ResearchBuzz

Bill Drew, Web4Lib Cool Guy, has created a Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) that searches over 225 sites. The sites are drawn from the 1999-2006 annual lists issued by the Machine-Assisted Reference Section of the Reference and User Services Association of the ALA. You can try out the engine at http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=012681041057676717069%3Alxoys7hon_y .

A search for Mae Jemison found a variety of sites on the first page of results, including CNN, Factmonster, Infoplease, Biography.com, and the Internet Movie Database. There was a not a full count on the search results page — is that missing from coop search engines?

By the way, LOTS of folks out there making custom search engines. Wanna find them on Google? The magic search modifier is inurl:cse inurl:coop site:google.com . Add that to a general keyword search and your results will be Google custom search engines. (Actually you might get a couple of listings that are results pages for custom search engines. If you get too many of those you can filter them out by adding intitle:custom to your query.)

A vanilla search for inurl:cse site:google.com inurl:coop gets something over 3300 results.

I did a few general searches just to see what I’d get. A search for solar inurl:cse inurl:coop site:google.com got three results, including one search results page. A search for politics inurl:cse inurl:coop site:google.com found 17 results (yow!) And a search for library finds 84 results (not much of a surprise there.)

For extra credit: if you search for a site instead of a keyword (like cnn.com instead of solar) you’ll get listings of engines which note that that particular site is being searched with their custom search engine.

Yahoo! Answers now has another level of filtering, thank goodness. The Web site ( http://answers.yahoo.com/ ) now offers “stars” for their results. Users can star questions that they think are high-quality or otherwise worthy.

Unfortunately, you can’t tell starred questions in the search results. I did a search for tigers. The first result in my search was a question called “Tigers vs. White Sox?” This question had one star, but there was no indication in the YA search results that I could find that this question was starred. It would be nice if you could sort search results so starred questions float to the top (maybe they change the search relevance; I don’t know.)

If you’re more interested in sorting the answers than the questions, you still have the option to list answers with the highest-rated ones first, or answers that have a minimum rating.

PR Newswire Hooks Up With Technorati. About time!

Web site of audio to help blind people (Chinese) http://www.tynews.com.cn/index/2007-01/15/content_2966212.htm .

A new search engine for radiology images: http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/526536/?sc=dwtr .

Congressional Hearings Digital Collection.

The latest addiction? Cell phones.

Update on Burritophile, a database of over 1,000 burrito reviews.

Wetland inventory maps for the state of Michigan now available: http://www.michigan.gov/som/0,1607,7-192–160215–,00.html .