I’m getting a little geeky today – for folks who don’t lean as geeky, I’m going to just remind you of my favorite handcrafted online store: http://www.etsy.com/. You might want that leading up to the holidays. Now for the geeky set…
Last week Google announced some big changes in how they are going to share info with other web site. If you’re a searcher, I think this is good news. If you are a website owner who checks stats, it’s not such good news.
Google will no longer be sharing keyword data with web sites for folks who perform searches on www.google.com and are logged in on a secure connection. Until today, webmasters could generally see where a visitor originated and if they came from Google, the webmaster could see what search they performed that results in the click to the owner’s site. So if you do a search on [diet dog food] and then click to Tommy’s Dog Food House – Tommy used to be able to see that someone came from Google and searched for [diet dog food]. Now Tommy can only see that a visitor came from Google.
This makes life tough for website owners for a couple of reasons – first you don’t know what terms people are successfully using to find you. Second – website owners often track traffic a step beyond and really like to know if someone who clicks on [diet dog food] goes through to purchase. Now that the keyword is gone – so is a lot of conversion tracking (tracking to see who converted from shopper to buyer). Third – some websites alter their content based on those search keywords. It doesn’t matter if you are using Google Analytics or another traffic tracking software – you won’t be able to get this info for organic listings. (Organic here just means non-paid placement.)
This is only true for organic listings. If you buy an ad on Google and someone clicks on your ad, then you can track the keyword and the conversion.
I will remind you of the caveat that this is only true for folks who use the Google web site, are logged into Google and use a secure connection. They claim that this is true for less than 10 percent of searchers but that seems kind of low to me.
You can get the full story here: http://tinyurl.com/3k3hxlf
I think I’ve talked about this amazing tool before but it just came up for me again. The Wayback Machine (http://www.archive.org) keeps older versions of web sites. They don’t keep every web site, but they keep a lot. Also their funding seems precarious so some years they archive more than others. So say you want to find a web site that’s now defunct, visit the Wayback Machine, put in the address and cross your fingers. This works best for older, more popular sites.
If that doesn’t work, you can always try Google’s cache. Do a keyword search for the site in question. If Google has a record of it, it will come up. If the site is gone, clicking on it will not help – but you could try the Cached button found on the search results page, usually under the site description. This works best for newer (or more recently deceased) sites.
I know I’ve talked about Good Search before – but this is such a good time of year for a reminder of Good Search. Here’s the quick take:
Use Good Search as your search engine http://www.goodsearch.com and your favorite charity will get a penny. You have to specify your charity; you can get a list here: http://www.goodsearch.com/charitylist.aspx. If you are/have a charity to add you can look here: http://www.goodsearch.com/addcharity.aspx
Also they have coupons on their site. If you use one your charity gets a bonus.
My friend reminded me of Good Search because the school where she teaches just joined two days ago. Already they’ve earned more than $5. So it’s a get rich slow plan – but an easy plan. (f you want to just test it out you could designate her school as your charity: Sobriety High Charter School St Paul MN.)
We had a great time watching the debates with my family. Everybody came away with a different opinion and everybody questioned at least one statement. So I thought I’d look up some political fact checkers before the next debate. I hope you find them helpful too:
FactCheck.org (http://www.factcheck.org/) monitors the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews, and news releases.
PolitiFact (http://www.politifact.com) has a truth-o-meter that gauges accuracy of comments made by politicians researched by reports and researchers at the St. Petersburg Times and Congressional Quarterly
Fact Checker (http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/) is hosted by the Washington Post.
Well I’m still in Dublin and my Internet access is still not stellar – so today I’m going to mention something I read in the newspaper over the weekend.
Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org) founder, Jimmy Wales is building a search engine that is going to debut is December. Wikipedia is the popular community-written online encyclopedia. It has 8.2 million articles in 253 languages. (That compares to 500,00o articles in Encyclopedia Britannica.) Article are written and modified by volunteers/readers. Mostly I like Wikipedia. I find that the articles I have looked at have been pretty well balanced – and the portions that are biased are usually somehow labeled as opinion, not fact. However, I know that Wikipedia has received criticism for articles that are biased and/or less than professional.
The proposed search engine (Wikia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikia,_Inc.) will be a mix of computer and community. Apparently the code for the search engines will be open for anyone to change (if they have the technical skill) for those of us who are less technical, we can participate by ranking web sites as they come up on the search engine.
I have seen some of these social search engines in the past and have not been hugely impressed – mostly because I’m not sure who, if anyone, takes the time to rank the results unless they have something to gain by artificially inflating or deflating results. On the other hand, Wikipedia has some 4,000 editors so if anyone can encourage participation I think the Wikipeida folks can do it.
Despite what Google would like us to think, there really isn’t a definitive engine. None of the search engines catalogs all of the web sites. So it makes sense to know about a few of them and to know how they work together.
Many of the search engines share databases, which is part of the reason results may look similar in different search engines. Bruce Clay has a wonderful chart that diagrams the relationships of the major search engines (http://www.bruceclay.com/searchenginerelationshipchart.htm). The chart is especially helpful if you have a web site that you want the search engines to find. Tap into the big feeder search engines and you’ll reach the others.
The top search engines include:
Google – http://www.google.com
Yahoo – http://www.yahoo.com
MSN – http://search.msn.com
Ask – http://www.ask.com
See the popularity of various major search engines at SearchEngineWatch (http://searchenginewatch.com/reports/article.php/2156451).
Specialty search engines include:
Yahooligans http://www.yahooligans.com – still my favorite for kids
NexTag http://www.nextag.com – for comparison shopping
Business.com http://www.business.com - for business sites
Melissa Data http://www.melissadata.com/Lookups - a couple of good info databases
Beyond Google http://www.llrx.com/features/supersearch.pdf - a presentation that includes lots of scientific and academic search tools
I hope that helps!
If you’re located in the Twin Cities, you are welcome to join us (ASIST & others) tomorrow evening for a great talk on information policy. You can get more info online (http://www.asis.org/Chapters/mnasis/index.html) or just let me know if you want more details.
I ran across a super fun site today – LibriVox (http://www.librivox.org/) -their catch line is “acoustical liberation of books in the public domain.” They catalog and store audio recordings of books in the public domain.
Through LibriVox you can download an old favorite or read and upload arecording of an old favorite. I think the literary and library folks on theByte list will like the site – but also I think it’s a fun way to see how some of this audio over the Internet works.
LibriVox does a good job of explaining how to download the software you needto access their files and various steps to take to get everything working.
One word of warning: these files are large so it takes a while to downloadthem. We’re taking a family/work trip to Brainerd next week and I might tryto download some files to keep kids entertained in the back. LibriVox led me to kayray.org (http://kayray.org/audiobooks/), a site that seems to focus on kids’ books.
It’s been hard to watch the events unfold in the South during and after Hurricane Katrina. It has also been interesting and heartening to see how the Internet community has created opportunities to help – demonstrating once again the global nature of the Internet:
Craig’s List of New Orleans is a community bulletin board where people post wants ads, jobs ads, and more. There are lots of local Craig’s Lists. The list is New Orleans has become a great tool for posting news, needs, and support.
Just as it sounds, Share Your Home is a site where families offer to share homes and families in-need sign up for help.
Katrina Aid Wiki is a community maintained site that posts resources, news, and a help board. Speaking of wikis (web sites where everyone can post edits and additions) PeopleFinderVolunteer is a volunteer effort to consolidate info from the many other sites that track victims and survivors.
On a local basis, Minnesota Public Radio has been tracking the migration of 3000 New Orleans transplants to Camp Ripley in Minnesota. You can learn more and lean how to help on the MPR web site.
Today’s Byte is short and sweet. I have mentioned it before, but not in years. The Wayback Machine
This site archives web sites. Search for a URL and it will provide links to how the site has looked through time. I love this site. I use it when I want to see an earlier iteration of a web site that I’m updating. I use it when I want to see access info I know was available last year. I use it when I want to see what a company has done with the web site over time.
The Way Back Machine does not index all sites. Some pages will not be available and some pictures or other items may be missing from a page but other than that it’s pretty darned good.
Google has yet another new feature – Google Scholar. It indexes scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research.
It debuted late last year. I think it’s a neat tool – but it has some pros and cons:
Pro – It filters out a ton of junk that you would normally find on Google. (The items in Google Scholar are also in big Google; but items in big Google are obviously not all in Google Scholar.)
Pro- There’s no advertising (aka sponsored links).
Pro – You can link from citations in many articles in Google directly to the cited resources, or at least to the abstract.
Pro – It appears as if you can search by keyword, author, publication, or date. I did a little testing and was impressed.
Con – Sometimes you cannot access the actual item listed in Google -only the abstract. You can often get full articles from your local library but it can take a few days. As I pointed out to students when I worked at an academic librarian – that doesn’t help if the assignment is due tomorrow.
Con – What Google Scholar defines as scholarly might not qualify for many of us as scholarly. Sometimes it matters; sometimes it doesn’t. They don’t have a list of what is included in their database or even list their criteria for inclusion.
I have to put in a plug for traditional scholarly “Googles” that you can find in your local library – and can often access remotely. Traditional journal indices will let you hone your search even more – such as searching by subject terms, which are determined by info specialists and can be very helpful.
