Monday, August 16, 2010

Specialist Search Engines

Blinkx claims to be the world's largest video search engine and I believe it! My advanced search on 'hiking new zealand' brought up lots of wonderful videos from Youtube. I like the continuous short exerts that play. It is all so much more interative than the straight Youtube search.
My searches on Time Magazine gave only the context of the words because the articles I found were in copyright.
I did a search of the magazines re global warming. There were some 4,000 hits. The oldest loaded was 1989. This search facility could be useful when looking for an article in a 'popular' magazine. By using the Advance search I could limit my search to more recent articles and cut down the number of hits.

Saturday, August 7, 2010

Google Web Searches

The various google seach options are great for narrowing down the number of articles or images you might want so that your search is as relevant as possible. Having the choice to only look at the latest is particularly useful for students who are looking for current information. The Wonder Wheel simple arrangement of relevant and related search results gives another search mechanism that might be easier for a lot of people. Not every topic has a Wonder Wheel but this number will grow. Again the Timeline is a format that appeals but it does often pick up irrelevancies when it thinks a number is a year.
My search for immunisations across the various search engines showed many differences in the results. On BING the results were very biased to the U.S. Dept Health and I only got a quarter of the search results that YAHOO gave me until I changed the s to a z in immunisations. Using Bing's Images I was able to limit them to all colour or just faces.
YAHOO gives you a page to take notes, a nice touch I thought. It also gives you a link on the left to the official bodies or journals/newspapers responsible for the articles so you can go just into them e.g.New Zealand Medical Association or NZ Herald. All NZ relevant if spelt with an s. Had to change to a z to get other relevant articles from overseas.
Exalead differs greatly in giving a graphic illustration of the front page of each website. Again I had to change the spelling to the American to get maximum number of hits.
All search engines were intuitive of my being in NZ and gave me articles from NZ first.



Thursday, August 5, 2010

Google alerts

I chose alerts for homoeopathy, swine flu and all whites soccer. I had to edit the swine flu topic and limit it to news items because it was inundating me. Not so much happening with the All Whites at the moment. Should have chosen to search the Black Sticks! The homoeopathy has so far turned up books for sale and a few blog comments which haven't been very enlightening. I should have perhaps gone for alternative health but that would probably cause a landslide. Maybe I should try using the spelling homeopathy without the second o which most people use. Google alerts is a great way of following a current topic or maybe a group/singer you are passionate about.

My Proquest feed with articles on xenotransplantation has produced a substantial list! This paper caught my eye ! Huh?!!
6. Susceptibility of recombinant porcine endogenous retrovirus reverse transcriptase to nucleoside and non-nucleoside inhibitors
M Wilhelm, J A Fishman, R Pontikis, A-M Aubertin, F X Wilhelm. Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences. Basel: Dec 2002. Vol. 59, Iss. 12; p. 2184

Monday, August 2, 2010

Topic 3 - RSS feeds

Soooo frustrating! Whenever I go into MyAccess Science it just takes me back to the Library web page. To top it off we have gone back to dialup here at home.

Tried the Proquest question but no luck there either. When I tried dropping the URL into my Bloglines account it gave me something completely irrelevant. Will have to move on and do this question at work with some input.

(5 minutes later)

Have just gone into my gmail and found that last nights gobbledygook worked!!! I have a feed for xenotransplantation. Yay! Now I just have to sort out MyAccess Science. Not sure I'm ready to roll this out to the public. Perhaps I better have another go when we get broadband back!