Link O'Day: Yippy

Remember Clusty? I used to really like that tool. Well, Clusty had an identity crisis and changed its name to Yippy. I like both names but think the first was more descriptive. There are some reasons why you might find Yippy attractive:

• Like Clusty, results are "clustered" into categories. You can click on one of these and get just the sites that are related.
• Yippy promises that your searching is PRIVATE--they do not save your 
• Yippy purports to be "safe" and to not take you to objectionable sites. I am NOT a fan of filtering so this is not a big plus for me but not necessarily a minus if it gives useful results
• There are lots of fun options to play around with. 

Things I am not so sure about:

• To take advantage of all the nifty resources they promise, you need to download the app. I was OK with doing that but my download failed, leaving me frustrated.

TEST DRIVE: I tried Yippy out with a search that I knew could bring up results with at least two totally different meanings. I searched for "shoe tree." There is such a tree just a few blocks from my San Marcos, TX home. And of course there are the devices that people use to save their shoes' shapes. Sure enough the results were separated out. I DO like that feature which was the whole big idea with Clusty as far as I remember. I had fun playing around with Yippy and find it worth recommending.

BY THE WAY, shoe trees are an interesting American (and British) custom. People toss or affix old shoes to trees, usually on a highway though the one in my home town is on a residential street. I blogged about that one a couple of years ago: http://drmabell.blogspot.com/2008/01/viva-shoe-trees.html.  Not only that, I learned that the San Marcos Nature Center, which I have yet to visit, has a path of shoes leading to some trees made entirely of shoes, all which have been fished out of the San Marcos River.

Link O'Day: TinEye

I just learned about TinEye today. Anybody interested in various ways to search the web...INCLUDING LS591 STUDENTS...might want to give this a try. It is a reverse image search engine. That means you can upload an image or give the link to a web page where an image is located, and TinEye will look for other sites where the image is used. Why is this useful? Well, I think it is important because it is a way to search and see if, where, and by whom the image is plagiarized. I tried it out with an image of Black Cowboy Bill Pickett. I use him for a sample search in class. Anyway, I used an image of him that I know is used in more than one site. Sure enough I was able to come up with 3 additional sites in addition to the one where I found it. Interestingly, one was a site called "Heroes of Rockdale, Texas." That was my mother's home town and one familiar from my own childhood, so I had a sort of odd circular feeling about the search starting and ending with me. I feel sure the perfectly harmless Rockdale site is using the picture without permission, and also without realizing this is a copyright issue. Who would want to go to all this trouble? Well, YOU would if you had original messages out there on the web that were for sale, and you were suspicious that others were using the image without purchasing and maybe even for their own profit. OR it could give you some information of a page you were evaluating. If the webmaster is plagiarizing, that impacts the validity of the page. Plus, it is just a little fun in a geeky sort of way.

Oh and if you have an interest in Rockdale Texas, the website I found is here: http://forttumbleweed.net/rockdalefamous.html