The Army Photos are directly available at http://www.footnote.com/documents/241910021/photos_vietnam_war_army/. There are almost 29,000 images available here and at this writing the collection is denoted as “76% complete.” The first page has lists of recent comments and “discoveries” that have been made, but there’s also a search box. I did a search for patrol and got 400 results. You can also browse items via 31 categories (from aerials to vehicles.)

The Army Unit Service Awards cover documents related to Presidential Unit Citations, Valorous Unit Awards, and Meritorious Unit Commendations. The documents cover duties of service, duties performed, and letters of recommendation, and are available at http://www.footnote.com/documents/241893090/vietnam_unit_service_awards/. You can browse these items if you like (they’re organized by unit) and you can also do a keyword search. Remember these are unit citations, and not individual citations. You can get more information on unit citations at http://www.homeofheroes.com/medals/ribbons/1_ribbons_unit.html.

As long as you’re here, you might want to check out some of the other materials relating to the Footnote.com Vietnam War collection, including Marine Corps photos (almost 20,000) and an interactive version of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, where you can leave a tribute to one of the people listed on the wall, or provide other information (like a picture.)

Bing is the search provider on Facebook. In other words, when you run a search on Facebook and get all the results that Facebook can provide — people, groups, and so on — you get Web results at the bottom, and those are provided by Bing. Bing’s Web search integration will be extended to outside the US, covering all of Facebook’s 400 million users, and Bing will soon be integrating additional features into its Facebook Web results, including (I hope!) its rich search answers. (So I can search on Facebook for red beans and rice and get fan pages, groups, and recipes!)

I suspect there will be a closer tie-up with Facebook appearing in Bing’s search results, but after a few tests searches I’m not seeing it yet. As Bing mentioned in its announcement, it’ll take several weeks/months for all this to shake out.

This is good for Bing. They’ve got a big role in one of the hottest properties on the Web. Twitter has an API and is appearing in all kinds of search results. What are the other hot independent Web properties that haven’t teamed up with a major player? Yelp, maybe? Foursquare?

(If, like me, you are somewhat confused about what Cloud computing is, Wikipedia can give you an overview. There’s also a video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJncFirhjPg that helped me understand it better.)

So anyway, the Cloudbook Products and Services Directory is available at http://www.cloudbook.net/directories/products-services-directory. The products and services listed there are divided into several broad categories, including applications, platforms, and network services. I decided to take a look at the applications and got a list of subcategories that included sales, marketing, data, collaboration, and human resources.

The “Collaboration” subcategory seemed interesting so I looked at that. I got a list of companies and basic description of the services. Some of them I had heard of (Zoho, Basecamp, SmugMug) and some I had not (Brainshark, GoView, etouches). Applications are listed in company name’s alphabetical order, not application name alphabetical order, which can be a bit confusing at first.

I still don’t quite understand what makes Cloud computing different from, say, applications that happen to be hosted on the Internet, but maybe I’ll get a better idea by exploring this directory. I was interested to see that this site was supposed to have more listings for government and research clouds as well as cloud groups, but alas, every one of the links I tried led me to a 404 error….

The direct link for creating your own calendar is http://www.sunrisesunset.com/custom_srss_calendar.asp. Choose a city, a month for which you want a calendar, and a few options (kinds of twilight to display, whether you want moon phases, time type, etc.) Once you enter all that you get a no-frills calendar that prints on one page in landscape format.

This is going to be handy to figure out when I can go exercise when it’s actually light outside! A useful application, though if you’re looking for sunrise/sunset information for individual days, I would recommend Wolfram|Alpha (do a search for February 3 1931 sunrise in 90210 at http://www.wolframalpha.com and you’ll get both sunrise information and a time calculation.)

This is a nice setup they’ve got organized on this page. You can browse through a list of the issues and download the ones you want (they’re PDF files and about 8MB each.) There are also four indexes you can download instead, if you’re looking for several things. And, there’s a keyword search engine too. There’s a specify query syntax to find regional reports and wildcards are supported.

I did a search for suet and got 212 results, from “A Sparrow Hawk Dines on Suet” to “Region 5 – Fall 1971″. The snippet with the search results only gives you a little context, and unless the date is referred to in the article title you’re going to have to figure out the issue of the Kingbird that’s being found via the file name on the PDF. Yup, these search results return pages as PDF files, though it doesn’t seem to be a problem. I wanted to check out “Short-eared Owls in a Suburban Housing Development” and the PDF downloaded quickly and was readable once I increased the zoom to about 150% (at 100% it was not readable at all on this monitor.)

Nicely done, NYSOA! A large archive of bird data that’s very easy to both browse and search through.

The papers were produced when the German government established an internment camp at a horse racetrack outside of Berlin to incarcerate male foreign civilians, with most of the materials dating from 1914 to 1918. Most of those interned were British, though there were other nationalities. You can view the digitized papers by going to http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/12382737 — the materials are divided into boxes which are further divided into topical folders. The content of the folders is not usually personal material — instead it’s things like notices, playbills, tobacco cards, newspapers, etc. If you’re interested in hand-lettered signage and general randomness don’t miss the Canteen Committee Announcements, Box 4, Folder 2.

There are also images available with this collection. You can get to them by searching for Ruhleben in Harvard’s VIA system. I did just that and got 371 hits, which included pictures of the theatre productions, camp buildings, groups and societies formed within the Ruhleben camp, and so forth.

Seeing the kind of societal bonds that developed when a bunch of people were thrown into a camp is fascinating. Especially the things like newspapers, camp notices, etc. I could spend a lot of time browsing the printed material. Kudos to Harvard for digitizing this collection, which they have had for over 75 years.

Good50 was designed to be help users who might have eye fatigue and strain while searching. You can see that from the home page, which has both a logo and a search box that might be considered larger than usual. Good50’s search results are Safesearch-enabled, so adult-oriented search results will theoretically not show up on Good50 (I don’t trust machine filtering completely.) Search results are set so that sponsored ads are only on the right (instead of on the right and on top) and there’s a setting on the top so you can enlarge search results to up to 200% of the default size.

… at least that’s what supposed to happen. It didn’t work for me so I contacted Ms. Huh, who said that this setting only works with Internet Explorer (yuck!) She did say that she’s going to get it working with Firefox.

If you want to search something besides the regular Web you might want to check out the “Shopping” tag, which applies the same large-font features to a search of over 700 shopping/brand sites.

Of course this site is of limited use as long as you can only enlarge the font with Internet Explorer and not Firefox, but when that’s fixed I do know a few people with whom I’m going to share Good50. How about some additional tools that will assist in making pages more readable? It’s great to be able to get a large page of search results, but then you still might be confronted with a Web site that has a black background, white text, and a six-point font…

Let’s back up a minute. Twitter’s “Trending Topics” are those keywords and hashtags that have become popular in recent tweets. It’s interesting to look at those trends in the aggregate, but as you might image trending topics in your area as a result of recent events — like weather activity, a conference, a concert, or something else location-based — could also be useful.

Trending topics show up on your Twitter home page. You have a “trending” partition on your right nav that defaults to global trending topics, but which you can change to a fairly limited number of areas — more about that in a couple of paragraphs —

Click on a trending topic to get a search result for that topic. (As far as I could tell, that search is a global search — your look at the trending topic is not limited to a particular geographic area.)

Twitter is “working on it” but at this writing has only a limited number of trending topic areas. Available countries include Brazil, Canada, Ireland, and the United States. Available cities include Atlanta, Chicago, New York City, São Paulo, and Washington DC.

Cool idea, but it’ll be a lot cooler when I can see trends for stuff that’s actually nearby!

Google’s Social Search features are basically built around what Google considers to be your “social circle.” Your social circle includes both your Google contacts and their friends, as well as contacts you have through your Google Profile (assuming you have a Google Profile.) The Social Search feature basically means that your the content of materials that your friends publish in their Google Profiles becomes another category of search result.

So you do a search for, say, search engines. You’ll get Web results, news results… and over halfway down your page you’ll get results from your social circle under a heading marked “Results from people in your social circle for search engines” That heading is clickable so you can get all the results on the same page. The results include an image of your social circle contact’s avatar in case their name isn’t ringing a bell.

I did several searches for various, mostly tech topics and didn’t see a lot of content from my social circle people. I did notice that I had to get fairly general in my searches to get results from my social circle, something that I don’t like to do. I played with this for a little while and didn’t get many results, and didn’t see a lot that will help me or enhance my search results. However, it did make me think of something I would want.

Say there was a way to tag people, in or out of your social circle, as particularly good at a certain topic. For example, I might want to tag Dori Smith as good at JavaScript, or Jeff Barr good at Amazon cloud computing. As more people tagged individuals, their prominence would rise. I could then specify that I want my search to take the context of a certain topic, and the results would weigh heavily in the favor of people who have been tagged as having useful, reputable sites. A search for Javascript tutorial might put Dori’s results up at the top, while mechanical turk might push Jeff Barr’s.

I have wonderful people in my social circle but they don’t know about everything I’d want to search for. If there were some way to crowdsource expertise of people or institutions, then I’d love to see that. I’d probably get a lot more use out of it. As it is, the social search idea is neat, but I don’t think it’s going to turn up a lot in my search results.

As you might remember, Startpage does not record IP address or search term details of its users. (You can get more details about its privacy policies at http://us2.startpage.com/eng/protect-privacy.html.)

The proxy service extends the idea of private browsing a little bit further, allowing you to view the contents of a page without directly connecting to the page itself. Run a search and you’ll see a link reading “Proxy” next to the URL for each search results. Click on it and you’ll get a page that looks like this:

(Yes, yes, that’s the EFF Web site, I was trying to be funny.)

Startpage connects you to the page in your search result via a proxy, which means the site you’re visiting does not see your ip and can’t put send you cookies. The page looks like it’s framed; the blue box at the top lets you go back to the search results or “Unproxy” and link directly to the site.

Browsing via proxy is good for protecting your privacy (and Startpage’s privacy policy extends to its proxy service as well; it does not record details about proxy usage, record IP addresses, etc.) but there are a few disadvantages. First, using the proxy means the page will load more slowly than if you linked to it directly. (Which makes sense if you think about it, since you’re going through an intermediary.) JavaScript will be disabled for the page (which might render some pages unusable) and you will not be able to fill out forms with text input.

You can get more details on the proxy service at http://us2.startpage.com/proxy/eng/help.html. This is a useful, quick service when you want to protect your privacy or make absolutely sure that you’re not getting cookies all over your browser.