ResearchBuzz

Vanilla wafers to Google Blogoscoped, which tipped me to Google’s new alert services for its Google Videos property.

Google Alerts are available at http://www.google.com/alerts . If I recall correctly, Google Alerts started out with News, but now you can track News, Blogs, Web, Google Video, and Google Groups. (And, of course, there’s “Comprehensive”, if you want to search everything.)

My first thought about this was, “This is nice, but not narrow enough.” Say I wanted to search for Carol Burnett Show episodes on Google Video. I want them to be at least four minutes long but less than 20, because if I laugh at Tim Conway for more than 20 minutes I might run out of air. I can do that with Google Video’s advanced search by specifying a duration. But I’m not sure that the duration will carry over to the Google Alert, should I choose the link at the bottom of the search results.

So the solution is to find the syntax for doing the advanced searches without using the advanced search page. As you might expect, the syntax for duration is duration: (duration can be short, medium, or long.) Site restriction is site:, of course. So this search, given to Google Alerts, should do what I want:

Carol Burnett Show duration:medium

We’ll see. Make sure when you’re using the video syntax that you’re only getting alerts for video!

There seems to be a resurgence of interest in niche search engines, though the subject of health is admittedly a pretty darn big niche. If you’re looking for health information on the Web, I admit I was pretty impressed with Healia ( http://www.healia.com ). (Healia’s in beta.)

The first thing I do with any of specialized search engine — especially one that indexes information that users might find critical — is try to break it. (Sorry.) The first query that came to mind for this particular search engine was canadian drugs. Run that search on Google and look at the kind of results you get — the query is a good magnet for splogs and e-commerce sites.

I was expecting at least a little of that in the Healia results but I didn’t see it! The query managed to find almost 1.9 million results (well over twice what the Google search for the same query found) but the first page of results were rock solid, including content from government sites (state and federal) Yahoo Health, and Dr. Koop. Going through several pages of results the only complaint I have is that one particular story (about the FDA’s announcement that “Canadian” drugs actually come from other countries) is repeated over and over and over.

Backing up I did a more pedantic search for methadone, which is currently in the news as the subject of an FDA warning. Healia produced a good set of about 12,000 results (this time Google clobbered them with over 4 million and a pretty good first page of results.) You might also notice that Healia’s results come in tabs; in addition to all search results you can get tabs of results on dosage, usage, and side effects.

In addition to plain search results Healia has a bunch of other features. With each search it’ll make suggestions (for both more specific and more general) and if you’re searching for drugs it’ll take a guess at an appropriate Medline entry. Also, if you check out the left side of the results page, you’ll see several checkbox-filters you can use to narrow down your results by reading complexity, relevant population, and characteristics (interactive tools, for text browsers, fast-loading, etc.) I didn’t trust the reading complexity filter that much. It brought me some slightly murky-to-the-layman NIH pages when I searched for synthroid.

Other than that, though, I was very impressed with this site. From the experiments I ran I found it a great place for basic health-related searches that provides a nice mix of results, combining consumer-level, government,and forum sites. Take a look!

Earlier this week eBay made several announcements of new features to its site. Here are a couple that you might find interesting.

First one is the release of a Wiki and blogs for eBay. The Wiki is available at http://www.ebaywiki.com/. Topics are on the left and are divided into several categories including buying, selling, finding, and developers. The site doesn’t really look like a “Wiki” as I visualize it — it looks more like a set of articles. Some areas are more populated than others — the section on developers had only two articles, while there were 13 articles in the buying section. Articles are editable, with history and comments, along with a count of how many people found the article useful.

eBay is also offering blogs now, which you can view and learn more about at http://blogs.ebay.com/. The front page of this site has the latest posts and the latest created blogs. (You can also browser blogs by eBay user name at the bottom of the page.) At the top of the page you may search by titles, posts, or members. I did a search for antique and got nine results. Results appear to be listed by date, but unfortunately no RSS feeds of search results appear to be available. Drat. (Individual blogs DO have RSS feeds.)

Those of you who do information trapping on eBay will appreciate eBay’s recently-announced eBay Alerts, which will notify users about eBay listing updates through instant messages and text messages as well as phone calls. (For example, users can get a phone call to let them know that three minutes remain before an item listing ends.) Sorry, these alerts are available in the US only. You can get more details about the new offerings at http://pages.ebay.com/wireless/?ssPageName=CMDV:AB. A couple of things to note. The text message alerts will actually cost you — 25 cents each, with the charges showing up on your cell phone bill. Yeesh. Also, while these features have been announced, the instant message and phone call offerings are actually marked as “coming soon”. (The phone call service will be available in July and will be rolled out as a pilot program. The instant message offering will become available at the end of June. eBay plans to offer similar alerts via Skype in 2007.)