Windows 7 Search Federation & Flickr Search Connectr | The Coffeehouse

longzheng

Since no one else has posted this yet I feel obliged to ~~spam~~ share my link Tongue Out

So a pretty cool but relatively unknown feature in Windows 7 is federated search. Brandon Paddock and David Washington did a lengthy video about it Channel9 recently but like they also did at PDC08 they used Sharepoint as an example. In their example you could search for documents (Word, Excel, Powerpoint) on the Sharepoint server from the common Explorer window. Practical, but not very interesting.

Two days ago the idea suddenly clicked with me, wouldn't it be cool to search Flickr straight from Explorer?

A couple of late nights later, I've put together a OpenSearch Flickr Search Connector (appropriately named Search Connectr) and a web proxy service that interprets Flickr API results into RSS2. If you have a copy of Windows 7 installed, head to http://www.istartedsomething.com/flickrsearch/ and try it for yourself.

Where federated search really shows its advantage is the ability to directly interact with the file, such as making an image the wallpaper.

I also tried to do YouTube. Because Windows 7 natively supports H.264 and AAC, which YouTube makes videos available in that format, that would work out great. Unfortunately the YouTube API doesn't make any sense to me so I gave up.

So I thought I'd share my little story and get other, and more talented developers, excited about this because I think it's got legs Smiley

stevo_
Human after all

For shame long Tongue Out

Actually we semi-hijacked another thread to talk about this:

http://channel9.msdn.com/forums/Coffeehouse/443652-some-new-features-including-one-with-questionable-usefulness/#Page=2

You should note that the gp are primarily now thinking "windows 7 to include flickr built in", they haven't quite realized the distinction nor grandness of the concept..

littleguru
<3 Seattle

Hey Long. That's not true. Brandond and David showed a search through videos on Channel 9 and that from the explorer or even the open file dialog Tongue Out

Dovella
Go Microsoft !!!!!!!

Great!
Pls Long add youtube search.

Koogle
I'm a Terminator - Astalavista, Vis7a!

Can you get it search flickr for just creative common licensed photos?

When you set a background does it get the default large(nearest to 1024) or the original?

And same with with the copy function, I'm assuming that doesn't just grab a copy of the visible thumbail?

BHpaddock

In reply to Koogle

#Nov 20th, 2008 @ 8:02 AM

Copy and verbs like Open/Edit work on the content / enclosure of the result, which I believe Long always sets to be the largest version of the image available.

I noticed his site is actually setting a fairly large thumbnail image though, which is probably bigger than necessary.

Koogle
I'm a Terminator - Astalavista, Vis7a!

In reply to BHpaddock

#Nov 20th, 2008 @ 1:38 PM

I think the current thumbnail sizes look fine, although the option to adjust them quickly would be good.

Maybe someone can make a video capture of it in action and show all the details of how its working, like when you're scrolling down does it keep fetching more results? and are the thumb results cached so if you come back and make the same/similar search and it picks up an image result its cached before, it displays instantly without having to download it again.

BHpaddock

In reply to Koogle

#Nov 20th, 2008 @ 2:36 PM

I didn't mean the size of the thumbnails in the view (that is the standard for search results). I meant the size of the file being downloaded, which looks like it's often as large as 640x480 or something. Flickr has lower resolution files meant to be used for thumbnail purposes.

Thumbnails are cached, but they also load asynchronously so you'll see the items and then the thumbnails will fill in lazily if they need to be downloaded and it takes a little time.

longzheng

In reply to BHpaddock

#Nov 20th, 2008 @ 11:41 PM

I use a 240px image for the thumbnails
They go in the media:thumbnail right? <media:thumbnail url="" />