Vast Active Library and Information Science blog. From a recent library science graduate in Wellington, New Zealand. A focus on reference and current awareness tools and issues, especially free, web-based resources.

 
A great list of 10 ways to improve Google searching, including using the * as a wildcard (to replace a whole word). In other words, typing "Bush *** Iraq" would return results like "Bush announces war on Iraq" (or whatever). In other words, proximity searching. Nice. Very, very nice. Still, Google suffers from its lack of internal wildcards, and truncation - it would be very helpful to be able to search on "behavio*r" to pick up on American and non-American spellings of the word, or "librar*" for anything to do with librarians. Sure, there are ways round this for those of us with at least basic search skills, but the majority of people don't have these skills. (I really need to put up links to the NZ Prostitutes Collective and to the Google 'Weapons of Mass Destruction" joke, because I'm getting a lot of hits from searches for those sites. For that matter, if anyone wants to help me set up a website for prostitutes based in Bangalore, please let me know, because I'm getting a lot of hits for that one too - latest 'good prostitutes in Bangalore').

Link via Sitelines.

| posted by Simon at 1:25 pm