Phil Bradley's Blog

Monday, January 31, 2005

 

Ariadne has been published today, issue 42, with a bunch of interesting articles. Mine on search engines looks at other reasons for choosing a search engine than just search. I did want to call it 'Whose corporate whore are you?' but understandably my editor wasn't keen!

Phil 11:33 AM

Friday, January 28, 2005

 

Seeking Better Web Searches is an article in Scientific American. Worth a read.

Phil 10:34 AM

 

Gary notes that Google Increases Maximum Number of Query Terms from 10 to 32. This is very good news, and way overdue.

Phil 10:21 AM

Thursday, January 27, 2005

 

I somehow think that Doogle won't last long once Google gets to hear about them!

Phil 7:22 PM

 

The National electronic Library for Health has started to offer RSS feeds for news aggregators. What an excellent idea, and really nice to see RSS is starting to be taken seriously in the UK

Phil 10:51 AM

 

Google has added a sort of video search feature and the linkAbout Google Video goes to their help page. I think it's misnamed to be honest, since it's a collection of exerpts from television programmes from American stations, such as ABC and Fox News. However, it's an interesting approach if you need multimedia information, but I don't rate it highly in comparison to what Yahoo is doing in this area.

Phil 10:38 AM

Friday, January 21, 2005

 

I won't be blogging much, if at all, over the next few days. I'm running a course at the St Petersburg centre of the British Council in Russia.

Phil 8:51 PM

 

Interesting article from eWeek titled Internet Explorer Use Keeps Falling. IE use is down to 90.3 percent, Firefox use has risen 0.9 % to reach 5%.

Phil 1:04 PM

Monday, January 17, 2005

 

Well, despite people telling me that Multimap still works, it just doesn't for me. Consequently I've moved to Streetmap instead, which works as well as Multimap did and I'm very happy with it.

Phil 11:44 AM

Wednesday, January 12, 2005

 

Story:Yahoo! News - Hard-Core Porn Takes Over Political Site is a good reminder - you don't own your domain name, you just rent it.

Phil 11:05 AM

 

Gary, over at SearchEngineWatch reports that Exalead's Index Passes 1 Billion Page Mark, Prepares to Launch Desktop Search App.

Phil 10:52 AM

 

BlogBib is an annotated bibligoraphy on weblogs and blogging, with a focus on library/librarian blogs.

Phil 10:36 AM

Tuesday, January 11, 2005

 

Fun little search engine this one. FindForward relies on Google search, but it has a host of options, such as Ask Question, RSS, related pages, a search grid, weblogs, date, just files and whole bunch of other things. Interesting!

Phil 10:53 AM

 

Yahoo! has lagged behind the others on this one and has only just released the Yahoo! Desktop Search Beta. To be honest, it's not one that I'm going to be loading - I'm already using Google, MSN and Copernic desktop search on my machines, so I'll wait and see what others have to say about it first.

Phil 10:33 AM

Wednesday, January 05, 2005

 

Interesting and balanced article on the Wikipedia is to be found at: apophenia: Academia and Wikipedia

Phil 9:20 AM

Monday, January 03, 2005

 

Robin Good, one of the Microsoft Search Champs has written an interesting piece entitled Free Fall: Internet Explorer Has Now Lost 30% Of The Browser Market . While these are his own statistics, it does make compelling reading and should make Microsoft sit up and take notice.

Phil 2:13 PM

 

Nokodo Search is an engine that launched on New Years Day. I do try to be positive when looking at new search engines, but this one is dire. No results counter, no advanced search functionality, virtually no help screens. One to avoid.

Phil 1:59 PM

Sunday, January 02, 2005

 

The BritishCouncil did a survey to find the 70 most beautiful words in the English language. They came up with some interesting results. Included in the list are: bumblebee, whoops, hen-night, loquacious, blue and aqua. The top 5 are 5)eternity 4)love 3)smile 2)passion 1)mother

Phil 12:18 PM