A gay slur from the Wikipedia page about the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team made its way into Google’s Knowledge Graph box for a short time this week. The slur has been making news with stories appearing in a number of press outlets. The Cardinals’ Wikipedia page has been home to a great deal of […]
With Google Alerts coming under fire as being broken, an impressive new service has stepped up to appeal to those seeking an alternative: Talkwalker. Luxembourg-based Talkwalker is a social media monitoring company that has now released its own keyword-based alerts resource. The free service utilizes Google’s Web, news, and blog databases and delivers alerts by email or RSS. So, are […]
Most news organizations provide video content on their sites, and aggregators like Google News also offer video clips for some stories. But there are also some excellent search tools that focus exclusively on broadcast television news, and they can often take you to “all the news that’s fit to watch” more quickly and efficiently than […]
The Wayback Machine from the Internet Archive, one of the most useful and important Internet research tools, recently reached a major milestone. In a blog post, archive founder Brewster Kahle announced that The Wayback Machine now provides access an index containing more than 240 billion URLs (about five petabytes of data), with archived pages dating […]
Trying to keep up with Hurricane Sandy? Below are a variety of resources which may help. Storm Tracking Google Super Storm Sandy Map Google Super Storm Sandy Maps: NYC Close-up ESRI’s Hurricane Information Map Weather.com Hurricane Tracker Local TV Live Stream Boston: CBS NYC: NBC Philadelphia: CBS Washington DC: Fox Washington DC: NBC Radio A […]
The final debate between U.S. presidential candidates Obama and Rommney airs tonight. Until the election next month, a lot of attention will continue to be on the presidential and vice presidential debates. Here’s an easy and free way to keyword search debate video and then immediately view the video online. In fact, all of the […]
At the beginning of the year I wrote about PolitickerUSA, a free tool that allows users to quickly and easily read tweets from members of congress and other political leaders. Today, I want to point out another free service named Politwoops that launched at the end of May. Here, users can access and read tweets […]
Big news for genealogists, historians and even for people just curious about their own families: the 1940 U.S. Census is now available on the web. Unfortunately, at this point at least, it takes a bit of skill and determination to navigate through the data, though there are many efforts underway to make this incredibly valuable […]
The Khan Academy gets a lot of deservedly favorable attention for its breadth and depth of online video instruction. But there’s another, similar site that I think deserves applause for quality, authoritative online video instruction. It also happens to be a freebie. It’s called WatchKnowLearn.org and it’s being developed for K-12 students and educators. While […]
Wolfram|Alpha (W|A) is launching a new fee-based service named Wolfram|Alpha Pro. In today’s highly competitive environment, you may wonder why W|A would ask people to pay for what many think should be free. Read on: you may decide to willingly open your wallet when you see what’s available. Since Wolfram|Alpha launched in 2009, I’ve often […]
I am a long time admirer of Wolfram|Alpha and I’m happy to report that my admiration continues to grow, as you can now access NFL (National Football League) statistics using Wolfram|Alpha. So, queries like: Tom Brady Joe Flacco Passing Yards 49ers 2011 New York Giants field goal attempts, field goals made Chicago Bears Record 1985 […]
Many U.S. Senators and Representatives are tweeting opinions, updates, images, documents, etc. these days, and Twitter can be a very useful, if not an essential tool, to learn about what’s going on directly from each member, especially regarding controversial legislation such as SOPA. An easy to use but powerful web tool (it’s also free) named […]
The lawsuit over Google Books is back on track for trial but purposely with enough time to allow the parties involved to keep negotiating a settlement. In a New York City courtroom today, Judge Denny Chin heard from Google, the Authors Guild and the American Association Of Publishers about progress in talks. Bloomberg reports that […]
Another Google search service has gone missing: the home page for Google News Archive Search is no longer available. It was previously accessible at news.google.com/archivesearch. Google News Archive Search allows you to search through news articles that date back longer than the 30 days that are typically covered by regular Google News. It’s still available. […]
Yesterday, Search Engine Roundtable and InfoDocket both pointed out that Google’s U.S. government specialty search tools, Google-Uncle Sam and USGov.Google.com had been offline for several days. Additionally, Google’s long time specialty search tools Linux Search, Microsoft Search, Apple Search, and BSD Search were also unavailable. Google has now confirmed both to us via email and […]