Search
Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability looks well worth reading (my copy’s on the way).
If it worked on a Mac, I’d give Google Desktop Search a try. I might, however, be slightly concerned about privacy issues, despite Google’s assurances.
When did Amazon start offering searchable menus?
Intelliseek’s BlogPulse uses the blogosphere to track trends. For example: Osama, Saddam, and Kim. (via)
Amazon has launched a (beta) search engine called A9. Since you’re already a registered member of Amazon, they can do things like saving your most recent searches and noting when you’ve followed a given result link. Of course Yahoo could do the same, but probably has figured that privacy concerns might keep people from using the search engine if it’s tracking their search behavior, e.g. “Your most recent search: ‘Britney Spears naked’.”
Alex Wright: In search of the deep Web
Amazon has added the ability to search the text of some of their books. The nicest part is that the results show the context and then link to a scan of the page they were found on. This is the kind of thing the Library of Congress should have done years ago.
I didn’t realize that search engines don’t really use the Meta Keywords tag any more: Search Engine Features For Webmasters.
So, I’m sure you know that Yahoo! just launched an updated search interface (they must have some killer PR folks; I saw a mention on CNN that actually managed to break into the relentless stream of war news)… Anyhow, on first glance a lot of what they’ve done seems to be playing catchup with Google. But their Search Shortcuts feature is hella cool and may well get me to start using Yahoo! instead of Google (which is the point here, right?). It’s one of those obvious-in-retrospect features that I feel like I’ve seen before (in fairness, Google sorta, kinda, half does this, but it’s just nowhere near as useful or elegant). Type in “map” and an address and you get a map. Type in “define” and a word and you get the definition. Type in “weather” and a city and, well, you get it. Nothing radical, just a really nice implementation of a truly useful feature. So, I just want to say congratulations to Christina et al. Nicely done!
I just typed “Pattern Recognition” into a search engine and got 0 results.
Surely this will be interesting to some search geek out there: Google Dance (via webref)
Nothin’ super mind-blowing, but I appreciate the publicness of labs.google.com—Google Demos
Alex’s cogent report from a VLAB discussion of The Semantic Web ™
omigod.. this is so good! Dave’s Quick Search Taskbar. (via andrew)
HumanMarkup.org: Human Traits and Expression through XML (via sigia list)
Leave it to google to do an image search that freakin’ works. It’s fast. It returns thumbnails along with useful info like image size. And they’ve actually done work to attach useful metadata to the images they’ve indexed. For example, compare a search on “airport” with “airport interior”. (thanks xblog)
Leave it to google to do an image search that freakin’ works. It’s fast. It returns thumbnails along with useful info like image size. And they’ve actually done work to attach useful metadata to the images they’ve indexed. For example, compare a search on “airport” with “airport interior”. (thanks xblog)
In response to my robot-book lament, monkey-mind pointed out that symbols.com does provide search based on visual characteristics. Of course, that’s a very specialized, focused set of possible results, it’s a totally closed system, and the search is still limited to a few basic criteria. It seems to work pretty well for the application, but it ain’t gonna find my long-lost robot book.
When I was a kid I had this rad book (I think it was a coloring book) about a planet (maybe it was the earth, but I don’t think so) that was going to be destroyed (by either a natural disater, like the star/sun going nova, or some alien attack). The inhabitants built this huge robot/space ship that they could escape on. I remember, especially, a cutaway view of the robot, which looked something like a Shogun Warrior (especially Raideen). Anyway, that’s all I remember about it, but I want to find a copy and it’s got me thinking…
What I really need is some sort of fuzzy, part-visual way to search. I mean, I have all the (admittedly vague) info above and I can picture a page from the book. I couldn’t draw it very well, but I could probably describe it to someone police-sketch style and incrementally get closer to how it actually looks. And with more and more visual communication going on, something like this needs to be figured out (I know, I know it’s really hard and lots of smart people are already working on it, but dammit, my nostalgia for the toys and media of my youth needs results now while I’m still in my 30s!).
Search Adobe PDF Online. In my opinion, PDF is the real cancer on the Web. [webword]