Mary Ellen Bates, one of my favorite search gurus, always manages to come up with some helpful new sites and web search tips. Here are some of the highlights she mentioned at the Monday morning Track A session. She says her presentation—and those from her CyberTours—will be available at BatesInfo.com/extras.
I was interested to see that her first mention was Newsy.com, which uses human editors to extract “the best of the best.” She calls it the “Walter Cronkite of the 21st Century.” Infotoday covered the launch of Newsy in a NewsBreak a year ago but I hadn’t heard of it since then (http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/NewsBreaks/Newsycom-Wants-to-Make-You-Smarter-Faster-53582.asp).
She spoke quite positively of Google Buzz, which she says competes with Twitter. It is accessed through your Gmail account and offers nice browse features but only rudimentary search capabilities. “I keep an eye on whatever Google is doing – your world will change,” she said. She didn’t mention all the controversy when it launched and unfortunately there wasn’t time to ask about it—for the details, see our Feb. 22, 2010 NewsBreak: http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/NewsBreaks/Google-Gets-Stung-by-Its-Own-Buzz-61253.asp.
Other interesting sites include the following:
Buzzzy.com – searches Google Buzz plus Twitter, Friendfeed, etc. Can limit by language.
Factery.net — searches Yahoo BOSS and Twitter and focuses on extracting facts
Technorati – is back from the dead and “Authority” is again working on the refine search page
SlideFinder.net – a great search tool for slide decks with an emphasis on university sites. This gets my vote for the best tip of the day: For competitive intelligence searching, try <company name> strategic
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Paula J. Hane |
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