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

2. 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

3. 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

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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. So Let’s Take a Look Numeric Data Services CSE
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

9. 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

10. 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!

11. 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