On Thursday November 2nd we played around with several searches and search engines, Basic tips:
Think carefully: What exactly are you looking for? Draw up your query and be as specific as possible.
We had some success with this search in Google Chrome: Convert photo into a sketch online free and were presented with a number of website services including a feature of BeFunky, https://www.befunky.com/features/photo-to-sketch/ We uploaded a photo and lo and behold – it was converted to a sketch in a moment. This site has several completely free image editing features, though uses are encouraged upgrade to get the full package.
Then we asked how do i print a list of names in excel in one page (which is actually a pretty bad question since what we were actually wanting to know was how to fit a list of names in several columns on a single page so they could be printed out on a single sheet. This is what Microsoft’s Bing AI search gave us:
This is fine if you are happy to shrink everything down so that the printout is very small. But that’s not what we wanted and the search results presentation on the screen looks very wordy.
Google in Chrome gave us something like this:
I guess Google is aware of how badly people frame their questions and it gives a drop down list of alternatives, among which was How do I print a long list on one page in Excel (not shown on the above screen-shot unfortunately!) and a link to the following YouTube video, which provides the simple answer: copy and paste the list into Word and format it into columns to print from there.
Note also that Chris’s Chrome has the WebChatGPT extension installed. This displays a side-bar when you ask a How do I type of question so that you can use AI for the search.
Chris suggested using Spanish words in searches e.g. muebles when looking for furniture shops, fontaneria for plumber etc. Many web sites and businesses are only in Spanish.
As regards image searches, both Google (using Lens) and Bing (Image search) were pretty good when presented with photos of local fruits (Persimmon – Google knew the Spanish name was a Caki) and Strawberry tree (Bing also suggested they were lychees). To use image search: Right-click on the image in the browser (Chris used some of her Google photos) and select “Visual Search” (Edge) or “Search Image with Google” (Chrome).
A member asked if we could search for how to change the delivery address for an Ikea purchase to a drop-off point on-line. This type of thing depends upon the capabilities of the company’s website, which did not have the facility. So searching wasn’t a useful exercise.
We briefly looked at some of the specialist searches provided by Google’s apps:
To access the Apps make sure you are logged into your gmail account and click on the square of nine dots
Among which are:
- Google News – seems to be very focused on US
- Google Books – Search the world’s most comprehensive index of full-text books.
- Google Shopping – This enables you to filter products by price and detailed specification
- Google Finance – Live data on stock markets etc.
- Google Travel – Among many other things this provides a comprehensive up to date price comparison for flights , and a timeline of past prices.
Chris B-J Also uses Google Scholar https://scholar.google.com to search for academic articles.
For a bit of fun Chris challenged the search engines to find the most popular versions of Scarborough Fair on YouTube by number of views. She knew that there were loads of videos of this song, and the one she was looking for had several million views (5- 7 million?) but didn’t provide any additional information. Both Google and Bing returned a list of fairly well-known artists and cover versions but seemed to have ignored the “number of views” part of the query, since the lists quickly showed videos with only a few thousand views. Failure!
The problem was, we were asking the wrong question. We should have made a more general query: How do you sort YouTube videos by the highest View Count? and would soon have been told by Google (or Bing) that you do it within to You Tube in Chrome. Go to the YouTube website, type the song name into the search box – in this case, “Scarborough Fair” press Enter ; click on Filters then Sort by / View Count
Top of the list was a Simon and Garfunkel full version with lyrics at 29 million views over the past 12 years). Scrolling down we passed Celia Pavey’s performance at the Australian version of “The Voice” TV programme (14 million views over 10 years), an Anime version at 10 million views, to find the one which Chris was after at 5.2 million views over past 2 years. (beating Sarah Brightman) . This is a performance (again in a singing competition) by a Korean quartet: “Forestella” .
We ended the session by enjoying the video which was new to everyone in the audience. Thus proving that searching the Internet enables us to find gems like this from all over the world. There’s a wealth of good cultural content out there, and it’s not just from the US or UK!
Chris Betterton-Jones – Knowledge Junkie