TinEye is an image search engine with a twist:  you provide it with an image, and it returns a list of websites utilizing that image.

I can quickly think of a few really good uses of this service:

• You have an image that you downloaded sometime in the past, but you don’t remember where you got it.
• You have found an image that would be perfect for a project, but you aren’t sure who the owner is, or what the usage terms might be.
• You are the owner of an image, and want to ensure that it isn’t being mis-appropriated by others.
• You have an image, and want to locate a site with a higher quality or different version of the image.

found via a comment thread in MetaFilter

Feedmil is a search engine for RSS feeds.  It does this specific task very, very well.  Search for feeds relating to any keywords you wish, and modify your results using a set of slides that emphasize/de-emphasize words that show up in your results.

I wish they had a more detailed “about” page, especially information on how they determine popularity, authority, quality, and relevance.

found via RSS4Lib

Wolfram|Alpha is a new type of internet resource that has just gone “live”.  Many are calling it a new type of “search engine”, which it technically is, but it isn’t a search engine in the way we are used to envisioning one.  Others are calling it an “answer engine”, which isn’t a bad description.  Wolfram takes the user’s query and builds a response from a variety of resources that resembles what one might get from an almanac or or encyclopedic resource.  Wolfram’s own “about” page avoids any particular label.

Right now it has a relatively limited set of resources.  It does well with towns, states, people, movies, word definitions and many scientific questions in the areas of mathematics and chemistry (which is understandable considering that it was built using Mathematica as the foundation.  It doesn’t do well with music, books, television shows, and abstract concepts.  Much of this has to do with the data sets and methodology that is in place, and I expect to see much greater depth and breadth represented as time goes on.

I have spent a bit of time last night and this afternoon playing with it, and am fairly impressed.  Try a few queries, and be sure to view the “Source Information” link at the bottom of the results.  This provides a fairly generic listing of the resources used for that type of query.  Not all of the sources were necessarily used for your particluar query, but were the sources from which the data was extracted.  One can see that with the addition of additional resources, Wolfram could become powerful first step for research.

Some sample queries:

• DeKalb, Illinois
• World According to Garp (movie)
• World According to Garp (novel) [note that this one fails... no resources yet for literature]
• Heaviest Gas Element [many variations of this don't work, an example of syntax, I suppose]

and it doesn’t know quite how to handle leading articles, either:

• The World According to Garp (movie)

This is going to be a great reference; it needs time to mature and for additional data sets to be included.  This is certainly one place where the use of library cataloging information would be very, very beneficial.  Imagine being able to connect the dots between books, authors, publication dates, settings/locales, etc. and other data sets.

There are many sources of data that are mostly silos waiting to be tapped, Infochimps.org being one example.  How quickly and effectively they are able to incorporate useful data will partly determine how successful this resource becomes.  Improving their context recognition (i.e. figuring out what a person wants to know based on their typed input) is the other, perhaps harder, challenge.

Other sources of commentary and information:

• Resource Shelf’s Brief Users Guide to Wolfram
• Quizzing the World’s First Answer Engine
• MetaFilter’s entry, and resulting discussion/commentary
• Wikipedia’s Wolfram Alpha entry

In closing, I like their nod to 2001, A Space Odyssey in their load exceeded error screen:

I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that...

Why you can’t find a library book in your search engine is an article in The Guardian.  It is a good overview of the broader issues surrounding the OCLC Licensing problem, and is written for the general reader (i.e. this is the article you should recommend to all your non-library friends (and perhaps even some of your library friends).

found on Librarian.net

Unshelved is having a transcription party, and we all are invited!

Bill and Gene have installed the ohnorobot comic search engine, and all that remains to make every Unshelved comic searchable by character, quote, or topic is for everyone to jump in and transcribe a few strips.

The 2008 Presidential Election Search Engine is a Google Custom Search Engine created by the University of Kansas Library.

It is a great resource in that one can find the needles of information in the haystack of campaign rhetoric.

found via “Organizing the 2008 Presidential Election”, from College and Resource Libraries, October 2008, p. 540.

I am a bit of a political junkie… and it generally won’t spill over onto this blog. However, one resource that I have found very interesting when examining Ohio and New Hampshire results has been Google Maps coverage of the primaries. They haven’t committed to doing all 50 states, but the service has been popular, and I suspect that they will continue at least as long as the nominations are in play. As for November… who knows??

• Google LatLong Blog entry
• Iowa page
• New Hampshire page

found via Search Engine Land

Wikia, the search engine designed around the concept of wikis, has been launched in alpha.  This means that a) it isn’t going to work as well as anyone wants, and b) no fair comparing it to Google et. al., except in the theoretical.  In fact, we usually wouldn’t see software until the beta stage of development; this shows how much Wikia will rely on users.

There isn’t all that much to see yet, but the idea of an annotated search engine where the users provide feedback about the search results, which will then be used to improve future results, is tantalizing.  Search 2.0 anyone?

via Open Access News

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has released a report (Pdf here) that you should read. Really. It will likely challenge assumptions that we make regarding who uses libraries and why. Here are a few of their findings as examples:

Problem Solving Behavior (from Major Questions and Findings):

• 58% of those who had recently experienced one of those problems said they used the internet (at home, work, a public library or some other place) to get help.
• 53% said they turned to professionals such as doctors, lawyers or financial experts.
• 45% said they sought out friends and family members for advice and help.
• 36% said they consulted newspapers and magazines.
• 34% said they directly contacted a government office or agency.
• 16% said they consulted television and radio.
• 13% said they went to the public library.

Public Library Use, by Generation (from Chapter 3):

• After Work (age 72+) – 32%
• Matures (62-71) – 42%
• Leading Boomers (53-61) – 46%
• Trailing Boomers (43-52) – 57%
• Generation X (31-42) – 59%
• Generation Y (18-30) – 62%

Regarding the second set of statistics, this is a dramatic turnaround from a survey in 1996 (from Chapter 9) which showed 18-24 year olds being the “least supportive” of libraries.

Another interesting note is that those with broadband access to the internet are more likely to use a public library than those with lower or no access to the internet (from Chapter 3). This finding surprised me.

Read the report; there is a lot more there to catch your attention. What surprises you? What confirms your circumstances? What does it all mean?

We are in a time of great change for libraries. The internet, social networking, wireless access, and broad access to computers are all radical forces that are going to alter our jobs and environments in ways we still cannot fully imagine. Understanding and implementing Library 2.0 concepts is only a start (but a necessary one).

We need to understand that this is a revolution in information. Storing, seeking, accessing, using, and understanding information is going to be different. Different is not necessarily good. Different is not necessarily bad. It will simply be… different.

We in Libraryland need to be on top of this moving colossus, and to be doing our best to anticipate and understand where it is going. This is not only important for ourselves, but for the good we can do for society as a whole.

found on Search Engine Land

LibWorm is a fantastic resource for those who are interested in libraries and blogs.  It is a search engine for library-related blog content, drawn from 1400 RSS feeds.

The Right Way to Fix Inaccurate Wikipedia Articles is the title of a Search Engine Land post by Durova, a Wikipedia administrator.

Not only is it an intersting read, it allows one to see how those who help manage Wikipedia view their responsibilities.

If you want to be, um, whelmed by both the number of Google products that exist, as well as how they are interconnected, check out this organizational chart from Zorgloob.  Clicking on an icon takes you to a page with further information about that product.  The chart image can be found here.

I have no idea who/what Zorgloob is, or why he/they created the chart; the link came from Search Engine Land and was too interesting to not post.

The Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) has just been made easier to set up and use.

The brief summary: create a page of links to web resources you feel are useful and appropriate for a given topic. Via Google, you generate a short bit of code that is added to the page, and you have a search tool that will let people do a full-text Google search on all of those resources — without you having to maintain anything other than the page of links. If you add or remove links, the CSE automatically adjusts the search to match. Techie description and details are here.

So if your library has lists of web resources, this may be a way to effectively let your patrons search them for the information they want.

from Google Librarian Central

This isn’t directly related to libraries, and even the indirect aspect only applies to larger libraries, or libraries within larger institutions, but I thought there were some points of interest in this blog post from an anti-Google blog.

Of special interest to me is how Google handles their IT issues (near the end of the post). They have a local IT person (one per floor, it seems) who handles initial troubleshooting, updating and changing equipment, and other tech-related issues. This looks like a very flexible and quick system to get people what they need to keep working effectively. I have lost count how many times something like this would have been beneficial for a workplace.

Some of the gripes (office space, management structure, insurance) could be a reflection of what that particular employee values in their work experience. They could also reflect growing pains on Google’s part, so I leave it to the reader to decide where they would prefer to work, or at least which of these ideas could be applied to your library.

found on Search Engine Land

Jonathan Rochkind has an interesting commentary on this New York Times article about Google’s Algorithm titled Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine.

I really don’t have much to add, except for the thought that we are too mired in the “algorithm” we currently have, which was built around small index cards in drawers, and need to recognize that there are many parts, facets if you will, to how we store and provide information. We need to be open to each of these facets and the ways we can use them.

Storage, Search, Presentation, Categorization… these are all parts of what we do; they do not have to all reflect the same structure, they just need to be able to interact.

Pipl is a search engine geared towards finding people, but it casts a wider net than other people search tools. It searches social networking sites, job sites, and blogs.

As you might guess, there are usually a lot of results to wade through, especially with common names.  That aspect aside, this site can be helpful for tracking down someone, or for seeing what your own web presence is.

from Search Engine Land

eTools.ch is a search engine with a couple of interesting twists…

It is a meta-search engine, meaning it doesn’t do its own crawling and indexing of web pages, it sends your search to 10 other search engines, then sorts the results for you. But this is neither new or interesting; MetaCrawler was doing that when Google was called BackRub.   Look at these features, though:

• eTools lets you rank, and even disable, any of the 10 search engines it uses. Thus, if you don’t like the results that Google retrieves, you can eliminate them.
• eTools works with keyword search terms, like every other search engine. Unlike every other search engine, however, it accepts boolean queries, and translates it into the closest equivalent for each of the search engines it uses.
• eTools allows you to select a language limit for your results.
• eTools will export the search result list as either a Pdf or RSS file (essentially an XML file).

from Search Engine Land

MasterKey is an interesting prototype of a new meta-search engine.  I like search tools that generate metadata (in the form of subjects, authors, etc. to narrow one’s search) on the fly.  Vivisimo was the first of these that I encountered, and MasterKey is an excellent example of how to do this in a usable manner.

One thing that needs to be addressed, however:  once you have narrowed your search results, there doesn’t seem to be any straightforward way to go back to a broader set of results, short of modifying the info in the search box.  One has to expect to be able to back up and explore other areas with as much ease as narrowing the search in the first place.

from Catalogablog

Wow… library blog land is abuzz tonight with the release of LibraryFind… and it does look fantastic!

It is an open source federated search engine that is fully customizable, and the price is right.

Check out the Oregon State University Demo to see what it does.

from (in time stamp order): Web4Lib post (5:52 p.m.); One Big Library (6:15 p.m.); OSS4Lib (6:31 p.m.); ResourceShelf (6:35 p.m.) — makes my later-than-9-p.m. post seem kind of late, eh?

As part of their real estate search area, Yahoo has debuted a School Search feature that provides information and reports on schools throughout the country.

from Search Engine Land