ResearchBuzz

Sometimes people at work want me to do search engine-y things. A co-worker’s mother is losing her vision, unfortunately, and he wanted some help in finding equipment for her. “I want her to have one of those scanners,” he said. “You put a letter on it and it reads it.” I thought he meant a computer scanner, but after looking around some I think he means a whole class of scan-and-read standalone devices. One of them is called The ScannaR. (There’s also SARA, the Portset, and the Extreme Reader XR10, if you want to look around on your own.)

The ScannaR and similar devices are pretty expensive — I saw prices for around $3000 — so I tried to find a used one. eBay didn’t pan out, so I decided to look on Google.

scannar for sale found only about 3,060 results, but many of them were for people who couldn’t spell the word scanner. So I tried again with scannar for sale blind.

Imagine my surprise when the result count jumped up to 511,000!

Turns out Google was politely correcting my spelling when I DIDN’T WANT IT TO BE CORRECTED and searching for scanner instead of scannar. So I ended up with half-a-million results. If you want Google to quit correcting your spelling, put a + in front of the word you want left alone. In this case +scannar for sale blind brought me a mere 100 results, a much more easily-handled set.

I found a good circular listing different types of assistive products at http://www.loc.gov/nls/reference/circulars/assistive.html. I think I’ll take it to my co-worker and see if he can clarify a bit on what he wants. Maybe he and I can sit down and look at Abledata.

Google recently announced a new version of its Google Maps API, called the Static Maps API. Its Web site is at http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/staticmaps/index.html . Unlike the regular Google Maps API, the Static Maps API doesn’t require JavaScript, and its parameters are passed through a URL. You WILL need an API key for it to work.

There are several parameters you specify with the URL, including basic stuff like the size of the map, where it should be centered (longitude and latitude), and how close it should be zoomed. You can also add little markers to it. I’m including a sample map below of the New Bedford Whaling Museum.

The URL looks like this:

http://maps.google.com/staticmap?center=41.637497,-70.923529&zoom=12&size=512×256
&maptype=roadmap&markers=41.637497,-70.923529,bluem&key={my key goes here)

From left to right, the parameters are where the maps centers, how close it’s zoomed, the size, what kind of map it is, where the one marker is placed, along with what color and what letter, and the API key.

Then all you have to do is take that URL and put it into an img src:

This API makes it really, really, really simple to create maps for your Web site for just off the cuff. Of course, it doesn’t have the flexibility or the functionality of a map created by the JavaScript API, but it’s very quick. I am morosely remembering little projects I did that took ages with the regular API that I would have knocked off very quickly with this one….

Google News announced recently that you can now search by city/state and zip code to get news. I don’t know why they’re talking about this while not saying much about the location: syntax, but whatever. Let’s get local.

When I think of hyperlocal news search (zip-code level) I think Topix. You can do zip code news searches by using the Google News advanced search form at http://news.google.com/advanced_news_search . (Don’t try to do the searches from the main search form; you’ll get really wonky results.)

I did a search for 82001, which is Cheyenne Wyoming. I got 492 results, from what looked like mostly Cheyenne searches. But if I did the same search and restricted the results to Wyoming media (again using the advanced search form) I got far fewer results.

(By the way, if you want you can search for news about one zip code — say, 82001 — in media from another state — say, New York. When I tried this I got some irrelevant information but I also got legitimate news from other sources.)

Searching by city and state worked equally well; searching for Burlington Vermont found over 1900 results, again mostly from that state’s media.

Doing some location searching is all very well, but nothing I saw here is going to tear me away from Topix. On the other hand, I see plenty of opportunities to add Google’s various special searches to the location search. For example, I might decide I only want television station stories from my search — I could add source:tv to my geography-based search. I might want to add keywords that are restricted to headlines — like searching for 90210 and then adding intitle:strike to the search.

(It appears that you have to edit the searches from the advanced search pages. When I tried to change the keywords on the search result page, Google News lost its location searching.)

When it comes to news by location, I’m going to stick with Topix. But I do want to do some additional playing with Google News’ area-based news in conjunction with other special syntax.