Search 1.x » Tips

Useful Search Tips for Holiday Travellers

Felix — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 23:03:00 +0000

As the holiday season nears, many people are no doubt planning for their trip away from the city, and the Internet and Search Engines are often the first port of the call when people start to research and plan their trip.

It’s no secret that the Internet is a fantastic resources to search for cheap airfares, holidays ideas and accommodation recommendations. The mix of extensive commercial contents and user supplied material means that as long as you know where to look and how to find the right information, you can really leave nothing to chances when it comes to planning for your next trip.

Here are a few tips that I have used over the years to help me take trip planning to the next level and help me plan for the perfect trip by leveraging the power of the Internet and Search Engines!

Bing Travel Search

If you live in the USA or are traveling to and from USA, the Bing Travel search engines have some cool features to help you sort our your airfares. Whilst many website allow you to search for the cheapest flight tickets, one of the big feature of Bing Travel search is the ability to predict flight fares going forward and recommend you to buy it today or wait for it to get cheaper.

It also offer the ability to fine tune your search and when you click on the flight will take you directly to the address where you can buy the fare from the vendor.

I must admit, I don’t live in the USA but from what I can see, the features seems comprehensive and I would certainly use it if I were to travel within the USA and hope Bing bring the same search engines to other countries.

Research the location

Got an address of your hotel? If you do, there are a whole lot that you can do today before you leave home to find out about your destination. Firstly, Google Map can show you where the hotel is on the map, what the front gate looks like, what the surrounding environments are like, all highly useful information when you are staying at a brand new hotel, particularly ones that you are offered very cheap rate! For example, here is a satellite view and front gate view of the Versace hotel up in the Gold Coast in Australia.

Secondly, want to know if you can get a decent Pizza near your hotel? A quick search on Google map, once again reveals where to go for a late night feed when you get there!

Use forums for reviews

When you do come across various web sites about your destination or accommodations, chances are its filled with pretty pictures and descriptions of how exciting and wonderful the place, such is the nature of commercial contents, they WANT TO SELL YOU SOMETHING.

But If you are like me and are interested in finding out what real people who have visited the place really think about a place or hotel, online forums offers a fantastic venue where people often debate passionately about their favorite (or most hated!) destination. Google now offers you the ability to search within forum via advanced options or you can use any of the specialist forum search engines to dig through people’s experiences and discussions about a holiday destination.

What is going on today?

Whilst forums are great for finding past experience from people, Twitter search comes into its own when you need to find out the latest about a particular destinations. Latest discussions, sales or promotions, events, or even celebrity sightings! One of the coolest thing about search through twitter is the fact that you never know what you are going to find, so it’s always worth checking out the twitterspehere about your destination!

There you have it, the time you spend on researching and planning for your trip is definitely worth it, as you can leave the thinking at home!

Similar Posts:

What Treasures Can You Find On Twitter?

Felix — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 07:06:00 +0000

Now that Twitter has added a search box on its home page, I often get people asking me why would I ever want to search through twitter? After all, isn’t it all about people going on about what they had for breakfast? Whilst it is true there are plenty of comments about breakfast cereals on Twitter, there are actually useful treasures if you know what you are looking for. Here are some ideas and examples of of some of the treasures that you might find useful but didn’t know that you can find on twitter!

Find A Good Deal

This is probably one the most powerful and useful use of Twitter search and one that any bargain hunter needs to pay close attention to.

Many companies today are starting to use Twitter to promote and offload their excess stocks. Companies such as Dell regularly broadcast sales and discount stock through Twitter, It is great for finding good deals on all sorts of products when buying online, in fact, its probably a good idea to search through twitter when buying anything online as a couple of extra keyboard strokes might just save you a few bucks.

Whilst you can search directly on the twitter website for discount codes such as “Dell Discount Code”, there are also specialist twitter deal search sites such as CheapTweet that aggregates discount related tweets publishers and not only can help you find discount coupon codes, but also list general sales promotions that retail outlets are offering at a particular time, highly recommended for any bargain hunters!

Stock Tips

The real-time nature of Twitter makes it a perfect platform for sharing Stock market related news, announcements, tips and discussions (or rumours!). You can also sometimes find links to useful analyst reports or analysis on a particular company that have just been published and that might influence your buy or sell decision. The trick is to filter out all the noisy tweets (and there are plenty!) by adding useful keywords and exclude noisy keywords for a particular search or use the advanced search options to add addition filter such as date range and hashtags.

If you follow a particular analyst or stock related site that publishes tweets, you can also use the advanced search function to search through tweets from a particular user.

For example, here is twitter search on What @TheMotleyFool has said about Google.

Check for the Status of Web Services

Not so much treasures but definitely useful nonetheless is the ability to check for critical online services through twitter search. When you are having issues with Gmail or Hotmail, or Skype, it is often hard to work out whether the issue is due to the latest browser update you did, the new corporate firewall policy or something else. A quick search on twitter can often give you an idea if it is indeed a general outage from the service provider and save you the hassle of ringing up your Internet provider or corporate support desk.

Not only will the twitter search find other user’s experiences with the service, you might also find officially announcements from the service provider. You just might find links to posts on whether it is a scheduled downtime and when is it due to come back up. I have personally use the twitter search on Gmail down numerous times to work out what is going on with Gmail when I am having issue with it and see what the word on the street is, and found it a great time saver!

Go on, have a search on twitter, you just might find some other treasures, if you do, make sure you share it in the comments section below!

Similar Posts:

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!

Similar Posts:

Why Should You Bother With Alternative Search Engines

Felix — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 10:08:00 +0000

For most people, Google is the only search engine they know (OK maybe you have heard about Bing now!) when in fact there are a number of powerful and useful alternatives search engines out there. Blogs such as AltSearchEngines does a great job in promoting and teaching the merits of these alternative search engines. At Search 1.x, we believe that whilst a lot of these alternative search engines are complete waste of time, some of them definitely offers value to any serious searcher and you should definitely bother checking them out!

And if you are still lacking motivations and think that Google does it all for you, here are some ideas on why you should bother exploring them:

1. They Are The Specialists

As good as Google is at Web search sometimes a specialist search engine can get a particular job done better and faster. I guess its a bit like how we go to a specialist doctor for specialist treatment.

Specialist blog search engine such as Technorati has been around for a long time and has built a wonderful reputation and set of features that makes it one of the best blog search engines on the web.

One good recently launched example of a specialist search engine is WolframAlpha which claims to be a “computational knowledge engine” which ultimately means that it is a facts engine and allows users to search through a number of specialist databases of facts and figures. If you are interested in finding certain numerical facts or stats, it beats Google hands down and will help you get there faster. For example here is one WolframAlpha query that directly gives you the answer to “Date of Kennedy’s Death” on the results page. Great for trivia nights!

For more specialist search engines that what their special powers are, check out the Search 1.x Search Directory!

2. Real-time Search

This is arguably one of the Google’s biggest short comings in being able to search not last week’s websites, not even yesterday’s blog posts but the discussion and chatters happing now. In trying to answer the question of what’s going on right now, the sources of contents can be new stories, comments, conversations, pictures or videos. The subtle distinction of real-time search when compared with traditional web search being that the source of information is less important than the timely information itself.

Check out my previous blog about conversation searching using the twitter search feature!

More recently, CrowdEye and Collecta are a couple of great up and coming real-time search engines that combines real-time results from various “real-time” content sources including microblog sites such as twitter, popular blogs, and social websites such as facebook. CrowdEye is unique in that it analyses the links that are being tweeted by people and show you what are the hot or popular links. Collecta on the other hand has a bigger content sources that include not only twitter but blog posts, comments, and Flick.

3. Access To All The Results!

If you are an Information Junkie and Google fails to return any relevant results, have you ever wondered what Bing or Twitter search might bring ? Metadata search engines are specifically designed to answer this question by providing a unified results page that include search results from popular search engines in one single page.

Dogpile and Scour are two of the most popular meta search engines that gives you quick access to results from all the popular search engines.

There are however, other ways to get the same results, one such method is to use browser plugins such as the Unified Search Firefox plugin which appends search results from other search engine and sources as you do a Google Search without you having to go to dedicated metadata search engine.

3. Get To See the Future Of Search

Interested in seeing the future of search? Alternative search engines are often where the real innovation happens, so if you are a real life hacker or true technologist you ought to keep up with what’s happening it he world of alternative search engines.

Whilst there are numerous innovation in search happening as we speak, one area that is predicted to drive some real innovation in search is the area of semantic search and the poser child (or alternative search engine) in this space is Hakia

There you go, hopefully one of the above points is enough to get you to look beyond Google and go on, give it a go and let us know about your favourite alternative search engines!

Similar Posts:

Bing Search Improves on the Search Results Page

Felix — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 10:40:00 +0000

So Bing has a good name that you can now replace “To Google Something” with “To Bing Something!” and has been getting tonnes of positive media coverage, but from the searcher’s point of view, what is the big fuss and why should I care? Well the good new is that Microsoft has done their homework this time and Bing is definitely a better search engine than the old live search service.

By in large, it is a very similar Search experience to Google in terms of the display layout and results relevancy which is a good thing. However, Bing has some cool innovations that Google currently does not have and I think not only improves on the Google design but really helps the searcher and I give Microsoft and the Bing Search team for thinking beyond the Google offering.

Sure the Bing search screen has nice interactive background that changes everyday, but for me, it’s all about the search results page!

Microsoft research apparently identified that one of biggest frustration in search today is in clicking through to a page, only to find it is not the right one so helping searcher identifying the correct page to click through on the results page was identified as a main area of focus for the Bing team.

I am happy to say that the focus on delivering useful information on the results page itself has been a good one and I think has delivered real tangible benefits for the searchers.

Now on to the Bing search results layout…

Whilst the Bing search results page looks similar to any other results page, the secret is revealed when you mouse over a particular result entry.

When your mouse is anywhere on top of a result, a vertical rule shows up at its right edge to visually clue you that this preview is available. Hovering the cursor to the right edge of any Web result brings up a small window containing text from the linked page. It can even find relevant deep links within that page. It’s great for getting a peek at pages that are relevant, and for helping avoid clicking through to pages that aren’t.

Furthermore, if the site contains malware, the Bing engine will also reveal that in the preview text window and let you make up your mind as to whether to visit the site.

If you don’t pay attention, you might actually miss this little feature, but I think it is a small clever innovation that actually works really really well!

The other nice touch is the placement of your Search history right on the results page to speed things up. I for one find I often re-run some of my previous searches so this is definitely another handy feature to have on the results page.

A bit of a tip for you if you are from outside of the USA, you should click here to switch to the USA version of Bing as I find some features were disabled with the Australian local version so I am guessing this might be the case with other local versions.

The Bing Image search and research tools of Bing also have some really cool features that makes it superior than the current Google offerings. I am planning on covering them soon so be sure to come back to check them out!

If you have not already checked out Bing, then You should most certainly have a go at the new Bing search engine! as I suspect you will be pleasantly surprised with the Bing search experience.

Tell us what you think about your Bing experience!

Similar Posts:

Take a Navigational Approach To Search

Felix — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 09:58:00 +0000

What’s navigational search you ask? It’s a search approach where you are not searching for a specific answer but more looking for good materials that relates to a particular topic. The search results is a start of a navigational experience where it leads you on a guided navigational experience that allow you to drill down to the relevant concept or topic area that you are interested in. Or in the words of the founders of Kosmas, the goal of its search engine is to “tell their users more about something,”

A good example is when you are researching about a particular travel destination. This is the case where you are not looking for a particular answer but are just looking for general material ABOUT a particular destination. You are looking for someone to help and guide you through the most important topics or concepts related to your travel destination.

In order to have a navigational search experience, someone needs to act as a guide, and that’s where Kosmas comes in.

Kosmas has been mentioned by the New York Times as a potential Google killer and have often been described as a semantic search engine, I like to think the unique search results it presents lends itself also to a navigational search approach.

The search experience on Kosmas is hard to explain other than describing it as sort of like a metadata search engine except it actually knows what you are asking about and customise the content sources it searches and present it to you in a useful manner in a magazine like layout.

For a start, it clusters your search query results and present you with related topics that you can drill into. But it then go on and provides you with a wealth of material that are somehow RIGHT for the search you are conducting. For my search of “iPhone case” above, it presented me with a number of related topics such as iPod and iPod Touch, it then presented me with images of iPhone cases, links to shops where I can buy them, and tweets of people talking about iPhone cases.

The interesting thing is, if you search for something different, the types of contents presented may be completely different. For example, if I search for “Sydney”. I am presented with the Wikipedia entry for Sydney and a map of Sydney!

Kosmas claims that the results for any search can contain information from over 15 sources and may include images, videos, reviews, and conversation. The neat thing is that the search engine works out what you are searching for semantically and searches through the best contents sources that relates to your search string.

It is remarkably accurate and comprehensive when you are searching for basic concepts such as an object or location, but when the number of keywords starts to go north of 3, the results becomes less useful, the argument would be that you really should be searching for basic concepts that you like to explore more and less narrow topic areas using Kosmas.

One thing is for sure, if you are planning a trip, or doing research on a new product, Kosmas is definitely a good place to start, and I will definitely be using it in the future.

Similar Posts:

Leverage the Time Dimension For Search Relevancy

Felix — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 02:23:00 +0000

Here is a tip that I think people sometimes overlook but can pay huge dividend when used correctly! :+)

Google has done such a good job in providing great search results sometimes we take it for granted and become lazy in thinking about basic search strategy.

Google by default returns results sorted by relevancy based on its ranking algorism that includes the now famous “PageRank” algorism. Now whilst nobody really knows the secret source/formula Google use in its ranking algorism, it is understood that freshness or time dimension plays an important part. In addition, Google also give you the option to control the date range or how recent the page is in the advanced search options, use it to supplement your search query when you know timeliness of a result set plays a critical role in terms of relevancy.

By selecting the date range, you can restrict you search result to pages created or updated within the last 24 hours. week, month or year. This operator is invaluable for certain types of search as sometimes instead of dreaming up keywords to include or exclude, it’s much more effective to limit and control the time elements.

For example, as you searching for information about a newly released gadget that’s only been out on the market for a month. Restricting your search to pages created or update within the last month is going to dramatically help you filter out material not related to this particular release of the product without mucking around too much with product version and keywords.

By the way, if the time dimension or freshness of a source is very important to you when searching, chances are you should also leverage other sources of more timely search engines where time plays a more important factors. These include News search sites such as Google News, various Blog search engines and Twitter search for searching through more update to date web contents and near-realtime web conversations.

Once again, thinking beyond keywords when it comes to intelligently structuring you search query can make your life easier as well as make your search much more effective :+)

Similar Posts:

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:

Why You Need to Check Out Google Scholar Search

Felix — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 01:51:00 +0000

When it comes to authoritative source or fresh new thinking based on actual research, you just can’t beat academic research. Sometimes, you are looking for what the latest thinking or theories is on a particular topic or wants to know what academia thinks about a theory you want to apply in business. If you have been in those situations and have not checked out Google Scholar, then you are are missing out big time.

Google Scholar is an obscure search service that Google has been providing for a while that I was not familiar with until I was introduced to it by a professor. It indexes all well known and popular journal databases, publications and research publications (Harvard Business Review, etc), and allows you to search through the index using the same intuitive search interface as the general web search. From my personal experience and feedback from people who uses it extensively, the publications that it indexes is extensive and of high quality, and that’s important when it comes to scholar research.

In another word, Google has taken library catalogues searching to another level. Gone are the bad, old days when you need to go to the library and search through the physical catalogue of academic journals, gone also are the days when you need to log onto various academic database, learn the intricacy of their search syntax individually and collate the results together to compare them.

You can sort by relevancy or date in the Google Scholar search results , and Google uses a number of factors to calculate relevancy including how many times a particular paper was cited by other researchers.

There is a catch though. :+)

Whilst Google Scholar give you access to the index and allow you search for articles, getting access to the actual article is a different story. Whilst you will find a lot of publically accessible articles, most high quality papers have restricted access from the general public.

The good news is that most articles are in digital forms and are linked to directly from your Google Scholar search results, the bad news is that you will need to be affiliated or have membership to a library to gain access to them as most libraries have subscriptions to popular journal databases. As far I can see, there are two ways for you to get access to these restricted articles.

1. If you are doing any sort of undergraduate study or post graduate study, ring up the library and request access to their online library databases.

2. If you have a colleague or family member doing any sort of study (and there should always be someone studying around you !) ask him or her for access to their online library database

Once you obtained a valid library access account, you can even tell Google to automatically link to the article in the specific library that you have access to as shown here where Google Scholar is providing a link to the article from Macquarie University where I have access to their online database.

Once you set it up, it truly is an amazing piece of research tool.

There are a lot of hard core theory based content in Google Scholar, but if you search effectively, you ought to find exactly what you are looking for. Give it a go and as Google puts it, leverage the wealth of knowledge available through the research of others and “Stand on The Shoulder of Giants”!

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: