New in the Search Engine world

There has been quite a bit of activity in the search engine world this week.
We'll start off with the Google Calendar
program launched yesterday. On-line calendars are not new to the Internet, and
my first thought yesterday when I signed in and started investigating the beta
launch of Google Calendar was "great,
yet another calendar program...(yawn)", and for the most part my feelings
were accurate.

So far I haven't found anything that is spicy about the beta launch. It's a
calendar. You put appointments in it and is sends your reminders if you desire
them to be sent. One of the features is that you can have the reminders and
notifications sent to your cell phone, which is nice, if your text message service
doesn't cost you a fortune. On the whole, I wasn't fascinated by the experience
at first.

Where Google has always excelled however is in quite understatement. Up to
this point I have been using the Mozilla Calendar program called Sunbird
which has been very good to me. I don't need bells and whistles; I just need
to remember where I want to be today and what I need to get done. The limiting
factor with Sunbird
(or Outlook for that matter), are the published versions of my calendar, so
that the people I am working with, or want to work with, can see what my schedule
is like and request appointments through my calendar program. Outlook allows
this through the MS Exchange server (a costly piece of software to be sure),
but only for those who have access to the Intranet of the company. I'm a freelancer,
and need a bit more availability and much less cost.

True, I can export the calendar to an HTML page and post it on my website.
I personally don't want to do that every day. It's a bit silly, since the people
looking at it can't see live updates or requested blocks of time, nor can they
make basic comments on the events. The Google calendar does have answers to
these options ... but so does the Yahoo calendar and I quit using that one a
while ago.

What Google does bring to the table is a quiet elegance, not really any new
features. The program is very easy to use, and graceful in how it displays the
information. For example, I created three calendars, one for my work, one for
my personal life which I invited a few people to, and one for my "world"
(able to be viewed and searched by anyone). When I sign on with all three calendars
active, the events on each one of them are displayed in a very clean looking
overlap display, so that I can see at a glance where my work time has overlapped
into my personal time. Again, nothing new, but very well done all the same.

The other quality I like a great deal is the easy import/export functions already
active. There is nothing I like less than a program that deals with schedules
and contacts which will not export my data in a format that can be used by other
programs. Not being able to back up my data drives me nuts.

I give the Google Calendar a thumbs up. It is a calendar program, not much
has changed in that area for many years, but they have created a wonderful layout
and a very easy to use interface.

Now, on to the Academic searching topic. Microsoft has released their new beta,
the Windows Live Academic Search, which
is a challenge to Google's Scholar search.
Using these search engines is a bit different than the normal web search. What
you are hoping to find on these search engines are academic papers and reviews.
These are typically found on sites with the .edu or .gov extenstions, though
there are many .org and others which post academic findings.

I searched both for "Body Language" since I'm writing some papers
on that topic, and got good results. The Microsoft results were a bit slim,
but they just started, so I wasn't expecting 21,000 results (like I got on Google).
What I didn't like is that it is slow (very slow) and the display is slow as
well. The search says that it found 488 results to my search, and gives me access
to 20, but I couldn't figure out how to see the other 468 results. After a while
I found that if I gave focus to the results window with my mouse and then used
the Wheel on my mouse I could scroll down to the rest of the listings, but that
seems to be the only way. The little slider on the side only brings you down
to the 19 listing.

I do like the instant abstracts on the right side of the page. That is a time
saver (...if the page wasn't so slow it would be a time saver). Over all I felt
the beta was not quite ready for prime time (which is probably why it is still
in beta).

Last on our list today is the Google
Voice Search which made the news today by getting a patent for voice searching.
The United States Patent and Trademark Office has approved Google's patent application
for a voice assisted search engine. Patent number 7,027,987 is titled "Voice
interface for a search engine" and outlines how Google wants to improve
voice recognition specifically for providing search results. Google (as well
as others) have been working on this for several years. Voice recognition however
is a very tricky item. Gaining the patent has given them an edge in the market,
but they are definitely not ready for prime time in this area either. I believe
the functionality is not far off however. GTalk
is a fantastic voice communication program, it has a very light footprint on
the system running it, and the sound is very clear. So they have that technology
in place. Once they are able to bring the voice recognition up to speed then
they will have everything else they require.

Remember that if you need help with your computer, have specific questions
about search engines or your operating system, our help
forums are available to you.