Phil Bradley's weblog

Free stock photographs and video resources

Looking for good quality free images to use in your presentations or posters? Try Pexels which has some excellent photographs. I searched for both books and libraries and got some really good stuff on both searches. Pexels also adds 10 new images a day. Each photograph comes with attribution data and a clear indication of what you can do with the image, so you're never in doubt. 

Alternatively, try Unsplash, which also has some great images, which are entirely free to use however you want, including commercially. The photographs are of excellent quality and really large, which is just what you need if you're going to be messing around with them. 

Stocksnap is a more traditional type of image search engine, but again all the images that it retrieves are free to use with no attribution required; though personally I think it's always nice if you do that. It doesn't have the same quantity as Unsplash, but the images are all good quality. 

If you're more interested in videos, try Coverr. It's got a very poor search function - mainly a few basic headings, and then you have to scroll through to find exactly what you want. It didn't particularly excite me, but if you're in need of a bit of stock footage for a project, this is a good place to come. 

XStockVideo is another video search site, but some of the video may have commercial use restrictions on it and are available for a fee. Really didn't find this site terribly helpful when it came to searching, with only a few major subject areas, so it would take a lot of browsing to find what you need. 

Videezy is slightly better in that it does have a search function. Some of the videos are of really high quality (ie. 4K) and there's a nice selection. I found myself really drawn into this site, since it has some really interesting video clips - mostly about 30 seconds long, so it's always a case of 'oh, just one more!'.

Leap.it; a new visual search engine

Leap.it is quite fun. Whack in a search term and it will produce results in a magazine item format/style with images. You can also create an account and with that have a series of 'perspectives' which is their fancy way of bookmarking content that you can come back to later. Leap.it is happy with Boolean operators and it can also cope with site: searches, intitle: and so on - though it doesn't say so, I suspect that it's therefore getting a bunch of its content via Google. Searches can also be filtered to all, web, video, images, news and social.

Leap.it is a nice search engine - simple and easy to use, but attractive. I'd really like the chance to rank stuff in date order, since I'm not entirely convinced that their relevance algorithm works too well, but it's worth taking a look at.

Squify 3D search engine

This search engine calls itself The Next Dimension in Web Applications but to be honest, that's a bit of hyperbole in my opinion. However, what it is, is a very nice visual search engine. Run your search (which is private and it isn't kept) and you'll get a nice carousel of webpages with large thumbnails, and you can flick through them quickly. You can then click on a down arrow to look at the next collection and so on.

It's attractive, and it also offers to give the majority of ad clicked profits to charity, which is never a bad thing. It's an interesting version on visual search engines such as RedZ and Spacetime 3D, but I can't imagine that Google is getting worried.

 

NerdGraph

calls itself The best infographics blog of the galaxy! Well - it's nice to have confidence! It's a blog site that just lists infographics, but it's got a useful menu of subjects down the site. Worth remembering if you're looking for just the right infographic and can't find it elsewhere!

hashtagify.me

Explore the hashtagspace This is a nice little search feature for hashtags on Twitter. Simply pop in your preferred hashtag to search on, and it will display a 'wonder wheel' of related tags, links to most recent tweets using the tag and a graph of top influencers of that particular tag. It looks nice and neat and does the job well. The top influencers graph looks very interesting, and would be a great way to find good people to follow in a particular area. I'd like to see an integration with ones own Twitter account, but this is a great start.

 

Related articles

• Hashtagify: Exploring the Connections between Twitter Hashtags (infosthetics.com)

RIP:Viewzi

RIP:Viewzi. A bit of sad news - Viewzi, which I always liked - cracking little search engine that provided over 14 different ways to visually search the web has shut its doors. It hadn't been actively developed since the end of 2008. Another small 'victory' for the big boys of whitebread search I'm afraid.

Simploos

Visual Search Engine. This is an interesting engine, and one worth taking a look at. The method of displaying webpages is by horizontal scrolling, with an automatic sliding to make it simple to the searchers. You can slide the pages as faster or slower you want. You control the scrolling through a pointer. The pointer indicate the webpage or pages displayed at the top, and in the bottom area will be located a big display of the webpage. The webpages content  are displayed in graphic format, it means that all the homepages or interior pages of the websites requested will be showed as they actually look on the internet. A few results in text format will be displayed. With this tool, you can easily find and compare the ones you need or only see some images or pictures desired. You have the option to log in to the desired webpages and go back to perform another search.

You can also set up to 10 specific sites that are preloaded and you can skim through them, so it's vaguely akin to a basic start page option, though of course you can't share the page.

Nexplore

Visual Search Engine - Web, Video, Images, Blogs and News. Fairly straightforward search engine. Web search results give you small thumbnails, but you can do a preview of the page without having to visit it. News results give you a chance to view a single image from the news.

Video gives users the option of a mouse cursor over the video thumbnail and it loads into the search results window and plays the video. It's a really nice feature that I've not seen before.

Image search also lets searchers view in preview mode, and they can be saved or trashed if appropriate. There's a blog search option, and also podcasts.

Thanks to the lovely folk at Pandia who put me onto this and a couple of other visual engines.

Yometa; visual search engine

This is quite interesting if you like visual results. Yometa takes the results from Google, Yahoo and Bing and displays them in a Venn diagram, thus:

To search a term, simply type in a search term in the top left entry box and click the search button.

The top 22 results will be displayed as pins on the three intersecting circles. The top 4 results (as determined by the Yometa algorithm) among these 22 pins will display in the form of bubbles with website information, linked to the pin location.

To search among the remaining Yometa first page results, simply hover your mouse over the squares on the far left side of the screen. Website bubbles will display over every 4 results in a sequential manner.

To display the next set of results, i.e, results 23-44, press the “next” link at the bottom of the set of blue squares.

To display any combination of results from the three search engines, simply click on the appropriate section of smaller set of intersecting circles on the left side of the screen.

For example, if you want to see only the results shared by all the three engines Google(red), Yahoo(green), and Bing(blue), you would click on the center portion of the small intersecting circle.

To go back to the original results, simply click on the shaded portion again.

 

SpaceTime 3D for visual search

There are a few visual search engines around at the moment, and SpaceTime 3D is a new one that I've just discovered. A visual search engine is one that displays results for you visually - usually as a series of thumbnail shots, although of course it there are other alternatives. SpaceTime 3D displays pages in an arc, and you can flick through them, clicking on any that interest you. Spacetime has search options for Google, Images, Wikipedia and YouTube. I have to guess at the selling point, since there's nothing on the page to tell me anything about these people, but it's the size of the thumbnail - it's very clear indeed. Perhaps too clear I'm afraid, since the thumbnail dominates the webpage, pushing out the other pages in the arc, and I found it rather too claustrophobic for my tastes. However, demonstrating or training could be another matter, and I can see how it would work there. My preference is still for RedZ in this area - it was the first of them and I still prefer it. Yes, the previews are smaller, but I like being able to see more of them, and that's surely what visual search is all about. RedZ doesn't have the Wikipedia option, but as well as Web and Images, it's got News and Video, which I'm happier with anyway.

Your mileage may vary however, so I've included a screenshot of both engines for you to take a look at.