CogBlogged Tagged ‘search’

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Pink Sherbet Photography Summoning a deep toned Don Fontaine voice In a world of 140 characters… every keystroke, every picosecond saved counts. There is one who can get to their search results the quickest… There are times when it benefits you to be the quickest search to get the URL to tweet or toss into a webinar chat, but it is also efficient to make the finding process less tedious. I had long ago forgotten how I got them into Chrome (I think it was first done in Firefox and brought over), but I had a few quick search short cuts set up, like typing “f” in the address bar, pressing space- then a keyword, press return (enter), and boom! I get flickr search results from my photos right away. Somewhere in the process of moving off of the development version [...]

By sheer accident I stumbled across the google search results display that matches results to a timeline, here is a technology timeline This apparently lists results that have both your search keyword and a date. I cannot figure out how I got there, but if you take any standard results, say the big wide search on technology. From the results, on the left side bar, click the link for timeline. Now you can adjust the time range, or change the search terms, this time, say I wanted to create a search history timeline for China It could be an interesting activity/exercise to create other timelines. Google embeds surprising functional bits i search results. Looking to calculate a currency exchange? Just google “currency exchange” and you get a widget calculator right there. Have you found other embedded tools in search results? Thanks for the surprise serendipity (as if there were any [...]

I have an old JavaScript bookmark tool I made five years ago– it allows me, from no matter where I am on the web, to either select some text in a page (or enter in a box) and run a search for it in my own blog. This came from realizing that the basic wordpress search URL was always something like: http://www.myfreakyblog.org/index.php?s=cheddar+cheese And with my mediocre JavaScript tools, I made a site that allows anyone yo make one for their own blog– the Make A WordPress Search Bookmarklet tool — which to my utter surprise, still works. It’s prety easy- you enter the name of the blog, its base URL, and click “Build The Bookmark”- drag the generated JavaScript link to your toolbar, and you are done. So for example, let’s say I have some B movie blog I want to make the tool for, I enter its name, the [...]

cc licensed flickr photo shared by lamont_cranston One of my primary uses of Google Search is locating URLs for web pages I am creating, blog posts, etc. The way Google outputs search results in a PITA as the links to the results are obfuscated in redirects through google (things they do to harvest our actions). In the old days, the search result was a link to the actual result. You could copy it and move on. They changed it back and forth a few times on 2005, but since then, that blue link is worthless as a copiable URL. Since then, I have been doing the tedious manual copy of the real URL that is written in green text below the results. Until recently. For long URLs, Google is now even strealing that as useful information, as it abbreviates long URLs with ellipses in the middle. As is the only [...]

New in Google Labs is an add-on for having embedded web search in your email space- this means while composing a message, there is right in the mail interface a search form. The results appear in a GChat pop-up/overlay, and the results can be directly inserted into your message. In this case, I am emailing my friend Cole a message, and need a URL for a site to share– I can search+find+insert all in the email composing window. So this saves having to tab over to another window, run a search, copy/paste the URL (especially since the one in Google Search results does not point to the actual URL, but a Google ByPassSnagSomeINfo URL). It’s Gggggggggreat!

I always knew some day I’d have a reason to blog about something I could relate to the insurance duck (don’t seek an answer why). In my travels last week, a friend I stayed with shared some (well a lot) of concert audio files, all in .flac format- which I had maybe heard of before, but now know it is a lossless audio file format. My ears are not near discriminating enough to know, but that is way besides the point. Of course I expected to find a free audio converter as something I could use to bring in the music to iTunes and onto the phone/pod (you can open them in Audacity and convert but that would be a one by one manual op. I first went to a reliable source of Mac apps, VersionTracker and searched for “flac”- scanned a few (I peek at the reviews as well), [...]