Here is a search tool that you may want to add to your bookmarks.
LeapFish is an application to conduct multi-media, real-time searches and share results with others. The tool allows users to select the type of query that could be executed, specifically:
- General Web Search
- Real Time Search
- News Search
- Video Search
- Image Search
- Blog Search
- Shopping Search
The following two images illustrate the search results for a real-time and blog search query for the keywords, “foreign direct investment”.
Figure 1: Results from news sources and Twitter
Figure 2: Results from the blogsphere
To share findings with a colleague, simply place your mouse over the result and click on “Share”. LeapFish will provide you with the option to post on different Web 2.0 platforms such Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Delicious just to name a few. Figure 3 shows the complete list of tools.
Figure 3: Web 2.0 sharing tools available on LeapFish
Other value added features of LeapFish includes adding the tool to your browser and customizing your homepage.
LeapFish is available at www.leapfish.com
Late last week, I was asked to search the blogsophere to see what I could find out on the prevailing views within a controversial industry. With the correct keywords and tools, I was able to cull some recent and relevant postings together however; I noticed something rather bothersome during the searching phase. There were “posts” which were simply press releases that were copied from its original source. As a matter of fact, there were a lot of posts of ripped releases or articles that I had to discard in my search.
Based on the Wikipedia definition of a “blog”:
“A blog (an abridgment of the term web log) is a website, usually maintained by an individual, with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse chronological order.”
The keyword to focus in the definition is “commentary“. Since when has copying and pasting press releases passes as commentary?
Any posts that are just mere press releases or republished articles should be considered a trap in the blogosphere. A trap that will get you to visit a blog without an value added content on it. There are millions of blogs online that do republish snippets of articles HOWEVER these blogs provide their own insights into the discussed topics.
There is no doubt that as a competitive intelligence researcher, I have fell into the trap many, many times. Besides a very good search tool that has a filter to weed out blogposts that are copied releases and articles, these traps will continue to appear.
One possible way of curtailing the growth of these traps is making present and future bloggers aware of possible guidelines of writing a proper blog.
I have not been a huge fan of search agents or assistants. I find that they tend to slow down my computer and are headaches to maintain in order for them to work properly.
Here is a search assistant that does not involve any efforts to set up.
GoshMe is a meta tool that permits users to search among 1350 engines and databases at one time. The tool assists users to delve into the invisible web where general search engines cannot go. Users can simply enter their keyword(s) and receive hits from all search engines / sources or broken down by a specific tool (ie, video search, blog search, news search, etc.). The screenshot below presents the results for a video search for the keywords, “NCAA tournament”.
The links provided on the result pages of GoshMe lead users to the hits from a specific tool. The first hit originates from Google Video in the above screenshot.
GoshMe is available at http://www.goshme.com/. GoshMe is currently in beta testing phase.
