LLRXBuzz – May 21, 2001

Tara Calishain is the co-author of Official Netscape Guide to Internet Research, 2nd Edition, and author or co-author of four other books. She is the owner of CopperSky Writing & Research.



In This Issue:

All Research Launches TrademarkTracker

Air Safety Online Releases Report and crashDATABASE.com

OMB Watch Assesses State Legislative Websites

Carfax Adds Canadian Records to Database

U.S. Tax Court Site Launched

IntelliSeek Launches ProFusion.com

ADA Offers Directory of Dentists in the USA

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All Research Launches TrademarkTracker

All Research, Inc. has announced patent-pending technology designed to “revolutionize the process of identifying trademark abuse on the Internet.”

TrademarkTracker.com’s intelligence agents will search 500 million Internet
pages daily for possible trademark or brand violations. Its filtering agents can then determine if the trademark is being used appropriately. You can read
more about their service in their press release at http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/010515/0381_3.html

Air Safety Online Releases Report and crashDATABASE.com

Air Safety Online has released a report on safety issues in the aviation industry. “Air Safety in America” examines commercial safety data, and fuel tank explosions on Boeing airliners. It also discusses the causes and preventions of DVT, which are blood clots in the lower leg after sitting for extended periods. Full text of the report is available at
http://www.airsafetyonline.com/indepth/asiusa/.

Also available at this site: crashDATABASE.com, at http://www.crashdatabase.com. Last mentioned in LLRXBu zz on June 2000, it offers a database of aviation accidents, searchable by airline and aircraft type.
There’s also a newsfeed of airline crash and safety information as well as multimedia and crash information links.

OMB Watch Assesses State Legislative Websites

OMB Watch has added a report on state legislative web sites to its site at http://www.ombwatch.org/npadv/2001/stlg/. The March 2001 report, complete with addendum dated 4/30/01, is intended to “bridge, if not eliminate, the distance between decision-makers and stakeholders.” The sites are evaluated for information provided to the public. Criteria includes calendars, floor schedules, report/journals and more.

There are some interesting finds here besides a list of resource links. For example, half of the legislative sites use cookies and nearly all of those don’t inform site visitors of said cookies. Also, states seem to more aggressively report information from the minority and majority leaderships rather than what is happening with the oversight, ethics and legislative research bodies.

The site is worth some exploration time. And your time will not be wasted downloading, because it loads quickly for the most of us who still have dial up connections.

Carfax Adds Canadian Records to Database

Carfax <http://www.carfax.com/> has announced adding vehicle inspection and inspection repair records from British Columbia to its database of more than one billion U. S. and Canadian records. The company offers potential buyers history reports on vehicles that includes odometer readings, accidents and flood damage.

U.S. Tax Court Site Launched

In accordance with Article I of the U.S. Constitution, Congress has created the Tax Court for taxpayers in dispute with the Internal Revenue Service. All of the
Tax Court’s judges have tax law expertise and “apply that expertise in a manner to ensure that taxpayers are assessed only what they owe, and no more.”

The U.S. Tax Court Web site, at http://www.ustaxcourt.gov/, provides current opinions, historical opinions, forms, posted tax rules, as well as a list of charges and fees payable to the court.

IntelliSeek Launches ProFusion.com

IntelliSeek announced yesterday the official launch of ProFusion.com (http://www.profusion.com/; it’s been in public beta since February.)

The new site has ditched the banner ads and now adds 1000 resources in over 200 search groups. I went and looked at their news section (that’s where I always look first when it comes to meta-search engines.)

There were several different categories for news. I chose Business News to search. While I got 19 results for my query, it was difficult to tell what sources were available. I clicked on the “Business News” link at the top of the results page, and was astonished to see that there were so many sources missing in the category’s default search!

I don’t get it. You put together all these sources, go to all this trouble to categorize them, and you don’t activate them all in a default search? Before you start seriously searching, view the sources first (use the “Search Within This Group” link) and activate the ones that most interest you. The search interface provides plenty of flexibility, allowing you to specify a search type and how many results you want per search.

Results are sortable by relevance, title, URL, or source, and are provided with the percentage of relevance, title, summary with keywords (most of the time), URL, and source. You can specify similar Web pages to pull results from or request that your pages or queries be monitored for relevant results. (You’ll have to register for that feature, but it requests nothing intrusive — just a user name and a password.) You can also e-mail or print search results.

This is a powerful site, but it might take some time to wrap your mind around the volume of materials here. Worth a look.

ADA Offers Directory of Dentists in the USA

The American Dental Association has made a directory of dentists available at http://www.ada.org/public/directory/index.html . The list is searchable by name (first and last), city, zip code, specialty (there’s a page of descriptions if you’re confused), and member category (another page of descriptions if you need it.) The search engine insists that you provide a state on the search form, even if you enter a zip code. If you enter the zip code “90210” and the state “Montana,” you’ll get no results.

Search results give you the hyperlinked name of the dentist, their address, phone number, and specialty. I saw no Web site addresses on the results I looked at. Clicking on the hyperlinked name gives you a MapQuest map of their office. There is not a heck of a lot of information here but it’ll give you a good first place to start looking if you’re trying to find dentist information.

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