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Same damn post, but I'm not so god damn lazy.

I've been working at the company in question, ditto.com (formerly known as Arriba Soft) for several years, designing and building the technology that lead to this. The judge ruled against Ditto on one point, that being the display of the full-sized image. I'd like to clarify what exactly that means, though.

All thumbnails displayed are served from our own servers, not using the bandwidth of the sites being displayed in our search results. The issue that came into play was what happened when a user clicked on a thumbnail. When that happened, we would pop up two windows (as ugly as that is). One would contain just the full-sized image hosted on that site's server. The second window would be the actual page that the image was found on. Because of the judge's ruling, we no longer pop up the full-sized image, just the page that the image was found on.

I don't think this ruling will have much impact on us and others like Google who are providing the same type of service. The judge ruled upheld the previous ruling about fair use of thumbnails, which is the primary concern of this business.

To be more specific, since I work at the company in question, the issue that the judge ruled against us on was poping up the full-size image *if*, and only *if*, the user clicked on the thumbnail. Not only did we pop up the full-sized image, we popped up the original page that the image was found on, thus driving traffic to that persons site. The thumbnails are stored on our server, so unless the user actually clicked on the image, it would use no bandwidth of his or any other webmasters site.

alltheweb.com Let's you search the web, ftp files, images, MP3s and Videos. The results are quite good though not as good as in google. It has support for more languages than google and I use it exclusively to search pages written in my native language(which isn't supported in google). Has the best ftp search.

ResearchIndex Nice scientific literature search engine. Lets you search not only documents but also citations. Keeps cached copies of the documents in multiple formats. Can show related documents or other documents viewed by users that viewed the current document.

vivisimo.com Groups the found documents by topics and subtopics. Nice interface and the sudgested topics are quite reasonable.

www.wisenut.com Similar to vivisimo, but vivisimo(IMO) is beter.

www.searchshots.com Lets you see screenshot of the found pages. Too bad has a content filter and the results are not very good.

www.teoma.com Simple interface. Can group the results by their topic.

ditto.com An image search engine.

webshots.com Not exactly an image search engine. But I've had much better luck finding images there than in any image search engine. Requires you to download a program (windows only) that puts the images as a wallpaper.

AltaVista

Corbis

Ditto.com

Lycos

Photos To Go

Diggit!

A friend of mine writes image-recognition code for Ditto (formerly Arriba Vista). They've been providing this same service for over 2 years.

Google is amazing, and I'm sure that their search will be better eventually (if it isn't already), but this is a difficult field, and it's nice to have options. Give them a look.

"We all say so, so it must be true!"

As fast as Google is (even under the slashdot effect), I think I just visited Ditto for the last time.
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