS0.9* RSS 1* RSS 2* Atom*
How do RSS aggregators work? When might you see it being used?
- Many servers out there
- Your web browser connects you to the internet
- You can go to a site and check it everyday and check for changes.
- Very time consuming
- Or, you could sign up for RSS account from a site like Bloglines (RSS Aggregator) that will allow you to store the names of the sites you want it to check and it will check all the sites for you. All the RSS feeds are stored in one site.
RSS Standard > RSS Tools > Site Development > RSS Tools > Web Sites
RSS feeds have been around since 1995
- RSS-reader focused tools:
- Bloglines, Google, iGoogle, myYahoo, Rojo
- Rojo—this year does not exist anymore. Last year it was a great tool. These tools come and go. Do not get too tied in to any particular reader. You can export your feeds.
- Searchable subject indices of RSS feeds (with browsing)
- Searchable feed databases help you find what you need
RSS tools give you a way to multiply your own efforts! RSS helps you manage your attention!
09 News Search
by roopak (02 Oct 2008 07:45)
Introduction
Today we learned about half of what we’re getting out of this class!
Issue: Information on the internet is doubling every so many years largely because of developing news. This makes finding and monitoring news items overwhelming!
Action: Learn how to use specialized news search tools to monitor the news
Why is news search different?
Focus: news searches focus on mainly on accredited news sites (credibility is key!)
Priorities: Time and Place are of greater importance than with normal searches
Desired features: Response time, Relevance, Update speed, and Quality of sources
- About half of the tools on last year’s presentation no longer exist and about a third of this year’s tools didn’t exist last year. Many of the sites no longer exist because they lacked the money to keep up in update speed! (Not as stable as you would think.)
Most essential sort option: Time or date
- By the time you hear a story now, it’s usually already in the news searches.
- An example that demonstrates the importance of this sorting: A story about the bankruptcy of United Airlines came up as the first result five or six years after the fact and the stock dropped by something like 70%! (Can you imagine the lawsuits with that one?)
Special features: ranking/sorting, about location, RSS feeds, categories, photos
i.e. If you want to work for Target Corp., you can submit a query about Minneapolis (location of headquarters).
News Search Engines
Major Internet-based News Providers: Yahoo! News, Google News, and Altavista
Where to go:
- Local Newspapers —> Newsvoyager - allows you to find local newspapers from U.S., Canada, and college newspapers (not so up-to-date)
- Historical News —> Google News - free and great!
- International news —> World News - delivers breaking news from all over the world in 43 languages!
For more news search sources and print newspapers, go to the class notes page and look under "Resources."
11 The Deep Web
by thauck (08 Oct 2008 16:40)
Introduction
The Deep Web is also known as the “invisible web”. This means it is invisible to the general search engine. People also refer to this as the academic web, given the nature of the material that is often hidden. The Deep Web is much larger than the surface web (20-100 billion documents). There is something around 10 million documents in Google. There are 450,000 queryable databases; 7,500 Terabytes of data. What we want to be able to do is figure out how to access this data.
The standard web search resources provide us access to millions of documents, but students cannot access all of the high quality resources through Google and Yahoo.
Specialized Tools
We must learn to use specialized tools to gain access to some sources. The Google database gives us access to HTML pages, which is what Google can read. Google can’t read flash files, shockwave, etc… Google also cannot access documents that are accessed after filling out a form. Real time info and proprietary information also present problems for web search engines.
What we want out of these tools is to be able to do a search and not miss out on anything.
Google Scholar
Google Scholar is Google’s attempt at making the Deep Web searchable. This is actually pretty bad software. There are, however, a few highlights. Google Books allows for full text searches of books. There are also a significant amount of journal databases that have opened up their access to Google Scholar. This means full text of journals and books, not just excerpts, and in multiple languages. There are also library links.
Google does not tell us what journals and books are in and out of this tool and gives us no quantitative data about what can be accessed through Google Scholar. The search software is bad. Really, really bad. At one time, the most prevalent author on Google Scholar was “Password”. There are no specific fields for input in Google Scholar, which would be a good improvement.
Alternatives
During the class, we will be exploring the use of Turbo 10, Scirus, BNET, and Librarians’ Internet Index.
14 Page Monitors
by mlrossit (22 Oct 2008 23:32)
Class News
Before class, Prof. Moore mentioned that the “Yahoo guy” will be coming sometime during November to speak to the class. All you need to know about this guy is that he’s very nice and very loaded ($$). It should be an interesting class, so get excited! Also, you should check out the What This Class is About page (that page with the web-like diagram on it) to see where we’ve been so far and where we’re headed. We’ve covered a lot so far, but we still need to go over the “Specialized Tools” section. To see exactly what topics remain, take a look at the “rest of the schedule” section on the BIT 330 homepage (it’s located right under the schedule). Finally, check out Dylan Burkhardt’s update on Google and get ready for my update on image search for next class.
Quick Review of Last Class
Prof. Moore quickly ran through the two different types of email alerts: site-based & search-based. Site-based email alerts are most commonly used for websites that don’t have RSS feeds. Search-based email alerts would be used in the event that some information isn’t site-based. Page monitors, the topic of today’s class, are used when some information is too fine-grained to be covered by RSS feeds. Take a look at Prof. Moore’s notes and the following diagram to try and make sense of it all:
The Basics
Page monitors are programs, either downloadable or web-based, that download specific web pages in order to notify you what, if anything, has changed since the last download. Basically the program will download a specific URL, compare it to a previous copy of that same URL, and proceed to send you an email alert if there are differences between the two. Obviously you specify the URL to be tracked, but you can also set how often the page monitor checks for different versions (i.e. daily, weekly, monthly). Some page monitors simply notify you that a page has changed, while others will actually highlight the differences. Page monitors have been around for several years now and are pretty straight forward to use at this point.
One of the better page monitors out there is WatchThatPage.com. Of course this is an example of a web-based page monitor. WTP, like all page monitors, automatically tells you if a web page, or part of a webpage, has changed. WTP is particularly useful since you can have the results delivered by email, an RSS feed, or a web-based summary. Prof. Moore demonstrated some of the useful ways that WTP can be used:
- Track company press releases
- Track new job postings (i.e. Ross company database)
- Find out when a new product is released (i.e. new Canon camera at Best Buy)
- Track software updates (i.e. Microsoft Vista update page)
The opportunities are endless, so you should play around with page monitors in your spare time and see how they can make information-gathering more convenient for you. Just a reminder though, there’s really no point in using a page monitor if an RSS feed is available on a particular web page.
Pipes
Yahoo! Pipes is another interesting tool that Prof. Moore demonstrated to the class. According to Yahoo!, Pipes “is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.” Pipes can be used be to do the following:
- Combine many feeds into one, then sort, filter and translate it
- Geocode your favorite feeds and browse the items on an interactive map
- Power widgets/badges on your web site
- Grab the output of any Pipes as RSS, JSON, KML, and other formats
Using Pipes may seem complicated at a glance, but it’s really quite intuitive. Just remember that “fetch feed” is the URL(s) that you get the feed from and “union” connects these feeds. You can then subscribe from the Pipes output on Bloglines and the result will look like just like any other page.
18 Exploring Connections
by Hcflow (05 Nov 2008 19:38)
Extras…
Google speaker have been reached and have been scheduled for the 24th of November. He was good last year and is expected to be a good experience for the class.
Other News…
Purpose Of This Class…
- Find out where your website fits into the web.
- Find out a way to monitor your website.
- Find out how to make your site more search engine friendly.
You And Your Website…
Things To Note…
- Other websites have links in them (inlinks)
- A lot of in links are preferred (Provides more avenues to access a site)
- Yahoo Site Explorer and Google Search Engine are two places to test how to search for your site. (inlink:, site:)
- An RSS Feed (Feed Burner) will allow people to subscribe to your feed.
- You want as many as possible, while knowing information about the people (Monitoring is key to the success of a site).
Different Sites…
Google Web Search Engine
- Person searches a query and is linked to your site
- You want to know:
- How a person found your site
- Who found your site
Google Analytics
- Monitors the Google Search Engine and answers how people reach your site.
- Both McCain and Obama had great websites, Obama's website was more search engine friendly, thereby helping him win.
Yahoo Site Explorer
- Find out what pages are linked to a specific page.
- Can list all subdomain and domain links.
- Can explore six combinations:
- Inlinks From All Pages to Entire Site
- Inlinks from all pages Except from this subdomain
- Inlinks From All Pages to Only this URL
- Inlinks from all pages Except from this subdomain to Only this URL
- Inlinks from all pages Except from this domain to Entire Site
- Inlinks from all pages Except from this domain to Only this URL
- Other Options:
- linkdomain: random domain; shows what sites link to any page within this site.
- Type in a specific URL.
Google Search Tools
- Takes out similar pages (Click on similar pages to view them.)
- Different amount of links than yahoo.
- By using the same query as yahoo, Google searches the sites for that wording.
Google Analytics
- Set one up for your site (wikidot).
- See statistical information regarding your site:
- How they found it?
- How many, from where?
- Who found it?
- How long they stayed?
- How many times they visited?
- Traffic during a certain period, etc.
- Helps you to set up your site so people can find your site
- Can be used to help the traffic and popularity of your site
Go To This Site
- Click on Access Analytics
- Log In using your Gmail account name
- Click sign up
- Fill in the information
- Websites URL
- Account Name
- Time Zone Country
- Time Zone
- Click Continue
- Insert Your Contact Information
- Last Name
- First Name
- Phone Number
- Country
- Click Continue
- Click the Yes Box
- Edit Your Data Sharing Settings
- Click Create A New Account
- Click Continue
- New Tracking Code Example:
<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' > type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-6203770-1");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script>
- Legacy Tracking Code Example:
<script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
_uacct = "UA-6203770-1";
urchinTracker();
</script>
YOUR ACCOUNT HAS BEEN CREATED!
- From there you can do the following:
- Add Website Profile
- User Managers
- Filter Managers
- It also provides some helpful links on the side.
Thus far our wikidot sites are private so the tracking status will be unknown until we make the site public.
21 People Search notes
by laytosp (08 Feb 2009 20:11)
Today's class covered the different tools that can be utilized when you are searching for people. This category of search tools hasn't really settled. Just a big mass of tools out there. Some useful tools disappeared since last year. Many new tools have emerged this year.
General People Search
Google, Yahoo, Ask, Cluuz. Through Google you can use the special search syntax of phonebook:, which will search all phone listings. Also, you can narrow your search for either residential or business listings simply by adding a rphonebook: for residential and bphonebook: for business. This is all pretty neat stuff. All these tools apply to Yahoo, Ask, and Cluuz. Professor Moore provided an article that assists in defining your query for Google searches. This can be helpful if you aren't skilled in your query defining.
Through our quick research performed by our exercises we completed in class we found these general search engines to retrieve the most relevant results. Surprise, surprise.
Various People Search Engines
We then took a quick look at 15 different people search engines. To name a few:
We tried to figure out the different search engines to determine which one was better and of more use for us. Most of the databases provided standard searches, which are people search and phone number. Some of the information retrieved by the various sites was a little weird. For instance, iSearch provided a list of relatives.
Social Sites
Social site searches have come up big in recent years. linkedIn commonly used by professionals. Professor Moore noted that he uses it frequently. Most of the results retrieved for my query: "Paige Laytos" were my facebook account.
Specialized Searches
A lot of specialized tools: doctor finder, finding people's birthdays, and a military search.
Obituary Specific Sites
Obituary searches allow you to retrieve data on relatives that have passed away. The Obituary Daily Times is provided by a guy who enjoys obituaries. (Hmm…)
Today's Exercises
Today go through exercises and for each resource search for the same person all 19 times. After come up there and scribe whether you found them or not. Search then for you home phone and gather information which database is good. Currently there is no information out there as to which one is better, they all just say they are new.
22 Videos And Music Search
by Susan Kennedy (22 Nov 2008 17:38)
Administrative
- Be sure to check the lecture page, 22-Videos and music search, about the remaining dates of class. Remember that the last day of class is when your term project will be pretty much done and will be presented in class.
- The next class (Monday) is when the Google guest speaker will be there. PLEASE ATTEND! It promises to be one of the best classes of the semester :)
- Please don't use computers during Monday's class.
Industry Update
- Google update: Hernando (Hcflow)
- Last industry update of the semester!!
An Explanation of 'Academics'
Post Undergrad Tracks:
Undergrad ->Masters -> Industry
OR
Undergrad -> PhD -> Academics
If you decide to pursue a PhD, there are two different academic tracks:
- Tenure Track
- PhD -> Assist Prof (0-7 yrs) -> Associate Professor (Tenure—2-50 yrs) -> Full Professor
- Non Tenure-track no research
- Adjunnets
- Visitors Associated with another entity
- Clinical long term commitment, typically retired professionals
Our Professor, Scott Moore, is an associate Professor and is currently working on research related to auctions and posted price.
Lecture: Video and Music Search
Video Related Searches
Video search
Here are the video search tools we tried out. (YouTube is the only one that lets you upload videos.)
Even though these are ranked by popularity (see Top Ten Most Popular Video Sites (about.com)), definitely spend some time with the videos tools besides YouTube. I actually found Youtube to be the least helpful compared with the others for my research.
PodCasts
Podcast searches are generally less popular search tools. These are all niche-market sites that may have business or news that may or may not be useful to you.
- Pod-o-matic
- VideoSurf -> Be sure to read this article for videosurf
- Podcast Directory -> look at their search tool
- Podcast Alley
- Everyzing ->Make sure to look at their business podcasts
- iBizRadio
- Podcast Blaster ->check out their directory directory
- Podanza ->check out their business podcasts
- GetAPodcast
These two are ones that you would have heard of and are designed for general needs:
- iTunes
Again, these were ranked on popularity. But it really is worth your while to go through all of them because you would be surprised to find what would be most useful for your project.
Original Content Sites
Veoh, Hulu, Vuze (look at this review) Crackle, and Mevio are sites that focus on entertainment. You would find TV episodes, short films, satires, and creative projects at sites like these.
Music Related Searches
These searches may be slightly less relevant for your project, but will still be very fun.
Music Searches
These are general ways to going about finding music.
Firstly, you can use a general search engine, such as Google, and add [music:] before music related queries. Check out this article from class about searching for music for more details. Then, you can use "advanced options" within YouTube to serach for music. Here is another article about More advanced search options for YouTube to read if you prefer YouTube. Then there are some slightly less popular ways:
Yahoo Audio Search (click on "options" to be able to filter -> read this article for help), Altavista Audio Search and SkreemR. These are listed in order of popularity, which you are probably aware is not the strongest indicator of precision.
Searching Music Providers
These are sites that you can actually download music from (legally)
General Music Providers:
Niche Market Music Providers:
GarageBand ( Here is a review), Sideload,
Jogli (Here is a review), PureVolume (more Indie/Alternative) and
Pandora. Again, check them all out to see if these would would interest you. They might greatly diversify your music selection. I personally rely exclusively on iTunes and sometimes feel very limited. I am excited that there are more options out there than I realized.
Music blogs
These can be a great way to learn about new music that you are interested in without relying on your friends.
You can use The Hype Machine, which actually follows music blog discussions of general interest. Of you can search for specific blogs of your interest through blog search engines. Try Google Blog Search, Bloglines, Technorati, or Yahoo. As we have learned in class: virtually no blog search engines will return the same results. Therefore, the only way to find what you really are looking for is to use multiple blog search tools.
Exercises
After looking at Podcasts and Video searches, be sure to do the exercises. These are basically you ranking the sites based on what worked the best for you and your personal research. Note: the exercises do not rely dig into the Music-related search tools. This doesn't mean that they are not worth trying :)