Part V

The Part of Tens

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In this part . . .

This part contains two chapters, each listing ten things that are useful, fun, or even scary! (I’m just kidding

about the scary part, of course.)

Chapter 19 tells you about Web sites that help you navigate the resources of Google or just plain become a more effective researcher. You’ll find most of these sites really useful — but I have thrown in one or two that are gosh-darn silly and fun.

In Chapter 20, you can find information about tools that have been built using the Google Web APIs. Of course, I’ve included the Web addresses of these tools so that you can try them out for yourself. You may find some of these tools useful (I certainly have!) You’ll find all of them inspirational. The software I tell you about in Chapter 20 shows you what can be done with the APIs — and may give you ideas about creating your own great research tools!

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Chapter 19

Ten (Mostly Really Useful)

Google Research Resources

In This Chapter

CrossRef Search

Enterprise Search Center

Everything Google

Google Zeitgeist

Googlefight

Googlewhack

Open Directory Project Help Central

PageRank Explained

ResearchBuzz!

TouchGraph GoogleBrowser

Experienced researchers know that you can never have too much knowledge and understanding — particularly when it comes to something like Google. So this chapter points you to resources on the Web that help you use Google better for research, become a better researcher . . . or simply have fun

with Google!

CrossRef Search

CrossRef Search, www.iop.org/EJ/search_crossref, harnesses the power of the Google search engine in cooperation with content from 29 peer-reviewed scholarly publications. You can find a list of the participating publishers at www.crossref.org/crossrefsearch.html.

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312 Part V: The Part of Tens

This is a pilot program, with the hope of eventually extending it to include the more than 650 academic and scholarly publishers and societies that are the members of the not-for-profit CrossRef organization. CrossRef’s goal

is to create a scholarly citation and linking mechanism that can be generalized to work with all scholarly and academic content.

The CrossRef program provides the underlying taxonomy and content used by Google Scholar, an academic and scholarly search feature currently offered by Google (see Chapter 1).

Here’s how it works. You visit the CrossRef site and conduct a Google-powered search using the CrossRef Search box. You are never bothered with a lot of Internet junk because only the academic and scholarly publications participating in the pilot program are included in the results. The result links are to academic and scholarly literature.

Enterprise Search Center

Enterprise Search Center, www.enterprisesearchcenter.com/default.asp, is an information repository focused — as the name implies — on enterprise searches, particularly the needs and concerns of information technology professionals.

Content categories provided by the Enterprise Search Center include

News about search, such as news about search engine companies

Enterprise search case studies, for example, information about how the FBI conducts searches

Search technology analysis, for example, information about how to create a dynamic (or changing) taxonomy

Tips and expert opinions related to searching, for example, analysis of natural language search tools and their effectiveness

The Enterprise Search Center provides a treasure trove of content related to enterprise searches, searching, and search technology.

Everything Google

Everything Google, http://googlefan.com/modules/Everything/, is a great page of links that can help you quickly find the Google resources you need. You can think of this as a kind of a non-Google-sponsored site map of Google info and resources. Link categories include Google:

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Chapter 19: Ten (Mostly Really Useful) Google Research Resources 313

Searching

The Company

Fun

Customization

Tools

For Webmasters

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Google Zeitgeist

The Google Zeitgeist page, www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html, is maintained by Google and updated weekly based on Google users’ search behavior.

Zeitgeist uses graphs, lists, and tidbits of information to shed light on interesting (and sometimes surprising) search trends and patterns.

You can view archived Google Zeitgeist information week-by-week, going back to 2001 when Google started the page. Google Zeitgeist also compiles interesting — and fun — year-end results as well.

Zeitgeist is great fun and provides insights and impressions about the changing times. For more information about Zeitgeist, and to learn how to use the Google APIs to create your own Google trend analysis, see Chapter 18.

Googlefight

Googlefight, www.googlefight.com/, lets you compare the relative number of results for two Google search terms. Although it’s a fun game, you can make some interesting observations about Google’s behavior if you play with Googlefight. For example, it may be a comment on human psychology that darth vader wins a Googlefight against luke skywalker and that evil triumphs over good. This site is also a reminder that the Web, and Google search results, tend to look towards sensationalism, er, the dark side.

Googlefight is constructed using client-side scripting, explained in Chapter 5 and Chapter 13.

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Googlewhack

A googlewhack is a Google search that produces exactly one result (remember, most searches result in millions of listings). Googlewhack, www.google whack.com/, is a site devoted to googlewhacks and googlewhacking. The site has some rules: Most significantly, you cannot use a quoted search term because it is just too easy to googlewhack with a literal phrase.

In addition, terms used in a googlewhack must exist in the dictionary; specifically, they must be linked by Google to Answers.com in the search results. See www.googlewhack.com/rules.htm for the complete rules of googlewhacking.

Some of the all-time great googlewhacks are

ambidextrous scallywags

illuminatus ombudsman

nigritude ultramarine

squirreling dervishes

assonant octosyllable

fetishized armadillo

As one of my friends puts it, “Googlewhacking is addictive, and a great way to waste time spent at the office.” In addition, googlewhacking has become a cultural phenomenon, with artists exhibiting works all of whose titles are googlewhacks, media coverage of googlewhacks, theatrical productions based on googlewhacking, and more.

The most compelling googlewhacks don’t retain their googlewhack status for long because of their celebrity status. One-time googlewhacks, like ambidextrous scallywags, for example, now get hundreds of Google hits because of their popularity as googlewhacks — an illustration of how quickly Google, and the Web that it indexes, change in response to the actions of its users.

Open Directory Project Help Central

The Open Directory Project (ODP), http://dmoz.org, provides the content and taxonomy used in the Google Directory (see Chapter 7 for information about using the Google Directory and Chapter 11 for more about taxonomies).

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Chapter 19: Ten (Mostly Really Useful) Google Research Resources 315

The ODP is probably the best single source of information on the Web. Its content is classified and vetted by human editors, and ODP aims to be the brains of the Web.

But understanding (and navigating) ODP can be a challenge. A good place to start is the Open Directory Project Help Central, http://dmoz.org/help/ helpmain.html.

PageRank Explained

PageRank Explained, www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html, provides everything you always wanted to know but were afraid to ask about the Google PageRank algorithm.

In addition to a highly technical explanation of PageRank, which may interest you geeks (you know who you are!) who want to know how Google does

its thing, PageRank Explained also provides useful information about maximizing the PageRank of Web pages. This is useful even to researchers who don’t maintain Web sites, because it helps to explain the ordering of Google search results.

PageRank also offers tips and examples of various linking scenarios. The PageRank calculator on the site is also fun and useful.

ResearchBuzz!

ResearchBuzz!, www.researchbuzz.com/, provides news and information about search engines and research topics.

Written and edited by search engine and research guru and author Tara Calishain, ResearchBuzz is a must-stop for anyone interested in the world of Internet research.

You can also sign up for a daily ResearchBuzz! e-mail newsletter in both free and paid subscription versions.

Tara says that ResearchBuzz! gives frequent updates on search engines and related technologies, providing information about information repositories and Web directories; basically, the site offers information about anything and everything that a reference librarian would find useful to know about research on the Web.

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TouchGraph GoogleBrowser

The TouchGraph GoogleBrowser, www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser. html, uses the Google APIs to show a visual representation of the links between Web pages and sites. For example, in Figure 19-1, you can see some of the connections between the PayPal and eBay sites, and the various inbound and outbound links to and from these sites.

Oh, what a tangled Web we weave! Understanding the interrelationships between Web pages and Web sites can be difficult, but the TouchGraph GoogleBrowser can make grasping these relationships quickly a little bit easier. Aside from their educational value, some of these graphs are beautiful. If I didn’t have to spend my time writing this book, I could open up the TouchGraph GoogleBrowser and spend hours looking at the pictures!

Figure 19-1:

PayPal and eBay shown in the

TouchGraph Google Browser.

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Chapter 20

Ten Tools That Use

the Google APIs

In This Chapter

Amoebacode

Anacubis

CapeMail

Flash Search with Google

GARBO

Google Alert

Mangle

MetaLib

Speegle

XooMLe

This chapter is inspirational and informative. (Yeah! If I do say so myself!) By finding out about ten great applications written using the Google Web

APIs, you’ll discover some great tools that you can use in your research. Maybe you can even use some of these tools to help build your own research tools. The breadth of what can be done with the Google APIs may take your breath away.

Some of the sites in this section require that you use your own Google developer key (see Chapter 14 for information on how to get one).

Amoebacode

Amoebacode, www.amoebacode.com/index/, is a demonstration project built with the Google Web APIs; it creates an alphabetized index of the text of a Web site. The index creation is automatic after you specify the search terms to use.

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318 Part V: The Part of Tens

The program generates an XML file for all the terms selected for the index and adds search results to the document as they are returned from the Google service. It then builds a set of categories for the index terms (also created in XML format), and creates an HTML page for each of the terms and categories.

The demonstration on the Amoebacode site shows a single alphabetic index of the text of the columns of Bill Simmons (The Sports Guy) on ESPN.com. You can click any hyperlinked letter (say the letter D) to see which names and topics appear under the letter D. Want to know what Bill Simmons has to say about Dunkin Donuts?

You can apply this functionality to a variety of research projects and reports. For example, suppose you need an easy way to cross-reference a great deal of material. (Pretrial discovery is one place this comes up often.) If the material has been uploaded to the Web, Amoebacode provides an easy way to create a concordance of important terms.

You can download the complete Java source code for the demonstration project from the Amoebacode site.

Anacubis

Anacubis, www.anacubis.com/googledemo/google/index.asp, is a visual search tool powered by the Google Web APIs.

Anacubis shows links between sites (such as a link between PayPal and eBay), or lists similar sites together (such as BN.com and Amazon), or both. It’s usually more interesting to try Anacubis on more obscure sites. For example, a site with information about antique typewriters, such as Mechanista, www. mechanista.com, is likely to be linked (and similar) to other sites about old machinery. If you are researching antique mechanical collections, you can use Anacubis to find out at a glance (using the first site as the starting place) which other sites are likely to be productive (for example, the Virtual Antique Typewriter Museum, www.typewritermuseum.org).

Under the covers, the related: operator (explained in Chapter 5) is used to determine which sites are similar.

The primary point of Anacubis is to use a visual display to help you see relationships that might not otherwise be clear. Certainly, I’ve found some surprisingly similar sites that I might not have paid any attention to otherwise when using this tool. At its simplest level, this tool allows you to easily see which sites are linked together even if there are some degrees of separation. You can see Anacubis in action in Figure 20-1.

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Chapter 20: Ten Tools That Use the Google APIs 319

Figure 20-1:

Anacubis lets you see linked and similar sites visually.

CapeMail

CapeScience has used the Google APIs to create an e-mail interface with the Google search engine. You can read about it at http://capescience. capeclear.com/google/, but CapeMail is really very simple to use:

1.Send an e-mail message to the address google@capeclear.com.

2.Put your Google search query in the subject of the e-mail.

3.Pick up the Google response in your e-mail Inbox.

The CapeMail response to the Google query ambidextrous scallywags is shown in Figure 20-2. CapeMail responds to inquiries quite quickly, and is potentially useful in situations where you have access to e-mail but not the Web (for example, using a device like a Blackberry).

Flash Search with Google

You can easily use the Google APIs with Macromedia Flash. The advantage of using the APIs within Flash is that you can add the resulting Flash object inline to any HTML Web page — such as a blog page. There’s no need for additional programming or server-side access, so long as you have the Flash object.

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Figure 20-2:

CapeMail lets you search Google using e-mail.

To learn more about combining Flash with the Google APIs Web service, see www.flash-db.com/Google/. This site provides a nice demo of searching Google using Flash (search results from the demo are shown in Flash in Figure 20-3) and the source code for programming Flash (in the PHP programming language).

Figure 20-3:

Search

Google within a Flash object using the APIs.

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Chapter 20: Ten Tools That Use the Google APIs 321

GARBO, GAPS, and GAWSH

Find GARBO — Google API Relation Browsing Outliner — at www.stagger nation.com/garbo/. GARBO uses the Google APIs to search for pages that are similar to a given page (used the related: operator) or linked to a page. You can then follow the relationship by using GARBO to see what pages the related page has a relationship with, and so on.

At the same location as GARBO, you find two other oddly named browsing tools that use the Google Web APIs:

GAPS: Google API Proximity Search, uses the wildcard operator (*) to find results that have words within a specified proximity of one another. For example, you can search for words that are four words apart.

GAWSH: Google API Web Search by Host, returns the Web hosts, or toplevel URLs, in the results of a Google search. For example, a search for Harold Davis might return the specific home pages where my name appears (including www.bearhome.com and www.braintique.com). You can then individually expand the Web host to see all the pages

on a particular site that include your search string, for example, www. bearhome.com, www.bearhome.com/harold_davis/, and so on.

Google Alert

Google Alert, www.googlealert.com/, is an alert service that tracks the Web for topics you’ve specified and sends you updated results via daily e-mail.

As an individual user, you can use Google Alert without charge, although Google Alert does market customized information alert services to institutional users.

Unaffiliated with Google, Google Alert is based upon a version of the Google APIs (Google has made available to Google Alerts a high-traffic version of the APIs that is not limited to 1,000 queries per day).

Mangle

Too much time on your hands? Want to imitate the random Web surfer that is one of the theoretical underpinnings of the Google PageRank algorithm? Try Mangle.

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Mangle, www.mangle.ca/, uses the Google Web APIs to open a random Web page. The default random search chooses three words more or less out of thin air and opens the first Web page that results when the three words are combined as a Google query term.

You can customize various aspects of this randomness by changing the number of words, adding a specific word to the random terms, or by limiting the geographic search area.

My favorite feature — or, should I say, my favorite waste of time — is the random home page generator, which shows a different random home page each time. Boy, some of the families in these random home pages look geeky, as long as you’re not talking about my family!

Mangle’s worth a look because it shows you how much you can do with the Google APIs — although you may be inclined to use the technology to benefit your research rather than random surfing!

MetaLib

The MetaLib portal provided by Ex Libris is a research portal tool — or metasearch engine — primarily intended for reference librarians. (Chapter 10 has more information about meta-search engines.)

MetaLib lets users search a wide body of aggregated information in one fell swoop, including Google. Google access is provided under the covers using the Google Web APIs.

Most access to MetaLib is through an institutional subscription. Ex Libris does provide individual end-user access on an evaluation basis, but you need to be approved for access by Ex Libris.

You can find out more about MetaLib at www.exlibrisgroup.com/metalib. htm. You can start the process of gaining access to MetaLib at www.exlibris group.com/metalib_resources.htm.

I’ve included information about MetaLib even though it is intended for institutional rather than individual access because it is a good example of a very serious research tool built using (in part) the Google APIs.

Speegle

Speegle, www.speegle.co.uk/, uses the Google APIs to play your choice of the Descriptions, Titles, and URLs of the results of your Google search.

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You will, of course, need speakers or a headset on your computer for Speegle to work.

Although you can choose the gender of the voice that is used to read the Google results, you can’t choose the accent: It is Scottish, Scottish, Scottish. I guess that’s the prerogative of this Scottish software company, because they have done something so cool with Google.

Joking aside, this is a wonderful tool that gives Google search access to people who have visual difficulties with their computer screens. It wouldn’t be possible without the Google APIs.

XooMLe

Dented Reality’s XooMLe translates the SOAP-based Google APIs Web service to HTTP. This service provides a convenience for developers, as I explain in Chapter 15.

You can download a version of XooMLe to run on your development Web server, or invoke XooMLe directly on the Web (see Chapter 15 for details).

Learn more about XooMLe from the Dented Reality Web site, www.dented reality.com.au/xoomle/.

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