Posts Tagged ‘search’
Web 2.O for researchers at Dublin Insitute of Technology (DIT)
Just went to a really interesting lunchtime talk in DIT entitled “research internet tools – benefits and pitfalls”. Interesting discussion on wikipedia, especially since Jimmy (Wikipedia) Wales is in Dublin at the moment. There was a general agreement that wikipedia could be a great place to start and also had many topics (such as Jedward) that academics would never cover. But Wikipedia wouldn’t be something which could be cited in research papers.
What I found interesting is that the universities are coming out in the open now also. So you can find a huge amount of published research online. Various colleges have open access repositories. DIT’s is arrow.dit.ie.
Another example is Open Doar – a directory of open access repositories. So now researchers can find each others research much more easily.
Another big takeaway for me was the advice that we should think outside the Google box when searching. While it’s important commercially to know where things sit in Google, we have to remember that they make their money from advertising rather than through the search engine. Google has an excellent set of tools for analysing search rankings and for buying adwords but there are other search engines out there which are worth googling with.
Here are a few:
http://www.hakia.com/
http://www.chacha.com/
http://clusty.com/
http://www.kartoo.com/
http://www.mahalo.com/
Their approach is more semantic webby than being at the mercy of the keywords you happen to choose. I’m looking forward to using them for my research on Market Research Online Communities (MROC). – Maybe I don’t have the right keywords for that – but I’ll soon find out.
