The Firefox add-on Context Search X adds additional search engines to Firefox’s right-click context menu to run searches right from there.

Once you have the extension installed in the browser, you can start firing away searches with a right-click on the highlighted phrase and the selection of the search engine that you want to search on.

A list of all available search engines currently configured in the browser are displayed for selection. A click opens the search results page of the selected search engine in a new tab in Firefox.

You can click on Manage Search engines to change the order of search engines in the context menu, remove engines from the listing or modify the extension’s behavior further.

One interesting option is the ability to configure search engines to appear in the root context menu instead of the extension’s submenu.

This is done with a click on the Context Menu button in the interface.

Select the Outside Submenu option to have the selected search engine appear in the root context menu.

If your favorite search engine is not installed in the browser, you can do so by visiting Mozilla’s Search Tools page which lists hundreds of different search engines that can be added with a click. You can alternatively check out Add any Search Box to Firefox Search if your favorite search engine is not listed on the page.

Context Search X is a fork of the popular Firefox Context Search add-on which has not been upgraded for over a year. Firefox users who like to run searches from their context menu should take the add-on for a test drive. Those who are just looking to replace the default search engine can look at Replace Firefox’s Right-Click Search Engine to find out how to do that.

Bing

Microsoft seems to favor ehow, one particular download site and several other sites in their search engine. Quality of those results is usually not that good. The first ehow article for instance is outdated and not applicable anymore, the four remaining answers either are not about Thunderbird or not about JavaScript.

• How to Enable JavaScript in Thunderbird
• How do I turn tabs OFF in Thunderbird 3? – ANSWERED
• How do i disable archiving in thunderbird 3.0? – Will come in …
• In Internet Explorer, how do I enable or disable Java or JavaScript?
• How to Turn on Javascript in a Mac

Google

Google’s results are better. The second result leads to the information that answers your query (JavaScript is no longer supported for mail and news in the browser, and thus does not need to be turned off anymore). In Google, two of the five results give you the answer for your query. That’s better than in Bing, but not optimal either, especially since the first result leads you into the wrong direction.

I have been testing other search engines, DuckDuckGo and Ixquick in particular, to find out if they provide better results than Bing or Google.

Ixquick calls itself the world’s most private search engine. Unlike other search engines, IxQuick does not record user IP addresses or share personal data with third parties. A full page with privacy related information is available on the service’s website.

I have used Ixquick for the last week as my main search engine. There are things that I like, and things that do not work out that well. IXquick, like Bing, provides solid results for short queries. If you are looking for a particular business, software or product, you usually find it in the top spot on the search results page.

Results begin to deteriorate quickly if you add terms to the query. The first five results for the Thunderbird JavaScript query above for instance do not offer the information that you would need to get your question answered. The first result furthermore links to outdated information, just like they did on Bing (a different web property though).

Results are not always that bad though, but they are often not that great either. I also noticed that Google’s results are not always that better for longer queries, but you find pages with the information you are looking for more often there.

Back to Ixquick. Search results are always opened in new tabs instead of the same tab by default. It happened to me more than once that I clicked multiple times on a search result wondering why it would not open when in fact it was opened multiple times in new tabs in the browser. It takes some getting used to time but it is not really that bad.

You can open any page with a proxy that is provided by the search engine itself. This can be handy if a website is blocked in your country.

Do not get me wrong though, search results are not always that bad or that different from other search engines. A few things need improvement though:

• When I’m looking for something product related, e.g. Swtor PVP, I expect the product developer site in the top 5 results.
• When I’m searching for technology related things I expect recent information in the top 5 result if I do not add a version number to the product.
• When I’m searching for a product or business, I expect it to be the number one result in the search results (you will notice that software searches sometimes list download portals in front of the developer site).

All of this applies to Microsoft’s Bing search engine as well, and probably to the majority of other search engines out there. Google’s results are not really that much better or different, but the company somehow manages to often sneak in at least one result that you find your answer on.

I’d still suggest you give Ixquick, Bing or DuckDuckGo a try to see if these search engines return satisfactory search results for you. I for one will now move on to DuckDuckGo for a week to see how it is holding up.

Have you tried other search engines besides Google? Why do not you share your experience in the comments?

Sometimes though you want a more natural way to work with search in Windows and you might be surprised that it does actually exist, but it’s hidden away.

Natural Language Search is an option hidden in the file options.  From a Windows Explorer window click the Organize button and then Folder and Search Options from the menu that appears.

At the next screen, under the Search tab, you can tell Windows 7 to Use Natural Language Search.   This system isn’t perfect but it can a decent fist of commands such as “files created by Mike” or “tiny music files”.

This is an excellent, albeit slightly flawed way to interact with search in Windows 7.  Since this system was designed by Microsoft we have seen great advances in search with Microsoft’s Bing search engine and we can sure that some, if not many of these advances will find their way into the next version of Windows.

It’s a shame really that natural language search, which Google has been tremendously successful with for a decade now, isn’t something we can yet properly use with our computers.  This is especially galling given the ever growing volume of files of different types we are accumulating.  It will be great to see not just improvements to this in Windows 8, but also the feature brought more to the foreground.

Sometimes when I search on a website I try to select a search term that includes inflections. Say I’m looking for the terms replace or replacing on the website. For that I would have to enter replac in the search form so that both terms are found on the page. Another example is the search term use which would reveal not only all instances of use on the page but also used, user and using.

With the Chrome extension, you can enter one term and find all occurrences of all matching terms highlighted on the page.

You bring up the advanced search form after installation by either pressing F2 once of the f-key twice in rapid succession.

The extension highlights all occurrences on the page. If you add more than one search term you will notice that each is colored differently. That’s interesting as it allows you to run multiple searches at once on a page.

The program found all occurrences of use and printing on the page. It will furthermore highlight the total result count in the search form. You can use the up and down arrow buttons to scroll to the next or previous occurrence of a search result on the active web page.

The inflection detection works both ways. You can enter use to find using or user, or enter using to find user or use as well on the page.

Advanced Search on Page is a handy Chrome extension for users who want to find related phrases on a website during searches. The free Chrome extension can be installed at the official Chrome Web Store.

While that is certainly not a issue on most systems, it could lead to issues on some. If you are experiencing pages that do not load, broken applications or other issues you may want to fix or reverse the change.

Before I’m showing you how this is done I’d like to explain what’s happening.

Google recently announced that they would enable https, also known as encrypted, search for all logged in users that visit the main search engine google.com.

Logged in users who load http://www.google.com/ are automatically redirected to https://www.google.com/. Encrypted search can be beneficial as it encrypts the traffic that is send to and received from Google. This means that no one in your computer network (e.g. admins, your boss, your ISP) can see what you are doing on the Google website. They still see that you are on Google, and will see the sites that you click on though.

Using secure connections is an optional feature. On my PC, it is already enabled in the Chrome web browser but not in Firefox. Google has added a preference in the Global Search preferences to enable or disable the secure connection feature.

Google users who notice automatic redirects can prevent this from happening in the search settings. To do that they need to click on the options icon in the upper right corner of the screen (next to the profile name) and select Search Settings from the context menu that opens up.

They then need to scroll down until they find the Secure Connection setting.

Secure connections are enabled if the box is checked. To disable simply remove the check mark and click Save Preferences. This puts an end to redirects to the https version of search.

Update: It appears as if Google has removed the option to disable the redirection to https in the search options. There is no option available anymore to force your Google connections to use http instead of https.

The portable freeware Dropout for the Windows operating system is a search tool that has been designed for exactly this purpose. All you basically need to do is to place the program executable in a directory, for instance the root of the USB drive or your Dropbox folder, to have a sophisticated search application at hand when it is needed.

Dropout displays a search form right on the startup screen. You can use it to find files in the particular directory structure or switch to the more advanced search under the advanced tab.

Dropout indexes all files that are stored in its root directory structure and saves the search information in a folder that it creates in root. The program indexes the contents of some text based file types like txt, pdf or doc so that content matching results are displayed as well in the results list.

The searching itself usually takes less than a second after the initial indexing. The search supports the query parser syntax of Apache Lucene which includes boolean operators, wildcards and grouping options. Search examples provided by the developer on the program homepage include:

• Tests NOT NUnit – Finds all instances of the work Tests but NOT with NUnit
• Scripts AND Tests – Requires the words Scripts AND Tests
• Dev* – Words starting with dev, i.e. Development, Develop, Devious, etc
• type:doc AND Tests: Searches for the word Tests only in *.doc files
• modified:201109* – All files created from September 2011
• modified:[201105 TO 201106]: Files modified between May and June 2011

Results can be sorted by all values including name, modification date or containing folder. The search tool furthermore assigns a score to each hit and makes those scores sortable as well.

A double-click on a file opens it in the default viewer for its file type. A right-click displays a context menu with an option to open the containing folder in Windows Explorer.

The advanced search form offers to search contents, file names, types and filter the results by a start and end modification date.

Windows users can download Dropout from the project homepage over at Codeplex. The program requires the Microsoft .Net Framework 2.0. It is compatible with all recent 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Microsoft Windows operating system.

Alternative search tools are Everything or Locate.

Boounce for the Firefox web browser makes this process a lot easier to handle. On first glance it does nothing more than adding additional search engine links to the bottom of the results listing of supported search engines.

When you click on another search engine there you are taken directly to the search results page of that search engine. There is a twist though that many users will appreciate: Boounce automatically hides duplicate results. The idea behind this is simple. You have not found what you are looking for when switching search engines which means that it does not make sense to display duplicate results.

You can still display the results that have been automatically hidden by the add-on if you want.

Take this search for patio sets for instance. You see the icons that the Firefox extension has added at the very bottom of the results page.

The search engines that are displayed depend on the search phrase. You may only see links to other search engines or shopping related sites mixed in. The latter is for instance the case for the test search query.

You see links to popular search engines like Bing, Google, Blekko or Wolfram Alpha, as well as links to Wikipedia, eBay, Amazon or NexTag.

A click on another search engine opens the engine’s results page in a new tab in the browser. Boounce adds a toolbar to the Firefox browser which you can easily enable or disable. It is not really needed for the functionality but may be convenient for some users who use the extension day in day out.

It needs to be noted at this point that the search engine icons are only displayed when you search using Bing or Google. If you use another search engine as your default, you won’t see the icons at all which leaves the toolbar as another option to run related searches more efficiently.

The toolbar offers another interesting feature. It supports group searches. What this basically means is that you can select to search sites that have been grouped by the makers of Boounce or by you simultaneously.

Just select a group from the extensive selection, for instance Download > Mobile Apps > Android, Business > Finance or Programming and IT > Webmaster. The extension displays the top sites in the toolbar. You can now click on a single site to perform the search, or double-click on a site to open multiple search tabs at once (four is the default value, you can change that in the options).

It appears that you need an account to create your own set of groups. While it is possible to create a custom group in the toolbar, I have not found a way to add search engines to it. The Boounce homepage features a groups gallery that list user generated groups and a list of all supported search engines (more than one thousand according to the developers).

What I like most about Boounce is that it automatically hides duplicate results when you use it to display results in another search engine. I could not move the Boounce icon from the navigation toolbar in Firefox (which I do not use) to another.

Firefox users can download and install Boounce from the official Mozilla Firefox add-on repository.

The files are displayed with their name, the row and column the phrase was found and the phrase surrounded by words before and after. One of the issues that I found was that it was not possible to scroll horizontally. The only option to display all text was to increase the window size significantly.

Filters are available to narrow down the search results. It is for instance possible to search only specific file types or folders, or to exclude files and folders from the search.

Other filters include making the search case sensitive or to limit the results to full word matches. GGrep supports regular expressions just like the original grep application. This opens up several interesting options for more powerful search and replace operations. You could for instance search for euro|dollar to find documents containing either the phrase euro or dollar.

Another interesting feature of GGrep is the option to replace text. While it is possible to use simple text to text replacements, one could use regular expressions for better text matching.

Please note that the program is not displaying a list of possible matches first. When you click Replace the replacing of text happens instantly and without option to undo the changes (other than reversing search and replace strings).

The results of a search or replace can be exported into a csv file which can then be imported into programs like Excel. Windows users who are looking for a powerful search and replace tool should take a closer look at GGrep. The software is compatible with all recent 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the operating system.

While that’s distracting from the search form, it also is something that is highly popular.

Bing today announced an addition to their search engine’s homepage. Users with HTML5 capable browsers may see a video playing instead of the static wallpaper image.

The developers note that this is not something that Bing users should expect to see every day, but that it will be used regularly in the future. Most modern web browsers (e.g. Internet Explorer 9, Google Chrome, Firefox or Opera) should display the video just fine.

It has to be noted that only the US homepage of the search engine is currently showing the HTML5 video on the frontpage. Users from other countries that head over to Bing need to change the country to United States first in the upper right corner to see the HTML5 video in action.

Bing announced that the videos will be rolled out to international markets in the coming months, so that users from all over the world can view the videos on localized versions of the search engine.

I personally have to admit that it looks really well on the homepage, and that loading times do not seem to be longer than before. I was not able to test the connection on a slower machine. It can be that users connecting with low speed Internet connection may have a different experience.

Microsoft has created a video that gives us a look behind the scenes of the Bing homepage.

Have you seen the new HTMl5 video on the Bing homepage? If so, what’s your take on it?

By using certain operators and searching syntax, AQS allows for a significant level of precision with search results. As long as you learn the operators, you will be able to find specific results rapidly. This syntax is a gateway to specified search parameters. This saves time and overall effort. When a file needs to be found, the basic Windows Search option will work, but generally you are presented with a list of possibly related files. You would have to sort through the search results list to find the right file. AQS hones this down and gives you the control to quickly find specific files and applications. The syntax is easy to learn and need only be applied to awaken the AQS potential within Windows 7.

As in the screenshot above, open a Windows Explorer window and search for a term. “Microsoft” was selected in this search and it was narrowed down to the Documents folder as the selected area for the search. The following screen shot is a search for “Reader” on the main hard drive (C :).

This comes up with many different files. This user is looking for Screen captures, so eliminating the term “Adobe” would be favorable in order to find an SC Reader file. Simply add a dash before words you wish to eliminate from the search results.

This yields all files without “Adobe” attached to the filename. The SC file was discovered, as were other important files that may be of use. The point is that the search option changed and the simple syntax entry of (-) before a term negation will alter the search parameters.
Similar to Google, if you want to search for exact phrases, use quotation marks. In this example, the user has documents on social commerce. Social commerce is entered in quotations in the search field.

Apparently the file has multiple copies in a few different locations but it was found quickly nonetheless. Windows Search does not discern between letter cases, so the lettering in the search field is not case sensitive. These are the AQS operators involving text searches:

• NOT/- : Using “not” in addition to a prefix dash tells the search to exclude items in the following term.
• AND/+ : “And” and the prefix of the plus sign aims the search to solely include items matching both search terms.
• Use quotes (“”) to filter for a specified term or phrase

You can take this even further by using search filters. You can search by Kind, Date modified, Type and Size.

Some alternatives to using the mouse include the following syntax:

• search terms >mm/dd/yy
• search terms datemodified:mm/dd/yy..mm/dd/yy
• search terms date:past month

This is just an introduction to Using Windows 7 Advanced Search Operators. There are many options for searching with syntax. Some examples include:

• size:>=4mb < 12mb
• modified:September…yesterday
• type:music bitrate:>=180kbps

This is a phenomenal feature in Windows 7. The ability to use natural language in a GUI advanced search is definitely a wise addition to the geek toolbox.

More recent updates made some sites recover while others still would not return to their previous rankings. The core problem with Panda was that Google did not release a definition of quality. And if you ask one hundred Internet users about their definition of a quality website, you will likely get one hundred different answers.

Google first rolled out Panda to websites in the United States, and there only to English sites and queries. A later update launched Panda for all English speaking websites regardless of their location in the world. Today’s announcement at the Google Webmaster Central Blog marks the next step of the “high-quality sites algorithm” as Google likes to call it. Panda is now used on non-English versions of Google Search as well, with the exception of the Chinese, Japanese and Korean language versions.

According to the information posted, Panda will affect between 6 to 9 per cent of all queries “to a degree that a user might notice”. That’s lower than the initial 12% of affected sites of English queries, but still a considerable amount.

With Panda out in the open almost everywhere: What is your personal impression of Google’s search engine quality as of late? Has Panda improved the results significantly by pushing down lower quality sites? Or did you experience a decrease a value, something that might even have made you use another search engine?

Let me know in the comments.

Lets start to look at how Google Search by image works, before we look at how good it actually is.

You start the search on Google Images. A new camera icon is displayed in the search form, similar to the microphone that is displayed on standard search on Chrome.

Search engine users can click on the icon to display a new search by image overlay. They can paste in an image url, or switch to the upload form to upload an image from their computer. It is alternatively possible to drag images from the desktop or a website to the search interface.

The search results page displays the uploaded image on top, and possible hits below that.

Google will display visually similar images on the page, as well as pages that contain the very same image, opening up new possibilities for owners of the image to find out which websites have copied it.

Testing Google Search by Image

Lets run the new image search through a series of tests.

a. People

Google Search by image shines in this regard. Just upload a portrait photo to the search engine to get more information about the person on the photo. I have tested it with stars like Caroline Quentin, Karen Duffy or Sabina Gadecki, as well as people from the past like John Constable, Goethe or Shakespeare. Google was able to identify the people on the photos correctly even if the file name gave away no clues. Impressive.

b. Locations

Popular locations and landmarks were identified correctly by Google Search by Image. Important sites like the Berlin Dome, Statue of Liberty or the Eiffeltower were all identified correctly.

Results were not that good for lesser known locations, like the Calanque De Sugiton France which is one of the top Bing images today. The Blue Spring State Park in Florida was recognized correctly on the other hand.

c. Objects

Results were better when objects where shown in images. Most were identified correctly, like the Knight’s Templar cross, the Samsung NX100 digital camera, company logos or the picture of a housefly. This opens up interesting possibilities, for instance to find out more about a laptop solely on an image that you have at your disposal, or about a new television that looks incredible.

Verdict

I have not been impressed by most new features that Google rolled out in the past two years or so. Google Images by Search on the other hand is almost to good to be true. The recognition of objects, people and landmarks works very well. It opens up new search possibilities that have not been there in this form before. Especially the mix of search results, something that I have criticized in the past, works well for this type of search.

Why do not you try it out yourself and let me know how it works for you?

Back to Google. The new voice search option is currently being rolled out to google.com visitors who open the search engine’s website in the Chrome browser.

A small microphone is displayed next to the search form if voice search is available. Users need to click on the microphone icon before they can use their voice to search Google. The only requirement is a connected microphone and the Google Chrome browser.

Take a look at the following video that introduces the new feature.

The feature is rolling out, and it may take weeks before all Google visitors get to see the microphone on the main Google page.

Probably the biggest usability issue is that you have to click the microphone before you can start speaking and searching. This slows down search noticeable, especially when compared to searching with the keyboard. It is also necessary to click again whenever you want to search anew.

We have not been able to test the feature yet, but have a few concerns. It is likely that text in the search form gets erased whenever the microphone is used to submit a new search to Google. It is also unlikely that there is an option to correct words with your voice, which means that it may be necessary to use the mouse and keyboard to do that.

It will also be interesting if the speech recognition algorithm will be able to identify English words from users from all over the world correctly. While that’s probably difficulty enough for the different English accents, it is without doubt even more difficulty when foreign users use the feature.

There is however a gap between the Firefox user interface and those search engines. If you want to search, you can either use the built-in search to search on the default search engine (or switch search engines manually before you search on another site), access search websites manually to make the search there directly or make use of extensions that add search options to the context menu or the Firefox interface.

Drag and Drop Zones adds another – innovative – option. The Firefox add-on overlays the entire browser screen sans the user interface elements with drop zones for specific search engines and options. The extension imports all existing local Firefox search engines by default and makes them available on the overlay. New search engines need to be added to the list of available search engines before they become available for selection.

You can move search engines around on the grid in the add-on options. Here it is furthermore possible to remove drop zones, change the overlay color of individual search engines, add new search engines to the overlay or configure general add-on settings.

This includes the the grid size, delay before showing the dropzones and various activation options.

Dropzones are by default activated when you drag text, images or links in Firefox.

To search for a phrase or word on a website you would highlight it, drag it and drop it on the search engine in the overlay that you would like to use.

You can define different colors for search engines, which could be interesting to create search engine groups. The drag search process can be canceled at anytime with the ESC key.

It is not only possible to link search engines to a grid. All context menu items can also be added to grids, which adds new possibilities to the add-on. It is now for instance possible to create drop boxes that save images, bookmark links or print the selected text.

A toolbar button is available to enable and disable the Drag and DropZones add-on. This can be important if you need to perform other drag and drop operations in the Firefox web browsre.

Drag and Drop Zones adds a lot of flexibility to searching and using the context menu. The addition of new search engines could be more comfortable, but that’s the only minor complaint that I have.

Interested users can download the Firefox extension Drag & DropZones from the official Mozilla Firefox add-on repository. The add-on is compatible with all Firefox versions from Firefox 2 on.

At its core, it is almost identical to Google’s solution. The search results are automatically updated whenever you enter or remove characters from the search form.

But similarities end there. Yahoo displays an overlay search box on the search page that is automatically updated, while the search results page is updated on Google.

A box opens around the search form that indicates the direct search interface. It is made up of the search form and button, a list of suggested search terms and a selection of the top results for the selected term.

If you enter win in the search form you see suggestions for Windows Media Player, Windows Live Messenger, Winrar, Oprah Winfrey, Winzip and Windows Update at the top.

It is possible to switch between those suggested results with the keyboard up and down keys or the mouse. The search results change whenever a new suggested term is selected, or if characters are added or removed from the search term.

The results listing displays different results, from the top 3 sites for that search term over shopping information pulled from Yahoo Shopping, interesting locations or places for countries or cities to media information with direct trailer links.

A search for London demonstrates one of the weaknesses of the algorithm. One would expect to find London city information, but the direct result is for the movie London.

A click on the search button loads the standard search results. Surprisingly enough, the first search results is either Yahoo’s own London visitor guide or the Visit London website. It feels rather strange that the movie is displayed instead in the direct search interface.

The new search interface has only been enabled on search.yahoo.com and not the main Yahoo domain or a country subdomain. A search on the main Yahoo website on the other hand loads the website where Yahoo Search Direct can be tested.

The way the results are presented will surely drive Yahoo revenues up, considering that many searches only reveal hits from Yahoo Shopping or other Yahoo properties.

It is however just the next logical step for search engines, from indexing and sorting the web, to keeping users on their properties to increase their revenue even more. Google does that as well with integration of their services in the search engine results.

I personally cannot see myself using Yahoo Search Direct. The limit of three results, and sometimes even less, is just not enough most of the time to find what I’m looking for.

What’s your impression of the new feature?

Disable Yahoo! Search Direct

It is possible to turn off Yahoo! Search Direct. Click on More > Preferences on the main search website

Locate Search Direct – Change the Search Direct Layer Frequency on the new page and click the Edit button right beneath the setting. Click on Off and then the Save button to save the new preference.

These settings are saved temporarily if you are not logged into a Yahoo account, and permanently if you are logged in. Temporarily means that Yahoo saves a cookie on your computer that contains the control. If the cookie is deleted, the information that Yahoo Search Direct has been disabled are lost and the function becomes active again.

So what’s the best way to deal with search engines that do not provide the information you need, even if you know how to perform advanced searches?

Right, you create your own. I’m not saying that I did program a new search engine though; It is merely a custom search engine based on Google that concentrates on the best tech sites in the world.

You can access and try the search here http://www.ghacks.net/search.htm and I’d love to hear your thoughts about it, especially:

• Are sites missing from search that you believe should be included?
• Are sites included that do not belong there?
• Would you like to see additional features?
• Would you like to see other design elements, more design elements?

Please note that the search engine is no replacement for Google Search, Bing Search or Yahoo, Ask and other search engines. Let me give you an example why:

If you search the custom search engine for eBay you won’t see eBay at the top. Why? Because it is not included in the list of sites. If you need a search engine to find eBay you should stick to the standard search engines.

A list of tech sites that are included in the search engine is available here as a Excel document: tech-sites

What you will get results for are related searches, best eBay sniper software, firefox 4 changes, ipad 2 reviews, windows 7 service pack 1 download, windows troubleshooting tips, computer repair and so on.

If you are looking for tips and tricks, best practices, gadget and software reviews, freeware and everything else that makes tech great, then this search engine is right for you. You won’t find low quality results in the mix, no scraper sites and no spam and ad infested sites.

I’m sure that the search engine needs refinement, new sites that I missed to add, more controls and the like. I did have to start somewhere and this is it. You can test if your favorite tech site is included with a site:domain name search, e.g. site:ghacks.net.

Oh, and don’t forget, let me know what you think. Here is the link again: Tech Search.

So how can you search a website by date and time if the website itself is not offering that functionality? Easy, you use a search engine like Google (I’d say Bing as well but Bing does not offer date and time filters currently). Lets take a look at the default search results first on the userscripts.org website.

The top five lists one result from 2010, three from 2009 and one from 2006 of which all are not working anymore. Lets take a look at the advanced site search on Google for the same search.

The Google search shows the most recent hits on userscripts.org for the specified search term. How was it done? Lets take a closer look at the search phrase:

site:userscripts.org keyword

This is the basic search phrase. The site: command followed by a web address tells Google that you only want to search that site, the keyword can consist of one or multiple terms. You can use boolean parameters like AND, OR as well in the query. If you would search for this Google would display similar results to those on the original website. To sort by date and time use the sidebar and switch from any time to another option, for instance past month. Please note that the search results are not sorted chronologically. Google places the most relevant result at the top. But since you have selected a different time range you can be sure that you only see results that have been created during that time frame. Users who want to see results from a specific day or custom time range can use the custom range option to filter the results.

The advanced search parameter can be helpful in numerous occasions. It can for instance be used if a site does not offer a search at all, or if the search is limited in functionality, for instance if there is no option to sort the results by date or time.

In the interview, Schmidt described Microsoft’s search engine as their main competitor, describing it as a “well-run, highly competitive search engine.”

He said that Microsoft need to be watched and implied that they had perhaps been written-off prematurely by the media, especially where Bing is concerned.

The Bing search engine now also powers Yahoo! search and Bing recently overtook Yahoo to take second place in the search engine rankings.  This isn’t bad for a search engine that comes from a family of search engines that had awful reputations, and that’s achieved this in less than 18 months.

It was also clear that Google’s smartphone and tablet operating system, Android, is a secondary concern and that Apple, as a result, isn’t the main competitive focus of the company.

This is not really a surprise as search and advertising provide Google with almost all of its revenue.  The free Android OS must be a drain on resources and is really only a way to help market the Google name and maintain consumer goodwill towards the company.

You can view the entire interview on the Wall Street Journal’s website.

Search becomes polluted with ads and additional options that most users do not want or seem to care about. Even worse, the search quality seems to have dropped in that time as well.

The newest addition to Google Search is a change for some searches, that will have a huge impact on search engine users and webmasters.

Before the change, a single domain could only occupy two slots of the ten available slots on any page in the results. Authoritative sites were able to get an additional boost with site links, displayed under their first result.

With the change, a single site can occupy up to seven of the ten slots on any Google search results page, leaving three for other domains.

The example that Samarth Keshava, Software Engineer at Google gives is a search for exhibitions at amnh which now displays seven results from the official American Museum of Natural History website in the top seven slots of the search results.

Why is that bad? Mainly because the first link in the search results lists the official exhibitions page at the museum. The remaining six results lists specific exhibitions, which the user could also access by clicking on the first search result.

And Google did even offer a solution for this cases until now by displaying the “more results from domain” beneath the search listing.

And then there is the site: command, which would only display search results from a specific domain if desired.

There are situations where a query like this may make sense, for instance when looking for articles on a specific site, e.g. ghacks windows which now behaves similar to the site command, by displaying multiple site listings of the site.

In the end, it depends on the reach of the new feature. If Google has managed to limit it to very specific queries, where users are searching for information from the site, then it’s a welcome addition.

If they however did not find the right ratio, then it may put a lot of businesses and websites in jeopardy. Webmasters who would like to discuss the topic find threads in all popular webmaster forums, including Webmaster World.

What’s your take on this change in Google Search?

Google has made lots of changes to Google Search in the past, and while some of them made sense, others did not.

Google’s latest experiment is only accessible by a minority of search engine users, a typical sign of a feature that is tested with a life audience.

This experiment, apparently one of about 50-200 Google is running at all times updates the search results page automatically when the user types in characters in the search form.

While we did not have the option to test the feature, it looks similar to pages that are powered by Ajax to make content changes without reloadings.

SEO consultant Rob Ousbey was the first to spot the new experiment. Rob even made a video of the new feature which is embedded below.

As you can see, the contents of the search results page change with the characters typed into the search form.

But how useful is that new feature? Users who know what they are looking for may not need the auto updating search results nor the search suggestions displayed beneath the search form.

Users who only vaguely know what they are looking for may benefit from this slightly, as it visualizes the search results to them directly, so that it becomes possible to alter them by changing the phrase, all without page loads.

This on the other hand means that more bandwidth is used in Google Search, as every new search results page has to be loaded even if they are not used at all.

What’s your take on this new feature? Annoying, or useful?