First, I dream of the day or month or moment when someone brilliant creates a search or metasearch engine for pictures that you can see clearly in head or memory, but do not have a title for.  I long for the ability to, essentially, do a head search, inputting the vision the user has and getting a replication with painting title.  Any search or metasearch engine designers listening?  Help!!!  How can you find the picture in my head for me?  That is, you are seeking that picture of the Joseph Wright painting, you know his alternym is Wright of Derby.  You know he was English and that he ushered in a unique and emphatic style that attended to industry for his primary subjects.  But you would like to avoid having to manually search through hundreds of museum pieces at the Louvre website, as one article taking a full day is not lucrative for anything besides your tangential penchants.

Don’t get me wrong.  I LOVE Google Images.  I can spend days in the labyrinthine and insipid results of searching an author’s name and getting totally unrelated porn shots of someone with the same middle initial.  I love typing names of murderers or missing people or new authors, to see what each looks like.  I love typing in the Wikipedia creator’s name in the images and getting the coolest of photos of the great Jimmy Wales sitting at a desk in what appears to be his office, of which the wall behind him is an intriguing amalgam of hand done sketches of an apparent prototypes.  But then I cannot search such a wall shot to learn what exactly is painted or scrawled on that wall to identify the kind of genius, like an Albert Einstein or a John Nash, who write their most profound ideas and calculations on walls!  No manual search of all 598 images of Wales and reading the accompanying text will give me an answer.  No metasearch engine will do that for me, either.

And I’m not lazy.  I try the images section with a number of words, get nowhere, so resign to the Web where I search, until I find the name of that painting I see so well and it is called “The Widow of an Indian Chief Watching the Arms of her Deceased Husband” (1785).  Then I return to Google Images with the title to use to look up the image I needed to begin with.  But I digress.  Sort of.

Next on the list of bitches - when you are a writer, researcher, student, or individual looking for specific information, the search and metasearch engine process can be maddening.  Granted, we are a cyber-culture of profit and gain, of buy and spend, but scholarship should not be impeded in such an obtrusive manner.  For example, I was working on a knitting and fashion article this morning, seeking the exact measurements of a plain, single-stitch Dries Van Noten knitted scarf, one which he showed on the runways for a winter 2000 collection.  My goal as writer was to describe the knit stitch, the length, the width, the color, pattern and style.  Most of my searches yielded horrifyingly unrelated results.  In the margins of the results page were ads for everything from scarves by L. L. Bean and trucks!?  In the main body of the results list were runway shows for 2003, chat forums on buying the designer’s stuff because he had just turned 50, and enticements to buy floral silk scarves.  Could I find the exact length of that scarf about which I had to write with veracity?  No.

So how about a single metasearch engine for serious, non-buying, but producing scholars and writers?  Yes, there are databases, encyclopedias, and compendia of encyclopedias and thoughtful resources.  And yes, those of us complaining do spend hours searching.  That is, we do not give up after one set of results offers nothing but material product.  But one metasearch engine that at least attempts to be knowledge oriented or knowledge based is all I’m asking for here.

Clarification is important here.  It may make little difference to some casual users, but there is a distinction between search and metasearch engines.  Google Images is not a metasearch engine, though it is the most popular.  A search engine is a program of sorts that has “spiders” that go out and crawl all the world wide web to find website pages that are relevant to your search words/phrase.  A metasearch engine then, is beyond the search engine.  A metasearch engine “crawls” all the search engines, delivering the results.

SEARCH ENGINES
A9
Alta Vista
AOL
Ask
Clusty
Excite
Google
Lycos
MSN
Yahoo

METASEARCH ENGINES

Dogpile
Mamma Metasearch
Metasearch.com

There are patterns and plans for how search engines travel and where they go. There are tools within the better or larger, more capacious search engines, identifying user search habits.  This is intended for optimized searching but is also taken advantage of by advertisers and their advertising efforts.  So in my case, when I spend a day on a literary analysis for a client, then switch at night to a how to article for another client, my daytime searches bleed into the night.  A month ago I was researching trucks. Is that why today, when seeking knitting terminology, I got an errant truck ad?  Argggh!

The Internet has really introduced our world to a spectrum of new possibilities. Many things that we dreaded taking care of in the past, we can now simply solve online. Those irksome trips to the bank, ordering a pizza over the phone, sending letters via snail mail and looking up information in the library have all become unnecessary. Our home computers can handle all of these common tasks and much more. These days you don’t even have to venture out of your home in order to meet others like you. In fact, meeting people online is becoming quite the trend. Ever check out a chat room or maybe post some messages in a forum? These are new age ways to build relationships with others no matter where they reside.

Who’d have ever guessed that by the 90s we’d be meeting people online? This is such a bizarre concept. I think up until it actually happened, people would have had a difficult time trying to fathom the phenomenon. The first time that I decided to try meeting people online was in college. I have a passion for martial arts, so why not try and locate others who share that interest. After some surfing I had discovered a cool site called Kung Fu Forums. This website was amazing. I could actually converse, debate, and argue with others who shared my passion for martial arts. They are even broken down into chat rooms that pertain to different styles. This way you can obtain all kinds of new information concerning whatever style you wish. You truly can learn a lot from others. I still post in that forum today and have met several individuals.

The great thing about meeting people online is the option of meeting in person. If you don’t feel comfortable meeting someone in person, then you don’t have to. The freedom is yours. You can exchange info or photos, chat it up with someone in another country and make friends who actually live nearby. Meeting people online has never been easier. With the high-speed connections we have today and our constant access to computers, it’s easy to make a new buddy via the Internet. While this new form of socializing can be ideal, you always want to be careful with who you’re conversing. If it feels wrong, then bail. You computer allows you a great deal of freedom and access. You have the power to decide. If you’re interested in meeting people online, then jump on your laptop and check out the abundance of websites that will cater to your every interest. It is now possible to meet others like you.

There are many human resources companies offering their services. Some specialize in assisting companies to find the best employees, that are most suited to each individual organization and job description. Others take it from a different angle and assist individuals to team up with most suitable employers. Still others offer recruitment advertising services, handling the entire recruitment process from writing up job descriptions, to posting job ads, to receiving resumes, interviewing and hiring the best employees for the posted positions. These human resources companies sometimes work on a retainer basis, while other times they work on a hiring-to-hiring basis. Some discounts may be offered for repeat business and guarantees are generally in place ensuring that businesses using the services of these human resources companies actually get what they are paying for.

Companies that specialize in recruitment advertising sometimes focus their business on just the advertising itself. They generally offer services including copy writing, advertisement design and ad placement, as well as media planning, holding job fairs and creating collateral materials. Organizations that usually opt to use the services of one of this type of human resources companies include nationwide banking institutions, colleges and universities and hospitals, whose recruitment needs are ongoing and often involve mass hirings.  Still other human resources companies specialize in resume writing and career workshops, assisting job seekers in finding the best ways of marketing themselves and thereby better positioning themselves as employees-of-choice in their communities.

The services of these human resources companies can make all the difference in the recruitment process, both for employers and job seekers alike. Their services may seem expensive at first, but the value they can offer goes a long way in making this investment worthwhile. A lot of time can be wasted and many wild goose chases can be embarked upon without the expertise and direction of a human resources companies. If an organization lacks an in house human resources team, then they are well advised to spend the extra money and turn the recruitment process over to the professionals, who often guarantee longterm results.

Job seekers may balk at paying for assistance with reworking their resumes.  This is generally a nominal fee and by accepting professional resume writing assistance individuals can benefit by increasing their earning power exponentially and ensure a good fit with an employer that best suits their skill set and career goals.  So too, employers who avail themselves of these services are making a valuable investment in their employees, resulting in profit down the road.

Are you one of those people who habitually misplaces their keys? Do you lay them down just anywhere and hope for the best? Do you freak out when you realize you’ve lost them and don’t know where to look? Have you locked yourself out of your house or car simply because you don’t keep track of where you put those blasted keys? If you habitually lose your keys, you need a system. The simple idea of a key chain may hold the answer to your woes.

When you find yourself locked out of your car or house, it almost always ends up costing you money. Locksmiths are expensive. When locked out of your house, with today’s groceries in the car, you risk spoiled food. More money wasted. If you can’t get into your car, you may lose money if you’re due at work, besides having to pay the locksmith. If you can’t get to class and you miss that exam, your grades may suffer as a result of this simple flaw in your habits. Some people do this so frequently.  They ought to have their keys around their wrist, like a watch you never take off.

Wouldn’t you agree it’s time for a change? A key chain can solve all of your problems. Just any old key chain won’t do. For your problem, you want one that’s large and colorful. You can get a large round plastic key chain with a photo of your husband or kids laminated between the clear plastic. A glow-in-the-dark key chain isn’t a bad idea either. The point is, you need a key chain that highlights the importance of those modest looking little pieces of metal – your keys!

Your next step is to choose an absolute designated spot to which you always return your keys. When you brush your teeth, you don’t then carry your toothbrush to the garage and lay it down! You return the toothbrush to it’s holder. You must simply train yourself to hold on to those keys until you reach your designated key spot.  When you leave the house and are out and about, you need another designated spot, either on your person or in your purse. Again, you must make a conscious effort and train yourself. Woof!

These two steps alone don’t guarantee you won’t still misplace your keys. That’s why you need two sets of keys and another key chain. This strategy works best when the second set always resides in your purse. If you change your purse, your duplicate set of keys goes into the new purse, right along with your wallet and glasses.  One last helpful comment.  If your dog can learn to “sit”, you can learn to put your keys away. You are smarter than your dog, right?

We all tend to think that college is tough when we’re stuck in the midst of studying for all those tests and writing those infinite research papers. However, the truly difficult part usually comes after the four year academic sentence is through. Yep, I am talking about finding a decent job. It’s kind of like a massive smack in the face and welcome to the real world. Suddenly you’re well aware of the competition. I will say one thing’ I hope you received a nice high graduating GPA. This can help a bundle. If you received honors or graduated from an Ivy League school, that’s even better. Anything to give you that edge in the workforce. Now, for the great news. In this modern age of technology and utter convenience, you can easily take advantage of online employment searches. In fact, I totally recommend it!

You want to know what’s funny in college? It’s when you meet someone who tells you they’re not interested in a particular field because it’s competitive. Ha -  this is such a joke. Name a field that’s not competitive. The point is that most of them are. It’s rare to find a decent job field that has no one vying for positions. That’s plain and simply not reality. With six billion people on the planet, there is always loads of competition. But, at least you can search for new and available positions much easier now days. If you’ve got a PC or Mac and online access, you’re pretty much set. Pop open a decent search engine and punch in the words “employment searches.” You will soon notice that there are many available job search engines. All you need now is the name of your desired field and a location you wish to search in. Maybe you have a particular state or city in mind and maybe not. You can narrow your employment searches by specifying location.

Although employment searches have become quite advanced these days and we have to put less effort forth to find out what’s available, I can’t stress enough how crucial grades are. Don’t be duped into thinking that GPA has no bearing whatsoever. When it’s you against two other applicants, those GPAs may pop up and be examined. What is your’s going to look like? Anyway, a couple of the larger websites for employment searches are Careerbuilder.com and Monster.com. Check them out when you get a chance.

An ancestry search can be a both fun and exciting way to discover all kinds of things about who you are and where you come from. By looking into your genealogy, you can understand more about your family and where they come from, and ancestry searches are a good way to show your relatives that you care about the consanguineous people in your life. Besides that, an ancestry search can settle many unknown and unanswered questions about who you are and where you come from.

I first got the idea of an ancestry search from a simple question from my younger son. “Father,” he asked, “how did our family get over here?” In my family, it doesn’t take an ancestry search to answer certain basic questions about our genealogy. Everyone knows about Grandma Milton, and her epic struggle to get over the border despite having no money. She eventually went across the sea as a stowaway on the S.S. Martha, barely surviving weeks of sickness and near starvation. And everyone knows that she married a sailor, and that they later got rich through the maritime trade and the plentiful fishing in those days. But no one knows much about that sailor, besides his name. Where did he come from? We did an ancestry search to find out.

The ancestry search initially yielded very little information, and we had to pay big bucks for a more comprehensive search before we had anything to go on at all. But soon we had a family tree and found out that Grandpa Sal, as he was known, came from Wales. We even had several generations of his family roots in the old country but that is all that the ancestry search told us. To get the real answers we decided to go to Wales and research it ourselves.

One thing about internet ancestry searches is that they can’t do everything. Your ancestry search is only as good as the information available online. Much of the information is simply not currently available to ancestry searches. To do a proper ancestry search if it is very important to you to know just where you came from, as it is important to me, you might just have to go to the country and look for records yourself. We are currently pursuing our own ancestry search the old fashioned way – perusing town records for clues about the life of our ancestor. So far, our ancestry search has yielded some interesting results but it is far from over.

One of my friends works as a civil liberties attorney. In my family he is always viewed as a bit of a nut. Most people think that he is a little bit paranoid, you see. It is hard to believe that the government is out to get us as he says they are. Nevertheless, I checked out some of his allegations and they seem to have some grounds to them. I was really worried when I found out about background searches.

Most people are familiar with criminal background checks. A background search is a way for a potential employer to find out if you have had any nefarious dealings in the past. There are not that many people who would really object to background searches either. Most of us feel that the public has a right to know, after all. If you have been involved in illegal activities, why should it be hidden from everyone?

What I did not realize was just how much information a background search reveals. It can reveal your credit history, your criminal history and even the places that you have lived . It just does not make any sense to me. The background search seems like a way to destroy a persons privacy. I can understand why someone should have the right to know if some criminal is living next door to them but I think there are limits. I do not think someone should have a right to know if I have been married before. They should not be able to know everywhere I have lived, how much money I make, or what I spend it on. They certainly should not be able to know my credit history! Yet a background search gives you the right to do all of these things.

Of course, the companies that make money off of background search will defend their right to do this in the name of free speech. I don’t think it really is about free speech, however. I think it is all about money. There is money to be made helping people snoop on each other. Some times a background search is done for a legitimate purpose. They are used by law enforcement, for example, or by potential employers. I would be willing to bet that the majority of them, however, are used by paranoid people to snoop on each other. I don’t think that this is right. I think that our country demands at least some right to privacy.

I  never thought that there would be much reason to use a reverse phone number search. After all, if I have a person’s number then I pretty much know who he is, right? There are times when this service comes in really handy. Following are a couple scenarios in which a reverse phone number search is helpful.

Many people take their telephone digits along with them when they move to a new location. This is a wonderful convenience for anyone who has to make a big move. Now you don’t have to worry about changing your number in most cases. In addition, anyone who needs to find you can just conduct a reverse phone number search to find your new address.

Many of us forget to send moving announcements to friends and family during this hectic time in our lives. Moving is never easy and remembering every detail is nearly impossible. The reverse phone number search has helped my family and my friends find my new address in seconds. I didn’t have to remember to send moving announcements after all.  I have also used this number look up device on my computer to update my address book. There are plenty of friends and family members who have moved or who have addresses that I simply forgot over the years. I just entered their last known telephone number in the reverse phone number search and up popped the information that I needed.

This service came in really handy when I was preparing for my wedding. I already had telephone information but in this age of emails I really didn’t have addresses. Using the reverse phone number search has proved to be a quick and efficient way to get addresses in a snap.

There are other reasons that you might want to use a reverse phone number search. I recently received a message on my answering machine that was meant for another person. Unfortunately, the person speaking just called herself “Grandma”. This didn’t help me in returning her telephone call to explain that she had the wrong number.

My caller ID only had the number listed on the list of incoming calls. I had no idea what to say when calling this lady. I decided to conduct a reverse phone number search and I found the information that I needed. This made the call much easier for me to make considering that I had a good salutation to begin the conversation.  There may be other instances that a reverse phone number search will prove to be helpful. It’s nice to know that this kind of convenient service is available.

I have always wanted a metal detector. I remember seeing people with them when I was a young child and I was fascinated with a machine that could tell you when something was buried underground. I never had one, though that didn’t mean my fascination with this type of technology would end. When I see an advertisement on television for a metal detector I often stopped to watch it. I guess I’m a pretty practical person however, because I just don’t see myself ever owning one.

I can see were having a metal detector would be a lot of fun. But as would anything, there are some things to consider. You can use a metal detector just about anywhere you wish but that does not mean you can dig anywhere you wish. If you dig in the wrong spot you may dig up some sort of power or cable lines. If you do this you may end up being in a lot of trouble. If you have ever had to take anything in your yard, you have probably had to call someone to make sure you are not digging where any lines are buried.  Though these lines may not set off a metal detector that does not mean you will not run into some if you were to dig.

If you want to find a great place to use a metal detector, you may want to use one on the beach. For the most part you will never find any wires of any sort there. People lose all sorts of things on the beach and you never know what you may fight. There is even more benefit to using a metal detector on the beach than you may have realized. Just the act of walking around with it for an extended period of time means that you are getting the exercise you need. I suspect this is part of the reason why people like to use them.

These are not to be confused with a metal detector you may find at the airport. These are not so much fun. When you are boarding a flight you have to remember to take everything metal off of your body or you are going to be too late. While I understand that these are necessary, I still resent having to go through the metal detector, time and time again because I forgot to take some change out of my pocket, or perhaps because it is so sensitive it is picking up on my zipper.