Searches such as [unemployment rate new york] will now bring up a quick answer that looks like this:

Clicking on the result will take you to a more detailed graph with ways to plot other data on this charge. Below is me plotting Rockland County, New York, compared to New York State and also adding California:

Google promises to add public data for answers on prices of cookies, CO2 emissions, asthma frequency, high school graduation rates, bakers’ salaries, number of wildfires amongst others. Currently this data is coming from produced and published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau’s Population Division, but Google does hope to bring in more public data sources.

Why did Google announce this during the Wolfram Alpha Demo? Wolfram Alpha seems to be all about collecting these data sources and making it easy for people to search information on these types of data sources, complete with charts. The timing suggest Google was hoping to spoil what some see as a weakness it might have compared to Wolfram Alpha. I expect us to do more detailed piece on Wolfram|Alpha soon, so stay tuned.

Gary Price has also posted on the news and Google also posted a quick video demonstration:

Postscript: See Impressive: The Wolfram Alpha “Fact Engine”, our review of the service and which also covers Google saying the timing of its structured data launch was entirely coincidental.

On October 31, 2009, MSN® Encarta® Web sites worldwide will be discontinued, with the exception of Encarta Japan, which will be discontinued on December 31, 2009. Additionally, Microsoft will cease to sell Microsoft Student and Encarta Premium software products worldwide by June 2009. We understand that Encarta users may have questions regarding this announcement so we have prepared this list of questions and answers below. Please keep reading if you would like more information about these changes to Encarta.

Clearly, Wikipedia is the dominating online encyclopedia these days. Of course, that leaves concern in the library community for accuracy of encyclopedia content. I am not an expert in this area, so hopefully we will bring on someone to write a more detailed analysis of this change.

This week, I am on a special trip known as the Blogger Delegation to Israel. We are being taken around by the Israeli Consulate to learn about Israel and the people who live here. Clearly, my focus is on search – so when I went to the Weizmann Institute today and met with extreme experts in the field of nanotechnology, alternative sustainable energy and even plant sciences, my main question was – what databases do you use for your research.

As I listened to information that was clearly way above my head, i.e. a new onion like molecule that when used in your car, it would never require an oil change again – I kept wondering, how can other scientists and researchers use this information to help their studies. How can researchers quickly pull up data, with citations, to find information at their finger tips.

So when I spoke with Professor David Cahen, he told me about his meetings with Google and trying to convince them to build out a search engine that does just that. In fact, he is on a personal crusade to educate the average person out there that much of the information out there on the web is either wrong or can be used wrong. His dream search engine would return accurate information, with citations listed, to your questions on how much energy does it consume to burn a certain amount of oil. Google is on their way to showing information on energy topics, such as their Power Meter that is designed to educate consumers about their power consumption. The issue is, according to Profession Cahen, it isn’t always accurate.

Cahen’s issue, in my opinion, is that Google cannot possible allocate their resources to building out a specialty database for this cause. If the Professor can use tools such as Yahoo’s BOSS platform and feed the data to BOSS, it might work well for his purpose. The main issue is that the professor does not have the time and resources to collect and feed this data to a search engine.

I was incredibly impressed with the work Ron Milo did with BioNumbers. Ron Milo is actually building a community of researchers, who add and edit (almost in Wiki style) to his specialty database. Milo’s main issue is getting his “pet project” out there to his community. What came to mind immediately was Google Coop’s Topics program. I cannot tell you how frustrated I was to hear that Ron Milo never heard of it. Why do I say that? Because Ron Milo is the exact person Google wants to use this service. Ron has built a structured data set that can easily be added to this Google project and might build out more awareness of BioNumbers.

Why is awareness of BioNumbers important to search? Google, no matter how good I find it to be, still has issues accessing structure data. Google Coop was one of Google’s answers, as is Google Base, Google Blog Search and so on. Yahoo BOSS or Search Monkey is another answer to these questions. BioNumbers can be expanded into other verticals, such as ChemiNumbers or GeoNumbers and so on. Getting experts to contribute to these specialty databases and Google and Yahoo educating these researchers on the tools they have to help build awareness of the answers the databases have, is incredibly important to furthering all sciences. Bridging the two, is a win-win for both the search engine and the researchers.

Here is a short video demonstrating some of the answers BioNumbers gives searchers:

The only issue is, resources – and who can the search engine serve best with those resources. The average consumer or the researchers? In this case, researchers need to build these data sets and feed them to a search engine. Search engines need to better educate these types of organizations about the tools they have that can unlock the data these researchers seek.

Yes, it’s a busy life but I’m very fortunate to do what I love and even get paid for it. The challenge, as least as I see it, is writing on something of interest for Search Engine Land and not worrying about conflicts of interest with every sentence I write.

Good news: I have found a topic that not only interests me but grows in significance for all of us as each day and each version of a web page passes: The importance of making web content more permanent. It’s crucial for historical purposes for web content to become less ephemeral.

It’s my goal in this series of articles to keep you posted on some of the major web archiving initiatives, databases, research and services, while at the same time offering quick peeks at tools you can use to save web pages and other forms of electronic content on your own. Naturally, awareness of copyright is key.

There is a lot going on all over the world and I will do my best to offer you introductions to many digital preservation initiatives, along with the research from universities and organizations engaged in collecting and storing online content.

So, where do we begin?

Many people know about The Internet Archive, based at the Presidio in San Francisco and home to The Wayback Machine. But many people aren’t aware of numerous additional projects (archiving, digitizing, preservation) that the Internet Archive, under the leadership of Brewster Kahle, is involved in.

One is a service the Internet Archive offers for a growing number of institutional clients, named Archive-It.

In a nutshell, this subscription service allows an organization to use an application that includes crawling, recrawling and data hosting services.

From the web site:

Internet Archive’s subscription service, Archive-It, allows institutions to build, manage and search their own web archive through a user friendly web application, without requiring any technical expertise or hosting facilities.

Subscribers can capture, catalog, and archive their institution’s own web site or build collections from the web, and then search and browse the collection when complete.

The collections are then made public (unless a user decides to keep them private) via the Archive-It web site. At last count, Archive-It was permanently archiving more than 135 million pages in nearly 300 collections.

For those interested, Archive-It regularly offers webinars explaining their services.

This page offers direct links to all of Archive-It collections. In recent weeks, the collection has seen many new collections added to the service

A few of the most interesting collections include:

• Tragedy at Virginia Tech A collection of web pages from the University and elsewhere immediately following the tragedy.
• California High Speed Rail Authority
• Orange County California Web Sites
• Latin American Government Documents Archive, (University of Texas)
• Canadian Political Parties and Political Interest Groups

It’s also worth noting that unlike the tens of millions of archived pages accessible via The Wayback Machine which cannot be keyword searched, pages archived using the Archive-It service can be searched using keywords.

In an upcoming article I will take a look at two massive web archives that combine the best of both the National Archives of the United States and The Internet Archive. They are named Web Harvest Presidential Term 2004 and Web Harvest 109th Congress (2006). Between them they contain terabytes of archived U.S. Government web data.

Gary Price is Director of Online Information Resources for Ask.com and also editor of ResourceShelf and DocuTicker. The Search On Search column, written by employees of major search engines, appears periodically at Search Engine Land.

He explored several science search tools including Scirus, Live Search Academic, Google Scholar, Scitopia, Global Science Gateway and others.

The search options are fairly limited – to geographic areas of the world, themes (such as art, politics, science and so on), with the option of further limiting to specific sites such as the British Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Boston and so on. The searcher then pops into the search box the year they are interested in and TimeSearch responds with a timeline starting at that date and extending for about a year.

Entries are brief, but can be expanded to a more helpful paragraph. There are two sets of icons, one either side of the specific event which link to sites and images.

I quickly discovered that it makes sense to expand the results since the one line notation of events wasn’t always helpful. I would also have preferred more dating information. Oddly for a search engine that is emphasizing time, searchers only get the year that an event happened, nothing more specific; it’s necessary to click on a link and hope, and this is a very poor oversight by the designers.

There is a second search box which is for subject searching, but this merely takes the user to Google, Answers, the Wikipedia and so on and leaves them to their own devices from that point on.

This is probably the most annoying drawback of the system – while it is all well and good to be able to search a specific period of time, this search engine does not help if I need to discover when the American Civil War started for example. Once I know that it’s 1861, I can get a lot of useful information, but if I don’t know that at the outset, I’m stuck.

Other than that, it’s certainly an interesting search engine and one that I could see being widely used within the education system. A little more development could turn this from a good search engine into a great one, and I’ll be keeping an eye on it in the hope it does just that.

The details on Live Search Books Beta:

The U.S. beta launch of Live Search Books is a big step forward in advancing the way people discover information through the integration of content that has been “off-limits

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