Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Using Flickr For My Blog

Google and Yahoo have enormous image collections. These are good for answering the question: is there a photo that suits my needs? For example, I collect Star of David photos on my blog. I search for Star of David on Google and get 55000 photos. I start evaluating them and find one that I wish to blog. How do I do that? I have to find out who shot it and ask his permission. How do I find him? At this stage things become quite complicated...


But with Flickr I can jump over this hurdle.
With Flickr I can answer an even more sophisticated question:
Is there a photo that suits my needs which is available to blog?
The answer is yes. I search for Star of David on Flickr. I get "only" 1,727 photos.
I go to the advanced search and at the bottom of the page there are options to choose:
Only search within Creative Commons-licensed photos
Find content to use commercially
Find content to modify, adapt, or build upon
I mark the first and the third options, push the search button, and get 372 photos available to blog without starting a correspondence about getting permission, and without waiting for an answer that might never come.

There's more: I choose the photo I want and see above it a button called "blog this". I click on it and the photo is on its way to my blog.

- And that’s it?
No, I go back to the comments section on Flickr to thank the photographer for letting me use his creation. The link to the original photo is automatically installed in my blog. Neat!

Imagine what will happen if Google and Yahoo will start using this feature on their enormous Image Search Engines...

Monday, November 20, 2006

Axioma Search Engine

My neighbor sent me this link to an article in Hebrew about Axioma and I hurried to download it and to try it out. My first impression is that it is fun and that the team there did a good job. Investor Arie Adler can be satisfied from the result...

On their web site I read that Axioma
Allows you to interactively increase the relevancy and context searches you make on general search engines… You arrive at more relevant results quickly - without weeding through a lot of unwanted results.

So the idea behind Axioma is to solve the problem of relevancy, the problem of “lot of unwanted results”- but can they do that?

IMHO Axioma will never solve the problem of relevancy because it is built on the wrong concept: it is a macro content search engine, which means that even if you get the web-page you wanted you still have to find your way in it, and what if you need only one small paragraph from a page that contains hundreds of irrelevant paragraphs? And what if the data you need is scattered in 10 different results? – you’ll have to enter each result separately, just like you did in the “old" search engines that the “new” Axioma is destined to save us from.

Only micro content strategy will help essentially solve this problem. QTSaver is a step in that direction. Axioma is a step in the opposite direction…