Toolkit
Addition
Tool
Kit: Data Grabber
If you're
brain is cluttered and your desk is a mess, perhaps you'd like to
have your Web information more organized. If so, Data
Grabber is a fun tool. More than that though, it's a browser
add on that helps organize information in a way that makes sense
to you. It's an ultimate bookmark.
Data Grabber
lets you grab images, text and URLs from the Web and organize the
information into folders that you create and customize. A file manager
type interface is used to then sort the folders and sub-folders.
You can view them hierarchically or as thumbnails. The nifty part
is that you can create conglomerations, or pieces of sites that
you want to keep hold of without needing to go back to all of them.
The down
side is that you've got to maneuver between the browser window and
the Data Grabber window. However, for the ease of information compilation,
it's worth the effort. Easier to use and rather more intuitive than
some of the other bookmark manager programs.
However,
not all of us can be organized all the time. Data Grabber is the
third helpful tool we've tried to make some sense of our bookmark
lists. Each works for a week or two and then there's a time crunch
and we go back to just shoving all those URLs into a big long, disorganized
list.
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Search Tips
Search Technique
Do your searches
still produce myriad unwanted results?
Read the
suggestions
put out by the University of California at Berkeley.
In their
easy-to-understand article, their is a superb table that categorizes
the types of searches you might want to do and how best to go about
them.
They break
your type of search into the features that you might be looking
for. For instance, are you looking for a proper name or phrase?
Or are you looking for information "about" something? Perhaps you're
looking for a rather common phrase that has so many contexts your
search results become a new search on their own. Or are there numerous
words that you could use and you're not sure which is best?
UCB gives
you suggstions for how to conduct your search in each of the above
trying situations. There is a dandy little chart that explains how
best to incorporate search operators and phrases to help you get
better results. Read it. It can save you an amazing amount of time
in your future searches.
If you're
not a fan of reading tables, and find tables hard to follow, there's
also a text version that includes details and very specific search
instructions.
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