Tool Tutorials

I hope you will these detailed tool tutorials to guide you through your Specialist Training.

For each tool, I will discuss how I used them for this project and evaluate them on a scale of 1 - 10 (10 being the highest) all relative to each other in terms of usefulness. I primarily used these tools for two reasons

  1. To gather background information on the industry
  2. To gather news about changes in the industry

Here's an index of the tools I used and a brief description of function. Please go to each tool's tutorial for more information.

  • Blog Search - Blog Search engines help you navigate through the blogsphere and search by blogs and by posts.
  • Change Notification Tools
    • Email Alert - Alerts of changes or new information to your email can be set up by a particular website or customized through services like Google Alerts.
    • Page Monitors - It alerts you when a page or a specific part of a page you are watching changes. This can be helpful for tracking "static" web pages that do not have RSS feeds nor updates frequently.
  • Custom Search Engine - A search engine created by yours truly with websites I believe are relevant.
  • Deep Web Search - Used to find the tons of content out there not indexed by regular search engines.
  • Image Search - Image Search tools differ in subtle ways. This is not important to information collection for this project, but still interesting to compare and contrast.
  • News Search - These tools can help discover the latest news. There are actually several brand new ways of reading news besides through traditional means.
  • RSS Tools
    • RSS Reader - This software collects RSS feed updates you are subscribed to into a central location for easy management and access.
    • Feed Filter - This software acts as spam control for feeds. It will help you narrow down content in a feed such that you only get what you desire.
  • Tag-based Sites - These are mostly social news and social bookmarking websites that use keywords (tags) to organize the content.
  • Videos & Podcasts - Video Search tools help you find videos. I could not find any podcasts concerning this topic, so I did not review Podcasts.
  • Web Directories - Web Directories are human compilations of links to websites about a specific topic. As opposed to search, browsing is the preferred process to find a category or sub-category that is relevant. The categorization is based on the website as a whole and not a specific page.
  • Web Search Engines - You should be most familiar with this category which includes common search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask. However, you can improve search by learning more syntax.
  • Other Search Tools - There are some search tools out there that I did not use for this project but may be useful They include Real Time Search Engines and Meta Search Engines.
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