A brilliant little Firefox + GreaseMonkey script, adds a discreet Google Books preview link in pages for Amazon books. It works a treat!
Google Books links in Amazon results
13 Saturday Nov 2010
Posted Academic search, JURN tips and tricks
in13 Saturday Nov 2010
Posted Academic search, JURN tips and tricks
inA brilliant little Firefox + GreaseMonkey script, adds a discreet Google Books preview link in pages for Amazon books. It works a treat!
13 Saturday Nov 2010
Posted JURN's Google watch
inRemove the new Google Image Search’s increasingly annoying ‘Bing-bling’, by using Firefox + GreaseMonkey + a potent combination of Google Image Basic and Direct Images in Google Image Search!. Image search then reverts to how it used to be. Clicking on a thumbnail in the search-results takes you straight to the largest version. When searching for images “larger than…” you may need to tell Firefox (one-time only) what application to open the image with, rather than popping up a “where would you like to download this to…” I told it to open large images with Firefox itself, and large images then open in a new Firefox tab. Nice.
And, while you’re at it… Flickr: link all sizes.
11 Thursday Nov 2010
Posted New titles added to JURN
inAdded around 140 book reviews from BBC History Magazine, via the URL www.bbchistorymagazine.com/book-review/
11 Thursday Nov 2010
PC Mag‘s pundit John C. Dvorak calls it today…
“You can see the beginnings of Google’s ruin already … the recent and more aggressive changes have been terrible … It doesn’t take a genius to see that Google is beginning to make huge judgement errors.”
Much as I love Google, I’ll admit to a similar uneasiness in recent months. Wild and often silly experimentation with the core search results appears to be a product of chasing “the dumb market”. It’s also possibly a reaction to the apparent lack of innovation in search itself — exemplified by what seems to be the obvious failure (*)of Google Caffeine to suppress spammy search results and SEO spivvery. I’d wonder if yesterday’s global 10% pay rises at Google, aimed at stemming the outflow of people from the company, might be linked to this sense of failure?
Perhaps better to split the basic search almost in two, via the configuration options. Give people who don’t want to switch to a Firefox/GreaseMonkey/scripts solution a single tick box in the Google Options dashboard that says, in as many words…
“I not a drooling idiot, please take all the silly training wheels off.”
Google also needs to invest far more heavily in free high-quality online training in how to search effectively. And to push it into schools at the junior level under the rubric of ‘search literacy’.
More commentary on the Dvorak article at Beyond Search. He thinks the article harsh, but concludes…
“What’s unfolding now is little more than visible signs that a systemic problem is disrupting functions. … The digital Black Death has taken root.”
* “Some 22.4% of Google searches done since June [2010] produced malicious URLs, typically leading to fake antivirus sites or malware-laden downloads as part of the top 100 search results, according to the Websense 2010 Threat Report published Tuesday”
01 Monday Nov 2010
On Saturday I picked up a special one-off Google “how to” £9.99 magazine in W.H. Smiths (the biggest UK magazine chain store). It claimed to be a comprehensive guide to Google, yet devoted just a half of one of its hundreds of pages to some basic search modifiers such as “quote marks for phrase”. And most of that half-page was screenshots. This inexplicable dismissal of search as a teachable skill is something that’s been worrying me for some time. Despite the absolute necessity of learning to search, to find and re-find — it’s not a skill that’s taught at primary, secondary or further education, except in the most perfunctory manner. Students enter my new technologies undergraduate class and the British education system has simply not equipped 95% of them with the most basic knowledge of how to skilfully search using Google.
Stephen E. Arnold of Beyond Search has a long post today in which he sees this same inexplicable mood appearing in businesses, where bad search skills have a direct financial impact. He calls the new mood “anti-search”…
“People at this meeting don’t want search. These attributes are anti search, and I think that is the big trend for 2011. Everyday users of online systems don’t know how to formulate a query, figure out most business intelligence reports, and have little time to invest in piecing together an “answer.” The goal is the intellectual equivalent of buying a do-nut when hungry. Quick, easy, and probably not good in the long run but okay for the now moment.
What is anti search?
I think it is a culmination of many experiences. People who did lousy research in college don’t become great researchers when they get a job, gain 30 pounds, and have to juggle life’s rubber balls.
Anti search, therefore, is the need for systems that are easy to use, require little intellectual effort to learn, and deliver “good enough” information. Maybe information “on training wheels” is a better way to think about anti search.
Anti search 2011 is taking root in an environment with several characteristics…”
This is a ridiculous attitude, since properly training staff in search would pay for itself. For instance, in a recent Network World (2010) article on findability, it was said that research has found that professionals…
“spend 20% of their time looking for information and they find what they are looking for less than half of the time. That’s equivalent to spending 10 weeks a year searching for information and remaining ignorant half of that time.”
And a summary of the Summer 2010 ROI Research survey of 500 search-engine users found that…
“19% abandon the online search, taking it offline if they can’t find the information”
The UK business situation was reported in research from official UK government researchers YouGov, The Costs of Traditional Filing. Small and medium businesses in the UK…
“[staff in an average firm] spend approx. 3 months a year looking for [paper] documents […] 87% of respondents spend up to 2 hours every day looking for documents”
The national waste of time was estimated to cost £42 million each day. And that’s just paper documents. Add to that the time that untrained staff waste looking for things online (“spend 20% of their time looking for information and they find what they are looking for less than half of the time”), and it seems there’s some serious wastage going on in businesses. And I’d suspect that matters are the same in much of the UK’s public sector.