The SurRural Librarian

Hold the fort, here’s a very handy search engine.

Compfight is a super easy way to search Flickr for images. It’s got a very simple interface, it feeds you back loads of clickable thumbnails, allows you to limit to Creative Commons licensed material, and gives you the option of searching full-text or just tags.

With more opportunities to publish student research projects online, it seems to me we should really be pushing the use of CC-licensed images in student work. I’ll definitely be showing this to the students. (and Safe Search is the default. nice.)

Here’s one wacky business decision

SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) — In a dramatic about-face, Ask.com is abandoning its effort to outshine Internet search leader Google Inc. and will instead focus on a narrower market consisting of married women looking for help managing their lives. … As part of the new direction outlined Tuesday, Ask will lay off about 40 employees, or 8 percent of its work force.

With the shift, the Oakland-based company will return to its roots by concentrating on finding answers to basic questions about recipes, hobbies, children’s homework, entertainment and health.

I know many school librarians struggle to get students to try different search engines. But now that it sounds like Ask will be as cheesy as Yahoo! Kids, I think we need to focus energy on teaching more in-depth Google strategies, instead of trying to buck the trend.

I don’t use much video in my lessons, it’s not a popular medium at my school and I really don’t like to encourage too much screen time. But this short video from Google does such a good job of explaining how they collect information on their users that I think I might just try it out on my JH kids.

I’ll certainly show it to the teachers, I get many questions on privacy and search engines.

Link to the Google Video On YouTube

I’m playing around with Google Co-op, trying to make a better way for students to find images. Google image search - filtered or not - too often returns inappropriate images. So with this I can stipulate which sites to search, and restrict each search to just my list of sites. Getting the kids to try something different might be easier if it’s still Google (they are addicted). I especially like that I can plunk the search box right onto the classroom homepage.

One thing that’s proving a little tricky: I’d like to include Wikipedia to grab the popular culture topics, but if I do, it seems to take over the results. So, a little tweaking is in order, but it’s worth a try.

The ability to create different searches for which ever sites I want will also come in handy when I start working with the younger kids on their first web searches. This is a nice way to limit results to a manageable amount, relatively safe from crud, while still giving them a real idea of how search engines work.

no kiddin!

Lest it be said that I just sit around thinking up ways to break copyright, here are two wonderful resources posted this week on Rule the Web, a immensely informative new blog from Mark Frauenfelder of BoingBoing.

Publicdomain4u.com has about a hundred old folk and blues standards (Robert Johnson, Uncle Dave Macon, etc) available for free download.

and

Morguefile.com a searchable index of very good copyright-free images.

I can not make any guarantees as to the suitability of content for students on these sites (blues lyrics can be pretty racy!) but I did some of my typical smut-magnet test image searches and was relieved to find good, G-rated material. (Try hot girls and you actually get photos of kids at the beach, appropriately dressed. Always a good sign with search engines.)

Here’s a tool that will certainly come in handy at school. Brings back memories of sitting on the floor with large strips of construction paper scotch-taped together, World Book encyclopedias scattered around.

Still in the Google Labs,  the Timeline Search:

With the timeline and map views, Google’s technology extracts key dates and locations from select search results so you can view the information in a different dimension.

Keep the kids on their toes, though, otherwise they just might think Theo Epstein worked for the Sox in 1918.

This is the most helpful thing I’ve seen in days. I use Google Image search an awful lot, mainly looking for images to use in my booktalks. I’ve always hated how many clicks it takes to get to the actual image. And I’m constantly being called on to explain to people how they ended up with just a thumbnail when they thought they were getting a full size picture. Google Image Ripper is a nice little hack that gets rid of all that for you, what a relief.

Though, I should also mention, I steer my students away Google Image search, it’s really too easy to stumble on inappropriate material. We’ve found that Picsearch is much more appropriate for student use.

I’ve always thought it would be really cool if you could hum into a search engine and it could recognize the song. I also really doubted it would ever happen.

Wrong again. midomi (beta) is a search engine based on a database of user-submitted recordings (just register and start singing). You hum or sing into your computer’s mic and it tries to give you back recordings of other folks singing the same song.

I heard that some who’ve tried it couldn’t get a match, but after playing with it last night, my whole family was able to make it work. It seems that the more a song has been recorded into its database, the greater the chances it’ll be able to match you up (makes sense).

Try Beatles tunes, or Happy Birthday.

Frankly, I can’t yet see the benefits of this beyond what’s the name of the song that goes… But it’s fun, and I think the technology’s pretty out of this world.