Novalawcity

Search engine for government web sites

FirstGov.gov began as a search portal for federal and state government web sites.  The FirstGov.gov site grew and grew to the point that the simple search capability on the site became lost and search results were imprecise.  There are, afterall, over thirty million government pages to search.  Now, FirstGov.gov has introduced a straightforward search page called FirstGov Search.

For more about the search engine and how it works see:

• FirstGov completes its search
• The Government Domain: FirstGov becomes first in government search
• New FirstGov.gov search database goes live

Search historical news

Google has added a new feature to its Google News service.  Google News has always been great as a current news source, aggregating news from 4,500 sources.  The new feature allows for searching historical news sources.  Unfortunately, many of the search results lead to fee-based sources.  However, the ability to search these sources is a great starting point for certain research projects.  The solution is to take the citations to your nearest library and hunt down the text through the sources owned by your local library.

Search Engines and safe web sites

There are dangerous webs sites and safe web sites out there.  Search engines index both kinds.  McAfee, the company that makes security software, has just completed a study, The Safety of Search Engines.  The study compares the top search engines and how well they do in filtering the risky web sites out of their search engines.  MSN is the best, Google is in the middle, and Ask.com has the highest percentage of bad web sites.  For regular advice on web safety issues, McAfee also has the SiteAdvisor blog.

Ask.com

Try a little variety in your search engines.  Ask.com has revamped its search engine, and as of today, the butler has been retired.  Ask Jeeves has now become Ask.com.  For a little background on the situation, see this SF Chronicle article: Ask Jeeves closes door on the butler and Business Week:  Say "Cheerio" to Jeeves.

New search engine breaks tradition

A new search engine, Dumbfind, breaks tradition by adding a second search box that will search tags.  Tags are self-defined subject categories.  In this case, the people behind Dumbfind, are creating their own tags for web sites.  So, the search results here include clusters of tags that enhance the subject search results.  To read more about Dumbfind, there's some press about it:  InformationWeek and at this blog, Solo Technology.

Fuzzy copyright laws

Google presses on with its desire to scan the text of library books with its Google Print program.  The company is running into some cooperation and some opposition.  Most recently, the Authors Guild has filed a complaint, which states that Google is "engaging in massive copyright infringement."  For a good overview of Google's recent legal entanglements, see "For Google, Another Stormy Chapter," from the Technology section of Business Week Online.

Blog Searching

IceRocket now has a blog search component.  Technorati is not functioning as well as it once did.  See "So long, Technorati" where Jason Kottke points out that Technorati's tracking of 14 million blogs has reached a break point. PubSub does better and there's still Daypop, which is very small in comparison (searching only 56,000) sources.  Google also indexes blogs in its search engine, especially blogger.com blogs, which it owns. 

What Google knows

Many of us use Google's search engine and other services without any thought to what information Google saves from these visits. To learn more about what data Google captures, take a look at this article from Technology Review:  "As Google Grows, How Much Does It Know About You?"

Yahoo! Mindset

Yahoo! Mindset incorporates a new concept in search engines.  It allows the researcher to sort results according to commercial or non-commercial web sites.  So if you are looking for academic, informational, or research-oriented material, Yahoo! Mindset may be the ticket.  For more about the beta technology see the FAQ.

Google attacks

This week, eWeek.com features a special report on "Exploiting Google."  With Google's popularity comes a natural desire by hackers to attack the service.  This past weekend Google services were not available for several hours, including Google's home page, Gmail, Google News and just about everything else. See "Google Knocked Offiline ..."  Another useful article warns about typosquatting, where users who misspell Google's URL can find themselves on a malicious web site infested with viruses and other traps.  Do not type Googkle.com by mistake!  See "Beware How You Google."