LISNews: Librarian News

Bing has an image that shows on the main page. Each day it changes. If you think it is more professional to run a search engine that does not have an image displayed here is a link to Bing that does not include the image.

If you had not seen Bing before and want to see what it looks like with the image you can see that here.

Legal Informatics Blog has a Summary of WolframAlpha & Legal Research

For the summary click the link above.

Be prepared to read the phrase "seems unable to" several times.

Stephen Wolfram (New Kind of Science, Mathematica, etc.) is releasing a new semantic search engine that "can pop out an answer to pretty much any kind of factual question that you might pose to a scientist, economist, banker, or other kind of expert...". Link to story in h+ Magazine by Rudy Rucker.

OPPORTUNITIES for social networking abound on the Internet, but not when it comes to one standard job: using a browser and search engine to comb the Web for information. That task is still typically done solo, because browser displays and search procedures have traditionally been designed for a single user.

Now tools are being developed by Microsoft and other companies that let people at different computers search as a team, dividing responsibilities and pooling results and recommendations in a shared Web space on the browser display as they plan a family vacation, for instance, or research a medical problem.

Full story here.

Also in article: SearchTogether, by contrast, actively supports a group search, said Michael Twidale, an associate professor at the graduate school of library and information science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who studies people’s strategies for conducting research jointly.

“SearchTogether addresses a real need,” he said. “People searching for information often want to interact with other people. But most of our information retrieval systems fail to recognize this.”