Getty Open Content in the Getty Art Collection. Google Search results for site:www.getty.edu/art/collection/ “without charge” suggests there are currently around 1,700 such images in the Getty Open Content public domain programme. Sharp 20mb+ hi-res versions are available, though a simple anonymous form on which the user tells Getty the intended use.

The Getty has an Advanced Search panel which can limit the search results to Getty Open Content. A test for “rabbit” unearthed nine items, but failed to unearth a delightful rabbit in a 13th century illuminated manuscript.

The manuscript rabbit was however found via a straightforward keyword search in DuckDuckGo’s Image Search…

site:www.getty.edu/art/collection “without charge” rabbit

However I should note that DuckDuckGo Image Search also failed to find the other nine “rabbit” results.

Further perusal of the 17Mb source picture for the single-rabbit image found by DuckDuckGo, revealed there were actually two such rabbits on the manuscript page…

Thus a combination of a Getty Advanced Search and DuckDuckGo Image Search seems useful for public domain picture researchers.

The old DuckDuckGo MultiColumns v.5 script no longer works with the Duck’s search results page. Upgrading to DuckDuckGo – Multi-Columns v.7 fixes the problem.

1. You first need to remove the 0.5 script, which is found under: Tools | Addons | User Scripts.

2. Install version 0.7. This will show up is a new place, under: Tools | Addons | UserStyles.

3. The script’s garish results numbering will default to ‘visible’, but it’s easy to fix this. Click on Edit to edit the script. Change both results numbering colour codes to the same neutral colour hex code…

The result of this change is that the distracting red/gold flash of the results numbering becomes a simple light blue-grey dot, which gently aids the eye in passing across the results but which doesn’t distract…

4. To also change the garish tomato + violet colours of the domain + link URL in each result, to the more restful blues shown above, fix the colour hexes in the script here…

For a traditional green look, try a colour combination like #089000 and #479458

5. To fix the colour of the highlighted word(s) in the results snippet, fix the colour here. I’ve set it to a dark blue that’s not quite black…

Then press Save to save the changed script.

Then, to prevent such changes being overwritten, turn off automatic updates for the script.

That’s it. Enjoy multicolumn desktop-friendly searching in DuckDuckGo…

Fed up with all the “Educational” quacking on the DuckDuckGo home-page? You can turn it off via the DuckDuckGo settings…

One of the annoying things that searchers often encounter is a site-blocking overlay, blocking the site just seconds after it loads. Overlays are not just annoying, but are also publicity killers. No experienced Facebook curator, regular blogger and only a few journalists will link to a site that’s not going to give readers the content they were told to expect, as well as annoying the heck out of them within two seconds of arrival. It would be a betrayal of carefully-built trust to send one’s readers to such a broken website.

So all attempts at overlay blockers are welcome, and I was pleased to see the new Behind The Overlay Revival. It’s a forked revival of an older abandoned add-on for the Firefox Web browser. It allows a uniform one-click closure of site-blocking overlays. The only drawback with Behind The Overlay Revival is that it plonks a HUGE icon on your browser task-bar, and will remove something else on the page when you click the button without an overlay present. Without any easy way to Undo. For those reasons I un-installed, but it’s about the only option available and may be what you need.

The equivalent for users of the Chrome browser is the much more polished Poper Blocker. Works as a right-click context menu + select. Option to always remove the overlay on that site. Blacklist option, even.

The other way of doing it in Firefox is via the AdBlock Plus + “Select An Element To Hide” (get that option via the Element Hiding Helper for Adblock Plus). But that requires that the users manually block each and every element of the overlay, which can take a laborious minute or so since there can be as many as a dozen elements. But these days I’m increasingly just going back to the search results and clicking BLOCK, and never again seeing that site in search results.

See also CSS and desist, for methods of getting to content even on sites with vile blockers such as unherd.com.

A quick round-up of some helping hands for a better Facebook experience:

* the vital Facebook Purity plugin has just gone to version 18, restoring blocking of “Sponsored” ad posts in timelines.

* a new Greasemonkey script, Facebook Demetricator tweaks all the fairly pointless “View 33 comments”, “Posted 25 minutes ago” micro-messages and suchlike. Instead you just see a much more relaxed format such as “View comments”, “Posted recently” etc.

* new to me, Unseen for Facebook. Prevents your Web browser from pinging a “Seen” message to Facebook, when you open a message sent via a chat box. Possibly especially useful if your employer starts to use Facebook messaging for business purposes, when you only use Facebook for personal matters.

There’s new behaviour from Google Custom Search, of relevance to Google CSE curators. In the dashboard, one can no longer edit a URL in place (for instance, make a simple updating of a URL from http:// to https:// ) and then save it to update it in the index. Doing this deletes the URL from the index without any warning. If you didn’t keep a backup copy of that URL pattern, you’ve lost it.

The behaviour is so remarkable and abrupt that I think perhaps it’s a temporary glitch. But for now, a wary CSE curator needs to:

1) open the indexed URL in the CSE then copy / paste it to Notepad
2) manually delete it from the URL base
3) make the corrections to the URL in Notepad
4) then paste the URL back into the CSE index, as if it were a fresh URL.

Backing up one’s CSE index (aka ‘annotations’) as .xml is probably also advisable, if glitches are indeed getting into the system.

Here’s a working Microsoft Excel 2007 .xlsx file (11kb) that has a simple formula to split a word list according to the case of each word’s starting letter. For instance, you have a list that runs…

Frodo
Merry
Pippin
riders
Gandalf
Sam
ponies
Strider
mushrooms

You want to remove all the words that do not start with a capital letter, since they are not likely to be personal names or place-names or species etc. Excel can’t do this ‘out of the box’, at least not with the various Sort buttons available in Excel 2007. Nor can plugins like ASAP Utilities. This spreadsheet results in a list with the all-lowercase words pushed down to the bottom of the sorted list, thus…

Frodo
Merry
Pippin
Gandalf
Sam
Strider
ponies
riders
mushrooms

It won’t work properly if you also have words in your list with a capital letter after the first letter, such as “naZgul”. Those words will be flagged as if they start with a capital letter. Numbers, on the other hand, are fine.