Pandia Awards 2004 Part 6

Best weblog on searching

Gary Price's Resourceshelf

Yes, we are talking about the same Gary Price that is working for Search Engine Watch. He also has his own weblog, called Resourceshelf, that provides useful information on search engines and information resources.

The daily updates are divided into several sections, like:

• Resources, Reports, Tools, Lists, and Full Text Documents
• Professional Reading Shelf
• Library Catalogs
• Science--Alert Tools
• Consumer Issues--Directories
• Search Briefs

This is, of course, exactly the kind of information librarians and professional researchers are looking for.

The fact that these categories are listed one after the other makes the weblog a little bit hard to navigate, and the site might probably benefit from more clearly delineated sections.

Highly recommended

Tara Calishain, the winner of our award for best book on searching, is also the editor of Researchbuzz, a weblog that was started way before the term "blog" was introduced.

It started out as a newsletter, and you can still get your weekly dose by mail.

Needless to say, there is a lot of useful input here, on search engines, online databases and other information resources.

Look out for Sitelines

Look out for Sitelines -- Ideas about Web Searching, a blog featuring news on search resources.

If this isn't enough, you could also take a look at LISFeeds, a site that gathers library news headlines from 174 library blogs.

Best weblog on search engine marketing

The number of weblogs devoted to search engines and search engine marketing is growing by the day, proving once and for all that the world has discovered the importance of the search engine industry.

Pandia's own list of relevant weblogs, the search engine's own blogs included, now contains more than 30 entires!

An the winner is: Search Engine Journal

Search Engine Journal is a very sober weblog, making it a little bit less informal and less personal than some blogs.

The entries also tend to be a little bit longer, making it look more like a news column than a "proper" blog.

However, this is probably one of its strengths. It brings you all the essential news, as well as more extensive analysis, reviews and "how to" guides.

Search Engine Journal gets the Pandia Award 2004 for best search engine marketing weblog for bringing the facts in a transparent way.

Highly recommended

Andy Beal can be found thinking aloud about search engines and search engine marketing at The Search Engine Lowdown, always a good read.

Another search engine expert that it is worth listening too is John Battelle. His blog contains "thoughts on the intersection of search, media, technology, and more".

Look out for...

As mentioned above Danny Sullivan, Gary Price and Chris Sherman at Search Engine Watch have started their own search engine blog. How can they go wrong?

Pandia's own search engine weblog has -- of course -- not been considered for the blog awards.

Best desktop search tool

2004 saw the birth of a large number of search tools designed to search your own computer.

Given that the search tools in Windows, Office and Outlook are suboptimal to say the least, this new software makes it possible to find documents and emails fast and effectively.

All the major search engines have launched their own free search software ready for download, and you can read more about all of them in our review of desktop search tools.

Copernic gets the award

However, this years winner is not one of the search engine giants, but Copernic, which in our opinion has delivered the best Windows tool for finding files and emails on your own computer.

Copernic Desktop Search searches Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, Acrobat PDFs, Outlook emails, and all popular music, picture and video formats. Copernic also searches your browser history, favorites, and contacts.

In order to find the information you are looking for, Copernic will build a separate database in the background -- while you are working. New files are added to the database as soon as you have saved them on your hard disk.

Copernic has a simple and easy to understand interface. By using pull-down menus you can actually build quite advanced search queries. That being said, Copernic also supports Boolean search terms (AND, OR, NOT), nested searches (use of parentheses) and fixed keyword phrases (use of quotation marks).

Copernic Desktop Search gets the price for its easy to understand interface and its fast and inobtrusive indexing.

Highly recommended

If you prefer a more traditional web browser based interface to your PC searchers, Google's desktop search tool is the answer. If you know how to search the Web using Google, you also know how to use Google Desktop Search.

The End

We congratulate all the winners and thank you all for showing up!

The Pandia Award winners for 2005 will be announced early next year. Do not hesitate to nominate candidates, or send us books or software for reviews.