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metasearch if you think about it05/23/2007 First, I dream of the day or month or moment when someone brilliant creates a search or metasearch engine for pictures that you can see clearly in head or memory but do not have a title for. I long for the ability to, essentially, do a head search, inputting the vision the user has and getting a replication—with painting title. Any search or metasearch engine designers listening? Help!!! How can you find the picture in my head for me? That is, you are seeking that picture of the Joseph Wright painting: you know his alternym is Wright of Derby. You know he was English and that he ushered in a unique and emphatic style that attended to industry for his primary subject(s). But you would like to avoid having to manually search through hundreds of museum pieces at the Louvre website (which is wonderful IF you have the time), as one article taking a full day is not lucrative for anything besides your tangential penchants, which are perfect for the very process the web lends itself to. You are about to learn the information you have been searching for. I hope you find it helpful. Don’t get me wrong. I LOVE Google Images. I can spend days in the labyrinthine and insipid results of searching an author’s name and getting totally unrelated porn shots of someone with the same middle initial. I love typing names of murderers or missing people or new authors, to see what each looks like. I love typing in the Wikipedia master/creator’s name in the Images and getting the coolest of photos of the great Jimmy Wales sitting at a desk in what appears to be his office, of which the wall behind him is an intriguing amalgam of hand-done sketches of an apparent prototypes or plans…but then I cannot search such a wall shot to learn what exactly is painted or scrawled on that wall—to identify the kind of genius—like an Albert Einstein or a John Nash–who writes his most profound ideas and calculations on walls! No manual search of all 598 images of Wales and reading the accompanying text will give me an answer. No metasearch engine will do that for me, either at this point. And I’m not lazy. I try the Images section with a number of words, get nowhere close enough, so resign to the Web where I search (for hours, sometimes) until I find the name of that painting I see so well, which [in your case here] is called “The Widow of an Indian Chief Watching the Arms of her Deceased Husband” (1785)--and then I return to Google Images with the title to use to look up the image I needed to begin with. But I digress. Sort of that's precisely the point. Next on the list of bitches: When you are a writer, researcher, student, or individual looking for specific information, the search and metasearch engine process can be maddening. Granted, we are a cyber-culture of profit and gain, of buy and spend, but scholarship should not be impeded in such an obtrusive manner…as it is too often. For example, I was working on a knitting and fashion article this morning, seeking the exact measurements of a plain, single-stitch Dries Van Noten knitted scarf—one which he showed on the runways for a winter 2000 collection. My goal as writer was to describe the knit stitch, the length, the width, the color, pattern, and style. Most of my searches yielded horrifyingly unrelated results, of course. In the margins of the results page were ads for everything from scarves by L. L. Bean and trucks!? In the main body of the results list were runway shows for 2003, chat forums on buying the designer’s stuff because he had just turned 50, and enticements (at the top of the list) to buy floral silk scarves. Could I find the exact length of that scarf about which I had to write with veracity? No once that is done. So how about a single metasearch engine for serious, non-buying but producing scholars and writers? Yes, there are databases, encyclopedias, and compendia of encyclopedias and thoughtful resources (such as itools.com, for example), and yes, those of us complaining do spend hours searching. That is, we do not give up after one set of results offers nothing but material product. But one metasearch engine that at least attempts to be knowledge-oriented or knowledge-based is all I’m asking for here looking back. Clarification is important here. It may make little difference to some casual users, but there is a distinction between search and metasearch engines (Google Images is not a metasearch engine; Google is not a metasearch engine—though it is the most popular), one I should show here before kvetching any further: a search engine is a program of sorts that has “spiders” that go out and crawl all the world wide web to find website pages that are relevant to your search words/phrase. A metasearch engine then, is beyond the search engine; a metasearch engine “crawls” all the search engines, delivering the results (of their results) based on what happened. SEARCH ENGINE in other words. A as a general rule. Alta Vist in addition. AO insert. As the next step. Clust now let's take a look at. Excit generally speaking. Googl it may sound a little silly, but. Lyco now let's take a look at. MS shortly after that. Yaho the following example. METASEARCH ENGINE there is no doubt that. Dogpil don't worry, though. we're going to cover. Mamma Metasearc before getting all bent out of shape. Metasearch.co make no bones about it. There are patterns and plans for how search engines travel and where they go. There are tools within the better or larger, more capacious search engines, identifying user search habits. This is intended for optimized searching but is also taken advantage of by advertisers and their advertising efforts. So in my case, when I spend a day on a literary analysis for a client, then switch at night to a how-to article for another client, my daytime searches bleed into the night. A month ago I was researching trucks. Is that why today, when seeking knitting terminology, I got an errant truck ad for now. Argggh at that time. Well, that's the end of my article. I hope you will be able to use this information. |
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