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 of Chrome I had been running (for some unknown reason) which started doing weird things (putting pieces of pages in other tabs down at the bottom) back to the production version– I lost my short cut searches.

Where did they go? How do I get them back? What do I do?

I search for the answer… and find about 15… here was my refresher from Michael Greywolf.

What you need to do is pull up your Chrome Preferences (on Mac) or Options (on that other platform), either under the Chrome menu or that little settings wrench on the top right of your bar.

Have you seen this yet? It’s access to your settings for chrome, look under the Basics section, and click on Manage Search Engines

From what I could see Chrome listed the last few search sites I had used; the three columns are the name of the site, in the middle the url of the site, and a search string on the right (that is actually a special string as we can see).

I had already started editing the middle column, but if you replace what is there with a short code, like I used “tw” for a twitter search, that means, for a quick twitter search, I just go to the address bar, type “tw”, press space, then type my keywords, like “grand canyon”, press return, and shaboom! I did a twitter search w/o having to go to their form first.

If you look at the URL, it is:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%s

That %s is a variable that represents whatever string you type into the bar, say my “grand canyon” and it makes that url into

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=grand+canyon

Now here is what’s cool- you can make your own search short cuts. You just need to go to the site you want to search, run the query with the settings you want, and parse out the search results url and replace where ever you see your entered keywords with “%s”. You can then go to the Manage Search Engines thingie, and create your own short cut.

Let’s walk i through for something useful. How about making one to search flickr creative common photos? That might be handy to do quickly, eh?

I go to flickr’s advanced search, select the options for photos only and Create Commons licensed, and enter something important, like “dog” (just to get a results string)

So let’s copy the URL that we have now–

http://www.flickr.com/search/?l=cc&ct=6&mt=photos&adv=1&w=all&q=dog&m=text

And we see our search term is there at &q=dog. What we need to do is switch out “dog” for “%s” and we have the URL we need for our manages search.

I then go to my preferences and at the bottom, use the blank fields. I might enter for name (first box) “flickr cc search”, in the middle, my shortcut, say “fcc”, and then the third box enter this URL.

Now when i want to do this quick search, from anywhere I am in the web, I type in my address bar fcc, press space- i see now in blue “Search” and the name I gave it

and when I press RETURN (or enter), I get the results right there, again saving me those laborious seconds of going to search form, typing in keywords, selecting options….

I made another one just to search my own flickr photos. I also use this one to search php.net for a function name

http://www.php.net/manual-lookup.php?pattern=%s

So any search result can be turned into a browser bar short cut search.

And you know what that is? (I found this with my own shortcut)

cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by jimmywayne

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 other kind!)

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 URL (http://bavatuesdays.com/), and shazam, I can search the Bava no matter where I am browsing:

And from there it runs the search for me- oh, what a surprising result!

Seriously, Jim, just wanted to share that this is a tool I use all the time as I try to find the old references in my blog.

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 way to get the actual URL for a web search result is to follow the link to the page (cause that’s What Google Wants– its lot like I am reading the page, I am scraping the URL).

Huh?

Here is a search I did this morning on augmented reality. The blue links to the results do not provide URLs I can copy. The green text for the second long link is now re-written with “….” i the middle, so that is a URL I cannot use. I am hosed.

So I started thinking I might have to write a Greasemonkey Script that would display the actual links. I went to http://userscripts.org looking for some existing scripts I could use as models to parse the results (have you ever looked at the source of a page of google results? It’s not your grandpa’a HTML).

But then it dawned on me…

What is someone had already done this?

doh.

They did.

Dugeen had created the Obviously Scrub Google Redirect Links which works perfectly- it adds the real link adjacent to the blue on produced by Google- and this is one I can right/controil click to copy the link URL right from the search results! Yay.

This is so handy.

And also– despite excitement for new web browsers, something lacking the ability to re-cast web content like Greasemonkey does is going to make it hard for me to step away from Firefox.

Hah, take that Google – you url obfuscating boogers! Gotcha.

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!

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), and gave ALL2MP3 a try.

It worked for a batch of movies, basic enough, and converted a set to MP3. But when I tried to run the app again, it would not respond at all. I decided to go back to the wider well and searched Google on mac os x flac converter and came to a blog post about someone having good luck with XLD. From here I was at the developer site, which roaming past the command line junkie stuff, there was a link for the GUI version… The link works now, but when I did it I got a Japanese 404 page (I am guessing the developer was uploading a new file at my bad luck timing), so I return to Google, searched on XLD, and found a mirror site.

This is a long way (I am not even sure why I am outlining except to hint that searching takes a multi-pronged approach) to get at that this is a very cool converter tool, and is very quick at batch converting- I used the settings to go to m4a format for itunes.

So if you need to do a flac, not Aflac, dont squawk.

Actually the larger lesson is that more and more (and I guess its the new Chrome way) that finding information is not looking in web site directory catalogs (the old Yahoo way), but wide open search. Knowing search is a key, and I continue to refine the approach every time I engage in the act.

Quack.

I said it.