Searching reviews and tips.

Government agencies, trade associations, consulting firms, and publications are dedicated to tabulating data and reporting on the state of the automotive industry in the U.S. and abroad. Article includes a sampling of resources that might help you get started. Given the global nature of the automotive industry, most sites include domestic and international information. Many also provide links to other industry-related resources. ‘Automotive industry sources.’ Penny Leidtke. July 23. http://www.freepint.com/issues/240703.htm#feature

Competitive intelligence Research Strategies from the UCLA Rosenfeld Library.  Series of CI questions and sites that can help answer them. Eloisa Gomez Borah.  http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/resources/library/libcoint.htm
 
Copyright law has a reputation for being an arcane and marginal discipline. The article outlines ten copyright myths and briefly explores why each of the statements made is not strictly correct. Paul Pedley. FreePint, http://www.freepint.com/issues/100703.htm#tips

You no doubt use Google to search the Web. Everybody does. But you probably don't know all of the things that Google can do, and you may not know that you can create your own programs to improve Google's already impressive searching power.’Tips and tricks for Google geeks.’ Lee Dembart. July 25, EcommerceTimes. http://www.ecommercetimes.com/perl/story/31194.html

Google recently announced the availability of a new command for finding synonyms. Use the tilde (~) before any keyword to find the word and its synonyms. August 5, TVC Alert. http://www.virtualchase.com/tvcalert/aug03/5aug03.html

ISIHighlyCited.com calls itself "an expert gateway to the most highly influential scientists and scholars worldwide," using similar techniques to Google's PageRank to identify these intellectual leaders. This free search tool makes it easy to identify individuals, departments and laboratories that have made fundamental contributions to the advancement of science and technology over the past several decades. “ A Google-like portal of the world’s leading scientists.” Chris Sherman. July 28, www.SearchEngineWatch.com

The Guide to the US Federal Legal System is intended to direct legal research through publicly accessible web-based databases. Gretchen Feltes. July 21. http://www.llrx.com/features/us_fed2.htm

E-mail interviews and Web searches can be helpful when used with discretion, but some experts fret that reporters are letting their guard down, making themselves vulnerable to online hoaxes. ‘Are online search tools lulling journalists into lazyness?’ Mark Glasser, Online Journalism Review, July 22. http://www.ojr.org/ojr/glaser/1058908404.php

The examination here yields eight business models that describe more or less comprehensively the commercial approaches to online news. Using the models, I review the secondary literature to see what has worked, what trends have emerged, and what the experts expect. ‘Business models of news web sites.’ Frederick Schiff. FirstMonday, June 2. http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue8_6/schiff/index.html

The web contains a wealth of product reviews, but sifting through them is a daunting task. Ideally, an opinion mining tool would process a set of search results for a given item, generating a list of product attributes (quality, features, etc.) and aggregating opinions about each of them (poor, mixed, good). Print clipping services have been providing competitive intelligence for some time. (very technical) ‘Mining the peanut gallery: opinion extraction and semantic classification of  product reviews.’ Dave Kushnal, et. al.  2003 http://www.kushaldave.com/p451-dave.pdf

On the net, almost no matter what you do, you leave behind scraps of information about what you have been doing. ‘The leaky net.’ Mark Ward. July 29, BBC news. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3092839.stm

Pandia Q-cards are special pages for some of the major search engines and directories that sum up their features and search syntax. Examples show you how to formulate queries. ‘Pandia Q-cards.’ http://www.pandia.com/q-cards/index.html

Forrester Research evaluated search vendors and segmented the market into three groups based on how well the products support multiple user types, structured and unstructured content, and limited vs unlimited topics. PDF requires free registration. http://endeca.com/products/forrester_future_search.pdf

Serious searchers need to understand that there is not now and there will never be JUST ONE starter that will be suitable for finding everything anywhere. They need to have a “search toolbox” – a list of starter sites that they can return to over and over again when they don’t already know the best starting points for their information search. ‘ Selecting Web sites for ‘beyond Google’ resource discovery.’ Rita Vine. LLRX.com, July 21. http://www.llrx.com/features/beyondgoogle.htm

A brief look at toolbars offered by smaller firms not associated with the larger search engines. For reviews of other toolbars, including offerings from Alexa, Google, Googlebar, Groowe, Teoma, Ultrabar and Yahoo, see Search Toolbars & Utilities. “A gaggle of search engine toolbars.’ Chris Sherman. SearchEngineWatch, June 26. http://www.searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/2226291

scip.online, issue 37, 2003