Every now and then I go in search of 2 house music tracks that got played often at the clubs I went to when I was in my teens in the late 80s/early 90s--Quick on Hubert St, Mars in the meatpacking district, Tunnel and Palace de Beaute. One of the tracks was "The Max," which played the baseline from Max Q's "Sometimes" as the hook. The other track I can still sound out, but have no idea what the name is. Had a bit of an "Acid Crash" sound to it.

For some reason, when I was a DJ, I just never went in search of these tracks at the time because having been lured to raves, I started playing music of the blip, bleep, and harder Detroit variety more often. But when I went out it was to house music clubs. In any case, tonight I spent a few hours looking for the elusive tracks again because I ran into this guy's YouTube page containing loads of classic house and rave tracks. Beatport makes searching for classic tracks easier, but I still came up empty handed.

I used to go digging in record stores looking for these tracks--at places like Rock and Soul and Satellite. But I've never found them. Once in a while you can sing a part of a tune to the guru in the shop and they'll retrieve it from memory. I've done that a few times with success. But these 2 tracks keep eluding me. And I was thinking, besides searching for playlists or looking for compilations of music played in that era (early 90s) and place (NYC), it is really difficult to search for aural content without lyrics. Believe me, I know how to search and research, but this one I can't figure out and I think it is one of those cases where an expert is more valuable than a machine at retrieving the information.

In any case, the search goes on. I'm not ambitious enough to really look for a person to point me in the right direction. The search has just become a sort of hobby of mine. "Oooh," I'll say. "A 12" shop. Maybe I'll just duck in for a few minutes to dig." It's kind of like that movie "Serendipity", where John Cusack has to look in used book stores constantly to find that book with Kate Beckinsale's number in it, Love in the Time of Cholera. That's me, except I'm not looking for my soul mate. I'm just trying to compile the soundtrack of my life. I have playlists that act like diaries in a way, and I'm obsessed with finding this because it's like a significant piece of my teen years is missing. It's all just memories.

Google announced their Custom Search Engine Beta. Like the similar Rollyo service, Google CSE allows you to specify the sites you want searched. You can also tell the CSE to search the entire Google index, but give weight to those sites. It also gives you the option of excluding sites. You can also use patterns to specify parts of sites, e.g. to filter out urls including certain words.

There is an option to include the search form and results in your own site. To see that in action check out this job search page on my site.

One of the nicer features is refinement labels. This allows you to tag sites with a descriptive label that can be used to refine results. If, for example, you label sites in your set using facets, e.g. subject, type, etc., then those can be used to narrow the result set.

You can see the CSE I'm playing with for UX-related sites to see how this works (e.g. search for "sparklines"):

Or try this search of some of the newish niche web design/development job sites:

I've made these CSEs open so anyone can contribute to them by adding other UX-related sites to the list. I've also set the CSEs to limit to the sites specified. I tried with the option to search all of Google, but I noticed a little noise because many of the results were outside of the UX scope. It's simple enough, I suppose, to expand the search by clicking the "Web" radio.

I'm not sure how much I'll actually use this. I stopped using Rollyo after playing with it for a few days. But the added refinement functionalities make this service a bit more useful to me.

As you probably know, Google began it's Book Search project a while ago, scanning the collections of prominent academic libraries in the US and England. We're now beginning to see the most practical uses of Google Book Search. Google began offering free PDF downloads of books in the public domain -- books that were published before 1923 or whose copyright has expired. See for example this copy of John Stuart Mill's On Liberty scanned from the Library at Stanford.

I had to read this book in grad school. Students will be able to save quite a few dollars I suppose because of this, but think of the money they'll spend printing these things out. Someone's got to come up with a usable ebook reader. I'm certainly not scrolling through a book like this on my PPC PDA, even in landscape mode. When's the affordable, easy to use E Ink based product going to hit so I can read a novel like Jean Luc Picard in his "Ready Room"?

In any case, this is a great development. If we do see a usable method for toting these ebooks around, I can't see why Google couldn't begin selling ebooks like Amazon does. But maybe that's years away from being a reality. The good thing is the dead tree data is getting digitized in some standardized and accessible fashion.

Amazon's Online Reader is really nice, by the way. Here's a demo using a Beatles book.

A few new interesting labs projects were announced at a Google Press Day. What caught my eye:

Google Notebook (to be released at http://google.com/notebook) uses the familiar Gmail UI to give you an easy to use text editor application. Seems to take cues from the wiki-hybrid text app http://www.writeboard.com/. It seems to integrate with Search somehow so you can take notes while sifting through results. Screenshots of the app are available via EricaJoy's photos at flickr.

Google Trends provides simple graphing of search and news reference volume around search terms. The UI is similar to the Finance timeline, without the slider controls. See for example this search for ajax or even more interesting is this search on several different content management systems.

Google Gadgets are little apps that can be floated on your desktop similar to Konfabulator's widgets or the Mac's Dashboard. Gadgets will be most interesting when used for showing stuff like changing data in stock quotes or weather, but I presume will be created for nearly any type of information Google retrieves.

Rollyo is great. It's one of those things I tried to do for myself (for iaslash really) by running htdig and harvesting/indexing all of the sites I read regularly. Rollyo makes this so simple, there's no reason why you shouldn't use it.

Squidoo is another idea that makes sense. It sort of takes the idea of guides and pathfinders and gives lets anyone set up shop as an expert on a topic using their simplified page building interface.

Both are great ideas and projects that are possible because of the APIs and standards made available to developers now. People were just putting these projects up because they could a few years ago. Now people are focussing on information problems and providing services to help get them solved. I don't get really excited about all the Web 2.0 stuff that people are evangelizing out there, but I do get excited by the prospect of new services that help us find information better.

So here's two information architecture services I set up in an hour on both of these sites:

• Information Architecture with Rollyo
• Information Architecture with Squidoo