Phil Bradley trawls the internet to find the answers to this months' readers' queries.
Q Can you suggest a good medical search engine for me to use please?
A You haven’t said if you are keen on material for professionals or for laypeople to use themselves, so I’ll try and cover both. If you want a simple search engine to provide you with basic advice as a layperson I’d suggest NetDoctor (www.netdoctor.co.uk/) which gives you lots of useful information on a wide range of maladies. It also has a good encyclopedia, services, discussion forum and support. If you’re after something a little more detailed I’d be inclined to try OmniMedicalSearch (http://omnimedicalsearch.com/) which is a multisearch engine, covering more than a dozen authoritative search engines, news, images and Web2 (government, academic and .org sites).
Q I’ve heard about this ‘Google Earth’ application, but have not tried it out. Have you, and if so, what do you think of it?
A Google Earth is quite simply amazing! It’s satellite images of the Earth and, while you can’t zoom in very far in all places, some have been scanned at a very high resolution indeed – it’s possible to see individual cars in London, or stones on the Pyramids for example. Moreover, people have been using it in conjunction with other imaging systems such as Flickr so you can see photographs that people have taken of individual places. It’s entirely free, though you do need to download it and it really needs a broadband connection; I did try it on dial-up but it was so slow as to be unusable. I’ve actually written a short article on Google Earth (www.philb.com/googleearth.htm) and would strongly advise trying it out. Be warned though – an undocumented feature is that when you use it, time seems to go very quickly indeed – I spent 10 minutes wandering around the world and when I surfaced again more than two hours had passed.
Q A friend of mine has a birthday coming up shortly and I wanted to be able to present her with a list of facts; I’ve already done the ‘this day in history’ side of things – can you suggest anything else?
A There’s a fun site called The Birthday Calculator (www.paulsadowski.com/birthday.asp). You simply type in the birthday and it will tell you things such as how many weeks or hours old you (or your friend) are (I’m 1,452,510,951 seconds old – I’ll leave you to work out the maths), birth stones, birth trees and other such oddities. It’s terribly depressing news though, so I hope your friend has a good sense of humour!
Q I’m trying to put together a small display of library/librarian-related humour – pictures and cartoons for example. I’ve found a few examples, but I’m looking for more. Do you have any ideas?
A I recently joined Flickr (www.flickr.com) which is a photograph-sharing site and was browsing around and came across a section on library humour (www.flickr.com/photos/library_mistress/sets/717735/) which seems to have the sort of thing that you’re after.
Site of the month
My site of the month is the BBC ‘People’s War’ (www.bbc.co.uk/dna/ww2/). It’s a site which is encouraging people to add their own memories of WWII, as well as offering research opportunities and materials for teachers. It’s going to be archived in January 2006, so if you have friends or relations who regale you with their wartime experiences, get them to write them down and send them in before it’s too late!
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Phil Bradley is an internet consultant, trainer, web designer and author. Visit www.philb.com for free information on internet introductions, search engine articles, web design tips and a host of other free information. New: 3rd edn of The Advanced Internet Searcher’s Handbook is now available! If you have any questions about the internet send an email to philb@philb.com with the subject header ‘column query’.
Updated: 07 November 2005