Crossengine.com has now been renamed Intelways.com. It is a great way of running your search through many different types of search engines and has been very popular with participants on my search workshops. I do wish, though, they would stop fiddling with the layout and the name. It just confuses people. OK, Intelways is the company name but Crossengine is more indicative of what it does.
Monthly Archives: July 2007
Live Search Images adds face search
First Exalead adds an option to limit your image search to faces, then Google, and now Live Search has joined the gang. In terms of ease of use, it is not as slick as Exalead’s but not quite as clunky as Google’s. You first of all carry out a search in Live Images and then add filter:face to your search search strategy or filter:portrait. If you want to look for black and white images you add filter:bw. At present you have to remember the commands but they say they are looking at how to make these features intuitively accessible through a drop-down menu or some other means.
On my image test searches on Live.com I cannot honestly say it was better or worse than Exalead or Google. None of them are perfect. They do remove most of the non-people images but all three also lose relevant faces and ‘portraits’.
9 books that (probably) won’t get sold
It’s Friday, so this is a bit of light relief. I picked this one up on Google Blogoscoped. I am not going to tell you what they are – you really need to go to the original posting to fully appreciate them. Personally, I would buy “Stuff the CIA doesn’t want you to know” subtitled “and unfortunately didn’t tell me either”.
Exalead to access scientific articles
Exalead has announced on its blog that it has reached an agreement with the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information (INIST) that will allow Exalead to offer its public search engine users access to INIST’s database of 13 million English, French, Spanish and Italian-language scientific articles. According to the press release “Exa-searchers will soon be able to explore this rich resource using Exalead’s practical search refinement tools, like dynamically generated lists of related terms and concepts”.
As a regular user of scientific databases myself, anything that highlights good quality, reliable and consistent resources is great news. I am becoming increasingly tired of explaining to people why I have problems with Google Scholar. I will delay my final verdict on the Exalead-INIST offering, though, until I have seen it in action.
Yahoo suggests
Yahoo has launched Yahoo search suggestions. This feature is not entirely new as it has been available in the Firefox Yahoo! Toolbar for a while. Like the Google version it comes up with changing suggestions for search terms as you type. Unlike the Google version, it is only available on its .com interface and it does not give you an estimate of the number of results for each strategy. (See below for screen shots of the two services ). Neither is ‘suggest’ available on the vanilla search screens such as search.yahoo.com.
It annoys me no end when search engines roll out and advertise features that are only available on their .com sites, especially when many of these engines automatically redirect you to your local country version. I hope that Yahoo enables this feature world-wide and soon. Meanwhile, I shall continue with my local UK version.
Figure 1: Yahoo! Suggests for gordon brown
Figure 2: Google Suggests for gordon brown
