I used to use Google Alerts all the time to keep me apprised of what was going on in the world of Apple tech, for another gig I have writing online. It was a great solution, but eventually, Twitter’s real-time information flow became much more useful for me.
But the problem with Twitter is that it’s kind of unwieldy. I follow a lot of people, and even though I have multiple accounts to follow different groups of people, a lot gets lost in the stream. Twitter clients with built-in search help, but at a glance, Google Alert-like results would be ideal. Thankfully, there’s a service that does almost precisely that. It’s called TweetAlert. Read the rest of this entry »
Some big news yesterday was the announcement of the Bing/Twitter/Facebook deals that will see the three services sharing info and working together in all kinds of interesting ways. One of those ways has now gone live, and it’s Microsoft’s Bing Twitter search. It looks a little like Twitter Search, only better, and much more broadly useful.
What do I mean by that? Well, for one, you have Twitter’s trending topics, but more than the 10 you normally see, and they’re arranged in a tag cloud. I also noticed that some from the official Twitter search page aren’t actually present, but it looks like it’s cut out the hashtagged, frivolous stuff, and left the more meaty subjects. Read the rest of this entry »
Twitter, you’re not the only one with up-to-the-second search results. Google now boasts that ability, too, a fact revealed in an Omgili blog post. It isn’t yet a publicly-available feature, but with very little effort on your part, you too can narrow your results to “this past second,” or a range of other different increments.
The trick is in using Google’s “Search Options,” a new feature added in May of this year that allows you to filter your results a number of ways, including according to how recently something was published. The closest you can get to real-time results using the official Google menu options is “Past 24 hours,” which is handy, but if currency is central to how well you do your job, getting even closer is ideal. Here’s how to do it. Read the rest of this entry »
A much-improved version is out of uberVU, a site that helps you track the flow of conversations on the web, whether they’re taking place on Twitter, Digg, Reddit, in the comments sections of blogs, or elsewhere. There are many tools available for searching specific social sites (including lots of them for Twitter), but uberVU is particularly useful for checking on what people are saying all over the social web. In this post, I’ll look at some of the improvements to the app, and what you can get done with it.
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Have you been using Microsoft’s (and now Yahoo’s) new Bing search engine in conjunction with Google for searches? I have, partly because of the novelty, and partly because Bing does a few interesting things that Google doesn’t, including good natural language searches. Webware has published an interesting roundup of a slew of mashup applications designed to let you perform Bing and Google searches simultaneously, with, in some cases, dual-paned views of search results. These include CompareGoogle and Google-Bing, but the most useful one appears to be Bing vs. Google. It gives you a dual-paned view of results from both search engines, and has some shortcomings, but while using it I got a better sense than ever of what Bing and Google, respectively, are good at.
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Last week, I shared some tips to help you get more out of Google Blog Search. I prefer Google Blog Search for vanity searches, where I want to see every mention across every blog talking about any of my various efforts. I generally use it as my starting point, but for some very broad topics, I just get too much noise and not enough relevancy. When that happens, I have three fallback search engines that allow me to filter out the less popular blogs and focus on ones with more authority.
Ask Blog Search Read the rest of this entry »
I thought it might be fun to build on my recent Twitter search operators and FriendFeed search filtering posts with another set of search tips. This time, I’ll be talking about getting more out of Google Blog Search with a few tips, tricks and hacks.
First, let’s cover a couple of differences between Google Blog Search and the standard Google search along with a few of its advantages. I use these two search engines in very different ways. When I need some piece of information, I use the standard Google search. I use Google Blog Search to monitor information, or to find the newest results for a particular query.
Google Blog Search has a few additional features over standard Google search that make it perfect for monitoring:
- Limited to blogs. This is the “well, duh” difference.
- RSS feeds. This is the key for me. Blog Search has RSS feeds. For anyone familiar with my previous posts, you know that I am an RSS junkie, so I love having RSS feeds available for my searches.
Common Searches
The Advanced Blog Search page has several interesting options that you will find useful in addition to the standard options found in most search engines (AND, OR, exact phrase, etc.)
- Words in the post title. This option is a great way to increase the relevance for your search when searching for common words, by limiting searches to posts that have the search terms in the post title. I tend to use it when searching for topics about RSS or Twitter, for example, since many blog posts mention them in the text of the post, even when the post is actually about some other topic.
- Words in the blog title or at a specific URL. I use these searches almost daily to search a particular blog for a specific article or to see what they have written on a certain topic. While most blogs have a built-in search engine, I generally don’t want to navigate to the blog to type in a search, especially since the search engines used by many blogs aren’t as good or as fast as Google.
- By author. This is a great way to narrow the results if you are looking for something written by a particular author, especially on some of the larger multi-author blogs.
Incoming Links
This is one of my favorite Google search tips, since it finds incoming links to any URL. I use it to find when people link to one of my posts, especially when they don’t use my name or the name of my blog, which would show up in one of my other vanity feeds. Here’s how it works:
I also have a couple of caveats with this one. When some blogs link to my web site in a sidebar, it will show up as a new link for every single new post on that blog, even though the text of the blog post doesn’t link to my web site. This can generate a considerable number of false positives when a prolific blogger links to a web site in a sidebar and you get a new search result for every single post they publish. It is also worth mentioning that while I love to use this operator, I don’t think it is officially supported by Google.
More RSS Results
As I mentioned earlier, I am a self-confessed RSS junkie. I take various search results from different Google searches, and use Yahoo Pipes to construct the searches using lists of keywords with some additional filtering on content and removing duplicate results. Google defaults to RSS feeds with only 10 items, which is fine for low volume queries, but it just isn’t enough for higher-volume searches. The only way I have found to change the number of results in the RSS feed is by tweaking the variable in the URL.
By default, the RSS feed with 10 items will look something like this one. I’ve simplified it by removing any optional parameters to make it easier to read.
- http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?q=%22Yahoo+Pipes%22&num=10&output=rss
Here’s a version where I have tweaked the “num” variable to show 50 results:
- http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?q=%22Yahoo+Pipes%22&num=50&output=rss
Many of the search options that I discussed above are also available in the standard Google search, but I tried to focus on the ones that I find most useful when using blog search. You can get a few more advanced search operators out of the Google help pages; however, this unofficial Google guide has many more, and most of them should work with Google Blog Search.
What are your favorite Google Blog Search hacks?
Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
