Thanks to Kate Sheehan (Loose Cannon Librarian) for live blogging the sessions she attended today with Mary Ellen Bates at the Greenwich Library. Wow, tons of terrific search tips in these posts! Check ‘em out.
Search Tools
RSS feeds for web searches
Most of us have a few (or many!) topics that we do repeat searches on in the big search engines. This might be a research topic you’re trying to keep up to date on, your library’s name or even your own name. An RSS feed for a subject search can save you some time by automatically send you recent changes in the top hits for your favorite search. (Reminds me of setting up SDI searches in Dialog many moons ago!) But none of the major search engines make it easy to set up an RSS feed for a general search.
So thanks to Digital Inspiration for this tip on how to create an RSS feed for a subject search (more…)
Kindernet – Children’s Search Engine
Just heard about Kindernet, a new children’s search engine. Though the layout isn’t the jazziest at the moment, the search results look useful and age appropriate. The developer left a comment on Phil Bradley’s blog indicating that they’re working on a new look for the site. Looking forward to seeing how this project develops.
From their “about us” page:
Core Values
- Safe
A pre-researched set of great sites for kids.
- Relevant
Helps kids, teachers and parents find what they are looking for sooner.
- Global
Children are able to participate and communicate with other children around the globe.
- Friendly
Designed to be user-friendly for all children 12 and under.
- Free
The Kindernet search engine is free for all people to use.
(via LIB and Phil Bradley.)
Viewzi – New Search Tool
Viewzi takes your search terms, tries to figure out what you’re looking for and get the most relevant results. Sounds like every search engine, right? Viewzi’s twist is in the variety of different “views” within the search results and the highly visual presentation. The results are grouped into categories or “views” like shopping, weather, photos, videos, web pages, mp3′s, etc. And then presented in a snazzy flash based visual format.
A search for DDR mats brought back the Shopping view as the first view. The view made it easy to browse results from Amazon, ebay, Target and WalMart. The Recipe view accurately returned no results, while the Weather view revealed that it was 81 and sunny in Defiance, MO. Oh well, if I were really looking for DDR Mats, I wouldn’t have bothered to look at the Weather view. (more…)
Time to Clean Up Your Web Site & Give Your Customers What They Want
Curtis Rogers’ post The Library’s web site shouldn’t be a PUZZLE to Patrons (which is in part a summary of a post from The Marketing Blog) makes some great points about our how we can use our library web sites to engage our customers.
- Is your web site cluttered?
- Does the navigation make sense to customers?
- Is their initial interaction with the site relevant to them?
- Is your content up to date?
- Can you interact with your customers?
- Does it provide support when needed?
- Does it make sharing easy?
These are just a few of the things that we should all be asking about our library web sites! Read both posts for more details.
My soapbox lately has been the 3rd point. When customers get to our web sites, is it relevant to their needs? Can they find what they want?
And if what our customers want is to find is information, then lets give them some BIG search boxes right there on the main page (and on all the other pages!). And I don’t just mean the catalog search box. Give them an internet search box too. And put your meebo or other IM chat box right next to it to offer them some help if they can’t find what they want. Better yet, give them a search box that gets info from our catalogs, our databases and the web all rolled up in one. I know, that last one really isn’t so easy for many of us to do.
We can also create custom web search tools that focus on the types of information our customers ask for over and over. I bet you have a list of great web sites for different topics hiding somewhere on your web site? Pull out some of the most information rich sites and create a custom search tool that searches just those selected sites. Easy to do with tools like Google Custom Search and Rollyo.
And please, please, as Curtis suggests, do this one simple thing:
PUT YOUR PHONE NUMBER AND ADDRESS ON YOUR START PAGE! Many times, that’s all that people are looking for…
Better yet, add it to the footer info on all your pages!
GoGooligans revisited
After I posted some concerns about GoGooligans last week, the developer of GoGooligans responded to these and those expressed by others over at flickr.
As a result, he’s deleted the “hey kid – click this button when your parents or teachers aren’t looking” feature. Thank you!!
And he’s updated some search terms and phrases to unblock phrases like “breast cancer”. There’s a link on the page to contact them if you find other words and phrases have been inappropriately blocked.
There are three search pages withing GoGooligans and it’s worth looking at each one to see which one might fit your needs:
- Main search page – heavily filtered
- The less filtered version – just what it says, less filtered.
- Student Safe Search – for older students? Lets you limit results to selected reference tools.
I appreciate the developer responding to the concerns. And I’d like to hear reactions from others about this new search engine for kids.
