Listen.com to Become Part of Real

InternetNews.com: RealNetworks makes its move in the online music scene with a $36 million cash and stock acquisition of Listen.com.

A birthday in the house

Light blogging today, it's family day here in the Lasica household. Our Bobby turned 4 today, and the relatives are out in force.

U.S. backs record labels' pursuit of file sharers

A NY Times followup to Saturday's news that the Bush administration is backing the recording labels' pursuit of music file sharers.

Tips and tricks for Google geeks

International Herald Tribune: Tips and tricks for Google geeks. Excerpt:

Did you know, for example, that you can use Google as a U.S. telephone directory?

To start, all you need to know is the person's last name and state. Type "phonebook:" followed by the last name and two-letter state abbreviation in the Google search field. (The search returns a maximum of about 600 hits, so to find names that are fairly common, you'll have to help it out by providing a city or a first name.)

If you type rphonebook:, you will get only residential listings. If you type bphonebook:, you'll get only business listings. (Don't leave out the colon after ìphonebook.î) You can even use this feature as a reverse directory. Type phonebook: (area code) (number), and Google will (usually) give you the name of the person who has that number.

I recently learned this trick from a new book, "Google Hacks," by Tara Calishain and Rael Dornfest, which is published by O'Reilly ...

Did you know that there are special syntaxes you can use to narrow your Google search? If you're researching an academic subject, type site:edu into the search window, and you'll restrict your hits to .edu sites - colleges and universities. It is also possible to search Google for a particular file type, such as a Microsoft Word document or an Adobe Acrobat file.

Google also has a built-in dictionary. After you've done a search, search terms appear near the top of the page of results. Click on an underlined word, and Google will give you its definition. Another click activates a thesaurus.

Another useful enhancement to Google, which Calishain said came too late to be included in the book, is Google Alert. You enter your search terms, and the site, which is not affiliated with Google, automatically runs a Google search every day and e-mails the new results to you.

Calishain, the co-author of the book, has more free samples at her Web site, www.researchbuzz.com, an informative site dedicated to search engines and databases on the Web. You can find the Google tools that she has devised at www.buzztoolbox.com/google. Among the handy ones is Goofresh, which lets you search for pages that were indexed today, yesterday, in the last seven days or the last 30 days.

Another person who has invented tools for Google and put them online is Kevin Shay. One of his programs lets you search Google for terms that are within one, two or three words of each other.

Other search engine articles today:

PC magazine: Fooling Google.

Wired News: A revamped search at Ask Jeeves.

Chris Sherman in SearchEngineWatch: Ask Jeeves Serves Up New Features.