I'm in the throes of my (Northern Hemisphere) spring speaking tour; by June I
will have been to Washington DC, London, Oslo, Pittsburgh,
Seattle, Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, and Baltimore. In the course of preparing all the presentations, I have accumulated a number of
tips and sites that aren't extensive enough to fill up an InfoTips newsletter, but are useful nonetheless. So, this issue includes some
of my favorites of these ah-ha!s.
In an act of faith that Yahoo! will survive its possible absorption into The Borg, otherwise known as Microsoft,
I'll mention one
interesting Yahoo! search tip. If you enclose your search terms in [square brackets], you will only retrieve pages that have those words in that order.
Mind you, this isn't a phrase search -- those two words may be anywhere in the page, but the first term must appear before the second. So,
for example, the search
[subprime crisis] will retrieve
pages with "subprime mortgage crisis", "subprime lending crisis" "the subprime mortgage industry is in crisis right now"
and so on. It will not retrieve "there is a crisis in subprime mortgages", however.
I mentioned Technorati.com in my
March 2008 InfoTip, but I had one of those epiphanies today and thought up another use for this
blog-search tool. When bloggers attend a professional conference, they often about the sessions they find particularly noteworthy. In fact, they will sometimes
transcribe the speaker's PowerPoint presentation along with their own thoughts. Conference organizers are now encouraging bloggers to use a standard tag to
identify blog posts about the conference, so that anyone can search for blogs about that conference. What that means is, if you can identify the appropriate
tag, you can search for all blogs with that conference tag, and get at least a sense of the key themes and most thought-provoking sessions. See, for example,
the blog entries that were tagged with CIL2008, the agreed-upon tag for the Computers in Libraries conference.
There are only two search engines that I know of that let you search for a word that you would like to have in the search results but isn't required. Say,
for example, you are looking for information on the "green banking" trend, particularly in Colorado. You definitely want the phrase "green banking" to appear in
each retrieved page, and you would like to see pages that also mention Colorado ranked at the top of the search results. Note, though that you don't want
to limit your search only to pages that mention Colorado; you just want to see those pages first. Live.com and
Exalead.com allow you to do this. The syntax for
Live.com is prefer:word, so the green banking search query would be
"green banking"
prefer:colorado and the syntax in Exalead is word1 OPT word2, so the green banking search query would be
"green banking" OPT colorado. (Note that you must type OPT in all caps.)
