Phil Bradley's weblog

AllInOneNews - A News Metasearch Engine

The AllInOneNews search engine collates data from 1,800 news engines from 200 countries in order to provide searchers with very basic, but reasonable results. A search will provide users with title, source, date (day and time), short summary and photograph if available. It would appear to be possible to search back to 1988, but I ran a search for 'America' with dates from 1988-1990 and got zero results, and a search for 'Bush' from 1988 - 2008 only returned 99 results, so I'm not overly confident of either coverage by date or news resource. It doesn't seem to have any advanced search functionality, though to be fair it does have an RSS option - either terms they've chosen or you can input your own.

Bottom line - too basic for anything other than very simple searching, and you'd be better off sticking to Silobreaker.

Picollator search by faces

This is a search engine that you can supposedly use to find faces. Simply upload a photograph or point to a URL and Picollator will find other images that are a match. Now, my first question here is very basic - why would you want to? If you want pictures of a particular person, do a search for them the image function of your favourite search engine. Or if you want someone with a beard you could search for that as well. If you're interested in faces related to a subject Google is pretty good at that, as are most of the other major engines. While I'm all in favour of alternative engines there are times when I do think 'why?' and this is one of them. (I can see a more extended use of this however if you want to find things that look like other things, such as being able to take a photograph of a monument or wotnot and have an engine look at it, work out what the image is, match it to others and for example tell you where you are.)

This engine just doesn't seem to work however. I tried half a dozen times with images of film stars and got 0 results every time. I therefore have to take issue with their FAQ 'How does Picollator Online work?' Answer 'Do not care. It works.' Actually, I do care, and it doesn't. Anyway, in the FAQ I think I'm approaching an explanation: "There is no system that can define 100% who is the man." The photographs that are best to use are also with less hair across the face (beards are out then), no glasses (I'm failing at every hurdle here!) and so on.

Nice idea but really, it doesn't work. Not even a little. One to give a miss to I think.

UK Govt Minister looks like a fool...

I've resisted this one since Saturday, but can manage no longer. In the BBC news story Website age ratings 'an option' it's reported 'Culture Secretary' Andy Burnham wants to apply film-style ratings to websites in an attempt to 'save the children'. The lack of understanding this man shows regarding the internet is quite astonishing. I can only suppose his civil servants dislike him as well, given that they didn't actually stop his gibberish getting published.

It wasn't so long ago that the government was talking about having chat rooms policed to 'save the children', and a fat lot came of that. Quite how a rating system is going to stop children looking at anything is baffling to say the least. The best that it'll do is encourage children to look for X rated sites, leading to the exact opposite of what Nitwit Burnham wants.

I love some of the things he says: "content standards online are not as clear as we've all been used in traditional media". No, that's right, and that's because the internet is not traditional media - we do things differently here y'know. (I'm going to sidestep the whole WWW v Internet debate since I suspect it'll be a definition too far for him). The classic political doublespeak however comes when he says that he doesn't want to curb free speech while in the same breath saying that he wants to protect the public from 'unacceptable' material. So that'll be censorship then?

I could weep sometimes, really I could.

100 top sites for the year ahead - maybe.

The Guardian recently produced a list of the 100 top sites for the year ahead and I've had a chance to go through them. I'm not listing all of them - just those that catch my eye for some reason, either good, bad or WTF? If you want the lot, follow the link!

Blogging. For reasons that escape me they've got Bloglines in there, and described it as smart and clean. I boggled at this - it's turned into a trainwreck and the only context I see people writing about bloglines with now is to say that they're leaving it. No mention of Blogger which I think is making a real comeback now and getting more and more useful. If Google had been a bit more off the mark when it came to updating the functionality I wouldn't have moved to TypePad, which I regret since they upgraded and lost a bunch of functionality in the process. Amusingly I mentioned this in a Twitter post and had a TypePad employee leap into an email offering to discuss it with me, so I gave her a small list of problems that I had with it and guess what - not a word since, and yes Ginevra Whalen I am talking about you.

Browsers is a section they added, and have clearly decided to make sure they get it right since they've added in all the main ones, so no surprise there.

Cartoons. Uh, ok... not really my thing, but I did take a look at XKCD which was vaguely tecchie and 'net related and produced a wry smile for the few that I looked at.

Create/collaborate. Ah, back onto solid ground here. I agreed with just about all their choices here, so if you've not been to Dipity, Zoho, Rememberthemilk Netvibes, 280 slides or Zamzar I'd suggest follow the link to the list and click through as necessary. Interesting that there wasn't a mention of Pageflakes, but given the stupidity of the unilateral introduction of adverts this doesn't surprise me and I think is a wise choice.

Gaming. Totally blank look here. I have no idea about gaming and the only games that I have on my computers are the ones that come with them.

Geek Squad. More for programmers than anyone else really, and since I'm not and you probably aren't either we can skip on by.

Government/politics. My favourite in this category is 'Upmystreet' which I've used for years to provide me with details on various areas that people live in.

Location, location. A collection of resources that flourish if you've got a smartphone. They've mentioned most of the ones that I'm familiar with and have written about in the Web 2.0 apps weblog such as Dopplr (sharing future travel plans), Qype (localised search for pubs) and Brightkite (location based social network),

Maps. The newspaper reckons that Google Maps street view is going to be busy in the forthcoming year, which has to be a sure bet. I was however introduced to Where's the Path from Google which shows a split screen with map on the left hand side, satellite image on the right, making it easier to track paths, and the defra 'Noise Mapping England' that lets you check a few urban areas to check the noise pollution levels.

Money and finance. I particularly liked Moneysavingexpert which does what you'd expect and Say no to 0870 numbers which gives local alternatives that might save some pennies.

Music. Again, not an area that I'm strong in, but Lastfm is one that I've used and I think their choice of Blip.fm is also on the mark, given the number of links I've seen to it from Twitter.

News recommendation sites. Less impressed with the collection here really - digg, reddit, techmeme - all fairly standard sites. I prefer getting RSS feeds from delicious and FURL myself.

Offbeat. Lolcats has to be included here, just don't look at the site if you need get any work done in the next hour!

Photography. Mention of the obvious Flickr which makes sense, but they could have added in rather more in the way of online photograph editing suites - is anyone really prepared to pay stupid amounts for Photoshop any longer?

Physical from virtual. Good choice of Moo cards, self publishing sites and t-shirt printing services.

Reference services. CIA Factbook makes sense, Wikipedia perhaps less so. Wayback machine is a useful choice, but a nod towards library sites such as Intute or the Librarians' Internet Index would have been sensible.

Search. An insane choice of three - Google, Clusty and Cooliris. Nothing wrong with the other two, but they wouldn't reach my top ten, put it that way.

Social software. Again an odd collection - Facebook, Myspace and LinkedIn make sense (though no Bebo), but Friends Reunited is dead in the water now. Can't see that going anywhere.

Twitter. An entire category for Twitter makes much sense. However, given that Twitter is as much about communicating while on the move they've left out any mention of iPhone apps which seems odd.

Video. iplayer, YouTube and Seesmic make a lot of sense. Not so sure about the others though.

Virtual worlds. Games again, and interesting that there's no reference to Second Life, which I think is sensible as I don't reckon it's going to go anywhere at all - it's like a huge motorway that leads directly to a dead end in my opinion.

Visualisation tools. A fair selection.

So if you don't have time to check out the list, that's my take on it.

What's your password?

There's a fair chance that some of the people reading this posting will have passwords that are:

• 123456
• password
• 12345678
• 1234
• pussy
• 12345
• dragon
• qwerty
• 696969
• mustang

because these are the top 10 worst passwords around, according to What’s My Pass? The Top 500 Worst Passwords of All Time. It's an interesting list and worth having a look at - just to make sure that you're not using any of them. What interests me most is that the vast majority of them are 'normal' words or numbers - but then of course these are the rather more stupid passwords. I did rather like ncc1701 (Starship Enterprise) and there were a fair number of variants on swear words which was rather depressing. Anyway, worth a quick peek.

Twellow :: Twitter Search Directory

If you're still trying to get into Twitter, and are having difficulties in finding people to follow, then I'd recommend giving Twellow a go. It provides searchers with access to a lot of different categories which are then arranged by people (by number of followers, which doesn't overly impress me, but there's got to be some way of doing it I suppose). Very simple and easy to use, and you can claim your own profile, add yourself to different categories and so on.

Worldwide People Search - NOT!

Those of you who run weblogs will of course already know that a lot of people try and post comments to a weblog simply in order to get a link back to their own site. I don't really have a problem with this, as long as the comment that they leave adds value to a posting, is informative and so on. However, all too often the comment is meaningless, such as 'Great information!' and a lot of these are picked up by the spam trap software the blogging platform uses. This isn't always the case however - just today I had a comment in reply to my recent posting on the Twitter people search engine that said "There are many people search engines available for us which provide information about people. Some provide information for free while others charge for using the services." Not exactly informative or adding value.

I checked out the 'search engine' that was referenced and it was grandly called the 'Worldwide People Search - Locate People Instantly'. They're not getting a link to their site for obvious reasons. Anyway, you'd think that a 'worldwide people search' would well - be world wide really. Not just limited to the United States, which this is. You'd also expect it to be a search engine as well. This however simply provides you with a link that tells you how many records it has found (or may have found) and then asks for money to show you the results. I checked out the FAQ, and those with schoolboy humour may be amused by:
"If this is public record, why do I have to pay?
Just because a piece of information is "public record" does NOT mean it is easy to find or access. In fact, most pubic records are extremely hard to locate."

This is a reasonable example of failed comment spam if you ask me.

Gluten Free Fox

This search engine announces itself as The World's First Gluten-Free Search Engine  and because I have a friend who has issues with gluten I was rather pleased to see it. I was slightly concerned to see that the search 'engine' element is from Google custom search which while good, isn't that sophisticated. My concern grew as I looked at the large adverts on the site asking if I was looking for 'gluten-free gifts' (that's not hard - buy someone a book!) and so on.

Anyway, I thought I'd try a search - being festive I tried Christmas pudding. The legend to the side of the search box says 'Welcome to Gluten Free Fox! Where search results are tailored to your gluten-free needs.' The first three results gave me results that included flour and made no mention at all of gluten free products or alternatives. Several other searches that I ran also gave results of recipes that happily included flour with no mention at all of gluten free alternatives. This isn't that much of a surprise given the source of results - the Google custom search, but it's pretty poor given the claims.

There's also a section on articles, so I thought I'd take a quick peep there too. There are three (count 'em) - yes, three articles. I suppose I can't complain that much since three is more than one, so 'articles' is technically correct. The directory option was interesting since 'This feature currently works in Internet Explorer only' - not something that I've seen for a while. When you do open up IE the directory lists food types, stores, and products but doesn't provide an active link to anywhere.

Finally there's the store, where you can buy your branded 'glutenfreefox' t-shirts. The impression that I'm left with is that this is a fairly cynical attempt to make money out of a bunch of people who have a particular condition and if it's trying to be a 'gluten free search engine' then it's failed.

Worio Search

Keyword searching is well and good, but in order for it to be effective you need to know what words to use, and oft times you don't. This is where social search engines start to come into play because you can see what other people have searched for, see recommendations and so on. Rather than using some computer algorithm to see what's what, using people is another option. This is where Worio Search enters. Run  a search for your subject, and then concentrate on the results on the right hand side of the screen.

These results are based on what people have discovered; they are related to your keyword, but not restricted to the word itself. It's further able to personalise results by watching your tagging activity and the results that you click on. As you might expect with a new generation search engine you can save results and share them with other people. Thanks to Charles at AltSearchEngines for this one.

Twitter finally adds people search.

Well, it's take a while, but Twitter has finally added a Name Search function. It's just a shame that it's not very good, in that it has no intelligence at all. It'll search for phil+bradley but can't make any sort of intuitive leap to philip for example. And when it does turn up results it still suggests 'did you mean?' The content provided is useful though - avatar, real name (if given) and a bit of biographical data. You also get to see the number of followers the person has, their location and last update date. Adding in the last update itself would be interesting, as would the number of tweets they've made. Still, early days, and at least they've done it!