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I found a rather interesting little blog / RSS feed a couple weeks ago. It's disappointing to realize, at the ripe old age of 32, that my memory is going, so I'm not exactly sure how I found it. Found it I did, though. It's by librarians. I know, you're already giddy with anticipation. Before your natural librarian prejudices take over, I'll mention it's also about free stuff. Free information stuff. The Internet is nothing if not a bastion of free information, whether the aforementioned information was supposed to be free or not.

Fear not, though. Resource Shelf provides only the finest sources of completely legit free info and is updated quite often. The nature of the free info sources they find ranges far and wide. Common sources are governmental and academic, though they hardly ignore free commercial information. Resource Shelf covered the recent decision by the New York Times to kill off it's Times Select subscription service, and the day before had pointers to a US Census Bureau report on why people didn't work in 2004. The information is wildly varied and eclectic, but it's all free. Virtually everyone will find something useful, like great sources for blog topics for the idea-challenged webmaster.

Which brings me to their highly useful entry on PanImages. PanImages is a multi-lingual image search portal that currently uses Google Image Search and Flickr. One might be thinking that Google already allows one to search in different languages with their Advanced Search features. That's true, but all it does is return pages from other languages with the same search string. Search for "cars" in Dutch and you get a list of pages written in Dutch with the word "cars" on them. Change the image search with that query and you get the same thing, Dutch pages with the word "car" on them. But in Holland, they call cars "autos" or "wagens." You see pages with "car" on them, but not "auto" or "wagen" on the Google search, even though they are relevant to the query. Perhaps more so than "car."

Enter PanImages. Panimages serves as a portal site that formulates your image query across multiple languages. If the word you enter exists in multiple languages, it provides the option of picking what language you meant. If your word has multiple meanings across multiple languages, you are offered not only the language choice, but a list of possible meanings from which to choose. Once you've specified the details,PanImages opens up Google Image Search and Flickr in a columned framed layout with a search query formulated using all the translated equivalents. For example, "car" becomes:

car OR سيارة OR 汽车 OR auto OR automobile OR coach OR "motor car" OR wain OR bagnole OR voiture OR automobil OR wagen OR 自動車 OR 車 OR coche OR "máquina colloquial"

Apologies for any text encoding issues...

The execution is simple. PanImages simply queries each service using the OR operator to include all the translated versions of the search term. Simple in execution, but powerful in it's formulation. You couldn't form the same query without a bunch of research. Only C-3P0 could do it faster, and his fingers appear to be fused together, so he'd have a tough time typing all those terms into the search box. I suppose he'd be relegated to the hunt-n-peck method of keyboard interface.

PanImages, as one might expect, works primarily with fairly broad terms that are dictionary friendly. Searching for "cars" is fine, but those trying out "1988 buick skylark" will be disappointed, much like said vehicle's owners. One must assume that 1988 Buick Skylarks are universal in language and culture, a true uniting force for the ages. Or perhaps there's simply no substantive difference in most proper names between languages. Not sure about languages with different alphabets. We didn't cover how to spell 1988 Buick Skylark in Cyrillic in my 1 semester of college Russian. Granted, that one semester was not the highlight of my academic career. Looking back, taking Russian was exactly as bad an idea as everyone reading this thinks it was.

Perhaps a more "meta" critique of PanImages is simply that expanding the search pool with such basic dictionary terms rapidly approaches information overload. The single default image search for "car" in Google Images returns 61,300,000 results. The above query, using all the translated terms, ups that to 197,000,000. Now, you can't get past page 100 either way, but it illustrates that you're getting more information than you know what to do with. It's a bit of a double-edged sword with PanImages. The whole point is to get more results, but when does the sheer number outweigh the usefulness of having those results.

A more nuanced use of PanImages might be to find those translated terms and break them out one by one, providing the information in smaller, more friendly parts. PanImages provides individual language searches in their "advanced interface" section, allowing you pick a single language to search in. The translation function works the same, thus you can search on "car" only in Bulgarian or a number of other languages. If you find your "universal" query is providing to much info, try the language by language results to get more manageable chunks.

PanImages will open up some sources you probably wouldn't find otherwise. Allowing you to find them without doing a lot of translation work is a welcome idea. Themarriage of translation software to image search probably didn't seem like an intuitive choice, but it definitely works. Only it's prototype stage, there's welcome room for growth. The basic feature set delivers what's promised even now.

Other News from Earth, Google

Since I managed to avoid it last time, I'll go ahead and mention the flight simulator recently found in Google Earth. I've toyed with it, and it's "kinda" cool. Honestly, the controls are a little too sensitive and the mouse / keyboard combo doesn't lend itself to flight simulation control in the first place. The way the terrain loads isn't all that different from the regular GE interface, thus you've got terrain graphics slowly popping in as you're zooming around in your digital F-16. I was a bit of a flightsim aficionado in the days of yor (Falcon 3.0, anyone?), so perhaps I'm predisposed to be hard on it.

I'll see how it develops, as I'm sure this early entry will probably grow a bit over time. Is Google gunning for "Flight Simulator X" territory? Unlikely, but it certainly provides an interesting little addition to the Google Earth program.