NETSPEAK
Collaborative Web search
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Academic fraternity should always look for new search services and tools that can make this task more efficient and effective.
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Search tools that facilitate the academic search process are discussed in this week’s NetSpeak.
A search engine like Google is more than sufficient for a lay Net user. However, if you are an academician or a serious researcher, sticking to a single search service may not be a wise approach. Academic fraternity should always look for new search s
ervices and tools that can make this task more efficient and effective.
To facilitate the academic search process, many search services tuned to the academic community are in place. Refseek ( http://www.refseek.com/) is one such service recently appeared on the search tool arena. It is likely that you obtain more relevant results by enlisting the service of Refseek, which claims to have created an index with more than one billion academic documents.
Searching together
Of course, good search skills and knowledge of various search services enhance our web search efficiency. However, this is not sufficient to tame the ever-expanding Net content. Instead of researching alone, if you can enlist the service of friends/acquaintances (with similar interest) to search along with you, the search process can be made more efficient/effective/enjoyable.
Tools that enable us to do collaborative search is fast catching up on the Net. In this context, the new collaborative search tool from MicroSoft, SearchTogether, assumes significance.
SearchTogether (http://research.microsoft.com/searchtogether/) is an IE (Internet Explorer) plug-in that enables you to search in collaboration with others in real-time.
To get started with SearchTogether, each of the participants should have IE7 (with this plug-in installed) and have a Windows Live ID. After installing the SearchTogether plug-in, start IE, launch SearchTogether and sign-in to the system with your Windows Live ID (using the ‘Connect’ button).
Now to start a search session, click on the option ‘Start New Search session’ (from the ‘Action’ menu). At this point the system will display your current MSN messenger buddies (for a person to be your search collaborator, she has to be on your MSN messenger buddy list). Select the relevant ones from the list.
Once a session is initiated thus, your invitees can join it and the fun of searching together starts now. Whenever a participant (this includes you also) invokes a search from the SearchTogether interface, this search string immediately appears in the common screen (under this member’s name/photograph). Any of the participants can initiate a search on this string by double-clicking on it. Under each of the participants’ name, a list of all the queries conducted by him so far in the session is also displayed. This search history will always be available to each of the members. The search history feature enables even a late entrant to catch up with the session easily.
A great facility of this tool is the Peek/Follow option that enables other members of the session to view/follow your browsing activities. Once you enable this option, other session members can peek into your browser screen anytime they wish so. Besides this, they can even watch your browser screen in real-time (by ‘Following’ you).
The facility to rate/comment web pages, a chat tool and the like are some other features of this tool worth a mention.
Keyword aid
We know that Google Suggest monitors the words you type and based on the word entered, it offers a list of possible keywords in real-time. Apart from Google, several other search engines (like Yahoo and Ask.com) also offer this facility.
Naturally, the search process can be enriched if we have access to those suggestions as well. This is the context in which the search tool Soovle ( http://www.soovle.com/) comes in. Select a search engine of your choice and start typing in the string.
Soovle immediately displays search phrase suggestions from different search services on a single web page.
Automating programming task
To write a computer program first you need to have an algorithm or step-by-step procedure to arrive at the solution.
Once you know the algorithm it can be converted into a program in a specific programming language by a programmer.
Now, if it is possible for us to automate this step with a system that takes the algorithm in a natural language (like English) as its input and produces the program in your preferred programming language as output, then life would certainly be more comfortable. This could provide even a layperson an opportunity to unleash his programming creativity.
Aasis Vinayak ( http://www.aasisvinayak.com/), a young free software enthusiast, strives to create a system of this kind with his ambitious V language project.
He has hosted a prototype of the product here: http://vlanguage.org/download/. Some of the algorithms that can be tried with this prototype are listed here: http://grogammer.com/v/
stage3/algo.html.
Google’s magazine archive
Google, as part of its endeavour to create an on-line magazine archive has started to index content from popular magazines such as Popular Science and Newyork Magazine (http://googleblog.
blogspot.com/2008/12/
search-and-find-magazines-on-google.html). If you invoke a search on Google Book search (http://books.google.com/), now you will get links to magazine articles as well.
If you wish the output to contain only links to magazine content, access the ‘Advanced search’ menu and select the appropriate option.
J. MURALI
The author can be contacted at: jmurali@gmail.com
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