Phil Bradley's weblog

Twitter second largest search engine? Perhaps.

At Chirp The Official Twitter Developer Conference Ev Williams (Twitter cofounder) said that Twitter now serves results to about 600 million queries per day, and this works out to about 19 billion per month. Danny Sullivan points out that Google does 88 billion per month (this includes all their subsiduary products such as YouTube), Yahoo does 9.4 billion, and Bing does 4.1 billion per month.

Of course, it's not quite as simple as that since these are Twitter figures, and the searches are pulled in from a lot of different services, so it's a little like apples and pears. However - it's a useful figure nonetheless and one that might be worth quoting if you're trying to get access to Twitter at work, though don't hold your breath!

Google search story creator

If you're interested in creating some very short but fun videos with a search slant to them you might want to try Google's Search Stories Video Creator. It's very simple to use - just choose your search terms, decide which element you want searched (web, news, images, maps and so on), then choose your music and you're done. Google then adds in panning and movement itself, and publishes it to YouTube.

It's a fun thing to do - great for creating simple (or even complex) stories with a 30 second limit to them. While the Google examples are fun, they're mostly cheats - I spent ages trying to work out how to do some of the interesting things they've done, only to find out later that you can't, which was irritating.

Here's an example that I did:

Google introduced FollowFinder

Google Follow Finder analyzes public social graph information (following and follower lists) on Twitter to find people you might want to follow. It's a Google Labs experiment, and it seems to be quite accurate. Just pop in a name and the Follow Finder will provide two options - 'Tweeps you might like' and 'Tweeps with similar followers'. I popped in my own name and was happy with the results that came up. It's a simple and straightforward resource. It looks like this:

Google adding timeline to tweets

Google is rolling out an interesting piece of functionality related to tweets. We're all familiar with the timeline option, but now Google has added that to Tweets. I did a search for Cilip and this is what I got:

I'm displaying data for the whole of 2010 - or at least, that amount of data that Google is prepared to share with me. Google does go into more detail in their blog on this. It's not readily available yet, but if you want to see if you're one of the lucky ones, run a search, choose Show Options, then Updates. Hopefully you'll see the timeline above - if not, either wait for a few days, or try out the special Obama link they've provided, and then you can piggyback off that with your own searches.

Old magazine articles

Thanks to ResearchBuzz for this one, about old magazine articles  which is basically what it is. A collection of old magazine articles that some nice chap is putting together himself. There's a lot of pre 1922 stuff up there, but it's now been expanded in depth and coverage. It's a real mishmash of data, but worth wandering through, especially if you have an interest in history.

Nachofoto: excellent real time image search

If you want visual images of things in the news, you can have a hard time finding them. This is the problem at Nachofoto is trying to address. Traditional search engines and image search engines don't really get into the business of re-ranking by time. Both Bing and Google are great when it comes to ordering images by colour, or line drawings, or faces, but that's their limit. So if you want pictures of a person in the news you're likely to find images that are weeks, months or even years old.

A nice example is 'red shirts'. If you want images of the protesters in Thailand who wear red shirts you have to think a little bit about your search. Just 'red shirts' isn't going to work, as the screenshots from both Bing and Google demonstrate:

The same search over at Nachofoto however is rather different:

Now, it could be argued that I could have done a search for Thailand red shirts, and it's true - I'd have got better, more accurate results. However, a search for a politician or celebrity isn't so easy.

Furthermore Nachofoto provides a handy little timeline at the top of the search pages, allowing you to pull up images at a specific period of time. I did a very neat search for Gordon Brown, pulling up pictures of a campaign visit he made 3 hours ago, and was then able to pull up another collection 3 weeks, 5 days ago. So if you want images of a person at a specific event, this is a superb and very easy way to get them.

Nachofoto, like many other alternative search engines isn't going to replace traditional image searching tools, but when you want to combine news and images, this is a resource that's going to be hard to beat.

BOOKS etc - stupid beyond reason

I got an email sent to my gmail account informing me that BOOKS etc has relaunched it's online bookstore. It was offering various incentives, so I thought I'd go along and see what was what.

First task was to register and create an account. This is where I'll admit that I was stupid, because I didn't think - "they sent me an email, they have my address, which means I'm probably registered already'. So I got through the whole signing up process only for Books etc. to come back and tell me that a user name with that email already existed. Fair enough I thought, so I moved to the sign in section, and put in my email address. Tried what I thought might have been the password, but no luck; I got 'Incorrect details'. Not very helpful - was the email address wrong, or the password? Not to worry, I'll ask for my password again, Off to the next screen, input my email address only to be told that it's unrecognised.

Hang on - a moment ago you sent me an email. You told me that details were incorrect, and I'm assuming that meant the password. However, all is not lost - I can contact support. So I click where I'm told to, only to have to click a second time for reasons best known only to Books etc. This is where we get the genius of the site - the crowning glory of their stupidity, because in order to seek support about not being able to log in... I have to be logged in to use their system.

Brilliant marketing move Books etc! Any company that can't even make it easy for me to register/signing/request a password really doesn't deserve any more of my time.

How NOT to get a good search engine review

As you'll imagine, I get lots of individuals and companies sending me emails inviting me to look at their search engines. I try and be fair and even handed, but even I get pushed to my limits. Which is the case with Chameleon. The blurb sounds great: "internet Search Reach is deep and precise, we search out the most relevant opportunities that others may miss" That's great, until you discover that it's actually a Google custom search engine. So this isn't going to do anything more than Google, and probably considerably less. Calling it "our latest search engine" is pushing it a bit I think, because it isn't really is it. 'Our latest version of a Google custom search engine' would be a little more precise.

Even then, well - you can get good custom search engines, but the thing that really annoyed me was the line at the bottom of the page 'This Domain may be for sale'. Right, so you're not actually interested in internet search are you? You just want to get a few more hits on the site to try and increase the sale price. Sad....

Google the Wii game

Being the sad search geek that I am, this is interesting - it's a Japanese Wii game based on Google search. Players have to choose which search term is most appropriate. It's called Ando Kensaku and a screen shot that I've managed to see is this:

I know it's not going to get you excited, but if you were, don't, because I can't think that it's ever going to be released in a Western version. However, just think of the Wii games that could be released with a search/librarian slant... re-shelve books with the Wii remote, dodge sleeping library users, fend off attackers on the recently returned books trolley, explore the stacks in semi-darkness, fending off dust bunnies - loads of possibilities!

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LocPDF locates PDFs.

LocPDF. Okay, let's start again with this one. Daniel (the creator) was moving stuff around and I just happened to arrive at the wrong time, with the previous review. Type in your search, get a bunch of pdf's up on the screen for you to look at. A mouseover displays a large thumbnail of the page which gives you a better feel for the content. You can click on it and it loads there and then on the site, which saves a lot of moving around to different places, which I like. The blurry nature is still a slight issue, but if you click to zoom the image doesn't zoom much, and it comes into proper focus, so I'm happier with that than I was. PDFs are arranged with the most linked to first. The icon for unavailable pages still comes up and I did try clicking on a few just to see if I was going to have any luck, but didn't. The error message isn't very user friendly, but given the speed that Daniel is working on this I suspect that'll be fixed shortly as well.

All told, much happier with the resource now, and I'm happy to ditch the previous review and suggest that, if you're after quick access to PDFs, this is worth trying.