I consume content every day and work hard to archive the key elements of knowledge that I may wish to read again or use at a later date.

To that end, I bookmark extensively with Delicious , clip content to Evernote , and read content offline with Instapaper. I also favorite a lot of tweets for future reading, mainly because they have interesting articles I wish to read and ‘bank’ for a later use.

But when it comes to looking for content or information, I still Google first. I have to remind myself to check Delicious, evernote and Instapaper as well.

So this started me thinking, I want the ability to centralise all my sources into one easily searchable place.  So, I started thinking about ‘creating’ my own search engine. A quick Google showed me that wasn’t to be an easy task so I started thinking about how I could centralise my sources to feed into my Google search results when I typed.

This is where I have got to:

1. Use Evernote & Chrome

Evernote has a Chrome Plugin that allows you to both crop articles and also to include Evernote results in your Google results.

This is a great service as it means my Evernote articles are queried for every Google query I make. As you can see the results will indicate if I have articles of relevance but I have to click through to see the results. Not perfect but a good start.

2. Feed Evernote

As I am not able to use Evernote for all my ‘digital filing’ I need to feed what I can to Evernote. After a bit of searching, it seems I cannot simply feed Evernote with RSS feeds (no that would be too easy.) So, I need to feed them through email.

For this I have been using two functions:

i. For emails I use Gmail’s Filter function to forward specific emails (newsletters, press releases) directly to Evernote.

ii. For RSS feeds I convert them through Feed my Inbox. I then send them to my Gmail account and using Filters, send them into Evernote.

Now I am feeding about 100 articles a day into Evernote, I can start to achieve a more personalised search experience.

It is not perfect and I do hope someone comments with a ‘just do this’ solution which will make it much cleaner. Have you tried personalising your search? Do let me know how you get on

These are my bookmarks for June 24th from 16:54 to 17:12:

• Read It Later Launches New iPhone App (But if You Don’t Like It, You Can Build Your Own!) – Read It Later, a cross-platform browser extension for saving online articles for later reading, has just debuted their newly updated iPhone application. This latest version introduces a number of useful features for voracious mobile readers including support for articles spanning multiple pages, support for sites requiring logins (like WSJ or NYT), new sharing features, and a lot more.
• Mafia makes money from Twitter (but you didn’t hear it from us) | Digital | Revolution – LONDON – Social media gaming start-up Lolplaying is turning to the Mob to generate revenue from Twitter, with the launch of a game that allows users to turn their followers into La Cosa Nostra.
• Once Touted As A Google Killer, Cuil May Deal With Search King – Yahoo! News – Cuil , the upstart search site launched by former Google engineers to a wave of publicity last year, isn't too cool to do business with its supposed rivals, Google or Yahoo.
• Google wants to make friends with your agency | Search | Revolution – Google is testing the new AgencyLand platform in the US with agences including Aegis' Carat Interpublic's Initiative and WPP's Ogilvy and plans to roll it out to all major search spenders.

These are my bookmarks for June 24th from 15:39 to 16:55:

• Mafia makes money from Twitter (but you didn’t hear it from us) | Digital | Revolution – LONDON – Social media gaming start-up Lolplaying is turning to the Mob to generate revenue from Twitter, with the launch of a game that allows users to turn their followers into La Cosa Nostra.
• Once Touted As A Google Killer, Cuil May Deal With Search King – Yahoo! News – Cuil , the upstart search site launched by former Google engineers to a wave of publicity last year, isn't too cool to do business with its supposed rivals, Google or Yahoo.
• Google wants to make friends with your agency | Search | Revolution – Google is testing the new AgencyLand platform in the US with agences including Aegis' Carat Interpublic's Initiative and WPP's Ogilvy and plans to roll it out to all major search spenders.
• MAC Tips, Techniques, MAC Freeware, How to use MAC, free training mac | All about MAC by TheMacTips.com – loads of tips and free software to boost mac productivity.

These are my bookmarks for June 24th from 12:50 to 13:22:

• Top 50 Twitter Acronyms, Abbreviations and Initialisms « digiphile – A big list of well used acronyms used on Twitter
• It’s a Search Engine Bonanza | Mark Evans – Over the past couple of weeks, Microsoft’s Bing has captured a lot of attention but it’s just one of many new search engines that have appeared on the scene. Some are trying to go head to head with Google, some are focused on Twitter, and some have adopted a hybrid approach by focusing on real-time search.

These are my links for June 4th through June 5th:

• Google Chrome for Mac and Linux has Arrived: But Don’t Download it Yet – Google has just announced the first official beta versions of Google Chrome, its browser, for Mac and Linux. As of now, these versions are only available in the developer channel, which is Google's cutting edge, rapid-release channel for Google Chrome that is geared towards developers and testers, but not the mainstream public.
• template size Twitter background guidelines – Croncast – Ever wanted to make an interesting Twitter background? Here's how I did it.
• WordPress hack: Display your tags in a dropdown menu – I never liked tag clouds, for the simple reason that most of the time, they’re aren’t readable properly. Here is the solution to this problem: Displaying tags in a dropdown menu.
• Chart.ly – share stock charts on twitter
• Google Integration Toolkit • Projekty • Poradnik Webmastera – Google provides a lot of useful services, which can be integrated with your blog. With them you can check how your site is indexed in Google (using Google Webmaster Tools), get detailed statistics (Google Analytics), earn money (Google AdSense) and more. Most of them can be integrated using Text Widget only or modifying theme. This can cause problems, especially for beginners. Moreover, you have to remember to make all changes again when you decide to switch to new theme. You can avoid all of these problems by using Google Integration Toolkit plugin.
• How to Change the World: 24 Hours at Sea on the USS Nimitz – On Friday, May 29, 2009, fourteen bloggers and “distinguished visitors” served a twenty-four hour tour of duty on the USS Nimitz. The following 140 or so pictures and videos document this visit
• Snagsta | Your favourite things. Sorted. – Make lists of your favourite things. Share them with your friends. Discover new stuff in the lists of people similar to you.
• Top 50 UK Charity People by Twitter Followers | Snagsta – This is a list of Third Sector people I've found to be really passionate, knowledgeable and generous on Twitter. It's only a start, as I know there are lots of other great people out there, but I tried to limit the list by having individual (not organisation) profiles. I hope you enjoy following their tweets.
• Can Webwise Discover save Phorm? News – PC Advisor – Controversial behavioural advertising firm Phorm has announced a new system called Webwise Discover, a tool that can be used to recommend deep site content to web visitors based on tracking previous internet use.
• 9 Crucial UI Features of Social Media and Networking Sites | How-To | Smashing Magazine – This article goes over crucial features of the user interfaces of social media and social networking sites. It discusses important features, techniques and concepts behind these designs and explains why they are important, with examples from top sites. These easy and general usability strategies can be applied almost anywhere and to almost any type of user interface.
• BBC NEWS | World | Aerial guide to the D-Day beaches – BBC correspondent Robert Hall gives an aerial guided tour of the French coastline where the D-Day landings took place 65 years ago

I compare the search results of Google vs. Bing on three terms that I find poorly represented on Google: Hotels, Sheet Music and Feng Shui.

A new article from Techcrunch this morning highlighted a basic but effective mashup of Bing vs. Google. If you read the Techcrunch article you will get a good overview of the comparisons. Naturally, I searched for myself. On Google I own the whole front page with relevant links (the blog, econsultancy profile, brand republic profile etc.) – on Bing there are very similar results, with the addition of jamieriddell.net which I hadn’t registered (I rectified that) so not much to learn from there.

search results - click for larger image

I then looked at three areas in which I don’t get good results, namely hotels, sheet music and Feng Shui.

So lets look for a Hotel in Edinburgh.

click for larger image

To be fair, these results are neck and neck. Both results have sponsored ads, map links (more from Google) and then a list of hotel specific websites, leaving little room for aggregators on either platform.

Sheet Music. I am just starting to learn the piano so I want to find some sheet music. Like Pink Floyd Sheet Music.

click for a larger image

For this, Google offers many links to different sites whereas Bing offers fewer links focusing on a handful of websites. The first three natural Google ranks were spammy, offering me further links with little content.  The first link on Bing is totally spammy, but follows with three quality sites offering exactly what I want. I would pick Bing as the winner here for quality of content delivered.

Feng Shui. I have been given a money tree and want to know where I should place that in my room. I tried these searches yesterday. So I searched for, “where do I place a money tree in my room?”

click for a larger image

The Google results were just spam filled. Not even one answer to this direct question, including results for real estate less than half way down the page. Bing wins marginally for having slightly better content linked but there wasn’t much in it. For reference I aske dhtat question on Mahalo, Yahoo Answers and Twitter and couldn’t get the answer. I resorted to buying a book!

So, not entirely conclusive at this early stage but Bing has the potential to make me switch if it weren’t for the Google hooks of Gmail, Analytics etc.

How have you found it?

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• Still Searching for More Search Users (markevanstech.com)
• What Do You Think of Bing? (blogs.wsj.com)
• IMshopping Provides Human-Powered Shopping Suggestions [Recommendations] (lifehacker.com)
• Future of search may not be about indexes and algorithms (financegeek.com)
• Wow: Bing Has Live Video Thumbnails — But is it Fair Use? (beet.tv)

These are my links for May 31st through June 1st:

• Google Wave Drips With Ambition. A New Communication Platform For A New Web. – Yesterday, during the Google I/O keynote, Google’s VP of Engineering, Vic Gundotra, laid out a grand vision for the direction Google sees the web heading towards with the move to the HTML 5 standard. While we’re not there yet, all the major browser players besides Microsoft are aligned and ready for the next phase, which will include such things as the ability to run 3D games and movies in the browser without additional plug-ins. But Google wants to take it one step further with a brand new method of communication for this new era. It’s called Google Wave.
• Micro Persuasion: Visits to Twitter Search Soar, Indicating Social Search Has Arrived – According to data from Compete.com visits to the Twitter search page grew more than 400% in the last six months. This sub-domain alone recorded 2.7M unique visitors in April, up from just shy of 536,000 in October. Even more remarkable, traffic to the site, which is tucked away, grew 24% in April.
• Freshen me up – A nice blog about stuff…
• 100+ Incredible Twitter Backgrounds | cheth Studios – As the Title suggests these are the Best designed, kickass Twitter Backgrounds! I know that I cannot make justice to this I might have missed out some great ones, so do comment and let us know!
• Monday Note – media, tech and business stories – A potentially interesting blog
• Revealed: where Google’s data centres are around the world | Technology | guardian.co.uk – Analysis of data released by Google shows where its data centres – the places that keep it going .
• Zivity » The home of independent artists, models and rock-stars. GET EXPOSED. – A social network for artists, models & musicians. By paying a $10 subscription one gets the ability to view great work and vote whilst generating micro income for content providers. So fr the majority of the images on the homepage (I have not subscribed) include scantily clad females..
• New Economics of Advertising: 101 Twitter Tools to Help You Achieve All Your Goals – Twitter has become an incredible tool not just for communication, but for improving your life. Anyone can use it to expand their social circle, promote their side business, keep their coursework organized, and more. Whether you want to achieve your Twitter goals, or just use it as a tool to achieve others, these tools will help you get there.

These are my links for May 26th through May 28th:

• The Forrester Blog For Interactive Marketing Professionals – Microsoft announced today its Bing search engine, a "decision engine" that will replace live.com worldwide as of June 3. A distant third place in the search engine game, Microsoft hopes that this engine will help it gain more searcher share by delivering results and content more relevant to how users actually search. What makes Bing different from existing search engines?
• Micropayments for content and services | Contenture – Every time a Contenture user visits your web site, you make money. Your slice of every visitor's monthly payment is based on how many visits they made to your site divided by the total number of visits they made to all Contenture sites.
• Mozilla Labs Jetpack | Exploring new ways to extend and personalize the Web – Jetpack is a newly formed experiment in using open Web technologies to enhance the browser, with the goal of allowing anyone who can build a Web site to participate in making the Web a better place to work, communicate and play
• Linkbait Writing Services | Unique linkbait writing services to help your website grow and get more traffic. – At Linkbait Writing Services, we are determined to bring your website or blog more traffic by creating quality linkbait articles. Our small team of writers strive to create linkbait articles that will not only help you reach the front page of social bookmarking sites like Digg and Stumble Upon, but also bring you traffic for the lifetime of your blog. Save your time for marketing your blog and interaction with your readers and let us take care of the time consuming task of building linkbait articles.
• WordPress Designers – Premium WordPress Themes – WordPress Designers is a small team of talented developers and creative designers. We pride ourselves on our intimate knowledge or WordPress and our ability to push it to its limits. Since discovering the WordPress platform several years ago, we have strived to learn as much as we could about it so that we could bring you some of the most creative and well coded themes on the market.
• Outlaw Design Blog » 34 Brilliant Ads on Semi Trucks – a great post showing loads of advertising designs on lorries
• ConceptShare: – ConceptShare is a simple, cost-effective tool for gathering feedback from team members and clients.
• 5 Basic Rules for Creating an Effective About Page — Des Walsh dot Com – This short list of basic rules for creating an effective About page has been prompted by my frustration with the number of blogs and other websites that either do not have an About page or, more commonly in my experience, do not put their About page to work effectively in the interests of their business.
• Small Screen Blog: All about mobile – (by MoFuse) – If you believe that mobile is a strong medium to reach your customers – you need to be thinking about how your brand will evolve on the mobile web. Today you have a few interesting options and they are not mutually exclusive.
  As consumers wake up to the idea that they can actually reach the internet on their phone, we are about to see an explosion of new mobile devices; ITouch, Kindle, “netbooks” and even Sony Playstation Portable already are rapidly changing the ‘connection’ landscape.
• D u s t y T u n e s | Let your music collection see the light…. – Dusty Tunes automatically creates your own personal web page with a list of all the music in your iTunes library (although you can cheat). It will organise it all into a nice list and provide you with links so you can share it with your friends, on blogs, forums, websites, digg, facebook or simply keep it as a personal reference. You can come back at any time and update your page with all your latest tracks.
• WordPress › SEO Ultimate « WordPress Plugins – SEO Ultimate was developed with WordPress plugin "best practices" in mind:

  * Integration with WordPress's contextual help system
  * Internationalization support
  * Nonce security
  * An uninstall routine
  * Integration with the new WordPress 2.7 menu

• Privacy Policy Plugin For WordPress – At the end of February, 2008, Google started requiring AdSense publishers to display a privacy policy on all sites that displayed AdSense ads or search boxes. Since many WordPress blogs are monetized with AdSense, I decided to write a plugin that would automate the creation of AdSense-compliant privacy policies for WordPress users. Thus the Privacy Policy Plugin for WordPress was born.
• WordPress › CMS Navigation « WordPress Plugins – Do you want to use WordPress to create a full website, with easy navigation and menus? This plugin will let you add essential navigation functions to your template.
• WordPress › WordPress Navigation List Plugin NAVT « WordPress Plugins – The WordPress Navigation Tool (NAVT) plugin is a powerful tool designed to provide you with complete control over the creation, styling and contents of your web site's navigation.
• Why Twitter beats RSS: Context + Content = Added Value – broadstuff – Twitter

These are my bookmarks for May 13th from 22:03 to 22:46:

• The Human Clock® – About – Humanclock.com shows a photograph of the current time, with the photo changing every minute of the day (all 1,440 occuring minutes on Earth!) Thus you end up with a rotating picture clock sorta deal.
• Natasha Miller – Natasha Miller :: San Francisco Bay Area Jazz Vocalist – HOME – Jazz Singer recommended on #WebsiteWednesday Twitter
• May 12, 1967: Pink Floyd Astounds With ‘Sound in the Round’ | This Day In Tech | Wired.com – 1967: Pink Floyd performs the first-ever surround sound concert at “Games for May,” a lavish affair at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall where the band debuts its custom-made quadraphonic speaker system. The technological breakthrough not only amazes and confuses the mass of stoned concert-goers, but it goes on to raise the standard of what audiences would come to expect from a live rock performance.
• Google Search Introduces New Feature – "Google Search Options" | Fuzz One Media – Google’s search options adds an extra layer of dynamic filters to the search engine result page (SERPs) – with a single click a search result has extra filters (on the left) that shows your search query results as Video, Forum posts or Review only results. You can also further filter your results by time or choose to display more text on the description area of the SERPs.
• Twofer The Price of One: Help! Disney World Questions – Need Your Input! –

There is a lot of buzz around Wolfram Alpha, the ‘computational knowledge engine’ and I was priveleged to have a look around. So here are my very first impressions, hot of the press, if you will.

1. Wolfram Alpha is beautiful

From the clean design on the homepage, it just looks wonderful. It is clean and clear but does not ape Google like so many other challengers.

2. Wolfram Alpha is currently a knowledge engine.

This means it is pooling multiple sources of information and presenting you with its own answer, not a list of pages that may answer your questions.

3. Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine (yet).

Try looking for cheap flights and it will redirect you to Google.

Wolfram Alpha Cheap Flights Results

4. Wolfram Alpha is still short of information.

(which is understandable at such an early stage.)

Wolfram Alpha FAQ

5. Wolfram Alpha has a potentially bright future.

From spending a small amount of time on the site, I feel that Wolfram Alpha may not be the next direct challenger for Google, but a potentially powerful hybrid between a search engine and a knowledge base like Wikipedia.

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• Wolfram Alpha Answers Data Questions, Needs Transparency (poynter.org)
• Wolfram Alpha? (ethelthefrog.com)
• New Search Tool Aims at Answering Tough Queries, but Not at Taking on Google (nytimes.com)