Research on your Crackberry

By Tom Mighell on May 6, 2004

For those of you who use the RIM device, you know what I’m talking about — it’s addictive, isn’t it? Well, it turns out that LexisNexis is an enabler, now making its content available via the Blackberry wireless platform. The service will soon offer the ability to search results from over 14,000 information sources.…

Spyware on your PC?

By Tom Mighell on May 6, 2004

Posted in Privacy, Security

How often do you check to see if you have spyware residing on your computer? I check once a month, and so far I’ve been pretty lucky — most of the spyware found is limited to tracking cookies we all pick up at various websites. But Earthlink, which has started a free scanning service…

Blawg of the Day

By Tom Mighell on May 5, 2004

Posted in Blogs and Blogging

The folks at the Boley Law Library at Lewis & Clark Law School have started up BoleyBlogs!, sharing the finest in legal research links, news and hints.

Sasser on the loose

By Tom Mighell on May 4, 2004

Posted in Security

A new Internet worm was released this past weekend, and it’s infecting computers at a fast and furious rate. The Sasser worm does notrequire e-mail or user interaction to infect your PC — all it needs is an unprotected Internet connection. So if you’re running Windows 2000 or XP, make sure you have your…

Where loyalty has its drawbacks

By Tom Mighell on May 4, 2004

Posted in Internet Search

A recent study by iProspect on search engine loyalty finds that 56.7 of Internet users use the same search engine when performing research. This, of course, is contrary to the advice that I and others give about using search engines: use a search engine according to the type of search you are conducting. In the…

Pics on View at LOC

By Tom Mighell on May 4, 2004

Posted in Useful Web Sites

The Library of Congress has expanded its online access to photographs and prints in the Prints and Photographs Reading Room. Keep in mind that not all of these photos are in the public domain, and the usual copyright protections will apply.

Searching for Science

By Tom Mighell on May 4, 2004

Posted in Search Engines

I forgot to mention this story when it first came out, but Wired featured an article early last month on Scirus, a science search engine that indexes 167 million scientific web pages for its results. Good to see Scirus is still doing well; I have mentioned the site in both 2002 and 2003. Scirus

Using spam filter technology in your research

By Tom Mighell on May 3, 2004

Posted in Useful Web Sites

Google Alert, no doubt in a move triggered by the debut of Google’s own Google Web Alerts, has announced several new technologies, including SightPoint, which uses Bayesian statistics to rate new search results based on their similarity to results the user has clicked on before.