SiteLines - Ideas About Web Searching

Interesting Tool: Copyscape

Plagiarist alert! There's an interesting online tool to help those of you who want to track those who has lifted content off your website. Copyscape uses Google API technology to identify distinctive sentences and phrases from your site and then sniffs around for other sites that use the same or similar phrases. Although Copyscape tends to sniff out a lot of blogs (probably because bloggers copy or paraphrase stuff a lot from other sources), this is a great way to track unapproved uses of your web site content. The folks who make Copyscape also produce Google Alert

Best 46 Free Utilities

I don't know about you, but I'm tired of seeing the same old (and mainly not very good) software appear on the major mags' "best of" lists. So it was refreshing to spot Ian Richards at Tech Support Alert's The 46 Best-ever Freeware Utilities, which I spotted on my colleague Gwen Harris' weblog, Internet News this week. I loved almost everything about this roundup, but the best part was learning about not-so-well-known software and resources. Recommended.

Toolbars: Trash or Treasures

Librarian Greg Notess contributes a thorough and informed review of various search engine toolbars, in the January/February issue of Online Magazine. Notess reviews the major toolbars and offers readers pro's and con's of downloading and installing them.

On the plus side, Notess recognizes that toolbars can make some search tasks easier. Some even have neat features like pop-up blockers and text highlighters that offer additional conveniences. On the downside, there are potential security risks in installation, and in some cases, the toolbar software may collect information about web pages visited. Notess concludes by noting that the toolbars are really a fabulous form of advertising, and admits that he rarely uses them.

Reference Management Links

Tracy Kent of the University of Birmingham has produced an excellent portal site on reference management software. The site links to over a dozen reference software packages available, as well as reviews, email discussion lists, a brief annotated citation guide, and sources of current awareness services for reference management.

Bookmarklets - Hot tool for faster web work

Many of the latest and greatest search gizmos leave me cold, particularly any that call for software installation on the desktop. But I've been watching the growing interest in bookmarklets and I can really see the value of these handy little browser toolbar shortcuts.

If you would like to learn more about bookmarklets, I draw your attention to two good articles: Greg Notess' On the Net column, Bookmarklets, Favelets, and Keymarks: Shortcuts Galore, and Mary Ellen Bates Tip of the Month: Bookmarklets- Nifty Tools a Mouse-Click Away. (Those new to bookmarklets should read Greg's article first, as it provides an excellent beginner-level explanation.)

RSS Primer

RSS enables easy syndication of published web content for easy retrieval and redeployment by others. RSS is used extensively by news reporting sources and weblogs ('blogs') to enable easy linking to headlines, and RSS also permits those who use newsreading software to easily track headlines from RSS sources.

There are some great applications for RSS in libraries and at technical help desks (newsletters, reference desk "where-to-look" files) but for the novice, it's sometimes difficult to conceptualize what RSS is when you don't know anything about it.

A helpful primer on RSS is now available through the EEVL, the Internet guide for engineering, mathematics and computing. The guide "is primarily intended for a non-technical audience who require an overview of RSS in order to allow them to make decisions regarding the possible use of the technology. However, the guidelines do provide recommendations for good practice, case studies on RSS production and links to tools and specifications which will provide useful starting points for those tasked with actually producing RSS feeds."

Latest Search Engine Gizmos - Toolbars with Popup Blockers

Both Google and Altavista have recently released new improved downloadable free toolbars that contain pop-up blockers. Pop-up blockers are designed to prevent those annoying pop-up advertisements that serious searchers loathe. This hook is a good one and will likely compel many searchers to download the new toolbars, since prior to the availability of free search toolbars the only option to prevent pop-ups was fairly rudimentary shareware that often blocked things that you wanted to see as well as things you didn't.

I'm not a big fan of free search engine toolbars, mainly because I think they just reinforce our ever-increasing over-reliance on search engines, by making them even easier to use without first considering if they are appropriate to the task.

Nevertheless, I checked out the FAQ for the new Google toolbar and the Google folks provide some explanation of how their pop-up blockers work -- the blockers should allow at least one popup window IF YOU CLICK ON A LINK (so that legitimate web sites that have coded their links to open in new windows will continue to function). The blocker tries to target pop-ups that are coded to open without clicking or other deliberate choice by the user. However, if you find that, after installing one of these new toolbars, you're having trouble opening windows with a click, try uninstalling the toolbar and see if the problem resolves itself.

What are your thoughts on the new toolbars? I welcome your comments and reviews!

Review of Bookmark Management Software

If you keep a large collection of bookmarks/favorites on hand and need an advanced tool to search them, Associated Press reporter Anick Jesdanun reviews several free and shareware bookmark management tools in the article "Software to help you track down those elusive Web bookmarks" in the April 25 2003 issue of USA Today. Jesdanun rejects the free web-based bookmark management tools that he tested, favoring commercial ones. He reviews Outertech's Linkman, Linkstash, Kaylon's Powermarks, and the Mac-only URL Manager Pro.

Although it's not Jesdanun's favorite, I have been using Powermarks for over a year to manage our site selection process for the Search Portfolio, and I used it for several years before that as a personal bookmark manager. A Powermarks file holds links under consideration for the Search Portfolio -- another one, titled "Dumps and Rejects," holds web links that we have chosen to remove or sites we considered but decided not to include. Powermarks enables us to assign individual keywords, personal comments from our assessment team, and fetches meta-tags and descriptions from the page automatically. A sync option makes sure that the selection team has updated lists. And the link-checking automation process lets us quickly see if a link is live, changed, or dead. Not bad for under $30.00.

Search Engine Position Analyzer - A Tool for Web Trainers

A search engine position analyzer enables you to check to see if a particular web address would have been displayed in the first few pages of search results (the only ones most people look at) if you searched using selected keywords.

This type of tool can be of great benefit to those who teach web searching. A position analyzer provides an easy way to discover if an allegedly "invisible" web search result would have come up in a typical keyword search of a major search engine. I often use them to test my class examples.

Search engine position analyzers are employed by search engine optimizers to check relative positions of a client's site. There are several professional-level SE position analyzers but I came across a free one that worked reasonably well in several tests that I conducted. The Search Engine Position Analyzer Script enables users to enter a URL, then enter the keyword(s) that would be searched. Check up to 7 search tools to test, and the analyzer returns information indicating if the URL would turn up in the first 50 results for that keyword search. The analyzer also links directly to the source search tool's results, so you can check the hit list to make sure.

Please note that during my tests, some of the listed search tools did not deliver results properly, indicating that the script may be somewhat out of date. (I attempted to contact the script's author without success.) The script's links to Google, Hotbot, and Altavista worked properly, with Hotbot defaulting to AlltheWeb's results. The script linked incorrectly to or returned no sites from Excite, Infoseek (now Disney's Go.com) and Lycos. Although it also linked to Magellan, that site no longer exists.