ResearchBuzz

Thanks to Quillblog I got to hear about Covering Photography, a site that indexes book covers with photographs (as opposed to abstract book covers or those with paintings, illustrations, etc.) It’s available at http://idesweb.bc.edu/baden/covering_photography.html . The site contains hundreds of book covers with photographs, browsable by date, photographer (Laurie Anderson??), publisher, author, or designer. You can also search. I found browsing by publication date to be the most fun. Book listings contain large versions of the cover, information on the design/author/publisher/etc. and often commentary. The cover for the 1976 publication of The Big Kiss-Off of 1944 was not a photograph per se but the commentary noted from which photograph elements on the cover had come, and where that photograph could be found. Very impressive.

I’m not a designer per se but I am continually fascinated by book design. The collection of covers here has sparked my brain.

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.

This post came from ResearchBuzz, a site with news and information about online data collections. Visit us at ResearchBuzz.com .

Yahoo has announced that now Yahoo’s Image Search results will include Flickr photos! Over 300 million of them have been added to the Yahoo Image Search pool.

The direct link for Yahoo Image Search is http://images.search.yahoo.com/ . I did a search for snowstorm and saw that the Flickr images are denoted with “by on Flickr”. (You can click on the member name to see all their images on Flickr.) I was also reminded that Yahoo Image Search gives you a wallpaper search option while Google Images only goes up to “large” images.

Obviously this adds a huge pool of photos to Yahoo Image Search, and judging by the quality of what I’ve seen on Flickr this is a good thing. I am disappointed however that Yahoo didn’t take advantage of the fact that there’s a lot more data for these photos (like date taken, updated, tags, camera used, etc.) and make that part of the YIS advanced search. And no RSS feed either…. bummer…

This post came from ResearchBuzz, a site with news and information about online data collections. Visit us at ResearchBuzz.com .