From crispen@INTERNIC.NET Thu Nov 13 23:48:09 1997
Date: Thu, 13 Nov 1997 14:35:47 -0500
From: crispen@INTERNIC.NET
Reply-To: TOURBUS-Request@LISTSERV.AOL.COM
To: TOURBUS@LISTSERV.AOL.COM
Subject: TOURBUS -- 13 NOVEMBER 1997 -- NORTHERN LIGHT
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TODAY'S TOURBUS STOP(S): NORTHERN LIGHT
TODAY'S ADDRESS: http://www.nlsearch.com/
Howdy, y'all!
I "oopsied" again. Last week, I told you that if you are looking for a
pretty good site to find the latest news about the Alfred P. Murrah Federal
Building bombing and its related trials, check out KWTV's bombing page at
http://www.kwtv.com/news/bombing/bombingpage.html
That address should be "htm" not "html" (drop the letter "l" off of the end
of the address and it should work). Sorry about that. :)
Anyway, I want to thank Laura Strong (see below) and the kind folks at
Automation Consulting and Supply, Inc., (see the bus logo above) for their
support of this week's TOURBUS post. Make sure that you stop by and thank
them for keeping our little bus of Internet happiness on the road!
+----------- DESIGN YOUR OWN WEBSITE, QUICKLY & EASILY! ------------+
Super 60-Minute Video walks you through every step.
$39.95 + 3.50 S&H to: Laura M. Strong, Librarian
PO Box 7041, Grand Rapids, MI 49510 USA. mailto:lstrong@juno.com
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
NORTHERN LIGHT
--------------
By now, I'd be willing to bet that most of you have used the Internet's
"magnificent seven" search engines at least once:
- Alta Vista ;
- Excite ;
- HotBot ;
- InfoSeek ;
- Lycos ;
- WebCrawler ; and
- Yahoo! .
And if you have been on the bus for a while, you have probably also used:
- Dogpile , which we visited on 24 July
1997 and on 27 March 1997 (and which is _STILL_ my favorite
search engine);
- Inference Find , which we
visited on 29 May 1997;
- MetaCrawler , which we visited on
11 April 1996; and
- Metafind , which we visited on 11
September 1997.
That's a pretty cool little list of search engines, isn't it? By the way,
you can find the TOURBUS articles about Dogpile, Inference Find,
MetaCrawler, and Metafind in the TOURBUS archives at
.
Anyway, thanks to a suggestion made by Sally Arrivee, the Head Reference
Librarian at the Madison Heights Public Library in Michigan, I think we
need to add another search engine to our list. The new search engine is
called "Northern Light" and it can be found on the Web at
http://www.nlsearch.com/
Like most search engines, Northern Light shows you the 25 strongest hits
for your search term(s). What makes Northern Light so special is that,
much like Metafind and Inference Find, it also clusters the rest of its
hits into something called "Custom Search Folders." These Custom Search
Folders appear on the left-hand side of the screen after you run your
search.
If you don't see what you are looking for in Northern Light's list of the
25 strongest hits, you can click on a Custom Search Folder that best fits
what you are looking for. There are 4 types of Custom Search Folders:
- Subject (e.g., hypertension, baseball, camping, expert systems)
- Type (e.g., press releases, product reviews, maps, resumes)
- Source (e.g., commercial web sites, personal pages, magazines)
- Language (e.g., English, German, French, Spanish).
If, for example, you do a search for the keyword "squirrel" (and I just
want to add that Alabama's squirrels have been out in full force recently),
you'll get a page that contains both the 25 strongest hits for the word
"squirrel" as well as links to the following Custom Search Folders:
Commercial sites
Personal pages
www.squirrel.com.au
Bird feeders
Mathematical puzzles
Shrubs
web.wt.net
Government sites
Genetics
www.cdc.com
Reproduction
all others ...
By automatically clustering the remaining hits into these Custom Search
Folders, Northern Light helps you easily avoid going down the wrong path
when searching for a hard-to-find search term. By the way, these Custom
Search Folders are really that: CUSTOM. Every time you conduct a search
with Northern Light, it creates a new set of Custom Search Folders based on
your search term(s).
Northern Light also lets you search through their "Special Collection," a
collection of over 1 million articles from over 1,800 journals, books,
magazines, databases, and newswires, most of which simply are not available
anywhere else on the Web (think of it as the online mini equivalent of
LEXIS-NEXIS). Unfortunately, the articles in Northern Light's Special
Collection are not free. The price of the "premium" content -- those
articles not available anywhere else on the Web -- ranges from zero to four
dollars (US) per article, with the average article costing about US$1.00.
Granted, it would nice if these articles were free ("free," of course, is
my favorite word), but Northern Light's "premium" content does give you
access to a world of accurate -- and, most importantly, peer-reviewed or
editor-approved -- information that usually can't be found anywhere else.
I guess it is not all that unreasonable to have to cough up a buck or two
from time to time for that (but I'd probably only do it when I had a paper
or report to write and I couldn't find any free content elsewhere on the
Internet that was accurate enough for me).
Still, you don't have to use Northern Light's Special Collection at all if
you don't want to. Northern Light is a completely free search engine, and
its use of clustering ("Custom Search Folders") really does help you weed
out search categories that do not match what you are looking for. All in
all, Northern Light is a really useful tool. :)
TODAY'S TOURBUS STOP(S): NORTHERN LIGHT
TODAY'S ADDRESS: http://www.nlsearch.com/
--------------------------------
TODAY'S SOUTHERN WORD OF THE DAY
--------------------------------
SHAUR (noun). A compartment for vertical bathing..
Usage: "Bubba, you STINK ... go take a shaur!"
(Special thanks to Rachel Wilder for today's wurd)
YOU CAN FIND ALL OF THE OLD SOUTHERN WORDS OF THE DAY ON THE _NEW_ SOUTHERN
WORD HOMEPAGE AT http://www.brigadoon.com/~crispen/word.html
=--------------------------------------------------------------------=
For info on my book "Atlas for the Information Superhighway"
Visit http://www.brigadoon.com/~crispen/atlas.html
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=====================================================================
.~~~. ))
(\__/) .' ) )) Patrick Douglas Crispen
/o o \/ .~ Network Solutions Inc. / The InterNIC
{o_, \ { Business E-mail: crispen@internic.net
/ , , ) \ Personal E-mail: crispen@brigadoon.com
`~ '-' \ } )) http://www.brigadoon.com/~crispen/
_( ( )_.'
'---..{____} Warning: squirrels.
