Are we experiencing a general tools decline? What are the most innovative tool concepts since people aggregators made their appearance a few years ago? Here are some tools that have reduced functionality or are gone altogether: The latest version of MS Outlook no longer supports the Social Connector. The last Outlook version that still supports ir, the one from Office 2013, …

If you are searching for Accountants, here is (yet another) new Custom Search Engine to try: http://bit.ly/AccountantsCSE I built it using the semantic mechanism available in Google’s Custom Search Engines, the same as the one I used for Physicians Search Engine in the previous post. Example uses: Tax Dublin CPA Seattle contact “818 000…999” Quickbooks help small business tax “bay area” Let …

If you are searching for healthcare practitioners, here is a new Custom Search Engine to try: http://bit.ly/HealthCareCSE (I built it using the semantic mechanism available in Google’s Custom Search Engines, by only showing search results with a meta-tag, an object from Schema.org called “Physician”.) Here are some usage examples: registered nurse houston texas internist geriatrician toronto speech language pathologist florida …

Those of us who save Google searches usually keep them in a text file vs. an MS Word file, to avoid issues caused by auto-formatting. (By the way, if you haven’t noticed, Google is processing “curly quotation marks” all right now, in the same way as straight quotation marks; but if a minus is converted to a dash, your strings will …

  The first edition of the e-Book “300 Best Boolean Strings” is ready and starting to ship!!! (“Shipping” electronically, of course.) The format is PDF where you can click on links to reproduce searches. Writing it took much more work than I had expected. Verifying the exact syntax rules down to every detail, selecting the material, re-running all the search strings, and formatting was a lot of effort. I wouldn’t …

Thanks everyone for participating in the year-end Boolean Sourcing contest! The prize is the 300 Best Boolean Strings e-Book  that is being released two weeks from now. Sourcing is a global discipline! We had truly international participation this time, with contestants coming from the United States, the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, Singapore, Malaysia, India, Russia, Switzerland, Romania, Hungary, Philippines, and …

It never gets boring in our profession! Ways to search online change all the time. Here’s a quick outline of some changes that happened this year in searching on the four major Social Networks – LinkedIn, Twitter, Google-Plus, and Facebook. On LinkedIn, changes usually appear unannounced; overnight we are switched to new UI and different (usually, more restricted) ways to search. To create even more confusion, …

It has been seven years since the first Boolean Sourcing Contest (won by Andrea Mitchell). The ways search engines respond to queries have shifted since then. Boolean Search syntax has changed, but only sightly. However: 1) Google has become smarter, interpreting searches and looking for synonyms. 2) The amount of indexed data on the Internet has grown many times. It has become harder to control Googling outcome. Sometimes it feels …

If you are a Recruiter and have listed your job openings within your LinkedIn profile, chances are, sometimes you receive messages offering a job as a JavaScript programmer or a SAP consultant. Annoying! That happens because you have those keywords on the profile; someone found you in search and forgot to review your profile. It’s NOT a good practice sending messaging to people who are not qualified. However, they …