Comparative searches of Yahoo, Google and Flickr – vaguely useful approach to supplementing limited symbol sets or untagged concepts.

This page is performing multiple searches live, so may be a little slow. Lack of reliable copyright metadata pretty much rules out commercial applications along these lines – although the following searches are rigged to drop anything with populated exif copyright fields.

The current convention with AAC symbol use is to use layout tables – to ensure correct position of the symbol qualifier without CSS and to maintain runs accurately – spacing is punctuation in symbolised text – layout is semantic. Using Ruby maintains the vertical relationship and allows runs to be separated with paragraph tags – without requiring tables or CSS.

Ruby is a W3C Recommendation and though it was supported by Microsoft Internet Explorer natively up to version 7, looks to be pretty much dead as an option now. Firefox still supports it via the xhtml Ruby Support extension.

Use Ruby markup to layout the symbols. Doesn’t fly in most browsers.

Flickr Tag Highest Relevance

cheese	anger	egypt	physics	ipad

Flickr Multi-Image

Tagging is pretty hopeless on Flickr at the moment, so this run is using animated GIFs assembled from the top 6 images according to Flickr’s relevance value.

cheese	anger	egypt	physics	ipad

Yahoo Image Search

Increasingly accurate for concrete concepts. Yahoo often blocks requests, I’m using my key too much – these may come back blank

cheese	anger	egypt	physics	ipad

Google Image Search

Usually the most accurate for concrete concepts.

cheese	anger	egypt	physics	ipad

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