I knew it would happen. Google keeps a record of all your searches, as well does A9 (you can even seen them if you create a login - I can still see my searches there from March of 2004!). What you search is not private. Who’s search records are they receiving? Will it be yours?

In court documents, the Bush administration asked a federal judge to force Google to comply with a subpoena for the records, which would reveal the search terms of a broad swath of Google’s visitors.

If you were searching for something illegal, you may be screwed.

Listen to some audio clips of his speeches here.

Audio pieces about Martin Luther King Jr on NPR.

Fight hate and promote tolerance with the resources on Tolerance.org.

MLKR day celebrated on NAACP’s website.

Enjoy!

Why? Because they’re government regulated, no spin allowed. Annual reports are a wealth of information and all incorporated companies have them. You don’t have to be an investor to to care about the kind of information that’s available on an annual report: as a consumer planning to spend a lot of money, as a job hunter, a student conducting a school research project, a news or blog writer researching a story, and even for entertainment (they’re a good read!). An annual report will answer many questions you might have about a corporation. Are they going to be financially capable in the future of providing support for your purchase? Does it look like they may be headed for lay offs or are they growing and if so in what sector?

Why are annual reports better than the company website when it comes to providing information? Because the company website and press releases are market spin. It’s true that the wording in annual reports tries to reflect positively on the company, and often it is used as a defense in market decline, but because it is mandated by the SEC it must adhere to certain rules in order to provide investors information truthfully so that they may be able to balance the risks involved with choosing to invest in the company. In the wake of Enron, Worldcom, Qwest, and others, companies are much more careful about disclosing ‘off balance sheet’ activities, and in comparison to any other freely available information about a company an annual report is a must have.

They kind of information available on an annual report:

1. Potential risks and concerns facing the company’s future that could undermine it’s profitability.
2. Detailed financial information including revenues, expenditures, and investments.
3. Company strategy for the future.

Here are some sample annual reports: Yahoo. General Electric. PepsiCo. General Motors.

Finding an annual report for a particular company is easily accomplished through the world wide web. Often you’ll find it on the ‘investor relations’ portion of the corporate website of what ever company you’re examing (i.e. www.pepsi.com -> www.pepsico.com). Sometimes, as in the case of GE, if you can’t find the annual report in the investor relations portion try the website’s search feature, if it has one, or use or search and search for: ‘annual report’ site:www.ge.com.

Two massively informative federal resources you should be aware of are ERIC and FedStats. These two sites are free for anyone to access without registration.

ERIC is short for Education Resources Information Center and is a database of millions of journal articles and other literature. While the articles it stores are mostly related to topics on education, it doesn’t mean it won�t have something of interest to you. The vast number of articles stored guarantee that you’ll find something relevant to any kind of information you may be interested in. A search for ‘web technology’ (without quotes in search) returned 8,244 results, a search for ‘homeless’ brought up 1,594 results; a location search for New York returned 59,426 results. You can perform full-text searches, meaning the entire article will be searched and available for you to read, cost free.

Similar databases are available only at great cost to libraries, and often only at academic libraries at which you must work or be a student in order to access. Next time you need information for school research, to see what is being written about a topic, or anything else try ERIC.

Fedstats is another amazing informational site provided by the Federal government. Looking for federal statistics on anything whatsoever? Fedstats has the combined statistics of over 100 government agencies right at your finger tips. You can look up stats by agency or by topic. Look up statistics for crime, health, population issues by demographic, poverty rates, employment stats, you name it.

These two sites are indispensable for anyone doing research for school or work and a great reference for the rest of us.

There are few rights we in the library profession hold as dear as that of free speech, and this ruling troubles me deeply. A US appellate court ruled against Yahoo’s attempt to overturn a French court’s ruling that barred it from selling NAZI memorabilia on its website. I’m no fan of NAZI’s, but this ruling is terrible because:

1. As Threadwatch indicated, it may lead to the restriction to free access for other nations citizens to online content.
2. Or worse, in the increasingly global economic climate US companies will not make content accessible universally, including to Americans, when they fear that the content may be barred in other countries.

I don’t understand the legal details, I’m no lawyer, but I do see some serious implications. I don’t think I agree with these judges of ours

Clusty is a search engine recently featured on digg. It’s a meta-search engine, in the vein of Dogpile and Ixquick. Indexing all the billions of sites on the entire web requires massive resources and ‘meta-search’ is really a euphanism for ‘too broke to index ourself.’ So what meta-search engines do is innovate something that may help in the search process, since they can’t innovate in the actual crawling and indexing (which I think is probably more important). Like most meta-search engines, Clusty has some unique feature that they use to differentiate themselves from other search websites. Its unique feature is ‘clustering.’ What it does is it groups search results into broad categories much like KartOO. KartOO however creates schematic relationships to results on a graphical map. Clusty’s grouping feature does seem intuitive and helpful, but still very similiar to KartOO. Clusty is a subunit of Vivismo, also a meta-search engine - although only partly meta-search; it indexes popular online news outlets.

I personally don’t like meta-search, I don’t believe that more is necessarily better. Search engines like Yahoo Search and MSN Search (oh, and Google) work hard to create complex algorithms in order to rank sites. A combination of these closed and secretive algorithms mixed up by those who don’t have access to them and don’t understand how they work is a questionable tactic. The proof is in the pudding, how effective are they at providing relevant and reliable search results? Not very in my opinion, but make up your own mind and compare searches for ‘dog’: [1] [2] [3] [4] vs [7] [8].