January 2006 Archive

Google's Define Adds Related Phrases

Gary reports on the addition of related phrases at the top of the results when using Google's define: prefix.

New Image Search at Ask

Ask has launched its own image search database and now no longer relies on Picsearch for the data. Their press release and blog note that image searching is 16% of their total. In addition to the new underlying database, Ask has introduced "Zoom related search for Images" which is a search refinement option on the right hand side of the page providing options to expand, narrow, or search related words.

New Search Prefixes for Yahoo! Image and Video Searches

Paul Bausch, author of Yahoo! Hacks : Tips & Tools for Living on the Web Frontier, shares a few tricks in a Yahoo! Search blog post. These may have been around for awhile, but I have not used them before. In image searching, Yahoo! supports the width: and height: prefix for specify exact image sizes. In the Yahoo! Video Search, you can also use aspect: to specify video size (if you know the correct numbers such as 133 for TV's 4:3, 125 for computer monitor's 5:3, and 177 for wide screen). Other unadvertised prefixes for video search include filesize, date, width, height, duration, tld, fromtld, site, fromsite, title, and fromtitle. See pages 44-45 in tip 11 in the book itself.

Google News Finally Out of Beta

A mere two and a half years after its initial launch, Google says that "We're taking Google News out of beta!" Not all 22 regional of Google News are out of beta, but at least many of the English-language ones are. With the move out of beta comes a feature that suggests stories for users of the personalized news page and keeping search history and personalization enabled. The stories will show up under a "Recommended for. . . " heading.