Sometimes you and Google are going to disagree. I know, I know, so far it’s been a fairytale romance, but it happens to the best of us, trust me.
When you do disagree, you really haven’t had any option to date but to suck it up and trudge along, pretending that you don’t care that Google’s search prioritization disagrees with your own. Now you can finally do something about your contrasting opinion thanks to Google SearchWiki.
More customizability means more productivity for web workers in the long run.
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The Firefox 3 “awesome bar” generally does a good job of finding the web page you want when you start typing into it. With its ability to look into your history, go to a URL, or trigger a search of the web, it offers multiple avenues to get to where you want to go. But it can still be improved. If you find yourself navigating around the web on a frequent basis (and what web worker doesn’t?) here are a selection of ways to supercharge your searching.
Inquisitor started life as a Safari add-on, but Yahoo! has ported it to Firefox now. This add-on brings a dropdown area to Firefox’s own search box, including word completion, tracking of your search history, and easy access to Flickr and Wikipedia searches. It will show you sites you’ve already visited with a flag that tells you how often you’ve been there. By default, Inquisitor uses Yahoo’s search engine, but you can use its preferences to switch this to Google if you like (and to turn off its default behavior of sending information on your searches back to Yahoo).
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For most people, even web workers, there is only one search engine on the web. To some extent we differ over which one that is: there are people who use Google all the time, others who swear by Yahoo, and so on. In reality, of course, there are a zillion search engines out there. We’ve covered a bunch of alternatives in the past, and we’ve barely scratched the surface. But except in very narrow niches, it seems like all of the alternatives face the same problem: how to get any traction in a market where most people have long since decided what they’ll use.
Search engine makers have tried a variety of ways to get customers. Some have bragged about their superior technology and invested in splashy launch PR (sometimes with disastrous results - remember Cuil?). Microsoft has resorted to paying people to use its search engine - most recently with the SearchPerks! program. Firefox has made it easy to switch by providing a dropdown button that can change your browser’s default search engine with two clicks.
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Like many web workers, I spend a lot of time searching online, and I try to expand my set of tools for doing that well beyond Google. One of my latest finds in this area is Kosmix, a search engine that’s still in Alpha but does what it does very well.
As described in this post, Kosmix is based on the following notion: “Search engines are great finding the needle in a haystack. And that’s perfect when you are looking for a needle. Often though, the main objective is not so much to find a specific needle as to explore the entire haystack.”
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There’s no doubt that the web can be a great resource. Whether you are doing serious research, shopping, or answering trivia, chances are there is relevant information out there somewhere.
While the search engines are getting better at serving results, the sheer volume of information available is growing as well. With Google recently announcing they index nearly 1 trillion unique URLs, it can be a challenge to find the information you are looking for.
Learning how to craft your queries can certainly help but wouldn’t it be nice to have a search assistant that could look ahead in your results and grab the ones that are most likely to be useful to you. That’s what Surf Canyon promises.
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Despite the existence of dozens of competing services, del.icio.us remains the standard for bookmark storage for many web workers - if only because it’s been around so long that we’ve accumulated hundreds or thousands of bookmarks there. But one of the big annoyances of del.icio.us is its rather lackluster search feature: you can search for text in the title or tags of your bookmarks, but if you only remember a word or phrase from somewhere in the page, you’re out of luck.
Fortunately, third parties have stepped into this hole with their own solutions. At this point, I know of three ways to get full-text search across your del.icio.us bookmarks. One caution: if you try testing these in quick succession, and you have lots of bookmarks, you’re likely to have your API access throttled by IP address.
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The promise of intelligent software agents has been floating around for a long time. Yotify is the latest to try to deliver on this promise. The idea is fairly simple: you tell Yotify what you’re interested in, and it scours the web and sends you daily updates. For example, you could tell Yotify to instantiate a “scout” that follows Craigslist job postings on your behalf, or one that updates you on the latest search results for a particular term. Results are delivered by email or through the Yotify interface. There are also some social features - you can invite friends and share scouts, or make them public.
Though the idea is sound, I find myself wanting scouts with more smarts than the ones they’ve supplied so far. For example, on the Craigslist scout I’d love to be able to do a search of ALL the Craigslist sites for Rails telecommuting jobs - something you can’t easily do in the Craigslist UI. But the scout requires you to pick a particular city to watch. The search results doesn’t seem to offer any advantage over subscribing to a Google search RSS feed. So, I have to mark this one as “promising”, but I don’t think they’ve delivered yet. The service is in closed beta, but it didn’t take me long to get an invitation after requesting one.
AntStorm is an interesting new entrant in the online bookmarking space. Though their just-launched public beta has some rough edges, they have an interesting vision, combining several niches into a single web application. First, they’re a bookmark manager, designed to make it easy to use your bookmarks on multiple computers. (Right now they’ve got a Firefox toolbar to make management easier, with an IE version promised). Second, they’re a social bookmarking site, where you can selectively make your bookmarks public in groups called “trails”. Third, they’re a scheme to raise money for charities, by kicking back part of their Google AdSense earnings to the charity of your choice.
Beyond that, they have plans to turn this collective intelligence of bookmarking into human-powered search, though those plans are as yet a bit fuzzy. Right now, their drag-and-drop user interface needs some tuning, and there’s not much content on the site yet. But if you’re not already committed to another bookmarking site, they might be worth a look.
