Information

Mapping a Phone Number

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Ursula is not real happy with one aspect of Google searching:

I use Google everyday, but I am not digging their new feature that allows you to enter a phone number and get a map to the address

These capability with or without Google has been around a long time. Just go to any of the various white page services, key in the number, and they will do a reverse look up and provide an address. Take the address to your preferred map site and, presto, you have the same thing Google is doing.
Me, I’d like to see the kids at Google talk to each other! Really, shouldn’t they at least be listing the Google map?

The World’s Biggest, But is it Useful

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The folks at Web’s Biggest say that they are “The World’s Biggest Directory Search Engine.” Last week Internetweek reported that:

A Web search engine that uses the “whois” database said Friday that it searches more Web sites than any other search engine, including Google, which crawls the Web in a different manner for its search results. ….
“Other search engines missed from a third to more than half of the Web sites [included] in the Web’s Biggest search results,” the firm stated.
Always on the outlook for better information sources I headed right over and entered a search that has pointed a few visitors to Modulator: live strong bands. The results were 3 references that appeared to be paid adds and they were preceded by this message:
Important: We suggest you make your search LESS specific. Please remember you are not searching the contents of web pages like you do at Google or Yahoo. You are searching one paragraph website descriptions. Furthermore, you will only find websites that contain EACH of your keywords in their description. Web’s Biggest is designed to find websites devoted to what you are looking for, not web pages that happen to contain those words.
On the other hand a search for Lance Armstrong generated quite a few results.
Want to find the text of the state of the union speech? Well, it is #2 on Google and the Web’s Biggest responds with the above “be less specific” message and no links of any kind. And it was a bit slow doing that.
Lesson: use your preferred traditional search service first. In fact, I’m still puzzling over why I’d use them at all…

Dogs Beat Cats

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All you cat bloggers out there will be disappointed to learn that cats finished 3rd in Google’s October listing of the most popular animal searches. Dogs were first followed closely by dragons. Cats were far behind and barely edged out puppies and horses. So why do I find so few dogs and dragons for the Friday Ark?
For the politically inclined In October kerry beat bush in the category of popular news queries (though bush currently leads kerry by about 3.6 million Google listings)
For more interesting Google search stuff check out the Google Zeitgeist.
Via Marginal Revolution.

10×10: 100 Words and 100 Pictures

This entry was posted in Information Journalism on by

10×10 looks both interesting and entertaining:

Every hour, 10×10 scans the RSS feeds of several leading international news sources, and performs an elaborate process of weighted linguistic analysis on the text contained in their top news stories. After this process, conclusions are automatically drawn about the hour’s most important words. The top 100 words are chosen, along with 100 corresponding images, culled from the source news stories.

They also provide links to the related articles and it looks like they intend to archive the hourly reports starting with their beginning back on 11/4. The history funtionality will be cool variation on ‘this day in history’ stuff.
They do not say whether they intend to add more news sources to the three they are now using and the images currently load slowly.
Via LawPundit.

Top 101 Useful Websites

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According to PC Magazine these are the top 101 useful websites. Your mileage may vary but there are probably some here that you have not yet realized need to be on your daily rounds.
Sree Sreenivasan says:

That’s what I keep preaching: You need to expand your Web travel horizons. If you only go to the places you already know and trust, you are likely to miss out on a lot of good and/or fun stuff.
Sree complains about navigating around the top 101 list:
What I didn’t like is the internal navigation on the list. Once you click into a category on the main list page, you’re reading about an individual site and you can get to others within the category (so far, so good). But if you use the provided navigation, you cannot easily get back to the master list; instead you end up on an older section of site, with out-of-date listings. So I had to keep using my browser’s back button to get to the master list.
He would find this pretty much a non-issue if he were using a modern tabbed browser, say, Firefox.