Internet Search Current Trends

Went to Gary Price's latest SLA research toolbox webinar recently. Good stuff. There is an extensive resource list detailing the cool stuff we learned about. Here's the cliffs notes version, optimized for the truly special librarian.

Go Mobile! Many sites now have mobile versions (i.e. OCLC, wikipedia, etc. etc.).

Trend Watching. Twitter becoming the standard for internet trend and business tracking.

Visualization. Most implementations are for search results.

Stalking. Tracking people’s and website’s movement and changes can seem creepy and voyeuristic, but it can be tremendously useful.

Get Hip! There are many ways to keep current and to find new content. Many websites out there to help you automate the process. Most have RSS feeds or Twitter account.

Search Tools. While there are only five full scale databases of internet webpages (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Live, Ask, Cuil) there are many specialty tools that help you access a specific type of content.

Content Management. An completely enormous topic and problem that was only briefly touched on in this seminar.