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The new invisible Web: on searching wikis and tweets and blogs and more
Face it. We are faced with a new invisible Web. These days, when we search, we miss so much of the stuff that appears in new Web formats. the Web 2.0 stuff.
For years I told my students that searching Google alone, they missed a huge part of the invisible web that was reachable through databases and through valuable portals (American Memory and Oyez, for instance), best searched with their own interfaces.
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I’ve told them that they have a wide assortment of search tools in their toolkit, and that when they searched Google, they might also mosey over to Google Directory, Google Books, Google Scholar, and Google News Timeline
I realize now that I was talking about an old invisible Web.
We have a new relatively invisible web.
Wikis are now an increasingly serious part our webspace. Because they are webpages, they do appear on the results lists of traditional search tools (Wikipedia always makes it towards the top).
But independent wikis get buried in long lists of results, unless you remember to use search terms like wiki or brands like wikispaces.com or pbwiki.com to your search.
Why search wikis? Wikis contain conference content, collaboratively built professional content, pathfinders, archived student work, archived professional work, media, tutorials, book reviews, and more. Wikis are where I am doing much of my own newer work and I suspect that is true of others.
Happily we have new tools to search this wikispace exclusively.
- Wiki.com searches wikispace and offers searchers the opportunity to search: all wikis, wikipedia only, indie wikis only, or encyclopedias only.
- Google Wiki Search (a customized Google search developed by Rich Hoeg)
My students are just beginning to tap Twitter for identifying experts and to explore the dialogue in their areas of interest. A variety of search tools now allow them to search Tweets and to search for experts with whom to network:
- SearchTwitter
- TweetScan
- Mailana (Network Twitter maps and for searching people who talk about . . .)
- Twitterment
- Tweefind (returns results by rank)
To find people to follow:
- Twellow (people search, a Twitter Yellow pages)
- Twitter WhoShouldIFollow
- Twitter Mosaic (creates a mosaic of followers)
- Mr Tweet Follow Mr Tweet and he will recommend people you should be following
- Mailana (Network Twitter maps and for searching people who talk about . . .)
And then we have blogs. At their best, blog posts may be the new interview, the new source of primary sources. In addition to having students subscribe to RSS feeds–that’s a bit of a commitment–we can help them search blogspace for blog posts or to discover those bloggers who share their interests, those who blog about the subjects they study.
Technorati Google Blog Search Internet Public Library Blogs Bloglines Blogdigger BlogPulse
And then we have video. I’ve been trying to keep up with those tools on a video pathfinder page.
I am sure I missed some of the best of the new search tools. Please feel free to add them to my wikis and in your comments!
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About Joyce Valenza
Joyce is an Assistant Professor of Teaching at Rutgers University School of Information and Communication, a technology writer, speaker, blogger and learner. Follow her on Twitter: @joycevalenza
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