Search 1.x » Browser

How to Customise Your Browser For More Search Power

Felix — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 10:37:00 +0000

Browsers such as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox provides a window to the World Wide Web and are increasingly playing a bigger part in the overall search experience. So much so that Google, the king of search has launched its very own browser to get in on the action and control our window to the Internet.

You may know that tinkering with your browser can help protect your privacy and often improves your overall web experience, but you way not know that you can also customise your browser in various ways to improve your web search productivity. Here are some basic hacks/tips for you to try out!

Search Toolbars

This one is an easy one and one many people knows about. All the popular (and many non-popular!) search engines provide search toolbars that offers shortcuts and features that make you a more powerful searcher. Search Toolbars typically provides short-cuts and quick access to things such as previously searched keywords and advanced search options right from the toolbar as you conduct your search. One of my favourite feature and a real time saver is being able to highlight your search keyword terms on the page you are viewing (so that you don’t have to use the browser’s “Find” functionality) and is one feature that many people are not aware of but a huge productivity booster.

Check out my previous blog on 3 reasons why search toolbar make you a better searcher to learn how to do this using Google toolbar along with other cool tricks!

Manage the Default Search Engine

Did you know that you can change the default search engines used when you run web search directly from the search box within the browser? Further more, you can add more specialised search engines (such as YouTube or Twitter Search) and interchange them as you conduct your search from the browser search box depending what you are trying to find at the time. When you come across your new favourite search engine, why not switch over your default search engine and see what new results you get!

Amit from Digital Inspiration has a great write up on how to change and edit the default search engine when using Firefox.

Search Related Browser Plugins

Here is where things get really interesting and the advanced users really power up their search productivity. Using Browser plugins you can really customise your search experience any way you want it particularly if you are using the Firefox browser.

Want to customise your Google search results page by including results from other search engines on the same page? The CustomizeGoogle Firefox plugin can do this and much more! Want a preview screen shots of the websites alongside your Google search results? The GooglePreview plugin does exactly that! One specialist search related plugin that I find incredibly useful and you might enjoy as well if you are a movie buff and a fan of Rotten Tomatoes is the Movie Rating Firefox plugin. It allows you to highlight a movie title directly from within a web page and trigger a search on Rotten Tomatoes that not only returns the movie rating but also a brief description of what the movie is about, a real time saver when you want to do some research on a particular movie!

Embrace the browser, learn more about the browser and you will find that it really can be a powerful platform from which to power up your search productivity!

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The Dawn of Conversational Searching

Felix — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 23:37:00 +0000

The popularity of the Twitter Service has created a lot of chatters, chatters that are

1. Less than 140 characters long,
2. Very easy to publish anytime, anywhere, ANY PLATFORM
3. Mostly rubbish about what people had for lunch!

However, similarly to what happened to the evolution of blogs, more reputable (and knowledgeable!) people and companies are starting to use twitter as a mean of communicating, branding and marketing mechanism. As a result, there are actual quite a lot useful information in the tweets that people produce today.

Now in order to leverage these information you can follow people’ tweets all day, or you can search people’s tweet, for me, searching is a better use of my time and that’s when a number of the new conversational search service comes in handy.

Twitter search allows to search for what about what is happening now and what people are talking about now. The results are gathered from people’s tweet now or in the last hour or so and hence the other name given to this type of search “Realtime Search”

Whilst you are mostly searching through people’s chatters which are not exactly high quality content, it does have some interesting and useful applications. Firstly, since it is much easier to twitter than to setup a blog site and provide good blog content, you will see contents you normally don’t see in blogs from people who don’t really know how to blog. What good is this search and what useful information can you find? I can think of at least 4 applications:

1. Verify whether some web service is down: There has been numerous time when I am having issues with Gmail and I wasn’t sure whether it was Gmail or something wired with my wireless/network/firewall/ISP, a quick search on twitter will easily reveal whether 3 millions other web users are complaining about the same thing.

2. Product Release: Twitter now is often the first place you hear about new product releases.

3. Search for discount coupons: This one I am keen to try out one day.

4. The very latest gossips about _ _ _: Now this could be a celebrity, politician or anything you have a interested about and can not wait for the bloggers to catch up.

I’d like to think of Twitter search as “a box of chocolates, and you never know what you gonna get!” hence the best way to find out its value and effectiveness is to just try it out.

If you use Firefox You can even integrate Twitter Search Results right into your normal Google Search Results by following these tips from the good folks at Lifehacker.

I am now so excited about what I will find in Twitter every time I do a Google Search!

Since Twitter is not the only realtime microblogging service, we are also starting to see the emergence of meta search engine or search aggregation site that allow you to search across these micro blogging sites such as Twitter and Friendfeed. One such site is Whostalkin.

I personally think this is one of the most exciting search development since the Googzilla has taken control of our search experience, watch out for this space!

I am also pretty sure there are lot of other interesting applications of conversational/realtime searching, so let us know what you think!

UPDATE: Just came across this fantastic post by Chris Allison on how to get the most out of your Twitter search with tips on how to use the advanced search features!Similar Posts:

Four Easy Tips To Increase Your Search Productivity Today

Felix — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 01:35:00 +0000

Apparently blog readers love lists about tips they can use immediately, and I know people love tips in simple, brief easy to implement list, because I do! So here is one for the GTD fan or productivity junkies!

These tips are easy to pickup, high impact and you can use them today. In a way they are about getting back to the basics of search!

1. Read the Search Help Page

This one seems trivial and almost idiotic but it will more than likely give you the biggest bang for your time spent.

We have all probably read the search help page one or two times in our life, but unless you read it last month, I have news for you: things have changed! There are likely to be new features released and advanced functionalities add since you last read the help page. By reading the help page, I don’t mean read it from page to page but focus on the areas that you think you can benefit the most, it might be the “What’s new” section if you have heard some new image search features that you want to know about or the “Advanced Search” section if you believe you are ready to take your search to the next level.

Here is the Google Search Help, Yahoo Search Help and Windows Live Search Help

2. Get a Search Tool Bar

And Learn what you can do with them. I love my search tool bar and that’s because it give me huge productivity boost as a searcher. I even blogged about it!

3 Reasons Why Search Toolbar Makes You A Better Searcher

Install search tool bar from your favourite search engine and know the features offered in them will save you time, increase your productivity and allow you to use your browser more as a powerful search platform than a HTML viewer.

With a search tool bar installed, did you know you can:

Execute a search for images right from the search tool bar!
Highlight the keywords you searched for within the page (Huge time saver!)

If you already have Google Toolbar, you can always try out Yahoo Toolbar or Windows Live Toolbar.

3. Try an Alternative Search Engine

People are so accustomed to Google that they think it’s the end all an be all of search. Well, its not. Whilst even Google has a huge range of specialist search engines, there is a wealth of alternative search engines that can make your search experience more productive today.

I can think of least three cases where Google is trumped by alternative search engines (and that I have blogged about here!)

Blog search using Technorati: Google Blog Search Is No Good!
Visual search using Cooliris: The New Visual Search Experience
Product comparison/review search using Retrevo: Tell me more about this product

Check out the Search 1.x search engine directory for more alternative search engines and why trying them out can sometimes make you a better searcher.

4. Believe That You Can Find It!

This one is a mental tip, but it’s one that will get most people. Often when people fail to find the exact information they are looking for, they give up or settle for “good enough” content where there are often much better material out there on the web

If it’s out there on the web, there is a way to search for and find it, and my experience has taught me that this statement is largely true, I am always amazed at the stuff you can find on the web using the search engines.

For example, did you know that you can find a huge listing of active webcam by using Google ?

By changing your mentality, you are more than likely to persist with it and when there is a will, there is a way, you just have to know how to search for it!

What’s your favourite tip when it comes to search?Similar Posts:

The Must Have Firefox Plugin To Customise Google Search

Felix — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 13:51:00 +0000

As good as Google is, have you ever wanted to try the same search on a different search engine after a your Google search disappointed you ? Did you give up on that idea because you didn’t want the hassle of typing in a new URL to go to a different search engine, type in the same keywords and do the same search again? I know I have :+P

Google has made us extremely dependant on it and very very lazy when it comes to search, mostly because the result Google returns on good most of the times!

For Firefox users, there is an extremely simple and power plugin to solve that problem and allow you to easily unleash the power of other search engines when Google did not answer your prayer.

The CustomiseGoogle Plugin is a Firefox plugin that gives you tonnes of feature to customise your Google search experience, some of the really handy features include:

Remove Google Ads
Rewrite links to point straight to the images in Google Images
Add position counter and many others !!!

But the real killer features for searchers is the way it adds links to the top of Google search results that allows you search the same keyword on other search engines with a simple click of a button! Here are the links just to show you how easily accessible they are!

I must confess I would not have tried a lot of my Google searches on other search engines if it were not for the simplicity of this approach and I have benefited greatly for it!

You will also benefit by having these short cuts to other search engines and be a more productive and efficient searcher

The plugin creates different links depending whether you did a Google web search, blog search or image search and point you to the other leading search engines depending on what you are searching for.

You might ask, which alternative search engines should I try then ? I have blogged the merits of various alternative search engines in Search1.x, including how Technorati is a much superior blog search engine for blogs search, and why you should try live search. Better still, you should check out the Search 1.x Search Engine Directory for a comprehensive list of great specialist search engines broken down by their specialisation.

At the end of the day, it is your own experience that counts, but at least the only thing stands between you and potentially better search results is just a click of a button now!Similar Posts:

Simplest Way to Refine Your Search And Improve Search Result

Felix — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 13:18:00 +0000

One of the easiest way to improve search results is by either excluding certain keywords (i.e. the “-” operator in Google) to filter out certain pages or to add certain keywords to zone into a particular area. Now there is a even simpler way to do this without learning the specific syntax!

Xippee is a plugin that make it much easier for you to refine your search using words from the results page.

The advantage is that sometimes you don’t really know what you need to filter out until you do a search, using the Xippee plugin, you can easily exclude certain keywords from the results page by just clicking on it right from the results page !

For example, let’s say I am interested in finding out how to extend the battery life of my iPhone and search for “iPhone Battery” in Google.

Now, there seems to be quite a lot of information about iPhone “Battery Replacement” which I have no interest what so ever and would consider them noise. I can either try to work out the correct syntax to exclude the keyword “Replacement” or I can use Xippee to select the word “Replacement” and deselect it right from the results page.

The end results is that Xippee updates the search query with the correct syntax to exclude the word “Replacement” from the search and returns a new sets of results that excludes any thing about iPhone battery replacement!

Xippee works as a plugin in Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, Opera and Safari and it automatically adjust the syntax as you use it with Google, Yahoo or Live Search.

For those of you who are just not operator inclined or does not like the thought of having to type more than your search keywords into the search box, this make it much easier to get better search results.

Sure the new Google suggest feature tries to guess what you are searching for and suggest other keywords to go with the one you typed in the search box. But the ability to select a word right from the results page and exclude it in the results is cool. It is simple, easy and effective, I would not be surprised if other search vendors start to include the functionality in their browser search bar.Similar Posts: