20 January 2009

Search beyond Google

I've recently realized that I use websites besides Google to search for information. The heavyweight is of course Wikipedia. I read an article (can't remember where) decrying the fact that Wikipedia articles now frequently come up as the number one search result on Google.

The New York Times finds that many people (especially children) use YouTube as a search engine. I certainly have done that, especially when my searches involve a strong visual element, for instance, an obscure sport. I like using Youtube to bookmark favorite video clips. Even if I own the DVD, it's nice to instantly pull up a favorite scene from a TV show. As someone remarked in a post (forgot where this one came from, too), we don't currently have a standard way to bookmark and highlight video the way we can with physical books and papers. It would also be wonderful to search YouTube videos in more complex ways than just by title, description, and tags. For example, what if I wanted to find all instances of pigs in Youtube?

A couple weeks ago, I mentioned how Midomi allows people to search for tunes. I also used Flickr to look for photos of New York Comic-Con. It's my first big comic convention and I wanted to know what to expect.

No comments:

Post a Comment