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Microsoft's Search Engine Plans
prostoalex writes "Andy Beal from SearchEngineGuide.com interviews Robert Scoble from Microsoft. Scoble tells the audience what current search technologies Microsoft is working on as part of its Longhorn/WinFS development as well as in the field of Internet. Scoble also discusses current problems with local drive and Internet searching, such as absence of metadata for a lot of files out there: "When I take pictures off of my Nikon, they have some metadata (for instance, inside the file is the date it was taken, along with the exposure information) but that metadata isn't useful for most human searches. For instance, how about if I wanted to search for "my wedding photos?" Neither X1, nor Windows XP's built in search would find your wedding photos. Why? Because they have useless names like DSC0001.jpg and there's no metadata that says they are wedding photos.""
The new iPhoto handles this very well - automatically imports the date the photo was taken. Then you can group the images together in albums similar to the way you create 'smart playlists' in iTunes.
you *can* do this to some limited sense with the command shell
for %a in (DSC*.JPG) do rename %a Wedding_%a
You just have to know a bit about the command shell...
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I once made the mistake of working with these files under Windoze. After I was done, all the EXIF information had been removed. You can imagine how mad I was.
So what is Microsoft going to do? Fix this bug and call it a feature?
-Rick
I use Windows (duck) and it preserves my metadata fine.
This dosent need fixing .. it obviously didnt annoy you enough to make you look for the option to turn it off.
Hit Windows+F, click change preferences, click I want to search without an animated character.
Next click preferences again go to 'change files and folders search behaviour' then click advanced
Voilla, the find program is (un)fixed
Google can already do a good job of finding wedding photos.. They may not be yours but they are wedding photos ;)
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
In KDE you can allready select an image file and say select "Find similar images". provided you have indexed your images using GIFT (Gnu Image Finding Tool)
You can search images both in your own GIFT database and databases on the internet.
So to solve the wedding photo problem you could make a drawing similar to your photos and search for similar images.
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
I did a quick Google search and what I can tell iPhoto was introduced at MacWorld Expo January 7, 2002. Picasa was introduced in October 2002.
Win a signed Stephen Carpenter ESP Guitar from the Deftones: http://def-tag.com/?r=0008781
I was recently at a longhor demonstration at my university and Longhorn had facial recognition software built right in. You could specify the name of the person by face and then all the photos with that person were searchable on your computer.
Also by default at the presentation there was a search bar built right in to the default desktop.
I don't see how adding 'metadata' is going to help. If people are unwilling to give their files meaningful filenames or organize them in directories, then how can they be expected to provide properly describe their data?
An interesting article that addresses this and several other points is here.
Yeah, there's a couple of different ways to do it in a dos batch file. I think you can even do a foreach to loop through all the files in a directory. And then there's windows script, another overly complicated solution for a simple problem. And of course, if I use a computer for more than half an hour, I put perl and php on it for command line scripting.
But for the average user with a digital camera, the software that comes with the camera normally has a batch rename function. I know my Nikon did and the others I looked at when shopping had similar software.
I used PhotoMesa before they wanted money for it, but you can still download a free trial. It's written in Java "but" it is well-written and feels very fast.
There's an article on Sun's Java website about PhotoMesa.
Dr Superlove 300ml. I use my powers for awesome
ACDsee, a well-known and, at one time, free, image viewing and organising app, supports metadata. It puts it in a "descript.ion" text file in each directory
Correction, it used to.
ACDSee 3.1 was quite intelligent, if it found DESCRIPT.ION files, it would automatically load the comments in. When you moved files to another folder, it would automatically create a new DESCRIPT.ION file in the destination folder.
Nice and simple, ne?
But, oh no, that's not good enough for the bright folks at ACDSee. Instead with version 6, you have to manually tell ACDSee to import information out of a DESCRIPT.ION file and manually tell it to export information to a DESCRIPT.ION file.
Not so nice and very complex, ne?
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Appendix B.1 of the HTML 4.01 specification suggests that a conformal browser should have a mechanism for flagging errors; this does not apear to be the case with FB (although there is a 'side-effect mechanism as it is possible to visit validator.w3.org).
Ultimately, Apple should leverage EXIF data - it is a standard and does not need to (for the most part) be manually input by users.
http://blog.wilsonet.com/archives/000180.html
Cory Doctorow has a great analysis of why most metadata schemes become less and less useful. This is also where he described the ebay "Plam Pilot" phenomenon that the NYT picked up on a little while back.
With iPhoto I can do that now.
Congrats, so revolutionary.
*rolls eyes*
I live in a giant bucket.