NEW RESOURCES

Make Google Maps Legotastic with Brick Street View. “There are two ways to explore it. You can move around a bird’s-eye-view map to see blocks of bumpy baseplates, shiny trees, and national landmarks like the Empire State Building and Eiffel Tower. Or you can drag and drop your denim-clad guide to obtain street-level views, which introduce various Lego artifacts like police cars, dead-eyed figurines, and fried egg-looking flowers.”

USEFUL STUFF

Oh, I love the idea behind Peruse: a natural language search for your cloud documents. “Peruse’s natural language file search works for business documents of any file type, albeit the NLP tech only currently works for the English language. The service is also initially limited to documents stored in either Box or Dropbox cloud storage repositories — but it intends to expand to integrate with more such services.”

Maybe not so useful: Play with old versions of Windows in your browser. I’m afraid I’ll have flashbacks of trying to get Trumpet Winsock to work.

TWEAKS AND UPDATES

Google Drive’s OCR capabilities have been expanded. “Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology aims to turn pictures of text into computer text that can be indexed, searched, and edited. For some time, Google Drive has provided OCR capabilities. Recently, we expanded this state-of-the-art technology to support all of the world’s major languages – that’s over 200 languages in more than 25 writing systems.”

More new stuff from FamilySearch. “Notable collection updates include 2,983,594 indexed records from the Croatia, Church Books, 1516–1994 collection; 57,446 indexed records and 1,785,969 images from the Jamaica, Civil Registration, 1880–1999 collection; and 1,087,758 indexed records from the Costa Rica Civil Registration, 1860–1975 collection.”

Google has launched a Chrome extension to gather feedback about its browser. “The new Chrome User Experience Surveys extension will occasionally pop up brief surveys about the user’s experience when something unusual happens in the browser. That could be a notification or a malware warning, for example, and Google says it will take the user feedback to improve Chrome.”

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

Pllbbt. Google is going to stop showing emojis in its search results.

Facebook beating you over the head with birthday notifications? That was a bug.

This is what happens when you ‘bot everything: Google Answers linking to a dead RadioShack page.

Is Yelp seeking a buyer? “While Internet users have increasingly searched for restaurants and points of interest in their cities and neighborhoods, Yelp and others have had difficulty turning the small businesses that populate the local economy into paying advertisers, said Sameet Sinha, an analyst at investment bank B. Riley & Co. in San Francisco.” I find this funny because the company for which I work has been advertising on Yelp for over a year. We want to advertise in a couple of other markets but we’re repeatedly told “There’s not enough inventory available.” I can’t even buy what they have; it’s a package or nothing. Good afternoon, Internet…

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