Does anybody know how to conduct case-sensitive web searches? Google apparently does not, although allegedly it might “sometimes“, which isn’t particularly useful as even a basic analytical tool. It seems odd that URLs are case-critical for search and resolution purposes, yet search keywords are not.

Can anyone help me out?

Blogging has its narcissistic side, as any honest blogger will tell you, as does writing in general. Upon seeing that a Word Counter might illuminate my poor writing style and repetitious use of certain words, I ran the Ubiwar posts and comments through this neat bit of software. The top 20 or so words reveal certain fixations once the usual guff is stripped out from the results of this unscientific exercise in egotism:

1. virtual - 65 occurrences

2. information - 55

3. war - 47

4. terrorism - 44

5. internet - 43

6. world - 41

7= blog - 39

7= cyberspace - 39

9.  al-Qaeda - 38

10. here - 36

11. links - 34

12. Second Life - 33

13= new - 31

13= image - 31

13= article - 31

16= media - 29

16= wikipedia - 29

18= military - 28

18= law - 28

18= time - 28

18= net - 28

18= speed - 28

Can’t say I’m surprised by any of them, except that the presence of ’speed’ probably reveals a latent preoccupation with Paul Virilio. I was expecting a couple of horrible adverbs, like ‘actually’ (2) or ‘probably’ (3) to crop up more, but ’tis not the case.

Last year, a similar test by a fellow blogger revealed a correspondent obsession with information technology, and it appears nothing has changed. In response to the previous exercise, I wrote: ‘I actually have very little interest in the geeky minutiae of computers and the internet, but a great deal of interest in the significance of the technology.’ That view persists.

Hot off the back of news that ‘Once shunned by academics, Wikipedia now a teaching tool‘ comes the launch of semantic search enginge Powerset, whose ‘natural language search technology … has read 2.5 million Wikipedia pages and extracted “meaning” from the sentences, creating a navigation and semantic layer on top of the popular Web encyclopedia.’

I’ve been playing around with the beta this morning and I like it. The results are far more ‘intelligent’ than the rather clunky Wikipedia search engine which generally returns zero/lame results unless you get the search criteria exactly right. Powerset has also indexed Freebase, Metaweb’s open structured database. Makes me wonder what happened to Google’s prototype search engine project Searchmash, which always returned a far wider assortment of relevant links whenever I used it.

As a bit of fun, you can also monitor your own web footprint at Addict-o-matic, a quick and easy way of seeing where your site shows up across various web aggregators.