Tara Calishain notes in her ResearchBuzz newsletter this week that Yahoo's Image Search is now indexing more than 1 billion images, compared to just under 900 million images over at Google. I love Google's image search and, am embarrassed to say, had no idea Yahoo was matching up so well in this regard. Tara has a good line about the search interface for both databases:
“Yahoo's Image Search interface is very basic, almost Googlesque — and does it strike anyone else as funny that the more people get broadband, the starker search interfaces get? Anyway, there's an advanced search that allows you to filter by size, type, color, and domain. And yes, there's a filter.?
So, anyhow, I go over to Yahoo and, to test any search engine, I always search on my own name. I figure I know just about everything there is to know about me so if a search engine does a good job pointing at me and my online artifacts, I'm likely to trust it to find search on terms or phrases I know nothing about. (I've no idea how computer science students test search engines but this, to me, seems like a relatively common-sense approach to separating search wheat from the chaff.)
The Yahoo search engine returns many images I figured would show up if I searched on my own name but it found a few I'd never seen before. First, apparently — and this is spooky — there is a David Akin Ministry, full of wholesome good-looking Akins, two of whom are named David — none of whom I know or who are likely related to me.
Second, Yahoo dredged up an article by a Humber College student about convergence in which I was featured. I'd forgotten about this. I do remember being interviewed and photographed for the piece about two years ago but I never saw the final result. Now, I've been the subject of several student journalism pieces but I've got to say Joel Hoidas, the author of the Humber College magazine piece, did one of the best jobs I've seen. He tackled a tough issue — convergence (convergence in the sense of two different media converging) — but I think he did a good job skectching out the work-a-day realities of convergence, mostly through me and Damien Cox, as well as touching on some of the bigger industry and journalism issues around convergence. He also took one of the best pictures (left) of me I'ver ever seen. Way to go, Joel.