Phil Bradley trawls the net for answers to readers’ queries.
Q Can you suggest a way in which I can provide a list of links for my library users which is easy to use and, more importantly, to maintain?
A I’d consider creating a search engine. Plenty of organisations offer them, such as Google custom search engine (www.google.com/cse), Rollyo (www.rollyo.com) or the Eurekster swicki (www.eurekster.com/). All you have to do is register (for free), decide on the name of the search engine that you want to create, list the sites that you want searched and then use it! If you want you can just point users to the URL or you can embed the code on to an existing web page. You can edit the search engine as often as you like, and create as many as you need. You can check out a couple of mine at http://tinyurl.com/2dztw5 (a Web 2.0 resources search engine) and http://tinyurl.com/yso9oy (a search engine for finding UK-based information).
Q Is there a search engine that will let me search for a word if I don’t know exactly how it is spelled?
A Of course there is the usual ‘Did you mean…?’ option that you get with an engine like Google for example, and that’s all well and good if you’ve got fairly close to the spelling, but there are times when even Google can’t come up with anything. I’d suggest taking a look at Exalead (www.exalead.com), which has both an approximate spelling and phonetic spelling option available in the advanced search page.
Q Is there an easy way of collecting all the web addresses on a page?
A There are lots of these tools available, but most of them are commercial. A search for ‘link extractor’ will find a lot of them. However, an excellent free resource is the Link Extractor (www.webmaster-toolkit.com/link-extractor.shtml) and all you do is give it the URL of the page that you want to extract links from and it will then produce a list of them, arranged alphabetically. It’s a great tool if you want to create a search engine, as mentioned in my earlier answer.
Site of the month
My site of the month this time around is – and I hope that you’ll forgive me for the blatant self-promotion – my own listing of country-based search engines (www.philb.com/countryse.htm). I’ve had this listing for about three years now and decided that it was time to give it a proper overhaul. Consequently I went through and chopped out all the dead wood and added in new resources. There are now more than 4,000 search engines listed, covering more than 220 countries or regions. It includes yellow and white pages (where they exist) and specialised regional engines as well. If you need to find geographical information and you’re having trouble, you might find this worth taking a look at.
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: 04 April 2008