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Mary Ellen Bates
Bates Information Services, Inc.
8494 Boulder Hills Dr.
Niwot, Colorado 80503 USA
Tel: 303.772.7095
Email: mbates@batesinfo.com
Skype: Mary.Ellen.Bates
Twitter: www.twitter.com/mebs
LinkedIn:
www.linkedin.com/in/maryellenbates
Bates Information Services, Inc.
8494 Boulder Hills Dr.
Niwot, Colorado 80503 USA
Tel: 303.772.7095
Email: mbates@batesinfo.com
Skype: Mary.Ellen.Bates
Twitter: www.twitter.com/mebs
LinkedIn:
www.linkedin.com/in/maryellenbates
of each word indicating its relative frequency within the search results. This can be an efficient tool for focusing your search on the most significant concepts or, alternatively, Search Cloudlet can be used to expand your search by identifying synonyms or related terms to your concept. Click on any of the words in this “cloud” and that word is added to your query. For my search on nanotechnology, renewable energy and Boulder, I saw from the Search Cloudlet that some of the words that frequently appeared in the search result
One of the most exciting aspects of web research these days is the emergence of more graphical displays of information. No more dense text...now we expect to see lots of white space, intuitive interfaces and displays that help us make sense out of what we find. Two of these tools are SearchCloud.net and Search Cloudlet— a couple of creative and useful resources with similar names but distinct features.
First, let's look at SearchCloud.net. These folks have identified one of the more frustrating aspects of search engines, that they're literal and don't have much imagination. If I'm looking for information on uses of nanotechnology in renewable energy technologies in Boulder, Colorado, I could simply type in:
nanotechnology “renewable energy” Boulder.
That would retrieve web pages that have those words and phrases, but a search engine can't tell whether I'm most interested in the Boulder angle, the nanotech angle or the renewable energy angle. They are all weighted (relatively) equally by a search engine, which uses the order of my search words as an indicator of importance; at most, the search engine will assume that the most important concept is nanotech if I put that word at the beginning of my query.
Enter SearchCloud.net, which lets users indicate the relative importance of each of the search words or phrases. As you type each word or phrase into the search box, you also assign it one of five font sizes, from quite small (meaning “the page has to include this word, but it's not the most important idea”) to quite large (”this is the main concept I'm concerned with—put these pages at the top of the search results”). If you don't like the results you get, you can re-weight the words until you are happy with your search results. In my experience, you will get the best results if you weight most heavily the most specific or the least common word. SearchCloud.net uses Yahoo's BOSS platform (which lets them re-order the search results based on their own algorithm), so you know you're searching a large index.
My other favorite “cloud”, with a confusingly similar name, is Search Cloudlet. This tool - an add-on for Firefox browsers only - comes into play when you are viewing the results of a search in Google, Yahoo, or Twitter. Once you've installed Search Cloudlet, you will see something new at the top of your search results page - a grouping of the most common words among the retrieved web pages, with the size
pages are NREL (National Renewable Energy Lab, located near Boulder, in fact), materials (good reminder that I might want to focus on the “materials science” aspect), and some good synonyms for renewable energy, including
solar, green, and clean.
Interestingly, Search Cloudlet can also show a cloud of the most frequently occurring sites in your search results - a great way to identify some of the most significant or useful web resources. In my search example, I learned that the most common sites include ColoradoNanotechnology.org, BoulderInnovationCenter.com and the Meetup groups that focus on alternative energy (I skimmed the Boulder area group and identified two experts I might contact directly). Click any of the URLs in the search cloudlet, and the search is re-run, but limited only to pages from that site. I might also simply note the sites and go directly to each one. While I likely would have discovered these sites eventually, having them surfaced in a search cloud saved me time and ensured that I could begin my research with some of the most frequently mentioned sites.
Search Cloudlet also works on Google News and Yahoo News. In addition to the word cloud, it can generate a “source” cloud that shows which news sources most frequently mention your search words. If I saw that the New York Times is covering this area particularly well, I might go directly to the nytimes.com site or to one of the fee-based online services that has a deep archive of the Times and search that publication in more depth.
And if you're searching for current buzz about a topic, you might want to search Twitter to see who is talking about nanotechnology and renewable energy. Search Cloudlet not only shows a word cloud, but also lets you see the most frequent “Twitterers” on a topic - a great way to identify people who actually has something to say and to get in touch with them directly. You can even see the most common tags that people have applied to their Tweets (Twitter postings) on a topic, which helps you narrow your search down to only Tweets specifically on your topic. Note that it sometimes takes up to 30 seconds for a Search Cloudlet to appear on the screen. While it is being calculated, you can still review and click through any of the search results.
Regardless of how you commonly search, try these two tools out and see if they help you focus those challenging searches onto the most fruitful directions.