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June 17, 2009

Two Firefox add-ons that sort your search results

Filed under: Libraries, Web Search Tools — Laura B. @ 9:11 pm

Via the GLRPPR Blog.

I recently discovered two add-ons for the Firefox browser that make it much easier to locate relevant web sites in the sea of results from your favorite search engine.

The first is Search Cloudlet, an add-on that inserts context-aware tag clouds into a traditional Google, Yahoo and Twitter interface to help you navigate more efficiently through search results. You can see an example of a tag cloud at Wikipedia, where they also have a nice explanation of how they work. Search Cloudlet also allows you to include and exclude particular tags from your search results, which makes it easier to find what you need.

The second is DeeperWeb, which uses both tag clouds and topic mapping to organize Google search results. Like Search Cloudlet, the tag cloud feature allows you to exclude certain terms from your search. In addition, DeeperWeb includes “zoomies”, which are mini-search engines that arrange results into categories to make them easier to navigate. I particularly like the Metrics catagory, which pulls out statistics and other numerical data. Other zoomies include: Answers (from sites like Ask.com and Yahoo! Answers); Business News; Wikipedia; Blogs; and Resources. You can also limit your results to a particular time frame (past 24 hours, past week, past month, past year).

What’s your favorite tool to help you wade through search results? Post your answers in the comments.

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P2 is Delicious

Filed under: Libraries, Pollution Prevention, Web Resources, Web Search Tools — Laura B. @ 9:10 pm
Via the GLRPPR blog.

One of the topics Rick Yoder covered at the recent GLRPPR conference was Delicious, a social bookmarking service that allows you to tag, save, manage and share Web pages all in one place.

Instead of having different bookmarks on every computer, Delicious makes it easy to have a single set of bookmarks kept in sync between all of your computers. Even if you’re not on a computer you own, you can still get to your bookmarks on the Delicious website.

If your friends use Delicious, you can send them interesting bookmarks that they can check out the next time they log in. Of course, they can do the same for you. As you explore the site and find interesting users, you can use our Subscriptions and Network features to keep track of the Delicious tags and users you find most interesting.

For more information on Delicious, see their Help section, which includes an excellent list of frequently asked questions.

P2Rx has started a collaborative tagging effort on Delicious to encourage P2 professionals to share the resources they find and bookmark. If you locate a resource that you think would be helpful to other P2 professionals, simply add P2TagTeam tag in the Tags field when you add the bookmark to Delicious. For more information on P2TagTeam, visit the P2Rx web site or contact Laura Barnes (lbarnes@istc.illinois.edu).

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