ResearchBuzz

New Blogger template widgets.

Live.com turning off advanced syntax because of data mining.
Whaaaaa? It had to go that far? They couldn’t search for user agents or institute a CAPTCHA or SOMETHING? That’s not Live Search, that’s half-dead
search right there. >grumble< Firefox Extension: Piggy Bank. Sounds fun.

Man, Jenny gets all gaming-nerd and I’m not going to CiL. Drat.

Wired interviews Eric Schmidt.

Two days per month wasted in aimless Web surfing. Only two?

San Francisco Real Estate Brain — http://www.sanfranciscorealestatebrain.com/ — one man’s
attempt to aggregate information on the San Francisco Real Estate market. Good on him. Nice topic list on left nav.

Family Caregiver Alliance has started an online database of state and national legislation on caregiving at http://www.caregiver.org/caregiver/jsp/content_node.jsp?nodeid=1848 . The database will be updated monthly.

You have a couple of ways to go through the available information. The first is to view the information broken down by state or federal sphere. Looking at Federal Legislation Introduced or Enacted in 109th Congress or State Legislation Introduced or Enacted in 2004-2006 will get you a page with a brief overview and then a table of information including bill status, date of introduction, summary, and current status.

Alternately, you can view the information by policy strategy, including care coordination, tax incentives, and Medicare.

As long as you’re here, also check out Caregiving Across the States, which provides state-by-state information on caregiving resources. Nebraska had four programs or sets or programs listed as well as a state profile available.

I remember when Gazoontite.com was launched. Long before it filed for bankruptcy in 2000 I told my husband it would fail. Why?, he asked. Because nobody’ll remember how to spell it, I said. They might guess gesundheit, gazoontight, gahzoontite, etc. Even if the site brands itself effectively it’ll be an uphill battle trying to get customers to remember the right spelling. Google may sound silly but at least it’s easy to spell. And that’s one of the reasons I can’t stand Web sites with complicated or hard to spell names.

Anyway, Gazoontite is the first thing I thought of when I visited new meta-search engine fisssh. Or, as I’m calling it to help myself remember, “Three-S fisssh.” (There is no four-s fish, and the two-s fish is a squatsite.) fisssh is available at http://www.fisssh.com/ . (No, I don’t think it’s going to fail or anything like that. I just wonder about the three s’s.)

Fisssh is another metasearch engine with two differences. The firssst (sorry) is that the results are laid out in “newspaper style”, across several columns, with different resources given different sized blocks of information. The blog search, for example, shows results from Zuula, Sphere, Technorati, and Bloglines, among others. The second thing is that fisssh points to additional search resources. The blog search has, at the bottom of its search result page, links to over eighty additional blog search resources, most of which I had never heard of.

Yes, there’s blog search at fisssh. There’s several other search options as well, including Web, videos, podcasts, “info” (Wikipedia, Answers.com, del.icio.us, Highbeam (!!)) and social (MySpace, Bolt, Friendster, etc.) Each search that I looked at had an enormous selection of pointers to additional search resources in the same arena. The fisssh searches themselves used an interesting combination of resources and the layout was easy to use. However, I got a lot more about the pointers to additional resources.