As the wealth of information available on the Internet continues to
grow exponentially — second by second — our challenge is not merely to
find information, but to sift out the truly useful and reliable
information we need to complete a task or accomplish a goal. Three new tools are available (or will be released very soon) to help save
you time in tracking down public records, demographic data, research
and statistics for your organization’s reports and decision making.
1. DeepDyve Research Engine
DeepDyve is a specialized
search tool for finding “high quality information from trusted sources”
in the “hidden archives” of the Web — databases, documents, journals
and subscriber-only archives that are not normally indexed by
conventional search engines.

With DeepDyve, the content is your query.
You can still type in a few words to begin a search, but DeepDyve
allows you to copy and paste entire sentences, paragraphs, or articles.
Results come back automatically arranged in organized folders. DeepDyve
simultaneously returns results from public and private information,
either together or separately. To go deeper and find additional
content, click on “More Like This” for any result and find all related
articles.
At the moment, DeepDyve specializes in Medical and Life Sciences sources, but the intention is to expand its coverage into other
topic areas as the product develops. You may find it takes a bit of
practice to learn to make the most of DeepDyve’s unconventional text
search methods, but advanced filters make it possible to narrow a
search quite effectively, and the ability to save and share your search
queries will be useful.
2. Google Data Search
Google’s data search
is not so much a new tool and a new feature of the Google search engine
that makes it easier to find and compare public data. The really
exciting part of this new feature is the ability to create and
customize an interactive graph to help you visualize the data, and
easily share your graph with others.
Here’s how it works, in a brief video:
So far, the public data search feature only applies if you’re
looking for population data or unemployment rates for American states
and counties. As the official Google blog announcement
explains, the data they’ve included in this initial launch, produced
and published by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and the US Census
Bureau’s Population Division, is “just a small fraction of all the
interesting public data available on the web” and there’ll be a lot
more to come.
3. Wolfram Alpha Computational Knowledge Engine
Wolfram Alpha is a new
“answer engine” developed by British physicist Stephen Wolfram. This
one’s not quite out of the box, but due to launch any day now —
Insiders got a preview at Harvard University last week, and ReadWriteWeb has posted screenshots of Wolfram Alpha. A short YouTube video of Wolfram’s presentation gives examples of how the tool might be used.
Touted in the technology news media as the next revolution in search
engine technology, Wolfram’s “computational knowledge engine” is not
intended to take on conventional search engines head-to-head.
Rather,
as Gizmodo Australia explains it:
The engine is designed using extremely advanced algorithms so it
truly has the ability to actually understand what you are asking for.
So if you type “How many protons are in a lasagna for six people?”, the
system will be able to recognise, interpret, connect the pieces of
available information and give you the answer to the question—provided
the question has an answer, of course.
I find this fascinating. An engine that could actually interpret
your questions and the information available to give you specific
answers is the Holy Grail of information technology. Wolfram doesn’t
claim Wolfram Alpha will fully achieve this, but he and other
scientists are claiming this is a huge step towards that goal. We will
have to wait and see how well it works—before Google buys it.
What search tools do you rely on?
Specialized search engines, human-edited directories, ratings
systems, social bookmarking sites, and personal recommendations via
social media are among the many ways we try to get a grip on the
information overload. No doubt this is only the start of a new wave of new ways to organize, retrieve, visualize and share publicly available data.
The recent high-pitched buzz in Internet technology circles (with the public release of DeepDyve and of Google’s
data search feature, and the public preview of Wolfram Alpha) brings
me back to one thought, however — maybe what the Internet needs is a
good Librarian!