Recently I lamented the demise of Northern Light's publicly-accessible websearch. Northern Light had said that it was concentrating on its relationships with its commercial partners.
Well, it hasn't taken long for this to bear fruit. If you want access to the archives of 7,100 publications, assembled by Northern Light, you can now use Yahoo's Premium Document Search. "Search Documents" is one of the options on the little pull-down menu you will find beside the search box. The snag is that Yahoo will charge you for each item it retrieves: the standard price seems to be $2.95.
You will get better value with the subscription deal, which costs $4.95 a month for 50 documents. That's much cheaper than you'd get the same stuff from the likes of Lexis-Nexis, which at last count wouldn't let individuals outside the US pay online.
There are snags, however. The deal only gives you access to a selection of those 7,100 sources. More to the point, a lot of what you are being asked to pay for is already available free elsewhere. You will find, for instance, recent stories from the Guardian and the Independent at $2.95 a time: both are available free on their own websites. Ironically, if you are looking for current news, Northern Light's news search is still supplying it for nothing. And there are lots more free news-search sites, notably the irresistible RocketNews and DayPop. Nonetheless, if you want proper archive material, especially from obscure journals, this is the best way yet of getting it at a reasonable price, as long as your target falls into the subscription deal.
Of course, there are plenty of other people in the archive business. One that's new to me is Factiva from Dow Jones and Reuters. Here about 6,000 publications are listed, and you pay per document ($2.95 again) or by subscription. The site does not list the subscription price: they want you to register first. One fascinating thing on this site is the list of publications withdrawn as a result of the recent court case that found that (American) publishers were not allowed to place freelance articles online without explicit agreement.
I find myself ambivalent about this: as a writer, I am with the writers, but as someone who uses these sources I am horrified to see holes appearing in otherwise complete archives. A sensible compromise might have benefited everyone. There are plenty of my copyright articles in those archives, but I can see the benefit to everyone of leaving them there rather than wrangling over what would only be pennies. Other people take a more fundamentalist view.
And now, a couple of quick things. KnowPlay is a one-stop site offering search boxes for a set of different reference tools, covering company information as well as the usual dictionaries and people finders. It is dominantly American in outlook, so ignore the "local" section.
Meanwhile, there are some fantastic 3D computer models of the Crystal Palace at the University of Virginia, and Gareth Long has produced a fascinating encyclopaedia of monsters, mythical beasts, etc.
If you like history -- it's the new rock'n'roll, after all -- you might be interested in the Historical Text Archive. These are not quite what I'd call historical texts, meaning primary source materials, more a collection of historical websites, but interesting nonetheless. Useful for teachers, perhaps, more than journalists: but also for those of us with homework to deal with. In a similar vein, take a look at the American government's official list of children's websites. Lots of useful stuff there, and better presented than anything I have seen from our own e-Envoy or whatever he's called.
Sometimes your story will need hard data and it is difficult to know where to find it at short notice. The other day I wanted to know unemployment figures for Stroud, Gloucestershire. I could have rung the Department of Employment's press office, where someone would have promised to call me back and then gone in search of a piece of paper with the right answer on it. Whole days might have passed, and they might never have called me.
Instead, I turned to Google and did a search like this:
Stroud unemployment inurl:gov.uk. If you don't know that special search code, you should. It just means that any page Google brings back must have "gov.uk" in its URL, which means its web address. Usually this is more effective than using the painfully slow and limited search box on the Government's main site, UK Online.
And so it proved in this case. Google now brings in much more than basic HTML web pages. In this case it brought me a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet giving vast amounts of information of Stroud's unemployment. Possibly more detail than I wanted, but it was good to have it.
The source of this material was the Government's Statistics site, which I have never previously explored. After I'd finished my piece I went back for another look and found it full of interest. Never again need you ask around the office to see if anyone would like to hazard a guess at the current figures for single-parent households, Internet use, unemployment, prison population or just about anything else.
I found a huge report on motoring offences, broken down by type, age, geography and so on and it made interesting reading. Did you know that 800,000 people were caught by Gatso speed cameras last year? For those who believe in evidence-based reporting, this site is full of great resources.
Meanwhile, no news on the 1901 census site, which looks to be turning into the online equivalent of the Millennium Bridge. The Public Records Office and its commercial partners has now created a "Welcome to the 1901 Census" page that explains, after a fashion, what is going on. Apparently demand ran at 20 times what they had anticipated, and they are never going to be able to cope with that. They are trying to boost the service, but in the meantime it looks suspiciously as if they are keeping it offline in the hope that people will lose interest. Shame, because I really wanted to know what Great Great Grandpa Morrish did for a living...
Northern Light is the latest search engine to decide that its future lies with its corporate customers, the only ones who pay for its services. It has closed its main search engine to non-paying public access. Some useful things remain: news search, the Special Collections of useful documents it prepares from time to time, and the Alert system, whereby you can ask to be notified when your search terms appear on the web. So it's still worth taking a look at Northern Light. It's just not quite as useful as it was last week.
Meanwhile, the 1901 UK census site is still closed, unable to cope with the demand. Fancy being caught out like that. Everyone knows that genealogy is the second or possibly third liveliest area on the web.
The big Internet craze of the New Year so far is the British Government's 1901 census site. I'd like to tell you what it is like, but it has been solidly jammed since it came online. As soon as I've managed to establish contact, I'll report back.
Meanwhile, more Google stuff to amaze and delight. On a minor note, you can now use a wildcard (*) in phrase searches. In other words, if you want a bit of Hamlet's soliloque and you can't remember quite how it goes, you can type in "to * or not to *" and it should find it along with numerous variants. As far as I know, however, Google will still not accept wildcards for single characters in ordinary searches. If you want fish, fishes and fishing, you have to do three searches rather than typing in fish*.
Even less of a big deal is Google's page of news headlines, which provides just that. But Google has never been one to stand by and let other people take a lead, so we can expect to see more movement on the news side in the near future. In the meantime, RocketNews, AllTheWeb and NewsNow are better bets.
The Google directory of printed catalogues, however, is that rare thing, a new Internet idea. It has taken a whole series of catalogues from mail order companies and presented them on line. You can search, and if you find something you want, it will send you to the company's website or give you its phone number. Obviously the catalogues are mainly for American companies, who may or may not ship to Britain. But it is rather fascinating, and shows what can be done.
Now here's another site devoted to online newspapers and publications around the world. It seems to work quite well, and benefits from a snappy name: All You Can Read.
Finally, here's the site I have personally found most useful in the last few weeks. I needed a book from my local library service. I found it on the Internet catalogue and asked for it to be brought out of store and moved to my local branch for collection. So far this process has taken a month. As a result, I thought I would try to get a secondhand copy. I went to Used Book Search, filled in the form onscreen and was immediately taken to a list of online book dealers with the item in stock. The one I used was affiliated to Abebooks.com, an association of 8800 independent bookshops around the world, with 30 million titles in stock at any time. If they can't find it, it probably doesn't exist.
It looks very much as if Northern Light has called it a day since I wrote this. Its parent company, divine, has gone into Chapter 11 or whatever it's called, meaning that its days would appear to be numbered.