Thanksgiving tips from Wine Search Engine Snooth

November 15th, 2007 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Alts | 3 Comments »

Wines to Pair with Thanksgiving Dinner from Snooth.
 
Thanksgiving presents lots of opportunities for creativity at the dinner table, particularly when pairing wines with food. Remember to pair wine with the meal as a whole, not just the prime ingredient.

Looking at varietals, Chardonnay is an obvious and versatile choice that comes in many guises – from creamy Blanc de Blancs Champagne with starters, to a dry white Chablis from Burgundy with side dishes and white meat. Prosecco, an accessible, less expensive, white bubbly from Italy, is another winning sparkling wine alternative – its fruitiness makes it an excellent starter wine.

Serving turkey with all the trimmings? Consider Burgundy’s easy drinking red varietal Pinot Noir (the one on our list is from Oregon’s famed Willamette Valley) with your dark meat, or an Italian Gewurztraminer (or the aforementioned Chablis) with white meat and sides. If a Pinot is too light-bodied for your taste, opt for a heartier red wine like Chianti Classico, one of the most popular medium-bodied red wines of Italy.
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While the plethora of flavors on the table makes it difficult to select only one wine, if you should go this route, rosé will easily cross from dinner to dessert. Try a California rosé, a versatile blend of Mourvedre and Grenache. Or a classic pink-colored White Zinfandel, an off-dry wine made from the Zinfandel grape.

For dessert, serve a Tokay, a sweet wine, our example being from Australia, or a nutty, rich Tawny Port. Happy Thanksgiving! Snooth

Music Search Engine MagicSing finds “song chips”

November 15th, 2007 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Reviews | 1 Comment »

What can I say about MagicSing? Nothing. You’re on your own!

Introducing MIT’s Lecture Browser Search Engine

November 15th, 2007 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Reviews | 1 Comment »

Imagine you are taking an introductory biology course. You’re studying for an exam and realize it would be helpful to revisit the professor’s explanation of RNA interference. Fortunately for you, a digital recording of the lecture is online, but the 10-minute explanation you want is buried in a 90-minute lecture you don’t have time to watch.

A new lecture search engine developed at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) could help with this dilemma. Created by a team of researchers and students led by MIT associate professor Regina Barzilay and principal research scientist James Glass, the web-based technology allows users to search hundreds of MIT lectures for key topics.

More than 200 MIT lectures are currently available on the site. So far, most of the users are international students who access the lectures through MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative, which makes curriculum materials for most MIT courses available to anyone with Internet access.

Many MIT professors record their lectures and post them online, but it’s difficult to search them for specific topics. Because there is no way to easily scan audio, as you can with printed text, “you end up watching the whole thing, and it’s hard to keep focused,” said Barzilay, the Douglas T. Ross Career Development Associate Professor of Software Development in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

On the prototype web site, users can search lectures for any term they want and then play the relevant sections.  (See what happens when I search for ’search engines’)

The lecture transcripts are created by speech recognition software. One major challenge is that the lectures usually contain many technical terms that might not be in the computer program’s vocabulary, so the researchers use textbooks, lecture notes and abstracts to identify key terms and feed them into the computer.  When properly adapted to a speaker and topic, the lecture-based speech recognizer gets about four out of five words correct, however most of the errors occur in words that are not critical to the lecture topic, i.e., not the key vocabulary terms that people would use to search.

In the future, Barzilay and Glass hope to add a lecture summarization feature to the language processing system. They also want to get users more involved in the project, by incorporating a Wikipedia-like function that would let users correct errors in lecture transcripts and allow them to add lecture notes.

Thanks to Federico for this great tip!

Announcing Job Search Engine JobisJob (U.K.)

November 15th, 2007 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Newcomers, Reviews | No Comments »


JobisJob is a search engine for job offers. In one search, they will help you to find the most interesting job offers from major job boards, saving you all the time you would spend browsing each of those websites.

 Jobisjob includes all the job listings from major job boards and they continue to add new sites every day.  They make it easy for you to drill down by keywords, locations and even by company name to jobs that fit your requirements. Job searches can also be saved as alerts and sent to you daily via email or RSS feeds.

Their search technology crawls the Internet to find job listings from job boards. The job offerings themselves are not hosted by Jobisjob and users are always redirected to the original job listing.

They also help job sites and companies increase visibility and exposure for their job listings by driving traffic directly to the jobs on their web site. They only display a summary of the job offer details on Jobisjob and then direct users to the web site to apply for the job.

Thanks to Sydney for this great tip!

Walking through the Web with Walk2Web!

November 15th, 2007 by Charles S. Knight
Posted in Innovations, Reviews | 1 Comment »


Today we are fortunate to have not just one Guest Author, but two!  This is a review of the fascinating site Walk2Web which has it’s own unique visualization.


Editor’s note:  Adult content – Walk2Web does not have any filters on their screenshots.  Okay?

Web 2.0 provides us with all sorts of ways to check our favorite sites. However, for the most part, we’ve been constrained primarily to using browsers, email and RSS Feeds. With the dawn of this second Internet, there seem to be a plethora of new ways to surf the Internet.  Walk2Web takes old paths and give them an upgrade.

What is Walk2Web?
Walk2Web is an application that allows you to surf the web based directly on the links within the site. You begin by entering the name of the site you wish to browse, and then it comes up in the browser, complete with a female computer voice giving out the name of the site. The voice seems to work okay with site names: It got Emilychang.com, but didn’t even bother to pronounce my site name (which is JTDabbagian.com) and just simply spelled it. Honestly, considering how people have messed up my last name so many times in my life, I was glad that it didn’t bother.
From the initial viewing of your site, you see a tree-map or central node which represents the website you’re currently visiting, and all of the links to other nodes/websites that the specified site links to. You can then click on each of the links and go to different websites, which will then produce an ever-expanding tree-map with new nodes and new links you can click on. Of course, like any browser, you can also go backwards and forwards too.

What makes this good?
One of the reasons I like this site is that it allows you to visualize the way a website links to the various corners of the Internet. If you’re viewing your own site, you can use Walk2Web to figure out if sites you talked about in the past have updated to have better content. It also allows you to rediscover websites that you talked about long ago, but have simply forgotten about. Maybe you’re looking for that old website that had the list of plugins for your blog, but you don’t know where it is? Odds are, if you blogged about it, it’s there somewhere, and Walk2Web can help you find it.

Problems walking the path of 2.0
As with every good path, there’s always a rather rocky mountain to trek up. For instance, Walk2Web is not designed with the typical monitor in mind. Most of the site gets squished in my browser, and it’s clear that at least a 20-inch monitor is required to surf using Walk2Web, otherwise you’ll have quite a time trying to get through the links of certain major sites. Just try going through eHub, and you’ll see what I mean.

Walk2Web offers a great way to figure out how we are all linked to each other. Any fan of the theory of Six Degrees of Separation will love seeing how certain sites link to each other. Otherwise, it’s good for examining how many sites you’ve linked to on your own blog, or comparing your blog to the links from your competitors.

Walk2Web is a good startup, and maybe with a few additional features, such as link analysis and statistics on how many sites link to a particular site, it could be a great way to measure how your favorite sites stand in the blogosphere. For now, it’s a way to discover new sites that have some hyperlinked connection with one another.

Written by J.T. Dabbagian and posted in eHub Reviews

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