Course details:

Power Searching with Google is a free online, community-based course showcasing search techniques and how to use them to solve real, everyday problems. It features:

Six 50-minute classes.

Interactive activities to practice new skills.

Opportunities to connect with others using Google Groups, Google+, and Hangouts on Air.

Upon passing the post-course assessment, a printable Certificate of Completion will be emailed to you.

Guess what I just signed up for?

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Why install the same application in so many different places? Evernote stores your collected items in the “cloud,” so every time you capture something using, say, an iPhone, that item resides on the Evernote server and thus becomes available through other interfaces such as the standalone Evernote application on a desktop machine or via the Evernote website visited on your laptop.

Miller explains the myriad ways he relies on Evernote. To use a technical term, it looks wicked awesome for journalists and researchers. I’m now inspired to try it out on my Android phone — check the instructional video.

Related: What’s Evernote for? How about making a vast, searchable archive of all your files

Update: Just found this vid that demonstrates how Evernote uses a type of Optical Character Recognition when you upload photos. So when you type keyword searches, you can find the words in documents you photograph. Madness.

The post Reporting tool: Taking notes with Evernote appeared first on John Tedesco.

Let’s say you’re researching the roots of the economic crisis, and you want to explore whether the deregulation of the banking industry played a role. The C-Span archive offers the full video of the 1999 bipartisan signing ceremony of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. And nearly a decade later, after the housing bubble burst, there’s a video on C-Span of former Sen. Phil Gramm defended his role in the legislation.

A New York Times article about the archives says:

The archives, at C-SpanVideo.org, cover 23 years of history and five presidential administrations and are sure to provide new fodder for pundits and politicians alike. The network will formally announce the completion of the C-Span Video Library on Wednesday.

Having free online access to the more than 160,000 hours of C-Span footage is “like being able to Google political history using the ‘I Feel Lucky’ button every time,” said Rachel Maddow, the liberal MSNBC host.

Related: What’s Evernote for? How about making a vast, searchable archive of all your files

If you think C-Span is boring, did I mention that Chris Farley appeared in Congress in 1995 to impersonate Newt Gingrich? Watch the video in all its glory on C-Span.

The post Full C-Span archives now online appeared first on John Tedesco.

I got some great feedback researching the history of my 85-year-old house using free deeds and public records at the county courthouse that anyone can look up themselves. But some people said they had trouble using Bexar County’s Web page set up by County Clerk Gerry Rickhoff to look up public records. Here are a few tips to get started.

When you visit the site, you have to register for free. Once that’s done you can log in and you’ll see this intro page:

Here you can search foreclosure notices, marriage licenses, business records — life’s important moments, all documented and filed at the county courthouse.

Deeds documenting property sales are also filed at the courthouse. If you want to know more about the history of a property, click on “name” to search by the name of the grantee or grantor. The grantor is the party selling the property, the grantee is the person who bought it.

Related: How to get in touch with an investigative reporter

You can’t look up a property by its address, but you can look it up by its legal description. To find the legal description for a property, visit the Bexar County Appraisal District’s page and click on “Property Search.” You can type in the name of the owner, the address or look up the property on a map.

So if you do a search for “Tedesco John” my house comes up and you can see the legal description is New City Block 1946, Block 24, Lot 28.

Go back to the document search page and click on the “Land info” tab. It pulls up this page:

Type in the legal description for my house and you’ll see all the deeds, tax liens, easements, and any other record filed at the county courthouse in connection to that property going back to 1960.

The search pulls up five documents tied to my property, and you can download digital copies of the records. For example, you can pull up this deed showing that I bought the house in 2003 from Angie and Andrew Millman, and I paid for it with an $87,899 bank loan.

Another deed shows the Millmans bought the house in 1996 from someone named Wilma Nora Boyle. My neighbors told me she was a nice woman who had lived in the house for years.

This search goes back to 1960 [UPDATE: The clerk’s office has since expanded the land records search to 1837. You can now ignore the part in this post about the historical records search], but my house was built in 1924. So how do I figure out who Boyle bought the house from?

Related: A history lesson about old neighborhoods and race in San Antonio

Go back to the search menu. Under the application menu, don’t click on “Land Records” like you did last time. Click on “1837-1963 Historical Records.” There, you’ll see a “Grantor/Grantee” search option.

Searching for Boyle’s name turns up the fact that she bought the house from the Ring family. Search for that couple and you see that they, in turn, bought the house from Hortanz Wiegand. Wiegand had bought the house from her husband, G.A. Wiegand. And the very first deed for the property was dated Dec. 9, 1925 when G.A. Wiegand bought the house from the builder, L.S. Busby.

If you own a house, your title company might have provided you with deeds showing the chain of ownership for the property. But you can also be your own title company and conduct your own research for any property. In the past, I’ve written stories about controversial land deals and developments. The two Web sites set up by Rickhoff and the county’s appraisal district let me quickly figure out who owns what, where and when.

And sometimes, these old records simply offer a glimpse at what life was like in another era.

Note: I’ve updated this post to reflect recent changes to the county’s search page.

The post How to research a property’s history using Bexar County’s free records search appeared first on John Tedesco.

Run a search for “San Antonio” and you’ll find all kinds of stories and photos:

Here’s Google’s original blog post about this new research tool. “This is part of a broader effort across Google to help bring offline content online and allow people to find it with a simple Google web search,” wrote Google’s product manager Brandon Badger. Hat tip to Marilia Martins who tweeted about this today.

Read more about searching Google: How to solve impossible problems: Daniel Russell’s awesome Google search techniques

The post New research tool: Searchable Google archives of Life Magazine appeared first on John Tedesco.

Meg Marco at the Consumerist blogged about a quirky New York Times article that offered car maintenance tips — from 1907. In the process, she highlighted the usefulness of an awesome research tool: Digital, searchable newspaper archives dating to the 1800s.

We were poking around the NYT archives when we stumbled across this gem, car maintenance budgeting advice for people interested in owning a car … in 1907. Some of the advice remains the same. Other parts, like how much to pay your driver and how much to budget for repainting the car once a year — not so much.

What’s amazing is how easy it is to unearth these ancient news articles. In the old days, you had to dig through musty archives or scroll through microfilm. But companies such as the New York Times, Google and ProQuest are putting vast newspaper collections online. And the articles are searchable by keyword, which really helps if you don’t know the exact date of the story you’re looking for. Run a search for “Civil War” in the New York Times archives and you can read the actual articles about the Civil War from the 1860s.

A few years ago I wrote a story about the problem of performance enhancing drugs in the Texas racehorse industry. I wrote: “The specter of drugs boosting the performance of racehorses has haunted the sport for more than a century. The word ‘doping’ first emerged at racetracks in the late 1800s.”

Related: How to solve impossible problems: Daniel Russell’s awesome Google search techniques

One way I traced the history of the word “doping” was by searching the New York Times archives, which led me to this April 7, 1901 story about the history of doping.

Google’s archives include millions of old articles from a wide variety of publications — and the company recently quadrupled its collection. Run a search in the Google archives for “doping,” and you see a chronological chart showing how often the word appeared in news stories over the years.

So what did Meg learn about maintaining a car in 1907? Check out her post, there’s some interesting, funny stuff about how much to pay your chauffeur and why you shouldn’t speed above — hold on to your top hats — 40 mph.

The post Car advice in 1907 and other archived awesomeness appeared first on John Tedesco.

Now the GAO, the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, is going all social media on us by setting up accounts on Twitter and YouTube.

Related: A new Web site for Freedom of Information

This is a nice touch by a federal agency that for years has offered e-mail updates to subscribers, who can be notified about topics that interest them. I also noticed today that the GAO’s home page has an RSS feed.

The main resource I use is the GAO’s search page, which offers a rich source of material. You can do keyword searches on GAO reports going back to 1980.

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