ResearchBuzz

Chocolate-covered Altoids to SEO Roundtable for pointing to the new options in Google’s advanced search. The advanced search page now allows you to search pages added in the last 24 hours and 2 months, in addition to the 1, 3, 6, and 12 months.

And of course I can’t leave that alone. If you want to do any more you can hack the results URL. The switch for specifying how recently you want to search the index is &as_qdr= . The variables are d (day), w (week), m (month) and y (year). So if you ran a search and added &as_qdr=d to the end, you’d get only results from those pages added to the Google index in the last 24 hours.

If you want to search multiple days, weeks, months, etc, add a number after the variable. Searching 2 days is &as_qdr=d2. Searching 3 weeks is &as_qdr=w3, and so on. Now when you start goofing around with the result URLs, odd things can happen. I found there was tremendous difference between just one day and two days’ indexing. I also found that for one search I did, a search for results indexed anytime (the search was cow) actually produced fewer results than a search for pages found/indexed in the past year.

One more thing about the advanced search page: the file format search now includes Google Earth files in addition to the Microsoft Office, Rich Text Format, etc files.

One day many decades from now when I am six zillion years old, all my great-great-great-grandchildren (or grandrobots, I shall not be prejudiced) will cluster around my knees and say, “Granny, tell us about the old days when you actually installed software on your computer.”

I find myself using online applications more and more — the lines are starting to get blurry. But places like Simple Spark ( http://simplespark.com/ ) really bring it home to you the variety of stuff that’s available online (or occasionally on-phone — there are some iPhone apps on here.)

The site is currently tracking over 5300 applications. You can browse these by most recent, by type (the aforementioned iPhone category, as well as Wii or more general mobile apps) or by category of application. You can also do a keyword search. At this writing applications on the front page include an experimental site to share meteorological data, a moon phase app for the iPhone, and an URL-shortener service. All over the map here.

I decided to do a keyword search for calendar. Simple Spark found 114 apps. (Yikes.) Besides the usual suspects like Google Calendar, there were a variety of results from services as general as RSSCalendar and Calendar to specific as Ovulation Calendar (should be self-explanatory) to an application that hooks Twitter and Google Calendar together, to FourthBook (Web-based church management system.)

Detail pages include an overview, several screenshots, and a link to visit the site. There’s also a place for reviews (though nothing I looked at actually had reviews) and a “related items” list. If you register, you can save apps to your own Simple Spark My Apps (but you do not have to register to search or browse the site.)

Web apps are getting to be like Web sites — it’s less and less possible to track what’s available. High time for a directory. Lots to see here but a huge timesink.

This post came from ResearchBuzz, a site with news and information about online data collections. Visit us at ResearchBuzz.com .

Back in April I wrote about a site that hosted video lectures related to science and computing. There’s a new one available, launched yesterday in alpha. This one is called SciVee and is a collaboration between the National Science Foundation and the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego. You can visit it at http://www.scivee.tv . The front page looks a bit like YouTube, with featured videos, tags, and a search box. Only instead of a video like, “Cat falls off table,” it’s “Structural Evolution of the Protein Kinase–Like Superfamily.”

Content on this site is divided into two types: Pubcasts (videos corresponding to peer-reviewed publications) and Videos (all scientific videos not belonging to a paper.) You can search or browse through a tag cloud, or review one of the many channels. (The channels are all called PLoS something-or-other; the PLoS stands for Public Library of Science.)

I picked the tag animals. I got three results, which listed a screenshot, title, and description. The descriptions are thorough but how useful they are to you depends on how much science you know. (”The protein kinase family is large and important, but it is only one family in a larger superfamily of homologous kinases that phosphorylate a variety of substrates and play important roles in all three superkingdoms of life.”)

Click on the title of the video and you’ll get a page for it. How that page looks depends on what you’re viewing. If you’re viewing a pubcast — a video that is associated with a peer-reviewed publication — you’ll get information about the paper in large format (with a link to the original paper) while the video will be a bit smaller (but still viewable, and you do have the option to enlarge it). In a plain video which is not associated with a peer-reviewed publication, the video will take center stage and be much larger. Both types of content have space for ratings, comments, and tags.

The videos varied a lot by quality. The ones that weren’t pubcasts tended to be a bit more “slick”. One or two of the pubcasts were a bit hard to hear (”Ten Simple Rules for Getting Published”) but for the most part they were easy to watch and hear. (This doesn’t mean it was easy to understand the content — most of this stuff is way over my head.)

You can register on this site, but you’re able to watch videos without registering. (You’ll have to register to provide comments and ratings for videos.) If you’re interested in uploading your own science-related content, be sure to read the site’s FAQ.

This post came from ResearchBuzz, a site with news and information about online data collections. Visit us at ResearchBuzz.com .