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Phil Bradley's weblog

Internet searching, web design, search engine developments and anything that will interest librarians!

Television channel searching (UK)January 4

If you like to know what you're missing on television because you're too busy sitting on your computer you might have used TV Genius in the past. As of today however they've closed their doors. Their message says "we don't really need the showcase site, and to be honest, we're so busy working with customers we haven't had the time to incorporate a lot of our newer features into this site." In other words - thanks for everything you've done to get us popular folks - now clear off because we're not interested in you any more.

So - where can you go instead to get a daily fix of televisual viewing delight? TV Genius recommends a few places and I've added in one or two more:

What's on tv which is their preferred suggestion, because it allows you to port across any alerting of programmes that you may have used with their service. It's a horribly bright page with a list of basic terrestrial channels, though you can choose to select a different set of channels, but you can't create your own mix. You can select by day and start time, and there's a search option. I'd be inclined to use this resource to set up reminders for me, and never visit again because it just hurts my eyes.

The AOL TV guide is easier on the eye. It does how

Gajeebo - Search AggregatorJanuary 3

Social search engines are all the rage at the moment and I'm fully expecting that to continue way into 2009. The first on the list for the new year is Gajeebo 'your search ends here'. Well perhaps. This one covers a few different areas and engines:

News
    Google, Yahoo, BBC
What's boiling
    Twitter, Digg
Reel life
    YouTube Metacafe
Pics
    Photobucket, Flickr, Picasa
Web
    Yahoo
Site reviews
    I tried several times on this tab, but only ever got corrupted results
Queries
    Yahoo Answers Wiki answers
Blogs
    Technorati, Bloglines
Buy it
    eBay, Amazon

Rather spotty coverage - the lack of Google in various places is noticable, and it was fairly basic. Nothing wrong with it, just nothing inspiring, interesting or particularly noteworthy.

   
   

WhosTalkin?January 1

You have to look closely at the name here - I misread it to begin with and thought it was Who Stalkin'? and thought it was some sort of way to find out if you had some sort of rabid moron hiding around the corner waiting to leap out at you, but no, it's WhosTalkin? Whos Talking? (about whatever). It's a nice enough little social search engine and it uses over 60 different social media gateways to gather its content.

You need to get your search terms correct though - phrase searching is a must, otherwise you get a lot of false positives. The first set of results come from blogs including Twitter, bloglines, Google blog search, Icerocket and a few others. There are also options to search in different categories, such as News, Networks, Videos, Images, Forums, and Tags. Within each category you can either search the lot, or choose a specific resource

It's not at all bad, and gets the job done. It's a useful engine if you're not very strong on social media, or you want to use a hammer to crack a nut and get everything you can find on a person or a subject.

100 top sites for the year ahead - maybe.December 30 2008

The Guardian recently produced a list of the 100 top sites for the year ahead and I've had a chance to go through them. I'm not listing all of them - just those that catch my eye for some reason, either good, bad or WTF? If you want the lot, follow the link!

Blogging. For reasons that escape me they've got Bloglines in there, and described it as smart and clean. I boggled at this - it's turned into a trainwreck and the only context I see people writing about bloglines with now is to say that they're leaving it. No mention of Blogger which I think is making a real comeback now and getting more and more useful. If Google had been a bit more off the mark when it came to updating the functionality I wouldn't have moved to TypePad, which I regret since they upgraded and lost a bunch of functionality in the process. Amusingly I mentioned this in a Twitter post and had a TypePad employee

Worldwide People Search - NOT!December 29 2008

Those of you who run weblogs will of course already know that a lot of people try and post comments to a weblog simply in order to get a link back to their own site. I don't really have a problem with this, as long as the comment that they leave adds value to a posting, is informative and so on. However, all too often the comment is meaningless, such as 'Great information!' and a lot of these are picked up by the spam trap software the blogging platform uses. This isn't always the case however - just today I had a comment in reply to my recent posting on the Twitter people search engine that said "There are many people search engines available for us which provide information about people. Some provide information for free while others charge for using the services." Not exactly informative or adding value.

I checked out the 'search engine' that was referenced and it was grandly called the 'Worldwide People Search - Locate People Instantly'. They're not getting a link to their site for obvious reasons. Anyway, you'd think that a 'worldwide people search' would well - be world wide really. Not just limited to the United States, which this is. You'd also expect it to be a search engine as well. This however simply provides you with a link that tells you how many records it has found (or may have found) and then asks for money to show you the results. I chec