Groundhog Punxatawny Phil fled from his shadow seven days ago today, and did we happen to mention it’s cold out there? Warm the cockles of your heart with some search headlines:
But can it tell which side is your good side? News.com has a video piece from the 2006 Demo technology conference about Riya.com, a photo search engine with impressive facial recognition capabilities. When the new site launches a beta test in two weeks, users can upload their digital snapshot collections and train Riya to recognize people in the photos by their mugs – it can even tell apart look-alike relatives. Riya needs only about 100 pixels to identify a face – a very small portion of the increasingly standard 3 or 4 megapixel digital photo – and since it can also pick out and identify words, text will be one of Riya’s available search parameters.
Ask.com shall receive ‘Watch’ man Research guru Gary Price leaves Search Engine Watch today, and will soon be joining Askjeeves as their new director of online information resources. The press release says that Price will deal primarily with library and education outreach, and will also advise with search development. The good news for the rest of us is that Price won’t disappear from the web entirely, as he’ll still keep up his excellent ResourceShelf and Docuticker sites. We’re glad to hear it; our RSS reader wouldn’t feel right without him.
Obligatory Google tchotchke of the day Speaking of Search Engine Watch, they’ve got the goods on Google’s Desktop 3.0 update, which adds a couple of noteworthy features: first, the ability to send information directly from your sidebar to the sidebar running on someone else’s machine, and second, the ability to search multiple computers running on your personal network at once. Beware, however; the AP reports that this latter component requires temporarily sending your information to Google to be indexed. While Google says it has no interest in looking at or retaining your info longer than thirty days, you never know if that pesky Department of Justice might want to take a gander at it.
Good old dog has made its last fetch Well, John Battelle reported it last week, but we could hardly believe our ears: search engine pioneer Lycos has apparently decided to turn in for good. While the site is still up, no one’s picking up the phone, and emails go unreturned. Lycos is survived by a black lab who’s off somewhere still digging… digging… excuse us… we need to get something out of our eye.
