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CONTENTS:

• Searching the Internet for Images
• The Scannery

TASI, The Technical Advisory Service for Images hosted by the Institute for Learning and Research (ILRT) at the University of Bristol, has provided us with a very helpful article, entitled "Searching the Internet for Images." The article discusses strategies for finding images using general Web search engines, databases and Web directories. It also covers how to find stock photos and scientific, art and historical images on the Web.

http://www.tasi.ac.uk/resources/searchingresources.html#im3d

A companion piece, called "A Review of Image Search Engines," is available at

http://www.tasi.ac.uk/resources/searchengines.html

This piece explains how image search engines work and critically examines the positives and negatives of image search engines. Engines reviewed include AlltheWeb, AltaVista, Google, Lycos, Cobion Visoo, Ditto, Picsearch, Dogpile, Excite, WebCrawler, Mamma, Fazzle, Ithaki, Ixquick, Photoseek, Search 22, Corbis, Getty Images Creative, WebShots and 1ShotStock. This article is well worth reading to discover the differences in these search engines and what type of results you can expect from each. Also included is a list of a number of stock photo collections sites.

THE SCANNERY

The Scannery is "an investor focused web search platform that only searches the websites of publicly traded companies from around the world . . . it can also search any files available on those websites in a variety of file formats including PDF, XLS, DOC, PPT, RTF, TXT, ARC, ZIP and many more."

Search countries from Argentina to Zimbabwe, as well as top lists of companies from some of the countries. For example, included in the U.S. lists are the S&P 500 and the top 1500. You can also search within industry sectors. There is no explanation of the methodology used to create the generic top lists, like the U.S. top 1500.

Search options include phonic (sounds like or soundex) and fuzzy (spelling variations) search, synonyms and stemming (variations on a root or trunk word). You can query by phrase, any word, all words or write your own Boolean search. Display options allow you consolidate results by company Web site, choose the number of hits to display and the maximum number of hits to allow. Results can be sorted by date, hits, score and size. Consolidating results by company Web site is nice because it clusters all the hits by company, then lists them by score. There’s even a free toolbar you can download.

http://www.thescannery.com/

I found the help page very, well, helpful, particularly in explaining Boolean and wild card search options. To learn more about how the various search and results options operate, click on the rather unobtrusive question mark (?) at the top right corner of the Web page or go directly to

http://www.thescannery.com/help.htm

Some of the search results were puzzling and some of the omissions even more so. For instance, a search for Bill Gates uncovered fewer hits about the Microsoft site than expected. While search results for Nike did bring back a link to the Nike Web site, the Nike page did not rank first in the list. With these caveats in mind, overall the Scannery is an annual report search engine worth using.

Chris Mildner

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