A few of the more substantial articles that have appeared over the last few days about the Guardian’s total redesign on Monday 12 September:
- City of Sound: Assessing the new Guardian, with brief nod to the avant-garde (aka Grazia, Heat and The Sun)
- Mark Boulton (UK typographic designer): New look Guardian
- NewsDesigner.com: A Guardian in hand
- Media Week: Taylor hopes commercial nous will drive The Guardian forward
- Journalism.co.uk: Jilted Doonesbury fans besiege new Guardian
- Journalism.co.uk: The Guardian: my new favourite pygmy paper
The Guardian itself reports Sales of Guardian leap on day of relaunch. The first Berliner issue gained a massive 40% uplift in sales. This shows a high level of initial interest in sampling the new product. No doubt some of this increase is already falling away with time. It will take some weeks to more accurately assess the true level of increased sales. One of my local newsagents reports increased buying of The Guardian amongst young people.
I have bought it every day so far - somehow I cannot resist it. I love the feel of the product - but do not have much time to properly read it through. 
My opinion of it is improving, but I am still not sure about the headline font or (the need for) the mess of pictures on the front page above the masthead. Remember - it’s free to read the online ‘digital Guardian’ for another week or so - right back to the 1st September issue.
Google Scholar, Google’s specialized search engine for finding ’scholarly’ material on the web (using a small subset of its main index) has introduced a broad search by subject option on its Advanced Scholar Search page. Searches can be limited to any combination of the following seven subject areas:
- Biology, Life Sciences, and Environmental Science
- Business, Administration
- Finance, and Economics
- Chemistry and Materials Science
- Engineering, Computer Science, and Mathematics
- Medicine, Pharmacology, and Veterinary Science
- Physics, Astronomy, and Planetary Science
- Social Sciences, Arts, and Humanities
On Google Scholar weblog, which first alerted me to the new search option, points out that the list of subject areas highlights one of Scholar’s drawbacks - it is heavily dominated by the Natural Sciences. As the list above demonstrates, The Arts are confined to only one category: ‘Social Sciences/Arts/Humanities’.
A commenter, who only calls himself ‘Brad’, points out another conclusion to be drawn from the subject area search: scholar is cataloging:
“Google employees are placing resources into subject categories. I doubt very seriously it’s 100% powered by AI. No, this isn’t LC cataloging, but it’s cataloging nonetheless.”
Background
Google Scholar enables web searches specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.
Google has launched Google Blog Search. Google is the first major web search engine to launch a weblog-specific search option (if you don’t count Ask Jeeves who own Bloglines - although Bloglines is primarily a web based ‘feed aggregator’ for monitoring RSS feeds). The size of Google’s Blog Search index is relatively low at around 8.7m weblogs, but this will probably increase over time. It covers all weblogs, not just those published using Google’s own blogging site Blogger. It will be strong competition for existing weblog search sites such as Technorati - up to now considered to be the blog search engine and currently tracking over 17m weblogs - twice Google’s number. There are lots of other weblog search engines, for example: Feedster, BlogPulse, Bloglines, PubSub, Blogdigger, IceRocket, Gigablast, Daypop (which uses a high-quality, but much smaller, index hand-picked by human editors) to list the better know ones.
Technorati, which many consider should be afraid - very afraid - of Google’s move into its territory, says:
“[Google Blog Search] will mark a major milestone for the World Live Web. At Technorati, we have a tremendous amount of respect for the Google team and for everything they’ve done in the world of search. I’m sure that they’ll continue to improve over the coming months, perhaps including tags, recent images and links, zeitgeists, blogger tools, and other types of semistructured data. I’m sure that they’ll also start indexing the full-text of blog posts, not just the partial text found in most blog feeds.”
This translates to: what took you so long and, by the way, don’t forget all the stuff we do that you don’t. As
SearchEngineWatch points out that Google Blog Search indexes only the XML feeds and not the actual HTML weblog text:
“Although Google Blog search focuses primarily on content published to the blogosphere, it’s not a true full-text search across all sources, according to Goldman. This is because some publishers only syndicate excerpts of content via RSS. Google’s blog search indexes all of the content it finds in [RSS] feeds, but does not attempt to access and index the full content available on a publisher’s web server.”
Unusually, the blog search results default sort order in Google is by ‘relevancy’ - although they can also be sorted by date. Most blog search engines default to a date-based sort which would seem to be the most useful order (generally we are looking for ‘breaking news’). As well as the usual standard
Google Search operators, Google Blog Search adds four of its own to help narrow down weblog searches:
- inblogtitle:
- inposttitle:
- inpostauthor:
- blogurl:
ResearchBuzz is impressed:
“Google has an impressive advanced search for their blog search, which Feedster should take a look at. You can search by blog title (special syntax inblogtitle: ) or post title (special syntax inposttitle: ). You can limit your searches to particular URLs. There’s also syntax to limit results by date — either a particular set of dates or a time span (last 6 hours, last 12 hours, etc.) It’s about time that someone took the delineation offered by RSS feeds and made a nice advanced search out of it. I’m sure this is only the beginning.”
To take the example Google gives in its
‘Frequently Asked Questions’ (FAQ), the search query [mandolin inpostauthor:Graham] will find blog items about mandolins written by people named Graham. Two points to note here: (1) the square brackets are
Google’s ‘official’ way of marking the beginning and end of queries - only the text
within the square brackets should be entered - TIP: see them as the borders of the search box; (2) as with standard Google, there should be no space after the full colon of the search operator - as in inpostauthor:Graham.
Google Advanced Blog Search achieves the same search in a more user friendly way - and it is the advanced search options which really set Google Blog Search apart from the rest. Also, according to
Robert Scoble’s Scobleizer weblog Google Blog Search is very fast.
Google Blog Search, like a lot of search engines now, also allows you to subscribe to a ‘feed’ of your weblog search. The feed (often referred to as an ‘RSS feed’) automatically alerts you to new instances appearing which satisfy your search query. You will need to use a ‘feed reader’ - such as the (free) web based Bloglines - to subscribe to the update feed.
It is important to note that other ’scholarly’ search engines exist. Two excellent ones (considered to be superior to Google Scholar by the academic community) are Scirus which searches over 200 million science-specific web pages and OAIster which searches amongst a constantly increasing collection of freely available (and previously difficult-to-access), academically-oriented digital resources. Scirus offers a Scirus-Google test. The Charleston Advisor published a detailed review of Google Scholar [April 2005].
Background
Google Blog Search is Google search technology focused on weblogs (or ‘blogs’). Google is a strong believer in the self-publishing phenomenon represented by blogging, and we hope Blog Search will help our users to explore the blogging universe more effectively, and perhaps inspire many to join the revolution themselves. Whether you’re looking for Harry Potter reviews, political commentary, summer salad recipes or anything else, Blog Search enables you to find out what people are saying on any subject of your choice. Your results include all blogs, not just those published through Blogger; our blog index is continually updated, so you’ll always get the most accurate and up-to-date results; and you can search not just for blogs written in English, but in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese and other languages as well.
Backlinks
Google Scholar Report - could do (much) better [20 June 2005]
New! Google Scholar search for academic material [19 November 2004]
