Windows on the Web:  Tools to Search, Manage Online Identities

By Bruce Kratofil
NABE Webmaster

In the column this issue, we will be looking at some Web services we can use for both managing identity and for searching. In both cases, there is competition, which should help drive innovation in these services. (Of course, the competition can’t drive down the price since they are all free.)

Some people want privacy in the online world. Other people want to be found. If you belong to the latter group, you may have a large number of profiles scattered about, including your website, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google, and your blog. If you are in the latter group, here are a couple of ways to help organize your online presence.

Google Profile

Many of you already have a free account with Google. (If you don’t, you should really consider getting a free Google Gmail account to server as a backup e-mail system.). A Google profile merely lets you set up a page that can display as much or as little contact and backup information as you wish, along with links to your other sites. You can set up this page so that people can contact you at your Gmail account while not learning what your email address is. The profile is only going to be accessible to other people who have Google accounts, although this is a fairly high percentage of the online world.

ClaimID

ClaimID can also help manage your online identities, as well as serve as an interface to OpenID, a one-step login service that many third-party sites support. It also has other tools that let you track your identity and keeps watch on your profiles. This service is also free. I haven’t been using it enough for a detailed review yet.

Wolfram Alpha

Everyone is familiar with Google as a search engine. In fact, its trademark name is in danger of becoming generic as phrases such as “Google that” or “I just googled myself” become commonplace. While Google may be dominant in search engines, Stephen Wolfram of Wolfram Research (the makers of Mathematica) decided that while the world may not need another search engine, maybe it needs a “computational knowledge engine” and gave us Wolfram Alpha.

What’s the difference? A search engine will give you all the pages that contain the word or phrase you search on, while a computational knowledge engine will attempt to answer a question that you ask. For instance, go to Wolfram Alpha and ask “GDP of Croatia.” You will get a 2007 result, in U.S. dollars, along with a graph from 1990 to 2007. Underneath the graph, it also gives a GDP measure at the (unspecified) exchange rate, at parity, in the local currency, and other economic statistics. Click on the Source Information link, and you see that it comes from Wolfram Alpha curated data, which is based on the CIA World Fact Book, the United Nations Statistical Division, the U.S. Census Bureau, and other sources.

Go to Google and search on “GDP Croatia” and you will get over a million pages that reference that term. The #1 hit is the Wikipedia page that gives the 2008 data; footnotes indicate that CIA data is one of the citations for this page. Of course, anyone can come in and edit a Wikipedia page with the wrong information, although someone will typically change it back to its correct value.

Wolfram Alpha appears to be pretty good with facts. Type in Cuyahoga County, and you will be given a page of demographic, geographic, and economic statistics. Do a Google search for Cuyahoga County and you will be given links to the county’s main website, as well as the courts, county treasurer’s website, auditor’s website, engineer’s website, and so on. (The county has a very fractionalized government structure.)

Wolfram Alpha doesn’t crawl the Web robotically making links. Instead, it is built on curated information. That’s good, because you may be able to trust that info, but it’s bad in that there are gaps. For instance, I asked Wolfram Alpha for American League MVP 1957, and I was informed that it wasn’t familiar with the term MVP. It then asked whether MVP stood for “Most Valuable Primate.”  I then tried the query again, spelling out Most Valuable Player, but it still couldn’t do it. So I guess the nerds behind Mathematica aren’t that interested in sports. On the other hand, Google easily came up with many pages telling me that it was Mickey Mantle.

And finally….

Of course, economists tend to be somewhat on the nerdy side too. If so, they might appreciate the comic strip xkcd, a “webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.”  The strip that first got me hooked (via Greg Makiw’s blog) was this one

Follow the link to see the rest of them. (There are some four-letter words in the strip, but the stick figure drawings are all SFW.)