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Scale Model Shop

interrogating the web

scottie3158

scottie3158

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Thread owner
when you guys are searching for information on your builds is there a secret in how to search? I have been trying to get some detailed pictures og the Humber Mk.lll armoured car, in particular the engine and engine bay. I'm lucky if I even get the right vehicle.

Any pointers would really help.

cheers
Scottie
 
I know just how you feel. I have exactly the same issues. In the recent thread about research I said how difficult I found it to interpret old, grainy photos. I could have added that often it is hard to find the photos in the first place. I seem to remember this being raised a while ago and Jakko (I think it was him) came up with some helpful ideas.
 
Thread owner
Jim R said:
I know just how you feel. I have exactly the same issues. In the recent thread about research I said how difficult I found it to interpret old, grainy photos. I could have added that often it is hard to find the photos in the first place. I seem to remember this being raised a while ago and Jakko (I think it was him) came up with some helpful ideas.
Click to expand...
cheers Jim, hopefully Jakko will point me in the right direction. I don't know if certain words need to be placed in brackets or speech marks to highlight them.
 
Google 'humber mk 3 armoured car walkaround' you might get lucky if theres one in a museum somewhere
 
I don't do much but in the case of my Higgins boat project I started with 'Higgins boat' and 'landing craft', D-day etc until I discovered there were all kinds of landing craft. Then followed all kinds of rabbit holes. it helps to know about what units used them and which campaigns, often photos are wrongly captioned. in my case the same photo is captioned as D-day, Utah beach, Omaha beach -one was actually from Iwo Jima! That said, Higgins boats were indeed used at Iwo Jima and some shots were helpful once I understood them.
I also ,usefully, discovered the French term 'debarquement' (for the invasion) which brought up some some unusual pics.
We have to remember that those captioning or compiling are probably not doing so with modellers in mind. we have all seen pictures of bombers called fighters and vice versa, you do have to be a bit of a detective and think laterally sometimes.
good luck!
 
if you search for images rather than articles you might find a restored version, then go to their site , follow conversations in forums ,as I said, rabbit holes p
it can be quite distracting....
 
@scottie3158 Paul, try having a looking on a site called Prime Portal, I use it from time to time, they do the walk-around a vehicle pics, hope this helps?!
 
scottie3158 said:
when you guys are searching for information on your builds is there a secret in how to search? I have been trying to get some detailed pictures og the Humber Mk.lll armoured car, in particular the engine and engine bay. I'm lucky if I even get the right vehicle.

Any pointers would really help.

cheers
Scottie
Click to expand...
Just back in after 13 hour day , But will have a look at Mafva mags I have and see what is available.
Will try and update tomorrow
 
Part of the problem is that search engines are not as good as they used to be, especially Google — largely because of web sites applying search engine optimization so they get more income from advertising, and partly because the search engines try to guess what you want instead of giving you what you ask for. The latter is mostly the problem we face, I think, though it’s probably useful for mainstream searches like how to boil an egg:

View attachment 515229

But it does not help for something like Leopard 1 engine compartment firewall:

View attachment 515230

Sure, the Leopard 1 query has engine compartment shots, but all of them are from models, when I (presumably) want pictures of the real thing so I can see if my model kit parts are correct or need more work.

I can’t offer any specific solution, because I also frequently struggle with this, but I do have some tips. If you find you get a lot of results that seem to be based on only one of the words in the search, but you actually want to search for a specific combination, add quote marks around them. For example, Humber armoured car will give results for Humber, and due to the word car being in there, I suspect you’ll find a good number of pictures of Humber motorcars as well as armoured ones — and perhaps even of the river, too. But Humber "armoured car" should ensure that the search engine doesn’t look for all three of Humber, armoured and car but for Humber and armoured car. Hopefully.

Another reasonably good way I’ve found to narrow down the search, at least for Second World War vehicles, is to tell it to only show black-and-white photos. With Google, if you click on the Tools button near the top, just above the image results, you get an extra little toolbar where you can select things like image size, colours, licences, etc. By saying you only want black-and-white, you’ll eliminate most or all of the model photos that always clutter up these searches, as well as modern (because colour) pictures of unrelated things. Unfortunately this doesn’t help much if you’re searching for, say, Ukrainian T-80 modifications :)

Also, change search terms slightly if you can’t find what you’re after. Either add more terms to make it more specific, or remove one (or more) if you don’t get anything useful at all, or change a word to a synonym.

Plus: don’t just use image search. If you let it search web pages (that is, the standard search, without saying you want images), you’ll probably get pages that include photos of what you’re after, but which won’t show up in the image search. Of course, it’s much more work to trawl through those yourself, but with a bit of luck you’ll find more of what you’re after.

Oh yeah, and just walk away and try again from scratch later. Even that may turn up results you didn’t find first time round :(

Edit, the next day: I realised this morning that I forgot to mention a few tricks.

One is that quote marks can be used not only to group things together, but that they actually mean “I want this exactly”. For example, if you search for Humber armoured car and you’re getting a lot of hits for armoured cars of other types, try "Humber" armoured car. This should go some way to excluding things that don’t include the word Humber.

Another is the - operator, which tells the search engine that you don’t want that term. If you put a - directly in front of a word (no space between the two), it hopefully shouldn’t show you things that do include it. For example, Humber armoured car -model -kit should weed out sites that have the words model and/or kit on them, and so probably return more hits for the real vehicle instead.

You can combine this with quote marks: Humber armoured car -"scout car" should work to exclude sites about the Humber scout car, for example, if you’re getting too many hits for that as well.

Another option is to specify web sites to search, or not to search: Humber site:mapleleafup.net to only search at the MLU site, or Humber -site:mapleleafup.net to not include results from that. Again, you can use these to try and weed out unwanted results, or to try and get better results from sites that you think have good information, but return also too much stuff you’re not interested in.
 
Are there many similarities with the mk iv? I know Steve Jones has a walkaround of one of those on his channel.
 
Thread owner
Jakko said:
Part of the problem is that search engines are not as good as they used to be, especially Google — largely because of web sites applying search engine optimization so they get more income from advertising, and partly because the search engines try to guess what you want instead of giving you what you ask for. The latter is mostly the problem we face, I think, though it’s probably useful for mainstream searches like how to boil an egg:



But it does not help for something like Leopard 1 engine compartment firewall:



Sure, the Leopard 1 query has engine compartment shots, but all of them are from models, when I (presumably) want pictures of the real thing so I can see if my model kit parts are correct or need more work.

I can’t offer any specific solution, because I also frequently struggle with this, but I do have some tips. If you find you get a lot of results that seem to be based on only one of the words in the search, but you actually want to search for a specific combination, add quote marks around them. For example, Humber armoured car will give results for Humber, and due to the word car being in there, I suspect you’ll find a good number of pictures of Humber motorcars as well as armoured ones — and perhaps even of the river, too. But Humber "armoured car" should ensure that the search engine doesn’t look for all three of Humber, armoured and car but for Humber and armoured car. Hopefully.

Another reasonably good way I’ve found to narrow down the search, at least for Second World War vehicles, is to tell it to only show black-and-white photos. With Google, if you click on the Tools button near the top, just above the image results, you get an extra little toolbar whee you can select things like image size, colours, licences, etc. By saying you only want black-and-white, you’ll eliminate most or all of the model photos that always clutter up these searches, as well as modern (because colour) pictures of unrelated things. Unfortunately this doesn’t help much if you’re searching for, say, `Ukrainian T-80 modifications” :smiling3:

Also, change search terms slightly if you can’t find what you’re after. Either add more terms to make it more specific, or remove one (or more) if you don’t get anything useful at all, or change a word to a synonym.

Plus: don’t just use image search. If you let it search web pages (that is, the standard search, without saying you want images), you’ll probably get pages that include photos of what you’re after, but which won’t show up in the image search. Of course, it’s much more work to trawl through those yourself, but with a bit of luck you’ll find more of what you’re after.

Oh yeah, and just walk away and try again from scratch later. Even that may turn up results you didn’t find first time round :sad:
Click to expand...
Thanks Jakko very useful especially the quotes
 
Thread owner
Lee W said:
@scottie3158 Paul, try having a looking on a site called Prime Portal, I use it from time to time, they do the walk-around a vehicle pics, hope this helps?!
Click to expand...
Lee I use prime portal a lot. And did find the mk lV on there. But not being that knowledgeable I wouldn't know the differences and would probably mix the two. I know I always say I'm not worried about accuracy but I would like to get it right if I can.
 
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