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Posts Tagged ‘search’

Xobni Launches New Search Perks in Xobni Plus for $29.95

July 15th, 2009 | No Comments

Xobni, a messaging and collaboration tool designed to make finding information in Microsoft Outlook easier, begins offering a paid version of its plug-in. For $29.95 for life, users will get several advanced search features, including the ability to sit through appointments, to and from headers, and other nooks and crannies where data may be hidden within Outlook.
– Xobni has seen more than 2 million downloads since it was made available a
year ago, and now the executives behind the Microsoft Outlook search plug-in
feel the tool is ready to go commercial.
Xobni, which users have installed for free to help manage the
contacts and various e-mail threads in th…

How to Improve the Efficiency of Enterprise Search

July 14th, 2009 | No Comments

There is an efficiency gap between enterprise and Internet search today. Enterprise users are used to Googling queries and getting results quickly and accurately, but while searching at work, these same workers often find it difficult to find internal documents with the same speed and efficiency. For better search and retrieval, Knowledge Center contributor Yves Schabes explains why enterprises with large amounts of data should invest in an enterprise search solution that automatically tags and categorizes enterprise content.
– Searching for a document in the workplace usually involves sifting through multiple pages of search results, which wastes time and money. And because enterprise users are searching for specific information not just the most popular answer they expect more precise search results than they would get f…

Google Engineering Director Leaves for VMware

July 14th, 2009 | No Comments

According to published reports, Mark Lucovsky, an engineering director at Google, has left the search giant for a new position at VMware. The man who allegedly made Microsoft’s CEO so upset that he threw a chair is now going to work for VMware with former Microsoft cronies.
– According
to published reports, Mark Lucovsky, an engineering director at Google, has
left the search giant for a new position at VMware.
Despite having been hard at work over the last several years helping Google
develop and deliver on its Google APIs strategy, Lucovsky is perhaps best known
a…

Google search Images with commercial Reuse license

July 14th, 2009 | No Comments

Sometimes we need to search images that can be reused commercially or otherwise in our web projects, websites and blogs. Google has filter settings that only show images with “reuse” license type. This allows easy browsing and downloading of images that you can use without worrying about copyright.
How to filter images with Resuse license?
1. Open [...]

How to track UPS, DHL, Fedex, USPS packages on Bing?

July 14th, 2009 | No Comments

Bing is a web search service from Microsoft. It allows you to search internet for specific content of your interest. It has number of features like displaying daily wallpaper imageÂ on the homepage. You can also use Bing search to directly track shipment of UPS, DHL, Fedex, USPS packages.
Step to Track shipment packages
1. Open Bing.com and [...]

Arianna Huffington: Bearing Witness 2.0: You Can’t Spin 10,000 Tweets and Camera Phone Uploads

July 14th, 2009 | No Comments

When deadly riots broke out in China last week, the Chinese government sprang into message control mode. It choked off the Internet, blocked Twitter, and deleted updates and videos from social networking sites. At the same time, it invited foreign journalists to take a tour of the area. That’s right, it slammed the door in the face of new media — and offered traditional reporters a front row seat. The Chinese have clearly learned the lessons of Iran. The same can’t be said about the New York Times’ Roger Cohen who, writing about covering the Iran uprising, recently mounted an attack on search engines, news aggregation, and “miracles of technology” such as Twitter and real-time video delivered via camera phones — the very tools that allowed millions of people around the world to bear witness to what was happening in Iran. How bizarre is that?

Twenty ideas to save the world

July 13th, 2009 | No Comments

The Manchester Report: Join our search for the best plan to tackle global climate change

John Marshall: U.S. Begins Search for Something Good to Say About Dick Cheney

July 13th, 2009 | No Comments

Say say say / What you want / But don’t play games / With my surveillance WASHINGTON – The United States has begun a…

Passenger boat capsizes off Haiti

July 11th, 2009 | No Comments

At least six people are dead and dozens are missing after a passenger boat capsized off the coast of Haiti, officials say.

Rescuers managed to save 16 people and a search is continuing for the others aboard the vessel, details of which were not given.

The boat was reportedly en route from Anse a Pitre to the southern city of Jacmel when it overturned.

Survivors were taken to a hospital in Jacmel, AFP news agency reports.

Alta Jean-Baptiste, director of Haiti’s civil protection agency, said some 60 people had been aboard the boat when the accident happened between the towns of Belle-Anse and Marigot.

Local authorities and the UN mission in Haiti are helping with the search and have requested help from local fisherman, AFP adds.

No theories for the cause of the accident were being reported in the immediate aftermath. </p

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Kim Cattrall Discovers She Had A Bigamist Granddad

July 11th, 2009 | No Comments

Kim set out to find about him. But her search through birth, marriage and census records reveals that, far from building a new life for himself abroad, as her family had suspected, her grandfather was living just 40 miles away in Manchester, a…

Looking glass

July 10th, 2009 | No Comments

By Ian Hardy
Click reporter, Silicon Valley

If you want to find something out these days, one of the first things you will do is type words into a box on the webpages of a search engine.

The result will be an avalanche of websites which contain the words you are looking for, hopefully with the most useful ones at the top of the list.

For much of the past two decades, search results have been triggered by straightforward keyword connections.

It has been an adequate solution, but it is far from perfect says Mike Elgan, a columnist at Computerworld.com.

"Human beings view the world in terms of associations – a classic example in the scientific community is when you say the sentence ‘I saw a bird with a telescope’.

"Human beings instantly know it was you not the bird that was using the telescope. But computers don’t know that," he said.

Human understanding

Search engines have never really understood the precise meaning or true intent of questions or phrases – semantic search is a process trying to improve this.

A new generation of web services is in development to offer results for words and picture searches, and attempt to understand users’ questions.

"The idea is for people to be able to scan it and find interesting things more like a magazine"

Anand Rajaraman,
co-founder of Kosmix

Kosmix is one of a new batch of search engines trying to incorporate human understanding into its complex mathematical computations.

Anand Rajaraman, co-founder of Kosmix, said the site’s goal is to encourage a kind of "serendipity" by displaying information in a visual way.

"The idea is for people to be able to scan it and find interesting things more like a magazine.

"You know how you are scanning a magazine and suddenly something catches your eye serendipitously," he said.

‘Exciting work’

Bing is the latest reincarnation of Windows Live Search and MSN Search which have never been as popular as Yahoo or Google.

To improve it Microsoft bought semantic search company Powerset that uses updated methods to produce their results.

Scott Prevost from Powerset told Click that despite advances, the problems of natural language are not even close to being solved.

"There’s a lot of exciting work that will happen particularly in the next five to 10 years," he said.

Also, increasingly search is moving beyond desktops. One recent survey in the US showed the number of search apps downloaded to mobile phones in the past year has doubled.

While a third more searches are being done on mobile web browsers – many devices have GPS and a constant stream of updated information.

Voice search

A search engine of the future will not just return a list of restaurants, for instance, but it will know you are inside a car, what time of day it is, and the traffic conditions.

So when you get to the restaurant, it will be able to guide you to the nearest parking space, and tell you what specific lunch specials are on the menu that day.

But typing on the go can be dangerous and even illegal in some places, so the physical way we search may change over time.

Scott Prevost, from Powerset said that as speech recognition improves, voice input will start to appear more in mobile phone searches.

"With a mobile device it’s easier to say what you want rather than type some keywords," he said.

"People speak in short simple sentences when they know there is a speech recognizer listening to them," he added.

It is a long way from the search engines of the 1990s which were not smart enough to generalise. Often they could only find something if you knew exactly what you were looking for, sometimes down to the exact filename.

Make connections

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, believes search is still in its infancy and that semantics is key to a more powerful internet.

He said it all comes down to the ability to make connections.

"The thing explodes when somebody has the creativity to look at a piece of data that was put there for one reason and realizes that they can connect it with something else".

He added that, for example, someone could "realise something about global warming because we’ve managed to get all of the data out there."

There is a race going on between the established players and the young startups to take search to the next level.

All are aiming to make it highly personalized, intuitive and more integrated into our lives.

Perhaps one day search engines will deliver the most suitable result you were looking for every time.</p

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Get Random!

July 9th, 2009 | No Comments

We spend a lot of time at Lifehack talking about getting organized â€“ making up lists, labeling files, simplifying your workspace, and so on. Everything in its place, and a place for everything, right?

Thereâ€™s nothing wrong with this view of organization, so long as youâ€™re getting more work done than the time youâ€™re spending on staying organized. But a lot of times, our brains donâ€™t work quite so neatly. For that matter, our lives donâ€™t work quite so neatly. As it happens, we live in worlds that are as much defined by randomness and chaos as by neatness and order.

This isnâ€™t a â€œleft-brain/right-brain thing. Itâ€™s about how we engage with the world. Because the world isnâ€™t always as neat and orderly as the systems we create to interact with it, we can fall â€œout of syncâ€ at times. We feel this all the time â€“ overwhelmed, creatively blocked, or just plain stuck. At those times itâ€™s a good idea to inject a little randomness into our otherwise predictable system.

Randomness isnâ€™t just a way to â€œbreak out of the ordinaryâ€ â€“ it is the ordinary! And as much as we try to control things, we need that little seed of randomness now and again to close the gap between our attempts to organize our lives and the mixed-up world that is our lives. Itâ€™s what weâ€™re designed for â€“ humans didnâ€™t evolve in a GTD world, we involved in a messy and chaotic world, and weâ€™re pretty well adapted to it.

Bring on the Crazy

Here are a handful of ways to add a dash of randomness to your life. Try them all or just one or two, and see if you arenâ€™t quite surprised at the results.

The Noguchi Filing System: Designed by Japanese economist Noguchi Yukio, the Noguchi filing system relies on the vagaries of use habits, rather than the alphabet, to sort your files. The idea is simple: instead of filing material in traditional folders and drawers, you put every document (or bundle of related documents) into a 9×12 (or larger) envelope, label it, and file it upright on a shelf. New folders go on the left-hand end of the shelf, and every file you remove goes back not where it came from, but again, on the left-hand end of the shelf. As you use the system, the left side will fill up with material you use the most often, while material you useless often will move to the right. Every so often, you can box up the right half of the shelf and archive it, or shift them into long-term reference sections by subject (Noguchi color codes his reference files, and moves them to their own shelves to be ordered by use once again).

Though it seems crazy, in testing Noguchi says that access time is almost always faster in shelves sorted by the Noguchi system. Thatâ€™s because material youâ€™re most likely to need is going to be material youâ€™re most likely to have used recently, and that material is all on the left. The rarely-used files to the right might take longer to find, but since you rarely need to find them, on average youâ€™ll save time â€“ not to mention the time you save by not filing in any particular order in the first place.

Bananaslug Fever: Searching on Google is pretty straight-forward â€“ if you know what youâ€™re looking for. But itâ€™s easy to get stumped, trying search after search around a topic and coming up with a bunch of not-so-inspiring pages. Enter Bananaslug. The brain-child of my fellow UCSC alum (Go Fightinâ€™ Bananaslugs!) Steve Nelson, Bananaslug works like Google â€“ in fact, it is a front-end to Google â€“ but adds a random keyword from one of a dozen or so categories to your search, creating some interesting â€“ and maybe even inspiring â€“ results.

For example, a search for project planning on Google turns up the usual assortment of Wikipedia and blog pages, plus a book or two. Useful, if youâ€™re looking for basic info, but what if you already know all that, and you want to learn something new? When I enter “project planning in Bananaslug and ask for a random keyword from the category â€œgreat ideasâ€ (it chose â€œreasoningâ€), Iâ€™m introduced to whole fields of project planning I didnâ€™t even know about: quantitative reasoning, semi-quantitative reasoning, geometric-based reasoning, temporal knowledge representation, and so on. I could get the same results from Google, except Iâ€™d never, ever have known to add â€œreasoningâ€ to my search terms.

Change something: Ever try to change a habit. Man is that hard. Experts say if you keep it up for 21 days (or 30, or 28, or 45, orâ€¦) it becomes a habit, but thatâ€™s clearly BS â€“ the time it takes for something to become a habit varies by the habit itself, the personality of the person trying to instill it, the motivation, and so on. Some things never become habits, and some habits are born in a minute.

A lot of psychologists, coaches, and other counselors donâ€™t advice their clients to adopt new habits, because habit-creation is rarely under conscious control. Instead, they advise their clients to just change one little thing, anything â€“ move your computer, talk to someone new, try something thatâ€™s off your regular routine. It doesnâ€™t necessarily have to be the same thing every day, either â€“ the idea is to create enough chaos that your regular habits become indistinguishable from the new non-habits. Try one new thing every day, and see what happens.

Brainstorm: Stuck for an idea? Try â€œblueâ€. Or â€œpropellerâ€. How about â€œtraction ankleâ€? Throwing a random word or idea or phrase into the mix and forcing yourself to seriously consider it, no matter how far off-topic it might seem, can create a cascade of associations that finally circle back to something useful. For example, according to Eric Abrahamson in A Perfect Mess, the word â€œblueâ€ was the key that led an advertising firm to develop a safety-focused campaign to reach out to the previously-untapped market of female auto insurance buyers. How? Who knows, and who cares? The important thing is that it works.

Unschedule: Arnold Schwarzenegger doesnâ€™t have a schedule. If you want to see him, you call his secretary, and if heâ€™s available right now, you come on over. If not, try again later. How crazy is that?

Of course, your life is a lot more complicated than his, Iâ€™m sure â€“ he only has a state to run and movies to make. For you, maybe instead of a â€œnon-scheduleâ€ you could try an “Unschedule. Popularized by Neil Fiore in his book The Now Habit, in an Unschedule you schedule only the things you want to do. In the gaps in between, you work on projects, writing them into your schedule after youâ€™ve worked a solid half-hour on a single project. At the end of the day or week, you can see how many hours of productive time youâ€™ve racked up â€“ surprisingly, itâ€™s often muchÂ greater than people manage with a much more orderly, less random schedule. (You can see an example of an Unschedule at Fioreâ€™s site.)

When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Weird

Like anything, randomness is best in moderation. Try adding a dash to your otherwise orderly day-to-day and see what happens. One thing about randomness, itâ€™s flexible â€“ that little bit of weirdness might be just helpful today, but one day, when the going gets really weird, youâ€™ll be ready to go with it. You may even go pro*!

(*With apologies to Hunter S. Thompson)

Dustin M. Wax is the project manager at Stepcase Lifehack. He is also the creator of The Writer’s Technology Companion, a site devoted to the tools of the writing trade. When he’s not writing, he teaches anthropology and gender studies in Las Vegas, NV. He is the author of Don’t Be Stupid: A Guide to Learning, Studying, and Succeeding at College.

Follow him on Twitter: @dwax.

How to use Google for explicit sexual content searching?

July 6th, 2009 | No Comments

By default no explicit sexual content appear on Google Search result pages. However, some users want to see mature content results for specific keyword while searching internet using Google. Just like Bing search we can turn OFF Safe Search filter and use Google to show explicit “no filtered” results.
Turn OFF Safe search on Google
1. Open [...]

Marketwire Review – Press Release Distribution

July 5th, 2009 | No Comments

PR agencies, large companies and small businesses all have the need to announce news through a press release, still a great way to gain media exposure and PR. Once those releases have been written, itâ€™s often a wise idea to distribute the press release over a newswire (which makes your news available to thousands of [...]

10 More from the Webware 100

June 4th, 2009 | No Comments

Last week, I looked at the apps chosen by CNet for the productivity section of the Webware 100. There were, however, 10 other sections â€“ 9 categories of apps voted for as top in their class and an extra categories of apps chosen by the editors at CNet. This week, I want to look at a selection of applications from the rest of the Webware 100, with an eye towards their use to increase or improve personal productivity.

Some of the categories arenâ€™t very productivity-oriented, like the music and audio section â€“ I love Pandora and Amazon MP3, but I canâ€™t say they help with my productivity in anything but the most indirect way (by giving me music to listen to while Iâ€™m working). The browsing category is particularly useless â€“ picking the 10 best apps for web browsing is a bit like picking your ten best fingers. But scattered throughout the list there were some interesting apps, worth taking a look at.

1. Digsby/Pidgin

Both Digsby and Pidgin are multi-protocol IM clients, meaning you can use them to connect simultaneously to a variety of instant-messaging networks: AOL, Yahoo, MSN, Google Chat, and others. I use DIgsby, which is highly customizable with various skins, which allows me to chat in a very clean, clear, and large-fonted format thatâ€™s easy on my aging eyes. Digsby offers integration with Facebookâ€™s chat system, which is nice â€“ the built-in client on Facebook tends to crash on me a lot. It can also pick up your Twitter account, but I find that much too annoying and difficult to work with in Digsby, and leave Twitter duties to dedicated clients. (Interesting that there were no Twitter clients in the Webware 100â€¦)

2. Skype

I certainly donâ€™t need to sing the praises of Skype â€“ the VoIP service is already beloved by many. I pay about $40 a year for a SkypeIn number, unlimited US SkypeOut calling, and voicemail, and use it as my business phone. A cheap handset attached to my desktop makes it very phone-like to respond to calls; for interviews for articles Iâ€™m working on I use a $30 Logitech headset and either CallGraph or Skype Call Recorder to record the calls to MP3 (always ask permission when using call recording software!). I also use PamFax to send faxes for a small fee (which can be taken from my Skype credit).

3. Gmail

Like Skype, the glories of Gmail are widely known. What makes Gmail more than just another email service are the various â€œextrasâ€ Google has added to the service, both directly and as options available through labs. Some of my favorites:

Canned responses for saving snippets of text (up to whole emails) to reuse in future messages;
Tasks which also integrates with Googleâ€™s Calendar, allowing you to place dated tasks directly onto your calendar;
IMAP access which means I can check my email from wherever, online or through a client, and not worry about things Iâ€™ve read showing up as â€œunreadâ€ when I download my email on a different computer;
Google Docs and Google Calendar integration allows me to view my calendar and recent Google Docs from Gmail;
Google Chat pop-ups directly in the Gmail interface.

4. Dropbox

Dropbox is a file syncing service that has one feature that sets it apart from similar services: shared folders. You can set up a folder on your desktop that is â€œmirroredâ€ on another desktop â€“ say, a clientâ€™s or collaboratorâ€™s. Then, whenever you want to share a file to them, you just drag it into the folder, and itâ€™s uploaded to their computer (or held until the next time theyâ€™re online). So far, Iâ€™ve only used this for work, but I think Iâ€™m going to set up two folders on my parentâ€™s computers. The first one will be on their desktops, and Iâ€™ll use it to send them family photos and other files (since the whole concept of â€œemail attachmentâ€ seems so confusing to them). The second will be deep inside the folder structure, which Iâ€™ll use for backing up my own files â€“ since all they do is web browse and read email, they never come even close to using up the 160 or 320 GB of space on their hard drives, making it a perfect site for my off-site backup.

5. Drop.io

Drop.io offers an easy way to share large files â€“ with no sign-in or registration necessary. Of course, you can create private, password-protected repositories, but you can also just upload a file and send people the drop.io/whatever URL. You can upload up to 100MB for free, and photos, videos, and audio get converted so they can be viewed or listened to online.

6. Aviary/Picnik

Aviary and Picnik are, believe it or not, high-quality online graphics editor. Aviary is the more complex of the two, offering full-featured vector and raster creation and editing, spread over 4 sub-apps. Picnik is more of a touch-up app, allowing you to sharpen, adjust colors, resize, and do other photo editing tasks. Online image editing is a bit of a solution in search of a problem â€“ local apps like Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, or even IrfanView are more powerful and work faster, but folks with netbooks, especially those with small flash-based drives, will appreciate the ability to work on an image now and again without having to install software or wait for their slower processors to apply unsharp mask..

7. Evernote

Evernote keeps getting better and better. The basic idea is you can make notes in various ways â€“ type directly, clip form the web or other documents, take a picture, record a voice note â€“ and the program keeps it organized. Evernote also syncs to an online repository (subject to transfer limits) and to any other computer you install the client on. Apps for mobiles like iPhones and, just released, Blackberry allow you to create and send notes in a variety of formats from your smartphone (unfortunately, neither iPhones nor Blackberries have good enough cameras for up-close shots of text like business cards â€“ try putting a magnifying glass or card over the lens for close-up shots). My favorite recently-discovered feature is the ability to store and index PDF files, of which I have hundreds (academic articles downloaded for various research projects). Since I have a free account, I donâ€™t sync these online â€“ theyâ€™d quickly use up my monthly transfer allotment.

8. Google Voice

Only available to former Grand Central users, Google Voice offers powerful call forwarding and voicemail services. Basically, you get a single number that you can have forwarded to any or all of your phones â€“ and you can set up rules to decide what gets transferred where. Voicemails can be forwarded as audio files to your email, or you can read â€“ yeah, â€œreadâ€, since they do so-so voice transcription on your messages â€“ them online in a very Gmail-like interface. Got a troublesome caller, maybe from an autodialer system? Mark it as spam and block it, just like email! You can also make low-cost international calls, but a) I donâ€™t have any to make, and b) the process is a bit complex, so Iâ€™ve never tried this.

9. Windows Live Sync

Youâ€™d be forgiven for mistaking Windows Live Sync with Windows Live Mesh â€“ both synchronize files placed into a designated folder over the Internet, and both are free. Oh, and then thereâ€™s Windows Skydrive, which doesnâ€™t sync but, like Mesh, offers online file storage. Apparently, all these services will one day be a single service, probably called Windows Live Skymesh Sync (or, more typically Microsoft, Windows Live File Storage and Online File Synchronization for Windows, Premium Professional Version 2010). Whatever itâ€™s called, the technologies involved are pretty slick â€“ I use Mesh to backup my netbook, storing all my documents in a folder thatâ€™s synched to my â€œregularâ€ computerâ€™s desktop (and from there saved to an external hard drive and, through Mesh, to the Web).

10. Twitter Search

THe only Twitter-related choice in the list, this once gave me heartburn at first â€“ I mean, really? But after a little thought, it seems a more fruitful choice. Twitter Search is what transforms the screaming multitudes on Twitter into a resource â€“ a cross between a social network, news feed, and trend tracker. Itâ€™s real-time, which means you get whatâ€™s going on right now, and several Twitter clients incorporate it into their interfaces. I keep a couple of Twitter searches in columns in Tweetdeck â€“ one that catches sites, tips, and jobs for writers, another that lets me know when people are talking about Lifehack, and a couple of â€œtopic of the momentâ€ searches for whatever Iâ€™m interested in on any given day.

Well, thatâ€™s my take on the Webware 100. A lot of the apps chosen were, to be perfectly honest, a bitâ€¦ well, boring. Maybe thatâ€™s what happens when web applications stop looking like the future and start being the present? In any case, I feel like thereâ€™s more interesting stuff going on out there â€“ maybe youâ€™ve got a favorite web application or service that didnâ€™t make the list? Let us know in the comments.

Follow him on Twitter: @dwax.