Everything
A fast indexing and search utility for Windows.
One Thing Well
A weblog about simple, useful software.
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Posts tagged with search.
glark
A replacement for (or supplement to) the grep family, glark offers: Perl compatible regular expressions, highlighting of matches, context around matches, complex expressions (“and” and “or”), and automatic exclusion of non-text files.
Resurrect Google Cache Links
Restore Google Cache & “Related” links and Hide Instant Preview in Google Search
A Greasemonkey script to rectify Google’s peculiar decision to hide links to cached pages in Instant Preview.
Via @battez.
Vlingo
Simply speak to Vlingo and it will help you get more done, faster and easier than before. Try saying “Text John; What’s up?” or “find italian restaurants” or even “update Facebook; Vlingo rocks!”
A voice assistant for Android.
See also
- Iris, a similar app currently in alpha.
Notmuch
Notmuch is not much of an email program. It doesn’t receive messages (no POP or IMAP suport). It doesn’t send messages (no mail composer, no network code at all). And for what it does do (email search) that work is provided by an external library, Xapian. So if Notmuch provides no user interface and Xapian does all the heavy lifting, then what’s left here? Not much.
Self-deprecating description notwithstanding, Notmuch is well worth a look if you have a large archive of email and want to find messages quickly. It can be used with mutt, from within Vim or Emacs, or via dedicated client alot.
Affinity Search
Affinty is a desktop search tool, which hopes to provide a quick way to get at all the different information on your desktop. It achieves this by having various back-ends, but implemented through one standard interface.
Tunesque
A menu bar app for searching iTunes and the Mac App Store.
Duck Duck Go Bang!
I’ve written about the plucky upstart search engine Duck Duck Go before, but thought I ought to give it another plug now that it’s set as the default search engine in Chrome on both my computers.
The reason? DDG’s !bang syntax, which lets you search more than a thousand sites directly—type !w lovesexy in your browser’s URL/search bar and you’re taken straight to the album’s Wikipedia entry, type !a prince and you find yourself on Amazon’s search results page. DDG is happy to let you search on its rivals, too: if I’m honest, I wouldn’t be able to use it without the !g for Google.
TipToe
Tip Toe was created to make web search easier while on the go. Instead of using the built-in Google search of Safari, you can just search the web from Tip Toe, with a few advantages: the engine is based on Bing and Blekko, with a bit of artificial intelligence on top. It should remove all aggregated results of server farms, and the interface is free of ads. One more point: Tip Toe does NOT track your searches, and respects your privacy.
I confess I’ve never bothered with a dedicated web search app on iOS, but this looks to be perfect for those quick ‘settle an argument’ searches. Or for pub quiz cheats.
Via @patrickrhone
See also:
- DuckDuckGo for iOS.
Manually Block Rubbish Sites from Google Search
If you’re enjoying Google’s recently-added option to block splogs, content farms and MFA sites, the above linked page lets you add them manually, rather than flagging them as they appear. Shame you can’t upload a text file of URLS, but still handy.
Via jaduncan
Churnalism
Enter a press release to see which UK papers and websites have ‘churned’ it into news, complete with slick interactive visualisations of every cut ‘n’ paste.
An example: if you paste this press release into Churnalism, it shows that The Daily Mail churned it into this news item, pasting a whopping 98% of the press release directly into the published article.
So, curious readers and standards bodies can use it to uncover lazy reporting. PR outfits, companies and charities can use it to track the spread of their promotional efforts. And I’m sure folk will come up with more uses, too—under the hood it’s effectively a new type of news search/comparison engine, one that’s especially adept at spotting matching phrases, sentences and passages of text.
Tiny disclaimer: I worked on Churnalism for a couple of days early on in its development, and a friend wrote the backend.
Personal Blocklist
A Chrome extension that lets you block domains from appearing in your Google search results. Your blocking habits are sent to Google, who plan to use the data to improve their ability to keep spammy content farms out of their results.
