03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 1

Essential non-Google Search Tools for

Researchers [edited highlights]

Thursday, 16th April 2015, London

Karen Blakeman

karen.blakeman@rba.co.uk, www.rba.co.uk

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike International License.

Why not Google?

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 2

It’s not just about conventional web pages

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 3

Online in 60 seconds [Infographic] - A Year Later - Qmee Blog

http://blog.qmee.com/online-in-60-seconds-infographic-a-year-later/

Search Engine Market Share

http://theeword.co.uk/info/search_engine_market.html

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 4

Bing/Yahoo

Yahoo now uses Bing’s database, commands and ranking algorithms

Yahoo Finance still available

No advanced search screen on Bing - use commands

List at Advanced Operator Reference http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-

us/library/ff795620.aspx

filetype: site: inbody: intitle:

AND, NOT, OR parentheses for complex Boolean searches

NEAR:n where n is a number, specifies that the terms must be within that

number of words of each other and in any order

- banana NEAR:3 toffee

Date option only for US version

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 5

Bing http://www.bing.com/

Results seem to be more consumer/retail focused

– more ‘shopping’ than research

– results improve as soon as you start using the advanced search

commands

Sometimes more up to date than Google

– updates sites more frequently

– adds new sites more quickly

– useful if you are looking for information on a new company or

organisation

BUT interesting features and options available to US users only

– changing location and version of Bing does not always work

– using anonymous proxy does not always work

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 6

Bing gets personal

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 7

bingiton.com

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 8

When did Bing win

Holiday destinations

Tourist attractions

Shopping

Parts for a vintage car

People

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 9

Bing Video

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 10

Bing

Bing images – good alternative to Google

Bing videos – good alternative to Google (includes YouTube in results)

Bing maps – much improved over the last 2-3 years and generally a

good alternative to Google. Availability of different views including

Streetside are dependant on location. Has Ordnance Survey option

Bing news – limited coverage of non-US and regional titles compared

with Google

Bing Social (Twitter and Facebook search) – US only

Close links and integration with Facebook, also LinkedIn

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 11

Yahoo! Finance

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 12

DuckDuckGo – http://duckduckgo.com/

Does not track, does not personalise

Results are a compilation of about 50 sources including

Wikipedia, Wolfram Alpha, Bing, and its own Web crawler

DuckDuckBot. “In partnership with Yandex”

Advanced search commands include:

inbody: intitle: filetype: [site: used to work but now ignored on

occasions]

region:cc (e.g. de) to boost a country

DuckDuckGo Syntax

http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/300304

DuckDuckGo – silly name but a neat little search tool

http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2011/11/07/duckduckgo-silly-name-but-

a-neat-little-search-tool/

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 13

Millionshort http://millionshort.com

Million Short: unearthing information hidden in the dungeons of

Google’s results

– http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2012/10/04/million-short-

unearthing-stuff-hidden-in-the-dungeons-of-googles-results/

Uses Bing API plus other sources

Great for finding specialist articles that Google buries beyond reach

Removes top 10k sites from results - can change to top million, 100k,

1k, 100

Can add sites back in, can block sites

Can “Boost!” sites so that they always appear at the top

Can use site: and filetype: commands

Country versions give different results (under Manage Settings and

Country)

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 14

Million Short

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 15

Yandex http://www.yandex.com/

– for filetype use mime:

diabetic retinopathy mime:pptx

– has an advanced search screen at

http://yandex.com/search/advanced

Ask http://www.ask.com/

– supports filetype: and site:

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 16

Ask

http://www.ask.com/ http://uk.ask.com/

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 17

iSeek http://www.iseek.com/

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 18

eTools.ch

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 19

Carrotsearch http://carrotsearch.com/

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 20

Carrotsearch circles

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 21

Carrotsearch FoamTree

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 22

WolframAlpha

http://www.wolframalpha.com/

Computational knowledge engine, curated data

Click Examples, Random, or an image in the homepage

background to get an idea of what it covers

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 23

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk24

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 25

Selected free tools for research

information (not Google Scholar)

UK Gold versus Green OA

Gold OA– researchers publish their articles in journals that offer open access

publishing (can be established “conventional” publishers)

– articles can be made available free of charge to readers

immediately

– author or institution/department pays article processing fee

– CC-BY

Green OA – researchers deposit copies of articles in an institutional or subject-

based repository, subject to copyright/license permissions

– repository makes copies available to the public either immediately

or embargoed (more common)

– period of embargo varies (for example

http://cdn.elsevier.com/assets/pdf_file/0018/121293/external-

embargo-list.pdf)

– CC-BY-NC

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 26

Jeffrey Beall

Scholarly Open Access | Critical analysis of scholarly open-access publishing

http://scholarlyoa.com/

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 27

See also: Impact of Social Sciences – Beyond Beall’s List: We need a better

understanding of predatory publishing without overstating its size and danger.

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2015/03/18/beyond-bealls-list-

predatory-publishers/

Microsoft Academic Search

http://academic.research.microsoft.com/

Journal articles, pre-prints, post-prints, conference proceedings,

reports and white papers

Free to use but the full text of some papers can only be viewed

on payment of a fee to the original journal publisher

Author may have several different profiles and articles may be

assigned to wrong author

Sometimes very slow to load

Uses Silverlight for the charts

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 28

Microsoft Academic Search

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 29

Microsoft Academic Search

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 30

ResearchGate - http://www.researchgate.net/

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 31

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 32

Slideshare.net

Institutional repositories and open access

BASE - Bielefeld Academic Search Engine http://www.base-search.net/

CORE (COnnecting Repositories) http://core.kmi.open.ac.uk/search

DART-Europe E-theses Portal http://www.dart-europe.eu/basic-

search.php

DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals http://www.doaj.org/doaj

Open DOAR http://opendoar.org/

RIAN - Pathways to Irish Research http://rian.ie

ROAR - Registry of Open Access Repositories http://roar.eprints.org/

OpenAIRE http://www.openaire.eu/

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 33

Specialist search tools

ArXiv http://arxiv.org/

BioMed Central http://www.biomedcentral.com/

Chemistry Central http://www.chemistrycentral.com/

ChemSpider http://www.chemspider.com/

Deep Web Technologies

Mednar http://mednar.com/

Science.gov http://www.science.gov/

Science Research http://scienceresearch.com/

WorldWideScience http://worldwidescience.org/

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 34

Specialist search tools

Europe PubMed Central http://europepmc.org/

Mendeley http://www.mendeley.com/

Open Biology http://rsob.royalsocietypublishing.org/

PhilPapers: Online Research in Philosophy http://philpapers.org/

PubMed Central http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/

SSRN Social Science Research Network

http://www.ssrn.com/en/

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 35

BBC News - Public libraries get online access to

research journals http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-

25981183

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 36

For personal research, non-commercial use.

Public Library Initiative by PLS and ProQuest | Access to

Research http://www.accesstoresearch.org.uk/

List of participating libraries and publishers

Public Library Initiative by PLS and ProQuest | Access To

Research http://freetoviewjournals.pls.org.uk/

Search tool for the journals and articles covered by the

agreement.

Can view search results anywhere - articles can only be viewed

on library premises

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 37

Official Information

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 38

Oh joy - NOT!

www.rba.co.uk 39

More UK information vanishes into GOV.UK

http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2015/02/28/more-uk-information-

vanishes-into-gov-uk/17/03/2015

Welsh Government http://gov.wales/

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 40

http://www.assembly.wales/

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 41

The Scottish Government http://www.gov.scot/

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 42

The Northern Ireland Assembly

http://www.niassembly.gov.uk/

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 43

Where’s the information gone to?

List of departments, agencies and public bodies at https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations

“Home pages” on GOV.UK

Data and information may still be on the old websites

Data may have been moved to http://data.gov.uk/

Information may have been sent to http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/webarchive/

Or information may have been “lost”

Don’t rely on just GOV.UK search – use Google/Bing site: command combined with filetype: if appropriate

www.rba.co.uk 4417/03/2015

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/webarchive/

www.rba.co.uk 4517/03/2015

http://www.webarchive.org.uk/ukwa/

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 46

Wayback Machine http://www.archive.org/

www.rba.co.uk 4717/03/2015

Digital Education Resource Archive (DERA)

http://dera.ioe.ac.uk/

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 48

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/

Launched in 2010

Not all legislation has been updated

Pending updates are flagged

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 49

UK Parliament http://www.parliament.uk/

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 50

Monitoring progress of legislation

http://services.parliament.uk/bills/2014-15/infrastructure.html

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 51

Images

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 52

Getty Images is NOT making all of its photos freely available

http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2014/03/06/getty-images-is-not-

making-all-of-its-photos-freely-available/

Read the Embedded Viewer section of T&Cs

http://www.gettyimages.co.uk/Corporate/Terms.aspx

Only a selection of its images

Have to use the embedded viewer tool

Only for “editorial purposes (meaning relating to events that are

newsworthy or of public interest).”

Cannot be used for commercial purposes

Getty may start adding advertisements to the viewer

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 53

Bing images

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 54

TinEye Reverse Image Search http://www.tineye.com/

Search using an uploaded image or a URL of an image

Finds out where an image came from, how it’s being used,

modified versions, if a higher resolution version exists

Plug-in for Firefox, Chrome, Safari, IE, Opera

Free version not as comprehensive as Google’s reverse

image search

Search Creative Commons images by colour– http://labs.tineye.com/multicolr

– select up to 5 colours

– can adjust the proportions of each colour

– check copyright license on original image before using [I’ve

found occasional ‘all rights reserved’ images]

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 55

Creative Commons and public domain images

Always check the copyright on individual photos

Flickr Creative Commons http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons

Flickr The Commons http://www.flickr.com/commons/

Multicolr Search Lab http://labs.tineye.com/multicolr

Chromatik – Exalead Labs http://chromatik.labs.exalead.com/

Wikimedia Commons http://commons.wikimedia.org/

MorgueFile.com http://www.morguefile.com/

Geograph http://www.geograph.org.uk/ “UK and Ireland photos of landmarks and buildings for every Ordnance Survey grid”

Wellcome Images http://wellcomeimages.org/

Most of the images on US government web sites

Nasa http://www.nasa.gov/

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 56

http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 57

http://www.flickr.com/commons/institutions/

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 58

TinEye Multicolr http://labs.tineye.com/multicolr

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 59

http://chromatik.labs.exalead.com/

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 60

Geograph http://www.geograph.org.uk/

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 61

Historypin http://www.historypin.com/

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 62

Photos, video, audio – all types of licenses

Uses Google Maps, Street View and other apps

BBC - Your Paintings – http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/

Looking for photographs | The National Archives – http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/records/looking-for-

subject/photographs.htm

Flickr: The National Archives UK's Photostream– http://www.flickr.com/photos/nationalarchives/

English Heritage Images of England: a searchable photographic

archive of the historic buildings of England – http://www.imagesofengland.org.uk/

Local libraries, for example Old Newcastle in Photos– http://www.flickr.com/photos/newcastlelibraries/collections/721576

22600850187/

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 63

17/03/2015 www.rba.co.uk 64

Statistics, open data and

industry sector information

British Library Business & IP Centre in London Industry guides http://www.bl.uk/bipc/dbandpubs/Industry%20guides/industry.html

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 65

PDFs

Number of sectors

covered

Resources include

publications and

databases at the BL but

also freely accessible

websites

Official statistics

OFFSTATS http://www.offstats.auckland.ac.nz/

Google Public data Explorer http://www.google.com/publicdata

UK National Statistics https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/announcements

Office for National Statistics http://www.ons.gov.uk/

Official Statistics in Scotland http://www.gov.scot/Topics/Statistics

Welsh Government Statistics & Research http://gov.wales/statistics-and-research/?lang=en

Welsh Assembly Government StatsWales http://statswales.wales.gov.uk/

data.gov.uk http://data.gov.uk/

Eurostat http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/

European Union Open Data Portal http://open-data.europa.eu/en/data/

International organisations such as the World Bank, ILO

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 66

http://www.offstats.auckland.ac.nz/

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 67

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 68

Office for National Statistics (ONS) http://www.ons.gov.uk/

StatsWales http://statswales.wales.gov.uk/

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 69

data.gov.uk http://data.gov.uk/

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 70

www.rba.co.uk 71

Free Companies House data to boost UK economy - Press releases -

GOV.UK https://www.gov.uk/government/news/free-companies-house-

data-to-boost-uk-economy

17/03/2015

Companies House free data

http://download.companieshouse.gov.uk/en_accountsdata.html

Bulk data – all or nothing

Large daily files available as zipped files

No support provided – you’re on your own!

www.rba.co.uk 7217/03/2015

European Union - Open Data Portal http://open-

data.europa.eu/open-data/

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 73

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 74

The Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/data

Statista http://www.statista.com/

“The Statistics Portal for Market Data, Market Research and Market Studies”

– 60,000 topics from over 18,000 sources

– http://www.statista.com/topics/

– some information free, registration (free) required

– Chart of the day

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 75

Zanran

http://www.zanran.com/

Zanran – great for data in tables, charts and graphs

http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/2013/01/25/zanran-great-for-data-in-

tables-charts-and-graphs/

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 76

Spurious correlations!

Per capita consumption of cheese (US) correlates with Number of

people who died by becoming tangled in their bedsheets

http://www.tylervigen.com/view_correlation?id=7

www.rba.co.uk 7717/03/2015

News, alerts and current

awareness

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 78

Video

Bing Videos http://www.bing.com/videos/

Vimeo “Your Videos Belong Here” https://vimeo.com/

Dailymotion http://www.dailymotion.com/gb

blinkx Video “A simple way to discover and share great videos”

http://www.blinkx.com/

Individual news sites

ITN Source “The world's leading provider of archive footage"

http://www.itnsource.com/en/

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 79

News other than Google

Bing and Yahoo News nowhere near as comprehensive

as Google News

Follow favourite newspapers

Follow favourite blogs

Identify subject/industry portals

Twitter

Facebook

RSS feeds

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 80

ProQuest Newsstand

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 81

http://www.proquest.co.uk/en-UK/catalogs/databases/detail/newsstand.shtml

Selection also available through public libraries (personal use only)

Paper.li

http://paper.li/

Create a “newspaper” from your Twitterstream, Google+

account, Facebook, or for a hashtag or keyword

Sign in with your Twitter or Facebook account

– set up a separate account if you prefer for use with

Paper.li, a “nom de plume”

Automatically identifies articles, videos, photos from links in

postings

All papers are public

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 82

Paper.li

http://paper.li/karenblakeman

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 83

Paper.li (Permaculture)

http://paper.li/karenblakeman/1378805283

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 84

Scoop.it http://www.scoop.it/

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 85

Curated news e.g. http://www.scoop.it/t/internet-search

Storify

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 86

http://storify.com/Emily_Heath/netikx65-when-space-matters-for-

collaboration-inn

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 87

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 88

Social Searcher http://www.social-searcher.com/

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 89

Topsy.com

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 90

Twitter Search http://search.twitter.com/

Advanced Twitter search - https://twitter.com/search-advanced

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 91

Use advanced Twitter search commands

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 92

See also the free guide on

Searching Twitter at

http://www.rba.co.uk/search/Twitter

Search.shtml

Tweetdeck

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 93

Facebook Groups and Pages

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 94

RSS (RSSOwl - desktop only)

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 95

Keeping up to date

SearchReSearch http://searchresearch1.blogspot.co.uk/

Search Engine Land http://searchengineland.com/

Search Engine Roundtable http://www.seroundtable.com/

Search Engine Watch http://searchenginewatch.com/

Karen Blakeman’s Blog http://www.rba.co.uk/wordpress/

Phil Bradley's weblog http://philbradley.typepad.com/

03/05/2015 www.rba.co.uk 96