Online applications and tools - Week 9, pt. 2

I went into Google labs and looked at the Google Music Trends and Google Trends just to see what people are searching for in music and in general. There were many bands from today that I had no clue about that were on the top 20 hit list, but when I started to play around with the filtering tools at the top of the page I found that there were bands I knew in my favorite music genres. The searching trends were not quit what I expected either for the first page. Although the terms must mean something to the person using them, they had little relevance to me in the context of this page. I also looked breifly at Google Mars and found that to be a worthwhile view. Although, this is not the whole planet, but a strip of a picture from the planets surface for us to look at with the different filters available. I don't think that any of these tools as they are today will do very well on the regular "graduated" Google search site. There will need to be more searching criteria for those using it to gleem enough valuable information from these tools. It was fun to see what others are searching for even if it was not useful to me.

I chose to look at Etsy.com for the award winning site. This site has many handmade crafts for sale. I found the bar to the left interesting because they had categories to narrow down your search by: color, treasury, showcase, geolocator, time machine, connections, and last but not least traditional categories for handmade crafts (art, accessories, etc.). The unusaul search techniques were interesting but not very helpful to me. The time machine took a little getting used to so I could figure out how it provided information about things being sold. There was a swirl of images from items being sold. The only way I could see using this in a library setting is to try to figure out the value of handmade crafts for people doing research on an art object they own.