Karen Blakeman

• BSc, DipInfSc
• RBA Information Services

Karen Blakeman laments the dumbing down of the search functionality of Google. Are its days as a research tool over? She identifies the “useless and irrelevant” pursuit of revenue generating mobile personalisation options as the culprit and rally cries that now is the time to consider alternative search tools. Keywords: Information Retrieval, Searc...

Karen Blakeman laments the dumbing down of the search functionality of Google. Are its days as a research tool over? She identifies the “useless and irrelevant” pursuit of revenue generating mobile personalisation options as the culprit and rally cries that now is the time to consider alternative search tools.

Bibliometrics are a range of techniques and quantitative measures that provide an analysis of written publications such as books and articles, and which assess the impact of research outputs. They are commonly applied to individual authors in the form of citation metrics but can also be used to assess the influence of research groups or even entire...

Karen Blakeman argues that, while knowledge of alternative search tools is vital, it is no longer sufficient to have advanced search expertise; that information professionals require savvy appraisal skills and a better understanding of how search outputs are generated and manipulated. She also raises the issue of the “right to be forgotten” and the...

Google asserts that they are never going to be a ‘conventional company’, nor have any intention of becoming one. Karen Blakeman offers her take on the all-singing, all-dancing, all-embracing Alphabet, pondering over the impact it may or may not have on the quality of search technologies going forwards. She follows up with practical outcomes from re...

Although Google gives “good enough” results most of the time, there are occasions when it is the worst possible tool for researching a project. There really are alternative tools and strategies that can give better results. The recent UKeiG essential non-Google search tools workshop, hosted by Manchester University Library on the 9th September 2015...

Just when you think you've worked out how Google works it all changes, not just the commands but the whole way Google searches and displays results. Semantic search, artificial intelligence, extreme personalisation and quick answers that save you the bother of having to read any further are just the beginning. Add a dash of EU legislation and thing...

The Google alternatives workshop is a regular on the UKeiG training calendar. We don’t guarantee that you will be weaned off Google by the end of the day but we do try and highlight other search engines and tools that might be better for certain types of information. At the end of the workshops the participants pull together a list of Top Tips. The...

The Internet and the World Wide Web has had a major impact on the accessibility of research information. The move towards open access and development of institutional repositories has resulted in increasing amounts of information being made available free of charge. Many of these resources are not included in conventional subscription databases and...

Information Literacy Beyond Library 2.0 - edited by Peter Godwin March 2012

The big three web search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo!, are allowing users to locate more relevant images that can accompany their blogs, with the appropriate licensing options. Google has introduced Bing-style results for its image search in which results are crammed in side by side to neatly fill the rows. Clicking through on an image,...

Karen Blakeman's company, RBA Information Services, provides training and consultancy on the use of the Internet for business, social and collaborative web tools and on accessing and managing information resources. Twitter at http://twitter.com/karenblakmen and Facebook at www.facebook.com/karenblakeman

Web search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo! have acquired a huge amount of data about us and our search behavior, both en masse and as individuals. Many of these search tools track how we search and what we click on, an information that is used to build up a profile of us as individual searchers and to provide a personalized service. Google...

Google has institutionalized a left-hand navigational bar to declutter results by suggesting additional search facets and has discontinued the Show options link. Several options are self-explanatory apart from Updates, which is a Twitter search, and Wonder Wheel that is a clustering and visualization tool. BackupMyTweets creates a downloadable file...

Some of the significant tools that are available to address the changes being introduced in webpages. There are a large number of tools that will monitor a webpage and notify a user of changes by email or RSS. Google Reader has an option that will allow users to track changes to most webpages by logging in to Google, opening Google Reader, and clic...

Some of the significant changes being introduced in the field of online searching in 2009 are discussed. It has been observed that the search engines continually update their databases and indexes with new and updated pages. These changes are introduced when the search engine decides to experiment with ranking algorithms and display options. The co...

The phenomenal success of the World Wide Web has tended to be marred by Web developers’ tendency to ignore the needs and concerns of users regarding the design, layout and functioning of Web sites. Too many Web sites are irritating to look at or difficult to navigate, despite the work of Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to se...

This paper is aimed at helping telecom executives understand and meet the challenges faced by multinational corporations operating in a rapidly changing global environment. Results from a survey of over 100 of the largest US multinational corporations ...

The end of the Cold War and the fall of communist regimes in Eastern Europe has had a profound effect on the political and economic life in those countries. The changes have resulted in cuts in defence spending in both Western and Eastern Europe. The aim of this search was to find out how the defence industry in Eastern Europe is adapting to the ne...

This is a review of the book mentioned in the title. Unfortunately I no longer have a digital or paper copy of the review that I can upload or share with others.

Within some areas of the pharmaceutical industry, a view persists that certain types of software packages are unique to marketing/sales departments and that there are other quite different systems peculiar to medical departments. Spreadsheets are associated with data processing by marketing personnel while it is supposed that a medical department u...

The selection and implementation of an information retri eval software package in a small pharmaceutical information unit is described. Its initial application to the unit's product complaints system is outlined together with other current and proposed developments. These include a database of the slide collection and an index of information source...