ResearchBuzz

Well, it’s not really a search engine. It’s more like a directory. But you can do keyword searching. While there’s an admirable list of sites here it needs a little more functionality to make it most excellent. You can find Everything About Tourism at http://www.everything-about-tourism.com/ .

As you might expect from the name, the site is for finding tourism information. You can search by country, by category of site (lots of categories, from accommodations to adventure holidays to travel insurance to travel gifts) or by business name keyword.

I decided I wanted to find adventure holidays in Belgium. I used two pulldown menus to specify Belgium and Adventure Tours. (Once you get to the search results page, you can narrow down further by region.) I got three results, which listed the company name, location (country), and Web site.

And that’s all. No snippet, no last modify date, no anything. This was one time where a preview snap (either a screen shot or a frame of a live Web site) would have been extremely useful. Further, a link to domain information would be great as well - how long has that Web site been up? When was the domain registered? What’s the contact address? How many sites link to it? Etc. More data that would let us assess the site’s credibility would be very useful.

I was impressed with the number and breadth of resources here (safaris in China! Cycling in Finland!) and I like the simple way to put searches together, but I’d love to get more information from the search results than is currently available.

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

The National Archives of Britain has released a new set of passenger manifests which cover British ports from 1890 to 1899 (with more lists to be added later — eventually the site will cover up to 1960.) You can search through the lists (and sign up for e-mail updates as more materials are added) at http://www.ancestorsonboard.com/ .

Search by first and last name, gender, origin or destination port. I did a search for Thomas Murphy. I got 55 results initially, though if I’d done a search for all name variants I would have gotten plenty more results. Search results are shown in a table that includes year of departure as well as destination and departure port.

That information is free. However if you want to view a transcript of the information or an image of the manifest itself, you’ll have to pay. Views/transcripts are purchased with “units”; 5 units to view a transcript and 30 units to view high-resolution color images of the manifests. This sounds like quite a bit until you see that you can buy 50 units for £5. If you purchase units here they’re also work on FindMyPast.com which also has similar genealogy/historical records.

More news and updates about the site at http://www.ancestorsonboard.com/getBlogContent.action .

The AAA has improved their TripTik online mapping tool to include gas prices and locations for about 100,000 places in the US. You can try TripTik free (you don’t have to be a member) at AAA.com .

You’ll notice that it looks much like other mapping applications that you’ve used, except you get more options for point-to-point travel (you can travel between sports venues, for example, or hospitals, or cities, instead of being restricted to address-to-address mapping.)

I decided I wanted directions from Hollywood Florida to Hollywood California. After a cute little animation I got directions for the 2700+ mile trip (40 hours!) There are several tabs; the first one you see is for directions. The Travel Tab provides the gas information; it’s the last icon on that tab. When you click on it at first you won’t get any additional information since you have to zoom in pretty close (like three notches from the closest zoom) to get the gas information.

When you see a Gas icon, just mouseover it for information. You’ll get the name, address, and phone of the gas station. For some stations you’ll get no gas prices at all, for some you’ll get only a single price (just diesel, just regular, etc) and for some you’ll get several prices. In addition to the price you’ll also get a note of when that price was recorded. From what I could tell the prices are updated fairly frequently, though in my experience gas prices can change multiple times a day.

You can add locations to your trip or just click on a balloon to keep it “pinned” to the display, making it easy to compare multiple locations. I didn’t like the fact that I had to zoom SO FAR IN to get the prices (made it harder to keep track of the trip as a whole) but I liked the information here and the update frequency.