It allows the user to upload an image, enter an image URL, draw a picture (cool!), or keyword search a database of the GazoPa database and then find SIMILAR images based on the image that was upload or keyword search. You can also combine an image (what they call a “key image”) with keyword(s). A Firefox addon, a bookmarklet, and an iPhone app are also available. GazoPa is not exactly new (their blog goes back to September, 2008) but it’s new to us. So, why not share. Their colorful logo might remind some of other search engines with colorful logos. (-:

The home page also claims the database is large, more that 60 million images. We need to confirm this but the way we read the final page of the FAQ is that the 60 million images were crawled by GazoPa. They also have a page for webmasters about their crawler, GazoPabot. In other words, they’re not buying their image collection by stringing together other image databases they’ve been given access to for free or a fee.

Results pages offer four types of results:

+ Images
+ Videos (it appears that most of the results come from YouTube)
+ News Images (it appears to be a GazoPa crawl)
+ Flickr (Is the Flickr database included in the 60 million images total?)

Worth mentioning, GozaPa is a venture project of the Hitachi Corporation (note the copyright info at the bottom of the home page).

So, go forward and demo. We’ll do the same and report back in a week or so.

See Also: GazoPa Blog

See Also: GazoPa Twitter Feed

See Also: A little over a week ago we posted about a reverse image search named Tin Eye. tool has users upload an image and then the Tin Eye technology goes out on the web to see if others are using your content.

The National Library’s Australian Newspapers service has recently made available https://mail.google.com/mail/?zx=1rjv366gqucji&shva=1#inbox/1250a7f37fa96144early editions of The Sydney Morning Herald.

The digitisation of The Sydney Morning Herald was made possible by a $1 million contribution from the Vincent Fairfax Family Foundation. Eventually, all out-of-copyright editions of the Herald will be available, from its inception in 1831 to 1954.

It is now just over a year since Australian Newspapers was released to the public and there are 8.5 million articles available from 33 newspaper titles. A community of volunteer ‘text correctors’ has now corrected 7 million lines of the electronically translated text in 318 000 articles, enabling more accurate search results.

Access the Collection (via Trove)

Btw, what is Trove?

“one search…a wealth of information”

Trove is our new free online service that gathers information about Australia and Australians in a single search.

Discover:
+ Digitised Australian newspapers, 1803 – 1954
+ Books, magazines and articles
+ Pictures and photographs
+ Music, oral histories and videos
+ Maps
+ Archived websites
+ Biographical information

Source: National Library of Australia

The newest addition to Google Labs is a mashup of Google Images, Google Similar Images and the visual query refinement tool, The Google Wonder Wheel. Called Google Image Swirl, the new tool clusters similar images based on characteristics found in both the text surrounding images, as well as using some of the visual analysis techniques…

[Snip]

Image Swirl currently works for about 200,000 of the most popular queries. You can tell which queries have Image Swirl results when you start typing in the search box, as available searches will auto-complete, similar to Google Suggest.

Much More Including Examples in the Complete Article

Access Google Image Swirl

Source: Search Engine Land

See Also: On a Somewhat Related Note (Search Engines and Images) Check Out Bing’s Visual Search Tool (Beta)
We weren’t fans at first but this site and what it can do are now making more sense to us. Worth a look for sure.

From an ACM TechNews Summary:

The push to develop the Semantic Web recently received fresh support through a National Science Foundation grant, which has been awarded to researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The $1.1 million grant will support the creation of a software programming tool kit by mid-2010 that will allow scientists and researchers to make data from their work available to a larger audience. A Semantic Web would enable researchers to present their searches in a more natural way. A semantic interface would allow a researcher to visit a single research site, describe the desired information, and allow ontologies and semantics to find not only that information, but any relevant related information the research may have overlooked. “The Semantic Web has its own query language that takes advantage of meanings of concepts and their relationships,” says Tom Narock, a faculty research assistant at NASA’s Goddard Earth Sciences and Technology Center and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “You ask your question at very high level, and it takes care of filling in the details for you.”

Access the Complete Scientific American Report

Source: Scientific American Report (via ACM TechNews)

+ You can find movie listings by searching for the title of the film or the name of a specific theater in the main Google search box.

If the area is incorrect (remember they’re taking a well calculated guess) there is a link next to the location to change the area. You could also search with the title and a city name or Zip Code. This is also useful if want to see a film outside your own area. If you click on the title of the film you’ll find showtimes for area theaters (and the option to change dates), the film’s trailer, photos, and reviews culled from the web. While Google Movies has been around for several years this page has been enhanced.

+ When you go to http://www.google.com/movies you’ll be able to only search the movie database and find the detailed page with pictures, trailers, etc. that we just mentioned.

+ You can now search by genre. Here’s an example. We hope Google provides a list of the genres that can be searched.

+ Finally, another new feature is “Map View.” After you’ve selected a film, look in the left column of the Google page for that specific page. Click “Show Map View” and now you can see where the film is playing throughout the area you’re searching. Clicking on any of the pins brings up a link for the theater. Click and now you have showtimes for the new theater.

Source: Google

1) At the end of April, 2009, Google announced that they would start adding “public” data to search results “when available.” They launched with a couple of datasets from the U.S. Census and the U.S. Department of Labor. Here’s a Census result and one with labor data. Trigger words that would show the data have to be precise. For example, unemployment in California does not return a result with labor stats but unemployment Rate in California does.

It would be very useful for info pros and researchers if Google would provide a list of what data sets are available and what trigger words have to be used to get results that include “public data.”

Since the initial launch we’ve heard almost nothing about the program until today.

As of today, Google’s main database includes content (17 development indicators to be precise) from the World Bank’s Development Indicators (WDI) (2009 edition that looks as if it will be updated regularly). The complete WDI has over 800 indicators. Although the full text book is fee-based they do make some indicators available in this free “Quick Query” database and this VERY COOL WDI visualization tool.

The Google blog post points out seven indicators and the terms to trigger them:
1) [gdp of indonesia]
2 [life expectancy brazil]
3) [rwanda's population growth]
4) [energy use of iceland]
5) [co2 emissions of iceland]
6) [gdp growth rate argentina].
7) [internet users in the united states]

Here’s a search for GDP of Canada and as promised, you see the stat and a graph at the top of the page. If you click on the graph, you’ll be taken to a page where you can select a country or countries and see a graph comparing the statistic. Here’s an example. Links to email, IM, etc. as a well as code to embed the graph are located top right on the graph, “labeled ” link.

The indicators are:
+ CO2 emissions per capita
+ Energy use per capita
+ Electricity consumption per capita
+ Exports as percentage of GDP
+ Fertility rate
+ GNI per capita in PPP dollars
+ Gross Domestic Product
+ Gross National Income in PPP dollars
+ GDP deflator change
+ GDP growth rate
+ Imports as percentage of GDP
+ Internet users as percent of population
+ Life expectancy
+ Military expenditure as percentage of GDP
+ Mortality rate, under 5
+ Population
+ Population growth rate

Almost forgot. The two datasets that Google began the program with from the U.S. Census and Dept. of Labor are still available. According to this page, no new content from these organizations have been added to the database.

2) In other Google news, the company released a new feature allowing their SafeSearch filter to be “locked down in the “Strict Search” mode, the highest level of filtering. A password is required to change the setting. Additionally, pages will have drawings of colored balls (in Google’s colors) on them to indicate that Strict Search is on and locked.

From a Blog Post:

Even from across the room, the colored balls give parents and teachers a clear visual cue that SafeSearch is still locked. And if you don’t see them, it’s quick and easy to verify and re-lock SafeSearch.

To change settings, head to the “search settings” page. If you’re going to use the new “search lock” feature, it would also be a good idea to take a look at this 95 second video.

Although it’s unlikely that Google would release the numbers, we wonder what the adoption rate of this service will be in 4-6 months. Will schools use it in addition to any third party filtering they use? Will Google continually market the service (perhaps even with paid ads) or will it only get major attention in the search industry press for a few days?

Source: Official Google Blog

This afternoon more new/updated from Bing.

Bing Video is MSN Video meeting Bing Search. You can find Bing Video here (it’s also accessible via a link on Bing.com). The database is searchable. Remember, you’ll be searching metadata and not the transcript of the program. The home page also includes content from several video categories. For example, you might see “most watched video.”

In the left column, you can begin your search by narrowing (without entering any search terms) to tv shows, music, most watched, news, and sports.

Bing Video continues to offer the very cool and very useful preview feature where you simply place your cursor on top of the video thumbnail and several seconds of the video plays. No clicks required.

A search results page allows you to limit your results by length, screen type, resolution, and source. Look for these options in the far left column. If available, you’ll also find related videos here. Finally, like you see elsewhere on Bing, links to other Bing services (based on your search terms) are listed here.

If you look at the source list, Bing Video is aggregating content from:
+ MSN
+ AOL Video
+ MTV
+ Hulu
+ ESPN
+ YouTube
+ MySpace
and other sources like the USA Today.

From the blog post we learn:
+ At the present time Bing Video contains over 900 television shows
+ Sharing video has been made easier
+ An option with some videos to “dim the lights” to make viewing the content easier.

One thing we would like to know is how much content Bing is getting from their content sources? In other words, do the have the full hulu catalog? Every YouTube video? If they only offer limited content, who makes the call as to what is and is not included.

Source: Bing Blog.

See Also: For a Comprehensive Database of Television Shows Available on the Web, Take a Look at Clicker. It’s a private beta but it’s worth your time to register.

In honor of Sesame Streets 40th Birthday, here’s a Newsy report based on stories from:

+ Wall Street Journal

+ CNN

+ New York Times

+ San Francisco Chronicle

+ Fox News Detroit

+ Buffalo News

+ and The Jimmy Kimmel Show

At the top of the page note the direct links to several of the underlying stories and directly below the search box you’ll find the transcript of the Newsy video report.

Source: Newsy

See Also: Resource of the Week: Review the News Using Multiple Sources with Newsy (Beta)

From the Article:

Suppose you have posted some photos on a photo sharing site, and you’re curious to see if someone has absconded with them. What you need is a way to perform a reverse image search–where a smart search engine looks for a photo by detecting identical content within the image itself, rather than keying on file names or metadata, which are easily changed.

That might sound like science fiction, and in fact it’s pretty close. But I’ve found a Web site out there, TinEye, that can actually perform reverse images searches today.

To use TinEye, you can upload a photo from your computer or point the site to a Web page that already hosts the photo. TinEye then returns a list of sites using the same image.

TinEye is far from perfect. It often identifies photos that are similar to–but not exactly the same as–the source image. Worse, TinEye’s database of photos represents only a fraction of what’s available on the entire Internet–so if you get zero results, that doesn’t mean your photo isn’t being repurposed out there somewhere.

Other Tools

+ Similar Images with Bing
Hover over any thumbnail image and click the “similar images” link. In the left column note several options to narrow and focus your search results. Bing also offers a “visual search” beta.

+ Similar Images with Google
Run an image search and click the “similar images” link below each thumbnail. Note the “Show Options” link located below the search box, left side of page.

Ed. Note: We posted the following item last weekend. After using Newsy for another week, we believe it deserves to be a Resource of the Week and is also deserving of your attention.

Here’s an idea we haven’t seen before. We were a skeptical at first but after a short time we can say we like what Newsy is up to. The current version of the service has been available since April, 2009 when it was relaunched. The Newsy iPhone app launched a couple of weeks ago.

The idea is as simple and and fresh. We’ve not seen anything similar available for free. Basically, take stories in the news and then bring together multiple video (and sometimes text-based) news reports from a number of sources and place them all on a single location. It’s not only a great way to see how a news story is reported but viewing the same story from different news organizations can potentially turn up facts from one source that the other source does not report on. By the way, the company likes to think to think of themselves as “news analyzer” and not a news aggregator. We think both phrases can work together Whatever you call Newsy there is plenty of value here.

Newsy can be useful in many situations. One potential use is helping to teach critical information skills by reviewing what is and is not reported on in a news story and how it’s reported. For example, how much time does each source give to the story.

But wait, there’s more. In addition to aggregating news reports on the same story, Newsy produces their OWN original video content summarizing the material from each source into a single report. For those who don’t want to view each source video one at a time, here’s a way to learn what each one is reporting in just a minute or two.

You can keyword search Newsy (you’re searching metadata) or browse by one of seven categories:

+ World
+ Economy
+ U.S.
+ Politics
+ Tech/Sci
+ Environment
+ Culture

You can also sort results by:

+ Most Popular
+ Most Recent
+ Most Commented
+ Highest Rated
+ Editor’s Picks

Let’s review how Newsy works:

1] Find a story, search or browse
We searched for “Obama” and got back 10 results.

2] Select the story; We chose “Obama Gives Donors Access to White House” from October 29, 2009 with a video summary that runs about three minutes.

3] After clicking the play we were taken to this page.

5] Immediately, Newsy’s own video summary begins playing.

6] Above the video box (which can be embedded on any web page) notice the direct links to the various news sources used in the summary.

7] In this case the sources are:

+ Fox News
+ The Hill (Text-Based)
+ CNN
+ The Washington Times
+ CBS
+ The Washington Post

A good and well-balanced selection of sources. If you click on any of them, a new window opens and the “source” video (or text) begins playing. Text sources link directly to the article. No more going all over the web to find the content.

Quick Hits

+ Newsy does not offer its services for every news story. That’s minor when you sit back and review what we think is real value in what they offer. Hopefully, they’ll be able to cover more in the future.

+ An iPhone version of Newsy is also available. It’s a free app. Here’s a link to get Newsy iPhone (via the iTunes App Store).

+ If you register for the site you can comment on any story.

+ A text transcript of each Newsy original summary is available. You’ll find it below the summary video box.

+ You can share reports using direct links to many social networks or e-mail a link to the selected story.

+ An RSS feed of stories is available as well as the Newsy blog.1

We hope that Newsy continues to offer a wide variety sources and a well-balanced set of sources for each story it covers. One thing we would love to see is a source list (we’re guessing the Newsy uses more sources than listed on this page) and perhaps the expansion of this page about how news stories are selected. Another page about the news source selection process would be useful. Finally, we would be very happy if you could view stories by source. In other words, show me all of the stories that use video from MSNBC, BBC, CBS, etc.

You can learn more about the company this STLToday article. For example, they are based in Columbia, MO and have a staff (as of a few weeks ago) of 19.

Many Thanks to Charles Knight over at AltSearchEngines for letting us know about Newsy.
Yesterday, Charles ran a post about Newsy focusing on the success of their iPhone app.

For those of you who haven’t used Twitter, Twitter Trends is a near real-time listing of the most popular topics on Twitter at that given moment. On the Twitter home page you can asee what’s “trending” by the minute. You can also see top trends for the day or week. As you browse the list you spot a couple of trends that you don’t understand. In other words, why are these trends on the list?

To find the answer as to why something is “trending” is quite simple. Head to What the Trend? It’s a free database where you’ll find brief explanations about why a topic is trending. The explanations come from users of the site.

The entire What the Trend? database (more on that later) is searchable using a search box located on the upper-right corner any page. You can also filter the current list of trending topics by keyword. Clicking on any topic visible on the home page (you can also click the “explain” button) provides a bunch of data including:

+ The latest tweets on the topic with a hyperlink to the Twitter search engine.
+ The latest news on the topic (via Google News).
+ A history of the explanation (some change quite frequently) along with a map showing the location of the person writing or changing the material.
+ The first time the term of phrase appeared as a trending topic.
+ The most recent time it was a trending topic.
+ The most active trends of the day.
+ A list of the current trending topics.
+ A selection of related trends (if available).

As we said a moment ago, the entire What the Trend? database is searchable and its historic data (allowing you to see the history of a Twitter trend) can be of value to many people in business, advertising, public relations, marketing, journalism (to name just a few areas).

We would love to see What the Trend? add an option to limit a search by date or a range of dates. For example, show only new trending topics from May 1st-May 8th, 2009.

What the Trend? provides a mobile interface at http://m.whatthetrend.com. A free iPhone app named iTrends is also available.

“What the Trend?” is an example of a resource that’s not only useful but also fun. You don’t even have to be a Twitter user to enjoy monitoring trends and making use of the data the site provides.

The improvement won’t be very noticeable at first, but this is a small step toward unearthing more value in search and getting you more relevant results.

Trending topics on Twitter can be found on the Twitter home page or, if you’re logged in, you can find them in the right column below the search box.

Remember, today’s blog post is specifically about Twitter’s own search engine.

Source: Twitter Blog
Hat Tip: Search Engine Land

Don’t Forget

Many other Twitter search tools are available. Four examples are Collecta, OneRiot,tweetzi, and the new Twitter search tool from Bing.

From the Web Site:

Open Images is an open media platform that offers online access to a selection of audiovisual archive material to stimulate creative reuse.

As part of Images for the Future, the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and Knowledgeland are developing Open Images. [Our emphasis] The aim of this project is to offer online access to a selection of archive material to stimulate creative reuse. Reuse includes remixing of archive footage in new videos. Open Images also supports interlinking with other data sources (like Wikipedia), allowing the easy creation of mashups. Access to the content will be based on the Creative Commons model, which proposes a middle way to rights management, rather than the extremes of the pure public domain or the reservation of all rights. The ‘open’ nature of the project is underscored by adapting open formats and using open source software for its infrastructure. Software resulting from Open Images will also be released under an open source license.

The Media Page

At the present time, 371 films are available. Look for images and audio to be added going forward. The database offers numerous ways to find what you’re looking for.

For example you can search by:
+ Keyword
+ User
+ Source
+ Length
+ Language
+ License.

You can refine results by the same criteria.

An API is also available (Documentation is in Dutch).

Source: Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and Knowledgeland
Hat Tip: AMIA News Briefs

Barry’s post includes screenshots. However, Google previews are easy to access (assuming they’re available). Run any Google Search expand the “Show Options” link right below the search box. At the very bottom of list you should spot “page previews.” Click the link and now, if available (at this point, page previews are not available for every page), a static image of the page should appear to the right of the title, snippet, and link.

The Search Engine Land post mentions that page previews are far from a new phenomenon.

Ask.com used to offer them and Clusty continues to provide previews. In fact, they were available even before Vivisimo’s meta search tool was rebranded as Clusty. We still think they are a very powerful tool. run a Clusty search, next to each result title notice the magnifying glass, click it and a live version (you can actually click the links) of the result is embedded directly into the results set. Click it again, and it’s gone.

Exalead continues to offer to page previews. It’s something they have been doing for years. First, you can add “previews” of your favorite pages on Exalead home page and each result also contains a preview image. Here’s an example.

Last Friday, we mentioned a new beta of a metasearch tool from the National Institutes of Health Library. This database from Web4Lib also provides the embedded page preview option.

As Barry Schwartz points there have been and continue to be several add-on tools that offer page previews/thumbnails. Two add-ons for Firefox that are still available Better Search and SearchPreview (works for Bing, Yahoo, and Google).

Finally, one tool we use all of the time is CoolPreviews. With it you can simply cursor over any link on any page and see the view the page in browser window. Since the page is live, all of the hyperlinks are active. CoolPreviews is free and runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. We think if you try it, you’ll like it. (-:

UPDATE: We failed to mention that Bing offers video previews. Yes, video. Run a video search and place your cursor of a result. Approximately 30 seconds of the video will play (from various points within the clip) with audio. Clicking the speaker icon will mute the sound. Cool!

Hat Tip: Dan Giancaterino

But while there is a phenomenal amount of content, most of it is not that easy to find. Sure, text content can be skimmed or glanced, but audiovisual content has to be viewed in linear time. We cannot easily search inside a film or audio recording for relevant information.

That is changing, and one European project has created the first integrated platform for semantic search that can return results based on the content and context of film and audio files, as well as text.

But European researchers in the MESH project have developed an integrated platform which they say, for the first time, can combine semantic search – or search by the meaning of the words – and a host of associated tools to deliver more relevant information, from a wide variety of sources that can be accessed from an individual user.

[Snip]

These technologies are becoming common in particular knowledge domains, and more are emerging every day, but most relate to the concepts behind text-based documents. The MESH platform sought to use semantic search for every type of media.

On the way, it created some cutting-edge technology. “Our automatic annotation for video, for example, is state of the art,” explains Pedro Concejero, coordinator of the MESH project.

“The annotation system is capable of identifying the general scene setting, such as whether a video is a studio shot or a shot recorded on location. With adequate training, it can also detect (within some error margins) the general topic of the video, such as a scene about an earthquake or a flood. It can also find a number of salient objects within the scene, such as persons or fire, but cannot yet identify consistently objects with great variations in shape or aspect.”

One of the major challenges of the project was a product of its own success: It annotated too much information!

Much More fiin the Complete Report.

We will post Part II as soon as it become available.

See Also: MESH Project Home Page
Several videos are available.

Source: ICT Results

Google News has dropped the “Text Version” feature sometime over the past week or so. A Google News Help thread has some complaints dating back to October 22nd. More in the full post including a comment from Google

Source: Search Engine Roundtable

The idea is as simple and and fresh. We’ve not seen anything similar available for free. Basically, take stories in the news and then bring together multiple video (and sometimes text-based) news reports from a number of sources and place them all on a single location. It’s not only a great way to see how a news story is reported but viewing the same story from different news organizations can potentially turn up facts from one source that the other source does not report on. By the way, the company likes to think to think of themselves as “news analyzer” and not a news aggregator. We think both phrases can work together Whatever you call Newsy there is plenty of value here.

Newsy can be useful in many situations. One potential use is helping to teach critical information skills by reviewing what is and is not reported on in a news story and how it’s reported. For example, how much time does each source give to the story.

But wait, there’s more. In addition to aggregating news reports on the same story, Newsy produces their OWN original video content summarizing the material from each source into a single report. For those who don’t want to view each source video one at a time, here’s a way to learn what each one is reporting in just a minute or two.

You can keyword search Newsy (you’re searching metadata) or browse by one of seven categories:

+ World
+ Economy
+ U.S.
+ Politics
+ Tech/Sci
+ Environment
+ Culture

You can also sort results by:

+ Most Popular
+ Most Recent
+ Most Commented
+ Highest Rated
+ Editor’s Picks

Let’s review how Newsy works:

1] Find a story, search or browse
We searched for “Obama” and got back 10 results.

2] Select the story; We chose “Obama Gives Donors Access to White House” from October 29, 2009 with a video summary that runs about three minutes.

3] After clicking the play we were taken to this page.

5] Immediately, Newsy’s own video summary begins playing.

6] Above the video box (which can be embedded on any web page) notice the direct links to the various news sources used in the summary.

7] In this case the sources are:

+ Fox News
+ The Hill (Text-Based)
+ CNN
+ The Washington Times
+ CBS
+ The Washington Post

A good and well-balanced selection of sources. If you click on any of them, a new window opens and the “source” video (or text) begins playing. Text sources link directly to the article. No more going all over the web to find the content.

Quick Hits

+ Newsy does not offer its services for every news story. That’s minor when you sit back and review what we think is real value in what they offer. Hopefully, they’ll be able to cover more in the future.

+ An iPhone version of Newsy is also available. It’s a free app. Here’s a link to get Newsy iPhone (via the iTunes App Store).

+ If you register for the site you can comment on any story.

+ A text transcript of each Newsy original summary is available. You’ll find it below the summary video box.

+ You can share reports using direct links to many social networks or e-mail a link to the selected story.

+ An RSS feed of stories is available as well as the Newsy blog.1

We hope that Newsy continues to offer a wide variety sources and a well-balanced set of sources for each story it covers. One thing we would love to see is a source list (we’re guessing the Newsy uses more sources than listed on this page) and perhaps the expansion of this page about how news stories are selected. Another page about the news source selection process would be useful. Finally, we would be very happy if you could view stories by source. In other words, show me all of the stories that use video from MSNBC, BBC, CBS, etc.

You can learn more about the company this STLToday article. For example, they are based in Columbia, MO and have a staff (as of a few weeks ago) of 19.

Many Thanks to Charles Knight over at AltSearchEngines for letting us know about Newsy.
Yesterday, Charles ran a post about Newsy focusing on the success of their iPhone app.

In a single search click you’re able to retrieve results from PubMed, MedlinePlus, and the NIH Library Catalog. You can also personalize the search by selecting which databases you want to search. Look for the “select sources” box located directly next to the search button. To the left of the search box is a drop down menu where you can select searches limited to keywords, title, or author.

After you click search and before the results appear you’ll see each database being tapped with the number of records retrieved.

Here’s are search results for H1N1

Results pages contain a great deal of info and appear a bit busy making it a small challenge to actually find the search results. But that’s why this is a beta.

+ At the top of the results page is “Explore and Discover” offers related terms that are hyperlinked.

+ Below “Explore and Discover” are the numerical totals of how many results were retrieved by the engine

+ In the left margin are what appears to be dynamically generated categories that allow you to focus your search and potentially find relationships that could not be seen reviewing one result at a time. Categories can be sorted by topics, source, or topics graph. Selecting the topics graph opens a new window and provides (we think? Topics Graph did not work when we tried it) a visualized view of the categories).

+ In the middle column are the actual search results with the database source listed below the snippet. At the top of the results column a drop down menu let’s you sort results by relevance or date. What does date mean? The day the page was created? The day the page was first crawled? The date it was last updated? The date the page was last crawled? You’ll also notice a magnifying glass icon next to the title of each result. Click it and a box will appear with the actual page you want to view. In other words, you never leave the results page.

+ The third column contains hypertext links to other databases (Worldcat.org; USA.gov; PubMed Central and many others) and the number of results they contain for your search term. Click and run the search in the selected database. So, in reality, AllPlus Search allows you to quickly find results from more than three databases. Results from Ask, Google, and Yahoo are also available here.

Finally, for our H1N1 search you’ll find images (from Google Images) in the fourth column.
,
At this point, we were unable to find any search documentation or help pages.

This is an early beta that we will check often for changes and updates. Many of the issues are aesthetic rather than technical.

We’ve learned that the technology that powers AllPlus search comes from HealthMash (federated search and clustering) from WebLib. It also utilizes the new HealthMash Knowledge Base. This technology, also from WebLib, powers the “Explore and Discover” related terms at the top of all results pages.

Here’s a January, 2009 interview that Hope Lehman from AltSearchEngines did with Weblib CEO, Endre Jofoldi.

Access the NIH Library AllPlus Search Demo

Source: NIH Library Blog
Hat Tip: Charles Knight, AltSearchEngines

UPDATE: The All-Plus search beta now allows you to decide via links on the home page which type of data or format your looking for before entering search terms and clicking search.

+ Basic Search
+ News
+ Video Evidence-based Medicine
+ Academic Web
+ Alternative Medicine
+ Animal Studies
+ Drugs and Chemicals
+ Search Engines (Lets the searcher quickly identify the number of results in each database), somewhat similar to DIALINDEX (File 411)
+ Images
+ Consumer Health

First, real estate listings are now more visible in Google Maps with the new real estate “layer”. To access the listings, click the “More” button at the top of a map (near the satellite imagery or terrain maps buttons) and select real estate. Immediately, the listings become visible on the map. Click any red “pin” and you’ll see the address, get driving directions, etc. Click the “more info” link to see all the information about the property. Here’s a view of properties for the Zip Code 90210. Now you can zoom in and out and move the around the maps like you’ve always done.

Also, note the listings located on the left side of the page. Here, you can find basic info about each property and find a link to click and get all the available info. You can also refine your results here by:

+ Price Range
+ Listing Type
+ Number of Bedrooms
+ Number of Bathrooms
+ Area Range (in Square Feet)

It’s possible to only search to real estate listings by selecting “Real Estate” in the drop down menu located next to the search box at the top of the page.

Next, Matt introduces the new, improved, and enhanced Google Music Search. Google has offered a music “one box” located at the top of a results page for since December, 2005. Here’s an article that Gary wrote about music search at that time.

This is a major enhancement to the music search.

Matt writes:

According to today’s announcement [this story and news release are from late Wednesday afternoon], searches for the name of an artist, album, or song will show the new OneBox in Google’s main search results.* If you search for an artist or album name, the OneBox will include a set of four songs that are chosen algorithmically by the partner music site*, not by Google. Each song will be linked to an audio clip that will play in a Flash-based pop-up window provided by the partner site. In some cases, the partner may provide one full play of the song before defaulting to a 30-second preview.

Matt points out that the rumors about Google selling music are not true (at least for now).

Google’s RJ Pittman told us today that, while some of their music partners have a commerce element, the focus of Google’s new music search is information, not selling digital songs. In fact, there’s no commercial arrangement at all, we’re told, between Google and the music partner sites included in this launch.

Finally, the article correctly notes that Yahoo Music has been available for years and they
continue to offer music info and the ability to preview music/watch videos, link to the official site, get lyrics, photos, videos, etc. from a box at the top of web pages when a group or solo artist triggers the database.

He also points out (this is cool) that in some cases, if you enter song lyrics into the search box, youll get back the song info as a “one box” result. Here’s an example.

Speaking of song lyrics, a few weeks ago we posted about a searchable song lyric service, LyricWiki, being acquired by Wikia, an online community of wikis and content hubs that was started by Wikipedia co-founder, Jimmy Wales.

* Partners include: MySpace, Pandora, Lala, imeem, and Rhapsody.

Source: Search Engine Land

Video search engine company, blinkx, on Tuesday announced blinkx Music, a new service for finding and watching music videos online. According to the company, the service functions as a “single online gateway” that provides access to music videos in every genre, and features a “huge and varied constellation of artists.” blinkx claims to have indexed over 33,000 hours of music video from over 10,000 artists.

According to the company, users can search blinkx Music’s index by artist, album, genre or song, or simply browse the top tunes of the moment.

Access blinkx Music