Rowland Institute Library Blog

A PCWorld listing of free software for Windows.  (Source; ResourceShelf)

which searches the web, Amazon’s Search Inside the Book and the Amazon
site.  Also features a toolbar for Windows IE users.  Still
in beta.

With the slogan, “Americans for less secrecy, more democracy,” a number
of organizations and individuals, among them the American Library
Association, launched OpenTheGovernment.org.  The first challenge:
help identify the ten most sought pieces of government
information.  “The public’s right to know promotes equal and
equitable access to
government, encourages integrity in official conduct, and prevents
undisclosed and undue influence from special interests.
OpenTheGovernment.org seeks to advance the public’s right to know and
to reduce secrecy in government.” (Source; beSpacific)

Then get a translator … This site searches across Amazon US and half
a dozen other international Amazon sites.  If Amazon US doesn’t
have the book you want, maybe someone else will… (Source; Blogdex)

Greg Notess’ column discusses what engines and syntax to employ when
trying to track down formats other than html, such as pdfs, word
documents, spreadsheets and other digitized phenomena from the
quotidian to the obscure. (Source: The Virtual Chase)

Very, according to Marcus Zillman, who provides a guide to deep web
resource sites and intelligent agents (bots) in this LLRX.com article.
These are utilities that can find sites not seen by conventional search
engines (content in databases, etc.)(Source: ResearchBuzz)

There’s been a lot of discussion about search engines, particularly
crowning Google king and so forth.  Yet Bernie Sloan on
LIBLICENSE-L pointed to an interesting article about federated
searching – how libraries design web interfaces that can search
multiple sources at once – both proprietary sources (literature
databases) and freely available resources, some things that search
engines can’t index.  The California Digital Library has been
working on this for years and Harvard has its Metalib project
underway.  Stay tuned.

Update(noon): LISNews points to a New York Times article correlating Google’s popularity with internet credibility in general.

A beta product in Google labs enables one to type in a search query for
a product (e.g. pizza, vacuum cleaner) and then a location (e.g. zip
code, city, state, etc) (Source: the Virtual Chase)

(Requires registration) (Source: beSpacific)