Finally getting back to blogging after a hiatus to, you know, get work done...
I gave a bunch of talks at the Internet Librarian conference and used it as an excuse to find some new-to-me interesting sites. A few of my latest favorites:
Customizegoogle.com is enough of a reason in itself to switch to Firefox. It's a lovely little plug-in that makes my Google experience a lot more pleasant. Among its features are
- removal of ads and sponsored links
- infinite scroll of results - you never have to click to [next page]
- numbering of the results - helps you remember that you found item #3 useful
- links at the top of the search results page that let you automatically re-execute your search in Yahoo, Ask, and a number of other search tools
Both Google and Live.com let you limit your image search just to faces. Yeah, it's not perfect, but I've found it helpful when I'm searching on a well-known person and all I want are headshots. For Live.com, just add filter:face to your image search query. For Google, add &imgtype=face to the end of the image search results page URL and click [enter]. These aren't perfect, but they're not bad either.
Live.com supports queries that include words that you would prefer to see in the results, but that aren't required. The syntax is, curiously enough, prefer:word
