This page contains all the daily schedule pages from the whole semester.
01-Introduction
by samoore (27 Sep 2008 15:01)
09/03/2008
Description of what the course is about, what we'll do in the class, why students should take it, why all their friends should take it.
My notes
- Introduce myself.
- Go through the class pitch
- At the end of the pitch have a discussion about the merits of the class, what they're thinking, what they think sounds good, what sounds confusing.
- My slides (slides at SlideShare)
- Take role; use the Photo Roster
- Course wiki
- Show it
- Everyone who is going to be in the class should join my site.
- Show them the main pages of the site: schedule, syllabus, assignments, discussion forum
- Discuss interesting parts of class from my perspective:
- practical
- class wiki (that is open, evolves, contains forum & blog)
- individualized learning
- project-centric
- your own wiki
- revised from last year (projects, due dates, reading)
- web-based almost completely
- lots of small tasks; can't fall behind
To do
- Sign up as WikiDot member
- Apply for membership to the BIT330 web site.
- Read the following pages in this wiki: schedule, syllabus, assignments.
- Look through the rest of the course wiki.
- Choose every menu item in the wiki and see what it gets you. Note that I didn't say you have to read everything in the wiki — just know what's here so that you can find it at the appropriate time.
- You'll definitely want to note the discussion forum in case you have any questions.
- Sign up for class notes or questions (as described on the assignments page).
- Sign up for search industry updates (as described on this page).
02-Web search
by samoore (13 Sep 2008 16:32)
09/08/2008
Discuss basics of Web search and why students should use multiple search tools (rather than just Google).
At beginning of class
- Take role.
- Convince someone to take notes and post them for today's class
- By now you should have done the following. This is not optional. This is not to do later. These sign-ups are due today.
- Become a WikiDot member
- Become a member of the the BIT330 web site
- Read through the major pages of the wiki and looked through the rest of it
- Don't forget that you can use the discussion forum to post questions
- You should have signed up for class notes or questions (as described on the assignments page)
- You should have signed up for search industry updates (as described on this page).
- The structure of today's class is going to be fairly standard for the rest of the semester:
- Start off with announcements and taking questions and comments.
- Lecture for a bit. This lecture will be something of an overview and will provide the motivation and background for the exercises that you will complete and the assignments that you will have to work on.
- Provide some time for you to start on your exercises (which will allow you to explore the specifics of the topic that my lecture introduces).
My notes
- Go through “At beginning of class”
- Make presentation with slides
- Go through the search syntax page
- Discuss the Search tool data assignment
- Show the schedule page and the assignments page
- Talk about blogging
- Point out the blogging guidelines page
- Point out the exercises for today; they should start working on these as soon as I'm done talking.
- Point out the “To do after class” section on this page
To do after class
- Finish the Web search exercises.
- Read the Web search overview.
- Read Life before Google.
- Start working on the Search tool data assignment. It's due in one week.
- You should be very, very familiar with the search syntax page by the next class
Resources
- Life before Google
- Search syntax — for both Google and Yahoo.
- Today's slides
03 Wiki Instruction Day
by samoore (13 Sep 2008 16:59)
09/10/2008
We'll go over techniques and tricks related to using this wiki, which will also be the host of your term project wiki.
At beginning of class
- See if there are any questions about the assignment that students got last class.
- Note that students should check the announcements on the Web site on Sunday evening, Tuesday evening, and Thursday evening. Shouldn't take more than a minute or two.
- Students have their next assignment today: Search tool overlap data. This is due a week from today. Explain the assignment.
My notes
- Today we're going to learn about wikidot, get an idea of how to use it, get more familiar with working with a wiki.
- Wikidot is the host of the course Web site, but it's also going to be the host of your term project Web site.
- You are a member of the course Web site, and you will be the administrator of your own term project site. This means that, while you have total and complete control over your own site, you also have the ability to edit and create pages (but not delete them) within this course Web site.
- I will expect that you will be a very good user of this wikidot site by the end of the semester. Maybe you won't be an expert, but you'll be able to make a wiki that is filled with properly formatted content and useful navigation.
- The exercises for today's class can be found here.
During and after today's class
- Complete all of today's exercises before next class.
- Think about what you might do for the term project.
- Next class you will turn in the first assignment.
Resources
- Videos and other resources about wikidot
- Today's exercises are here.
Questions posed during class
- What does the pound sign mean in the menu bar (top menu bar)?
- It means that the menu item cannot be followed — generally it's a menu header or divider.
- How do you delete pages?
- Use the "site options" button at the bottom of the page.
- How do you edit pages?
- Use the "edit" button at the bottom of the page.
- How do you list the pages on the site?
- Use the button on the side bar that says "List all pages".
- Can you have the top menu bar automatically update with the most recent blog entries (or whatever)?
- Yes, and you should look at the code I use to generate the "Announcements" on the first page, and then you would have to put this code in your nav:top page.
- How do you put an image hosted on mFile on your page?
- The instructions are discussed on this page.
04 Search Techniques And Strategies
by samoore (16 Sep 2008 20:00)
09/15/2008
We go over several standard search techniques and strategies.
Class structure
- Go through “At beginning of class” info
- Lecture through the slides.
- Talk through the examples
- Go through “At end of lecture”
At beginning of class
- Today's office hours are cancelled; I have to take my wife to the hospital for a CT scan.
- Check who is doing class notes for today
- If you have questions, please post them to the class's discussion forum; I check it frequently — much more frequently than I check email on the weekends.
- Students should go over announcements made since the previous class
- Collect assignments due today
- Remind about assignment due in the next class
- Your first possible blog entry (on today's exercises) could be turned in next class (see the schedule for details on the timing of blog entries)
- Sentence added to the Search Tool Data Analysis assignment: Proper use of statistical tests certainly would strengthen your arguments.
- Industry updates:
- Search industry update: Lesley's industry-update-9-15-2008
- Brian's Google update
My notes
- Special search syntax — This is the tool that you have at your disposal that allows you to target your searches on specific parts of documents. Since different text in different parts means different things and perform different functions, you can use these operators to raise the precision of your queries.
- Full text search engines
- Title — intitle:
- Site — site:
- Top-level domain — site:
- URL contents — inurl:
- Links — link:
- Full text search engines
- Unique words and phrases — The use of multiple unique words and phrases are a key both to reducing the number of documents that are retrieved and raising the precision of your queries. Further, using multiple words and phrases increases the chances of retrieving content-filled documents (that is, increasing the number of “meaty” documents).
- They can be used to focus in on more specialized pages that would use those terms
- Gather related words using summaries
- Use search engines to find related words
- Example at Ask.com (both “Narrow your search” and “Expand your search”)
- Google
- Google Suggest feature
- “Related searches” at bottom of search results window
- Yahoo
- Yahoo Search Assist feature
- “Also try” at top or bottom of search results window
- Yahoo Directory (we'll cover this in a future class) can point in the right direction
- Use means queries
- Query specificity
- Narrow to more general: this is when you have a real good idea of what you're looking for.
- More general to narrow: this is when you don't know what you're looking for.
- Alternative naming
- People
- Using different name forms can return different information
- Sometimes you have to use other information to differentiate two identically named people
- Also, search specifiers can help target the information (intitle, site type, include, exclude)
- Places
- Use addresses (streets, zips, area codes, phone numbers)
- Use "official"
- People
In-class examples
Special search syntax
- Tigers
- Tigers but not Detroit Tigers.
- Information from an organization
- Information from an organization or a government
- Information from a zoo
Unique words and phrases
- Bunch of birds example
- Use "means" and "definition" queries: Hydrocephalus
- Ask — hydrocephalus — look at "Narrow your search" and "Expand your search"
- Yahoo directory — hydrocephalus
- Google — hydrocephalus — 2.34 million documents (2.26 in 2007); note the "Refine results" part of the page. Also note the “definition” link near the top of the page.
- Google — hydrocephalus means — 385,000 documents (789,000 in 2007)
- Google — 'hydrocephalus means' — 844 documents (415 in 2007)
- Google — intitle:hydrocephalus (intitle:means OR intitle:definition) — 470 documents (200 in 2007)
- Google — 'hydrocephalus means' (site:edu OR site:org OR site:gov) — 44 documents (131 in 2007).
- Related words: Investment guidance
- investment guidance — 487,000 documents (4.48 million in 2007)
- 'investment guidance' — 82,800 documents (71,700 in 2007)
- investment guidance financial goals stocks bonds portfolio — 235,000 documents (1.62 million in 2007)
- 'investment guidance' financial goals stocks bonds portfolio — 13,100 documents (10,900 in 2007)
- Fun with quotes
- 'statistical analysis' means — 26 million documents (21.5 million in 2007)
- 'statistical analysis' 'means' — 4.73 million documents (7.04 million in 2007)
- Lyrics
- Google — 'big rock stars' nickelback lyrics 'we all just' 'drugs come cheap' — 34 lyrics (6 results in 2007, and they were all good)
Query specificity
- Dog breed information
- Google — dog breed cavalier king charles spaniel — 355,000 documents (888,000 in 2007)
- Google — dog breed 'cavalier king charles spaniel' — 890,000 documents (535,000 in 2007)
- Google — dog breed intitle:'cavalier king charles spaniel' — 26,200 documents (15,400 in 2007)
- Yahoo Directory — dog breed 'cavalier king charles spaniel' — 69 documents (same as in 2007)
- Dog breed disease information
- Google — 'cavalier king charles spaniel' 'heart problem' OR 'heart murmur' OR 'mitral valve' — 7,710 documents (22,900 in 2007)
- Google — intitle:'cavalier king charles spaniel' 'heart problem' OR 'heart murmur' OR 'mitral valve' — 250 documents
- Yahoo — dog breed 'cavalier king charles spaniel' 'heart problem'= — no documents
Alternative naming
People
- George Washington information
- 'George Washington' biography -site:com -'Carver' — this returns 1.22 million documents (1.06 million in 2007).
- intitle:'George Washington' biography -site:com -'Carver' — 218,000 documents (240,000 in 2007)
- "George Washington" biography -Carver': — one whole category on George Washington, plus 76 other categories (74 in 2007) that are related to this query.
- Stephen Hawking (as a name example)
- Stephen Hawking — 3.61 million documents (2.27 million in 2007)
- 'Stephen Hawking' — 3.86 million documents (2.12 million in 2007)
- Note that this makes no sense when compared with the previous result. At least not given my understanding of how Google should operate.
- intitle:'Stephen Hawking' — 61,300 documents (63,100 in 2007)
- intitle:"Stephen * Hawking" — 9,310 documents (9,190 in 2007)
- intitle:"Stephen * Hawking" OR intitle:"Stephen Hawking" — 62,900 documents (75,200 in 2007)
- "Hawking, Stephen" — 535,000 documents (241,000 in 2007) — library and books, mostly
- "Hawking, Stephen W." — 72,100 documents (53,200 in 2007) — again, library and books, mostly.
- "Hawking, Stephen William" — 20,400 documents (13,900 in 2007) — lots of encyclopedia type entries.
- Levi Strauss (since there are two/three of them)
- "Levi Strauss" — 3.97 million documents (2.24 in 2007)
- "Levi Strauss" -french -france -philosopher — 2.21 million documents (2.06 in 2007)
- intitle:"Levi Strauss" — 78,100 documents (68,200 in 2007)
- intitle:"Levi Strauss" -french -france -philosopher — 66,300 documents (53,700 in 2007)
- intitle:"Levi Strauss" (french OR france OR philosopher) — 9,680 documents (15,900 in 2007)
- intitle:"Levi Strauss" bavaria germany — 241 documents (48 in 2007)
- intitle:"Levi Strauss" claude (french OR france OR philosopher) — 1,160 documents (556 in 2007)
Places
- Pizza places in Ann Arbor
- pizza "ann arbor" — 1.19 million documents (887,000 in 2007). This brings up the following sites right at the top:
- pizza "ann arbor" william — 547,000 documents (629,000 in 2007)
- (734) 669-6973
- pizza 734 — 1.81 million documents (1.36 million in 2007)
- The Sears Tower (as a landmark)
- "sears tower" — 1.44 million documents (1.49 million in 2007)
- "sears tower" official — 1.11 million documents (257,000 in 2007)
- intitle:"sears tower" — 28,800 documents (19,000 in 2007)
- intitle:"sears tower" official — 28,700 documents (1,440 in 2007)
At end of lecture
- Start working on today's exercises. The exercises are on this page. You should work on them for no more than another hour outside of class; we will have more time in the next class after the lecture to continue working on them before going on to that day's exercises.
- If you are late turning in today's assignment, you still should go through the effort of posting the information to the results page — the analysis assignment that you will be doing depends on having this information.
- If you are going to write a blog related to today's exercises, be sure to review the blogging guidelines before doing so.
05 More Search Techniques And Strategies
by samoore (17 Sep 2008 18:44)
09/17/2008
We go through the exercises related to search techniques; we also discuss evaluating sources from the Web.
Class structure
- Go through “At beginning of class” information
- Lecture (but no slides today) going through “My notes”
- Work on exercises
- Finish the exercises from last class
- Then work through the exercises for this class
At beginning of class
- So, my wife has liver cancer. Either benign (hemangioma) or malignant. We don't know yet. We've voted for benign. She'll be having an MRI in the next couple of days (we hope). Just wanted you to know.
- You should know that I send email when I have something to say to a specific student between classes. For example, if I have a something to tell you about your assignment specifically or an upcoming industry update or whatever, I will send you an email. The email will have BIT330 at the beginning of the subject line. For this reason, you might want to check your email no less than every couple of days to see if you have an email from me. More than likely, you won't — but you might.
- If any of you wrote a blog entry, please turn it in now. Generally, if you have written a blog entry, just bring it up to the podium for me before class starts.
- Check who is doing class notes for today.
- Check who is doing the Industry updates for next class.
- Students should go over announcements made since the previous class.
- Content update:
- We now have some information on the notes page and questions page. Even if people are not signed up for specific days on the class notes page, I would still recommend that you post notes and questions. The more good information that is on these pages, the more that I will be able to use this information on the tests, and the better that you will do on the test — as opposed to me coming up with some random, poorly-worded question that you have to guess on.
- Collect the assignment due today.
- I have significantly updated the write-up of the next assignment. It is due on September 29. Do not start working on this yet. The data still needs to be cleaned up a little bit. I will make an announcement on the wiki when the data is ready. Further, I will post an Excel spreadsheet containing the data.
- You should be thinking about the topic for your term project.
- Be sure to read the description of the assignment.
- Also look at the list of industry sectors that you might select.
- On day 8, which is September 29, you are turning in the first status report for your term project. On that date, you need to have decided on the topic, you need to have discussed your topic with me, described the topic on the start page of your wiki, and updated your information (that is, indicated the title of your wiki) on the class wiki's list of student wikis.
- Another note for your term project. Your term project reports will include a section on information sources (as we will discuss today). Part of this will be an evaluation of the quality of the information sources that you identified. You will want to describe how you evaluate the sources, and indicate on the report your evaluation of each one of them. This will not be a separate deliverable but should be integrated into the final report.
- There are so many blog opportunities from these two classes (i.e., today and Monday). If you want to blog on both classes, you don't have to choose something from “last class” and then something from “this class”. These are both the same topic; you can use any two things you want to blog on from both classes. It doesn't matter if they were the same or different days. (Again, you don't have to blog today, or last class. But you'll have to blog sometime, and you might as well start sooner rather than later.)
- Questions about any or all of this?
- Industry updates
- Yahoo update: Jennifer
- Google update: Roopak
- Demonstrate proper formatting of a wiki document
- Also point out proper naming of a document
My notes
Discussion
- Long term research projects, or more difficult queries, require another level of effort and analysis.
- Gather and save as much information as you can.
- Use information from the search results, page characteristics, and contents of the results pages.
- Look for names, contents, concepts, URLs, page titles, unique words, dates, places, facts, etc.
- Create a wiki site to keep information and links.
- Use information from the search results, page characteristics, and contents of the results pages.
- Sometimes finding a set of related nouns and unique names can help you find what you need.
- Use Google Sets
- Use the queries ["type of X"], ["there are * types of X"], ["compared to X"], ["X vs." OR "X versus"]
- Gather and save as much information as you can.
- Evaluate the potential validity of the Web page from which you get information.
- Facets to evaluation
- Location of the page
- Speaker's identity
- Speaker's motivation
- Credibility of sources
- Speaker's history
- Speaker's reputation
- Facets to evaluation
In-class examples
Candy bars
- Use of Google Sets
- Google Sets on twix, snickers, butterfinger, "baby ruth", "tootsie roll"
- twix "tootsie roll" butterfinger "baby ruth" snickers "almond joy" skittles starburst "milky way" "kit kat" twizzlers "nestle crunch" "clark bar" — 22 documents
Types of things
Resources
- Sites to use for evaluation
- Resources to use for evaluation
- Evaluating information found on the Internet from Johns Hopkins University
- Information evaluation form from the Cal-Berkeley library.
06 Web Directories
by samoore (28 Sep 2008 02:29)
09/22/2008
While focusing on Web directories, we learn about several different ways of using the work of others to help find information on the Web.
Class structure
- Go through “At beginning of class” information
- You should read the “On your own” stuff even though I'm not going to discuss them
- Lecture. This will involve
- Constructing the diagram
- Constructing the flow diagrams for
- Mailing lists and groups
- Web directories
- Work on exercises
At beginning of class
On your own
- Before this class you should have already finished the exercises from last class (and all previous classes)
- If any of you wrote a blog entry, please turn it in now. Generally, if you have written a blog entry, just bring it up to the podium for me before class starts.
- Check who is doing class notes for today.
- Check who is doing the Industry updates for next class.
- You should be thinking about the topic for your term project. I have only met with one student about his topic so far.
- Be sure to read the description of the assignment.
- Also look at the list of industry sectors that you might select.
- On day 8, which is September 29, you are turning in the first status report for your term project. On that date, you need to have decided on the topic, you need to have discussed your topic with me, described the topic on the start page of your wiki, and updated your information (that is, indicated the title of your wiki) on the class wiki's list of student wikis.
I'll go over with them
- Go over announcements made since the previous class.
- Return the assignment.
- Return the blogs from last class.
- You can start working on the next assignment. It is due on September 29.
- Industry updates
- Google update: Paige Laytos
My notes: Using the work of others
- Web directories
- Defining characteristics
- Defined categories of topics (ex: Yahoo Directory's categories)
- Categorized sites
- Browse or search
- Searching differs from full text search: should think about query terms as defining a class of results, not a specific result
- Role it fulfills
- Allows an organization to gather, collect, and organize Web resources in an organized hierarchy. Keeps a user from having to search through the whole Web to find the best resources.
- Examples
- Defining characteristics
- Groups & Mailing lists
- Defining characteristics
- Messages between users sent over a period of time
- Email might be involved (or it might not!)
- Descriptions are searchable
- But messages are only searchable sometimes
- Searching descriptions is like searching a web Directory
- Searching messages is a very strange, inexact process
- Role it fulfills
- Very up-to-date, highly personalized information in the messages
- As searchable information, it's not so great, but as a resource for yourself, it's invaluable
- Very up-to-date, highly personalized information in the messages
- How to locate: Either through group directories, mailing list services, web directories, or full text search engines
- Examples
- Defining characteristics
- Glossaries, dictionaries, & encyclopedias
- Defining characteristics
- Definitions of a set of related terms
- A company, an organization or a person might assemble these
- Role it fulfills
- Helps you get familiar with a topic area more quickly than otherwise
- How to locate
- Use specialized search process in a full text search engine
- There are also a few collections of these documents
- Examples
- Defining characteristics
- Assembled pages of links
- Defining characteristics
- An evolving set of links that a person or organization has gathered on a specific topic
- Role it fulfills
- Allows an organization or person to share its expertise
- How to locate
- Use specialized search process in a full text search engine
- Examples
- Defining characteristics
In-class examples
Full-text versus Web directory
Hemangioma
- Google: liver hemangioma — 413,000 results results
- Yahoo: liver hemangioma — 86,800 results
- Yahoo directory: liver hemangioma — 1 related category, and one URL
- DMOZ directory: hemangioma — 2 categories, 3 URLs
- But no results for [liver hemangioma]
Stephen Hawking
- Google: intitle:"Stephen Hawking" OR intitle:"Stephen * Hawking" — 64,000 results
- Yahoo: intitle:"Stephen Hawking" OR intitle:"Stephen * Hawking" — 191,000 results
- Yahoo Directory: intitle:"Stephen Hawking" OR intitle:"Stephen * Hawking" — 3 categories, and 6 URLs
- DMOZ directory: Stephen Hawking — 5 categories, and 32 URLs
Investment guidance
- Google: "investment guidance" — 80,300 results
- Yahoo: "investment guidance" — 171,000 results
- Yahoo Directory: "investment guidance" — 11 categories, and 6 URLs
- DMOZ directory: "investment guidance" — 4 categories, and 4 URLs
Groups & mailing lists: Behavioral finance
- Yahoo Groups
- Behavioral finance — 112 groups
- But there are 0 results for ["behavioral finance"]
- Google Groups
- Behavioral finance at Google Groups — 10 groups (note how they're segmented at the top) plus 5,560 messages
- "behavioral finance" at Google Groups — 3 groups plus 4,380 messages
- Behavioral finance at The Mail Archive — 35 messages
Directories
Behavioral finance
- behavioral finance at Yahoo Directory — 84 categories, plus 196 individual URLs
- Behavioral finance at DMOZ — 3 categories (not good matches) and 4 sites
- No results at Mahalo
- No results at Alltop
Market research in the consumer packaged goods industry
- Yahoo Directory
- market research consumer packaged goods industry at Yahoo Directory — 45 categories plus 53 individual sites
- "market research" "consumer packaged goods" industry — 4 categories plus 7 individual sites
- dmoz
- market research consumer packaged goods — 2 categories, plus 2 individual sites
- "market research" "consumer packaged goods" industry — no results
- Mahalo — no results
- Alltop — no results
Glossaries
Look at The Glossarist, eGlossary, and Frank Dietz's Glossary Listing.
Links, directories, resources, and what's new: Investment guidance
- investment guidance links — 349,000 documents (1.77 million in 2007)
- 'investment guidance' links — 15,300 documents (18,000 in 2007)
- intitle:'investment guidance' links — 155 documents (125 in 2007)
- intitle:'investment guidance' directory — 11 documents (10 in 2007)
- intitle:'investment guidance' resources — 90 documents (86 in 2007)
- intitle:"investment guidance" "what's new" — 3 documents (5 in 2007)
- intitle:'investment guidance' (links OR directory OR resources OR 'what's new') — 146 documents (143 in 2007)
- intitle:"investment guidance" (intitle:links OR intitle:directory OR intitle:resources OR intitle:"what's new") — 9 documents
Resources
- Directories
- Groups
- Yahoo Groups
- Google Groups — more than 1 billion Usenet messages over 25 years
- Usenet timeline
- What is Usenet? (Part 1, Part 2)
- Google Groups Help Center
- Glossaries and dictionaries
- The Glossarist — dictionary of glossaries.
- eGlossary — can't find out when this was updated.
- Frank Dietz's Glossary Listing — strange, but it's good
- Information.Org's listings for Glossaries
- Google Directory Listing of Dictionaries
- Yahoo Directory Listing of Dictionaries
- Law.com Legal Dictionary
- TechWeb Encyclopedia
- Webopedia — computer & Internet technology definitions
- Email lists
- Mail Archive — archive of 9000 (4840 in 2007) mailing lists, containing 57.2 million (48.5 in 2007) messages.
- Tile.net — the reference guide to email newsletters & discussion lists
- Topica appears to have changed their focus. They certainly don't advertise that they have than email discussion list directory — - but they do. You can search either the list description or the messages themselves.
07 RSS Intro
by samoore (27 Oct 2008 23:17)
09/24/2008
We are going to introduce the topic of RSS feeds.
Class structure
- Go through “At beginning of class” information
- Go through slides for RSS Intro lecture.
- Demonstrate bloglines.
- Work on exercises.
At beginning of class
On your own
- You should go to the SiteMaker page for this class.
- Enter your personal information under "Student".
- If you have completed a wiki-based assignment (blog entry, industry update, notes, or questions), then enter that information under "Add Wiki Assignment".
- Do this now.
- Be sure to read the announcement about extended office hours that I'm holding to discuss your term project topics.
- Go over any other announcements you might have missed since last class.
- Check who is doing class notes for today.
- Check who is doing industry updates for next class.
- I will return blogs next class. Why? Two reasons: 1) I want to have more turned in before I assign these grades. 2) I want you to have entered this information into SiteMaker so that I can test the grade recording process.
I'll go over
- What this class should be like so far
- Any questions about this class so far this semester? Where we're going? Anything at all?
- Next class you'll be turning in the search tool data analysis assignment.
- Next class your first status report for the term project is due. You will not be turning anything in on this date. However, you will need to update your SiteMaker page and the list of student wikis.
- Industry updates: No one signed up for one, so I'll do it.
My notes
The Internet is changing all of the time. New resources are being added at a phenomenal pace in millions of different sites. You can't keep up with everything on your own. You need help.
It's all about getting computers to work for you, to work while you're not using it. Use the computer to search through information so you don't have to. Use the computer to deliver information to your email inbox or to a specific Web page so you don't have to go get it. You don't have to remember to do the query.
You still have to define the search. You probably have to spend more time up-front when defining the query.
- RSS
- What it stands for
- Really Simple Syndication
- Rich Site Summary
- RDF Site Summary
- RSS is an application of XML.
- RSS is an open definition so anyone can use it.
- RSS is a standard widely adopted by millions of Web sites
- If you have a Web site that is updated relatively frequently, it makes sense to put these updates into an RSS feed.
- What it stands for
- Compare HTML and XML
- For our purposes, what are the benefits of XML (and, hence, RSS)
- Can easily be translated into HTML for display purposes
- Can specify "fields" that can be searched
- So, what does this mean for RSS?
- RSS a common representation for lots of databases and lots of Web sites
- This common representation means lots of tools can be specially written to work with that standard (send it, search it, slice it, dice it)
- So, what does this mean for you?
- Saved time
- Saved attention
- Classes of RSS feeds
- Blogs
- Newspaper articles
- Online feed readers
- Why not feed reader application?
- Where can you find RSS feeds
- In RSS feed directories (with search)
- In searchable subject indices of RSS feeds (with browsing)
- On RSS-enabled Web pages
- Created keyword-based feeds at search engines
- Types of RSS feeds
- Static feeds
- Keyword-based feeds
Resources
Online feed readers
Where can you find RSS feeds
- In RSS feed database (with search)
- In searchable subject indices of RSS feeds (with browsing)
- Yahoo Directory — RSS feeds of updates to specific Yahoo Directory categories
- Syndic8 — a directory of RSS feeds
- NewsIsFree — directory of RSS feeds
- RSS Network
- Financial Investing RSS feeds
- On RSS-enabled Web pages
- Created keyword-based feeds at search engines
- NewsIsFree (paid)
RSS feeds from Wikidot
08 RSS Lab
by samoore (29 Sep 2008 15:01)
09/29/2008
We are going to work through more exercises allowing you to explore RSS feeds and related tools.
Class structure
- Go through “At beginning of class” information
- No lecture today.
- Work on exercises.
At beginning of class
On your own
- Check who is doing class notes for today — and change your sign-up date. We're not going to have any lecture today so there's nothing for you to write about. Sorry!
- Bring your print out of the search tool data analysis assignment to me at the podium.
- I do not yet have a key to this assignment. I don't know what the answer is. I hope to discuss this next class.
- Go to your grades on the SiteMaker page.
- I have added a menu choice “Basics/Grades” that allows you to access your grades from anywhere within this wiki.
- From the SiteMaker grade page, do the following:
- Choose “Add Grade Record” and then input (and save) your uniqname.
- Within a couple of days I will input your assignment grades (from the data gathering assignments) here so that you can see them.
- Add your analysis assignment under the “Add Wiki Assignment” menu choice.
- Choose “Add Grade Record” and then input (and save) your uniqname.
- I have not yet graded industry reports, notes, or questions. I will have these graded by next class.
- You can check to see if I have recorded any grades for you on the SiteMaker page.
- All blog entries, industry updates, notes, and questions are points out of 10.
- I have several printed blogs for which you have not entered information yet.
- A “9” grade on a blog is what I would call a “normal, high-quality, well-written, informative blog entry.” A “10” means that you exceeded this standard. Your entry was somehow more informative, more insightful, more engaging (don't discount this — I very much welcome reading an interesting well-written entry with a good story integrated into it) than my expectations.
- If you get a “10” on a blog entry, I want you to copy your blog entry from your wiki to my wiki. Create a page with the same name (i.e., “blog:XXX”) but it should be in the class blog. Do this as soon as you see your grade. Thanks.
- I thoroughly enjoyed meeting with most of you last week and discussing your term projects. I'll be checking your wiki home page in the version as of the beginning of class.
- Go over any other announcements you might have missed since last class.
- Check who is doing industry updates for next class.
- Check the start page for any blogs you might be interested in that you might have missed.
- From now on you don't have to “turn in” blogs with a piece of paper. You simply need to record the page within the SiteMaker page. I will be able to see that the page doesn't have a grade and will grade it (with a goal of the next class for the rest of the semester).
I'll go over
- A little feedback about this class compared to last year
- Feedback about blogs
- it's versus its
- inurl versus site
- good examples posted
- Upcoming assignments
- blogs (8 total; 4 by fall break; be sure to refer to this page of blogging guidelines)
- exam (in many weeks)
- term project (2 more mid-term status reports; one coming up in 2 more weeks)
- Industry updates
- Google update: Tim Muir
09 News Search
by samoore (14 Oct 2008 02:19)
10/01/2008
We learn about the major news search tools, as well as how to integrate them with your knowledge of RSS.
Class structure
- Go through “At beginning of class” information
- I'll lecture for a bit (using some slides).
- Work on exercises.
At beginning of class
On your own
- Be sure to have all of your information entered under “Basic/Grades”. Otherwise, I can't record your grades!
- Do not leave class today if your information is not entered into the SiteMaker site.
- Personal
- My wife's MRI came back with less-than-encouraging news.
- She now has a biopsy scheduled for next Monday during class. I should be with her.
- So we're not having class next Monday.
- Check who is doing class notes for today. I had to change this a bit for this class and next Monday because of the previous item.
- Assignments
- Because of the turmoil of yesterday in my family, I didn't get much grading done.
- I hope to have more graded soon.
- I hope to discuss the search tool data analysis assignment next class.
- Go over any other announcements you might have missed since last class.
- Check the start page for any blogs you might be interested in that you might have missed.
- From now on you don't have to “turn in” blogs with a piece of paper. You simply need to record the page within the SiteMaker page. I will be able to see that the page doesn't have a grade and will grade it (with a goal of the next class for the rest of the semester).
I'll go over
- Let's look over the upcoming industry updates.
- A little feedback about this class compared to last year
- Industry updates
- None today
Resources
News search
- General news search
- Historical
- Google News Archive Search
- Newspaper Archive (requires paid subscription)
- International
- Local newspapers
Print newspapers
- Can Newspapers Be Saved? Part 1, Part 2
- Bringing history online one newspaper at a time
11 The Deep Web
by samoore (14 Oct 2008 02:18)
10/08/2008
We learn what the deep Web is and why we need to care about it.
Class structure
- Go through “At beginning of class” information
- I'll lecture for a bit (using some slides).
- Work on exercises.
At beginning of class
- My wife's biopsy went well. We'll find out the results by no later than Monday (or so we're told).
- Thank you for your kind words of support.
- Check your wiki grades. If you got a 10, please be sure to add the blog to the class wiki.
- Be sure to have all of your information entered under “Basic/Grades”. Otherwise, I can't record your grades!
- Don't forget — this is how you “turn in” your assignments.
- Blog entries
- to/too
- choose/chose (lose/loose)
- definitely/definately/defiantly
- Check who is doing class notes for today.
- I'm working on grading and recording. I'm about half way through grading your analysis assignments.
- This is my write-up of the analysis assignment.
- Industry updates
- Google update: Susan Kennedy Susan Kennedy
My notes
- General Web search
- Suggests that all information can be searched within one system
- Easy and self-explanatory
- Has only a limited understanding of "structure"
- The Invisible Web
- "Invisible" to the general search engines since they don't index it
- You'll hear about the "Invisible Web" or the "Deep Web" — same thing
- Pages that are invisible
- Disconnected page
- Page consisting primarily of images, audio, video
- Flash, Shockwave, compressed files
- Content retrieved as a result of filling out forms
- Real time information (ex: stock quotes)
- Pages that are proprietary
- Significance of the Invisible Web
- Bergman's widely-cited statistic is that there are 550 billion documents in the invisible Web
- Others believe it's more like 20-100 billion
- Estimated that there's about 300K Web sites with queryable databases
- Bergman's widely-cited statistic is that there are 550 billion documents in the invisible Web
- Academic Web-based search
- More academic content is moving to the Web exclusively
- Part of general trend from print to electronic
- Much of this is contained in the Invisible Web
- Explain how search engines work
- General
- Crawlers go out and send information back to the central database
- Queries go against the central database
- SE company expertise is in design of the index and design of the query process (including input interface and output formatting and reporting)
- Academic
- Crawlers go out, find a database, and what? Index the query interface page? Send some standard queries to the index and save the results?
- General
- Should you consider using Google Scholar?
- Pros
- A cross-database (federated) search engine
- Returns snippets from articles (and sometimes abstracts)
- Indexes the full text (actually, part of the full text) and not just the abstracts and subject terms
- Can link to your own school's library
- Cons
- Secretive about its coverage of specific publishers, journals
- Limits it searches to the first 100-120K of a page
- Hasn't been updated much (at all?) since its launch
- Returns far fewer documents than the native search engines
- Searching by field is fairly unreliable and counter-productive
- Pros
- What do we want from an academic search engine?
- Comprehensive
- Contains lots of journals over lots of topics
- Goes far back in time
- Up-to-date
- Integrated across databases
- Integrated into a database
- Transparent as to what it contains or doesn't contain
- Comprehensive
- Recommendation
- Use Google Scholar
- as a way to find free, online versions of articles you already know you want
- like you use Wikipedia — as a good starting place for exploring
- Use the other Deep Web search tools — Scirus, Turbo10, plus the LII.
- To do a complete search, you should definitely talk to a librarian and use the Library's immense set of resources.
- Use Google Scholar
In-class exercises
- Google Scholar
- Basics
- intitle:"carbon trading" — 271 citations
- Cited by
- Referenced by (under “Related articles”)
- Web search
- Availability at UM library
- intitle:"carbon trading" — 271 citations
- Weird logic
- Subject groups
- intitle:Vietnamese — 9,690 records
- allintitle:Vietnam — 816,000 records (all subject areas)
- Shockingly, as you will soon see, intitle:Vietnam returns the exact same results (which it should).
- allintitle:Vietnam — 29,100 records (with all of the subject areas checked)
- allintitle: Vietnam OR Vietnamese — 104,000 records (notice that this is less than the 816,000 found for Vietnam alone above)
- intitle:Vietnamese OR intitle:Vietnam — 105,000 records (this is less than the 816,000 found for Vietnam alone above)
- allintitle: Vietnam OR Vietnamese — 141,000 records (with all of the subject areas checked)
- intitle:Vietnam OR intitle:Vietnamese — 27,900 records (with all of the subject areas checked); this should be exactly the same as the previous query.
- Publication year strangeness
- allintitle: Vietnam OR Vietnamese 1435-2008 — 151,000 records
- allintitle: Vietnam OR Vietnamese 1960-2008 — 152,000 records
- allintitle: Vietnam OR Vietnamese 2010-2050 — 12 records
- Basics
- Scirus
- title:carbon AND title:trading (market) — 560 hits
- Ability to filter on the left (sources, file types)
- Recommendations of refining your search on the left
- Save or email the results.
- Sort by relevance or date.
- Similar results
- title:carbon AND title:trading (market) — 560 hits
- Turbo10
- Search for [carbon trading] at Turbo10.
- Topic clusters
- Engines
- Search for [carbon trading] at Turbo10.
- BNet
- carbon trading
- Content types to right
- RSS feeds
- carbon trading
Possible blog entries
There are two possible blog entries related to this class — you can write one, both or neither of these. But I would find these interesting.
- Write a blog entry on what you observed, what you learned and found interesting, focusing on information that other students might find useful.
- Go talk to a Ross librarian. Tell them your topic and ask what 3 to 5 databases or tools that you might find most useful given that topic. See what databases they might tell you to focus on. Use them for a while. By the end of the semester, write a blog entry describing how the information you find in these databases differs from what you would find in the Web at large or what you found in the Deep Web search tools we were introduced to above.
BTW, I would find it rather remarkable if you didn't have in your term project a section or group of resources or something related to information a person could get in a library's database (compared with Deep Web and the Web itself).
Resources
Search tools
- Scirus
- About Scirus: provides a ton of useful details about Scirus.
- Peter's Digital Reference Shelf: Scirus
- Google Scholar
- About Google Scholar
- Native search engines vs. Google Scholar
- Redux Peter's Digital Reference Shelf: Google Scholar — basically a scathing review of Google Scholar.
- Google still not indexing hidden Web URLs by Hagedorn and Santelli, D-Lib Magazine, 14:7/8, July/August 2008.
- CompletePlanet — 70K databases (but appears to be dead!)
- Amazon Advanced Book Search — Yes, I am including Amazon, the book seller, on this list.
- University of Michigan Library
- InfoMine (UCal, Riverside)
- Librarian's Internet Index
- Overview: describes who they are, what they do, and what you might expect to get from looking at their site.
- Directory of Open Access Journals — 1262 journals are searchable at the article level, 211,294 articles.
- Turbo10
- Directory of Open Access Journals
- Microsoft Live Search Academic — closed down in May 2008.
Articles
- Accessing the Deep Web
- Exploring the academic invisible Web
- Google Scholar revisited by Peter Jascso, Online Information Review, 32:1, 2008, pp. 102—114.
- The Deep Web: Surfacing hidden value
- As summarized by the editor of The Journal of Electronic Publishing: "Michael K. Bergman, whose BrightPlanet company offers a new approach to search engines, examines the wealth of information that is available only on dynamically created Web sites, those that don't exist except as relational databases until someone seeks information from them. As more sites adopt the dynamic approach to pages, they are creating a challenge for standard search engines. This article looks at some alternatives."
- Search engine technology and digital libraries: Libraries need to discover the academic internet
- Google Scholar -- a new data source for citation analysis, by Anne-Wil Harzing, February 5, 2008 (7th version).
E-books
- Google Book Search
- Project Gutenberg
- American Memory (by the U.S. Library of Congress)
- Million Book Project
- Google Electronic Text Archives
Other
- BrightPlanet
- Academic databases and search engines (wikipedia)
- Other databases of interest
- Science.gov
- Medline Cognition
- PubMed
- Infovell — the Deep Web of Life Sciences.
12 Project Day
by samoore (13 Oct 2008 15:29)
10/12/2008
We are going to discuss the term project.
At beginning of class
- I will pass the analysis write-up assignments back.
- You should check your grade records. I have entered your grades for almost all of the blogs, for the first data assignment, and for the analysis assignment.
- The following students do not have grade records. Show them what to do:
- Roopak
- Hernando
- Bryan
- Short notes about your writing:
- separated/seperated
- cite/site
- your/you're
- digits of precision
- [query delimiters]
- Notes about search write-up
- relevancy
- meta-search engine
- Additional research topics (for search engine experiment)
- Relevance of top 5/10/20
- Overlap of relevant in top 5/10/20
Analysis assignment information
Descriptive statistics
- Average: 83.6
- Median: 84
- Standard deviation: 11.2
Distribution of grades
5 |0
6 |
7 |68
8 |003335577
9 |026
10|2
Grading methodology
- Questions & queries
- you got 10 points if you showed both your questions and queries
- Data that I collected
- you got 10 points if you showed all of the data
- Results
- There are 40 possible points here.
- No statistics: 5 pts/ up to 10 points if discussion is good.
- Mean information: 15 pts/ up to 20 points if discussion is good.
- Spread information (i.e., s.d.): 25 pts/ up to 30 points if discussion is good.
- hypothesis testing: 35 pts/ up to 40 points if discussion is good.
- Discussion
- There are 40 possible points here. I looked for responses related to meaning, recommendations, learning, and further questions. I read everyone's responses, and grouped like responses together while ranking them. I then assigned points from 15 to 37 depending on the relative quality and completeness of your responses.
13 Email Alerts
by samoore (07 Nov 2008 23:53)
10/15/2008
We are going to discuss the different types of email alerts, how to find them, and how to generate them yourself.
Class structure
- Go through “At beginning of class” information
- Go through diagram explaining email alerts
- Work on exercises
At beginning of class
- I switched the order of “Email alerts” and “Page monitors”. Those who were supposed to give industry updates on the PM day should still give them today as scheduled.
- I haven't graded anything new.
- I'm giving a seminar on Thursday (tomorrow) about the technology that I use to teach this class (wiki, videos, presentations).
- Check the class notes page to see who is taking notes today and who is coming up with questions.
- Go over any other announcements you might have missed since last class.
- Check the start page for any blogs you might be interested in that you might have missed.
- From now on you don't have to “turn in” blogs with a piece of paper. You simply need to record the page within the SiteMaker page. I will be able to see that the page doesn't have a grade and will grade it (with a goal of the next class for the rest of the semester). Be especially certain to do this before Fall Break.
- Let's look over the upcoming industry updates.
- For this class: None
- For next class:
- Search industry update: Andrew Hermatz (hermatz does not match any existing user name)
- Google update: Dylan Burkhardt (dylanb)
My notes
The following is the drawing that I created in class describing the relationship among all of these change notification technologies.
Monitoring changes
- Email alert service
- Monitor entire site
- No false positives
- Sometimes you want email (cell phone! or even Messenger)
- Next class
- RSS feeds
- False positives
- Unless keyword based or filtered somehow
- False positives
- Page monitors
- Lots of false positives unless keyword based
- Monitor specific pages (but not sites)
- RSS feeds
- Why not just use RSS
- Some sites don't have RSS feeds
- So use site-based email alerts
- Some information isn't site based
- So use search-based email alerts
- Some information is too fine-grained to be covered by RSS feeds
- So use page monitors (next class)
- Some sites don't have RSS feeds
Finding email alerts
- Search for email alerts
- Query: "email alerts" OR "e-mail alerts" OR "email alert" OR "e-mail alert"
- Google results (77.2 million in 2008) (60.2 million in 2007)
- Yahoo results (392 million in 2008)
- More specific search for email alerts
- Query: inurl:mail OR inurl:alert "email alerts" OR "e-mail alerts" OR "email alert" OR "e-mail alert"
- Google results (115,000 in October 2008)
- Yahoo results (242,000 in 2008)
- Science email alerts
- Query: science "email alerts" OR "e-mail alerts" OR "email alert" OR "e-mail alert"
- Google results (17.1 million in 2008) (2.34 million in 2007)
- Yahoo results (69.9 million in 2008)
- INURL query
- Google results (382,000 in 2008)
- Yahoo results (85,600 in 2008)
- Query: science "email alerts" OR "e-mail alerts" OR "email alert" OR "e-mail alert"
- Copper email alerts
- Query: copper "email alerts" OR "e-mail alerts" OR "email alert" OR "e-mail alert"
- Google results (384,000 in 2008)
- Yahoo results (2.75 million in 2008)
- INURL query
- Google results (531 in 2008)
- Yahoo results (835 in 2008)
- Query: copper "email alerts" OR "e-mail alerts" OR "email alert" OR "e-mail alert"
General email alert services
- Yahoo Alerts
- Some types of alerts
- Broad-ranging alerts
- More specific
- If you use "Breaking News" alerts, then you should combine this with Yahoo Pipes
- Be sure to look over the whole list of categories of alerts.
- Some types of alerts
- Google Alerts
- All of this is based on submitting queries
- Once a day
- Once a week
- Broad-ranging alerts
- Web & comprehensive alerts
- More specific
- Keyword-based alerts for news, blogs, video and groups
- All of this is based on submitting queries
- GoogleAlert
- Advanced search form is the thing that makes it useful compared to Google's alert service
Email filtering
- Gmail
- Limit around 7.2GB (4.5GB in October 2007)
- Can use a filter
- To forward just some emails (to different people?)
- To apply a label to emails
- Plus addressing
- A powerful method that can be applied to Email alerts is using “plus addressing” service when you sign up for an Email alert (e.g. from some query), i.e. tell them that your address is dummy+moc.liamg|reifitnedIyreuQemos#moc.liamg|reifitnedIyreuQemos instead of the normal address moc.liamg|ymmud#moc.liamg|ymmud. Thus, if you get this address to your mail account, you can filter it by what comes after the plus! This is a extremely helpful since it makes it easier to filter emails.
- Description for GMail and description for Yahoo Mail
- Use a different address for each email alert
- Helps you filter
- Helps you track who is selling your email address
- Can be used with GoogleAlert but not Google Alerts (the Google-affiliated site)
- Defining a filter
- Keep definition to a minimum, as simple as possible
- Test, test, test
Project wiki clarification
You should do the following for your project wiki:
- You should figure out some way that you are going to document the email alerts that you use in your email account to route your incoming alerts. Maybe print the alert page to a PDF file and link it to your wiki? Maybe take a screenshot of your email inbox and highlight the email alerts?
- In either case, you are going to want to have a section in your wiki called "Email alerts".
- On this page you should describe each of the email alerts that you used: the page from which you subscribed to it, why it is useful, and if there are any keywords (or such) that you used to generate it.
14 Page Monitors
by samoore (02 Dec 2008 01:16)
10/22/2008
We discuss page monitors and then go into some detail about advanced RSS feed-manipulation Web sites.
Class structure
- Go through “At beginning of class” information
- Go through diagram explaining page monitors & RSS filters
- Work on exercises
At beginning of class
- I haven't graded anything new.
- Check the class notes page to see who is taking notes today and who is coming up with questions.
- Go over any other announcements you might have missed since last class.
- Check the start page for any blogs you might be interested in that you might have missed.
- I have arranged the Yahoo visit for early December. Don't miss that class!
- I want to review what this class is about.
- Let's look over the upcoming industry updates.
- For this class:
- Google update: Dylan Burkhardt (dylanb)
- For next class:
- Search industry update: Max Rossiter
- For this class:
My notes
Page monitoring software
Overview
Page Monitors were the next big thing five years ago. It is a program or web based program that you download. Each day (or whatever time period you want to set) it downloads the webpage, and if it's different it will send you an email. Some tell you what has changed while others just tell you that it has changed.
At first, you might not be that impressed with page monitors. But after realizing that it can be used for a lot more than news, it can be quite a useful tool. WatchThatPage.com is the best free site.
WatchThatPage has a limit of 250 characters for the URL. Also, shortened URLs (from tinyurl.com) do not work. To get around these problems, use TrackEngine, where neither of these problems exist.
- Capabilities
- Automatically determine if a Web page, or part of a Web page, has changed
- Results might be delivered via email, RSS feed, or a summary Web page
- Page Monitoring Software Examples
- Track a company's press release page (Goldman Sachs)
- Find out when a new version of software is released (BBEdit)
- Find out when a new product is released (Canon cameras)
- Track a product category (Flat panel LCD TVs at Amazon)
- Monitor product information (comments at CNet about a Tivo)
- Track auctions
- Track new jobs (at Google)
- Monitor earnings releases (at JPMorganChase)
- Track who is linking to you (e.g., David Pogue)
- Follow investment information about a company (e.g., Goldman Sachs at The Motley Fool)
Feed creation software
Overview
- Capabilities
- Demonstrations
- Demonstration with Feed43 and the JPMorganChase Annual report (the feed)
- Demonstration with Feed43 and a Google Web search results page
- Demonstration with Feed43 and the Goldman Sachs press release page
Make a feed
From a page
- Dapper
- Description: Dapper is pretty slick. You can look through user created Dapps or you can (easily) create your own. Don’t forget to use the “get a nice short url” option and create your own that is easier to look at/use. This allows you to get an RSS feed for more things (instead of just news and blogs) such as searches.
- The Glory, Bliss and How-to of Screen Scraping for RSS
- Demo
- Video tutorial
- Useful Dapps
- FeedYes
- Feed43
- Feed43 is a little bit more complicated. You have to find the actual html within the source code of the page.
- Define Extraction Rules – By finding the specific places (within the code) of the information that you’re looking to have monitored by the RSS feed. There are directions for what specific code to use in the program.
- Then click extract
- Then you can give it a title, description, url, etc
- Then put in where the title, date, etc are etc
- If these sites are updated once a month, its too much of a hassle to make one of these (use a page monitor). But if it is updated daily and you want to monitor it, then it might be a good idea to make one!
- Free, or $29/year for 20 hourly updates
- My feeds
- Feed43 is a little bit more complicated. You have to find the actual html within the source code of the page.
From other feeds
- FeedRinse: From their site, “Feed Rinse is an easy to use tool that lets you automatically filter out syndicated content that you aren't interested in. It's like a spam filter for your RSS subscriptions.”
- Yahoo Pipes
- FeedZero: This uses adaptive filtering software to learn what feed articles you like, and which you don't like, based on your input.
Purpose of today's tools
We’ve already done some Email alerts. But the remaining question is: why would we do all these different things that are available?
- Focused RSS feed — If you’re lucky, there is a keyword-based, or specific-topic defined, RSS feed available for a site you can subscribe to.
- General RSS feed: If there's simply a general RSS feed (such as "Yahoo breaking news"), then you should run that feed through a keyword tool:
- FeedRinse
- Yahoo Pipes (if other processing is needed)
- The following are useful if there's no RSS feed available on a page:
- FeedYes: I would try this first since it's the easiest to use when setting up a feed.
- Feed43: This is more powerful but more difficult to use.
- Dapper: This is another powerful tool. One of the benefits of this tool is that you can use pre-defined feeds ("dapps").
- Page Monitor — Use Page Monitor to get any updates on a specific page sent to your Email account.
- Email alerts — This was a precursor to RSS feeds. Some sites will give you updates to their site via email, not RSS.
Hints about possible test questions
You're definitely going to be held responsible for the following topics:
- What WatchThatPage (as an example of a page monitor) can do
- What Dapper can do
- What Feed43 can do and how its search patterns work
- What Yahoo Pipes can do and how feeds can be manipulated (for example, Fetch Feeds, Union, Filter, Sort)
- Under what circumstances would you use each one of these tools (as opposed to another)
I'll add to this later but this should give you an idea of the type of questions that I might ask.
Possible blog topics
You do not have to write a blog. These are suggested blog topics if you were to write one. There are lots of possibilities in this class. Describe different ways that you found these tools useful. Describe how you used Yahoo Pipes, possibly differently than how we have described them here.
Resources
Page monitors
Web-based
- WatchThatPage
- Free (for any number of pages), or $20/year for priority service
- Can highlight changes in pages
- Changes sent in an email
- Keyword matching
- This site doesn't appear to be updated any more (3+ years)
- TrackEngine
- Free for 5 bookmarks, or $20/year for 10 pages, or $53/year for 50 pages
- Highlights new content in HTML email
- Monitors changes daily
- Does do keyword matching
- This site hasn't been worked on for 6+ years
- Other possible sites: InfoMinder, ChangeDetect, Trackle
Mac software
Windows software
- WebSite-Watcher
- Free for 30 days; $47 purchase
Examples
- From TrackEngine
- TrackEngine help
- TrackEngine tutorials
- TrackEngine hot lists
- InfoMinder examples
- ChangeDetect examples
- Feed43 example
15 Tag Based Sites
by samoore (27 Oct 2008 15:39)
10/27/2008
We discuss social news and bookmarking sites.
Class structure
- Go through “At beginning of class” information
- Go through diagram explaining page monitors & RSS filters
- Work on exercises
At beginning of class
- I haven't graded anything new.
- Check the class notes page to see who is taking notes today and who is coming up with questions.
- Go over any other announcements you might have missed since last class.
- Check the start page for any blogs you might be interested in that you might have missed.
- Again: I have arranged the Yahoo visit for early December. Don't miss that class!
- Let's look over the upcoming industry updates.
- For this class:
- Search industry update: Max Rossiter (mlrossit)
- Google update: Daniel Nicholls (dpnick)
- For next class:
- Search industry update: Eric
- Google update: Bryan
- For this class:
My notes
Introductory information
- Describing with tags
- Taxonomies
- Folksonomies
- Types of social sites
- Social News (based on tagging)
- Technology
- Search & Internet marketing
- For researchers & scientists
- Social Bookmarking (based on voting)
- Social News (based on tagging)
- Features & dimensions
- Voting
- Current (e.g., “what's hot”)
- Time periods (e.g., “last hour”, “today”, “last week”, “last month”)
- Topic categories (e.g., “business”, “entertainment”)
- Tags (both personal and shared)
- Web storage & search
- Discuss the sites
General market size information
The following series of charts shows the relative traffic for several social news and/or bookmarking sites. The first chart shows that digg has about 7x the traffic of reddit. I am using these two sites as benchmarks for the two charts after that. (Each chart can only compare five sites.) In the first chart, digg is the benchmark, while in the second chart reddit is the benchmark. Again, remember that digg has about 7x the traffic of reddit.
The second chart shows the relative traffic of digg, stumbleupon, slashdot, propeller.com and fark. Here you can see that digg is approximately 3x the size of the next busiest sites, stumbleupon and slashdot. Propeller and fark are no more than 40% of the size of those smaller sites.
The third chart shows reddit as the clear size leader, though mixx (which only came onto the scene in any reasonable sense in May 2008) is growing quickly and relatively steadily. Newsvine is showing some signs of growth as well. Both dzone and sphinn have maintained a relatively steady amount of traffic for the last year.
The fourth chart shows traffic comparisons for sites that are more focused on social bookmarking than news. There has been a clear growth in traffic over the last year with CiteULike and Diigo leading the way. Over the same period of time simpy has lost traffic, ma.gnolia has maintained, and Connotea has grown significantly.
The fifth chart shows the relative traffic of the two largest social news sites (digg, stumbleupon), the largest social bookmarking site (delicious), and a smaller, but growing, social news site (diigo) — which can barely be seen at the bottom axis.
Resources
Social News sites
General news
- Digg (about, tour, search): “Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web… We’re here to promote that conversation and provide tools for our community to discuss the topics that they’re passionate about.”
- Reddit (about, search): “reddit is a source for what's new and popular on the web — personalized for you. Your votes train a filter, so let reddit know what you liked and disliked, because you'll begin to be recommended links filtered to your tastes.”
- StumbleUpon (about, video intro, guide, search): “StumbleUpon helps you discover and share great websites. As you click Stumble!, we deliver high-quality pages matched to your personal preferences… This helps you discover great content you probably wouldn't find using a search engine.”
- Propeller (about, tour, search): “Propeller is a social news portal, meaning that it is programmed by you – the audience. Our members post links to stories from all over the Web… Once the link has been posted, you can vote on it, comment on it, share it with friends, or bookmark it to read later.”
- Fark (about, help, search): “Fark.com, the Web site, is a news aggregator and an edited social networking news site… The idea was to have the word Fark come to symbolize news that is really Not News.”
- Mixx (about, tour, search): “You find it; we'll Mixx it. Use YourMixx to tailor the content categories, tags, specific users and groups, and we'll deliver the top-rated content as chosen by you and people who share your passions. So go ahead and whip up your own version of the web. Just tell us how you like it Mixxed and we'll deliver the best the web has to offer”
- NewsVine (welcome, help, search): “At Newsvine, you can read stories from established media organizations like the Associated Press and ESPN as well as individual contributors from all around the world. Placement of stories is determined by a multitude of factors including freshness, popularity, and reputation. Contribution is open to all, and editorial judgement is in the hands of the community.”
Technology focus
- Slashdot (about, help, search): “News for nerds. Stuff that matters.”
- DZone (about, search): “Fresh links for developers.”
- For Search & Internet marketing professionals
- Sphinn (about, help, search): “Sphinn is a social site for search and interactive marketers. It's designed to allow you to share and discover news stories, read and take part in discussions, discover events of interest and network with others.”
For researchers & scientists
- Connotea (about, guide, search on homepage): “Saving references in Conntoea is quick and easy. You do it by saving a link to a web page for the reference, whether that be the PubMed entry, the publisher's PDF, or even an Amazon product page for a book. Connotea will, wherever possible, recognise the reference and automatically add in the bibliographic information for you.”
- CiteULike (help, search on homepage): “CiteULike is a free service to help you to store, organise and share the scholarly papers you are reading. When you see a paper on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have it added to your personal library. CiteULike automatically extracts the citation details, so there's no need to type them in yourself.”
Social Bookmarking sites
- Delicious (about, video tutorial, help, getting started, search): “Delicious is a social bookmarking service that allows you to tag, save, manage and share Web pages all in one place. With emphasis on the power of the community, Delicious greatly improves how people discover, remember and share on the Internet.”
- Furl ([ about], help, video tour, uses of furl, search): “Furl is a free service that saves important items on the Web, allowing quick retrieval for future access. Furl archives a personal copy of every page and provides a search service the full text of all archived items. Each Furl member has a personal archive of 5 gigabytes (GB), large enough to store tens of thousands of searchable items.”
- Diigo (about, video tour, tour, search): “Bookmark, highlight, and add sticky notes to any web page. Organize your bookmarks and annotations by tags or lists. Multiple ways to share your bookmarks and annotations.”
- Magnolia (tutorial, search): “How is Ma.gnolia different from other social bookmarking services? It starts with making the social side of social bookmarking work better. With contacts, groups and different ways to share bookmarks both within and outside of Ma.gnolia, we make working together on a casual basis or more formal projects fun and easy.”
- Simpy (about, help, search on homepage): “Simpy is a social bookmarking service. With Simpy, you can save, tag and search your own bookmarks and notes or browse and search other users' links and tags. You can be open and share your links with others, or keep them private. Simpy also helps you find like-minded people, discover new and interesting sites, publish your bookmarks, detect and eliminate link-rot, etc.”
General articles
- 30 largest social networking sites (October 2008)
- Social bookmarking sites
- Articles on folksonomies
Possible blog topics
- Compare two of the social news sites.
- Compare one of the social bookmarking sites to delicious.
- Review Connotea or CiteULike from a student's perspective.
16 Image Search
by samoore (29 Oct 2008 15:50)
10/29/2008
We discuss and explore the variety of image resources and search tools available.
Class structure
- Go through “At beginning of class” information
- Go through diagram explaining page monitors & RSS filters
- Work on exercises
At beginning of class
- No new grades.
- The exam is one week from Monday (i.e., November 10).
- You should review the questions that have been posted so far, add to them as necessary, revise them as you see fit, and add pages for questions from days that don't have questions. (Do this by clicking on the link for the appropriate day.) Your motivation for this is that more questions that you have seen before might be on the exam. All of this posting of/revising questions must be done by midnight at the end of a week from this Friday.
- The exam will be multiple choice, true/false, short answer, and essay.
- You will be responsible for my lectures, for my in-class demonstrations, for your exercises, for student industry/company updates, and for anything that I have written on the Web site.
- Post any questions you might have about the exam on the class forum under “Assignments.”
- Check the class notes page to see who is taking notes today and who is coming up with questions.
- Go over any other announcements you might have missed since last class.
- Check the start page for any blogs you might be interested in that you might have missed.
- There are four more opportunities to write a blog entry.
- Again: I have arranged the Yahoo visit for early December. Don't miss that class!
- Let's look over the upcoming industry updates.
- For this class:
- Search industry update: Eric Brackmann (Eric Brackmann)
- For next class:
- Google update: Caitlin (Caitd)
- For this class:
My notes
- Diversity of image search tools
- Search the Web
- Search public, site-specific images
- Search for-pay or for-free images
- Search for facial images
- Use images to find other images
- Search news sites for images
- General search
- Google Images — "Ann Arbor" example, only photos of Ann Arbor
- Can search by size, filetype, color, domain (and description, of course)
- Can limit your search results to newscontent, faces, or photo content (under advanced search)
- Ask Images — example
- Can search by size, filetype, color
- Yahoo Images — example
- Can search by size, color, domain
- Exalead Images — example
- Be sure to hover a cursor over any image in the results page.
- Under “advanced search”, can narrow your search by size, orientation, and color (search help)
- Google Images — "Ann Arbor" example, only photos of Ann Arbor
- Image-focused search engines
- TinEye
- Search for this photo: http://etc.usf.edu/clipart/3700/3758/eiffel-tower_1_lg.gif
- PicSearch (and advanced search page)
- "ann arbor" "michigan theater"
- Can search for animations separately; also search by color and size
- Pixolu — search for [eiffel tower]
- Searches Google, Flickr, and Yahoo
- TinEye
- Face search
- Exalead
- Search for Gerald Ford
- Only face shots of Gerald Ford
- Picitup
- Search for "Gerald Ford"
- Only facial shots of Gerald Ford
- Search from Yahoo, Flickr, or Picasa
- Search filters based on size, layout, faces, landscapes
- FaceSaerch
- Search for Gerald Ford
- Google Images
- Search for "Gerald R. Ford"
- Using the advanced search page, search for facial shots of Gerald Ford
- Exalead
- Image-specific search engines for their private database of images
- Flickr
- Can search by full text or tags
- Explore flickr
- Explore the world with flickr
- Compfight: a flickr search tool
- Search for [eiffel tower]
- Notice difference in searching "Tags only" vs. "All text"
- Flickr
- Searching the news sites for images
- Images at Yahoo News — you can't specify to search for images but they appear at the top of the results page
- This works as a direct link — just replace the “carbon+trading” with your own search term
- Images at Google News — again, you can't specify to search for images directly
- This works as a direct link — just replace the ``detroit+lions with your own search term
- Images at Yahoo News — you can't specify to search for images but they appear at the top of the results page
- Stock photography (recommended by Presentation Zen)
- Inexpensive (but good)
- Free (but not bad)
- US Library of Congress images
Blog ideas
- Compare your results (related to efforts for your term project) using Google Images compared with one of PicSearch, Exalead Image, Compfight, Picitup, Flickr, Compfight
- Compare the effectiveness (related to efforts for your term project) of the two news image search tools (Google News, Yahoo News)
Resources
17 Custom Search Engines
by samoore (03 Nov 2008 17:10)
11/03/2008
We discuss custom search engines, and how you can build your own.
Class structure
- Go through “At beginning of class” information
- Explain what custom search engines are
- Work on exercises
At beginning of class
- No new grades
- Be sure to vote tomorrow.
- I'll be watching Indecision 2008.
- The exam is one week from today (i.e., November 10).
- Check the class notes page to see who is taking notes today and who is coming up with questions.
- Go over any other announcements you might have missed since last class.
- Check the start page for any blogs you might be interested in that you might have missed.
- There are three more opportunities to write a blog entry.
- Let's look over the upcoming industry updates.
- For this class:
- Google update: Caitlin (Caitd)
- Next class:
- Yahoo update: Bryan (bryblum)
- For this class:
My notes
- What is it
- A search tool that (usually) uses Google's search engine (as the back end) but that you can instruct the following ways:
- Look in a certain list of URLs
- Avoid a certain list of URLs
- Append a set of terms to any user-supplied query
- A search tool that (usually) uses Google's search engine (as the back end) but that you can instruct the following ways:
- How can it be used
- Its own Web page
- An iGoogle widget
- Embedded in random Web page
- Why would you use it
- Captures creator's knowledge of the field
Blog topics
- Describe how useful or not Google Custom Search Engine is for your site.
- Describe how you chose the sites to include in your custom search engine.
- Compare and contrast 2 (or more) different custom search engines.
Resources
- Topicle
- Eurekster Swicki
- Rollyo
- Google Custom Search Engine
- BuildASearch
- Yahoo Search BOSS — Build your Own Search Service
- 3 Guides to FireFox Quick Searches (Smart Keywords)
18 Exploring Connections
by samoore (07 Nov 2008 23:34)
11/05/2008
We discuss several tools that you can use to explore connections among Web sites and, more specifically, from other Web sites to yours.
Class structure
- Go through “At beginning of class” information
- Go through diagram explaining the tools we'll be looking at today
- Work on exercises
At beginning of class
- My wife had another MRI last night at 3:40am, this time on her spine. It went fine — just took a long time.
- No new grades
- The exam is next Monday (i.e., November 10).
- I have arranged for a speaker from Google to come to class on Monday, November 24. He is the same speaker I had last year, and he did a fantastic job. I'm very much looking forward to his day in class.
- Check the class notes page to see who is taking notes today and who is coming up with questions.
- Go over any other announcements you might have missed since last class.
- Check the start page for any blogs you might be interested in that you might have missed.
- There are two more opportunities to write a blog entry.
- Let's look over the upcoming industry updates.
- For this class:
- Yahoo update: Bryan (bryblum)
- For this class:
My notes
What you might want to learn about a Web site
- Who has created a link to your site (Web site)
- inlink — a link from another site to your site
- Who has written about your site (blog)
- Who has subscribed to your RSS feed
- How do people find your site (search engine)
What can you learn about your Web site
Yahoo tools
The Yahoo SiteExplorer allows you to explore all the web pages indexed by Yahoo! Search. View the most popular pages from any site, dive into a comprehensive site map, and find pages that link to that site or any page.
- link:http://www.somedomain.com shows what sites link to this particular site
- Yahoo search for 'link:http://autos.yahoo.com/'
- 5.5 million pages on this site
- 7.4 million links coming to this site (i.e. inlinks) — click on the “Inlinks” button
- This lists all the pages that link to autos.yahoo.com
- Choices of inlinks
- From all pages, or from all pages except this domain (i.e., not from yahoo.com), or from all pages except this subdomain (i.e., not from autos.yahoo.com)
- To only this specific URL or to any page within this entire site
- Outcomes
- Inlinks From All Pages to Entire Site: 14.15 million links
- Inlinks from all pages Except from this subdomain autos.yahoo.com to Entire Site: 11.04 million inlinks
- Inlinks From All Pages to Only this URL: 7.37 million inlinks
- Inlinks from all pages Except from this subdomain autos.yahoo.com to Only this URL: 4.27 million inlinks
- Inlinks from all pages Except from this domain yahoo.com to Entire Site: 460,649 inlinks
- Inlinks from all pages Except from this domain yahoo.com to Only this URL: 51,580 inlinks
- Yahoo search for 'link:http://autos.yahoo.com/'
- Yahoo search for 'link:http://autos.yahoo.com/ -site:yahoo.com' — 18,600 documents
- This lists all pages not in yahoo.com that link to autos.yahoo.com.
- Yahoo: linkdomain:somedomain shows what sites link to any page within this site (note that there's no http)
- Yahoo search for 'linkdomain:autos.yahoo.com' — this connects to Site Explorer as well; this is short hand for show inlinks from all pages to the entire site.
- Find a specific page in the database
Google search tools
- 'link:http://somedomain' shows what sites link to this site
- Google search for 'link:http://autos.yahoo.com/' — 350 documents
- Google search for 'link:http://autos.yahoo.com/ -site:yahoo.com' — 44 documents
- Find a specific page in the database
- Search Google for Gregg Easterbrook — finds 4 pages
Google Analytics
Demonstrate Google Analytics.
What you can learn about your blog
- Search Bloglines
- Search for citations of 'lifehacker.com'
- Search through Technorati
- To search Technorati for posts that link to a page within a specific URL, go to the Technorati advanced search page and look for “URL Search”.
- Example lifehacker.com
- You can sort by “freshness” or by “authority”
- Use Feedburner (now owned by Google)
Resources
- Searching for a New President: Obama Wins on Search Engine Optimization
- Yahoo SiteExplorer
- Linkology — an article from New York Magazine describing how blogs relate to each other.
19 Test
by samoore (10 Nov 2008 16:25)
11/10/2008
We take the test today.
- Sit every fourth seat.
- All material other than your pencil/pen should be along the walls of the classroom, away from your desk. Turn off your cell phone and all electronics; put them in your possessions along the walls. Put all hats and coats with your possessions as well.
- You have 1 hour, 10 minutes to complete the test. It's longer than I thought it was going to be but it shouldn't be a time problem for you to finish it.
- Read the front of the test when you get it but do not open it until I say.
20 Geography Based
by samoore (17 Nov 2008 16:13)
11/12/2008
We discuss all types of geography-based search tools and resources.
Class structure
- Go through “At beginning of class” information
- Go through diagram explaining the tools we'll be looking at today
- Work on exercises
At beginning of class
- No new grades
- I've graded first three pages of your tests.
- To do
- Tests
- Projects
- Blogs
- Rest of semester
- No test
- Some project related resources
- Many general-interest resources
- This is a test
- I have arranged for a speaker from Google to come to class on Monday, November 24.
- Check the class notes page to see who is taking notes today and who is coming up with questions.
- Go over any other announcements you might have missed since last class.
- Check the start page for any blogs you might be interested in that you might have missed.
- Let's look over the upcoming industry updates.
- For this class:
- Google update: Tyler (thauck)
- Next class
- Google update: Kevin (schmidke)
- For this class:
My notes
Here's what we're doing today:
- Mostly just you exploring some amazingly cool and useful Web resources.
- Please please add resources that you know about that aren't on this list that you find to be useful and interesting.
International, country-specific Web search engines
- SearchEngineColossus.com: "International Directory of Search Engines"
- Yahoo International: Yahoo home pages from countries around the world
Google Maps
- Google Maps (tour, popular content, featured content)
- Google Maps Mania: "An unofficial Google Maps blog tracking the websites, mashups and tools being influenced by Google Maps."
- 100 things to do with Google Maps mashups: the most fun you can have with maps.
- Also look under "Google Maps Links/Other Google Maps Stuff" in the right column.
- Pictures on Google Maps
- Related tool: Google Earth
Travel
- Google Sightseeing: "Google Sightseeing takes you on tour of the world as seen from satellite, using the free Google Earth program, or Google Maps in your web browser. Each weekday your guides James and Alex present new weird and wonderful sights as suggested by readers."
- TripBase: "Tell us what you like. We'll tell you where to travel." (review)
- TripWolf: worldwide travel guide (review)
- Whole Travel: "it's your planet. travel it. preserve it." (review)
- Standard travel search tools
- Newer general travel search tools
- Kayak: travel aggregator; searches 140+ travel sites with one search
- UpTake: "your first step on a great trip"; "search over 1000 travel websites and 20M opinions at once" (review, review)
- WeGo: "Wego searches through 100+ travel sites in the time that it takes you to search one. We’ll help you find the best prices and connect you to the best place to buy." (review)
- Specialized travel information
- NYC subway
- Google Transit: plan a trip using public transportation
- Ixigo: travel in India
- Sprice: "smart prices to go…anywhere" (actually, focuses on hotels in SE Asia, India, Europe) (review)
- HopStop: Provides door-to-door subway and bus directions and maps for NYC. Currently expanding to other major cities. Very popular in Manhattan.
Local search
- Ask City: search for businesses, movies, and events
- MSN City Guides
- Yelp: restaurant reviews
- BooRah: "restaurant reviews, menus, pictures, and more" (review)
- Mapquest Local: restaurants, events, news, weather
- When.com: "where to go, what to do, local events" (review)
- OnYoMo: "find movies, restaurants, airlines, services" (review)
- WebLocal: Canadian local search (review)
Road trips and driving
- Mapquest directions (search cheat sheet)
- Mapquest RouteBuilder
- Multimap driving directions
- Google Maps driving directions
- RoadsideAmerica Maps: "Find oddities and tourist attractions and plan trips more quickly"
- MileByMile: free road map RV itinerary guides
- Outside the U.S.
- Streetmap.uk: Great Britain street and road maps
- Australian driving directions
- European driving directions (ViaMichelin)
- Mappy.com: road guide for U.S. and Europe
- TheAA.com: route planner for U.K. and Europe
Maps
- US Maps
- World Maps
- Map Machine (National Geographic): political or satellite maps of anywhere in the U.S. or world
- Mapquest world maps
- Multimap maps
- Holt, Rinehart, & Winston maps
- Maps made for printing and copying (National Geographic)
- Atlas Explorer (National Geographic): tool to explore geophysical and geopolitical maps of the world.
- CIA's World Factbook: maps of every country in the world
Entertainment
- Brewster Jennings Protects America: "Remember playing "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego" as a kid? Well now the new game Brewster Jennings Protects America brings this classic adventure into the 21st century by merging the game play with Google maps technology*. In the web-based Brewster Jennings Protects America game you race around the globe as a government agent trying to stop a deadly terror attack from taking place…. "
- Google Moon Map
Information
- Historical Maps
- Maps of current interest
- Perry-Castaneda Library Map Collection (Univ of Texas)
- NationalAtlas Map Maker: build your own layered map with a wide variety of information
- WorldMapper: "a collection of world maps, where territories are re-sized on each map according to the subject of interest. There are now nearly 600 maps."
- Animation: be sure to check out this animation
- World Sunlight Map: "Watch the sun rise and set all over the world on this real-time, computer-generated illustration of the earth's patterns of sunlight and darkness. The clouds are updated every 3 hours with current weather satellite imagery."
- EarthPulse (National Geographic): a visual guide to global trends
- EarthTools: "find places, latitude/longitude, sunrise, sunset, elevation, local time, and time zones"
Commerce
- AuctionMapper: search eBay for auctions (info)
- Oodle: buy and sell locally (classifieds)
- LiveDeal: online local marketplace
Real estate
- HousingMaps: a mashup of Google Maps and Craigslist
- Trulia: real estate search
- PropSmart: real estate search (and community)
Interactive tools
- GMap Pedometer: plan your walking trips and measure their length
- Wikimapia: a mashup of Google Maps and Wikipedia. Completely addicting to explore.
- MapMyRun: a tool to plot your running route and see what the distance was
Clocks
- The World Clock - Time Zones: Current local times around the world
- Greenwich Mean Time: use this to set your clock to the right time whereever you are
- World Time Zone: find the time using a map
Mobile tools
21 People Search
by samoore (17 Nov 2008 17:50)
11/17/2008
We discuss several different ways to find out information about people through their Web presence.
Class structure
- Go through “At beginning of class” information
- Go through diagram explaining the tools we'll be looking at today
- Work on exercises
At beginning of class
At my request, we're going to have a visit from Nigel Melville to help explain his very exciting new class for BBAs that he's teaching next semester: BIT/MKT 378 “Service Innovation Management”. The following video relates to the MBA version of this class (which he taught last year).
- Grades
- I graded the tests.
- Possible points: 108
- Range: -3 to -64
- Median: -11.5
- At the end of class I'm handing them out; we'll go over them; you'll give them back to me before you leave this classroom.
- To do
- Projects (today was status check #3); next is last day of class
- Blogs
- I graded the tests.
- The new building (as of Thursday) — it's really really sweet
- The speaker from Google will be here next Monday.
- Check the class notes page to see who is taking notes today.
- Let's look over the upcoming industry updates.
- For this class:
- Google update: Kevin (schmidke)
- Next class
- Google update: Hernando (Hcflow)
- For this class:
My notes
Using Google to find people
- Searching phone numbers (details)
- phonebook
- bphonebook
- rphonebook
- Searching names
- "full name" location
- "full name" company
- Can do the same thing at other general search engines: Yahoo, Ask, Cluuz
People search engines
- Pipl
- Wink (people search, phone number) Will not only look for the specified name but similar names (i.e. Ted Kennedy, Theodore Kennedy…)
- 411 Locate (people search, reverse phone, reverse address, ZIP code lookup, area code, international calling codes)
- ZabaSearch (advanced search, review)
- Ages are wrong
- Switchboard (White pages, Reverse phone lookup, Public records search)
- WhoWhere (people search, phone lookup)
- WhitePages (people search, find email, reverse phone, reverse address)
- SuperPages (reverse phone, reverse address, area code, ZIP codes)
- AnyWho (people search, reverse phone)
- Yahoo People search (people search, reverse phone #, email search)
- ZoomInfo (advanced search)
- Spock (people search on the web, blogs, social networks)
- iSearch (review)
- 123people (people search) (review, review)
- Yasni (review): people search
- Uses a tag cloud customized to the person
Social site search
- PeekYou (people search, username search)
- YoName (people search, email search, reverse phone, social networks, blogs; "focuses on social media search looking through LinkedIn, FaceBook, Yahoo 360, Flickr, Friendster, MySpace")
- LinkedIn (professional social networking search)
- MySpace
- The Internet Address Book
Specialized
- Military Search (veteran, current, military ancestors)
- AMA's Doctor Finder
- International
- InfoBel (search by country, six continents)
- YourFamily (finding ancestors and lost relatives)
- Family Search (online birth, marriage, death, census, church, and other indices; run by Mormon Church)
- Birthday Database
- Riya (image search for people, places, times, tags, descriptions) (advanced search)
- FaceSaerch (yes, that's the right spelling!) — search for faces
- Namepedia (review): the name database
Obituary search
- Social Security Death Index (ancestery.com) (1875-current, US Social Security numbers)
- Obituary Daily Times search
- National Obituary Archive (obituaries, memorials, funeral homes)
- Obituary Central (obituaries, cemetary searches)
- NY Times Obituaries
Resources
- Ten Ways you can find Phone Numbers on the Web (about.com)
- Top Ten Ways to do a free people search on the Web (about.com)
- Fifteen People Search Engines (about.com)
- How to find someone online (about.com)
- 4 people search engines: Looking for someone online
- iSearch
- 123people searches the social web
- Facesaerch: search for people's faces
- Namepedia (review): the name database
- Yasni (review): people search
- Google, Yahoo, Ask, Cluuz