My name is Mitchell Waite and my team and I have developed a radical
search engine to identify birds of North America that differs from anything on the web.
Whatbird.com lets you find your bird with just a few clicks. What makes this engine so special is that it uses a parametric step-by-step approach as contrasted with all the other ID engines currently available in the Internet which use an "all at once" approach.
In order to find a bird these search engines require you to enter all the ID information and field marks upfront at the same time. This means you are either going to get "zero matches" or a huge number of matches.
Our engine gets around this by presenting a visual interface to whatever field mark you select first. Each step narrows the search results
to help locate the bird you saw. Try the
bird search engine--it currently has over
900 birds in the database, each having a magnificent hand painted illustration, a bird call (the sounds it makes) that you can listen to and extensive species accounts. Here is an example of the
Allen's Hummingbird.
The technology behind Whatbird.com is called
Percevia
which is a method and system for portable and desktop computing devices to allow searching, identification and display of items in a collection. The whatbird web site example is for creating a bird guide to identify birds and for bird watching
is just one of Percevia's extremely useful capabilities. The
Percevia® search engine offers a new level of
sophistication for searching any kind of interactive media.
There are ma y other features of this site you may want to
explore, such as the
Make-a-Guide that lets you build your own field guide
and print it out on your computer. There is also a bird "expert"
that helps you find bird using simple questions and a "browse"
feature that lets you view lists of birds in different areas
of North America. In fact you can even add the bird
QuickSearch engine to your own web site with just a few
lines of JavaScript. This will let your visitors identify
any bird as if they are using our search engine.
I hope you find this site fun and useful. If you have any questions just send me an
email here.
Sincerely,
Mitchell Waite
"Whatbird.com - the best place to find your bird"
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