Post by Deleted on Oct 16, 2018 6:02:51 GMT
Hey guys, So I've begun to notice some searches going dry, and thought I'd offer some search advice and tools you can use in order to perhaps get a lead.
So without further ado, let's get down to Binzness! (I regret this pun)
1. Search Engines
The number one tool that will aid your search is without a doubt, Google. However, depending on the obscurity and/or rarity of your item, you may not get immediate results, This is where the Advanced Search function comes in handy.
You see, when you search, for example, Ruth of the Range, Google searches for pages with these four individual words scattered throughout. While there will be some more popular results popping up with the correct title of what you're looking for such as Wikipedia pages and IMDb entries, you'll still have to sort through a whole lot of junk in order to get the finer and more specific details.
To filter out this junk, simply put quotation marks around the subject you are searching, ex. "Ruth of the Range". You'll find that the amount of results will go down from this:
To this:
Now, let's assume that there were certain results that pop up that include irrelevant content. If this appears multiple times, you can exclude it from the results by adding a hyphen/minus sign to the beginning of a word to exclude results that include said word. Let's say I wanted to get rid of the term "terror". Then I would simply do this:
and now we've narrowed our search down by about 4000 results. Google allows 32 words per search, so you can exclude as many terms as needed until you hit 32 total words.
Another trick you can use in conjunction with the advanced search terms is the "filetype" tool. This allows you to find files indexed by Google that relate to the topic of which you are looking for, and these often hold more informative and official results than standard webpages. For example, if I wanted to find PDF files talking about Norman Lear's All's Fair, I'd do the following:
And we get a very specific set of 96 search results.
Another thing you can do as a trick is search for Cloud Drives and see if you can find anything in a public drive. As an example, if I wanted to search Google Drive to see if there were any hidden results for the 1922 silent film "The Power of Love", I'd do this:
Of course it was a long shot, but we didn't find anything. While the trick doesn't work for MEGA or Amazon cloud storage, you can also use this with Microsoft OneDrive simply by replacing "drive.google.com" with "onedrive.live.com".
If by chance you can't find your result on Google, there's a possibility it might be listed on these other search engines:
Each of these alternatives will have their own different advanced search features, or perhaps none at all, so be aware how to go about using advanced search on these sites when using them.
If by chance you're looking for results based on an image, you can do a reverse image search through Google by either downloading said image, or using the image's URL. If by chance you're on a mobile device, you'll likely be unable to use this feature through Google itself. In this case, you would use ctrlq.org/google/images/index.html, which will take your image and backwards search it on Google for you. If nothing valuable appears through Google Images Reverse Search, you can use TinEye, which is often more reliable than Google for reverse searching images.
2. Web Archives
If there's any website on the internet that I love, it's archive.org, hands down. This site not only lets you search for audio, video, software, and images, but it also includes the famous Wayback Machine that allows you to browse deleted and revised pages as far back as 1996. Let's assume I'm looking for "The Fuzzpaws", and I know it aired on YTV. We look at YTV's website, and...
No surprise, it's all newer stuff. However, if we went on archive.org and looked for ytv.com's page history...
We find the show right there on the home page back in 1998. You can also search for user-uploaded media relating to Fuzzpaws through the regular archive:
In this case, we unfortunately find nothing.
On top of this, archive.org also hosts Open Library, which includes millions of free ebooks that may aid you in your search. If by chance you still find nothing, then there are also other archive sites for web pages including archive.is, WebCite, screenshots.com*, and multiple country-based websites focusing on web page archiving.
*screenshots.com seems to be behind a paywall now. I wouldn't recommend using it unless you have an extra $99 dollars a month (yeesh)
3. Online Books and Reading Materials
On top of archive.org's Open Library, there are other sites that offer ebooks and other literature, though not always for free in their entirety. Nonetheless, previews of written material on Google Books and Amazon among others may help by providing needed information for research. Other sites such as newspapers.com may include valuable information such as TV schedules, reviews, minor mentions, or other helpful material through purchase of a monthly subscription. Though most of what you will find for your search will be free to access, you may need to open your wallet if you're really dedicated to your cause.
Free newspaper websites you can use to advance your search include The California Digital Newspaper Collection as well as Fulton History.
4. WorldCat
When you aren't able to find any online previews of specific materials you need access to, WorldCat is your best bet for finding and locating them. WorldCat is an online database that indexes library and archive catalogues from around the world. Unfortunately, like Google, results on WorldCat may include tonnes of junk that may hinder finding what you need. Thankfully, like Google, WorldCat has Advanced Search features. Let's assume I'm looking for Leif Garrett's "Three for the Road". Originally, my search turns up as such:
Here we just click "Advanced Search and enter our known information:
And boom. We have both the scripts and the pilot episode both located in the first two results.
5. Inquire
If you can't find anybody who's already asking about what you're looking for, ask yourself! Go to anyone who may be willing to help who might have encountered what you're searching for. This may include:
6. Buy and Sell Sites
We're going shopping! Keep track of buy and sell sites such as Craiglist, Kijiji, and Amazon, as your search item may appear in these places. However, the best site for lost media searching by far is eBay. Be sure to set notifications on buy and sell sites when something of interest to you goes up for sale so that you don't miss the auction/buying period.
7. Heap and Hope
When all else fails, get yourself a VCR and some VHS tapes. Media can easily be found on recorded mediums such as 8-track, audio cassette, floppy disc, VHS, and Betamax. Though odds of you finding what you're looking for are nil, there's still a chance, and you'll definitely find archival-worthy materials such as old radio broadcasts, commercials, and news report segments. Refer to this guide for general media ripping.
8. Location Searching
If you get to the point where you need to find and pinpoint a certain location, there are multiple helpful tools that will be able to assist you with that. Of course, you can type in the name of a business or location into Google, Bing, or Safari, and have the results pop up in the maps section of those sites and apps. However, what if the business or landmark was older, or less renowned? Well here's how you'd be able to figure things out.
Let's say I'm looking for Central Media Productions. I know the company is based in Edmonton, Canada as it provides an address in that city. However, if I look through Google Advanced search...
We essentially find nothing of value. However, if I put in the address on the VHS tape and go to Google Street view...
We have the right address, but the building seems to be much too new for when the company was in business. This is where the timelapse feature comes in handy, as it allows you to view street views from years previous. In order to get the oldest possible image, you might need to move your position around the address or area before applying the timelapse. So after a shift in position, and a timelapse back to 2007, we get this:
That's more like the building we're looking for! However, let's assume that the place we're looking for doesn't really have an address, or just doesn't appear on Google Maps. That's where Wikipedia becomes a valuable tool.
Wikipedia has a tool by the name of GeoHack which pinpoints exact locations. Let's say I'm looking for the ancient Temple of Aphrodite in Athens, Greece. I know it's in this general area, but it's nowhere to be found.
Now, if you go to the Wikipedia page for the temple of Aphrodite, this pops up in the top right hand corner of the article:
If you click on the coordinates, you'll be redirected to the geohack page. Here you'll be given the links to the coordinates of the location through Bing Maps, Google Maps, Open StreetMaps, Apple Maps, TerraServer, GeaBios, and many more map applications. If we click on the Google Maps coordinates, we find that we end up in this area of our search:
Now, you may have known that Google Maps had Street view, but did you know that the Street view icon also gives you access to multiple 360 degree camera shots? Now, when you hover the street view icon, you may notice little blue and orange circles like the ones in the image below. These are "Photo Sphere" and "See Inside" respectively. If you hover the street view icon above these circles, and drop it, you can get a 360 view of specific areas outside of the streets.
We find one around the ruins, and this is our shot:
The image is unfortunately blocked, but we can attempt to find nearby photos of the area through Google Maps as well! Right next to the Google Street view icon, you'll find these little squares.
These squares are Google's "Show Imagery" icon. They allow you to view pinpointed photos around the area, and will even direct you to what point of your viewing area they were taken. Quite unfortunately, however, none of the images we find are within the area we are searching.
That's it! You know now how to search for (and possibly find) lost media. Have fun looking, and happy travels!
If you wish to have a more comprehensive list of resources, feel free to use the ones listed at the following link, or add your own if you so choose:
Resources Thread
So without further ado, let's get down to Binzness! (I regret this pun)
1. Search Engines
The number one tool that will aid your search is without a doubt, Google. However, depending on the obscurity and/or rarity of your item, you may not get immediate results, This is where the Advanced Search function comes in handy.
You see, when you search, for example, Ruth of the Range, Google searches for pages with these four individual words scattered throughout. While there will be some more popular results popping up with the correct title of what you're looking for such as Wikipedia pages and IMDb entries, you'll still have to sort through a whole lot of junk in order to get the finer and more specific details.
To filter out this junk, simply put quotation marks around the subject you are searching, ex. "Ruth of the Range". You'll find that the amount of results will go down from this:
To this:
Now, let's assume that there were certain results that pop up that include irrelevant content. If this appears multiple times, you can exclude it from the results by adding a hyphen/minus sign to the beginning of a word to exclude results that include said word. Let's say I wanted to get rid of the term "terror". Then I would simply do this:
and now we've narrowed our search down by about 4000 results. Google allows 32 words per search, so you can exclude as many terms as needed until you hit 32 total words.
Another trick you can use in conjunction with the advanced search terms is the "filetype" tool. This allows you to find files indexed by Google that relate to the topic of which you are looking for, and these often hold more informative and official results than standard webpages. For example, if I wanted to find PDF files talking about Norman Lear's All's Fair, I'd do the following:
And we get a very specific set of 96 search results.
Another thing you can do as a trick is search for Cloud Drives and see if you can find anything in a public drive. As an example, if I wanted to search Google Drive to see if there were any hidden results for the 1922 silent film "The Power of Love", I'd do this:
Of course it was a long shot, but we didn't find anything. While the trick doesn't work for MEGA or Amazon cloud storage, you can also use this with Microsoft OneDrive simply by replacing "drive.google.com" with "onedrive.live.com".
If by chance you can't find your result on Google, there's a possibility it might be listed on these other search engines:
Each of these alternatives will have their own different advanced search features, or perhaps none at all, so be aware how to go about using advanced search on these sites when using them.
If by chance you're looking for results based on an image, you can do a reverse image search through Google by either downloading said image, or using the image's URL. If by chance you're on a mobile device, you'll likely be unable to use this feature through Google itself. In this case, you would use ctrlq.org/google/images/index.html, which will take your image and backwards search it on Google for you. If nothing valuable appears through Google Images Reverse Search, you can use TinEye, which is often more reliable than Google for reverse searching images.
2. Web Archives
If there's any website on the internet that I love, it's archive.org, hands down. This site not only lets you search for audio, video, software, and images, but it also includes the famous Wayback Machine that allows you to browse deleted and revised pages as far back as 1996. Let's assume I'm looking for "The Fuzzpaws", and I know it aired on YTV. We look at YTV's website, and...
No surprise, it's all newer stuff. However, if we went on archive.org and looked for ytv.com's page history...
In this case, we unfortunately find nothing.
On top of this, archive.org also hosts Open Library, which includes millions of free ebooks that may aid you in your search. If by chance you still find nothing, then there are also other archive sites for web pages including archive.is, WebCite, screenshots.com*, and multiple country-based websites focusing on web page archiving.
*screenshots.com seems to be behind a paywall now. I wouldn't recommend using it unless you have an extra $99 dollars a month (yeesh)
3. Online Books and Reading Materials
On top of archive.org's Open Library, there are other sites that offer ebooks and other literature, though not always for free in their entirety. Nonetheless, previews of written material on Google Books and Amazon among others may help by providing needed information for research. Other sites such as newspapers.com may include valuable information such as TV schedules, reviews, minor mentions, or other helpful material through purchase of a monthly subscription. Though most of what you will find for your search will be free to access, you may need to open your wallet if you're really dedicated to your cause.
Free newspaper websites you can use to advance your search include The California Digital Newspaper Collection as well as Fulton History.
4. WorldCat
When you aren't able to find any online previews of specific materials you need access to, WorldCat is your best bet for finding and locating them. WorldCat is an online database that indexes library and archive catalogues from around the world. Unfortunately, like Google, results on WorldCat may include tonnes of junk that may hinder finding what you need. Thankfully, like Google, WorldCat has Advanced Search features. Let's assume I'm looking for Leif Garrett's "Three for the Road". Originally, my search turns up as such:
Here we just click "Advanced Search and enter our known information:
And boom. We have both the scripts and the pilot episode both located in the first two results.
5. Inquire
If you can't find anybody who's already asking about what you're looking for, ask yourself! Go to anyone who may be willing to help who might have encountered what you're searching for. This may include:
- Asking forums, Reddit, and Q&A sites
- Joining communities on Discord, Facebook, Amino, and other sites, and
- Contacting people through email, Twitter, LinkedIn, or general social media
6. Buy and Sell Sites
We're going shopping! Keep track of buy and sell sites such as Craiglist, Kijiji, and Amazon, as your search item may appear in these places. However, the best site for lost media searching by far is eBay. Be sure to set notifications on buy and sell sites when something of interest to you goes up for sale so that you don't miss the auction/buying period.
7. Heap and Hope
When all else fails, get yourself a VCR and some VHS tapes. Media can easily be found on recorded mediums such as 8-track, audio cassette, floppy disc, VHS, and Betamax. Though odds of you finding what you're looking for are nil, there's still a chance, and you'll definitely find archival-worthy materials such as old radio broadcasts, commercials, and news report segments. Refer to this guide for general media ripping.
8. Location Searching
If you get to the point where you need to find and pinpoint a certain location, there are multiple helpful tools that will be able to assist you with that. Of course, you can type in the name of a business or location into Google, Bing, or Safari, and have the results pop up in the maps section of those sites and apps. However, what if the business or landmark was older, or less renowned? Well here's how you'd be able to figure things out.
Let's say I'm looking for Central Media Productions. I know the company is based in Edmonton, Canada as it provides an address in that city. However, if I look through Google Advanced search...
We essentially find nothing of value. However, if I put in the address on the VHS tape and go to Google Street view...
We have the right address, but the building seems to be much too new for when the company was in business. This is where the timelapse feature comes in handy, as it allows you to view street views from years previous. In order to get the oldest possible image, you might need to move your position around the address or area before applying the timelapse. So after a shift in position, and a timelapse back to 2007, we get this:
That's more like the building we're looking for! However, let's assume that the place we're looking for doesn't really have an address, or just doesn't appear on Google Maps. That's where Wikipedia becomes a valuable tool.
Wikipedia has a tool by the name of GeoHack which pinpoints exact locations. Let's say I'm looking for the ancient Temple of Aphrodite in Athens, Greece. I know it's in this general area, but it's nowhere to be found.
Now, if you go to the Wikipedia page for the temple of Aphrodite, this pops up in the top right hand corner of the article:
If you click on the coordinates, you'll be redirected to the geohack page. Here you'll be given the links to the coordinates of the location through Bing Maps, Google Maps, Open StreetMaps, Apple Maps, TerraServer, GeaBios, and many more map applications. If we click on the Google Maps coordinates, we find that we end up in this area of our search:
Now, you may have known that Google Maps had Street view, but did you know that the Street view icon also gives you access to multiple 360 degree camera shots? Now, when you hover the street view icon, you may notice little blue and orange circles like the ones in the image below. These are "Photo Sphere" and "See Inside" respectively. If you hover the street view icon above these circles, and drop it, you can get a 360 view of specific areas outside of the streets.
We find one around the ruins, and this is our shot:
The image is unfortunately blocked, but we can attempt to find nearby photos of the area through Google Maps as well! Right next to the Google Street view icon, you'll find these little squares.
These squares are Google's "Show Imagery" icon. They allow you to view pinpointed photos around the area, and will even direct you to what point of your viewing area they were taken. Quite unfortunately, however, none of the images we find are within the area we are searching.
That's it! You know now how to search for (and possibly find) lost media. Have fun looking, and happy travels!
If you wish to have a more comprehensive list of resources, feel free to use the ones listed at the following link, or add your own if you so choose:
Resources Thread
