Master Google list

Google has so many services that it’s hard to keep track.

Try the Simply Google web page, which covers services, blogs, RSS feeds, software, and more.

Diigo - mark up the web!

A new web service that offers a number of useful advantages is Diigo.

• Bookmark, highlight, and add sticky notes to any web page
  • Diigo highlights and sticky notes are persistent in the sense that whenever you return to the original web page, you will see your highlights and sticky notes superimposed on the original page, just what you would expect if you highlighted or wrote on a book!
• Organize your bookmarks and annotations by tags or lists.
  • Tags and lists are two different ways to organize information. Tags are best for diverse and disparate information, while lists are best for focused information.
• Access and search your bookmarks anywhere, by tags or by full-text
  • Since all your bookmarks and annotations are stored in your Diigo account on the web, you can access them from any computer with web access. Your web pages are cached so they will always be available. You can search your collections not only by tags, but also by full-text, including highlights, sticky notes, and the full-text of the web pages.
• Multiple ways to share your bookmarks and annotations
  • You can publish your findings to your blog by using the one-click “Send to Blog” feature, by setting up automatic daily posting, or by adding linkrolls and tagrolls to your blog. You can send multiple annotated and highlighted pages at once by email, and the recipients will see exactly what you are referring to. You can also easily post to other websites such as twitter, facebook, delicious, etc.

Diigo also offers team research advantages, social bookmarking and annotating, and all for free.

How’s your rep? Reputation, that is…

More and more, we’re seeing articles and posts on people whose reputations are attacked, or damaged, or otherwise harmed by what’s on the Web.  Sometimes it’s by the very same things that they themselves put out there for everyone to see.

You can check out what’s on the web about you, using this tutorial from Lifehacker called “Manage your online reputation.”

And think about how others will see you, not just now, but in days to come, and in other situations.

Sync2It for bookmarks across browsers and systems

Sync2It is a web bookmark synchronizer that can operate across different browsers (IE, Firefox) and operating systems (Windows, Mac).

Additional features and more bookmarks covered in pay versions, but the basic version is free.

Google a single site

To use Google to search just one site, enter your search and follow it with site: and the url of the web site.

For example, to search the UA Fort Smith web site for anything on football, try football site:uafortsmith.edu

Skreemer hunts for MP3s

MakeUseOf has a post on Skreemer, the search engine for MP3s.

• Search and stream MP3s for free.
• Advanced Search: Filter MP3s by length, bitrate, title, album, artist or genre.
• Option to download any listed MP3 using ‘right-click’ -> ‘Save Link As’ option.
• Share and embed MP3s on your Blog or social networking profile (Facebook, Myspace, …).
• Add SkreemR search to Firefox Search bar (incl. auto suggestion).
• For each song view related YouTube videos, Flickr images, and Wikipedia entries.
• Songbird users: search SkreemR right from the Songbird media player.

This is for “DRM-free music, podcasts, speeches and much more”.

Songza - find and listen to music

Songza is “the music search engine & internet jukebox”

“Unlike KaZaa or Bit Torrent, Songza users can only listen to songs, not download them. And unlike Last.fm or Rhapsody, Songza permits users to choose exactly the song or artist they want to hear, and does not require them to subscribe or pay for its services.”  “Songza pays for licenses from all the major performing-rights organizations (ASCAP, BMI, SESAC), who then pay the publishers and writers in proportion to the number of plays they get on Songza.”

There’s also a Firefox add-on here to allow you to search Songza.

Songerize for trying out music

MakeUseOf has a review of Songerize.

The founders refer to Songerize “as SeeqPod’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. And that’s exactly what it is, you just enter the name of your artist and let Songerize choose and play one of his/her tracks. Apart from that, Songerize also allows you to search for by title and (if found) listen to them. You can’t do much here, there are no playlists or add to favorites options.

Windows Desktop Search for XP

Windows Vista has a new instant search for your computer, but XP is stuck with an older, slower version… or is it?

You can download the Desktop Search for XP and have the same advantage.  Internet Fixes has advice and the link for an XP version of it.

Find the broken links in your Favorites

Internet Fixes has a recommendation for AM-Deadlink, which works with Internet Explorer, Opera, Mozilla and Firefox.

“I was so happy to find this little nifty program that I had to share this with you all. It is a freeware program called AM-DeadLink, and what it does is it detects dead links and duplicates in your Browser Bookmarks. If a Bookmark has become unavailable you can verify it in the internal preview and delete it from your Browser. Additionally you can download FavIcons for all your Favorites and Bookmarks.”

Who knows?

Some experts are born, some are made… and some are self-appointed.

Still, if you feel that you’re an expert — or you find you need an expert — you can try the free help services, such as Qunu.

“Qunu was originally dreamt up as a way for people to get free, live chat tech support for products, direct from those who were most passionate about those products — the users themselves. The concept has resonated hugely, and since launch in July 2006 we have amassed thousands of experts donating help sessions in tens of thousands of topic areas, which suggests that Qunu has grown beyond just tech support.

In fact, examination of search and usage patterns suggests that Qunu is reinventing Search itself. Think of Qunu like a search engine that returns people instead of documents — a mashup of search and instant messaging.”

Another service is Yedda.

“At Yedda, we carefully select for you, based on your preferences, the questions and answers that are likely to be of interest to you. And, the more you use Yedda, the better we get at understanding your interests.”

Or you could Ask MetaFilter your question — about your sick cat, where to find an opera teacher near you, or all sorts of questions.  This is not exactly an expert service, but you might get something useful here.

Use at your own risk, but you might find somebody with just the answer you needed — or you might be able to provide it for someone else.

Google’s 411 service for your phone

Google has a 411 phone directory service. Just dial 1-800-GOOG-411 (that’s 1-800-4664-411) and “say where. Say what you’re looking for. GOOG-411 will connect you with the business you choose. This is a toll-free voice service.

If you are calling from a mobile device, GOOG-411 can even send you a text message with more details and a map. Simply say “Text message” or “Map it.”

BTW (By The Way): this has a hidden motive.  Google’s speech recognition people are using this as a way to collect samples of lots of people talking, to create better speech recognition software for the future.  It’s not intended for tying information to people, but just to give software all the variations people have in pronouncing things.

Google Custom Search Engine for your site(s)

Google offers the use of a customized version of their searches that you can use just for your own or selected sites, and then put a search box on your home page or wherever you like.

Google Custom Search Engine basically lets you select what URLs you want to be able to search, and then uses that search box like a limited search of Google’s database.

For example, there is a search box for the Boreham Library. You’ll find it on all of the catalog pages near the bottom (right under the lower gray bar) and it lets you search JUST the catalog pages and the library pages of the main campus site.

Now, it’s not perfect on the Library’s site — if there is already a search on the page (keyword, title, etc.), you may get sent to that instead [and we're working on solving that]. On the other pages, however, it works fine. And since most web pages you’re likely to write won’t have other search functions, it should work fine for you.

This is a free service, at least while it is in Beta version. If you have a large web site with no other search function, this will let people search just your site without wandering off to everything else that turns up in a standard Google search.

YouTorrent search engine for comparisons

“Newly launched torrent search engine that enables users to search for torrents on several popular torrent engines simultaneously.  What makes YouTorrent standout is the ease to compare sort search results by various criteria, i.e. size, number of seeds, peers, etc. Probably one of the best torrent search tools so far.”

Recommended by MakeUseOf.

Search with Copernic

Copernic Desktop Search Yes, there are other ways to search your computer for files, graphics, music, etc. (Windows has a built-in Search, Google and others have search engines) but Copernic is (a) free (basic edition), and (b) finds the non-Microsoft files and such — like your WordPerfect and Quicken and other non-Microsoft product files.

Six Techniques to Get More from the Web

CIO.com has an article called Six Techniques to Get More from the Web than Google Will Tell You which has advice from expert librarian researchers.

Lots of these are useful methods and resources, including links to a number of places that will help you search for all sorts of information.

Of course, once you get there, how do you know a web resource is worthwhile?

Says a section from the article (to show how useful this article really is!):

What’s Trustworthy Online?

How do you know what information you can trust online? Here are five tips from a research librarian:

1. The URL domain: If a URL ends in .edu, .gov or .org, you can bet the information you’ll find there is primary. Primary sources are more authoritative than secondary sources.

2. Website audience size and reach. This is especially true for blogs. The more people who link to it or subscribe to it, the more you can trust it.

3. Membership ranks. For trade associations, check out what companies are listed as members. Big names that you recognize will tell you the association is reputable.

4. Source materials. Think about Wikipedia. Wikipedia itself is not trustworthy because it is written by anyone, not necessarily an expert, and includes articles by contributors with an agenda. Scroll to the bottom of the entry and go to the links that are cited under References. The more references (ideally to news articles or books), the more trustworthy the wiki entry.

5. Quality of links and listed resources. Generally, the more primary the information, the better. But you’re busy. So look for a good aggregator of firsthand information. For example, a blog might cite a book that cites a white paper. You can’t necessarily trust the blog, or even the book. And the white paper is the result of months of research.

If you can access that raw research itself, that’s the most perfect source of information, but “the white paper is where a CIO should go, not to the research,” says technology librarian Jessamyn West. “Half the trick of being CIO is finding good, secondary cultivators of primary sources.”

Google for books? The Google Book Search Library Project

So, you’ve heard that some big libraries are putting ALL their books on Google.

Sorry, that’s not exactly the entire story. The first priority is to digitize the books that are old enough to be out of copyright. Those published before about 1923 and not renewed since, or any that have been released to the public domain since that time, such as government and public documents, can appear in full text.

Other materials still under copyright will be searchable but only display a few lines.

Check on Google Book Search Library Project for all the facts.

Google provides some text for books online, depending on the copyright and what the publisher allows.

• Just type Books about followed by the title or subject.
• At the top of the results, you should see links labeled Book Results. Click on the title or subject.
• Select a book from the list, if you asked for a subject.
• On the right sidebar beside the book, one of the choices will be Find this book in a library. Click on that.
• Enter your location information, such as your zip code, and search.
• Google will find the nearest libraries with this book.

Note: all the libraries must members of the international library database called OCLC.  Other libraries may hold the title but not be listed for that reason.

Yahoo has our catalog!

Library catalogs on Yahoo!: YES! The Boreham Library is a participating library in the Google and Yahoo services, provided through the international library service known as OCLC WorldCat. If you look up a book on Google or Yahoo, and it gives the option to find it in a particular library, you can get to the Boreham Library catalog information, as well as other libraries in the area. However, the listing may not be a very high priority, and you may have to go through several pages of listings before you get to one for the book, even if you request the exact title. Use the regular Google or Yahoo search box, or use WorldCat directly.