ResearchBuzz

Coming this fall: The Blackfoot Digital Library.

CNN and the NYT are Twittering.

Google Book Search bibliography now available.

FeedBurner talks about AdSense for feeds.

Amazon and Borders, officially broke up.

Interactive Web sites and shaping public perception.

The Brooklyn Museum is now in the Flickr Commons!

I was wondering if that was new. Google has changed its favicon.

Google Visualization API moving outside the spreadsheet.

LSU in Second Life.

New Grand Tour of Rome available online.

Is this new? A Guide to Civil War Records in the State Archives of Florida.

AWS has an article about the New York Times TimesMachine. Unfortunately it’s for Times print subscribers only…

Condoleeza Rice at Google.

Google has tool to check for malware.

News mapped on Google Earth.

Hey! Cory’s in a comic strip.

US Airways: No More Free Snacks. I think eventually they’re just going to stack passengers like cordwood.

Google’s new? discussion board results. Good good. More more. And isolate them so I can search just them (or them and Google Groups) when I’m trying to solve a tech problem…

I thought it was interesting that a professor at RIT — RIT — is claiming that Doodle 4 Google winner.

Drat. I missed Towel Day too.

The American Civil War Online, free through June 30. Thanks for the heads-up LiB.

Google Sites is now open to everybody, and now it has its own blog.

More instructional material on the Internet, this time wrapped up in a search engine. New engine HowDoYa.com (http://HowDoYa.com) gave me some odd results, but I like the way it offers additional topic keywords.

The first thing I did when I got to this site (simple keyword search) was run the Strawberry Shortcake Test. HowDoYa.com got a B- … There were plenty of Strawberry Shortcake recipes (How do I make Strawberry Shortcake?) but there were also some off-topic Web pages (including the intriguing “Unreal Tournament And Skins And Strawberry Shortcake” page, which I didn’t visit.)

You’ll notice on the search results page there are also sets of keywords that can narrow down your search. For example, my strawberry shortcake query brought me a What set (butter, berry, cake, flour, sugar, chicken(?!)), a Who set that was a bit odd (cobbler, batter, guest), a Why set (chill, baking, slice, sprinkle, stir), and Where (bakery, dairy, shop.) Click on a keyword and your search will be run again with that keyword included.

(I suspect that’s why some of the suggested searches on this site are so weird — “How to cook oatmeal in the microwave linear accelerator”??)

You can also see where those keywords are popping up. Next to every search result is an “X-Ray Spex” type icon of glasses. Click on it and the keyword sets will refresh. The keywords that appear in that search result will show in dark blue, while the other keywords will continue to show in light blue. I wish that the designer had chosen some other color besides dark blue — yellow, maybe — to make the keywords stand out more.

But actually that’s the only beef I have about the design of this site. I normally don’t have much comment about a site’s design, but this one I really like. It’s cartoony without being silly, easy to use without being overly-simplified. You may have to experiment with your searches a little to find good results, but I like the fact that suggested keywords are offered in such universal sets, and I like the “x-ray” feature that shows site keywords in suggested sets. Worth a look.