Searching for Data: Powered by Google Paul H. Bern Numeric Data Services Librarian Syracuse University 2007 IASSIST Conference Montreal, Canada

Searching for Data and Statistics Is rather difficult, especially for the novice Various sites to make it easier: ICPSR, ESDL, DISC, etc. Could even use some social bookmarking sites Or even create your own database of sites/data sets

Very Useful but… Require a great deal of maintenance Included sites change URLs, add/drop pages Each site must be annotated for searching Requires more than basic knowledge of programming Searching can still be difficult User has to know it exists

Google and Yahoo, etc. Well known, easy to use No maintenance Can return many results that have nothing to do with the topic

What we need is: A way to return many results, but only from relevant sites It has to be something the novice can use with little or no help It has to be easy to set up and maintain

Google Custom Search Engine Essentially, a CSE is a way of telling Google “search only these sites” Up to 5,000 of them to be exact Relatively easy to set up and maintain Can be done entirely from web forms Can have several people contribute to it Can link or nest several CSEs Arranged topically Way to get around 5,000 site limit

Some Downsides: Using the more advanced features can be complicated It is still a “Google” search, so more popular rather than more appropriate pages may come to the top At present, it’s still in Beta, so they make changes and things break from time to time

So Let’s Take a Look Numeric Data Services CSE http://libsites.syr.edu/mgi/google/iassist2007.html Can host on Google’s site or your own Hosting on your own allows more customization May have to highly customize depending on what you do Hosting on Google’s is easier

What You Need to Start: http://www.google.com/coop/cse/overview A Google account – it’s free A list of sites to include Labeled would be good A basic idea of how you want to set up the refinements

Working with Annotations An annotation is a URL Can be of a standard format or it can include wildcard character to include only parts of certain domains Easiest to generate a tab-separated file and upload Be sure it is in the proper format Use Google Marker bookmark to add new sites Download again in XML to use some of the advanced features and as a backup Gotcha: when you download your sites, ALL sites associated with your account will be downloaded, not just those for a particular CSE!

Working With Refinements Refinements can either redirect the user to another search engine (Google or otherwise) or can be used to modify the search results Include/exclude only sites with a specific label Give a “Boost” labeled sites so they move up in the results list Only good if you search entire web Inconsistent results You can have up to 16 refinements in each CSE