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Briefly, as a child, I rode horses. The knowledge that I was falling off horses more than I was actually RIDING them curtailed that activity. But I couldn’t suppress a bit of nostalgia when I got a notification for Equilink, a search engine for all things horsey, available at http://www.equilink.com/ . At this full-text search engine you can do a keyword search or you can browse by category (racing, dressage, western, vacation, etc.)

The first search I do on targeted search engines is intended to break them — the search is “Strawberry Shortcake” . If I get search results about a certain little annoying 80s cartoon character, the search engine has flunked the Strawberry Shortcake test. (There are at least a dozen vertical search engines I have not covered because they flunked the Strawberry Shortcake test.) Equilink passed with flying colors, giving me no results.

Turning to more horse-related searches, I did a search for withers acupressure. I got at least 100 results (I didn’t get a result count) of searches that covered e-commerce, information sites, and at least one result from Amazon. Results contained page title, URL, and snippet. A snapshot of the site would have been nice, especially a sometimes the whole URL is not included (too long?)

Once you have the search results, you have the additional option to filter them by state and city. Not sure how the state is being determined, though — several attempts to filter by state brought no results. California? 0. New York? 0. TEXAS? 0. The only state filter that worked was Alabama, and that brought one result. Use this feature cautiously.

All the searches I did, and all the browsing for that matter, brought very targeted, focussed results. I would like more descriptions and full URLs in the search results (because it’s always good to see where you’re going) and RSS feeds would be nice, of course. Worth a look to the equestrian-minded.

I feel compelled to write up any site that makes me laugh. Berkeley and Craig Newmark (he of Craigslist) have gotten together to create an online game that points a camera out in Craig’s backyard, takes pictures of, and identifies wild birds. You can play Cone Sutro Forest at http://cone.berkeley.edu/ .

The first order of business is registering with the site, which requires a username, e-mail address, and password. (Note that you have to come up with a username, but when you sign in you use your e-mail address. Whatever…) Once you’re registered and have confirmed your registration, you’ll log in and be presented with a closeup view of some bird feeders and a wider view of Craig Newmark’s back yard (which is absolutely beautiful.) You’ll need to have Java for this to work.

You can move the camera around by drawing boxes and by using a set of arrow controls. I found the arrow controls easiest — I ended up drawing boxes all over the place and not figuring out how to aim them at a particular area. There are also multiple people controlling the camera — if there are multiple people playing, you can just watch people move the camera around and focus on birds (hopefully they’re better at it than I am.)

Hang out and look for birds. The video is really good. Watching the site for 15 minutes or so I saw plenty of birds, though sometimes they came and left before I could get them into focus. (I imagine with several people playing this could get to be a problem — everybody spots the bird at the same time and jumps on the camera controls.)

Find a bird? Zoom in (or let somebody else do it) and click on the TAKE SNAPSHOT button. A picture of the bird ends up in your gallery page, where you can go back and review it. You can take up to ten pictures a day but can clear out some pictures on your “daily roll” to make room for others. If you can identify the bird in your picture, click on it and slowly type in the name (so the database for the site can make a suggestion.)

Your My Gallery pictures also end up in the Public Gallery, so be sure to junk blurry/empty/bad pictures. Browse the picture gallery to see what other folks have found — I saw several sparrows, jays, hummingbirds, and at least two upside-down squirrels.

This isn’t going to be for everybody, but I was very impressed by the technology and there were enough birds flying in and out to keep me entertained.

UC Davis has put up a new butterfly site by Art Shapiro, which consists of information about butterflies and their habitats in California as gathered by Dr. Shapiro over a 34-year period.

The front page has a helpful left nav consisting of butterfly taxonomy, but for those of us who’re a little rusty, a nav at the top allows you to browse butterfly information by common name. The butterflies are divided into six groups, with each group having its own page and list of butterflies. The Gossamer-wings, for example, range from the “Agricultural” Melissa Blue to the Willow Hairstreak. There are over 150 butterfly species covered at this site.

Each type of butterfly has its own page, with an overview of its habits and habitats, and a list of places where it’s been spotted. (Click on a site and you’ll get graphs of spotting over the last 30+ years and a probability graph for spotting the butterfly at any given point in the year.) There are also butterfly images, though unfortunately most of the pages I saw had only one image.

(UC Davis probably wants to protect the site, but this would be a great place to insert a Flickr search. I mean, if someone is putting up a picture and tagging it Willow Hairstreak, it’s probably going to be a butterfly. It’s not like any of these things are named Fred.)

In addition to the individual butterfly pages there are several other sections on this site, including an education area (”Meet the Lepidopteran Detective”), a library (ah, a call for photos), and a “Data Depot” (34+ years of butterfly observation data for you to splash around in.)

More pictures!

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