Site of the month

Sustainability is fast becoming the criterion by which all projects are being measured. Your Development is an Australian website that provides online resources for developing sustainable, urban residential developments. You can access a huge range of fact sheets and case studies and keep up with the latest industry news. Find information on all sorts of issues – transport, place making, water – and for all stages of your development. Developed in partnership with the CSIRO and the Australian Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage, and the Arts, the content has been created by industry experts and leading researchers, thus ensuring high quality information and ideas.

Finding meaning on the internet

In the middle of writing a report and forgotten how to spell a particular word? Or reading a paper containing unfamiliar words? In the past, we would have reached for the trusty dictionary and simply looked the word up. But, these days when even the LGAQ Library doesn’t have a dictionary on its shelves, what to do?

There are, of course, many online dictionaries – Dictionary.com, Your Dictionary and AskOxford to name but a few. However, unless you have a few of them bookmarked, you have to go search for one, then choose which one to use, then navigate around the site, type in your word, click on the result to finally get the definition. Tedious! So here’s a quicker way of doing it.

Simply type define:term into the Google search bar. You’ll be presented with a list of definitions from a variety of sources. Links to related phrases are also provided. How easy was that!

Still searching

I referred to ‘metasearch engines’ in my last post and some of you may be wondering what they are. In essence, they are programs that search across several search engines at once. Since the internet is too large for any one search engine to index completely, by using a metasearch engine you will obtain more comprehensive results. Using metasearch engines also saves you from having to repeat your search in multiple individual search engines.

Next time you need to search the internet, try one of these metasearch engines:

• Clusty: displays results in categories, or clusters, thus helping narrow down your search
• Dogpile: suggests related searches as an aid to narrowing your search
• Ixquick: searches across 14 search engines and databases. Ranks results by number of search engines the site is indexed by.

One of my favourite metasearch engines is Kartoo, which displays search results in a visual map, showing related websites. Hover your mouse over a website and an image of it with a short description is displayed on the left. Also displayed are a list of terms that you can click on to use to drill down to narrow your search. Give it a try and see what you think.