Search for wildflowers by location, color, flower shape, flower size and time of blooming. 3,126 plants indexed. This web site helps those of us with limited knowledge of botany to identify flowering plants that are found outside of gardens. This help is provided by presenting you with small images of plants. You can use a number of search techniques to get to the images that are most likely the plant you are looking for. When you click on a plant image the program shows you links to plant descriptions and more plant images. The site has about 5 ways of searching for a plant. You can use these searches in any combination. Some searches eliminate some plants from consideration. Most searches give a "score" to each plant depending on how well the plant matches the search criteria. The plants with the highest score are displayed at the top of the results.
Click here for Instructions. [more inside]
posted by Blasdelb
on Jun 5, 2013 -
21 comments
I turned around to face an approaching figure. It was Larry Page, naked, save for a pair of eyeglasses. “Welcome to Google Island. I hope my nudity doesn’t bother you. We’re completely committed to openness here. Search history. Health data. Your genetic blueprint. One way to express this is by removing clothes to foster experimentation. It’s something I learned at Burning Man,” he said.
posted by Horace Rumpole
on May 17, 2013 -
30 comments
OMGif! [Wired] "On Tuesday, Google announced via
Google+ that Image Search now has an “Animated” filter. That means that if you’re only searching for animated magic, you need never be bothered with a still image again. Finally that search for
Jennifer Lawrence GIFs from the Academy Awards just got a whole lot easier."
posted by Fizz
on Mar 20, 2013 -
31 comments
We've all seen it. The off-white UAV is seen side on, nose tilted slightly down, a stubby missile caught at the moment of launch beneath it, a blue and grey landscape of treeless mountains behind it. There's no motion blur and none of the markings on the aircraft have been obfuscated. It's a perfect shot. Except for one or two details.
[more inside]
posted by mwhybark
on Mar 19, 2013 -
56 comments
Global Internet Porn Habits: An interactive map that lets you see the most commonly searched porn terms by state or country. No porn images, but obviously porn-related language and the word porn in the URL, so whether it is SFW is up to you.
posted by jacquilynne
on Mar 17, 2013 -
97 comments
Starting in the early 1700s and exploding in popularity throughout the 1800s, Japanese woodblock prints depicted the fantastic world of
Kabuki actors,
courtesans,
warriors, and
nature. Ever since then keeping track of all of the incredible artwork has been a pain, traipsing between dealer and museum websites, awkwardly shuffling through academic library 'websites', wandering aimlessly through GIS, not to mention all the trouble a patron had to go through to see these
before the Internets. Well,
The Japanese Woodblock Print Database aggregates prints from a number of museums, dealers, and auction houses into a single resource, searchable by keyword and by image, and thereby provides a shining example of web-accessible art database interface. Enjoy!
[via mefi projects] [more inside]
posted by carsonb
on Jan 7, 2013 -
20 comments
For shell grumps and net.curmudgeons and people who think Internet search is just too cluttered with bitmaps,
DuckDuckGo (
previously) offers
TTY search. Sadly, there is no telnet interface, you'll need to use a newfangled web browser.
posted by pashdown
on Dec 15, 2012 -
26 comments
"To the credit of today's social networks, they've brought in hundreds of millions of new participants [...] but they haven't shown the web itself the respect and care it deserves, as a medium which has enabled them to succeed. And they've now narrowed the possibilites of the web for an entire generation of users who don't realize how much more innovative and meaningful their experience could be."
Anil Dash laments
The Web We Lost, and offers some suggestions for moving forward.
posted by oulipian
on Dec 13, 2012 -
74 comments
You want us to pay you for directing eyeballs to your sites? Newspaper publishers in France want a law whereby Google (and other search engine services) have to pay for each click made from the search engine to their sites. You click on a link to a French newspaper site from a search engine, the Search Engine has to pay the newspaper for that click. If the law is passed it's likely Google
will no longer include links to French sites that require payment for said links.
posted by juiceCake
on Oct 19, 2012 -
107 comments
New Google+ Study Reveals Minimal Social Activity, Weak User Engagement Fast Company summarizes a
new study from RJMetrics that looks at public posts, +1s, replies and reshares on Google+. It concludes "the average post on Google+ has less than one +1, less than one reply, and less than one re-share." Google replies that public posts are a poor metric of user activity; Fast Company replies that "Google has refused to provide clear figures and metrics for its social network's active user base" and links to Danny Sullivan's "brilliant rundown of Google's lack of transparency on the subject" -
If Google’s Really Proud Of Google+, It Should Share Some Real User Figures.
There was also Wil Wheaton's recent angry
"Oh, go fuck yourself, Google" rant in response to a recent experiment replacing YouTube's "like" button with a Google+ button for a small number of users, thus requiring them to sign up for Google+ before they can 'like' a YouTube video.
Is Google Forcing Google+ Down People’s Throats?
posted by mediareport
on May 21, 2012 -
205 comments
So, would a search engine be more useful if it just didn't include the Most Popular websites? How about the
ONE MILLION most popular websites?
Fortunately, it lets you adjust the filter to exclude the top 100,000, 10,000, thousand, hundred or ten. MetaFilter reappears under the 'thousand' setting.
Via WaxyLinks and HackerNews
posted by oneswellfoop
on May 1, 2012 -
12 comments
The Corpus of American Historical English is a searchable index of word usage in American printed material from 1810 to 2009. Powerful complex searches allow you to trace the appearance and evolution of words and phrases and even specific grammatical constructions, see trends in frequency, and plenty more. Start with the
5-Minute Tour.
posted by Miko
on Jan 7, 2012 -
23 comments
The 2011
Edublog Awards
are on. The nominee lists provide rich resources for everyone, perhaps most especially in the
free web tool category. A personal selection:
Online Convert (free online conversion of dozens of video formats),
GeoTrio and
TripLine (recorded tours around the world),
CorkboardMe and
LinoIt (online, shared pibboards),
Cover It Live (online event presentation) and
A Google A Day (daily questions and puzzles, presented by Google
(previously)). For kids, there’s
Artsonia (the world’s largest children’s arts museum)
Tarheel Reader (illustrated readers for multiple platforms) and
SweetSearch (a search engine for students),along with much, much more.
[more inside]
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul
on Dec 5, 2011 -
1 comment
Treshr makes it easy to give things away, or, the other way around, find free stuff. Everyone has stuff they don’t need anymore. Maybe your child outgrew their old clothes, or you moved to a new place and have old furniture to get rid of. Whatever it is you’re looking for, someone somewhere is trying to throw it away. Treshr is basically a search engine for
Freecycle, a nonprofit movement of people who are giving (and getting) stuff for free in their own towns. It's all about reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills. [
via]
[more inside]
posted by netbros
on Oct 20, 2011 -
28 comments
The City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program manages information about hundreds of murals that have made Philadelphia famous.
Muralfarm.org is the site where information about the growing body of public art created by the Mural Arts Program has been planted. Pictures and detailed information about murals can be searched by artist, theme, date, location, neighborhood, and other key terms.
[more inside]
posted by netbros
on Oct 7, 2011 -
12 comments
Book Blogs Search Engine: "Looking for reviews of a book by real-life book bloggers? Tired of sifting through corporate sites in your regular Google search results? That’s why I created the Book Blogs custom search engine – all book bloggers, all the time! Whether you’re looking for other non-commercial reviews of a book you’ve just read, or want real readers’ opinions on a new book you’re considering, this is the place." If you want to include your book blog in the search engine, leave a comment at this
link.
posted by Fizz
on Jul 10, 2011 -
3 comments
"Schema ...provides a collection of schemas, i.e., html tags, that webmasters can use to markup their pages in ways recognized by major search providers. Search engines including Bing, Google and Yahoo! rely on this markup to improve the display of search results, making it easier for people to find the right web pages. " [more inside]
posted by 00dimitri00
on Jun 2, 2011 -
20 comments
Age of the Algorithm. In the age of the algorithm, you can get just about anything you think you want, learn everything you think you need to know, by clicking on a link or typing a few words into a search bar. On SEO, content farms, old media, and 'online sweatshops.' (
From Maisonneuve.)
posted by shakespeherian
on May 11, 2011 -
20 comments
