Resources of the Week: Five Niche Search Engines
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor
We've done niche websites here as well as sources of niche statistics. This week, we'll take a look at a handful of niche search engines. If you're a regular follower of ResourceShelf, you know we preach the gospel of bypassing a general Web engine for a more focused search tool whenever possible. So consider these when the need arises.
Searches selected healthcare resources and sources taken from various Subject Tracer Information Blogs and resources from the Virtual Private Library. Currently over 119 healthcare meta search engines and resources are accessed.
This Google Co-op search engine, which appears to be updated regularly, is a project of Marcus P. Zillman, a Internet consultant, writer and speaker who has been hunting and gathering on the Web for more than a decade. We all know the pitfalls involved in searching for health information on the Net. Marcus has culled out high quality medical resources and bundled them for metasearching here.
The librarians at the Homeland Security Digital Library created this custom search engine to help blog readers find postings on topics of interest in the growing community of Homeland Security bloggers.
Who's behind the Homeland Security Digital Library? The U.S. Department of Homeland Security's National Preparedness Directorate, FEMA and the Naval Postgraduate School Center for Homeland Defense and Security. As "the nation's premier collection of homeland security policy and strategy related documents," it's definitely a key destination for anyone doing national security research. But we think it's especially cool that the librarians here have created a search tool for the homeland security blogosphere. We can only assume that they've focused on blogs with worthwhile content rather than...well, screed, but a list of the blogs being searched would be helpful here.
LibWorm is intended to be a search engine, a professional development tool, and a current awareness tool for people who work in libraries or care about libraries.
Do you have the time to read more than a thousand librarian-oriented blogs...and would you want to, even if you did? LibWorm allows you search the archives of more than 1,500 library/librarian-oriented RSS feeds. Radio buttons facilitate and/or Boolean options as well as phrase searching.
Not finding what you need here? Try LISZEN, a Google co-op engine where you can search 750+ library blogs and maybe get different results.
Omgili is a crawler based, vertical search engine that scans millions of online discussions worldwide in over 100,000 boards, forums and other discussion based resources. Omgili knows to analyze and differentiate between discussion entities such as topic, title, replies and discussion date.
A tag cloud at the bottom of the page shows "hot topics" of the moment, or you can click on the Buzzzz link at the top to see popular videos, headlines, movies and products. Also on this page -- a nifty little tool called Omgili Graphs which allows you to pick any three keywords and compare their "online buzz" over the past three days.
+ Twitter Search. Until this past summer, this was a standalone search tool called Summize. Personally, I've never found Twitter useful enough to actually join, but I'm not above mining its content for trends, etc., when appropriate. Plus, you can save your search as an RSS feed if you're interested in following a topic at a microblogging level, which could be useful for marketers, advertisers...politicians, etc. The advanced search interface allows you to refine your search in many different ways -- i.e., by people, by geography, by posts containing links, etc. But even the basic keyword search form supports a wide variety of search operators.
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