ResearchBuzz

AWS has an article about the New York Times TimesMachine. Unfortunately it’s for Times print subscribers only…

Condoleeza Rice at Google.

Google has tool to check for malware.

News mapped on Google Earth.

Hey! Cory’s in a comic strip.

US Airways: No More Free Snacks. I think eventually they’re just going to stack passengers like cordwood.

Google’s new? discussion board results. Good good. More more. And isolate them so I can search just them (or them and Google Groups) when I’m trying to solve a tech problem…

I thought it was interesting that a professor at RIT — RIT — is claiming that Doodle 4 Google winner.

Drat. I missed Towel Day too.

The American Civil War Online, free through June 30. Thanks for the heads-up LiB.

Google Sites is now open to everybody, and now it has its own blog.

More instructional material on the Internet, this time wrapped up in a search engine. New engine HowDoYa.com (http://HowDoYa.com) gave me some odd results, but I like the way it offers additional topic keywords.

The first thing I did when I got to this site (simple keyword search) was run the Strawberry Shortcake Test. HowDoYa.com got a B- … There were plenty of Strawberry Shortcake recipes (How do I make Strawberry Shortcake?) but there were also some off-topic Web pages (including the intriguing “Unreal Tournament And Skins And Strawberry Shortcake” page, which I didn’t visit.)

You’ll notice on the search results page there are also sets of keywords that can narrow down your search. For example, my strawberry shortcake query brought me a What set (butter, berry, cake, flour, sugar, chicken(?!)), a Who set that was a bit odd (cobbler, batter, guest), a Why set (chill, baking, slice, sprinkle, stir), and Where (bakery, dairy, shop.) Click on a keyword and your search will be run again with that keyword included.

(I suspect that’s why some of the suggested searches on this site are so weird — “How to cook oatmeal in the microwave linear accelerator”??)

You can also see where those keywords are popping up. Next to every search result is an “X-Ray Spex” type icon of glasses. Click on it and the keyword sets will refresh. The keywords that appear in that search result will show in dark blue, while the other keywords will continue to show in light blue. I wish that the designer had chosen some other color besides dark blue — yellow, maybe — to make the keywords stand out more.

But actually that’s the only beef I have about the design of this site. I normally don’t have much comment about a site’s design, but this one I really like. It’s cartoony without being silly, easy to use without being overly-simplified. You may have to experiment with your searches a little to find good results, but I like the fact that suggested keywords are offered in such universal sets, and I like the “x-ray” feature that shows site keywords in suggested sets. Worth a look.

Let’s just keep riding that multimedia indexing bandwagon, shall we? The next stop is Snipp.TV ( http://www.snipp.tv/search ), which allows you to search audio and media files for keywords. Snipp.TV describes what it is doing as “keyword spotting,” so I’m not sure if entire transcriptions of clips are being generated and searched. I did have luck searching for names and less-common words which might not make good topics.

The search engine at Snipp is regular keyword (the search box does provide suggestions as you type, but it’s a little slow). I started with Wii Fit. I got 5 results. There’s a media player on the left and search results on the right. Search results include several screenshots, source and length, and a small summary. There’s also a list of topics covered by that clip. Check out the two icons with each search results. The icon that looks like a pair of glasses will show you a list of topics covered by that clip. You can click on any of the topics listed and explore related sets of keywords that way.) The other icon lets you add your search results to a playlist. Very nice. I wasn’t sure that Snipp.tv was indexing EVERYTHING in a clip, so I did a search for Tsuboi, which is the last name of a reporter at CNET. I got about 27 results. (At the same time I got only 5 results on a search for “Wii Fit”. Huh?)

I’m going to have do a lot more playing with this in order to understand how best to work the keywords — I’m really surprised “Tsuboi” did better than “Wii Fit”. (Wii got 34 results, so maybe I’m getting too specific in my searching.) I love the way the playlist option is laid out, and I like the topic lists. If the suggested searches were a little faster I’d really like those too.