Search Computing Blog

Mechanical Turk (Mturk) is a Web service where users, turkers, are paid small rewards (few cents) for short computational task called HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks). A contractor generates the HITs, post them on Mturk and later download all the result.

TurKit is a Java/JavaScript API (developed by the User Interface Design Group at MIT) for running iterative tasks on Mechanical Turk. As of today, TurKit represents the first example of iterative tasks framework for Mturk, as it allows users to perform incremental tasks by automatically generating HITs based on the results of previous HITs.

Many applications can benefit from this iterative paradigm: turkers can take turns improving a passage of text, verify each other’s work by voting on it or implement the comparison function of an iterative sorting algorithm. In the context of SeCo, turkers can be employed, for instance,  to evaluate the quality of a query response.

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Apple has recently announced the acquisition of Siri, an application that includes voice recognition and search capabilities.

As some experts suggest (see John Battelle’s blog), Apple could be looking for a search engine for its App Store. As of April 8, 2010, there are at least 185,000 third-party applications available on the App Store.

The engine should not crawl the web and will not be a competitor of Google; it will suggests applications and services to be download/bought, according to the user interaction with the device. continue reading…

One of the research tracks within the Search Computing project deals with Visual Interfaces and User Interaction for Search Computing. There are plenty of JavaScript libraries out there for rendering data. This post lists 5 data visualization tools that we considered for our experiments and prototypal applications.

• The Javascript Information Visualization Toolkit: The JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit provides tools for creating Interactive Data Visualizations for the Web. JIT supports multiple data representations (Treemaps, Radial Layouts, HyperTrees/Graphs, SpaceTree-like Layouts, etc), it works in the most recent versions of major browsers (IE6+, Firefox2+, Safari3+, Opera9.5+ ). JIT is licensed under the BSD License.

• Stanford Protovis: Protovis is free and open-source, provided under the BSD License. It uses JavaScript and SVG for web-native visualizations. Although programming experience is helpful, Protovis is mostly declarative and designed to be learned by example.
• Flare: Flare is an ActionScript library for creating visualizations that run in the Adobe Flash Player. From basic charts and graphs to complex interactive graphics, the toolkit supports data management, visual encoding, animation, and interaction techniques. Flare is open-source software released under a BSD license.
• Processing.js: Processing.js is an open programming language for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions for the web without using Flash or Java applets. Processing.js uses Javascript to draw shapes and manipulate images on the HTML5 Canvas element. The code is light-weight, simple to learn and makes an ideal tool for visualizing data, creating user-interfaces and developing web-based games. Processing.js is explicitly developed for browsers that support the HTML5 <Canvas> element. Processing.js runs in FireFox, Safari, Opera and Chrome but will not be supported in Internet Explorer until Mircosoft catch up with ISSUE 15.
• Raphaël: Raphaël uses the SVG W3C Recommendation and VML as a base for creating graphics. This means every graphical object you create is also a DOMobject, so you can attach JavaScript event handlers or modify them later. Raphaël currently supports Firefox 3.0+, Safari 3.0+, Opera 9.5+ and Internet Explorer 6.0+.

copy right note: The content of this post has been  cut and pasted from the respective technologies’ Web sites, to increase their awarness.

As an increasing number of organizations feels the need to open up their data for public usage, it also arises the need for tools able to unlock the intrinsic  value of such data. Following a trend that already saw the creation of a public data search feature, Google Lab just launched the Google Public Data Explorer, an experimental visualization tool.

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Microsoft Live Labs recently launched  Pivot, a new tool to visually explore large sets of data. Gray Flake presented it at the latest TED Talk event.

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Below you can pre-view the new look of Google. Click to enlarge

Google's new look

Read more: http://www.taranfx.com/blog/googles-new-design-with-caffeine

Do you like to try it yourself? read out how http://www.taranfx.com/blog/try-new-google-search-caffeine

Google Base is a free service for submiting all kinds of content for Google to host and to make searchable online. It allows content providers to upload structured data to Google, surface it across Google search properties, and syndicate it via apis, gadgets and gadget ads.

Using the Google Base Data API, developers can programmatically access Google Base. Here’s some of the things you can do:

copy right note: The content was cut and paste from http://code.google.com/intl/de-DE/apis/base/ for the only purpose to increase the awarness of Google Base Data API.

Hittery.com lets you create a personal search dashboard. You can simply arrange your favorite search engines on one page. Add, remove, drag and drop searchboxes to your liking. Hittery.com provides two types of search engines: custom search engines and normal search engines.

Custom search engines
These are search engines that only show results from carefully selected websites that publish useful and trustworthy content. For example, the custom searchengine “Health” only searches through 75 trusted medical websites. This way, you will not get results from websites that do not add any value. We have selected and checked over 12.000 websites and added them to relevant search engines. Google provides us with the search technology.

Normal search engines
These are all well known searchengines like YouTube, Google, flickr, digg.com, and eBay. But we also provide you with handy search engines for Jobs, Weather, Traffic conditions, Travelguides, News, Facebook, TV Guides and Stock quotes. And many more.

[Source Hittery]

[Website http://www.hittery.com/]

retrievr is an experimental service which lets you search and explore in a selection of Flickr images by drawing a rough sketch. Currently the index contains many of Flickr’s most interesting images.

[Source systemone]

[Website http://labs.systemone.at/retrievr/]

Have a website or collection of sites you’d like to search over? With Custom Search Engine, you can harness the power of Google to create a search engine tailored to your needs.

[Source Google]

[Website http://www.google.com/coop/cse/]