Lots of press chatter in the last few days about a not-yet-public new academic search engine from Helsinki Institute for Information Technology called SciNet. It seems it’s been in development for some years. Here’s a screen capture of the UI sliders seen briefly in the video…

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AH_RD_hAOA&w=560&h=315]

I seem vaguely to remember similar style experimental search interfaces, maybe ten years ago now.

But the sliders made me think I’d like to see Google offer such a set of fine-tuning sliders, to change a variety of their currently fixed or on/off search parameters. Although I guess that might then be gamed by the SEO hucksters to winkle out a few of the secrets of Google’s algorithm weightings.

A new embedded search tool for non-fiction writers, Bing Insights for MS Office. It only seems to work in MS Office Live, rather than as a plugin for older desktop installations of Office. Sadly I just couldn’t find the Insights feature at all in Office Live, when I went to test it. So perhaps it’s not yet been rolled out the UK.

But it seems a neat idea, meaning that checking a basic fact no longer entails bouncing out of Word and into a Web browser. The search process also apparently inherits semantic nudges, drawn from the other words and phrases detected in the document. One wonders if the semantic data that Microsoft gain from this will, in time, improve the Bing Search service itself.

I’d expect the Open Source Office software suites to add this sort of fact-checking feature to their Word Processor soon, if they haven’t already (I couldn’t immediately find something similar for Open Office, LibreOffice, etc). Although their natural choice of partner, Wikipedia, might not be the most trustworthy source of facts.

A key element of online search literacy appears to be going backward, rather than forward. Results from 1,200 U.S. librarians surveyed in May 2014 appear to show a …

… 29.3 percent increase, over the past two years, in the perception that students have a rudimentary understanding of web evaluation. “[…] librarians feel students are now using the open web for research less than they did in 2012,” the report says, “[and] when students are on the open web, their evaluation skills are more lackluster.” […] 36.1 percent of the students surveyed felt that they had an advanced understanding of website evaluation, whereas only two percent of librarians considered their students to have a high degree of skill in the same area.”

The respondents were librarians from across the core educational spectrum, from elementary through to four-year academic institutions. 31 percent were based in high schools.

Scholar Ninja, new from Jure Triglav…

I’ve started building a distributed search engine for scholarly literature. … What makes Scholar Ninja unique is that all of its functions (indexing, searching, and distributed server) are contained within a browser extension. [and thus hardened against censorship] “What?”, I can hear you say, “How can that be? Since when can a browser be a server?” Since 3 years ago, when the almighty WebRTC was born. … [Scholar Ninja] is completely contained within a browser extension: install it from the Chrome Web Store. … beware that this is alpha software and may break completely.

Why we need both discoverability and long Plain English summaries (as well as short abstracts) for open academic work… “The solutions to all our problems may be buried in PDFs that nobody reads”. Admittedly, we are talking about World Bank reports, but in the ‘send a Congressman to sleep’ stakes I guess those can go head-to-head with many other academic papers.