One of the biggest problems for professional researchers is the one that’s getting more difficult all the time–how to cut through the noise and chatter on the Web and zero in on the most credible, substantive, and trusted blogs and news sources.

Two sites that I like very much that can help here are Rollyo and Feed Rinse.

The former is a “roll your own search engine” site, introduced last fall, where you can designate which URLs on the Web to restrict a search to. It’s a nice way to run a search just on those sites you like and trust. It’s not a totally new concept, but is nicely executed here. According to Danny Sullivan, of SearchEngineWatch, “Under the hood, Rollyo is tapping into Yahoo and refining it.”

The other site, Feed Rinse, is for your RSS feeds, and lets you restrict your incoming feeds based on keywords or phrases you designate, that appear in the text, title, author or other fields. Some RSS readers have this keyword filtering built in, but not all, and Feed Rinse does provide some nice advanced keyword limit protocols.

The May issue of The Information Advisor will have a detailed article on strategies, sites and sources for overcoming Web 2.0 type information overload.

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You may have come across the free people finding site ZoomInfo sometime in the past, and given it a whirl. And you may have found the results a bit weird and not really on target enough to be useful.

Well a reliable source told us recently that the site has really improved its relevancy–up to about 85% or so, and we decided to give it another try.

And yes, we were very pleasantly surprised to see how accurate and comprehensive the site has become–we’d say that 80% figure or so is about right–not bad at all for a fast, quick search to find contact and background information on people and companies. And the results are laid out in a clean and intuitive manner.

We’d say ZoomInfo should definitely be part of your people finding research toolkit. It’s not perfect, of course, as it relies on text mining algorithms to discover mentions of people’s names on the Internet to figure out which “John Smith” is which, but it does a surprisingly good job.

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I should have known it —a couple days ago I mention how Dialog doesn’t seem to be doing all that much in the Web 2.0 world, and the next thing you know it’s become part of Web 2.0!

Once the shock of Yahoo’s acquisition of Thomson’s Dialog Information Services yesterday wore off, I felt it was a good idea to step back and ponder some of the broader implications for professional searchers. Initially, I see the biggest as these three:

1. Why the comeback of Dial-Units? Yahoo says that one of the biggest appeals of Dialog was the firm’s algorithm that it had once used to calculate the cost of a search, by multiplying time spent searching against a standard per database search rate. But this was a discredited pricing approach—furthermore, which of Yahoo’s current services, all now free, will now be subject to the Dial-Unit’s old “ticking clock” fees?

2 Here’s something to knock your socks off. “Professionally -sourced, traditionally created and edited” journals said a Yahoo! spokesperson, represent an “elite, out of touch and outmoded” approach to knowledge. Instead, all new Dialog databases will be created by using data mining software to leverage the “wisdom of our members” as Yahoo puts it, by scanning the words in its users’ chat forums, and using machine learning recognition technology to create new searchable professional databases on the fly. Intriguing. But I was not encouraged, when spotting the title of the first DialogDiscuss database to emerge: “Jessica vs. Brittney: Whose (sic) Hotter?”.

3. Yahoo has said that it plans to use software to “observe” in real-time, each users’ Dialog database searching, which articles are then actually read, and for how many minutes. The software will allow other users to “watch” what others are doing too at the same time. This, Yahoo says, will create a “virtual vista of scholars” around the globe who can collaborate in real-time while running searches. Yahoo told me that in Web 2.0, “transparency is in; secrecy is out.” But will you really want your competitors to watch you run your searches, live?

Finally, I think its quite odd that Yahoo! has decided to purchase the rights to use the image of the recently “laid off” Ask Jeeves Butler to appear each time a user runs a search on Dialog, as Jeeves represents an older, discarded technology. Furthermore, we think that adding the British accented audio of “your data, sir” after each and every search may eventually come to be seen by some searchers as rather annoying. (not to mention sexist)

For more on the acquisition, see Thomson’s press release here

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