Helpers for Searching the Web
Bob Jensen at Trinity University

OmniFind Business Data Search
IBM and Yahoo try to challenge Google with free data-search tool for businesses

Six Tips to Protect Your Search Privacy --- http://www.eff.org/wp/six-tips-protect-your-search-privacy
Also see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce/000start.htm

Online Free Tutorials in Multiple Disciplines --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#Tutorials

Find Free Online Literature --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm 

Lost Titles, Forgotten Rhymes: How to Find a Novel, Short Story, or Poem Without Knowing its Title or Author --- http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/lost/

Find Free Online Music --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Music.htm

Bob Jensen listens to music free online (and no commercials) --- http://www.slacker.com/ 

Catalog of U.S. Government Publications --- http://catalog.gpo.gov/F

State and Local Government on the Web --- http://www.piperinfo.com/state/states.html

Google Maps Street View --- http://maps.google.com/help/maps/streetview/

Links by Logos --- http://www.allmyfaves.com/

Bob Jensen's threads on how researchers/scholars search the Web are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm#Scholars

Bob Jensen's threads --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Threads.htm

Introductory Notes:

When it comes to many questions (products, science, etc.) , I refer people to http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/
This fantastic site now has a new search engine. 

When it comes to encyclopedia-type questions my next favorite referral is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
If you don’t like something in a Wiki module, you can change it yourself from your browser.  If you don’t find a module, you can perform a service for the world by writing a module.

From the Scout Report on June 1, 2007

Pathway 1.0.3 --- http://pathway.screenager.be/download/ 

Sometimes wandering through the wilds of Wikipedia can result in confusion. For Dennis Lorson, his wandering led him to create this handy application. With Pathway 1.0.3 visitors can retrace their own steps through Wikipedia by creating a graphical network representation of article pages. It’s worth a try, and it will work with all computers running Mac OS X 10.4.

Bob Jensen's threads on encyclopedias are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob3.htm#080512Encyclopedias

CatsCradle 3.5 --- http://www.stormdance.net/software/catscradle/overview.htm 
Many websurfers enjoy going to sites that might be based in other countries, and as such, they might very well encounter a different language. With CatsCradle 3.5, these persons need worry no more, as this application can be used to translate entire websites in such languages as Thai, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian. This version is compatible with all computers running Windows XP or 2000. (Scout Report, September 1, 2006)

April 4, 2006 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]

FREE ACCESS TO SOME FOR-FEE ARTICLES

Congoo, a search engine launched this month and partnered with Google, gives registered users free online access to a selection of publications that normally required a subscription or a pay-per-view fee to read. After downloading the Congoo plug-in and registering, users can get access to "between four and 15 articles per month per publisher." Publications available include the Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, Financial Times, BusinessWire, Editor & Publisher, The New Republic, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, The Denver Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer and other major U.S. newspapers. Congoo is available at http://www.congoo.com/.

Critics of Congoo note that many public libraries, such as the San Francisco Public Library
( http://www.sfpl.org/sfplonline/dbcategories.htm ), also offer free access to subscription databases. And your own college and university library may also have online subscriptions that you can access at no additional fee.

See also:

"Internet Technology--Going Beyond Google" by Tom Warger UNIVERSITY BUSINESS, August 2005 http://www.universitybusiness.com/page.cfm?p=906

From the Scout Report on October 9, 2009

RadioSure 2.0 --- http://www.radiosure.com/ 

Are you looking for pop music from Senegal? The latest news from Romania? It's a fairly safe bet that you can use RadioSure to locate radio stations that will fit the bill. With this program, users can search over 12,000 radio stations, and even use a record button to save audio segments for later use. The stations are categorized by style of programming, city, and language. This version is compatible with computers running Windows 2003 and newer.

 

Evaluation of Information Sources --- http://www.vuw.ac.nz/~agsmith/evaln/evaln.htm 

Check whether things you read are true or false 
See Urban Legend helpers at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/245glosf.htm#UrbanLegend 

No A Grades to 83.33% of search engine users.
They say they trust their favorite search engines, but there’s a distressing lack of understanding of how engines rank and present pages -- only 38 percent of users are aware of the distinction between paid or “sponsored“ results and unpaid results.“ And only one in six say they can always tell which results are paid or sponsored and which are not.“  The funny part about this last bit is, nearly half of users say they would stop using search engines if they thought the engines were being unclear about how they presented paid results.
David Appell, "Search Engines," MIT's Technology Review, February 11, 2005 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/blog.asp?blogID=1732&trk=nl 

Scholarly Online Publishing Bibliography --- http://www.digital-scholarship.org/sepb/sepb.html 

Scribd Wants to Become the YouTube for Documents --- http://www.scribd.com/categories
It has a long way to go, although it now has over 350,000 archived documents --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribd
There are many tutorials such as those in basic accounting.

"A YouTube for Documents?" by Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 21, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2762&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Borrowing a page from the popular video-sharing site YouTube, a new online service lets people upload and share their papers or entire books via a social-network interface. But will a format that works for videos translate to documents?

It’s called iPaper, and it uses a Flash-based document reader that can be embedded into a Web page. The experience of reading neatly formatted text inside a fixed box feels a bit like using an old microfilm reader, except that you can search the documents or e-mail them to friends.

The company behind the technology, Scribd, also offers a library of iPaper documents and invites users to set up an account to post their own written works. And, just like on YouTube, users can comment about each document, give it a rating, and view related works.

Also like on YouTube, some of the most popular items in the collection are on the lighter side. One document that is in the top 10 “most viewed” is called “It seems this essay was written while the guy was high, hilarious!” It is a seven-page paper that appears to have been written for a college course but is full of salty language. The document includes the written comments of the professor who graded it, and it ends with a handwritten note: “please see after class to discuss your paper.”

There’s plenty of serious material on the site, too — like the Iraq Study Group Report and an Educause report about the future of technology at colleges.

Bob Jensen's threads on free online documents are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on general education tutorials are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch

"Web Searches That Really Bear Fruit:  New Free Tools Aim to Make Online Results More Relevant by Tracking Your Reactions,"
by Katherine Boehret, The Wall Street Journal, January 15, 2009 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123189045689079109.html

There's nothing more frustrating than a fruitless Web search -- or one that returns results that distract you from your original goal. Search giant Google knows this all too well and realizes that there's a chance you might switch to another search engine if you get tired of poor results.

This week I tested two free tools that attempt to make your Web searches more relevant by learning from users' reactions to search results: Google's SearchWiki and Surf Canyon Inc.'s namesake tool for Web browsers. These two don't necessarily compete against each other; in fact, they can be used in tandem. But after initially entering a search query, SearchWiki requires additional work on the part of the user that many people may not want to do. Surf Canyon works automatically as you go, sorting results according to real-time user behavior.

But who wants to do all this work? Google says your votes don't influence the way other Google users see search results, nor do they affect your search results if you aren't logged into Google. You can see the number of votes a URL got from fellow voters, as well as comments made about the URL -- but only after you select a link at the bottom of the search-results page. If you promote a URL, you'll automatically see what other people think about this link.

SearchWiki depends on people to rank their own search results by promoting favored URLs to the top of a screen and knocking others to the bottom. It is available to most people who are logged into a Google account, and these user preferences are remembered if the same searches are performed at other times.

This sorting is done using elegant animation; preferred URLs float to the top of the screen when selected and unwanted results disappear in a magic-trick-like poof when removed. Comments about a link can be typed into a word bubble beside the URL and all comments are available to the public, labeled as posted by "Searcher" unless you create another nickname for yourself. People can also add preferred URLs to a search-results page if, for example, they know a better link about something than those that show up.

But who wants to do all this work? Google says your votes don't influence the way other Google users see search results, nor do they affect your search results if you aren't logged into Google. You can see the number of votes a URL got from fellow voters, as well as comments made about the URL -- but only after you select a link at the bottom of the search-results page. If you promote a URL, you'll automatically see what other people think about this link.

SearchWiki depends on people to rank their own search results by promoting favored URLs to the top of a screen and knocking others to the bottom. It is available to most people who are logged into a Google account, and these user preferences are remembered if the same searches are performed at other times.

This sorting is done using elegant animation; preferred URLs float to the top of the screen when selected and unwanted results disappear in a magic-trick-like poof when removed. Comments about a link can be typed into a word bubble beside the URL and all comments are available to the public, labeled as posted by "Searcher" unless you create another nickname for yourself. People can also add preferred URLs to a search-results page if, for example, they know a better link about something than those that show up.

For your efforts, you'll create a small collection of results that are saved in your account, sorted by date and time should you ever want to revisit them. This could come in handy in some circumstances, such as if you were researching a topic and you forgot to save Web pages as you went. Google confusingly calls these "SearchWiki notes," though they really include all of the links you voted on, as well as typed-in notes about links.

SearchWiki is a tough sell because most of us are already trained to surf the Web quickly, skipping ahead and back through links without taking the time to rank those results or comment on them. And it only works with Google searches.

If you like the idea of more personalized Web searches but would like to use other search engines or don't want to do extra work, you might like Surf Canyon. Once downloaded, this tool displays bull's-eyes beside certain results to show that Surf Canyon has found additional related hits. Clicking on this bull's-eye reveals those suggested links, pulled from deeper down in the search results, and these links might have bull's-eyes of their own. This cascade of data goes on and on as an algorithm studies which of the returned results you do or don't choose.

You might be deterred from using Surf Canyon because it must be downloaded before it works on Internet Explorer or Firefox. (A version of Surf Canyon for Apple's Safari browser is due out within a month.) This tool works with Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Live Search and Craigslist, and just started working with LexisNexis's LexisWeb.com legal-search engine.

Surf Canyon might not seem to be doing much at first, but it changes and reflects your preferences as you make them. For example, a search for "Obama dog" originally returned results about how the President-elect and his family are narrowing their search for a puppy. But as I opened more links related specifically to Mr. Obama's daughters, more results appeared on screen about Sasha and Malia. Each time I hit the browser's Back button to return to the original search page, Surf Canyon offered a new set of relevant URLs.

I tried looking at Craigslist.com for last-minute inauguration tickets, and one hit listed an inauguration-appropriate dress that someone was giving away free. The Surf Canyon bull's-eye appeared beside this result, and when I selected it, three more dress listings appeared.

Surf Canyon recently released an option for users who want long-term personalization, found at my.surfcanyon.com. It lets people select sources from which they prefer to receive news, shopping, research, or sports and entertainment results. Individual sites not listed on this page can also be added to a list of sources to use; likewise, sites can be added to a blacklist so results never come from them.

Unlike Google, Surf Canyon doesn't save your history or usage profile. And if you haven't created personalized preferences using the link above, it responds solely using your as-they-happen signals, like when you choose one link over another.

Google's SearchWiki is asking users to do extra work, which may not be practical for many users. But if you do use it, this tool's personalized, saved results could be a real boon. Surf Canyon worked well for me with multiple search engines, retrieving data from result pages I likely wouldn't have opened. Either way, your days of futile Web searching are numbered.

The easiest way to find definitions is to go to Google Define --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm#define
Simply go to Google at http://www.google.com/ or http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en
In the search box type define and insert the phrase you want defined in quotations.
For example, suppose you want to define “Grid Computing”
Simply type in define “Grid Computing” in the search box and hit the search button 

Free Video, Movie and Music Links --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm

LocateTV will search over 3 million TV listings across all channels in your area
Type in the name of a TV show, movie, or actor
Locate TV will find channels and times in your locale
http://www.locatetv.com/

Songza
Search for a song or band and play the selection --- http://songza.com/
I tried it for Arturo Toscanini, Stan Kenton, and Jim Reeves.
The results were absolutely amazing!

SpiralFrog.com, an ad-supported Web site with a terrible name that allows visitors to download music and videos free of charge, commenced on September 17, 2007  in the U.S. and Canada after months of "beta" testing. At launch, the service was offering more than 800,000 tracks and 3,500 music videos for download ---  http://www.spiralfrog.com/

Digital Duo Video
The Differences Between DVRs DVR, TiVo, huh?
The Duo clear up the recorder confusion with a history lesson.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,124109/article.html

Dan Tynan
Finding Online Video Search tools are just catching up
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,122859/article.html

Google Links --- Click Here
Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google

Yahoo Links --- http://www.yahoo.com/
Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo

Searching for PowerPoint ppt files, Excel xls files, and other file types

Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Google Open Encyclopedia, and YouTube as Knowledge Bases

How do scholars/researchers search for academic references?

Pandora for finding songs and recording artists --- http://www.pandora.com/

Pixsy's updates on free news videos --- http://www.pixsy.com/search.aspx?cat=12

From the Scout Report on October 9, 2009

RadioSure 2.0 --- http://www.radiosure.com/ 

Are you looking for pop music from Senegal? The latest news from Romania? It's a fairly safe bet that you can use RadioSure to locate radio stations that will fit the bill. With this program, users can search over 12,000 radio stations, and even use a record button to save audio segments for later use. The stations are categorized by style of programming, city, and language. This version is compatible with computers running Windows 2003 and newer.

Zaba Search free database of names, addresses, birth dates, and phone numbers. Social security numbers and background checks are also available for a fee --- http://www.zabasearch.com/

Click Here for Specialized Search Engines (including shopping catalogs)

• Finding People

• Catalogs

• Addresses

• Zip Codes

• Yellow Pages

• People  (also see USA People Search)

• Catalogs

• Books

• Job Listings

• Industry

• Homes to buy or rent

• Airlines and hotels

• Email addresses, phone numbers, postal addresses

• References and answers

• Popular Free Phone Numbers --- http://www.hardtofind800numbers.com/ 

• Boxxet (searching within an academic discipline)

• Catalog of U.S. Government Publications --- http://catalog.gpo.gov/F

• State and Local Government on the Web --- http://www.piperinfo.com/state/states.html

Searching for Knowledge on the Web
Finding Dulcinea --- http://www.findingdulcinea.com/home.html
Tries to be your "Librarian on the Web"

Internet Resources --- http://www.internet-resources.com/writers/wrlinks-wordstuff.htm

Price Comparison Guide

The Global Accountancy Search Engine

The Best Way To Search Videos On the Internet

Find Sounds --- http://www.findsounds.com/

Search for Free Patents --- http://www.freepatentsonline.com/
Wiki Patent Review --- http://www.wikipatents.com/

Google, Cuil, Yahoo, Wikipedia, and YouTube as Knowledge Bases

Google History and Features --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google
"Ten reasons why Google is still number one," by David A. Vise, MIT's Technology Review, September 12, 2008 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/guest/22128/?nlid=1334

Google is a great search engine, but it's also more than that. Google has tons of hidden features, some of which are quite fun and most of which are extremely useful— if you know about them. How do you discover all these hidden features within the Google site?
See http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=675528&rl=1

1. Google Is a Calculator
2. Google Knows Mathematical Constants
3. Google Converts Units of Measure
4. Google Is a Dictionary
5. Google Is a Glossary
6. Google Lists All the Facts
7. Google Displays Weather Reports
8. Google Knows Current Airport Conditions
9. Google Tracks Flight Status
10. Google Tracks Packages
11. Google Is a Giant Phone Directory
12. Google Knows Area Codes
13. Google Has Movie Information
14. Google Loves Music
15. Google Knows the Answer to the Ultimate Question
16. Google Advanced Search
17. Language Tools --- http://www.google.com/language_tools?hl=en
18. Web Images Video News Maps Desktop more --- http://www.google.com/ 
    Books, Froogle, Groups, Scholar even more --- Click on "More" at http://www.google.com/
19. Google Maps  --- http://www.google.com/maps?ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&tab=wl&q= 
    Google Maps Street View --- http://maps.google.com/help/maps/streetview/

Amid the flurry of news over Microsoft's bid for Yahoo and Google's rebuttal, a research announcement by Google went largely unnoticed.
Last week, the search giant began a public experiment in which users can make their search results look a little different from the rest of the world's. Those who sign up are able to switch between different views, so instead of simply getting a list of links (and sometimes pictures and YouTube videos, a relatively recent addition to the Google results), they can choose to see their results mapped, put on a timeline, or narrowed down by informational filters. Dan Crow, product manager at Google, says that the results of the experiment could eventually help the company improve everyone's search experience.
Kate Greene, MIT's Technology Review, February 6, 2008 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20162/?nlid=857
Jensen Comment
You can read more about this experiment at http://www.google.com/experimental/index.html

Search for Blogs (Weblogs) ---  http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ListServRoles.htm 

Google Links --- Click Here

Google Cloud --- Click Here

Google Maps Street View --- http://maps.google.com/help/maps/streetview/

Custom Google Searches

Google Hacks

Google added historic map overlays to its free interactive online globe of the world to provide views of how places have changed with time.
"Google Earth maps history," PhysOrg, November 14, 2006 --- http://physorg.com/news82706337.html

Google Earth --- http://earth.google.com/

See Google Maps Features --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Maps
Google Maps Street View --- http://maps.google.com/help/maps/streetview/

Search for Manufacturers and Suppliers --- http://www.zycon.com/

Search for Music Equipment (Devices) --- http://www.zzounds.com/

ProQuest Digital Dissertations ---  http://wwwlib.umi.com/dissertations/ 

Corporate Reports Now Searchable Via EDGAR --- http://www.sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/webusers.htm

The SEC released a new, improved search tool for EDGAR --- http://sec.gov/news/press/2006/2006-190.htm

A full text search of a filing includes all data in the filing as well as any attachments. Other features of the EDGAR Full-Text Search tool include:

• Search by specific filing type
• Search by company name
• Search by Central Index Key (CIK) code
• Search by industry or Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) code
• Search results limited by date range.

The EDGAR full-text search tool is available on the SEC website at http://searchwww.sec.gov/EDGARFSClient/jsp/EDGAR_MainAccess.jsp. The Commission plans further enhancements based on user feedback. Requests, comments and suggestions should be sent to textsearch@sec.gov

Google Links

Search Tricks --- http://prezi.com/mohshuoe-qcf/google-search-tricks/

Google (Web Images, Video, News, Maps Desktop, and More) --- http://www.google.com/
Google Maps Street View --- http://maps.google.com/help/maps/streetview/
Google Advanced --- http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en
Google Advanced Scholar Search ---  http://scholar.google.com/advanced_scholar_search?hl=en&lr=
Google Maps --- http://maps.google.com/
Google Finance --- http://finance.google.com/finance

Did you ever scroll down Google's Advanced Search Site?
Go to http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en

Google Book Search - Search the full text of books New! Google Code Search - Search public source code Google Scholar - Search scholarly papers Google News archive search - Search historical news   Apple Macintosh - Search for all things Mac BSD Unix - Search web pages about the BSD operating system Linux - Search all penguin-friendly pages Microsoft - Search Microsoft-related pages   U.S. Government - Search all U.S. federal, state and local government sites Universities - Search a specific school's website

Google Books --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Book_Search

Google's Book Search --- http://books.google.com/

"Google's Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars," by Geoffrey Nunberg, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 31, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Googles-Book-Search-A/48245/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Whether the Google books settlement passes muster with the U.S. District Court and the Justice Department, Google's book search is clearly on track to becoming the world's largest digital library. No less important, it is also almost certain to be the last one. Google's five-year head start and its relationships with libraries and publishers give it an effective monopoly: No competitor will be able to come after it on the same scale. Nor is technology going to lower the cost of entry. Scanning will always be an expensive, labor-intensive project. Of course, 50 or 100 years from now control of the collection may pass from Google to somebody else—Elsevier, Unesco, Wal-Mart. But it's safe to assume that the digitized books that scholars will be working with then will be the very same ones that are sitting on Google's servers today, augmented by the millions of titles published in the interim.

That realization lends a particular urgency to the concerns that people have voiced about the settlement —about pricing, access, and privacy, among other things. But for scholars, it raises another, equally basic question: What assurances do we have that Google will do this right?

Doing it right depends on what exactly "it" is. Google has been something of a shape-shifter in describing the project. The company likes to refer to Google's book search as a "library," but it generally talks about books as just another kind of information resource to be incorporated into Greater Google. As Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, puts it: "We just feel this is part of our core mission. There is fantastic information in books. Often when I do a search, what is in a book is miles ahead of what I find on a Web site."

Seen in that light, the quality of Google's book search will be measured by how well it supports the familiar activity that we have come to think of as "googling," in tribute to the company's specialty: entering in a string of keywords in an effort to locate specific information, like the dates of the Franco-Prussian War. For those purposes, we don't really care about metadata—the whos, whats, wheres, and whens provided by a library catalog. It's enough just to find a chunk of a book that answers our needs and barrel into it sideways.

But we're sometimes interested in finding a book for reasons that have nothing to do with the information it contains, and for those purposes googling is not a very efficient way to search. If you're looking for a particular edition of Leaves of Grass and simply punch in, "I contain multitudes," that's what you'll get. For those purposes, you want to be able to come in via the book's metadata, the same way you do if you're trying to assemble all the French editions of Rousseau's Social Contract published before 1800 or books of Victorian sermons that talk about profanity.

Or you may be interested in books simply as records of the language as it was used in various periods or genres. Not surprisingly, that's what gets linguists and assorted wordinistas adrenalized at the thought of all the big historical corpora that are coming online. But it also raises alluring possibilities for social, political, and intellectual historians and for all the strains of literary philology, old and new. With the vast collection of published books at hand, you can track the way happiness replaced felicity in the 17th century, quantify the rise and fall of propaganda or industrial democracy over the course of the 20th century, or pluck out all the Victorian novels that contain the phrase "gentle reader."

But to pose those questions, you need reliable metadata about dates and categories, which is why it's so disappointing that the book search's metadata are a train wreck: a mishmash wrapped in a muddle wrapped in a mess.

Start with publication dates. To take Google's word for it, 1899 was a literary annus mirabilis, which saw the publication of Raymond Chandler's Killer in the Rain, The Portable Dorothy Parker, André Malraux's La Condition Humaine, Stephen King's Christine, The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, Raymond Williams's Culture and Society 1780-1950, and Robert Shelton's biography of Bob Dylan, to name just a few. And while there may be particular reasons why 1899 comes up so often, such misdatings are spread out across the centuries. A book on Peter F. Drucker is dated 1905, four years before the management consultant was even born; a book of Virginia Woolf's letters is dated 1900, when she would have been 8 years old. Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities is dated 1888, and an edition of Henry James's What Maisie Knew is dated 1848.

Of course, there are bound to be occasional howlers in a corpus as extensive as Google's book search, but these errors are endemic. A search on "Internet" in books published before 1950 produces 527 results; "Medicare" for the same period gets almost 1,600. Or you can simply enter the names of famous writers or public figures and restrict your search to works published before the year of their birth. "Charles Dickens" turns up 182 results for publications before 1812, the vast majority of them referring to the writer. The same type of search turns up 81 hits for Rudyard Kipling, 115 for Greta Garbo, 325 for Woody Allen, and 29 for Barack Obama. (Or maybe that was another Barack Obama.)

How frequent are such errors? A search on books published before 1920 mentioning "candy bar" turns up 66 hits, of which 46—70 percent—are misdated. I don't think that's representative of the overall proportion of metadata errors, though they are much more common in older works than for the recent titles Google received directly from publishers. But even if the proportion of misdatings is only 5 percent, the corpus is riddled with hundreds of thousands of erroneous publication dates.

Google acknowledges the incorrect dates but says they came from the providers. It's true that Google has received some groups of books that are systematically misdated, like a collection of Portuguese-language works all dated 1899. But a very large proportion of the errors are clearly Google's own doing. A lot of them arise from uneven efforts to automatically extract a publication date from a scanned text. A 1901 history of bookplates from the Harvard University Library is correctly dated in the library's catalog. Google's incorrect date of 1574 for the volume is drawn from an Elizabethan armorial bookplate displayed on the frontispiece. An 1890 guidebook called London of To-Day is correctly dated in the Harvard catalog, but Google assigns it a date of 1774, which is taken from a front-matter advertisement for a shirt-and-hosiery manufacturer that boasts it was established in that year.

Then there are the classification errors, which taken together can make for a kind of absurdist poetry. H.L. Mencken's The American Language is classified as Family & Relationships. A French edition of Hamlet and a Japanese edition of Madame Bovary are both classified as Antiques and Collectibles (a 1930 English edition of Flaubert's novel is classified under Physicians, which I suppose makes a bit more sense.) An edition of Moby Dick is labeled Computers; The Cat Lover's Book of Fascinating Facts falls under Technology & Engineering. And a catalog of copyright entries from the Library of Congress is listed under Drama (for a moment I wondered if maybe that one was just Google's little joke).

You can see how pervasive those misclassifications are when you look at all the labels assigned to a single famous work. Of the first 10 results for Tristram Shandy, four are classified as Fiction, four as Family & Relationships, one as Biography & Autobiography, and one is not classified. Other editions of the novel are classified as 'Literary Collections, History, and Music. The first 10 hits for Leaves of Grass are variously classified as Poetry, 'Juvenile Nonfiction, Fiction, Literary Criticism, Biography & Autobiography, and, mystifyingly, Counterfeits and Counterfeiting. And various editions of Jane Eyre are classified as History, Governesses, Love Stories, Architecture, and Antiques & Collectibles (as in, "Reader, I marketed him.").

Here, too, Google has blamed the errors on the libraries and publishers who provided the books. But the libraries can't be responsible for books mislabeled as Health and Fitness and Antiques and Collectibles, for the simple reason that those categories are drawn from the Book Industry Standards and Communications codes, which are used by the publishers to tell booksellers where to put books on the shelves, not from any of the classification systems used by libraries. And BISAC classifications weren't in wide use before the last decade or two, so only Google can be responsible for their misapplications on numerous books published earlier than that: the 1919 edition of Robinson Crusoe assigned to Crafts & Hobbies or the 1907 edition of Sir Thomas Browne's Hydriotaphia: Urne-Buriall, which has been assigned to Gardening.

Google's fine algorithmic hand is also evident in a lot of classifications of recent works. The 2003 edition of Susan Bordo's Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (misdated 1899) is assigned to Health & Fitness—not a labeling you could imagine coming from its publisher, the University of California Press, but one a classifier might come up with on the basis of the title, like the Religion tag that Google assigns to a 2001 biography of Mae West that's subtitled An Icon in Black and White or the Health & Fitness label on a 1962 number of the medievalist journal Speculum.

But even when it gets the BISAC categories roughly right, the more important question is why Google would want to use those headings in the first place. People from Google have told me they weren't included at the publishers' request, and it may be that someone thought they'd be helpful for ad placement. (The ad placement on Google's book search right now is often comical, as when a search for Leaves of Grass brings up ads for plant and sod retailers—though that's strictly Google's problem, and one, you'd imagine, that they're already on top of.) But it's a disastrous choice for the book search. The BISAC scheme is well-suited for a chain bookstore or a small public library, where consumers or patrons browse for books on the shelves. But it's of little use when you're flying blind in a library with several million titles, including scholarly works, foreign works, and vast quantities of books from earlier periods. For example the BISAC Juvenile Nonfiction subject heading has almost 300 subheadings, like New Baby, Skateboarding, and Deer, Moose, and Caribou. By contrast the Poetry subject heading has just 20 subheadings. That means that Bambi and Bullwinkle get a full shelf to themselves, while Leopardi, Schiller, and Verlaine have to scrunch together in the single subheading reserved for Poetry/Continental European. In short, Google has taken a group of the world's great research collections and returned them in the form of a suburban-mall bookstore.

Such examples don't exhaust Google's metadata errors by any means. In addition to the occasionally quizzical renamings of works (Moby Dick: or the White Wall), there are a number of mismatches of titles and texts. Click on the link for the 1818 Théorie de l'Univers, a work on cosmology by the Napoleonic mathematician and general Jacques Alexander François Allix, and it takes you to Barbara Taylor Bradford's 1983 novel Voice of the Heart, while the link on a misdated number of Dickens's Household Words takes you to a 1742 Histoire de l'Académie Royale des Sciences. Numerous entries mix up the names of authors, editors, and writers of introductions, so that the "about this book" page for an edition of one French novel shows the striking attribution, "Madame Bovary By Henry James." More mysterious is the entry for a book called The Mosaic Navigator: The Essential Guide to the Internet Interface, which is dated 1939 and attributed to Sigmund Freud and Katherine Jones. The only connection I can come up with is that Jones was the translator of Freud's Moses and Monotheism, which must have somehow triggered the other sense of the word "mosaic," though the details of the process leave me baffled.

For the present, then, scholars will have to put on hold their visions of tracking the 19th-century fortunes of liberalism or quantifying the shift of "United States" from a plural to singular noun phrase over the first century of the republic: The metadata simply aren't up to it. It's true that Google is aware of a lot of these problems and they've pledged to fix them. (Indeed, since I presented some of these errors at a conference last week, Google has already rushed to correct many of them.) But it isn't clear whether they plan to go about this in the same way they're addressing the scanning errors that riddle the texts, correcting them as (and if) they're reported. That isn't adequate here: There are simply too many errors. And while Google's machine classification system will certainly improve, extracting metadata mechanically isn't sufficient for scholarly purposes. After first seeming indifferent, Google decided it did want to acquire the library records for scanned books along with the scans themselves, but as of now the company hasn't licensed them for display or use—hence, presumably, those stabs at automatically recovering publication dates from the scanned texts.

Continued in article

Jensen Comment
I think the phrase "disaster for scholars" is very misleading. Google's Book Search has certainly been a delight for me. Also Google had the resources and stamina to fend off all the court challenges. In general, the major universities have been in favor of this project from get go.

 A project this massive is bound to have startup problems, but Google is adaptive and will listen to its critics. It's better to have the world's largest digital library than a bunch of decentralized smoke stacks of from the previous century.

Bob Jensen's links to finding free online books
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

Did you ever notice the links below?  http://www.google.com/help/features.html#wp

Google Web Search Features In addition to providing easy access to billions of web pages, Google has many special features to help you to find exactly what you're looking for. Click the title of a specific feature to learn more about it.   • Book Search Use Google to search the full text of books.   • Cached Links View a snapshot of each page as it looked when we indexed it.   • Calculator Use Google to evaluate mathematical expressions.   • Currency Conversion Easily perform any currency conversion.   • Definitions Use Google to get glossary definitions gathered from various online sources.   • File Types Search for non-HTML file formats including PDF documents and others.   • Froogle To find a product for sale online, use Froogle - Google's product search service.   • Groups See relevant postings from Google Groups in your regular web search results.   • I'm Feeling Lucky Bypass our results and go to the first web page returned for your query.   • Images See relevant images in your regular web search results.   • Local Search Search for local businesses and services in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada.   • Movies Use Google to find reviews and showtimes for movies playing near you.   • Music Search Use Google to get quick access to a wide range of music information.   • News Headlines Enhances your search results with the latest related news stories.   • PhoneBook Look up U.S. street address and phone number information.   • Q&A Use Google to get quick answers to straightforward questions.   • Refine Your Search - New! Add instant info and topic-specific links to your search in order to focus and improve your results.   • Results Prefetching Makes searching in Firefox faster.   • Search By Number Use Google to access package tracking information, US patents, and a variety of online databases.   • Similar Pages Display pages that are related to a particular result.   • Site Search Restrict your search to a specific site.   • Spell Checker Offers alternative spelling for queries.   • Stock and Fund Quotes Use Google to get up-to-date stock and mutual fund quotes and information.   • Street Maps Use Google to find U.S. street maps.   • Travel Information Check the status of an airline flight in the U.S. or view airport delays and weather conditions.   • Weather Check the current weather conditions and forecast for any location in the U.S.   • Web Page Translation  Provides you access to web pages in other languages.   • Who Links To You? Find pages that point to a specific URL.

And more Google Links --- http://www.google.com/intl/en/options/

Blog Search Find blogs on your favorite topics

Book Search Search the full text of books

Catalogs Search and browse mail-order catalogs

Checkout Complete online purchases more quickly and securely

Desktop Search and personalize your computer

Directory Browse the web by topic

Earth Explore the world from your PC

Finance Business info, news, and interactive charts

Froogle Shop for items to buy online and at local stores

Images Search for images on the web

Local Find local businesses and get directions

Maps View maps and get directions

News - now with archive searchNew! Search thousands of news stories

NotebookNew! Clip and collect information as you surf the web

Patent SearchNew! Search the full text of US Patents

Scholar Search scholarly papers

Specialized Searches Search within specific topics

Toolbar Add a search box to your browser

Video Search for videos on Google Video and YouTube

Web Search Search over billions of web pages

Web Search Features Find movies, music, stocks, books, and more

"Google Plans Searchable Text in Images:  InformationWeek reports that Google filed a patent in June 2007 for a technology that could make text in images searchable," by Hurley Goodall, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 7, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2642&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

The yet-to-be-developed technology detailed in the patent application carries serious implications for the future of search technology, particularly in regard to the Google Book Search project.

What could that mean for the future of academic research and the role of libraries? In an interview, Wendy P. Lougee, University of Minnesota librarian, frames the would-be technology in the context of “discoverability” — the ease with which an item can be found through a search.

“With respect to images, the challenges have been in the metadata,” or the data that contextualizes items in a database, she says, and the potential technology “could significantly enhance” librarians’ ability to catalogue and retrieve information.

"Searching Library Collections in Facebook," by Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 7, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2642&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

A new application lets Facebook users start their library research in the popular social-networking system. The plug-in provides an interface in Facebook for searching the popular Worldcat database, operated by the nonprofit OCLC. The group’s Web site says the index includes more than a billion items in more than 10,000 libraries.

So far the application does not seem to be listed in Facebook’s official directory. But a quick search of Facebook’s other applications shows that more than a dozen other academic libraries have created their own search tools for the social-networking platform. The University of Notre Dame has one, for instance, as does Elmhurst College, Pace University, and Ryerson University. JSTOR, the popular, nonprofit digital archive of scholarly publications, also offers a Facebook application.

One thing I discovered when I invited Wired Campus readers to join my Facebook friend group is that librarians are some of the most enthusiastic nonstudent users of social networks. But can Facebook, known as a place for socializing, become part of the research process as well?

You can read more about Facebook at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook

Frontiers (open source scholarly publishing) --- http://www.frontiersin.org/

CiteSeerX (Princeton University Library search engine) ---  http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/

Boston University Libraries: Research Guides --- http://www.bu.edu/library/guides/

How do scholars search for academic references?

Scholarly Online Publishing Bibliography --- http://www.digital-scholarship.org/sepb/sepb.html  

Some Things You Might Want to Know About the Wolfram Alpha (WA) Search Engine:  The Good and The Evil
as Applied to Learning Curves (Cumulative Average vs. Incremental Unit)
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theorylearningcurves.htm

MAE 10: Introduction to Engineering Computations --- http://ocw.uci.edu/courses/course.aspx?id=129

Scholarpedia --- http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Main_Page

PLoS One --- http://www.plosone.org/home.action

Google Scholar --- http://scholar.google.com/
Not to be confused with Google Advanced Search which does not cover many scholarly articles --- http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en

Google Knol --- http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/encouraging-people-to-contribute.html

Google Research --- http://research.google.com/

JURN (search engine for humanities and social science research) --- http://www.jurn.org/

One Million University of Illinois (Free) Books to be Digitized by Google --- http://www.cic.uiuc.edu/programs/CenterForLibraryInitiatives/Archive/PressRelease/LibraryDigitization/index.shtml
Google Digitized Books --- http://books.google.com/advanced_book_search?q=Accounting
For example, key in the word "accounting"
Then try "Advanced Managerial Accounting"
Then try "Joel Demski"
Then try "Accounting for Derivative Financial Instruments"
Then try "Robert E. Jensen" AND "Accounting"

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign announces the availability of a newly-digitized collection of Abraham Lincoln books accessible through the Open Content Alliance and displayed on the University Library's own web site, as the first step of a digitization project of Lincoln books from its collection. View the first set of books digitized at: http://varuna.grainger.uiuc.edu/oca/lincoln/

Microsoft's Windows "Live Search" or  "Academic Search" ---
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?scope=academic&q=

Amazon's A9 --- http://a9.com/-/search/advSearch 

The University of California's eScholarship Repository has recently exceeded five million full-text downloads, according to the university
The eScholarship Repository, a service of the California Digital Library, allows scholars in the University of California system to submit their work to a central location where any users may easily access it free of charge. The idea is to ease communication between researchers. Catherine Mitchell, acting director of the CDL publishing group, says the number shows that both content seekers and creators have embraced the service, allaying concerns among researchers that others wouldn't contribute to the repository.
Hurley Goodall, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 16, 2008 --- http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2667&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Beginning October 23, 2003, Amazon.com offers a text search of entire contents of millions of pages of books, including new books ---
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/10197021/ref%3Dsib%5Fmerch%5Fgw/104-3984945-7813514 

How It Works --- http://snurl.com/BookSearch 
A significant extension of our groundbreaking Look Inside the Book feature, Search Inside the Book allows you to search millions of pages to find exactly the book you want to buy. Now instead of just displaying books whose title, author, or publisher-provided keywords that match your search terms, your search results will surface titles based on every word inside the book. Using Search Inside the Book is as simple as running an Amazon.com search. 

Soon to be the largest scholarly library in the world:
Google Book Search --- http://books.google.com/advanced_book_search 

Answers.com --- http://www.answers.com/

Carnegie Mellon Libraries: Digital Library Colloquium (video lectures) --- http://www.library.cmu.edu/Libraries/DLColloquia.html

America [multimedia] --- http://www.america.gov/

United Nations World Digital Library --- http://www.wdl.org/en/

Frontiers (open source scholarly publishing) --- http://www.frontiersin.org/

CiteSeerX (Princeton University Library search engine) ---  http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/

Boston University Libraries: Research Guides --- http://www.bu.edu/library/guides/

Encyclopaedia Britannica to let readers edit content
Encyclopaedia Britannica, the authoritative reference book first published in 1768, is to let readers edit its entries, it said Friday, as it battles to keep pace with Internet resources like Wikipedia. From next week, visitors to the publication's website, Britannica.com, will be able to submit proposed changes to editors, who will check them and make alterations if they think they are appropriate. Users whose suggestions are accepted will then be credited on the site, the firm said in a statement. Gorge Cauz, president of the US-based firm, insisted that the publication was not trying to be a wiki -- a collection of web pages which allows users to edit content -- like Wikipedia . . . But some technology commentators say the step is a doomed attempt to preserve Britannica's subscription-based business model in the face of the challenge from Wikipedia, which is free. The Times reported that while Britannica.com attracts 1.5 million visitors per day, Wikipedia attracts roughly six million.
PhysOrg, January 23, 2009 --- http://www.physorg.com/news151938162.html
Jensen Comment
Whereas full text is available on Wikipedia for fee, Encyclopeaedia Britannica only provides full text to paid subscribers. Subscriptions are about $70 per year and a complete bound set is $2,000. Britannica is more reliable for accuracy on topics covered, but Wikipedia overwhelms Britannica in terms of millions upon millions of more topics covered. A scholarly approach might be to first look up a topic in Wikipedia and then try to authenticate it in Britannica, but this will only work for topics covered in Britannica. Also Wikipedia has millions upon millions of "discussion" commentaries that vastly widen the perspectives covered on many topics.

No Other Encyclopedia Comes Close to Wikipedia
"Understanding collaboration in Wikipedia,"  Royce M. Kimmons, First Monday, December 5, 2011 ---
http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3613

Abstract
Previous attempts at studying collaboration within Wikipedia have focused on simple metrics like rigor (i.e. the number of revisions in an article’s revision history) and diversity (i.e. the number of authors that have voluntarily contributed to a given article) or have made generalizations about collaboration within Wikipedia based upon the content validity of a few select articles. By analyzing the contents of randomly selected Wikipedia articles (n = 1,271) and their revisions (n = 85,563) more closely, this study attempts to understand what collaboration within Wikipedia actually looks like under the surface. Findings suggest that typical Wikipedia articles are not rigorous, in a collaborative sense, and do not reflect much diversity in the construction of content and macro-structural writing, leading to the conclusion that most articles in Wikipedia are not reflective of the collaborative efforts of any community but, rather, represent the work of relatively few contributors.

Wikipedia stands as an undeniable success in online participation and collaboration. By looking more closely at metrics associated with each extant Wikipedia article (N=3,427,236) along with all revisions (N=225,226,370), this study attempts to understand what collaboration within Wikipedia actually looks like under the surface. Findings suggest that typical Wikipedia articles are not rigorous, in a collaborative sense, and do not reflect much diversity in the construction of content and macro–structural writing. Most articles in Wikipedia are not reflective of the collaborative efforts of the community but represent the work of relatively few contributors.

Bob Jensen's search helpers ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm

"Wikipedia Comes of Age," by Casper Grathwohl, Chronicle of Higher Education's Chronicle Review, January 7, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Wikipedia-Comes-of-Age/125899/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en

The key challenge for the scholarly community, in which I include academic publishers such as Oxford University Press, is to work actively with Wikipedia to strengthen its role in "pre-research." We need to build stronger links from its entries to more advanced resources that have been created and maintained by the academy.

It is not an easy task to overcome the prejudices against Wikipedia in academic circles, but accomplishing that will serve us all and solidify an important new layer of knowledge in the online-information ecosystem. Wikipedia's first decade was marked by its meteoric rise. Let's mark its second decade by its integration into the formal research process.

Continued in article

Casper Grathwohl is vice president and publisher of digital and reference content for Oxford University Press.

Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Open Encyclopedia, and YouTube as Knowledge Bases

A professor wrote to me drawing a fine line between information and knowledge. Information is just organized data that can be right or wrong or unknown in terms of been fact versus fiction. Knowledge generally is information that is more widely accepted as being "true" although academics generally hate the word "true" because it is either too demanding or too misleading in terms of being set in stone. Generally accepted "knowledge" can be proven wrong at later points in time just like Galileo purportedly proved that heavy balls fall at the same rate of speed as their lighter counterparts, thereby proving, that what was generally accepted knowledge until then was false. "Galileo Galilei is said to have dropped two cannon balls of different masses from the tower to demonstrate that their descending speed was independent of their mass. This is considered an apocryphal tale, and the only source for it comes from Galileo's secretary." Quoted from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaning_Tower_of_Pisa#History

In my opinion there is a spectrum along the lines of data to information to knowledge. Researchers attempt to add something new and creative at any point along the spectrum. Scholars learn from most any point on the spectrum and usually attempt to share their scholarship in papers, books, Websites, blogs, and online or onsite classrooms.

That professor then mentioned above then asserted that Wikipedia and YouTube were information databases but not knowledge bases. He then mentioned the problem of students knowing facts but not organizing these facts in a scholarly manner. He conjectured that this was perhaps do to increased virtual learning in their development. My December 5, 2007 reply to him was as follows (off-the-cuff so to speak).

Although I see your point about information versus knowledge, the addition of the “Discussion tab” in Wikipedia changed the name of the game. As “information” gets discussed and debated and critiqued it’s beginning to look a whole lot more like knowledge in Wikipedia. For example, note the Discussion tab at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_Design

And when UC Berkeley puts 177 science courses on YouTube (some of them in biology), it’s beginning to look a lot more like YouTube knowledge --- --- http://www.jimmyr.com/free_education.php

With respect to virtual learning, my best example is Stanford’s million+ dollar virtual surgery cadaver that can do more than a real cadaver. For one thing it can have blood pressure such that a nicked artery can hemorrhage. Learning throughout time is based on models and simulations of sorts. Our models and simulations keep getting better and better to a point where the line between virtual and real world become very blurred much like pilots in virtual reality begin to think they are in reality.

Much depends on the purpose and goals of virtual learning. Sometimes edutainment is important to both motivate and make learners more attentive (like wake them up). But this also has drawbacks when it makes learning too easy. I’m a strong believer in blood, sweat, and tears learning --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
When I put it into practice it was not popular with students of this generation who want it to be easy.

You note that:  “These students have prepared but it is poorly arranged, planned, and articulated.” One thing we’ve noted in Student Managed Funds (like in Phil Cooley’s course where students actually control the investments of a million dollars or more of a Trinity University's endowment) where students must make presentations before the Board of Trustees greatly improves students “planning and articulation.” You can read more about this at the University of XXXXX (December 4) at http://financialrounds.blogspot.com/
Note that the portfolios in these courses are not virtual portfolios. They’re the real thing with real dollars! Students adapt to higher levels of performance when the hurdles require higher ordered performance.

I prefer to think of higher order metacognition --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metacognition
For specific examples in accounting education see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm
One of the main ideas is to make students do their own discovery learning. Blood, sweat, and tears are the best teachers.

Much of the focus in metacognitive learning is how to examine/discover what students have learned on their own and how to control cheating when assessing discovery and concept learning --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm

Higher order learning attempts to make students think more conceptually. In particular, note the following quotation from Bob Kennelly at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#ConceptKnowledge

We studied whether instructional material that connects accounting concept discussions with sample case applications through hypertext links would enable students to better understand how concepts are to be applied to practical case situations.

Results from a laboratory experiment indicated that students who learned from such hypertext-enriched instructional material were better able to apply concepts to new accounting cases than those who learned from instructional material that contained identical content but lacked the concept-case application hyperlinks. 

Results also indicated that the learning benefits of concept-case application hyperlinks in instructional material were greater when the hyperlinks were self-generated by the students rather than inherited from instructors, but only when students had generated appropriate links. 

Along broader lines we might think of it in terms of self-organizing of atomic-level information/knowledge ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organization

I look forward to your writings on this subject when you get things sorted out. You’re a good writer. Scientist's aren't meant to be such good writers.

---

Wikipedia in Hardcover?
Yes in terms of selected modules you want in hard copy near your desk

"The Open-Source Encyclopedia, Now in Hardcover," by Brock Read, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 10, 2009 ---

Need a gift for that open-source enthusiast in your life who happens to have some bookshelf space to fill? A German company called PediaPress has come to the rescue: For a not-unreasonable fee, it will create a book that compiles your favorite Wikipedia articles.

PediaPress has been at this since January, when it started printing volumes drawn from Wikipedia’s German-language edition, but late last month it added to its repertoire six new languages: French, Polish, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and Simple English (from a version of the encyclopedia written for children and for adults learning English as a second language). Regular English is on its way soon. It’s taking longer to work out the kinks, though, since that encyclopedia is so massive.

Assembling a book is pretty easy: Wikipedia has set up a Web site that lets you drag-and-drop your way through the process. A 100-page book will set you back $8.90 (additional pages cost more), plus shipping, and it’ll be at least halfway handsome — if the photo below, from Wikipedia user He!ko, is any guide. (photo not shown here)

So the books look perfectly good. But then comes the $64,000 question: Will people really pay for a hardbound copy of something they can view online for free? As like-minded books-on-demand projects such as the Espresso Book Machine have shown, there’s at least some kind of a market for readers of made-to-order books, so it’s not inconceivable that some Wikipedia visitors will order special volumes as gifts or buy texts that they can mark up with marginalia. Wikipedia says the press is doing brisk business: It sold more than 1,000 German-language books in its first month of operations.

Jensen Comment
Whereas finance is one of the best topics covered in Wikipedia, accountancy sadly has terrible coverage. My additions tend to be rejected on the basis of their length.

It sort of puts accountants in their places when aardvarks get better coverage than accountancy.

Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Google Open Encyclopedia, and YouTube as Knowledge Bases ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm#KnowledgeBases

---

Question
What's a WikiDashboard?

"Who's Messing with Wikipedia? The back-and-forth behind controversial entries could help reveal their true value." by Erica Naone, MIT's Technology Review, February 6, 2009 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/web/22076/?nlid=1757&a=f

Despite warnings from many high-school teachers and college professors, Wikipedia is one of the most-visited websites in the world (not to mention the biggest encyclopedia ever created). But even as Wikipedia's popularity has grown, so has the debate over its trustworthiness. One of the most serious concerns remains the fact that its articles are written and edited by a hidden army of people with unknown interests and biases.

Ed Chi, a senior research scientist for augmented social cognition at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and his colleagues have now created a tool, called WikiDashboard, that aims to reveal much of the normally hidden back-and-forth behind Wikipedia's most controversial pages in order to help readers judge for themselves how suspect its contents might be.

Wikipedia already has procedures in place designed to alert readers to potential problems with an entry. For example, one of Wikipedia's volunteer editors can review an article and tag it as "controversial" or warn that it "needs sources." But in practice, Chi says, relatively few articles actually receive these tags. WikiDashboard instead offers a snapshot of the edits and re-edits, as well as the arguments and counterarguments that went into building each of Wikipedia's many million pages.

The researchers began by investigating pages already tagged as "controversial" on Wikipedia: they found that these pages were far more likely to have been edited and re-edited repeatedly. Based on this observation, they developed WikiDashboard, a website that serves up Wikipedia entries but adds a chart to the top of each page revealing its recent edit history.

WikiDashboard shows which users have contributed most edits to a page, what percentage of the edits each person is responsible for, and when editors have been most active. A WikiDashboard user can explore further by clicking on a particular editor's name to see, for example, how involved he or she has been with other articles. Chi says that the goal is to show the social interaction going on around the entry. For instance, the chart should make it clear when a single user has been dominating a page, or when a flurry of activity has exploded around a particularly contentious article. The timeline on the chart can also show how long a page has been neglected.

---

Question:
What vexing problems do Wikipedia Authority and Online Product Reviews share in common?

"Reconsidering Authority in Wikipedia World," by Scott Carlson, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 23, 2008 --- http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3413&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Simson Garfinkel takes a look at authority and sourcing in Wikipedia world with an article in the latest edition of Technology Review. He focuses on Wikipedia’s requirement to cite published sources in adding information to Wikipedia articles. Yes, with a mob-written encyclopedia, a requirement for citing published, vetted sources makes sense, he writes.

“But there is a problem with appealing to the authority of other people’s written words: Many publications don’t do any fact checking at all, and many of those that do simply call up the subject of the article and ask if the writer got the facts wrong or right,” Mr. Garfinkel writes. “For instance, Dun and Bradstreet gets the information for its small-business information reports in part by asking those very same small businesses to fill out questionnaires about themselves.”

This policy is particularly problematic if you are the authority on a particular topic, but you can’t use your own base of knowledge. Jaron Lanier, a futurist, had problems changing a statement on the Wikipedia entry about himself that said he was a filmmaker. He wasn’t a filmmaker, yet every time he removed that non-fact, someone put it back in.

He finally got the item changed, but was then criticized for editing his own wikientry. (PR directors who maintain their college Wikipedia pages, take note.)

 

Comments

1. Doesn’t the problem of unreliability of other sources apply to any secondary or tertiary work? ;) (…and on that note, I suggest reading the Wikipedia page Wikipedia:Reliable sources …)

"Online User Reviews: Can They Be Trusted? They're all over the Web. Everybody reads them. But are reader reviews reliable enough to depend on when it comes to spending your cold, hard cash?" by Robert Luhn, PC World via The Washington Post, October 23, 2008 --- Click Here

Anyone can write a product review, and everybody reads them. But can you trust them? I refer, of course, to reader or user reviews, the kind you find on Amazon, Buy.com, Epinions, PC World, Yelp, and even the sites of tech product manufacturers, such as Dell. They're everywhere.

But it's the fraudulent reviews--positive reviews contributed by "readers" paid by the company being evaluated--that worry critics and advocates alike.

In an October 2007 poll conducted by the PR firm Burson-Marsteller, 1000 savvy Web consumers (dubbed "e-fluentials" by some wordsmith who evidently was unfamiliar with the term " effluent") were clearly convinced that fake reviews are endemic--and could result in a backlash from online consumers.

The numbers tell the tale: 48% (up from 39% in 2001) believe that fake reviews are being planted on consumer sites. 57% say they won't buy a product if the reader reviews seem suspect. And a whopping 76% claim to double-check what they read online. All are signs of a healthy skepticism.

So, how pervasive are falsified reviews?

Beau Brendler, Director of Consumer Reports' WebWatch site, says that the bottom line is: "[Fake reviews] happen all the time--but proving it, quantifying it--is very hard."

WebWatch--whose motto is "Look Before You Click"-- says on its site that its credibility campaign has led more than 170 sites, including CNN, CNet, The New York Times, Travelocity, and Orbitz to agree to uphold WebWatch's credibility guidelines.

Barbara Kasser, author of Online Shopping Directory For Dummies and Internet Shopping Yellow Pages, says: "There's no way to check the reviewer's veracity or if they're on the take--they're anonymous." Another concern: the reviewer might not be competent. "How did [the reviewer] use the product? Did they use it properly? Did they follow the manufacturer's directions? There's no way to know," she points out.

Why So Enticing?

Many ordinary people consider reviews written by consumers to be more reliable, more critical, and ultimately, more useful than many other sources of information. At least that's what they told The Nielsen Company in a survey conducted in April 2007. The top three most trusted sources: "Recommendations from consumers" (78%), "Newspapers" (63%), and "Consumer opinions posted online" (61%). (In a story that PC World posted in 2003, we generally agreed with the above perceptions--but we're a bit more cynical now.)

Certainly, reader reviews have come a long way since the era of Usenet and reader forums. Depending on the site and its readers, you may find pithy commentary, long-winded rants, numeric ratings, pros and cons, graphs, and even reviewer videos.

But Mitch Meyerson, author of the book Guerilla Marketing on the Internet, thinks that "influenced" reviews (paid for or not) are pretty common. For example, says Meyerson, "authors often enlist friends, colleagues, and clients to review their books on Amazon."

According to Blogging Tips founder and Web developer Kevin Muldoon, "tech sites usually have fair, accurate [reader] reviews...but there are definitely more fake reviews [on sites] covering cosmetics and hotels." Read Muldoon's blog entry on his own guidelines for how he reviews products.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on consumer fraud and reporting of such fraud can be found at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm

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Thus Far Cuil is Not So Cool

"Ex-Googlers launch rival search engine," CNN Money, July 28, 2008 --- http://money.cnn.com/2008/07/28/technology/cuil.ap/index.htm?cnn=yes

Anna Patterson's last Internet search engine was so impressive that industry leader Google Inc. bought the technology in 2004 to upgrade its own system.

She believes her latest invention is even more valuable - only this time it's not for sale.

Patterson instead intends to upstage Google, which she quit in 2006 to develop a more comprehensive and efficient way to scour the Internet.

The end result is Cuil, pronounced "cool." Backed by $33 million in venture capital, the search engine plans to begin processing requests for the first time Monday.

Cuil had kept a low profile while Patterson, her husband, Tom Costello, and two other former Google engineers - Russell Power and Louis Monier - searched for better ways to search.

Now, it's boasting time.

Web index: For starters, Cuil's search index spans 120 billion Web pages.

Patterson believes that's at least three times the size of Google's index, although there is no way to know for certain. Google stopped publicly quantifying its index's breadth nearly three years ago when the catalog spanned 8.2 billion Web pages.

Ex-Googlers: Where are they now? Cuil won't divulge the formula it has developed to cover a wider swath of the Web with far fewer computers than Google. And Google isn't ceding the point: Spokeswoman Katie Watson said her company still believes its index is the largest.

After getting inquiries about Cuil, Google asserted on its blog Friday that it regularly scans through 1 trillion unique Web links. But Google said it doesn't index them all because they either point to similar content or would diminish the quality of its search results in some other way. The posting didn't quantify the size of Google's index.

A search index's scope is important because information, pictures and content can't be found unless they're stored in a database. But Cuil believes it will outshine Google in several other ways, including its method for identifying and displaying pertinent results.

Content analysis: Rather than trying to mimic Google's method of ranking the quantity and quality of links to Web sites, Patterson says Cuil's technology drills into the actual content of a page. And Cuil's results will be presented in a more magazine-like format instead of just a vertical stack of Web links. Cuil's results are displayed with more photos spread horizontally across the page and include sidebars that can be clicked on to learn more about topics related to the original search request.

Finally, Cuil is hoping to attract traffic by promising not to retain information about its users' search histories or surfing patterns - something that Google does, much to the consternation of privacy watchdogs.

Cuil is just the latest in a long line of Google challengers.

Other contenders: The list includes swaggering startups like Teoma (whose technology became the backbone of Ask.com), Vivisimo, Snap, Mahalo and, most recently, Powerset, which was acquired by Microsoft Corp. (MSFT, Fortune 500) this month.

Even after investing hundreds of millions of dollars on search, both Microsoft and Yahoo Inc. (YHOO, Fortune 500) have been losing ground to Google (GOOG, Fortune 500). Through May, Google held a 62% share of the U.S. search market followed by Yahoo at 21% and Microsoft at 8.5%, according to comScore Inc.

Google has become so synonymous with Internet search that it may no longer matter how good Cuil or any other challenger is, said Gartner Inc. analyst Allen Weiner.

"Search has become as much about branding as anything else," Weiner said. "I doubt [Cuil] will be keeping anyone at Google awake at night."

Google welcomed Cuil to the fray with its usual mantra about its rivals. "Having great competitors is a huge benefit to us and everyone in the search space," Watson said. "It makes us all work harder, and at the end of the day our users benefit from that."

But this will be the first time that Google has battled a general-purpose search engine created by its own alumni. It probably won't be the last time, given that Google now has nearly 20,000 employees.

Patterson joined Google in 2004 after she built and sold Recall, a search index that probed old Web sites for the Internet Archive. She and Power worked on the same team at Google.

Although he also worked for Google for a short time, Monier is best known as the former chief technology officer of AltaVista, which was considered the best search engine before Google came along in 1998. Monier also helped build the search engine on eBay's (EBAY, Fortune 500) online auction site.

The trio of former Googlers are teaming up with Patterson's husband, Costello, who built a once-promising search engine called Xift in the late 1990s. He later joined IBM Corp. (IBM, Fortune 500), where he worked on an "analytic engine" called WebFountain.

Costello's Irish heritage inspired Cuil's odd name. It was derived from a character named Finn McCuill in Celtic folklore.

Patterson enjoyed her time at Google, but became disenchanted with the company's approach to search. "Google has looked pretty much the same for 10 years now," she said, "and I can guarantee it will look the same a year from now."

 

The Cuil Search Engine is at http://www.cuil.com/info/

Jensen Comment on July 28, 2008
Thus far the hype seems to be more hyped than the performance on this first day of trials. For example I typed in the following in both Cuil and Google:
"Basis Adjustment" AND "FAS 133"

Google gave me hundreds of hits and many of them were quite relevant to my research.
Cuil gave me four hits and most of them were irrelevant to my research. Cuil said it had 1,116,835,248 hits, but I could only find a way to list four of these hits.

Go figure! Thus far the "World's Largest Search Engine" has a ways to go.

Another limitation is that Google has many cached documents where the original link is no longer active. Cuil does not mention a caching service.

First turn your speakers on and read in "Excel Magic Trick #73" in Cuil.
Results:  Nothing!

Next read in ""Excel Magic Trick #73" in Google.
Google's cached version takes you to an interesting video on the significant-digits bound in Excel.

Please let me know when and where Cuil is better than Google.

Also is Cuil like Yahoo in that early listing priority of hits goes to advertisers' sites?

If that's the case, Cuil will be a bummer. It does have Preferences button, but thus far that seems to be inactive.

July 28, 2008 reply from Schatzel, John [JSchatzel@STONEHILL.EDU]

Thanks Jagdish,

I do a great deal of google searching almost everyday and so this is of great interest. To run a quick test, I went to cuil.com (which is supposed to stand for "cool") and entered "audit simulation." I received nine rather large blocks of information relating to web sites that I found to be mostly irrelevant. I then tried "auditing simulation" and got pretty much the same thing. I also noticed that it was looking for "audit" and "simulation" separately and that there was no option for an advanced search, which on google allows you to combine words into phrases and sentences. I then tried "audit simulation" again, but this time with the quotes. This improved the results slightly, but most of the hits were still not very relevant. The links did have more information attached to them, but the information seemed to take up too much space. When I type "audit simulation" or "auditng simulation" into the basic google search page or toolbar, I get http://realaudit.com as most relevant. This makes more sense to me and when this link does not come up in cuil.com at all, it leaves me thinking that cuil still has a long way to go. Thanks again, for the tip,

John Schatzel

"Google Beats Cuil Hands Down In Size And Relevance, But That Isn't The Whole Story." Michael Arrington, The Washington Post, July 28, 2008 --- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/28/AR2008072800098.html?wpisrc=newsletter

We've been testing the engine for the last hour. Based on our test queries Cuil is an excellent search engine, particularly since it is all of an hour old. But it doesn't appear to have the depth of results that Google has, despite their claims. And the results are not nearly as relevant.

. . .

It seems pretty clear that Google's index of web pages is significantly larger than Cuil's unless we're randomly choosing the wrong queries. Based on the queries above, Google is averaging nearly 10x the number of results of Cuil.

And Cuil's ranking isn't as good as Google's based on the pure results returned from both queries. Where Cuil excels is with the related categories, which return results that are extremely relevant. With Google, we've all gotten used to trying a slightly different search to get the refined results we need. Cuil does a good job of guessing what we'll want next and presents that in the top right widget. That means Cuil saves time for more research based queries.

And I want to reemphasize that Cuil is only an hour old at this point, Google has had a decade to perfect their search engine.

 

 

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Question
How does Google's new Wikipedia-like online Encyclopedia differ from the real Wikipedia?

Hint
Colleges may one day give scholarly performance credit for authoring a module in Knol. In a sense it's like exposing your scholarship and research in such a way that the entire world may become "referees" of you contribution. Of course most of the modules fall into the realm of scholarship (mastery of existing knowledge) rather than research (contribution to new knowledge). The catch of course, is that the author must approve the reviewer's call. Darn! The rejected reviews may be, in most instances, be published in Wikipedia. In that sense Wikipedia is more academic.

"Google Presents Wikipedia Competitor," by Andrea L. Foster, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 23, 2008 --- Click Here

Google today launched Knol, an online encyclopedia that, in many ways, mimics Wikipedia, the popular encyclopedia that anyone can edit. As in Wikipedia, anyone can create a page in Knol. But changes to the page become active only after they are approved by the page’s author or authors. And unlike Wikipedia, the author’s name is featured prominently on Knol articles.
 

Among the featured articles on the Knol site today are “How to Backpack,” “Lung Cancer,” and “Toilet Clogs.”

Daniel Colman, director and associate dean of Stanford University’s continuing-studies program and author of the blog OpenCulture, predicted in December that Knol would have a hard time attracting experts to write articles.

 

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I get free online access to Encyclopaedia Britannica':  Is this my just reward?

'Encyclopaedia Britannica' Is Now Free to Bloggers," by Catherine Rampell, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 21, 2008 --- http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2923&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Encyclopaedia Britannica, which apparently fears being nudged into irrelevance by the proliferation of free online reference sources, has started giving bloggers free access to its articles, TechCrunch reports.

Reference sites such as Wikipedia, which are often criticized for their amateur (if zealous) authorship sources, have made the expensive, expert-vetted, hard-bound book set a less popular purchase. (Comscore analysis, also reported on TechCrunch, found that “[f]or every page viewed on Brittanica.com, 184 pages are viewed on Wikipedia,” or 3.8 billion v. 21 million page views per month).

Under a new program entitled Britannica WebShare, the encyclopedia publisher is allowing “people who publish with some regularity on the Internet, be they bloggers, webmasters, or writers,” to read and link to the encyclopedia’s online articles. The company seems to hope that by offering its services free to Web publishers, links to Britannica articles will proliferate across the Internet and will persuade regular Web surfers to cough up $1,400 for the encyclopedia’s 32-volume set, or perhaps $70 for an annual online subscription.

Posted Comments as of April 21, 2008

“What’s that laugher?” Sir Colin wondered aloud to no one in particular. The entire room sat in nervous silence.
“I say, what is that laughter?”
— S. Britchky Apr 21, 12:50 PM #

The Encyclopedia Britannica print edition is worth every penny of the $1400 I paid for it. Other readers should note that the print edition of the set is marked down each year, to below $1000, near the end of its run, as the next year’s edition approaches publication. I don’t work for Britannica, but in my opinion, every home library should have a set. I’d be lost without it., even though I have full access to the Internet.
— Richard    Apr 21, 08:49 PM  

Jensen Comment
Woe is me! Should I continue to be one of the billions or join the millions?

This is the classic issue of open source versus refereed publishing. Refereed articles, including Encyclopaedia Britannica, assign a few highly qualified referees to pass judgment on the accuracy and relevance of each module once and some modules are not reviewed again for many years. Wikipedia freely allows the entire online world to edit each module in real time. Do you have more faith in one-time decisions of experts or real-time decisions of possibly millions of people with expertise ranging from dunder heads to the best experts in the world on a given topic.

What Encyclopaedia Britannica has going for it is that it prevents dunder heads from messing up the module. What Wikipedia has going for it is that experts generally override the dunder heads of most topics, although errors may remain indefinitely in modules that nobody online is particularly interested in to a point of searching for the module on Wikipedia.

There also is the "problem" in Wikipedia that organizations and individuals such as the CIA, FBI, IRS, Israel, Russia, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and the Fortune 500 largest corporations are "maintaining" certain modules about themselves and sensitive terms. This is both good and bad. It prevents kooks from spreading lies about these organizations/individuals, but it also affords these organizations/individuals to present their own biased accounts of themselves. Fortunately Wikipedia added a Discussion Tab to each module where even the kooks are allowed to express opinions on the modules. Readers can then choose whether to read the discussions or not.

Now what about scholarly journals. Should the refereeing be done by two or three experts (sometimes cronies) selected by the Editor or should the working papers be exposed open source to online people of the world who can then publish feedback regarding the strengths and weaknesses of the research paper or other scholarly work? Me, I'm an open source kinda guy!

Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Open Encyclopedia, and YouTube as Knowledge Bases --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm#KnowledgeBases

Nothing's Perfect But what Consumes you?
Poems at the Poetry Free for All --- http://www.everypoet.org/pffa/archive/index.php/t-24023.html

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"6 Degrees of Wikipedia," by Catherine Rampell, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 28, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3041/six-degrees-of-wikipedia

A researcher at Trinity College Dublin has software that lets users map the links between Wikipedia pages. His Web site is called “Six Degrees of Wikipedia,” modeled after the trivia game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.” Instead of the degrees being measured by presence in the same film, degrees are determined by articles that link to each other.

For example, how many clicks through Wikipedia does it take to get from “Gatorade” to “Genghis Khan”? Three: Start at “Gatorade,” then click to “Connecticut,” then “June 1,” then “Genghis Khan.”

Stephen Dolan, the researcher who created the software, has also used the code to determine which Wikipedia article is the “center” of Wikipedia—that is, which article is the hub that most other articles must go through in the “Six Degrees” game. Not including the articles that are just lists (e.g., years), the article closest to the center is “United Kingdom,” at an average of 3.67 clicks to any other article. “Billie Jean King” and “United States” follow, with an average of 3.68 clicks and 3.69 clicks, respectively.

More detailed information can be found on Mr. Dolan’s Web site

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A geology professor defends use of Wikipedia in courses --- http://www.wooster.edu/geology/HOL.html

"Professors Should Embrace Wikipedia," by Mark A. Wilson. Inside Higher Ed, April 1, 20058 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/04/01/wilson

When the online, anyone-can-edit Wikipedia appeared in 2001, teachers, especially college professors, were appalled. The Internet was already an apparently limitless source of nonsense for their students to eagerly consume — now there was a Web site with the appearance of legitimacy and a dead-easy interface that would complete the seduction until all sense of fact, fiction, myth and propaganda blended into a popular culture of pseudointelligence masking the basest ignorance. An Inside Higher Ed article just last year on Wikipedia use in the academy drew a huge and passionate response, much of it negative.

Now the English version of Wikipedia has over 2 million articles, and it has been translated into over 250 languages. It has become so massive that you can type virtually any noun into a search engine and the first link will be to a Wikipedia page. After seven years and this exponential growth, Wikipedia can still be edited by anyone at any time. A generation of students was warned away from this information siren, but we know as professors that it is the first place they go to start a research project, look up an unfamiliar term from lecture, or find something disturbing to ask about during the next lecture. In fact, we learned too that Wikipedia is indeed the most convenient repository of information ever invented, and we go there often — if a bit covertly — to get a few questions answered. Its accuracy, at least for science articles, is actually as high as the revered Encyclopedia Britannica, as shown by a test published in the journal Nature.

It is time for the academic world to recognize Wikipedia for what it has become: a global library open to anyone with an Internet connection and a pressing curiosity. The vision of its founders, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, has become reality, and the librarians were right: the world has not been the same since. If the Web is the greatest information delivery device ever, and Wikipedia is the largest coherent store of information and ideas, then we as teachers and scholars should have been on this train years ago for the benefit of our students, our professions, and that mystical pool of human knowledge.

What Wikipedia too often lacks is academic authority, or at least the perception of it. Most of its thousands of editors are anonymous, sometimes known only by an IP address or a cryptic username. Every article has a “talk” page for discussions of content, bias, and organization. “Revert” wars can rage out of control as one faction battles another over a few words in an article. Sometimes administrators have to step in and lock a page down until tempers cool and the main protagonists lose interest. The very anonymity of the editors is often the source of the problem: how do we know who has an authoritative grasp of the topic?

That is what academics do best. We can quickly sort out scholarly authority into complex hierarchies with a quick glance at a vita and a sniff at a publication list. We make many mistakes doing this, of course, but at least our debates are supported with citations and a modicum of civility because we are identifiable and we have our reputations to maintain and friends to keep. Maybe this academic culture can be added to the Wild West of Wikipedia to make it more useful for everyone?

I propose that all academics with research specialties, no matter how arcane (and nothing is too obscure for Wikipedia), enroll as identifiable editors of Wikipedia. We then watch over a few wikipages of our choosing, adding to them when appropriate, stepping in to resolve disputes when we know something useful. We can add new articles on topics which should be covered, and argue that others should be removed or combined. This is not to displace anonymous editors, many of whom possess vast amounts of valuable information and innovative ideas, but to add our authority and hard-won knowledge to this growing universal library.

The advantages should be obvious. First, it is another outlet for our scholarship, one that may be more likely to be read than many of our journals. Second, we are directly serving our students by improving the source they go to first for information. Third, by identifying ourselves, we can connect with other scholars and interested parties who stumble across our edits and new articles. Everyone wins.

I have been an open Wikipedia editor now for several months. I have enjoyed it immensely. In my teaching I use a “living syllabus” for each course, which is a kind of academic blog. (For example, see my History of Life course online syllabus.) I connect students through links to outside sources of information. Quite often I refer students to Wikipedia articles that are well-sourced and well written. Wikipages that are not so good are easily fixed with a judicious edit or two, and many pages become more useful with the addition of an image from my collection (all donated to the public domain). Since I am open in my editorial identity, I often get questions from around the world about the topics I find most fascinating. I’ve even made important new connections through my edits to new collaborators and reporters who want more background for a story.

For example, this year I met online a biology professor from Centre College who is interested in the ecology of fish on Great Inagua Island in the Bahamas. He saw my additions and images on that Wikipedia page and had several questions about the island. He invited me to speak at Centre next year about evolution-creation controversies, which is unrelated to the original contact but flowed from our academic conversations. I in turn have been learning much about the island’s living ecology I did not know. I’ve also learned much about the kind of prose that is most effective for a general audience, and I’ve in turn taught some people how to properly reference ideas and information. In short, I’ve expanded my teaching.

Wikipedia as we know it will undoubtedly change in the coming years as all technologies do. By involving ourselves directly and in large numbers now, we can help direct that change into ever more useful ways for our students and the public. This is, after all, our sacred charge as teacher-scholars: to educate when and where we can to the greatest effect.

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How helpful is Wikipedia to scholarship?
Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, told educators last year that students shouldn't cite his sprawling Web site: "For God's sake, you’re in college," he said. "Don’t cite the encyclopedia.” It's a safe bet that most professors agreed with that assessment. But according to BBC News, Mr. Wales has now modified his message. He told attendees at a London IT conference this week that he doesn't object to Wikipedia citations, although he admitted that scholars would "probably be better off doing their own research." From the BBC report, it's hard to tell how gung-ho Mr. Wales is about Wikipedia's academic value. But the online encyclopedia's efforts to improve the quality of its articles might be starting to pay dividends: A German magazine recently compared 50 Wikipedia articles with similar pieces in Brockhaus, a commercial encyclopedia. According to the study, the Wikipedia articles were generally more informative.
Brock Read, Chronicle of Higher Education, December 7, 2007 --- http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2598&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en 

Bob Jensen's threads on how scholars search the Web are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm#Scholars

Bob Jensen's threads on general education tutorials are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch

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See, I'm not the only one!
University of Texas Professor Praises Wikipedia
Scholars often take swipes at Wikipedia, claiming that it dumbs down education and encourages intellectual laziness. Some professors have even banned their students from using it for research. But in an article this week in Science Progress, a scholar at the University of Texas at Dallas argues that such bans are irresponsible. David Parry, an assistant professor of emerging media and communications at the university, writes that students need to become familiar with new and non-static forms of communication. He encourages his students to read Wikipedia’s “history” and “discussion” pages, saying they explain how articles were produced. And he says the online encyclopedia’s entry on global warming does a good job of explaining both the controversy and the science surrounding the issue.“Like it or not, the networked digital archive changes our basis of knowledge,” Mr. Parry writes “and training people for the future is about training them for this shift."
Andrea L. Foster, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 14, 2008 --- Click Here

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Wikipedia (heavily used by scholars in spite of authenticity risks)--- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s

Who is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? --- http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/09/who_is_mahmoud_ahmadinejad.html The Iranian-born author of the above article invites anybody to contact him with corrections at amil_imani@yahoo.com It would be great to see if and how the author tries to defend himself about contentious “facts.” Wikipedia --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Ahmadinejad It goes without saying that Wikipedia modules are always suspect, but it is easy to make corrections for the world. I think this particular model requires registration to discourage anonymous edits. What is often better about Wikipedia is to read the discussion and criticisms of any module. For example, some facts in dispute in this particular module are mentioned in the “Discussion” or “talk” section about the module --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Mahmoud_Ahmadinejad Perhaps some of the disputed facts have already been pointed out in the “Discussion” section. Of course pointing out differences of opinion about “facts” does not, in and of itself, resolve these differences. I did read the “Discussion” section on this module before suggesting the module as a supplementary link. I assumed others would also check the “Talk” section before assuming what is in dispute. Since Wikipedia is so widely used by so many students and others like me it’s important to try to correct the record whenever possible. This can be done quite simply from your Web browser and does not require any special software. It requires registration for politically sensitive modules. Wikipedia modules are often “corrected” by the FBI, CIA, corporations, foreign governments, professors of all persuasions, butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers. This makes them fun and suspect at the same time. It’s like having a paper refereed by the world instead of a few, often biased or casual, journal referees. What I like best is that “referee comments” are made public in Wikipedia’s “Discussion” sections. You don’t often find this in scholarly research journals where referee comments are supposed to remain confidential. Reasons for flawed journal peer reviews were recently brought to light at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#PeerReviewFlaws The biggest danger in Wikipedia in generally for modules that are rarely sought out. For example, Bill Smith might right a deceitful module about John Doe. If nobody’s interested in John Doe, it may take forever and a day for corrections to appear. Generally modules that are of great interest to many people, however, generate a lot of “talk” in the “Discussion” sections. For example, the Discussion section for George W. Bush is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:George_W._Bush Bob Jensen's search helpers are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm

 

"Forget the Articles, Best Wikipedia Read Is Its Discussions," by Lee Gomes, The Wall Street Journal, August 15, 2007; Page B1 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118712061199497533.html

You already know about Wikipedia -- or think you do. It's the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, the one that by dint of its 1.9 million English-language entries has become the Internet's main information source and the 17th busiest U.S. Web site.

But that's just the half of it.

Most people are familiar with Wikipedia's collection of articles. Less well-known, unfortunately, are the discussions about these articles. You can find these at the top of a Wikipedia page under a separate tab for "Discussion."

Reading these discussion pages is a vastly rewarding, slightly addictive, experience -- so much so that it has become my habit to first check out the discussion before going to the article proper.

At Wikipedia, anyone can be an editor and all but 600 or so articles can be freely altered. The discussion pages exist so the people working on an article can talk about what they're doing to it. Part of the discussion pages, the least interesting part, involves simple housekeeping; -- editors noting how they moved around the sections of an article or eliminated duplications. And sometimes readers seek answers to homework-style questions, though that practice is discouraged.

But discussion pages are also where Wikipedians discuss and debate what an article should or shouldn't say.

This is where the fun begins. You'd be astonished at the sorts of things editors argue about, and the prolix vehemence they bring to stating their cases. The 9,500-word article "Ireland," for example, spawned a 10,000-word discussion about whether "Republic of Ireland" would be a better name for the piece. "I know full well that many Unionist editors would object completely to my stance on this subject," wrote one person.

A ferocious back and forth ensued over whether Antonio Meucci or Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. One person from the Meucci camp taunted the Bell side by saying, "'Nationalistic pride' stop you and people like you to accept the truth. Bell was a liar and thief. He invented nothing."

As for the age-old philosophical question, "What is truth," it's an issue Wikipedia editors have spent 242,000 words trying to settle, an impressive feat considering how Plato needed only 118,000 words to write "The Republic."

These debates extend to topics most people wouldn't consider remotely controversial. The article on calculus, for instance, was host to some sparring over whether the concept of "limit," central to calculus, should be better explained as an "average."

Wikipedia editors are always on the prowl for passages in articles that violate Wikipedia policy, such as its ban on bias. Editors use the discussion pages to report these sightings, and reading the back and forth makes it clear that editors take this task very seriously.

On one discussion page is the comment: "I am not sure that it does not present an entirely Eurocentric view, nor can I see that it is sourced sufficiently well so as to be reliable."

Does it address a polarizing topic from politics or religion? Hardly. The article was about kittens. The editor was objecting to the statement that most people think kittens are cute.

These debates are not the only treasures in the discussion pages. You can learn a lot of stray facts, facts that an editor didn't think were important enough for the main article. For example, in the discussion accompanying the article about diets, it's noted that potatoes, eaten raw, can be poisonous. The National Potato Council didn't believe this when asked about it last week, but later called back to say that it was true, on account of the solanine in potatoes. Of course, you'd have to eat many sackfuls of raw potatoes to be done in by them.

The discussion about "biography" included random facts from sundry biographies, including that Marshall McLuhan believed his ideas about mass media and the rest to have been inspired by the Virgin Mary. This is true, said McLuhan biographer Philip Marchand. (Mr. Marchand also said McLuhan believed that a global conspiracy of Freemasons was seeking to hinder his career.)

Remember, though, this is Wikipedia, and while it tends to get things right in the long run, it can goof up along the way. A "tomato" article contained a lyrical description of the Carolina breed, said to be "first noted by Italian monk Giacomo Tiramisunelli" and "considered a rare delicacy amongst tomato-connoisseurs."

That's all a complete fabrication, said Roger Chetelat, tomato expert at the University of California, Davis. While now gone from Wikipedia, the passage was there long enough for "Giacomo Tiramisunelli" to turn up now in search engines as a key figure in tomato history.

Wikipedia is very self-aware. It has a Wikipedia article about Wikipedia. But this meta-analysis doesn't extend to "Wikipedia discussions." No article on the topic exists. Search for "discussion," and you are sent to "debate."

But, naturally, that's controversial. The discussion page about debate includes a debate over whether "discussion" and "debate" are synonymous. Emotions run high; the inability to distinguish the two, said one participant, is "one of the problems with Western Society."

Maybe I have been reading too many Wikipedia discussion pages, but I can see the point.

Jensen Comment
This may be more educational than what we teach in class. Try it by clicking on the Discussion tab for the following"

Credit Derivative --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_derivative

Capital Asset Pricing Model --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_asset_pricing_model

Socratic Method --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_Method

Moodle --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moodle

"Seeing Corporate Fingerprints in Wikipedia Edits," by Katie Hafner, The New York Times, August 19, 2007 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/technology/19wikipedia.html?ex=1188532800&en=c387035de4ec887b&ei=5070

"CIA, FBI Computers Used for Wikipedia Edits," by Randall Mikkelsen, The Washington Post, August 16, 2007 --- Click Here
"CIA and Vatican Edit Wikipedia Entries," TheAge.com, August 18, 2007 --- Click Here

Jensen Comment
Wikipedia installed software to trace the source of edits and new modules.

Bob Jensen's threads on tools of education technology are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm

---

"Can Google's New Open Encylopedia Best Wikipedia?" by Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, December 17, 2007 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2619&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en  

On Wikipedia, you never really know who wrote the article you're reading. Some are written by experts, but others are written by people with time on their hands who may or may not know what they're talking about. Actually, most Wikipedia articles are written by a combination of the two. But Google's new Web encyclopedia, announced last tweek, will put the authors of articles front and center, so you'll always know who is talking and what their qualifications are. The question is, which model will produce a better quick-reference guide? Daniel Colman, director and associate dean of Stanford University's continuing-studies program and author of the blog OpenCulture, picks Wikipedia to win this face off. He thinks that Google's planned encyclopedia will have a hard time attracting experts to write articles, whereas Wikipedia works by letting everyone write articles that are then often corrected by experts. "Take my word for it," writes Mr. Colman. "I’ve spent the past five years trying to get scholars from elite universities, including Stanford, to bring their ideas to the outside world, and it’s often not their first priority. They just have too many other things competing for their time." Others have pointed out that Google's project, called knol, is similar to other efforts to create authoritative topic pages, like Squidoo. There is at least one key factor in Google's favor though. Knol authors stand to make money for their efforts. "At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads," Google's Udi Manber, said in a statement announcing the service. "If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads." Those ad dollars would be more than professors make for writing journal articles, which are usually written for no compensation at all.

. . .

There is at least one key factor in Google’s favor though. Knol authors stand to make money for their efforts.

“At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads,” Google’s Udi Manber, said in a statement announcing the service. “If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with substantial revenue share from the proceeds of those ads.”

Those ad dollars would be more than professors make for writing journal articles, which are usually written for no compensation at all.

---

Santa Clara University Virtual Library --- http://campustechnology.com/articles/48506 .

Carnegie Mellon Libraries: Digital Library Colloquium (video lectures) --- http://www.library.cmu.edu/Libraries/DLColloquia.html

Other Scholarly Search Engines (CrossRef and Scirus.) --- http://privateschool.about.com/b/a/116956.htm
Also see http://www.library.uq.edu.au/internet/scholsearch.html

Scholarly search tools CiteBase Citebase is a trial service that allows researchers to search across free, full-text research literature ePrint archives, with results ranked according to criteria such as citation impact.   Gateway to ePrints A listing of ePrint servers and open access repository search tools.   Google Scholar A search tool for scholarly citations and abstracts, many of which link to full text articles, book chapters, working papers and other forms of scholarly publishing. It includes content from many open access journals and repositories.   OAIster A search tool for cross-archive searching of more than 540 separate digital collections and archives, including arXiv, CiteBase, ANU ePrints, ePrintsUQ, and others.   Scirus A search tool for online journals and Web sites in the sciences.

---

Scribd Wants to Become the YouTube for Documents --- http://www.scribd.com/categories
It has a long way to go, although it now has over 350,000 archived documents --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribd
There are many tutorials such as those in basic accounting.

"A YouTube for Documents?" by Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 21, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2762&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

Borrowing a page from the popular video-sharing site YouTube, a new online service lets people upload and share their papers or entire books via a social-network interface. But will a format that works for videos translate to documents?

It’s called iPaper, and it uses a Flash-based document reader that can be embedded into a Web page. The experience of reading neatly formatted text inside a fixed box feels a bit like using an old microfilm reader, except that you can search the documents or e-mail them to friends.

The company behind the technology, Scribd, also offers a library of iPaper documents and invites users to set up an account to post their own written works. And, just like on YouTube, users can comment about each document, give it a rating, and view related works.

Also like on YouTube, some of the most popular items in the collection are on the lighter side. One document that is in the top 10 “most viewed” is called “It seems this essay was written while the guy was high, hilarious!” It is a seven-page paper that appears to have been written for a college course but is full of salty language. The document includes the written comments of the professor who graded it, and it ends with a handwritten note: “please see after class to discuss your paper.”

There’s plenty of serious material on the site, too — like the Iraq Study Group Report and an Educause report about the future of technology at colleges.

Bob Jensen's threads on free online documents are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on general education tutorials are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Bookbob2.htm#EducationResearch

---

Librarian's Index to the Internet --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm#Librarian'sIndex

Google Book Search --- http://books.google.com/advanced_book_search 

Searching the Deep Web --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm#DeepWeb

UCLA Library Scholarly Search Helpers --- http://www2.library.ucla.edu/googlescholar/searchengines.cfm

University of Kansas Scholarly Search Helpers --- http://www.lib.ku.edu/technology/searchengines/scholar.shtml

Social scientists and business scholars often use SSRN (not free) --- http://www.ssrn.com/

If you have access to a college library, most colleges generally have paid subscriptions to enormous scholarly literature databases that are not available freely online. Serious scholars obtain access to these vast literature databases.

Open Access Shared Scholarship --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI

University Channel (video and audio) ---  http://uc.princeton.edu/main/

Bob Jensen's links to electronic literature, including free online textbooks and other learning materials --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

Bob Jensen's search helpers are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm

Zotero software for  storing, retrieving, organizing, and annotating digital documents --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zotero Zotero is a free, open source extension for the Firefox browser, that enables users to collect, manage, and cite research from all types of sources from the browser. It is partly a piece of reference management software, used to manage bibliographies and references when writing essays and articles. On many major research websites such as digital libraries, Google Scholar, or even Amazon.com, Zotero detects when a book, article, or other resource is being viewed and with a mouse click finds and saves the full reference information to a local file. If the source is an online article or web page, Zotero can optionally store a local copy of the source. Users can then add notes, tags, and their own metadata through the in-browser interface. Selections of the local reference library data can later be exported as formatted bibliographies. The program is produced by the Center for History and New Media of George Mason University and is currently available in public beta. It is open and extensible, allowing other users to contribute citation styles and site translators, and more generally for others who are building digital tools for researchers to expand the platform. The name is from Albanian language "to master". It is aimed at replacing the more cumbersome traditional reference management software, originally designed to meet the demands of offline research "Mark of Zotero,"  by Scott McLemee, Inside Higher Ed, September 26, 2007 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/09/26/mclemee  Zotero is a tool for storing, retrieving, organizing, and annotating digital documents. It has been available for not quite a year. I started using it about six weeks ago, and am still learning some of the fine points, but feel sufficient enthusiasm about Zotero to recommend it to anyone doing research online. If very much of your work involves material from JSTOR, for example – or if you find it necessary to collect bibliographical references, or to locate Web-based publications that you expect to cite in your own work — then Zotero is worth knowing how to use. (You can install it on your computer for free; more on that in due course.) Now, my highest qualification for testing a digital tool is, perhaps, that I have no qualifications for testing a digital tool. That is not as paradoxical as it sounds. The limits of my technological competence are very quickly reached. My command of the laptop computer consists primarily of the ability to (1) turn it on and (2) type stuff. This condition entails certain disadvantages (the mockery of nieces and nephews, for example) but it makes for a pretty good guinea pig. And in that respect, I can report that the folks at George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media have done an exemplary job in designing Zotero. A relatively clueless person can learn to use it without exhaustive effort. Still, it seems as if institutions that do not currently do so might want to offer tutorials on Zotero for faculty and students who may lack whatever gene makes for an intuitive grasp of software. Academic librarians are probably the best people to offer instruction. Aside from being digitally savvy, they may be the people at a university in the best position to appreciate the range of uses to which Zotero can be put. For the absolute newbie, however, let me explain what Zotero is — or rather, what it allows you to do. I’ll also mention a couple of problems or limitations. Zotero is still under development and will doubtless become more powerful (that is, more useful) in later releases. But the version now available has numerous valuable features that far outweigh any glitches. Suppose you go online to gather material on some aspect of a book you are writing. In the course of a few hours, you might find several promising titles in the library catalog, a few more with Amazon, a dozen useful papers via JSTOR, and three blog entries by scholars who are thinking aloud about some matter tangential to your project. Continued in article

Using Speech Recognition in a Search Engine
Boston-based startup EveryZing has launched a search engine that it hopes will change the way that people search for audio and video online. Formerly known as PodZinger, a podcast search engine, EveryZing is leveraging speech systems developed by technology company BBN that can convert spoken words into searchable text with about 80 percent accuracy. This bests other commercially available systems, says EveryZing CEO Tom Wilde.
Kate Greene, "More-Accurate Video Search:  Speech-recognition software could improve video search," MIT's Technology Review, June 12, 2007 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/18847/

University Channel (video and audio) ---  http://uc.princeton.edu/main/

The University Channel makes videos of academic lectures and events from all over the world available to the public. It is a place where academics can air their ideas and present research in a full-length, uncut format. Contributors with greater video production capabilities can submit original productions.

The University Channel presents ideas in a way commercial news or public affairs programming cannot. Because it is neither constrained by time nor dependent upon commercial feedback, the University Channel's video content can be broad and flexible enough to cover the full gamut of academic investigation.

While it has unlimited potential, the University Channel begins with a focus on public and international affairs, because this is an area which lends itself most naturally to a many-sided discussion. Perhaps of greatest advantage to universities who seek to expand their dialog with overseas institutions and international affairs, the University Channel can "go global" and become a truly international forum.

The University Channel aims to become, literally, a "channel" for important thought, to be heard in its entirety. Television has become so much a part of the fabric of our world that it should be more than an academic interest. It should be an academic tool.

The University Channel project is an initiative of Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, which is leading the effort to build university membership and distribution partners. Technical support, advice and services are provided through the generosity of Princeton University's Office of Information Technology. Digital video solutions courtesy of Princeton Server Group.

Search for University Lectures Available as Podcasts ---  http://uc.princeton.edu/main/
Bob Jensen's threads on podcasting, Apple's iPod U, RSS, RDF are at http://www.trinity.edu/~rjensen/245glosf.htm#ResourceDescriptionFramework
Also see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/music.htm#Video

Advanced RSS Mixer Personal 3.1.58 --- http://www.advancedrssmixer.com/software.asp#compare 

For those users who are finding their current RSS feed software a bit unruly, they may wish to check out this latest version of the Advanced RSS Mixer. The application can be used to combine different RSS feeds into one aggregate feed, and it also contains a built-in RSS keyword filter. The basic interface is quite easy to use, and for keeping track of RSS feeds, this application is most handy. This version is compatible with computers running Windows 95 and newer.

FindSounds Search the Web for Sounds (audio) --- http://www.findsounds.com/

The Future of Search (with RDF, RSS, and something new from IBM)

The Taxonomy Warehouse is a fantastic search engine in terms of helpful categories --- http://www.taxonomywarehouse.com/ 

Blinkx finds links of possible interest to you based upon what you are reading.

Magellan Metasearch Tool for the Techie Types and Other Meta Search Tools 

Copyright Information and Dead Links

Cognitive Science ePrint Search Engine 

Health, Medical and Science Searching

Current state of scholarly cyberinfrastructure in the humanities and social sciences

Social Networking  

What search engines know about you when you search.   

CatsCradle 3.5 --- http://www.stormdance.net/software/catscradle/overview.htm 
Many websurfers enjoy going to sites that might be based in other countries, and as such, they might very well encounter a different language. With CatsCradle 3.5, these persons need worry no more, as this application can be used to translate entire websites in such languages as Thai, Chinese, Japanese, and Russian. This version is compatible with all computers running Windows XP or 2000. (Scout Report, September 1, 2006)

Message Aware's Online Directory of Acrobat PDF Files --- http://www.messageaware.com/information.html

Portal to Asian Internet Resources --- http://webcat.library.wisc.edu:3200/PAIR/index.html 

Business Finders (yellow pages), Knowledge Experts, and Other People (including biographical material)

The above link includes search helpers for missing persons

(also see USA People Search

Weblogs and Blogs 

Domain Names  

How does your site rate in terms of popularity among large numbers of users?

Foreign Language Translation Software  

Maps, Travel Information, and Local Area Searches for Businesses and Places of Interest

(This includes a link to Google's Public Transit Planning Guide)

Accounting and Other Topic Searches

Safe Sites for Kids

Live Person Search Help and Other Fee Consulting from Google Brokers 

AllTheWeb 

OAIster is a Mellon-funded project of the University of Michigan Digital Library Production Services. The goal is to create a wide-ranging collection of free, useful, previously difficult-to-access digital resources (what are digital resources?) that are easily searchable by anyone.

Search for Education Websites (including finding a college that's right for you)

Search for Library and Reference Databases  

Amazon.com offers a text search of books

Search for Internet, e-Business, and e-Commerce Websites

Search for Government Sites 

Search for Images on the Web

Use Images to Search for Websites 

Search for Products and Marketing on the Web

Search for Discussion Groups, Newsgroups, and Chat Rooms 

Accounting Professional Site Links 
The CPA Team http://www.cpateam.com/  
Also see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob.htm 

Search the InvisibleWeb  

Search Tips and Helpers (including how to limit searches by language and other filters)

Search for Education Organizations

Search for People and Missing Persons

Searching for Companies (Business Firms)

Searching for Training and Education Providers 

Advanced Search Systems 

Forum and Message Board Searching 

Open Content Sites Allow You to Add and Edit Content and Share  

Librarian's Index to the Internet

Library Spot

Searching for Book Table of Contents

How to find (Swap) Books and Compare Prices 

Searching for Audio Books, Clips, Lectures, Speeches, and Books

Search for Patterns in Text

Electronic Books, Poems, Videos, and Journals

Free audio book downloads --- http://www.freeclassicaudiobooks.com/

Dictionaries and encyclopedias --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries

Database Searching (including literature searches and knowledge portals)

Search for Online Communities on Over 700,000 Topics

Search for facts and statistics --- http://www.factmonster.com/ 
For economic statistics, go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm#EconStatistics 

Getting an Answer Is One Thing, Learning Is Another  

Helpers When Searching for News and Events 

Helpers in Attracting the World to Your Website

Newer Searching Ideas

Searching the Deep Web  

Subject Index to Literature on Electronic Sources of Information http://library.usask.ca/~dworacze/SUBJIN_A.HTM 

What are the search terms most frequently used in search engines?

Craigslist:  Popular Online Classifieds
"Wanted: Just About Everything," by Daniel Terdiman, Wired News, February 8, 2005 --- http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,66530,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_2 
To go to Craigslist, click on http://www.craigslist.org/ 
Bob Jensen's shopping helpers are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob3.htm 

Legal Searching and Government Search Sites  

Accounting Software Vendors

Newspapers --- http://ejw.i8.com/newsweb.htm

Search for Quotations --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/default.htm#quotations 

Bob Jensen's overview of electronic books and custom publishing --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm

Electronic Sources of Information: A Bibliography http://library.usask.ca/~dworacze/BIBLIO.HTM 

Web Search Engines FAQS:  http://www.infotoday.com/searcher/oct01/price.htm 

Bob Jensen's Links to Glossaries  --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/245gloss.htm 

Encyclopedias, Dictionaries, and Glossaries --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob3.htm 

How to report a crime or deal with a lost wallet --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud.htm#ThingsToKnow 

The Bible With Hot Links (God's Yellow Pages) --- http://web2.airmail.net/dpelc/yellow/

Fun and Useful Stuff --- http://ejw.i8.com/fun.htm 

KidStuff                        Movies                                    Credit Bureaus NEW! 
About the Home            Inspiration                                Electronic Directories                     
Home Journals              Time and Weather                    Electronic Greetings       
Travel and Tourism        Numbers & Measurements      Books                           
Travel Coupons             Information, Please                  Hoax Sites 
Vehicles                         Free Stuff                                Dead Links Archive

          Bob Jensen's helpers on similar items are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob3.htm 

Bob Jensen's Bookmarks --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob.htm 

Over 30,000 Free Academic Literature and Multimedia Items from EServer (including some "Bad Subjects") --- http://eserver.org 

The EServer, founded in 1990, is now based at Iowa State University. We are increasing efforts to publish new works (31846 so far). 

The Academy	miscellaneous resources for students and faculty
Art/Architecture	links to art, architecture, and aesthetic theory
Audio and Video	audio recordings of scholarly presentations
Bad Subjects	political education for everyday life
Books	book-length nonfiction and miscellaneous literatures
Calls for Papers	calls for conference papers and journal articles
Cultronix	a journal of contemporary art and cultural theory
Cultural Logic	an electronic journal of marxist theory and practice
Cultural Theory	readings in cultural studies and critical theory
Cyber Tech/Culture	discussing links between technology and culture
Drama	a collection of plays, modern works and classics
Early Modern Culture	works and discussions in Renaissance studies
Education	resources for both students and teachers
Eighteenth Century	a site for eighteenth-century cultural history
Electronic Labyrinth	a study of the implications of hypertext for writers
Feminism	select resources in feminism and women's studies
Fiction	novels and short fiction, classics and new works
Film & Television	works in film, television and other media studies
Gender/Sexuality	some resources on gender, sex and sexuality
Government	materials in government, law, and their social implications
History	works and links in history and historiography
Home Pages	the personal home pages of EServer members
Internet	resources about the internet: guides, essays and articles
Journals	links to academic journals and popular magazines
Languages	resources in language studies and theory
Libraries	links to worldwide library catalogues
Literary Events	events for any date from literature and the arts
The Mamet Review	the journal of the David Mamet Society
Marx & Engels	a collection of writings in economic and social theory
Multimedia	a small collection of artwork, audio, graphics and video
Music	a vast collection of works in music and music theory
Philosophy	writings by modern and classical philosophers
Pittsburgh	information about the city and its neighborhoods
Poetry	original and classic verse, literary and poetic theory
Race	materials on race and ethnicity in the U.S.
Recipes	vegetarian recipes, and links to good related sites
Reference	select reference materials useful for research
Rhetoric	scholarly and pedagogical resources for rhetoricians
Software	freeware and shareware for your computer
Sparks	a publisher of fiction, poetry, music, art and spoken word
Sudden	original poetry that reflects imagination and intelligence
Tech Comm Library	a web portal for tech, sci and professional communication
Thoreau Reader	the works of American philosopher Henry D. Thoreau
Web Design	a site for discussion of new media design
Zine375

Specialized Search Engines

Searching for Knowledge on the Web
Finding Dulcinea --- http://www.findingdulcinea.com/home.html
Tries to be your "Librarian on the Web"

Question
What new online people finders are making it easier to find the whereabouts of people in your past?
Hint:  One of the sites has very large and pointed ears.

Zaba Search free database of names, addresses, birth dates, and phone numbers. Social security numbers and background checks are also available for a fee --- http://www.zabasearch.com/

"Searching for Humans:  Various websites are trying to make it easier to find friends and colleagues online," by Erica Naone, MIT's Technology Review, August 20, 2007 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19270/ 

Jaideep Singh, cofounder of the new people-search engine Spock, says he wants to build a profile for every person in the world. To do this, he plans to combine the power of search algorithms with online social networks. Singh says he got the idea for Spock while looking for people with specific areas of expertise among his contacts in Microsoft Outlook. Although he has two or three thousand people listed, he could only find people he was already thinking about. Spock is designed to solve that problem by allowing users to search for tags--such as "saxophonist" or "venture capitalist"--and then view a list of people associated with those tags. Singh could have manually entered tags for each of his contacts into Microsoft Outlook, but capturing every interest of each particular individual would be time-consuming. Spock uses a combination of human and machine intelligence to automatically come up with the tags: search algorithms identify possible tags, and users can vote on their relevance or add new tags. Registered users can add private tags to another person's profile to organize their contacts based on information that they don't want to share. For example, a contentious associate might be privately labeled as such. The social-network component of the website introduces an element of crowd commentary into the search process. George W. Bush is tagged "miserable failure," with a vote of 87 to 31 in favor of the tag's relevance as of this writing. Users aren't allowed to vote anonymously, and the tag links to the profiles of people who voted. Singh hopes social networks will also help with one of the main problems in people search: teaching the system to recognize that two separate entries refer to a single person--a problem called entity resolution. For example, a single person might have a MySpace page, a Linked In profile, and a write-up on a company website. Steven Whang, an entity-resolution researcher at Stanford University, says that there are several aspects to the problem: getting the system to compare two entries and decide whether they are related, merging related entries without repetition, and comparing information from a myriad of possible sources online. Finally, Whang says, there is a risk of merging two entries that should not be merged, as in the case of a name like Robin, which is used by both men and women. Many of the people-search engines try to get around these problems by encouraging people to claim and manage their own profiles, although Whang notes that this is a labor-intensive approach. Although there are many sites where people could claim their profiles, Singh says he thinks one engine will eventually dominate, and people will make the effort to claim profiles there. Bryan Burdick, chief operating officer of the business-search site Zoominfo, says that 10,000 people a week claim their profiles on Zoom, in spite of having to provide their credit-card numbers to do so. Singh has also introduced the Spock Challenge, a competition to design a better entity-resolution algorithm. He says that 1,400 researchers have already downloaded the data set, and they will compete for a $50,000 prize, which will be awarded in November. Continued in article

The Accoona Super Target search engine is at http://www.accoona.com/
That being said, Accoona looks, at first glance, not much different than other search engines — including Google itself. Its bare-bones initial interface follows the same design: A central search field with buttons that let you search the entire Web or confine your search to news or business sources. Searching On Scott I started with a general Web search on "Scott Joplin" on Accoona and Google, and found quite a bit of disparity in the results (112,393 for Accoona and 4,130,000 for Google). When I did a search on the phrase "mp3 players," I got similar results: Accoona came up with 6,031,343 results, while Google boasted 187,000,000. Quite frankly, while I appreciated Google's higher numbers, that alone wouldn't have made Google my preferred search engine — how many people go past the fifth page of results, anyway? There was also some variation in which sites came up in what order, but again, there were no really important differences.
Barbara Krasnoff, "Accoona: A New Google Alternative? The latest search engine to hit the Web, Accoona offers additional business info and a nice filtering ability. But is that enough? InternetWeek, March 20, 2006 ---  http://internetweek.cmp.com/handson/183700172

Academics should remember that Google Scholar greatly narrows down the search hits --- http://scholar.google.com/

Also see Google Knol --- http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/encouraging-people-to-contribute.html

Wolfram Alpha --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfram_Alpha

Some Things You Might Want to Know About the Wolfram Alpha (WA) Search Engine:  The Good and The Evil
as Applied to Learning Curves (Cumulative Average vs. Incremental Unit)
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/theorylearningcurves.htm

Video:  Wolfram Alpha has gotten much better --- http://www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html
 It is best described as a search engine that will perform complicated computations

Wolfram Alpha --- http://www.wolframalpha.com/ 

"Wolfram Alpha's Second Act Following a sharp drop in interest, the "computational knowledge engine" pins hopes on API--and homework," by David Talbot, MIT's Technology Review, October 16, 2009 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/24254/?nlid=2439&a=f

The summer months saw a sharp drop in user interest in Wolfram Alpha, the online "computational knowledge engine" that calculates everything from planetary distances to cholesterol levels and generates (from the topics it knows) customized charts and graphics not available from general search engines. In the peak days after the May 15 launch, traffic soared to around 2.8 million daily visitors--but then hit a trough of 200,000 in July, according to the company. But now, with traffic now drifting back toward the 300,000 mark, the site is pinning its hopes partly on a new application programming interface (API) to leverage the online tool in websites, online publishing, desktop applications and mobile devices. An iPhone app will be one of the early examples.

It will be interesting to see how third-parties leverage the depth of Wolfram Alpha's knowledge in math, science, geography, and engineering beyond the simple search-engine-like interface that now confronts users. Right now, the engine has a ways to go to meet the goal of its brainchild, the physicist Stephen Wolfram, to "make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone."

The rebound toward 300,000 visitors may reflect a back-to-school bump, with students seeing the engine as a great tool for doing their math and science homework, according to Schoeller Porter, who heads up Wolfram's API program. (Indeed, the engine is throwing a homework day event next week to promote further such use.) "We had an enormous launch with a huge amount of interest and a lot of traffic. The traffic fell off, and we fully expected that; it was a nice relaxation for us, and it let us fix code and put in new features," he told me this morning. "It followed a kind of---I won't say overhyped--but a well-hyped launch." Wolfram Alpha is built on Mathematica--Stephen Wolfram's comprehensive repository of mathematical and scientific formulae--and fed by datasets curated by Wolfram Research.

Tags: Internet, search, Web 2.0, search engine, wolfram alpha

Comments

Looking the gift horse in the mouth I have a great personal and potential professional interest in Wolfram Alpha, but I have a significant amount of uncertainty about the commercial terms of the yet to be determined business model that will eventually be settled on. I'm sure many others share this concern, and it will limit adoption of Wolfram Alpha and its API until clarified.

Bob Jensen

Bob Jensen's search helpers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm

Bob Jensen's threads on tricks and tools of the trade ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm

 "What's the Best Q&A Site?" by Wade Roush, MIT's Technology Review, December 22, 2006 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/InfoTech/17932/ 

Jensen Comment
None of these free services is very good for accounting questions. For me, Wondir did better with accounting questions than the other alternatives, but none of these sites would be very helpful in answering questions about accounting and tax rules.

Magellan Metasearch  --- http://sourceforge.net/projects/magellan2/ 
Metasearch Tool for the Techie Types 

Magellan is a perl, CGI-based meta search engine, aimed at being highly evolutive. It provides an extended query language that enables it to perform complex requests and check the results before showing them.

Bob Jensen's threads on OLAP, XML, and XBRL --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/XBRLandOLAP.htm 

Current state of scholarly cyberinfrastructure in the humanities and social sciences

From the University of Illinois Issues in Scholarly Communication Blog

"Our Cultural Commonwealth"

The American Council of Learned Societies has just issued a report, "Our Cultural Commonwealth," assessing the current state of scholarly cyberinfrastructure in the humanities and social sciences and making a series of recommendations on how it can be strengthened, enlarged and maintained in the future.

John Unsworth, Dean and Professor, Graduate School of Library and Information Science here at Illinois, chaired the Commission that authored the report.

The report is at http://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/

Questions
How can you search for text embedded in stored images, especially books and articles downloaded as images rather than text?

What if you could collect, in one well-organized, searchable, private digital repository, all the notes you create, clips from Web pages and emails you want to recall, dictated audio memos, photos, key documents, and more?

Evernote ---  http://www.evernote.com/
Perhaps the real "killer" feature of the program is that it has optical character recognition (OCR), which allows users to search for text within stored images. (there are free and fee options)

Features for Windows

• Create notes containing text, webclips, snapshots, to-dos, PDFs, and more
• Take photos of everything from whiteboards to wine labels and Evernote will make them searchable
• Premium users can attach any type of file to their notes
• Windows User Guide | PDF

 

From the Scout Report on February 12, 2010

Evernote 3.5.1.1410 --- http://www.evernote.com/ 

Looking to remember an image you found? Or perhaps a helpful email link? Evernote makes this all possible, and it can be used with a range of mobile devices as well. The program works as a note-taking application as well, and everything a user does with the program is automatically synchronized to their Evernote account. Perhaps the real "killer" feature of the program is that it has optical character recognition (OCR), which allows users to search for text within stored images. This version of Evernote is compatible with computers running Windows XP and Vista or Mac OS X 10.5 or 10.6.

"Digital File Cabinet You Can Bring With You Anywhere," by Walter S. Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal, January 20, 2010 ---
http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20100120/evernote-review/

What if you could collect, in one well-organized, searchable, private digital repository, all the notes you create, clips from Web pages and emails you want to recall, dictated audio memos, photos, key documents, and more? And what if that repository was constantly synchronized, so it was accessible through a Web browser and through apps on your various computers and smart phones?

Well, such a service exists. And it’s free. It’s called Evernote. I’ve been testing it for about a week on a multiplicity of computers and phones, and found that it works very well. Evernote is an excellent example of hybrid computing—using the “cloud” online to store data and perform tasks, while still taking advantage of the power and offline ability of local devices.

The idea behind Evernote is to be a sort of digital file cabinet. It allows you to create “notebooks” containing items called notes. These notes can range from text to photos to many kinds of attached files. You can locate, group and peruse them quickly, without having to dig through a computer’s file system. When I first reviewed the product, back in 2005, Evernote was a Windows-only, purely local information organizer. Now it’s a multi-platform, Internet-savvy, synchronized place for your ideas.

You can sign up for Evernote free at evernote.com, and use it entirely as a Web-based application, through any of the major Web browsers. But Evernote also comes in customized versions for a staggering array of devices: Windows and Macintosh computers, and for all the major smart phones, including the iPhone; the BlackBerry; phones running Google’s Android operating system; the latest Palm (PALM) phones; and Windows Mobile phones.

This week, Evernote, which is made by a small Silicon Valley company of the same name, is introducing a totally revamped Windows version that brings the platform into parity with the company’s previously more advanced Macintosh version.

I tested Evernote on two Macs and two Windows PCs, as well as an iPhone, a Palm Pre phone and the new Nexus One phone from Google (GOOG). I also tried free plug-ins the company offers that make it easy to insert all or part of a Web page or email into an Evernote note. These are available for the Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Chrome Web browsers, and for the Outlook email program. There are also system-wide Evernote buttons, which make capturing notes quicker, for Windows and the Mac.

I found Evernote works well for gathering ideas for business or personal projects, hobbies, or events you’re planning. When you see something or think of something you want to add, you can do it from whatever computer or phone is handy, and it will shortly appear on all of them.

Here are a few examples of how I used Evernote. I typed notes to myself on my desktops and laptops. I dictated a reminder to myself using the Evernote app on my iPhone. I used the Nexus One’s camera to take a picture of a person’s business card. I also copied text from Web pages, emails, and Word documents, and pasted them as notes. I even attached whole files to notes.

Within a few minutes, all of these notes were available on my personal Evernote Web site and from within all the Evernote apps on my computers and phones. I could search through them, email them, print them, group them with related items, or edit and annotate them.

Every Evernote user also gets a unique Evernote email address, and anything you email to that address goes into your repository as a new note. You also can use Twitter to get a note into Evernote.

The program has a few extra-cool features. If you create a note from a photo that includes printing, Evernote’s servers will try to figure out the words and make them searchable. This worked well in my tests with photos of business cards. And some smart-phone apps can save items directly into Evernote notes. One example I tested successfully was the Associated Press news app on the iPhone.

There are a few minor downsides to Evernote. While there’s no overall limit to the amount of data you can store, you can only upload 40 megabytes a month with the free version, attach certain types of files to notes, and you are forced to view ads. A premium version, which costs $5 a month, or $45 a year, increases the quota to 500 megabytes monthly, removes the ads, allows attaching any file type, and adds more features.

Also, I found the Evernote programs and apps, while similar, differ slightly depending on the capabilities of the platform they run on. Among the phone versions, for instance, the iPhone app is by far the most full-featured, and is currently the only one that can store whole notebooks offline, though the Android version is due to get that feature soon. Finally, the Evernote plug-in crashed Outlook on one of my Windows computers.

But, all in all, I found Evernote to be a valuable, easy-to-use tool that simplified my work and made good use of both the Internet and all my devices.

Jensen Comment
The video video introduction and links to a video library are at http://www.evernote.com/about/video/
This is a product that I am probably going to install.

Bob Jensen's technology bookmarks are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob4.htm

Bob Jensen's links to free electronic literature (some of which download as images rather than text) are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/electronicliterature.htm

Bob Jensen's search helpers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm

Standardized Test Helpers

I received this message on March 26, 2010

I am a academic volunteer in website TestPrepPractice.net. Our website is related with various standardized tests like GMAT, GRE, TOEFL, MCAT, LSAT, SAT and 50 other major tests. We offer ample information through detailed articles regarding each aspect of these tests. Our website also contains free practice tests, customized according to the format and syllabus of the respective tests. The content of the website is prepared by our efficient team of academic volunteers.

This is in reference to the

page:http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/tidbits/2007/tidbits070605.htm

In the above-mentioned page, there are  links and resources helpful for the students. We would be obliged if you could add our website TestPrepPractice.net's free practice test page link in the above-mentioned page. Students gathering authentic information and practice material online shall greatly benefit from the link.

You are humbly requested to assess the quality of free information and free practice tests offered to students by us for different tests and then decide to place a link in your article.

You shall agree that a link to the following pages would be highly beneficial to students preparing for standardized tests and for students looking for good quality test prep information online.

 

http://www.testpreppractice.net/

http://www.testpreppractice.net/LSAT/Free-Online-LSAT-Practice-Tests.aspx

http://www.testpreppractice.net/GRE/Free-Online-GRE-Practice-Tests.aspx

http://www.testpreppractice.net/GMAT/Free-Online-GMAT-Practice-Tests.aspx

http://www.testpreppractice.net/TOEFL/Free-Online-TOEFL-Practice-Tests.aspx

http://www.testpreppractice.net/MCAT/Free-Online-MCAT-Practice-Tests.aspx

http://www.testpreppractice.net/SAT/Free-Online-SAT-Practice-Tests.aspx

 

Kindly, let me know if you have any queries or concerns; I shall be glad to assist you in every way possible. Thank you for your time and consideration.

Regards,
XXXXX
Lead Volunteer, http://www.TestPrepPractice.net

Bob Jensen's Favorite Encyclopedias

Free pass to the "most comprehensive online research storehouse"
It's a lofty ambition -- the Internet equivalent of nonprofit public television: a user-supported resource that pays top academics to create authoritative maps, articles, and links to third-party content related to virtually any scholarly topic. But the vast scope of the project hasn't stopped former high-flying Silicon Valley entrepreneur Joe Firmage from building Digital Universe, a commercial-free storehouse of information four years in the making.
"A Free Online Encyclopedia:  Digital Universe, a nonprofit website, aims to be the most comprehensive online research storehouse," MIT's Technology Review, March 6, 2006 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/TR/wtr_16512,323,p1.html

The Digital Universe site is at http://www.digitaluniverse.net/

Of course never forget the open sharing encyclopedia blockbuster called Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Chinese-language version of Wikipedia
China's biggest Internet search site, Baidu.com, has launched a Chinese-language encyclopedia inspired by the cooperative reference site Wikipedia, which the communist government bars China's Web surfers from seeing. The Chinese service, which debuted in April, carries entries written by users, but warns that it will delete content about sex, terrorism and attacks on the communist government. Government censors blocked access last year to Wikipedia, whose registered users have posted more than 1.1 million entries, apparently due to concern about its references to Tibet, Taiwan and other topics. The emergence of Baidu's encyclopedia reflects efforts by Chinese entrepreneurs to take advantage of conditions created by the government's efforts to simultaneously promote and control Internet use.
"Baidu, the most popular search engine in China, has launched a Chinese-language version of Wikipedia," MIT's Technology Review, May 18, 2006 --- http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=16896

"Co-Founder of Wikipedia Starts Spinoff With Academic Editors," University of Illinois Issues in Scholarly Communications blog, October 18, 2006 --- http://www.library.uiuc.edu/blog/scholcomm/

Can scholars build a better version of Wikipedia? Larry Sanger, a co-founder who has since become a critic of the open-source encyclopedia, intends to find out.

This week Mr. Sanger announced the creation of the Citizendium, an online, interactive encyclopedia that will be open to public contributors but guided by academic editors. The site aims to give academics more authorial control -- and a less combative environment -- than they find on Wikipedia, which affords all users the same editing privileges, whether they have any proven expertise or not.

The Citizendium, whose name is derived from "citizen's compendium," will soon start a six-week pilot project to determine many of its basic rules and operating procedures.

Mr. Sanger left Wikipedia at the end of 2002 because he felt it was too easy on vandals and too hard on scholars. There is a lot to like about Wikipedia, he said, starting with the site's open-source ethics and its commitment to "radical collaboration."

But in operation, he said, Wikipedia has flaws -- like its openness to anonymous contributors and its rough-and-tumble editing process -- that have driven scholars away. With his new venture, Mr. Sanger hopes to bring those professors back into the fold.

He plans to create for the site a "representative democracy," in which self-appointed experts will oversee the editing and shaping of articles. Any Web surfer, regardless of his or her credentials, will be able to contribute to the Citizendium. But scholars with "the qualifications typically needed for a tenure-track academic position" will act as editors, he said, authorizing changes in articles and approving entries they deem to be trustworthy.

A team of "constables" -- administrators who must be more than 25 years old and hold at least a bachelor's degree, according to the project's Web site -- will enforce the editors' dictates. "If an editor says the article on Descartes should put his biography before his philosophy, and someone changes that order, a constable comes in and changes it back," said Mr. Sanger.

Continued in article

The Citizendium link is at http://www.citizendium.org/

Of course the Wikipedia link to an unbelievable (nearly 1.5 million articles to date) database in information (and some misinformation) is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

And then if you want to know who stuff really works, go to http://www.howstuffworks.com/

Other encyclopedias http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob3.htm#Dictionaries

Bob Jensen's links to electronic literature http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ElectronicLiterature.htm

"The Dangerous Side of Search Engines:  Popular search engines may lead you to rogue sites. Here's what you need to know to avoid dangerous downloads, bogus sites, and spam," by Tom Spring, PC World via The Washington Post, May 27, 2006 --- Click Here

Who knew an innocent search for "screensavers" could be so dangerous? It may actually be the riskiest word to type into Google's search engine. Odds are, more than half of the links that Google returns take you to Web sites loaded with either spyware or adware. You might also face getting bombarded with spam if you register at one of those sites with your e-mail address.

A recently released study, coauthored by McAfee and anti-spyware activist Ben Edelman , found that sponsored results from top search engines AOL, Ask.com, Google, MSN, and Yahoo can often lead to Web sites that contain spyware and scams, and are operated by people who love to send out spam.

The study concluded that an average of 9 percent of sponsored results and 3 of organic search results link to questionable Web sites. The study was based on analysis of the first five pages of search results for each keyword tested.

According to the results of the study, the top four most dangerous searches on Google are:

The study defined dangerous sites as those that have one or a combination of the following characteristics: its downloads contain spyware and/or adware; its pages contain embedded code that performs browser exploits; the content is meant to deceive visitors in some way; it sends out inordinate amounts of spam to e-mail accounts registered at the site.

These results are a sobering wake-up call to Web surfers, and they illustrate the changing nature of Internet threats today. It used to be that most viruses and scams made their way to our PCs via our inboxes . But thanks to security software that's getting better at filtering out viruses, spam, and phishing attacks from our e-mail, rogue elements are having a difficult time booby-trapping our PCs.

"Scammers and spammers have clearly turned to search engines to practice their trade," says Shane Keats, market strategist for McAfee.

McAfee says that of the 1394 popular keywords it typed into Google and AOL alone, 5 percent of the results returned links to dangerous Web sites. Overall, MSN search results had the lowest percentage of dangerous sites (3.9 percent) while Ask search results had the highest percentage (6.1 percent).

Given the study's findings, it shouldn't come as a big surprise that the company has a free tool, called McAfee SiteAdvisor, for tackling the problems. In my tests I found it does a great job of protecting you from the Web's dark side.

Since March McAfee has been offering a browser plug-in that works with Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer. SiteAdvisor puts a little rectangular button in the bottom corner of the browser. If a site you're visiting is safe, the SiteAdvisor button stays green. When you visit a questionable Web site the button turns red or yellow (depending on the risk level) and a little balloon expands with details on why SiteAdvisor has rated the site as such.

SiteAdvisor ratings are based on threats that include software downloads loaded with adware or spyware, malicious code embedded in Web pages, phishing attempts and scams, and the amount of spam that a registered user gets.

SiteAdvisor takes it a step further with Google, MSN, and Yahoo. With these search engines, it puts a rating icon next to individual results. This is a great safety feature and time saver, steering you clear of dangerous sites before you make the mistake of clicking on a link.

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's threads on computer and networking security are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce/000start.htm

Sex-Filtered Searching

"Kid-Friendly Search Engines Filter Content," by Akeya Dickson, The Washington Post, May 8, 2006 --- Click Here

It's not unheard of these days for a child doing online research for a school project to accidentally stumble into a porn site or someplace else that's too dicey for a parent's comfort level.

Between e-mail filters, parental controls and special software, there are plenty of tools meant to help parents keep their children safe. The next target for fed-up parents: Internet search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

The upside of the modern-day search engine -- an index of Web sites on the Internet -- is also the downside. And when kids research a report by tapping search words in Google or Yahoo, chances are good that they may run across something they shouldn't see.

Christine Willig, president of Cincinnati-based Thinkronize, said that one in four children across the country is exposed to pornography by age 11 -- often over the Internet.

Her company's flagship product, NetTrekker, a child-safe search engine featuring 180,000 sites that are regularly reviewed by 400 volunteer teachers, has been in schools since 2000, including many in Virginia, Maryland and the District.

Now, the product is being made available for home users for $9.95 ( http://www.netrekker.com/ ).

Willig, the mother of seven, said children's potential exposure to questionable Internet content was the primary reason she left her job as a textbook publisher and joined the start-up Thinkronize.

"My decision to leave was driven by my own experiences with my own children and stories I've heard from other parents and teachers," she said.

Since then, the product has been used in 12,000 schools across the United States -- reaching an estimated 7 million students. School administrators and parents in other countries -- including Hong Kong, Turkey and Nigeria -- also have expressed an interest in the product, she said.

In Pennsylvania, the search engine was adopted in school districts across the state.

Exposure to inappropriate sites "was definitely a huge concern with teachers," said Mary Schwander, a library media specialist at New Hope-Solebury High School in New Hope, Pa. "Some kids did a comparison between Google and NetTrekker and found that NetTrekker was more favorable to use and quicker."

Willig acknowledges that offensive and inappropriate sites have been found -- but usually by teachers and specialty software that constantly scan the sites, not the students.

"With our tools in place, we have found porn sites, and we have found them before users," Willig said. "There's a Martin Luther King site that's now a hate site, really a KKK thing in disguise. There are those things that we have to look out for with a combination of technology and human review."

That is the main challenge constantly facing John Stewart and Ryan Krupnik, the guys behind the family-safe search engine RedZee. The site filters out pornographic results and delivers targeted searches.

"Ryan and I have put a great deal of time and money to make sure things are blocked, but we're really coming to a point where we need the general public to help us," said Stewart. "We can't possibly catch all of it. I would love to say we're 200 percent, but we're not."

Continued in article

Google Hacks (smarter search like the geeks search) --- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Hacks

"Please Do Not Use These Programs for Illegal Purposes:  Powerful new tools let you search for free software and music, zoom in on landmarks and buildings, and add comments to news stories," by Steve Bass, PC World via The Washington Post, August 21, 2007 --- Click Here

I don't know what Google was thinking when it allowed Google Hacks to be posted on the Google Code site. But it's a sure bet most people won't abide by the "Please do not use this program for illegal uses" disclaimer you'll find on thedownload site.

Google Hacks is a front-end GUI you can use as a stand-alone app or as a browser toolbar. It performs searches you can already do--if you know the syntax. For instance, if I wanted to search for Dave Brubeck, I could pop the following into Google's search field:

But it's obviously a heck of a lot easier to type into Google Hacks and choose the music category.

Google Hacks lets you search in any one of 12 categories--music, applications, video, books, lyrics, and others. But there's a catch. The searches are indexes--Web site directories that haven't been protected. Translation: You have to sort through lists of files and some, if not most, could be unrelated to what you're searching for.

At the same time, you might hit the jackpot--loads of files with just the content you're looking for. The showstopper is that the content belongs to someone else who doesn't know how to hide it from prying eyes. (And yes, I know, that person may have downloaded the music illegally as well.)

BTW, credit for this masterpiece goes to Jason Stallings, the author of Google Hacks. Jason doesn't work for Google, but his program was released using Google'sfree code hosting service. You can find more of Jason's code onhis Web site.

Dig This:Microsoft's entryinto the mobile phone arena is sure to give Apple a run for the money--and promises to take the nerd world by storm.

Microsoft's Photosynth is awesome--and addictive. You can travel to Rome, zoom in on St. Peter's Basilica, and see details--and I mean close, close up--that I guarantee will amaze you. (The hardware requirements are stringent--more in a sec.) Don't believe me? Watch this7-minute demonstration.

But wait a minute: Unless you have a heavy-duty PC--you need Windows XP and the hardware needs to be Vista ready--save your time. You just won't be able to use Photosynth. (My wife's out of luck; she's been playing with Photosynth on my machine.) If you have the system requirements, you'll also need to download a small ActiveX plug-in available at the Photosynth site.

Photosynthis now up and running. (My friend Bill Webb has a goodwrite-up about it.)

Continued in article

"Search Google and Wikipedia at the Same Time With Googlepedia:  Browser Add-on Instantly view Wikipedia articles for your Google searches," by Danny Allen, PC World via The Washington Post, May 29, 2009 --- Click Here  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/27/AR2009052703653.html?wpisrc=newsletter

If you're a serious search hound who often clicks through to Wikipedia pages that Google digs up, then you'll love Googlepedia. This free Firefox add-on splits your Google page in half: On the left are your regular Web results, and on the right (where AdWords would normally appear), you're presented with a Wikipedia article based on Google's top result.

Of course, typing "Wikipedia"--followed by a subject--directly into Firefox's Location Bar is just as easy, but you don't get to scroll through Google links at the same time. And usefully, Googlepedia also lets you expand, shrink or hide the area that an article is viewed in.

By default, the add-on presents internal Wikipedia links as clickable Google searches, though you can toggle this in its preferences. You can also change the default Wikipedia language.

Articles from the open source encyclopedia appear surprisingly soon after Google's own always-speedy results. A good thing, as Firefox seems to take a slight performance hit for the second or so an article takes to load.

The author has recently released an early port of the add-on for Google's Chrome browser, and mentions that Safari and Konqueror versions are planned.

"Wikipedia Comes of Age," by Casper Grathwohl, Chronicle of Higher Education's Chronicle Review, January 7, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Wikipedia-Comes-of-Age/125899/?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en

The key challenge for the scholarly community, in which I include academic publishers such as Oxford University Press, is to work actively with Wikipedia to strengthen its role in "pre-research." We need to build stronger links from its entries to more advanced resources that have been created and maintained by the academy.

It is not an easy task to overcome the prejudices against Wikipedia in academic circles, but accomplishing that will serve us all and solidify an important new layer of knowledge in the online-information ecosystem. Wikipedia's first decade was marked by its meteoric rise. Let's mark its second decade by its integration into the formal research process.

Continued in article

Casper Grathwohl is vice president and publisher of digital and reference content for Oxford University Press.

"What Wikipedia Deletes, and Why," by Alexandra Rice, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 26, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/what-wikipedia-deletes-and-why/33930?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en 

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, famously allows anyone to write or revise its entries, and the history of each item is open for anyone to review. Except for material that leaders of the effort consider too “dangerous” to leave online.

The fine print of its stated practices notes that in some cases, material is completely spiked from the record. Or, as the policy reads: “a revision with libelous content, criminal threats or copyright infringements may be removed afterwards.”

These total redactions are what a University of Pennsylvania research team has been mining for the past year in the hopes of shedding some light on what Wikipedia deletes forever and why. In 2010 redactions accounted for more than 56,000 of the 47.1 million revisions, according to the research team.

The researchers, Andrew G. West and Insup Lee, wondered what content on the enormously popular Web site could be so troubling that Wikipedia administrators would decide to remove it forever. “Wikipedia is at that paramount example of open-source transparency,” Mr. Lee said. “So when you see them behaving in a nontransparent manner, you want to see what motivates them to do this.”

Copyright infringement was the most common reason Wikipedia stated for deleting material, Mr. West and Mr. Lee found.

The Wikimedia Foundation has been sued over copyright and privacy issues in the past. While only 0.007 percent of page views in 2010 to the English Wikipedia site resulted in content that was later redacted, that’s enough to land the organization and its operators in hot water. That’s why leaders of the encyclopedia refer to the material it redacts as “dangerous content.”

“We’ve identified that on the surface these copyright cases are the worst,” said Mr. Lee.

“The research goal for us is, how can we provide some automated way to detect the problems so they can be removed immediately?” Mr. West added. “It’s very difficult to stop people from adding something, but we can find a way to get rid of it quickly.”

The difficulty in identifying instances of plagiarism, the pair said, is evident in the numbers. Most “dangerous content,” such as libel or invasions of privacy, is taken down within two minutes, on average. But copyright-related issues stayed up for an average of 21 days, they found.

Wikipedia’s leaders have recently increased the number of people with the ability to permanently delete text, including entries in the history pages. In May 2010, approximately 40 people held these rights; now more than 1,800 people do, Mr. West and Mr. Lee said.

The larger work force has helped to reduce the amount of dangerous content found on the site, the researchers said. But humans alone won’t solve the problem in its entirety. Sometimes they even introduce problems when trying to delete dangerous content and removing beneficial revisions in the process, which the research team refers to as “collateral damage.” This brings up the question, then, of who even gets to make the call when something is dangerous content or not.

“For all the problems on Wikipedia,” Mr. West said, “I feel strongly that the solutions have to be automatic in nature because these attackers increasingly have these machines doing their bidding for them.”

Continued in article

Bob Jensen's search helpers are at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Searchh.htm

Are we witnessing the birth of a new challenger to Google?

Data from monitoring service StatCounter suggests that Bing, Microsoft's new search decision engine, has overtaken Yahoo Search as the number two search service in the U.S. and worldwide in large part thanks to stealing market share from leader Google . . . Are we witnessing the birth of the first true Google challenger or is this nothing but launch momentum bound to fade away?
Robin Wauters, "Did Bing Just Leapfrog Yahoo Search?" The Washington Post, June 4, 2009 --- Click Here

Jensen Comment
When I first saw the title to this article I thought it was referring to the new Mayor of Detroit (Dave Bing). Shows what I know about Microsoft's Bing up to now. Many of Microsoft's late entries to the market fail to compete such as when it belatedly attempted to compete with IPOD.

Microsoft Bing --- http://www.bing.com/

Microsoft's Bing search engine gains an edge over Google in the search wars

"Bing Goes Real-Time with Twitter and Facebook Updates:  ," by Kristina Grifantini, MIT's Technology Review, October 21, 2009 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/24283/?nlid=2451&a=f

In two separate, non-exclusive deals, Microsoft will partner with Facebook and Twitter to show status updates in its search site, Bing. Microsoft officially announced the deals at the Web 2.0 Summit today.

While rumors of the Microsoft-Twitter deal have been circulating for a few weeks, integrating Facebook updates is a surprise twist, although not entirely unexpected, given Microsoft's $240 million investment in Facebook two years ago. Google is said to be in talks with Twitter and Facebook as well.

*(It didn't take Google long to respond. An official blog post reveals that the company has also signed a deal to index real-time information from Twitter).

Twitter has been gaining notice as a valuable source of real-time information. For example, news often breaks on Twitter before hitting major media outlets and well before showing up in search engines. In January Yahoo announced TweetNews, which ranks Yahoo News stories based on Twitter posts.

The integration seems to be a win-win situation: social networking sites will presumably help search engines capture trending news topics more quickly, while the search engines can offer needed revenue streams to the social networking sites and help solidify their legitimacy. It also makes it harder for businesses to ignore social media: with the integration, having Facebook and Twitter accounts can also help a company gain prominence in the much-coveted top spots on search results.

Binging, but not cha chaing, Fraud Updates

For nearly eight years I’ve updated (usually daily) a log on fraud. This is like a chronological journal from which I also posted to various sites that I maintain on fraud.

The September 30, 2009 log has been added to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm

One of the best ways to search these logs is via Bing (or Google, Yahoo, etc.). For example, suppose you are interested in Bill and Hold fraud. You can enter the search terms [“Bob Jensen” AND “Fraud Updates” AND “Bill and Hold”] (without the square brackets) at http://www.bing.com/

It may seem surprising, but I’m having better results in most cases these days using Microsoft’s Bing search engine than either Google or Yahoo --- http://www.bing.com/

Bob Jensen's threads on fraud are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Fraud.htm

Bing Update:  When I recommended Bing I was not aware of the following:
"Bing! So That's What A Swizzle Stick Is," by Michael Arrington, Tech Crunch via The Washington Post, October 7, 2009 --- Click Here

Microsoft's new Bing search engine just can't seem to stay out of the red light district, no matter how hard they try.

There's no denying it is hands down the best porn search engine on the planet (although ChaCha is pretty good too). But Bing also had a snafu with Google ads that showed the search engine for "pornography" queries. Google took the blame for that one (see updates to that post), and at least it only showed up for people actually querying the adult term.

Now, a new controversy has popped up around a Microsoft ad unit that scrapes a page for content and then shows relevant Bing queries. The ads normally work fine. But last week Bing started showing an ad unit that contained sexually explicit terms, including at least one that I had never heard of before (the swizzle stick). Best of all, the ads were displayed on a WonderHowTo web page showing only Home & Garden content.

You can see the queries that were self-generated by Bing for the ad unit in the image. This isn't just R-rated run of the mill porn stuff. This is stuff that's still illegal in some states. Particularly that top query.

Microsoft is saying this is a bug, and they've taken down all of these ad units on all sites until they understand what happened. The unit is supposed to scrape only the page being viewed. In this case, WonderHowTo has sexually explicit content on other areas of the site, which may be triggering the ad content.

Said Microsoft's Senior Director Online Audience Business Group Adam Sohn, who wasn't too happy with the ad: "We are very cognizant of what we want the Bing brand to stand for, and this is not it."

My response ¿ "well, at least it's educational."

Jensen Comment
Nevertheless Bing is a good search engine, and you can avoid the porn by not looking for it and ignoring advertisements (that I never look at anyway in Google or Bing or Yahoo). Google still has the huge advantage of cached documents that can be found after they are no longer posted at their original Websites. I assume that all the major search engines will step up controls on the appropriateness of advertising for the general public (that includes children using search engines).

But Cha Cha is not a major search engine and may lag in such controls. I really don't cha cha on the dance floor or on the computer.

But instead of a computer spitting out answers (see Google, etc.), real (cha chaing) human beings answer instead.
"The Mystery Of The ChaCha Eiffel Tower Fail Pic," by Michael Arrington, Tech Crunch, October 29, 2008 ---
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/29/the-mystery-of-the-chacha-eiffel-tower-fail-pic/

I’ve aimed a lot of criticism at human powered search engine ChaCha over the last couple of years. The service lets users ask questions, just like a normal search engine. But instead of a computer spitting out answers (see Google, etc.), real human beings answer instead.

The ChaCha service was absurd in its original web version, which has since been discontinued. The mobile version is actually very useful, although we questioned its scalability when it launched. New information from the company suggests they’re keeping costs low enough to make a business model out of it. More on that soon.

Now about this image.

Some fairly funny answers occasionally come back from the human guides, who early on at least had to deal with a lot of prank queries. But none of the ones we’ve seen compare to the one to the right, which is a Digg favorite tonight. It describes the Eiffel Tower sexual position (yes, you learn something new every day) in response to a completely unrelated query about a Randy Newman show in Seattle.

I contacted the company about it and got the following message:

I appreciate your reaching out to me regarding this iPhone prank. We researched this as soon as it came to our attention and our logs indicate that the answer displayed was definitely to a question previously asked by this same user. So yes, this is a fake as this person is misrepresenting what actually occurred. They actually asked one question (to which the answer was sent) and then a second question shortly thereafter and then received the answer to the first question which, due to the way messages are threaded on an iPhone display, the answer is appearing below a different question than the one that was asked to spawn the answer that is displayed.

So in the end this was a bit of a trick apparently used to misrepresent what happened in order to get some laughs – which appears to be working as this is getting some serious play across the Web!

Ok that sounds more than reasonable. But when I go to the URL in the image, it shows the question and answer linked (see below). I understand how text messages back and forth can get out of order, but not how the wrong answer can be linked to the wrong question in ChaCha’s own database. I also note the guide was on the job for one whole day before this happened. I’ve emailed the company for further clarification.

I still recommend Bing when you’re not fully satisfied with your Google hits. I can't say I recommend Cha Cha, but then I've never tried it.