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Fantasy broadband league

Posted on 27 Jul 2005 at 17:12

Davey Winder goes in search of the perfect picture and joins the broadband elite

The standard one-way 16Mb service costs £33.99 per month (inc VAT) for 'unlimited bandwidth', although I would want to know exactly what that means before signing anything (because my service was, sadly, just a brief trial, I didn't probe too deep in the contractual mire). The interesting-sounding 'booster' product, which couples the 16Mb/sec satellite downlink with a standard 256Kb/sec ADSL uplink, starts at £34.99 (inc VAT), but is capped at 1GB of data, after which it switches back to 'plain old ADSL', or you can continue with the satellite downlink at 2p per MB.

Unlimited bundles are available, starting at £49.99, but these come with somewhat confusing 'higher priority volume' limits that again need further investigation. My current understanding is that you can choose between different priority groups for your traffic, depending on whether you are browsing the Web (when the high speed is of little consequence) or downloading files (when it most certainly is). Once you have used up your data allowance in the highest priority group, you drop down to the next lower level. If your usage patterns are such that you need that file downloading speed, and assuming that unlimited means just that, then it is a good value-for-money deal. I understand that skyDSL is already testing a 32Mb/sec service, if you would prefer to wait for speeds that would make even the Crazy Frog stop dinging.

Filter tips

Since its flotation, Google has been diversifying beyond purely search-orientated services (I will be looking at Google Maps Beta and its competitors next month, for example), but that always risks diluting a brand rather than strengthening it. I was recently reporting on the market for a client in the education sector and found this to be the case in the image-search arena.

I was tasked to investigate not only accuracy and depth of searches, but also the effectiveness of the adult-content filtering provided. Most of the metasearch engines I would normally steer clients towards failed on this family filtering capability (it is shocking just how flimsy many of these parental control systems are). Take the otherwise excellent AltaVista image search (www.altavista.com): entering sexual keywords produced a 'Have detected adult content' warning, from where you could turn the filters off (given the necessary password) and see that content or continue to view the non-adult content. However, opting for the latter displayed explicit images more often than not.

The two services I was left with were Google (images.google.com) and Picsearch (www.picsearch.com). Although Google was pretty much the first to market with a freely available, dedicated image search function - as opposed to commercial databases of stock photographs - it is now starting to look a little dated. However, everyone knows how to use it and what to expect, with images as well as web pages. And there is no denying the depth of Google's image database, as with more than one billion images indexed it can rightly claim to be the biggest.

Biggest is not always best, though, and most searches throw up many images that are no longer accessible except as thumbnails in the Google cache. Results are first displayed as thumbnails in a standard gallery format with host URL, filename and dimensions attached. Select any thumbnail and you get a two-tier framed page, the upper frame containing a slightly enlarged thumbnail, and if you click this the original image file is displayed. The lower frame shows the image in its original context on the host web page (provided that has not already been deleted or moved, which too often it has). The technology behind the image search is sound enough, analysing text adjacent to the image on the page as well as any caption or tag content. Duplicates are removed by dedicated algorithms, and the highest resolution version available is then indexed.

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