New finding: "Search engines are sources of learning"

The summary of work by Penn State researcher Bernard J. Jannsen, et al. is here.

The article, "Using the Taxonomy of Cognitive Learning to Model Online Searching," appears in Information Processing and Management, 45 (2009): 643-663. You can view it via Citation Linker.

Zoetrope: looking backward on the Internet

is about to take a great leap forward!

View the video

The MIT Technology Review has an interesting article on this soon-to-be-released software as well.

Google Tips and Tricks

We all know about site limits in Google, but here are a few more interesting ways to refine a search. The numrange option -- if it works consistently -- would be a great addition to the searching repertoire, given the frequency with which we need to apply date restrictions to queries, even on the Web.

The fullest list of options, as this author points out, is available from Google's own "search features" page.

Making PDF Text Searchable

You can use Adobe Acrobat to recognize and search text in previously scanned documents that have already been converted to PDF.
Directions:
1. Open the scanned PDF.
2. Choose Document > OCR Text Recognition > Recognize Text Using OCR.
3. In the "Recognize Text" dialog box, select an option under Pages.
(Optional) Click Edit to open the Recognize Text - Settings dialog box, and select the options you want to use. You may want to select a language other than English or specify a rate of downsample (i.e., resolution) higher than 600 dpi.

If you get an error message saying "This page contains renderable text," here's what to do next:
1. Save the PDF file as a TIF image.
2. Open the TIF file in Adobe.
3. Follow directions 1-3 above.