Trapping Tags and Conversations - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 194

Zniff
At irst glance, Znif (znif.com) looks like a regular search engine. But it's
indexing the bookmarks generated by people who use Spurl, a bookmark
service like del.icio.us. Znif also searches a collection of eight million Web
pages from Iceland!
Notice that the dates on the results you get are not recent. I suspect there's
some kind of lag between users entering items into Spurl and the items
making it into Znif. Because you can't get a sense of how “busy” a tag is,
you have to do some experimenting. And hey, while you're at, it, check out
Znif's help ile. Unlike many tag searches, it lets you search for phrases, do
“or” searches, or even do stemming searches. (A stemming search is when
you search for part of a word and add a wildcard character to ind the rest of
a word—so searching for moon* would ind moonlight, moonlight, moons,
moonpie, and so on.) While it helps to be as speciic as possible in your
searches, you can take advantage of this advanced syntax to try to coax out
a little additional information from your traps.
Znif and Del aren't the only general tag search resources. Heck, they're
hardly even the start. If you want to do some more searching through gen-
eral tag sites, try these sites:
. BlinkList (blinklist.com). A newer resource, BlinkList ofers both
RSS feeds of search results and suggestions of tags you might want
to search for as you are typing in your searches. here aren't as many
results as you'll ind on Del, but it's newer.
. RawSugar (rawsugar.com). RawSugar is another new tagging resource,
but it ofers suggested links and related links, as well as a list of the
users which have used the tag for which you're searching and what
other tags you're using. As you might imagine, using RawSugar could
turn into a huge time sink, but on the other hand, it points you to
other tags you might never have thought about.
Access to RawSugar's Showcase section is free, but to do more search-
ing you have to register. Registration is free. Make sure that you're
searching the full directory of sites, instead of just RawSugar's Web
2.0 Blogs search.