Nicely organized and handy cheat sheet of search shortcuts for Google & Yahoo. Also available as a 3 page doc file and a separate html page for easy printing.
NYLA SLMS & Some New Google Services
I’m looking forward to presenting two workshops at the NYLA SLMS 2009 Conference next week. One of the sessions is on Google tools for schools. In the conference program I suggested people stop by my blog and tell me about their favorite Google tools. A bit late, but the invitation is still open and open to anyone! Please share your favorite Google tools.
And with that in mind, Google released some new features today.
- Similar Images is a new service being tested in Google Labs. Search for a photo and look for the “Similar Images” link in the results to see more images like the one you selected. It finds images that have similar objects, colors & layout.
- News Timeline – Also new in Google Labs. Select from many sources: news, blogs, photos, Time, Wikipedia, quotes and more. Select time frame (1800, 1500, 1952, etc.) And frequency: day, week, decade, etc. Great display of articles, quotes, news stories and more. Sampel searches:
- Oil Pollution – Interesting to see mentions of topic over the decades.
- Barack Obama Quotes – View by week over the last decade.
- Meryl Streep – Movies
Google gadget tutorial
This tutorial from SEOish on How to Make Google Gadgets uses google gadgets to teach about making google gadgets. Love the video next to the gadget editor. Clever and effective.
Google in Quotes
Google has come out with a really clever gizmo that they’re calling ‘Google in Quotes‘. Basically it pits two political figures from some major countries together allowing searchers to type in a search term in order to compare what they say about the subject. The experiment comes in various country flavours…
This service is one of the ever interesting projects from Google Labs and draws quotes from sources covered by Google News. Handy for a quick lookup. Out of context quotes can certainly be misleading, as a search on what John McCain has said about “England” reveals. But there are links back to the original news source to provide context. Handy for information literacy lessons pehaps?
Note that you can find quotes for people other than the ones that are listed. Select “custom” from the Edition dropdown box and start typing someone’s name in one of the “quotes by” boxes, matching names will pop up.
RSS feeds for web searches
Most of us have a few (or many!) topics that we do repeat searches on in the big search engines. This might be a research topic you’re trying to keep up to date on, your library’s name or even your own name. An RSS feed for a subject search can save you some time by automatically send you recent changes in the top hits for your favorite search. (Reminds me of setting up SDI searches in Dialog many moons ago!) But none of the major search engines make it easy to set up an RSS feed for a general search.
So thanks to Digital Inspiration for this tip on how to create an RSS feed for a subject search (more…)
