Good idea (categorizing videos from academic sources), but YOVISTO (http://www.yovisto.com/) needs to index a great many more videos before it becomes relevant as a major search engine.

In keeping with this week's theme of reviewing some of the existing (free) information resources for conducting research. Today's quick hit is Google's News Archive Search (http://news.google.com/archivesearch), a news search utility that allows the searcher to quickly peer back in time by searching old  editions of newspapers. Results are presented in PDF images, and while not of the best quality, are readable. I did a sample search for Dred Scott, and found a good list of articles pertaining to the decision.

While News Archive is not yet comprehensive,  Google is continuing to add to the index (see their acquisition of paperofrecord.com); hopefully they'll continue building and improving the search functionality, as this could become a valuable tool for students and researchers. 

As a followup to the previous post, thought I'd make sure that I mentioned Google Scholar, Google's academic search engine (see: http://scholar.google.com/). Google Scholar is nice, but I'd like to see it include more power search options, such as what you find in Scirus or Scopus (a fee-based product). Features like citation analysis, searching by subject, by region, as well as other features would be welcome additions.

While Google Searches are good; anyone needing to research scientific information (and lacking a subscription to Scopus or other fee-based services) should check out Scirus (www.scirus.com), a search engine that focuses on the sciences and social sciences on the web. Scirus searches publicly available information sources, such as PubMed, Science Direct, as well as conference proceedings and scientist homepages. In addition, a search on Scirus can often find pre-published information ... not a bad tool for competitive intelligence or environmental scanning.