Search Tools

Evaluation Template
Directories
RSS Feeds
New Searches
Deep Web
Page Monitors
Email Alerts
Custom Search Engines
Tag-based Sites
Image Searches
Videos and Podcasts
Other Search Engines

Here you can find evaluations on search tools that I used to gather information about social networking. They are sorted by source type and then evaluated using the following format:

Name: The name of the service or resource
Access: How a person accesses the service. For an RSS feed, you would want to list the Web page where you found the RSS feed (maybe it's the page that lists all of the Web site's RSS feeds) as well as the <span class="caps">RSS</span> feed itself. For a Web resource, you would just want to list the URL.
Frequency: For example, how often did you have the email alert sent, or how often did the RSS feed have new information, or how often was it necessary or useful to access the Web resource?
Information: The type of information this resource provided for you. If it would be useful, you might show what typical results look like or list 5-10 typical items that the query would return. (Again, only list this information if it would be useful.)
Query: The way that you got the resource to give you the information that you wanted.
Evaluation: How useful this Web site was compared to all of the other resources. Use a 10 (high) to 1 (low) scale where 5 means it was of average usefulness compared to other resources that you tried out this semester.
Miscellaneous: Discuss anything here that you feel would be of interest related to this resource.

Directories

Name: Yahoo Directory: Social Networks
Access: http://dir.yahoo.com/Society_and_Culture/Cultures_and_Groups/Cyberculture/Social_Networks/
Frequency: Since the information on the directory does not change much, you only need to access it once every couple of weeks.
Information: Lists social networking websites, new and old. For example, currently the top results are MySpace, Nirvino, Peerclip, and Villiage Voyage.
Query: Directory > Society and Culture > Cultures and Groups > Cyberculture > Social Networks
Evaluation: 5

Name: Mahalo: Social Networking
Access: http://www.mahalo.com/Social_Networking (RSS Feed Page: http://www.mahalo.com/Social_Networking?action=rss)
Frequency: About twice a week
Information: Includes everything from a description of social networking and what social networking sites do, to pages about social networking, news and blog links. It is everything composed in one, easy to navigate site.
Query: Social Networking
Evaluation: 9
Miscellaneous: I suggest this be the first page you go to if you don't know anything about social networking, and then navigate to sites with more specific information later. There are also pages related to the main players MySpace, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Name: DMOZ
Access: http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Internet/On_the_Web/Online_Communities/Social_Networking/
Frequency: Only once or twice when you want to browse all the different social networking websites
Information: Large list of social networking sites and a short description of each
Query: Computers: Internet: On the Web: Online Communities: Social Networking
Evaluation: 2

RSS Feeds

Name: Bloglines
Access: http://www.bloglines.com (See Blogroll and Explanation of Blogroll Sites)
Frequency: Visit about every day or every other day to check for new results
Information: Bloglines is an RSS Feed reader that is sorted into folders and lists new results whenever they are posted.
Evaluation: 10 - This resource was the most useful because it combines a variety of other resources such as News Searches, websites, and others.
Miscellaneous: See Blogroll for the feeds that I included in my Bloglines Feed Reader

New Searches

News Search is one of the most useful tools to find new information on social networking. These can be found in the Blogroll. Also, there is a Jamesoo search for news information under Email Alerts.

Deep Web

Since there are so many blogs and sites on the web that any user can make, Google Scholar and other Deep Web resources are good because we know that the information is reliable. However, much of the information would be more useful in writing a research paper than learning about new information related to social networking.

Name: Google Scholar
Access: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_q=Social+Networking&num=10&btnG=Search+Scholar&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_occt=title&as_sauthors=&as_publication=&as_ylo=&as_yhi=&as_allsubj=all&hl=en&lr=
Frequency: About once every other week
Information: Gives scholarly articles about social networking. They are more description-based articles that describe social networking and its uses in other areas rather than news articles.
Query: allintitle: Social Networking
Evaluation: 2
Miscellaneous: This resource is good because it does not come up with results with social networking in them because of crimes or studies. The results are more focused on what social networking is, which is what we would use this site for.

Name: University of Michigan MLibrary
Access: http://searchtools.lib.umich.edu/V/K1U9JQ1M5VFTTHJKF7F1B8YCEFV2V9D29K66U49RCDGCP5B4N5-28782?func=quick-1
Frequency: About once every other week
Information: Gives scholarly articles about social networking or whichever query you choose. Again, they are more description based and are not recently updated to find new information about social networking.
Query: Under the quick search, you can search for articles related to [social networking] or narrow you queries to whatever aspect of social networking you are looking for, such as the main players. Once you search, there will then be a side toolbar on your left to narrow your search results even more by topics, dates, authors, and journal titles.
Evaluation: 3
Miscellaneous: In order to use this resource, you must log in with a unique name and password given to you by the university. If you are not affiliated with the university, than this resource will not be helpful.

Page Monitors

Name: WatchThatPage
Access: http://watchthatpage.com/index.jsp
Frequency: Once a week
Information:
Query: http://www.jamesoo.com/index.php?q=Social+Networking
Evaluation: 5

See Yahoo Pipes in Blogroll.

Email Alerts

Name: Google Alert
Access: http://www.googlealert.com/
Frequency: Once every 3 days
Information:
Query: All of: "social networking", None of: friends dating, Updated: in the past week, Occurs: in page title
Evaluation: 5
Miscellaneous: This resource would be more useful except for the fact that the search query could not be narrowed down more to include less results. Each email sent would give me the top 50 results of thousands of new results.

Custom Search Engines

Name: Google Custom Search Engine
Access: http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=010156238703100353329%3A6mca6pxwbko

Frequency: Information is updated frequently, however you only need to use it when searching for a specific topic. Therefore, frequency would vary greatly.
Information: The user can search for a specific topic within the social networking field. The results shown will first be results included in the specific sites (http://www.mahalo.com/Social_Networking http://mashable.com/ http://www.downloadsquad.com/ http://www.plasticbag.org/).
Query: If you want to search for blogs or news related to specific aspect of social networking, you can type in your custom query. For example, if you knew that MySpace recently added music, you can search for blogs on this topic within these sites with the query [MySpace music].
Evaluation: 5
Miscellaneous: Keep in mind that the sites I used here are also feeds in my Blogroll and you can find an evaluation of them there.

Tag-based Sites

Name: Delicious
Access: http://delicious.com/
Frequency: About once every other week for searching and about once a day for bookmarking pages.
Information: This site finds websites that other people have posted and tagged when you search. You can also use it as an online place to store links to important websites and articles you found on social networking, and then organize these by tags.
Query: The most useful searches I found were ones that searched a combination of tags. For example, tag:linkedin tag:news. You can also search for just key words such as [social networking].
Evaluation: 4 for searching, 9 for bookmarking pages

Name: Reddit
Access: http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/search?q=Social+Networking
Frequency: About once a week
Information: This tag-based site gives you results on specific articles that people posted related to your search query. Next to them they are rated by users for their helpfulness. You can also save a result for the future or share it with other people.
Query: Under the technology tab, search for [Social Networking]
Evaluation: 5

Image Searches

I found that image searches are not particularly useful to find information on the social networking industry. However, there are many graphs and charts that explain what social networking is and how it works. I found the most effective way to find these is go to Pixolu and search for social networking. Once you get the first set of results, then search for similar images to charts and graphs.

Videos and Podcasts

Videos and Podcasts were not useful or beneficial to use when researching social networking.

Other Search Engines

Name: SearchCloud
Access: http://searchcloud.net/
Frequency: About once every week
Information: SearchCloud is a search engine that allows you to search by making a cloud of different search terms. The bigger you make the term, the more weight it holds. The results provided are similar to that of other search engines, however, I found more to be relevant to what I was looking for because of the weighting.
Query: social networking (biggest) news (2nd biggest) Facebook (3rd biggest) MySpace (3rd biggest) LinkedIn (3rd biggest)
Evaluation: 6

Name: iSeek
Access: http://www.iseek.com/iseek/search.html?l=en&query=%22social+networking%22&sbl=2&bk=&spc=
Frequency: About once every week
Information: This site brings results that are similar to standard search engines. However, on the left hand column, it then lets you narrow your results by topic, people, places, organizations, date and time, source, etc.
Query: "Social Networking"
Evaluation: 5

Page tags: customsearchengine deepweb directories emailalerts imagesearches newssearches othersearchengines pagemonitors resources rssfeeds searchtools tagbasedsites videosandpodcasts

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