ResearchBuzz

Speaking of ask-an-expert services …. there’s a new search tool that connects your question with experts who are ready to answer it. It’s set up by a search engine but I’m not going to call it that because it doesn’t search indexed data. It alerts brains.

The site is called Jyve and it’s available at http://www.jyve.com/ . I am somewhat disconcerted because I always thought “jive” was a slang term for talking in a non-meaningful manner. Anyway, the theory behind Jyve is that you enter your question and a network of experts pops up in an instant-message format and gives you an answer. If you think you got a particularly great answer, you can give the answerer a tip via Jyve’s tip jar. There’s also a directory of experts available so you can work with them directly.

With an expert service, the first thing I want to see is the archives, so I can get an idea of how questions were answered. Jyve has an archive, but it’s a little buried (click browse, and then click Questions under the browse navigation.) There’s also a selection of “live” questions under the Answer tab on the front page.

I browsed a few of these. The questions range from general reference (who won best picture last year?), to technical (Why does my optical mouse randomly move to one side of the screen?), and some which would be good for hours of philosophical debating (where do souls go).

Clicking on a question takes you to a instant-message type page, where you’ll see an archive of the question and its answers. Sometimes there are many answers, sometimes only a few, or none. If it’s a regular reference-type question it seems that the question gets answered immediately, and the rest of the conversation is on the theme of “Hey, are you there? Is that the answer you needed?” etc.

I don’t know how I feel about this. On one hand it’s great to be able to immediately ask a group of folks a question. On the other hand, I missed the measured, long conversations that you’d see on a site like Google Answers, where there was not so much immediacy required. Asking the question in an IM format seems to preclude a long, intense discussion.

You know what I’d like to see? Every question gets its own page on JyveWiki.com . Then if you wanted to go back afterwards and add additional information, discuss aspects of the question, etc., you could.

I decided to ask a question, so started out with “Why is the sky blue?” I was taken back to the IM interface screen, where there were apparently about a dozen question-answerers on deck. I worked on this writeup for a while. I came back. I had gotten no answer. So while you can get an immediate response, don’t count on the fact that you will get an immediate response.

In addition to the question asking and archive, Jyve also has some tools for question-answerers and information on how to become an answerer yourself. I can see where a service like this can come in handy, but I can also see where it would make me miss a slower, more discussion-oriented format.

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Hey, did you see the Oscars? Me neither. If you need the highlights, check out Backup Brain: Dori Smith blogged the whole thing, as she does every year.

But right now I am not talking about the Oscars, I am talking about movies. Yahoo has introduced a shortcut to allow you to search on movie titles and location and get a nice chunk of information at the top of your search results.

Enter a current movie and a location — city and state or zip code. Sometimes just city will work — “Detroit” worked. A search for Happy Feet 90210 got a listing that showed a promo picture, links to information at Yahoo Movies, ratings from Yahoo and critics (with links to each) and movie showtimes for the area of Beverly Hills. (There was only one.) And hey, there was even a note that Happy Feet won the Academy Award for best animated feature. Hey, that was quick.

In addition to current features the shortcut also works on upcoming features. I did a search for 300 Detroit and got a promo picture, link to a trailer, link to a Yahoo Movies summary, and the release date, and that was about it. No critical reviews as of yet and of course it isn’t showing anywhere.

Occasionally I did a search that didn’t bring me anything — a search for Rocky Balboa New York NY brought me no shortcut, much to my surprise. Also Yahoo doesn’t seem to list all available theaters. I did a search for Ghost Rider Durham NC, and while Yahoo Movies listed a huge number of places where the movie’s showing, it missed the Starlite Drive In.

All in all, though, this is a great place to start your search for current movies — it’s amazing how much information they can cram into one little shortcut! But if you want to make sure you’re getting all the viewing options, you might want to check the theater listings in your local area’s media.

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It’s billed as a directory of businesses in Michigan, but this site has a lot more than business listings available. Visit http://www.michiganbusiness.us/ and you’ll probably want to start with the over 15,000 business listings — but after that, take some time to explore.

From the front page you can do some browsing for business — by type or by city. There’s also a lot of other stuff on the front page, including random Michigan facts (I didn’t know the one about Fremont and the baby food) and pointers to good Michigan sites. To get more into the business listings, choose the Business Search link from the nav on the left. Here you can search for businesses by phone number, description (keyword), name, area code, etc. There are also a couple of unlikely searches available here as well, like first name. Yes, you can find every business in Michigan with a listed representative named Herbert. (MichiganBusiness.us lists one.) Government agencies will also be found with this search.

Business listings include contact name, address, phone number, and map link. Sometimes, but mostly not, there’s also e-mail and Web site. (If there’s no e-mail address on file the listing will say so, but if there’s no Web link the listing will say nosite.html, which will take you to a new page that reads, “This business does not have a website in our records.” This is astoundingly annoying.) There’s a detail page for each business but I didn’t see anything on the ones I looked that that couldn’t be gotten from the search results page. (The business detail pages are also EXTREMELY ad-heavy.)

The “General Info” link on the left nav bar has several good pages, including a nicely-annotated link list, demographic information, Michigan related press releases, and eCards. The site also has Michigan job listings, but that part of the site doesn’t look very busy. And of course if you are a Michigan business you can get an account, update your listings, enhance your listings for a small fee, etc.

I liked the many search options and the annotated link lists are good, but the pages here are ad-heavy to the point of distraction. Removing an ad block on the individual pages — maybe the skyscraper on the far right? — would help the design a lot, in my opinion.

This post came from ResearchBuzz, a site with news and information about online data collections. Visit us at ResearchBuzz.com .