Specialist Search Engines

Once again I found myself like Alice down the rabbit hole, getting sidetracked into all kinds of interesting things in this module. I searched for All Blacks on both Blinkx (limiting it to Reuters, BBC and Channel 4) and YouTube, getting predictable results on both, and unsurprisingly the YouTube one had much greater NZ content. Of course the Blinkx selected content was more serious, whereas I went off at a tangent on YouTube finding not just game footage, but also a very strange French rabbit haka, and the gingerbread men haka too. One could spend HOURS on YouTube - hats off to the wonderful AP competition for the reference interview by the way, and good to see so many familiar faces on screen. While there I just had to listen to Dewey Rap and the Librarian's Song too.



I chose Life magazine in Google Book Search, and searched for Auckland across all issues. A lot of travel ads came up, but also some great articles and photos of the Lawson quints, Peter Snell, Edmund Hillary, etc. Flicking through various issues my first thought was how wonderful some of the old ads are for Y12 Media Studies students, but also for social history purposes from an overseas perspective. Some of the magazines on our e-Resources are not retrospectively indexed as far back as many of the mags here, so this resource is really useful, not just for students, but for pleasure and leisure reading too. Google Books also had some real treasures in full-text for me - I looked up some old Spanish picaresque novels I'd studied some 35 years ago and there they all were - they would probably be incredibly difficult to source from a bookstore, but up they popped on screen, large as life. NZ is making much headway in digitising its books too, though NZETC and others, so we are not getting left behind. Great stuff!