November 22, 2010

Yahoo Clues is like Google Insights for Search. It has one interesting thing that the latter doesn’t though: search flows. It doesn’t have an official API, so I thought I’d document the unofficial one. The API endpoint is http://clues.yahoo.com/clue The query parameters are: q1 – the first query string q2 – the second query string ts – the time span. 0 = today, 1 = past 7 days, 2 = past 30 days tz – time zone? Not sure how it works. It’s just set to “0” for me s – the format? No value other than “j” seems to work So a search for “gmat” for the last 30 days looks like this: ...

There are some standard enhancements that I apply to my photos consistently: auto-levels, increase saturation, increase sharpness, etc. I’d also read that Flickr sharpens uploads (at least, the resized ones) so that they look better. So last week, I took 100 of my photos and created 4 versions of each image: The base image itself (example) A sharpened version (example). I used a sharpening factor of 200% A saturated version (example). I used a saturation factor of 125% An auto-levelled version (example) I created a test asking people to compare these. The differences between these are not always noticeable when placed side-by-side, so the test flashed two images at the same place. ...