Phil Bradley's weblog

Google image rights filtering

Google has added a rights filtering option to image search. It looks like this:

There are 5 options as you can see, based on Creative Commons licensing. If you choose an option, Google tends to use a smaller number of sites such as Flickr, Wikipedia and Wikimedia to pull back content. However, it's also using other resources as well, and this is where it gets a little confused. Google is looking for some sort of Creative Commons signing on a page, but what seems to be happening is that it assumes that anything it finds on that page is all Creative Commons, which isn't always the case. I found an example where a blogger has a CC licence for his material, but he'd used an image from elsewhere which wasn't his own. I traced it back to the original owner, who does, it's fair to say, have a CC licence, but which requires attributation back, and the blogger hadn't done this. So it would be far too easy to think the image was the bloggers when in actual fact it isn't.

It's a nice tool, no doubt about it, but Google has once again gone for a quick shiney fix rather than doing the job properly. If you're looking for images to re-use, you might want to take a look at search engines that work specifically in this area, and here's an element of one of my Pearltrees that does that:

 

Yummly; a recipe search engine

It says of itself: The Best Site For Recipes, Recommendations, Food And Cooking and I'm not going to disagree. This is a really impressive search engine. If you create an account (via Facebook or Google) you can save your preferences, which includes allergies, diets or disliked ingredients. Once you have set that up, it's time to go searching. You can look for specific dishes such as curried chicken, you can choose a type of cooking, such as slow cooker, or specific ingredients. Yummly will display results with images (which can be added to Pinterest), or you can tweet and Facebook your recipe to friends. When looking at specific recipes you can print out the ingredients, read the preparations, get the nutritional facts, get an indication of the tastes which you can expect to experience with the dish, and there's an option to 'also try'. There are search options for time of year, particular occasions, and you can also use a time filter and throw in several other options as well.

I am not really into cooking, but if you are, then you really should check out this search engine. Also, if you have particular allergies etc. this is a must view.

 

Twitter's search filters

If you don't use the Twitter interface for search you may have missed out on the fact that they have changed them recently. The search filters restrict searches to videos, photographs, news, nearby locations and people that you follow. It's a nice easy interface as well:

(Ignore the background - that's from my page). Twitter has also updated the Android app and the IOS one isn't far behind.

Datacrowd; a People search engine

I continually look for the ideal people search engine. Again, this isn't it. Despite the Datacrowd claim that searching for people "is our passion. Therefore we collect and aggregate data from the web and make it searchable for you. We have well known people in our database as well as common people. We hope to provide the best free people search for you." they don't actually do it very well.

I searched for several names that are reasonably common, and met with zero results. Given that the people that I looked for have Facebook pages and/or Twitter accounts, I thought this was a very poor show. I did a search for David Attenborough and while I did get material about him, there was a confusion with his brother, so the results were messy, confused and worst of all, inaccurate in some cases. I ran a search for my name and did find a few of my namesakes, as well as me, but I know for a fact that there are plenty of other Phil Bradleys out there which this engine didn't manage to find.

I wasn't impressed with the results that did come up either - it told me that the youngest Phil Bradley was 44, and the oldest was 128. When I looked at the data about me it didn't provide links to my website, weblogs or other obvious sites. Other factual details, such as the books that I have written were also incorrect.

Sorry, but I really couldn't recommend this search engine as it stands - it needs a whole heap of work to bring it up to scratch.

Beware of Zorpia!

I've been getting a fair number of messages recently from a company called Zorpia, telling me that my friends are sending me messages. I am invited to view these messages, but I have to either let them have my Facebook or Google account details. According to the posts that I've read on the net about this company what they then do is harvest all of your contacts, and use your name to send out emails to them inviting you to join as well. The site at the name and .com address (I'm not linking to them directly for the obvious reasons) looks like it's a legit social media website, but I would suggest steering clear of them. Also, I'd be inclined to ignore the offer to take you off their mailing list - it doesn't work and will just confirm your email address. The best that you can do is to create a filter that automatically deletes their mails to you.

I don't normally issue alerts like this, but it seems to have got into the library/information community at the moment, so let's stop it before it takes hold!

Google results screwed. Again.

There's a really serious flaw in Google results at the moment, and I was alerted to this by a posting on Lifehacker. If you go along to Google.com (or .com.au and probably plenty of others) and do a search for Yahoo, you get told that there are approximately 926,000,000 results, which seems to make sense to me. Here's the screenshot:

However, if we now flick to the next page, there's apparently only 71 results:

Google promises to show you other similar results that it's culled from the results:

If you re-run the search you get 908,000,000 hits, which again is reasonable. I did try a few other terms, and they seemed to run ok, but it's worrying to say the least that Google can be this flakey. It's not a recent glitch either - the Lifehacker article indicated that this was at least 3 weeks old. Making errors is ok - we all do it. However, an error on this magnitude which doesn't get picked up for weeks is just really amateur.

Radio Search Engine

The Radio Search Engine does pretty much exactly what you could expect. Pop in the name of a track, genre or artist that interests you and this search engine will attempt to find if it playing somewhere around the world for you. If it can, you can listen to it there and then. If it can't find your choice it will find stations that are likely to play it shortly. The stations are from all over the world. About half are internet only stations and half are simulcasters who are transmitting their AM/FM station online as well. It is very simple and easy to use.

My blog is 11 years old today!

It's a happy birthday to my blog, which I started on February 4th, 2003. The first entry read:

Welcome to my blog. Since everyone else appears to have one, I thought it was about time that I did as well. You'll find a bunch of different stuff here - some of it will be personal information (but not *that* personal), some of it will be useful information that I've found but not yet incorporated into an article, and some of it will just be my musings (aka rants) about various things. I hope you find it to be of interest!

Clearly not quite everyone did have a blog, since I'm asked quite frequently to explain on courses to this day exactly what a weblog is. I was also very unaware of just how important the blog was going to be to the way in which I do my job - it really has become THE tool that I use to keep myself up to date and informed, not to say everyone else who reads it. I moved the blog across to Typepad (where you're reading this entry) in July 2006, and since then I've written over 2,350 posts, with 2,794 comments. Once I add in the other blog on social media tools I have had over 1,400,000 direct views, not taking into account views from other blog reading software. An amazing number - thanks to everyone for contributing to that figure!

I looked back at my first month of blogging, and much of what I read gave me a very wry smile. Here's a few extracts:

RIP Northern Light (Anyone remember Northern Light? Anyone?)

Yahoo! is apparently changing its layout in an attempt to get more advertising on the page. The idea is to put more adverts down the side of the screen ala Google. Of course, this isn't going to help the actual searcher, but hey - they want to make money! If ever there was a prophetic comment, it has to be that, surely?

Altavista continues to try and revamp itself by creating the largest multimedia database. Altavista has only recently finally been killed off by Yahoo - it was a real stayer.

We're starting to see the backlash against Google taking place.. there's a VERY long thread of articles at WebMaster World about how it's not doing its job very well. I just laughed and laughed when I read that. The more things change, the more they stay the same!

 

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Farewell AltaVista