Author Archives: futurilla

How to import/export a list of banned URLs from the Google Noise Reduction script, for Firefox + GreaseMonkey.

20 Saturday Nov 2010

Posted by in How to improve academic search, JURN tips and tricks, JURN's Google watch

≈ 2 Comments

You may have spent some time building up a list of banned URLs for the Firefox addon Surfclarity, which strips unwanted domains from Google Search Results. Surfclarity no longer works with the latest Google changes, but the Greasemonkey script Google Noise Reduction does. In this tutorial we’ll swop the Surfclarity blacklist into the Google Noise Reduction blacklist.

1. In Firefox’s address bar, type: about:config.

2. Scroll down to extensions.surfclarity.patterns

Double click on the line of banned URLs you’ll find there, and copy them to Notepad.

3. Scroll further down to greasemonkey.scriptvals.http://exego.net//Google Noise Reduction.blacklist and take a look at the format. Note that it’s a little different than Surfclarity…

({‘britannia.com’:true, ‘oxfordjournals.org’:true, ‘tandf.co.uk’:true, ‘ingentaconnect.com’:true, ‘sagepub.com’:true, ‘myspace.com’:true, ‘experts-exchange.com’:true})

So we’re going to have to do some basic search-and-replace on our Surfclarity blacklist. Back up the Google Noise Reduction.blacklist if you want, as we’re going to overwrite it in a few moments.

4. Go back to Notepad and look at the list of Surfclarity URLs you just copied out.

Search for : and replace with : ‘ — note the space after the “:”.

Then search for : and replace it with ‘:true,

Now add ({‘ to the very start of this list, and ‘:true}) to the very end of this list.

Congratulations, you now have your SurfClarity list in Google Noise Reduction format.

5. Copy your new list to the clipboard, go back to greasemonkey.scriptvals.http://exego.net//Google Noise Reduction.blacklist, clear what’s in there at the moment, and then paste the new list in. You’re done.

Obviously, you can now also copy a backup of the Google Noise Reduction.blacklist

Alternative Academic Careers for Humanities Scholars

17 Wednesday Nov 2010

Posted by in Spotted in the news

≈ Leave a comment

#alt-ac: Alternative Academic Careers for Humanities Scholars is set to be published online, in open-access format. It’ll be edited by Bethany Nowviskie, Director of Digital Research & Scholarship at the University of Virginia Library and Associate Director of the Scholarly Communication Institute. The book will feature…

“contributions by and for people with deep training and experience in the humanities, who are working or are seeking employment — off the tenure track — within universities and colleges, or in allied knowledge and cultural heritage institutions such as museums, libraries, academic presses, historical societies, and governmental humanities organizations.”

So not that alternative, then. I suspect that a great many arts and humanities people in the UK — both in teaching and publishing — will have to look much further afield than ‘the usual suspects’ if they hope to gain employment over the next few years.

How to get the old Google Images back

13 Saturday Nov 2010

Posted by in JURN's Google watch

≈ Leave a comment

Remove 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.

Google’s death throes?

11 Thursday Nov 2010

Posted by in JURN's Google watch, My general observations, Spotted in the news

≈ Leave a comment

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”

The anti-search attitude

01 Monday Nov 2010

Posted by in My general observations, Official and think-tank reports, Spotted in the news

≈ Leave a comment

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.