Day 1 – IL2009 – Super Searcher Shares: Search Tips Spectacular! Mary Ellen Bates

www.batesinfo.com/IL2009

Mary Ellen jumped right in with high energy to do this annual IL favorite!  In direct contrast to the previous speaker, Mary Ellen actually likes Twitter and sees searching possibilities.  She feels thatTtwitter is just like the web and like blogs – lots of noise, but the 140 characters limit the tweet to only important words.   You don’t bloviate on Twitter!  She then went on to highlight other search tips :
 - Wolfram/alpha
  Search-and-compute engine
  Works with factual queries
  Indexes “systematic knowledge”  data
  What is amazing is what it DOES with the data – makes data visible.
  Patrons want “added value” – more than just Google.

-  Google Squared
Works for categories of things
Generates table of facts.
You can edit this table.
Visualization is worth 1000 words.
 You can export this to an Excel Spreadsheet!!

 -  Search Cloudlet   (Customized google as an add on for Firefox)
 Tag/site/TLD cloud of results.
You can modify your search quickly.
Works on both Google and on Twitter.
http://Getcloudlet.com

-  Google News Timeline
 Skim the news by timeline – just particular days
Hyperlinked version of FastFlip

-  Google Domestic Trends
Visual display of CSEs of Google Insight
 Tracks search queries over time.
Compare search terms with sites
 http://Google.com/domestictrends/

-  One of Mary Ellen’s “can’t do without” sites is http://reQall.com –
Call a phone #, IM, email, text to reQall and leave a message.
Receive transcribed message in any medium
            Organized by categories
           dates/times, buy, note, meet, ask/tell/remind
            Time, Things, People

Mary ELlen left us with one final great tip – although not for the web.  It’s {MS} Office Tabs.  With this small app, you can create tabs in MS Office applications.  Find this at http://Bit.ly/2saSe