Course Modules

Core Module 1 Introduction to Advanced Internet Research.
Different tools for different jobs
Search strategy
Directories, search engines and meta search engines

2 Starting to focus
Faster searching
Important Google commands

Core Module 3 Precision Surfing
Using ‘advanced operators’
Combining commands

Core Module 4a Finding people and finding out about people
Using and searching social networks
Using and searching listservs and online forums
Other key tools

4b People behind sites
Investigating sites

Core module 5 Investigative internet Research
Google hacking. Searching for and accessing site directories.

6 Anonymous surfing

Core module 7 Search tools
Accessing past internet content
Monitoring future content
Getting the most out of RSS feeds

Core module 8 The ‘Invisible Web’
Accessing data hidden from search engines

9 An introduction to the semantic web and web3.0

Core module 10 Sorting and storing your research using online tools

11 Your own privacy and site reliability

I am @colinmeek on Twitter.

1 Collecta, just a few hours old, has the cleanest and most intuitive search page. Your search term is tracked and results listed in a central column. Clicking on those results gives you fuller content and a link to the source. The left hand column lists your recent queries and gives you the chance to include blogs, blog comments, images and updates (tweets) in your results. Collecta also tracks the time since your query. I’ve had impressive results so far.

2 Scoopler, has another crystal clear search page with the main section split between ‘real-time’ search results and ‘popular’ results that include content from news sites and videos. The ‘real-time’ results are drawn from Twitter, Digg, Delicious and other networking sites. This middle column gives you the options of previewing the posts or you can click through directly to Twitter profiles.

3 OneRiot, claims to do the same as Scoopler and Collecta but when I tried its ‘realtime’ search for results containing ‘tehran’ and ‘iran’ there weren’t a convincing number and they failed to appear with anything like the frequency I would have predicted. On the plus side, you can use its ‘pulse’ search option which uses an algorithm that looks at dozens of factors to give “weight” to certain results. OneRiot has used various factors to influence the weighting including: freshness; source credibility; and, ‘acceleration’ whereby posts that are gaining momentum (links) on the web are ranked as more important.

4 I looked at Icerocket in January. Not only has it set its blog search as its default option, it has also added a twitter search and a real-time ‘Big Buzz’ alternative. Big Buzz pulls in very recent results from blogs, Twitter, Video, News and Images and gives you an ‘auto refresh’ option to update those results every minute or so as you are working on a story.

I am @colinmeek on Twitter

Confusion is rife about how and when you can use Google’s advanced operators. Used effectively they can transform your research by helping you get better results faster. Here’s my recently updated presentation on advanced operators with some context and example results.

Tweetdeck is a free download that lets you monitor posts in real-time as well as send tweets directly. Perhaps its best feature is the ability to create columns so that you can track different terms using your own dashboard.

Twitscoop is a very simple tool that allows you to monitor specific trends and buzz around a topic. You can monitor the use of specific terms over the last few hours or days. It doesn’t let you compare keywords however.

Twhirl is another desktop application that you can download for free and then use it to monitor Twitter for specific keywords. You can also integrate this with your Twitter and other social networking accounts.

Tweetscan is a Twitter search tool that automatically refreshes the search every few seconds. This also lets you limit the search to specific users.

Twazzup is similar to Twitscoop but it also highlights related hashtagged terms, the most popular links, featured tweets, and singles out specific Twitter members as ‘trendmakers.’

Monitter also allows you to monitor specific terms as they appear in tweets but this tool allows you to monitor three in their own dedicated columns. Monitter also, very slickly, lets you monitor keywords within a specific distance of a specified location.

Update: See my posts on Tweetgrid and Tweetbeep for more on this.

SingleFunction is a showcase of single function website using crystal clear presentation, short but helpful summaries and user ratings. On my first visit I discovered itpints – a real-time search engine that lets you know about what’s being published right now. You can also convert your search to an RSS feed. tweefind is yet another Twitter search engine, but this one sorts twitter posts by relevance by prioritising those that appear to be the most important. Owaks is a new video search engine. SocialMention searches user-generated content so you can track what people are saying about a particular brand, company or topic.

More on some of the other sites listed by SingleFunction soon.

1: Scrapbook: This add-on is an incredibly powerful research tool that enables you to save web pages, page snippets and whole sites. You can organise your saves just like bookmarks (by dragging and dropping in trees) but, crucially, scrapbook saves the page (or pages) not just the link. If you need reliable access to sources, this is the add-on for you.

• save pages using a drop-down menu or by dragging the page favicon into the Scrapbook Firefox sidebar.
• drag and drop page snippets and save linked pages just by dragging the links to the sidebar.
• highlight sections in saved pages.
• annotate pages.
• use ‘in-depth’ capture to save whole sites and create site maps (see below).

Scrapbook is the answer if you need access to a range of pages and sites offline and to ‘capture’ a whole site and its links to external sites. Scrapbook even comes with a filter tool that means you can capture only the pages belonging to a target site while ignoring external links.

2: Picnik: Not necessarily a research tool, but beautifully simple and useful. Picnik is a quick way to do what you want with pictures – online, in your browser. You can create files of pictures, pull them from you own accounts on sites such as Flickr and your own hard drive. But, from a research and publishing perspective, you can download images from sites, give them a quick edit, change their format ready for use within seconds.
The Firefox add-on makes life even simpler. Right click on an image (or ‘ctrl’ click for Macs) and you can ‘edit image in picnik’. The image then automatically loads to your library in Picnik. No need for the laborious task of saving images to a photo editing application then exporting locally before you can upload online.

3. The Evernote Webclipper:

This add-on creates a handy button on your Firefox browser that you can use to quickly save a selection of a web page or an entire page to your Evernote account. If you need some background on why Evernote can transform your online life then check my recent post on this app.

4. Juice: This add-on is one of a new wave of intelligent search tools that let you access linked content without you having to navigate away from the pages you are viewing. By highlighting and dragging a selection, Juice searchers for reference material, movies, news and pictures and presents the content clearly in a separate Firefox column. You can switch Juice on or off easily by using a simple button on your browser bar.

Juice’s rocking webcast from Linkool Labs on Vimeo.

5: Semantic Radar: For those of you interested in the development of the Semantic Web then Semantic Radar is another tool that gives us a glimpse of what semantic tools are bringing to the web. Semantic Radar recognizes all RDF content and displays custom icons in Firefox to indicate presence of the data in languages such as SIOC and FOAF. This screengrab shows how Semantic Radar has detected RDF content on a Livejournal page. Click on those icons and you can access the RDF content directly. For more on the Semantic Web see my interview with John Breslin.