ResearchBuzz

Now that FeedBurner has been acquired by Google, it’s probably not too surprising that Google has FeedBurner tags on some of its blogs (alas, not all, not yet.) I had some fun wandering around the blogs and seeing what was being read the most. (Being read the most in FeedBurner, of course; this doesn’t count how many people are visiting the Web site, watching the pages, etc.)

The Official Google Blog has as you might expect over 440 THOUSAND readers. I’m surprised that the Gmail blog has less than 5000 readers (of course, it’s much more new.) GMail’s FeedBurner readership is only about 500 more than the Orkut blog, which I would not have expected.

Meanwhile, the Google.org blog has less than 300 readers in FeedBurner — very surprising! The Google Mashup Editor blog has less than 500, less surprising since this application is not yet publicly available.

Between the GMail blog and the Google.org, blog, the Public Policy Blog has over 2000 readers.

I can’t wait for the FeedBurner badge to be added to the all the Google blogs. How is the Google Reader blog stacking up against Google Book Search? What about Google LatLong or Inside AdWords? The mind boggles…

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I haven’t been doing much nerdy on ResearchBuzz, but in my job I have been spending time with Amazon ECS and I quite like it. The Amazon ECS — Amazon E-Commerce Service — is a way to search Amazon’s listings and merchants, either in toto or one at a time. You can get more information at http://aws.amazon.com (click on the “Amazon E-Commerce Service” link on the left.)

I bring this up because a new version of Amazon ECS has been announced. This new version introduces a few new variables and includes lots of coverage of Amazon tags. I have mentioned Amazon’s tags recently.

If you want to get a sense of how popular Amazon’s tags are, check out the tag cloud at http://www.amazon.com/gp/tagging/cloud/ref=tag_cld_cl_icld_sm/104-7921062-4880723?ie=UTF8&length=250 . See that &length=250 at the end? It’s editable; I found it worked to set the number up to 1000. The resulting huge cloud goes from 1080p to zen zombie zombies. Click on a tag for products tagged with that information and pointers to additional information, like forum discussions.

I was pleased with Amazon ECS before, but I can see a whole new set of experiments now that tags are so extensively supported. There’s not enough time in the day…

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It’s almost retro — there’s tons of discussion about videos on the Web, but now I’m getting a lot of e-mail about different ways to search static images. Microsoft Live Search (as opposed to half-asleep-I-just-hit-the-snooze-button-search) has announced three new ways to search Live Search Images.

Live Search Images is available at http://search.live.com/images/results.aspx?q= . The three new ways to search are special syntax and are the following:

filter:face — Finds only results with faces in them, similar to a feature on Google I mentioned last month. (except that was an URL switch.) Like Google Images, if you do a search for something not face related and apply the filter, like lightning filter:face you will get a lot of mixed results. In this case I got plenty of faces (including David Bowie, Tony Blair, and Black Lightning) but I also got pictures of binoculars, motorcycles, and for some reason a stick of deodorant. A search for Ruth Buzzi filter:face worked better (though I also got picture of Jerry Lewis and for some reason Jodie Foster.)

filter:portrait — Does not find face-oriented results, instead finds full-length portrait-type things. Ruth Buzzi filter:portrait found only nine results. Note you can also do Ruth Buzzi (filter:portrait OR filter:face) to find all possible results. Searching lightning filter:portrait did appear to provide more people-oriented results (though there were still some non-people matches.) If you’re looking for humans in your results, I’d try the portrait search first.

filter:bw — Finds pictures only in black and white. Why this should be a syntax instead of an option or a pulldown menu (as it is with other search engines) is beyond me. Filter:color , as you might expect, seems to only find pictures in color.

Despite my irresistible urge to poke fun at its name, I liked several aspects of Live Image Search. You can, for example, search for images the size of your desktop. And though I would like more information available on an initial page of search results, I like how mousing over an image provides plenty of information. Worth an explore.

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