Two new offerings from Flickr and Google news archive

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Flickr Launches New Search Offerings
Flickr announced last week some new offerings to the search engine. And while you can get a lot more information out of the search results page, I found I had to be pretty careful with the mouse!
You can do a Flickr search off any page, and of course there’s an advanced search page available at http://www.flickr.com/search/advanced/. This page allows you to narrow your search results by media type, date, and of course by Creative Commons-licensed content.
Now the search results show a whole page of thumbnails. The search box at the top of the results page allows you to narrow your search results from everything to those shots in the Getty Images collection or those in The Commons. (It’s great to have an easy to way to switch your search to Commons results.) Options over on the right of your search result give you the option to narrow your search to group, photographer, tag cluster, or even location.
This new search also allows you to get information about the individual images, and this is what I found to be tricky. If you’re in the small or medium view of search results (the default is small), hold your mouse over an image. You’ll see that a small i appears in the lower right corner. If you hold your mouse over that i in just the right way, and click on it, you’ll get a popup window with more information about the image including the number of views, comments, favorites, tags, and the date it was taken. You can see an example of this in this page of search results for tamales (haven’t had breakfast yet, again.)

Google News Increases Its News Archive
The standard Google News has been a little more open lately about how many news sources are getting indexed, and now Google News is getting in on the act as well. Google News announced last week that its news archive has been quadrupled, with new publications both from the US (Village Voice, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel) and abroad (Manila Standard, The Nation).
The direct URL for Google News’ advanced archive search is http://news.google.com/archivesearch/advanced_search. There you can narrow your search by a variety of options including date range and source. You can also narrow down your results to only those archives which are free.
Just to get a sense of how large the archives are, I did a search for a. I got about 328 million results. (By the way, you can also do a plain search for a on Google’s Web search. You’ll get over 17 billion results at this writing. Yes. 17 billion.) Running that search and looking for free articles only finds you about 179 million results, so based on this you can guess that something like half the Google News archives are free. (I’d have to do a lot more searching and calculating before I’d feel very confident about that, though.)
If you don’t want to use the date range option in the advanced search, you can use the timeline view at the top of the search results to narrow you results to a particular year span. When you do that you’ll get another timeline that lets you narrow down your results even further, as you can see in the screenshot below.

You might notice that the search results also have links for related news articles (which unfortunately do not restrict themselves to the fee options you initially requested) and related Web pages. I found the related Web pages option was a good way to find new keywords for my topic, as Google seems to be doing some kind of relevant keyword extraction on the news archives.
I had never used Google News’ archives that much, as it seemed to be mostly paid articles with a fairly limited offering. I’m very impressed with the new extent of the offerings. You know what would be absolutely perfect? The ability to set a Google Alert so that you get an e-mail when articles with the keyword of your choice are added to the archives.

Seadragon--Microsoft's Cool Picture Zoomer!!!

Microsoft recently launched a new picture tool called Seadragon. Available at http://seadragon.com/http://seadragon.com/, you can point Seadragon to any image on the Web, and get a zoomable viewer.

It works very simply: give Seadragon the URL to an image file, and it’ll be fetched. It’ll then process the file and give you a nice page containing your image along with tools to zoom in on it to get fine detail. You can also pan the image, pop out to a full-page view, look at the original image, etc.
I was a little leery of this at first because it didn’t seem to work. I had a nifty giraffe photo I took at the zoo that I thought would make a good image for this tool. Seadragon happily took the URL of the image and processed it — but the thumbnail and the zooms showed blurry sections toward the middle of the photograph. I tried again, this time with a larger version of the same image — and the same thing happened, only this time the blurry part was on the side. Even when I zoomed in on the image that part was blurry.

Putting that to one side I took the result I got and tried to embed it in Facebook, which worked fine. I then noticed that when I clicked the link to get to the Seadragon image from Facebook, the image looked fine with no blurs. I zoomed in on it and it still looked great. So all I can guess is that when I originally used Seadragon I didn’t wait long enough for the photos to render.

Anyway, despite what I initially thought this tool worked great. If you have some photos that you want to easily make zoomable — genealogy documents, or building images, or scans of newspaper pages — this is a very quick and handy way to add such functionality. I’m embedding my nifty giraffe photo at the end of this post so you can see how it turned out.

brought to you by ResearchBuzz.com;posted Aug.4th