TimeSearch

Only a week late but just before leaving for work last Monday, I caught a bit of Start the Week where Bamber Gascoigne was talking about TimeSearch, his new search engine. Despite Andrew Marr's rather inaccurate introduction that this is a rival to Google, it sounds like a welcome addition to the researcher's armoury of tools. TimeSearch is a search engine that presents a timeline as the basis for your investigation. Pick a theme or area, enter a year, and you get a timeline with relevant links. There are already 10,000 events listed and it's growing fast. Naturally Bamber was very excited about his new product but what was most interesting was his enthusiasm for Wikipedia and all things Web 2.0. In the future the plan is for people to start adding their own timelines.

Spelling Tales

If a suicide bomber is to go down in history it's helpful if the media can agree on how to spell his name. Here's the tale of one 7/7 bomber and the many spellings as used in the Guardian:

mohammed siddique khan = 12 hits (latest 09/01/07)
mohammad siddique khan = 3 hits (07/07/07)
mohammad sidique khan = 121 hits (16/12/06)
mohammed sidique khan = 33 hits (09/02/07)

The Official Intelligence and Security Committee Report into the London Terrorist Attacks on 7 July 2005 (published) May 2006, has its version of the name as

mohammed siddeque khan

And hits in the Guardian for this variation = 0