searching

A simple way to find resources published by universities or academic institutions is to use the Google search. The site parameter can be used to restrict the search to the academic domain, if such a domain is defined in the country you are interested in. Unfortunately not all countries do have an academic top level domain. Canada or Germany for example do not have such a top level domain.

The further development of Google Notebook, a useful tool for collecting, organizing, and sharing of web clippings is terminated (Details). While current users might still have access to the tool as is. This means practically that it is dead. Too bad, it was a very handy tool for the collections of resources during a research process. Does anyone know a good alternative?

Google image search has been great. Now it is possible to search the LIFE Photo Archive for their photos, many of them still unpublished. There are two ways to do so:

Scirus - for scientific information This is a quote from their site: "Scirus is the most comprehensive scientific research tool on the web.

Google did change its advanced search window. They made it a lot easier to use and it looks now much more simplified.  Some search options are minimized and can be expanded if necessary. Well done. Take a look here: Google Advanced Search .




Lets hope the German version will be available soon.

Thanks to OCR (optical character recognition) technologies Google now indexes and makes available to text searches pdf-documents, that have originally been scanned. While these documents in the past appeared to be images with their content (text) hidden in the image, Google now converts them to html text and indexes their content. These are great news for everyone searching for articles in old scanned journals.
See: Official Google Blog: A picture of a thousand words?