The battle for search is still going strong. All search companies are continually tweaking and adjusting their algorithms to help improve their search results and keep those same formulas for being gamed by developers.
 
With Microsoft releasing Bing and Google working on their newest search algorithm called Google Caffeine, there’s a lot of effort around incorporating the idea of social search with your organic results.
One of my biggest complaints about search is that my results are impacted by just about everything that’s available on the web. If I’m searching for a question about a certain topic, I don’t want to get …read more

This post may be pretty basic for many people but I’ve decided I should write-up a quick article about it anyway. I frequently come into contact with people who love using Google and have it set as their default search engine, yet they don’t customize it to their preferences.

There are a variety of settings you can set to tell Google search to act the way you want it to act. If you want to access all of these options, just look for the “Settings” link in the top, right-hand corner of the screen on the main Google search page.

Interface Language …read more

My good friend Dr. Thomas Ho made me aware of a development from Google this evening that I think will be pretty interesting if executed well. And let’s be honest, most of what Google does is done fairly well.

It appears that Google will be adding some social search functionality to their toolbox. Currently in development in the Google Labs, we’re told it should be coming publicly available soon.
The idea is that when you search, there will be results offered from those in your social networks as well. So, if you’re searching for images, you can bet that your friends images …read more

About a month ago now I wrote about a website called Aardvark that combines the power of social media with searching. Search engines by themselves are great, but you’ve got to know some of the tricks of working the Google machine and its counterparts.

I received an email earlier today from Aardvark’s CEO, Max Ventilla, letting me know that they are now equipped to work with and take advantage of the power of twitter. I never knew aardvarks and birds could have produced such a symbiotic relationship as this.
The formatting of how to use Aardvark with twitter is very straight …read more

When I started my computer earlier today I noticed something different along the very bottom of my monitor. It was something new in the Windows Start taskbar that I hadn’t seen before. Something had invaded my system and put something there I don’t remember asking for in the past.

There was a new button sitting right next to my "Start" button. I was familiar with the name on the button, as I’ve been generally pleased with my experiences using their products.

It appears in a recent update to my Google Toolbar, which I don’t remember approving automatic updates to my …read more

Every Sunday, I perform a set of jobs on all my computers. They help optimize the system, save hard disk space, increase security and privacy, etc.
 
Clean: Using CCleaner, I clean the PCs including all the browser caches and various other application caches. (Read my introduction to CCleaner here.)
Disk Cleanup: I run disk cleanup ($ leanmgr) on all the drives.
Registry: I run a registry cleaner (these days CCleaner itself) to clean the registries, after taking a backup of the current registry set.
Virus Scan: I run an entire PC scan, not just the scan across the “commonly infected areas”.
Defragment: Using …read more

find is an elaborate search program with a number of features. Unlike the Google Desktop Search and locate, it doesn’t index anything but processes the request on the fly. Thus it is slower.
find is one of the most useful commands when you also have to search within unknown files and make further operations on the result set. It does a recursive search, looking in all subdirectories.
The first set of arguments is always the paths where the search should initiate. $ find /home /tmp <remaining arguments> would search based on the remaining arguments in /home, /tmp and all their subdirectories. If …read more

Every once in a while, there is some file that you know you’ve saved but yet can’t find it. Windows Search comes handy at such times but is very slow. Windows Desktop Search, a new utility that is now being shipped with the Windows OSs and being given as an update works using indexing. I think it was started to beat the competition of Google Desktop Search.
IMHO, both Windows and Google Desktop Search consume too many resources.
e.g. Windows Desktop Search recommends Pentium 1 GHz Processor and 256 MB RAM, 500 MB of free hard disk space,… A process that starts …read more