Wednesday, May 06, 2009

A clean approach

I should highlight the NorthernLight search project - a way of avoiding the ever more cluttered findings of Google.
Every time I search for specialised data (that might be the slightest bit ambiguous), the first 10 results are commercial ads. While Google might be king amongst consumers, it's dropping the towel for research purposes, casual or professional.

Go instead to http://www.nlsearch.com/home.php, NorthernLight's online search initiative.
While it may not look simple or neat, it gets the job done in a variety of ways. And it avoids news sources that are purely commercial in nature. How it deals with the anamorphic category of "blogs" remains to be seen.

A truly great thing: through registration, you get to set up and save searches. These may in turn be triggered as alerts, ie. run at given intervals. This alert may be subscribed to as an RSS feed. This way, using more or less advanced search strings, you can actually create your own news feeds. I just created one for ""Virtual reality" and 3D", for instance.