If you have ‘linked’ or on-the-fly Google Custom Search Engines, note that they will have stopped working a week or so ago. As planned and announced, at around the end of May 2017 Google withdrew the ‘linked’ CSE option (self-hosted, and a pain to set up and admin). They also withdrew the ‘cref’ URL-path item, which was what enabled an on-the-fly CSE from any page of Web links (handy, but not that often). It’s a pity to see the latter go, but apparently it’s part of a modernisation of the CSE service.

JURN’s various ongoing search projects are not affected by the changes, as GRAFT has been ported. But if you’re affected, then you now need to either: i) port your search tool’s URLs into a full free CSE, via Google’s CSE console (easiest way is .tsv files containing 500-URL chunks of your list, must be less than 30Kb per .tsv); or ii) use the free DuckDuckGo CSE functionality to get a quick CSE which only runs over a handful of URLs. The current drawback of the DuckDuckGo CSE service is that the Duck may not yet have had a good quack at some of the obscure academic sites you may want in your CSE.

There’s a newly-mature free PDF reader, PDF-XChange Editor which has just had an excellent TechRadar review. Sounds interesting but I cancelled my download halfway, immediately after reading…

“You can try any of these “Protected” features [buttons for features in the paid-for version] but, be very careful not to save your PDF if you do not want the watermarks to appear in the upper corners of each page in the document. Once a document is watermarked, there is no way to remove them without a license”.

Ugh. Sounds to me like the free version is effectively a form of ransom-ware, activated by the user’s curiosity and tiredness.

Europeana : Photography has launched, with a wide range of public domain and CC0 pictures from the nations of continental Europe (the UK seems to be almost absent). Judging by a test search for “cat”, it’s mostly landscape and architectural pictures.

Great to see Public Domain filters, though. But then there’s no way to search by the pixel size on the final download. The test samples I downloaded were pointlessly small, at just 600px to 800px. You can however use a Google Images site search and then filter by size…

site:http://www.europeana.eu/portal/en/record/ “Public Domain Marked”

But the Google Images search filters can’t yet distinguish between a photo and a good engraving…

… and adding the word “photograph” to the Google Images search is of no help in that respect. This makes it difficult to filter just for the Europeana Photography collection.