Search Computing Blog

Do you want to make sense of messy data? Google Refine may prove to be the right tool! It allows for cleaning up messy data, transforming it from one format into another, extending it with web services, and linking it to databases like Freebase.

It takes only 8 minutes to watch the following introductory video!

Do you want to learn more? The next video explains how to transform a wikipage like this into a table by isolating rows of text  using a filter and transforming them in one shot using a command.

If you still have time to spent in learning about Google Refine, you may watch the following video. It explains how to augment a dataset with external data. In particular, it shows

• how to obtain latitude and longitude of an address by invoking Google Geocoding Web Service and parsing/filtering the JSON results;
• how to group multiple text filed in multiple languages by language using Google Language Detection Tool;
• how to link text fields to freebase IDs using free based reconciliation service; and
• how to augment your data set with freebase data.

As many other Web 2.0 applications Mendeley also has Web API. Check out Read Meter by Dario Taraborelli for a great mash-up built on them.

Is developing mash-ups with Web 2.0 really much easier than using Semantic Web technologies? For instance, given a music style as an input, what it takes to retrieve data from online music archives (MusicBrainz, MusicBrainz D2R Server, MusicMoz) and event databases (EVDB)? What to merge them and to let the users explore the results? Are Semantic Web technologies up to this Web 2.0 challenge? This half-day tutorial shows how to realize a Semantic Web Application we named Music Event Explorer or shortly meex (try it!).

Below you can pre-view the new look of Google. Click to enlarge

Google's new look

Read more: http://www.taranfx.com/blog/googles-new-design-with-caffeine

Do you like to try it yourself? read out how http://www.taranfx.com/blog/try-new-google-search-caffeine

Image via Wikipedia

The IEEE Technical Committee on Data Engineering has just published a Special Issue of its Bulletin on “New Avenues in Search”.

Contents

Letters

• Letter from the Editor-in-Chief, David Lomet
• Letter from the Special Issue Editor, Sihem Amer-Yahia

Papers

• A Characterization of Online Search Behavior, Ravi Kumar and Andrew Tomkins
• Kosmix: Exploring the Deep Web using Taxonomies and Categorization, Anand Rajaraman
• Flexible Querying of Personal Information, Amelie Marian and Wei Wang
• iMeMex: From Search to Information Integration and Back, Jens Dittrich, Marcos Antonio Vaz Salles and Lukas Blunschi
• Challenges, Techniques and Directions in Building XSeek: an XML Search Engine, Ziyang Liu, Peng Sun, Yu Huang, Yichuan Cai and Yi Chen
• Searching Shared Content in Communities with the Data Ring, Serge Abiteboul, Neoklis Polyzotis
• The Social Future of Web Search: Modeling, Exploiting, and Searching Collaboratively Generated Content, Eugene Agichtein, Evgeniy Gabrilovich, and Hongyuan Zha

Google Base is a free service for submiting all kinds of content for Google to host and to make searchable online. It allows content providers to upload structured data to Google, surface it across Google search properties, and syndicate it via apis, gadgets and gadget ads.

Using the Google Base Data API, developers can programmatically access Google Base. Here’s some of the things you can do:

copy right note: The content was cut and paste from http://code.google.com/intl/de-DE/apis/base/ for the only purpose to increase the awarness of Google Base Data API.

Mamma is a “smart” metasearch engine – it’s like using multiple search engines, all at the same time. Founded in 1996, its one of the first and most popular search engines on the web today, with a rich history.

[Source http://www.mamma.com/]

The main goal of Fusion Tables is to make it easier for people to create, manage and share on structured data on the Web. Fusion Tables is a new kind of data management system that focuses on features that enable collaboration. [] In a nutshell, Fusion Tables enables you to upload tabular data (up to 100MB per table) from spreadsheets and CSV files. You can filter and aggregate the data and visualize it in several ways, such as maps and time lines. The system will try to recognize columns that represent geographical locations and suggest appropriate visualizations. To collaborate, you can share a table with a select set of collaborators or make it public. One of the reasons to collaborate is to enable fusing data from multiple tables, which is a simple yet powerful form of data integration. If you have a table about water resources in the countries of the world, and I have data about the incidence of malaria in various countries, we can fuse our data on the country column, and see our data side by side.

Read more here http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/06/google-fusion-tables.html

Check out an application of Fusion Tables here http://www.circleofblue.org/waternews/2009/world/google-brings-water-data-to-life/

The main goal of Fusion Tables is to make it easier for people to create, manage and share on structured data on the Web. Fusion Tables is a new kind of data management system that focuses on features that enable collaboration. [] In a nutshell, Fusion Tables enables you to upload tabular data (up to 100MB per table) from spreadsheets and CSV files. You can filter and aggregate the data and visualize it in several ways, such as maps and time lines. The system will try to recognize columns that represent geographical locations and suggest appropriate visualizations. To collaborate, you can share a table with a select set of collaborators or make it public. One of the reasons to collaborate is to enable fusing data from multiple tables, which is a simple yet powerful form of data integration. If you have a table about water resources in the countries of the world, and I have data about the incidence of malaria in various countries, we can fuse our data on the country column, and see our data side by side.

Read more here http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/06/google-fusion-tables.html

Check out an application of Fusion Tables here http://www.circleofblue.org/waternews/2009/world/google-brings-water-data-to-life/

Hittery.com lets you create a personal search dashboard. You can simply arrange your favorite search engines on one page. Add, remove, drag and drop searchboxes to your liking. Hittery.com provides two types of search engines: custom search engines and normal search engines.

Custom search engines
These are search engines that only show results from carefully selected websites that publish useful and trustworthy content. For example, the custom searchengine “Health” only searches through 75 trusted medical websites. This way, you will not get results from websites that do not add any value. We have selected and checked over 12.000 websites and added them to relevant search engines. Google provides us with the search technology.

Normal search engines
These are all well known searchengines like YouTube, Google, flickr, digg.com, and eBay. But we also provide you with handy search engines for Jobs, Weather, Traffic conditions, Travelguides, News, Facebook, TV Guides and Stock quotes. And many more.

[Source Hittery]

[Website http://www.hittery.com/]

retrievr is an experimental service which lets you search and explore in a selection of Flickr images by drawing a rough sketch. Currently the index contains many of Flickr’s most interesting images.

[Source systemone]

[Website http://labs.systemone.at/retrievr/]