Search Tools and Technologies - Articles Archive
from October 5, 2004 to May 16, 2004

On September 23, 2004 The Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future released its study "Ten Years, Ten Trends" outlining a decade of trends it's identified since it started studying online behavior. "After a decade of observing the evolution of the Internet, and four years of ... read more

The speed at which various web-based information management tools are converging is breathtaking. On an almost daily basis it seems, new composite tools are launched which combine and integrate the best features of any number of other recently launched products to help you to better manage ... read more

Straight from Seattle, a randomly ordered list of all people invited to join the meeting of the MSN Search advisory group, nicknamed "Search Champs": Elizabeth Lane Lawley (mamamusings) Paul Aelen (Dutchcowboys - in Dutch) ... read more

As any researcher will tell you, research is a process. However, it is rarely a seamless, end-to-end flow of integrated tasks and one of the key skills of information professionals is to be able to provide neatly distilled, easy-to-digest products for the end-user, without necessarily inundating ... read more

As long anticipated in this very column, and as early as being discounted as "naive", I had humbly indicated my feeling that Google may had been working around the release of its own browser. Please review my own original posts on the topic (see bottom of this ... read more

"Finding information hidden in huge amounts of data is one of the constant leitmotivs of Information Visualisation. Autofocus is a software that combines computational linguistics with visualisation to achieve this goal. ...The goal of this program is to simplify the search for existing files in our ... read more

"The current emphasis on content management is not about content management at all but rather about content publishing - and there is a difference. Organizations are aware of the problems in getting current, reliable information into an intranet but feel that their responsibility stops with building ... read more

Jakob Nielsen points to the emerging relevance of dedicated search feeds, and, as I personally interpret this, of the highly specific and targeted newsfeeds. He says in one of his latest Alertbox columns: "...the Web's strength comes from narrowly targeted sites that provide users with highly specialized ... read more

John Blossom captures in a great article the essence of what is already happening with the emergence of very dedicated news channels and search tools. "While major search engine indeed have changed the face of what's considered valuable content, search technology as a whole is empowering ... read more

Michael Fagan is at it again with one of his great search services. "Fagan Finder's goal is to help people find what they are looking for" and URLinfo, the latest gem in his search collection, just launched overnight and still in beta. It sports the most ... read more

Quality newsmastering gear is finally appearing everywhere I turn. Last night I was out for dinner with Reid Conrad (former Extensibility) who has a fascinating product in development (version 1.0 - Mac only is already out) called Near-Time Flow. These tools facilitate individual researchers/publishers role of ... read more

Among the many different tools and online services that can be utilized to create key topic trackers, competitive intelligence reports, and content newsfeeds for independent publishers GoogleAlert stands out from the group for its focus on Google Web results and its powerful filtering capabilities. What GoogleAlert ... read more

"Intelligence is moving to the edges, flowing through networked computers, wireless devices, empowered users and distributed teams. Ideas spread like wildfire. Innovations emerge from uncharted borderlands. Information is in the air, literally. We're exploring a new world called cyberspace, and we're navigating without a map. How ... read more

Google spills discretely its own philosophical life paradigm in a short list of statements/realizations that deeply should deeply reflect its official heart and mission. In your opinion is this a faithful true credo of Google mission or is it just a smartly worded PR piece? 1) Focus ... read more

Frassle is yet another tool that tries to leverage the many opportunities created by the information overload. The collective abilities generated by the efforts of thousands of individual selfish explorers cataloguing the network according to their personal viewpoint is nothing short of marvellous. It provides a ... read more

Technorati has just launched a brand new look online. It finally sports the lines and profiles of a serious, online professional service and gets finally rid of the several links to sections forever under construction and to those others not always clear Technorati trend-spotting sections. Now ... read more

If you have not have had the opportunity to be invited to try out GMail, the new email service from Google, now in beta testing, this good article outlines the clear benefits and advantages of this promising service. GMail turns upside down many of the expectations ... read more

Have you ever tried to find the exact same web page you saw a couple of weeks ago? And failed? Have you ever had a conversation remind you of something you saw on the web? But then, when you tried to find the web page, you ... read more

Bibster introduces a system which assists researchers in managing, searching, and sharing bibliographic data in a peer-to-peer network. The advantage of the system is it provides the possibility to search on a distributed peer-to-peer network. It provides an easy way to share data with other researchers. ... read more

Pluck is a new free desktop tool that integrates facilities to easily search the Web, access RSS newsfeeds and the collection of Web links that can be rapidly shared with friends and colleagues. Pluck makes each task as easy and intuitive as possible and adds other ... read more