ResearchBuzz

All work and no play makes Jack one sad rhino. When you get tired browsing through academic digital archives, check out the new Marvel Comic Vault, available at http://www.marvel.com/digitalcomics/ .

Make no bones — this is a pay site. You can pay either $4.99 a month for a year of access (that’s if you pay for a year at a time) or $9.99 a month, billed monthly. There is a sampler of 250 comics available for free, with over 2,500 comics available in the archive and about 20 titles being added every week. (The way the press release describes it, I do not get the impression that Marvel is going to try to make this an absolutely complete archive.

Oh dear, I haven’t read comics in a long time, and I don’t want to search for something obvious like Captain America. Oh, I know — how about Captain Marvel?

No, not THAT Captain Marvel. The female, African-American Captain Marvel who I think was a police officer named Monica? Wikipedia informs me that I am thinking of Monica Rambeau. I did a search for Monica Rambeau and got only four results, with what appears to be for other characters named Monica. There is a place where you can browse by character/artist names, but it appears to be available for subscribers only. A search for Jonah brought about 15 results, mostly (as you’d expect) for Spider-Man comics.

The viewer appears to be Flash-based, allowing you to page through the comics. Even if you’re not a subscriber, it looks like the first two or three pages are available. This is pretty comfortable except sometimes it takes a few minutes for the page to load (I guess the vault is rather busy at the moment.)

I’m sure I’m a bit too old — okay, dammit, way too old — for the demographic that’s being aimed for. Browsing the free samples did find some amusing offerings, like a Love Romances comic from 1960. (Who can resist the line, “Come here, you beautiful little ninny”?). If I were the demographic, however, I think I would agitate for an advanced search that allowed you to do more complex date/title/character searching and a faster load for the comics viewer…

Air kisses to Boing Boing for hipping me to LocateTV, which is in beta at http://www.locatetv.com/ . This site allows you to search for television shows, movies, or actors, and see when they’re going to be on TV.

So I did a search for Match Game. I got 30 results — far more than I expected — but it’s because I didn’t realize the depth of the search results. Yes, the search result was for the TV show Match Game, but then I got individual episodes of shows like ER and The Honeymooners, as well as pointers to a “Behind the Scenes” special for Match Game, actors, and movies. (The summaries for most of the listings were quite good.)

I chose a Frasier episode from 2004. I got a page that showed a more extended description, cast list, and credit notes. Beneath that is a three tab setup that shows where the episode is available — on television, DVD, and online. In this case, the episode is only available online; according to LocateTV, it’s not showing on TV any time soon. On the other hand, if you look up something like Bionic Woman, you’ll see that it’s available online and on television, but isn’t yet available on DVD.

Nice! Now when I want to know where I can get a copy of the Brady Bunch “Joe Namath” episode, I know exactly where to go…

GenieKnows has launched a search engine focusing on content for video gamers, now available at http://www.genieknowsgames.com/ .

In addition to the search engine query box, the site also features a tag cloud (I’m starting to like tag clouds a little better for browsing), featured video, and a gaming blog.

I’m happy to report that the search engine passed the Strawberry Shortcake test with flying colors, getting me lots of results that were oriented toward the character’s video games (in case you needed a cheat against a Purple Pieman boss.) I noticed that more recent games tended to get more results than older games (perhaps differences in which Web sites are talking about the older games?) and I’m not sure that quotes for phrases are recognized; I did a search for “Emperor Rise” and got results for Emperor, Rise of the Silver Surfer, etc…

Search results included the usual title/extract/url pattern, though FeedBurner content also had a little flame icon next to it. Links allow users to submit sites as broken or spaham. Look to the left of the results page to see that results are divided into categories — cheats, fans, blogs, articles & reviews, etc.

I did notice that in one category — software — the results weren’t as good, and there was a little bit of spaham (though it was quickly reported.) It would be nice if search results in the blogs & news categories could be ordered by freshness, as well. It’ll take a little extra searching to get around if phrases don’t work, but this could be useful next time I need a walkthrough…