Coverage: Worldwide, by country, economic region and geographical region

Years Covered: From 1980 to 2016 forecasts

Indicators: Over 50 indicators from our database of 1,000 are currently display by Econ Stats

Data Sources: IMF, World Bank, UN, OECD, CIA World Factbook, Internet World Statistics, The Heritage Foundation and Transparency International

Last Updated: 1st August 2011

Economy Watch

Need to practice your google-ing skills? Or want a fun trivia game to kill time on your computer or phone? Want to stump your friends and students with random facts?
Try Google's Google-a-Day application. It's fun and educational!

Watch last night's State of the Union Address for free on
whitehouse.gov!

From the Southern California Association of Law Libraries:

The Public Access to Legal Information (PALI) Committee is pleased to present the revised 5th edition of Locating the Law. We've updated links, added titles to Chapter 10: Bibliography of Self-Help Resources and moved the List of Common Abbreviations in the Law from the end of Chapter 2: How to Read a Legal Citation to Appendix B.
This publication is available online only.

Handbook for Non-Law Librarians

In advance of the Iowa primary election, Google launched a Politics & Elections page. According to SiliconFilter:

Maybe the most interesting aspect of the site is the real-time dashboard, which displays recent search trends, Google News mentions and YouTube video views for all the candidates. The recent surge of Rick Santorum’s campaign, for example, is nicely illustrated by this tool.

Google Politics and Elections

If you get the message "Sorry, your browser is not supported on this site", you may need to upgrade your browser or use Google Chrome.

Place your mouse on a city anywhere in the world and the newspaper headlines will pop up. Double click and the page gets larger; you can read the entire issue for some papers if you click on the "Web" link on the top right.

World Newspapers

Yes, another "Google Tips" entry. You may like this informative infographic, courtesy of Hack College, better than previous ones you've seen. It gives a nice rundown of some of the most useful operators and shortcuts and search examples. Check it out.

Get More Out of Google

A series of 30 minute workshops on key information skills has been scheduled. Here is the schedule:Library Research Minis Series Schedule

The new beta version of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine (see link at end of review) is avowedly faster than the so-called "classic" version (discussed in Internet Archive, CH, Jan'05, 42-2534) which debuted in 2001 with 10 billion pages and is still available at http://www.archive.org/web/web.php. The Wayback Machine beta is built on an open source platform and now claims 150 billion pages in its database.

Uninitiated readers should know that the Internet Archive "crawls" the Internet and saves copies of Web sites, much like search engine companies. The difference is that the Wayback Machine provides snapshots--"captures" in time of how Web sites looked at specific dates and times.

Uses for the Wayback Machine include finding lost Web content and seeing how Web sites have changed over time. Users may view CNN.com, for instance, the day a major event occurred. After typing a URL, users have the option of clicking Show All, which goes right into the calendar of page captures, or clicking Latest to go to the most recent capture available. At the top of the search results screen is a new toolbar that displays a bar graph showing which years have the most captures. The toolbar also shows the total captures along with the oldest and most recent captures available. Some search functionality (e.g., searching by URL, date, or keyword) from the classic Wayback Machine is not available in the beta version.
Reviewed in 2011jul CHOICE.by M. Shores, Miami University Hamilton

Internet Archive WayBack Machine

One cool example:
Say you live in South Carolina, and you’re only interested in information about poverty made available by state government agencies, you can construct a search like this:

poverty site:*.sc.gov

and you’ll only get 299 results--much less than the tens of millions hits gotten without doing that.

The trick is to add site:*.sc.gov to the query where site: specifies which web site (or sites) you want to search. In this case, I also used the wild card * before sc.gov so that any site run by the state government will be included. This is just one example among many of the strategies you can use for better Googling.

from article by G. Williams in The Chronicle of Higher Ed

Better Googling