Archive for the 'Search' Category
“When you’ve seen the White House change occupants seven times over the course of your career, as the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Tyler Przybylek has, you become an expert at navigating shifting political climates.
Federal agencies are increasingly turning to online technology to hold on to the decades of knowledge that baby boomers will take with them as they retire in coming years. Officials fear that without robust knowledge-retention programs, agencies will lose details of their histories, or forget how certain programs worked and be doomed to repeat past mistakes.
Realizing this, the Energy Department agency asked Przybylek a month before he retired to share his insights with co-workers. So for two hours in March, the former chief operating officer and special adviser to the agency’s administrator told stories and offered advice on how to make sure the new political appointees in charge recognize one’s contributions and how to avoid being seen as resisting the administration’s priorities.”
You knew it had to happen. Interestingly though, the House and the Senate beat them to it back in April.
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Podscope -search spoken phrases in podcasts by keyword
BlinkX - index of over 18 million hours of searchable video and more than 200 media partnerships, including national broadcasters, commercial media giants, and private video libraries. Included speech recognition search.
Tour the stars. I’m not kidding. Here’s a demo.
A fast way to find information on your computer is to search all the files on your hard drive is with Copernic desktop search. It is a free download for Windows-based computers. The program scans your harddrive and creates a search engine that you can use to search everything from articles and e-mails to music and photographs.
Get a visual. Sometimes getting a visual representation of something you know nothing about is the quickest way to obtain a broad overview of a subject. One very cool example of this is FlickrMaps. Let’s say you want to know what a city landscape looks like, who lives there, and what they care about, such their sports teams and schools. Maybe you want to know what it would be like to drive there and what you could expect to find if you spent a week there. Let’s also say you only want to spend five minutes looking for an answer.
FlickrMaps is a fast search and the visual returns are easy to absorb quickly. Contributers to Flickr Maps indicate where they took their pictures. This makes the search better than in Google Images. Try searching for Charlottesville, Va in the “taken in” field then narrow your search in the “search for” field by keywords such as “architecture”, “urban” or even a color such as “blue.” The result is a mosaic that tells a story quicker than words.
Use a “tinyURL” when you want to send someone a link to a site, but do not want to send a long URL. Long URL addresses are sometimes temporary and can expire. You know if your URL address is temporary because if will often (but not always) have have the word “temp” in the address.
Long URL addresses can also break in an email if they cover more than one line and will not work when the receiver tries to click on them. TinyURL is a free service that allows users to paste long addresses in a form on their site. The service returns a very short URL that is easy to mail and will work even for a temporary URL.
It is possible to search for synonyms in Google. For example, if you want to search for the word “food” but do not want the word “food” included in the results, construct you search like this: ~food -food
Google reads this search statement as words “similar to food but not food.” See the search results here. Give it a try. It’s fun.
Even though we call it surfing the Internet, browsing or surfing the web is actually is done less often than searching. You may not have realized but when you use a search engine you need to know something about what you are looking for. When you are browsing or surfing you do not. Surfing is a time of discovery, like flipping through the channels on TV or browsing the shelves on a library and finding books you never would have thought to look up in the catalog. Scanning headlines is another form of surfing. RSS (Real Simple
Syndication) Readers are a good tool to use for scanning headlines. See Recommended
RSS Feeds for a list.
Unlike searching, surfing allows users to start broad then narrow down according to interests. StumbleUpon is a fun surf tool. It’s very similar to channel surfing on TV. Directories are another surfing tool. They start with broad prearranged categories. Users then drill down to narrower topics.
So the next time you are surfing the web ask yourself, “Am I searching or surfing.”