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Chrome: Select Search is a Chrome Extension that pops up a ballon with a number of search engines when you select a block of text. When you double-click on a word or phrase you can quickly pop open a search in Google, YouTube, Wikipedia, Binsearch, and others.
If you find yourself continually opening new tabs to search for content you find on a page Select Search is a handy little tool to have around. When you select a block of text, a small pop-up appears and you can click on icons to search Google, Google Images, Wikipedia, Twitter, Binsearch, Facebook, eBay, Google Maps, YouTube, Geograph, Flickr, and Nzbindex. You can add and remove search engines in the options. New searches are done in a new tab so you don't have to worry about losing your place.
If you're sick of seeing content farms and other spammy links showing up in your Google search results, you can manually block any site through your Google Account preferences. Here's how.
Google added a new feature to their search results page that let you block any search result after viewing the page. However, having to navigate to the page first was kind of annoying, and lately, I've been finding that this "Block _____.com" link doesn't even show up most of the time—meaning I kept getting crappy search results with no way to filter them.
Reader Java-Princess, however, discovered that Google has another method for blocking sites. All you need to do is head to this page and type in a URL in the text box at the bottom. You can also unblock sites you've previously blocked, which is great if you ever blocked a site accidentally, or if a specific site decides to become more useful in the future. Hit the link to check out the feature, and let us know what useless sites you've blocked in the comments below.
Googler Daniel Russell knows how to find the answers to questions you can't get to with a simple Google query. In his weekly Search Research column, Russell issues a search challenge, then follows up later in the week with his solution—using whatever search technology and methodology fits the bill. This week's challenge: Are there more languages above or below the equator?
We were talking the other day about how languages came into being. You know the stories—English grew out of the Anglo-Saxon dialects with dashes of other languages (especially French and Latin) added in. The title image is one view of how languages are scattered around the world.
But then the discussion grew a bit more heated... Did languages arise because of geographic isolation, did they come about because of drift over time, or... what?
After a few glasses of wine, various complex and learned theories were bandied about, and in the end we boiled it down to one really interesting search problem that we couldn't resolve with a quick Google search:
Are there more languages ABOVE the Equator or BELOW the Equator?
A big part of answering questions like this is making your terms very clear. For this question, let's consider only Official languages (that is, languages recognized by the country) and not worry about relative sizes of speakers. We're just interested in whether or not countries below the Equator have more languages than those above the Equator.
To take an example, we know Switzerland has four "official" languages (German, French, Italian and Romansch). Romansch has been recognized as one of four "national languages" by the Swiss Federal Constitution since 1938.
So, once you figure out what the languages of all the world's countries are, and divide them into languages spoken above-equator and below-equator, you'll be set to give the answer. Notice that some languages (such as French or English) are spoken both above and below the Equator.
And for countries that straddle the Equator, let's go with the location of the capital as deciding if the country is above or below. Thus, Ecuador (capital: Quito, at 0° 9' 0? S, 78° 21' 0? W) is in the southern hemisphere.
Obviously, you don't want to do this one country or one language at a time, so the real question is... HOW will you do this?
As usual, please let us know your answer, HOW you figured it out, and HOW LONG it took for you to figure this out!
More above or below? The ideal solution will actually determine some way of measuring this directly from data available on the web.
Search on!
Wednesday Search Challenge (3/21/12): Are there more languages above or below the equator? | SearchReSearch
Daniel M. Russell studies the way people search and research—an anthropologist of search, if you will. You can read more from Russell on his SearchReSearch blog, and stay tuned for his weekly challenges (and answers) here on Lifehacker.
A job itself is a broad idea. Being a developer or a chef or an engineer can mean different things at different companies. As a result, trying to figure out how you'd do a particular job well isn't specific enough. Willy Franzen, founder of job-finding site OneDayOneJob.com, believes that you need to understand what doing that job well entails at a specific company. That involves knowing the company's narrative, its opinions, and its place in the industry:
People lead with the job and I think that's totally wrong. You go to the job board and you find a job. It's medieval. If you don't understand what the company is and what they do, the job doesn't have meaning. It's just a piece of a puzzle. You have this little piece but you don't understand the context on how it fits in.
Instead of looking at a job posting and applying for it, take apart the details inside. Look at the company. Look at the name of the person who posted it. Is it a hiring manager or recruiter? Look at the news. What's happening with the company? What about the industry? There's so many plot and sub-plots here that you need to understand to be successful in that job.
If you're in the market for a new job, keep this in mind. It's not enough to simply consider how the job can be done well because positions will often be treated with relevant differences at different companies.
Willy Franzen: How The Internet Has Changed The Job Hunt | The 99 Percent
Googler Daniel Russell knows how to find the answers to questions you can't get to with a simple Google query. In his weekly Search Research column, Russell issues a search challenge, then follows up later in the week with his solution—using whatever search technology and methodology fits the bill. This week's challenge: Where's that cat with the Mai Tai?
I was wandering around the Bay area and came across a remarkable statue.
Even more amazingly, once I saw it, I realized that this bronze cat has a deep connection to that rum concoction known as the Mai Tai.
Given just the photos shown here, you should be able to figure out what the connection is. Can you? What possible connection can there be between this statue and a rum drink?
For extra credit, you should be able to easily determine the lat/long of the statue. Can you find an aerial image of the cat?
Googler Daniel Russell knows how to find the answers to questions you can't get to with a simple Google query. In his weekly Search Research column, Russell issues a search challenge, then follows up later in the week with his solution—using whatever search technology and methodology fits the bill. This week's challenge: Where's that cat with the Mai Tai?
Short answer: This cat is a bronze statue sculpted by Vic ("Trader Vic") Bergeron. It stands outside of McCone Hall on the UC Berkeley campus at lat/long 37.873763, -122.259545. "Trader Vic" is the inventor of the Mai Tai rum drink. (For what it's worth, that lat/long can also be written in old-school style as:
+37° 52' 25.55", -122° 15' 34.36"
And now... how to find it: Here's what I really did... Given that the picture was pretty high res, I just zoomed in and read the plaque at the bottom of the statue. Duh. But in a search challenge, every clue is fair game. Once you zoom in enough you can read it was sculpted by Vic Bergeron, which seems like a pretty obvious clue. A quick search for [Vic Bergeron Mai Tai] and you'll find many articles (including the Wikipedia entry about Trader Vic's that argue that he was at least one of the two people who claimed to have invented the Mai Tai (the other person being Donn Beach, of "Don the Beachcomber" fame).
Several readers noted that the mini-plaza around the statue seemed university-like, and that's a good clue as well. But for a question like this, I always just start by asking the simplest possible question with a query like [sabertooth cat statue bronze] and then switch into Images mode to see what I could spot there. Sure enough, I found the picture just a few rows down. From that image I learned it was at Berkeley, so a quick second source search led me to a result from Berkeley.edu, a result that is a tour of McCone Hallt — which seems pretty substantially credible. It even included the reference to the Mai Tai:
"...The saber-toothed cat, Smilodon californicus, whose likeness menaces the southern entrance to the building, is the official California State Fossil. It was sculpted by Victor Bergeron (of Trader Vic's fame) who is more widely known around the globe for his Mai Tai than for his sculptures..."
I have to admit to being surprised by a few of the answers submitted by readers. Who knew, for instance, that doing a query for [Sabre Toothed Cat, University Drive, Berkeley, CA] in Google Maps would work? Nice discovery.
Using the lat/long from above, these are the best aerial images I could find.
By the way, you CAN extract the lat/long from the link, but it's much better if you install the lat/long tool in Maps, then just right-click on any point in the map to capture the exact lat/long location.
Most people reported finding this one in less than 10 minutes. Next week, we'll go back to harder questions! Get ready!
March 1st marks the date when Google’s new unified privacy policy takes effect, and once the new privacy policy goes live, Google will be able to combine all of your search history with each of your Google profiles, and use it to target you with (in their opinion) better search results as well as advertisements. Google’s terms of service are also changing, but only so that the legibility of them read much more transparently.
Google is implementing these changes because they want to make their 70-odd individual privacy policies and terms of service simpler, and for the benefits of their millions of users they are trimming the fat and making these agreements much more digestible. By having far fewer pages to read and agree to, Google is ensuring the safety of their users by not masking any vague details that will allow any malicious activity that you would expect a behemoth company to do.
Clearing your entire search history is very simple and straightforward, but be sure to note that you will have to do this for every unique Google account you own, should you wish to clear them all.
Step One: Sign into your desired Google account.
Step Two: In the address bar of your browser, click this link, or copy and paste this URL in a new window and hit enter: https://google.com/history
Step Three: Click “Remove all Web History”
Step Four: Click “Ok”, and you’re all done!
Your privacy is important while browsing the Internet, and whether or not you agree with Google’s new methodology of search result delivery and targeting ads, it’s important to know you have the option to remain as private as Google will possibly allow you to be. You should also know that Google Chrome has a private-browsing feature as well, called “incognito mode”.
Interested in making your Google experience better? Check out this Hack College Infographic that allows you to get the most out of Google by enhancing your search operators to finding exactly what you may be looking for: Getting More Out Of Google.
A big thanks to EFF for pointing this out.
If you have other great Google tips, feel free to send them my way via email: greg[at]hackcollege.com.
HTTPS has been the default protocol for the past months for users connecting to the google.com website. Google switched to https on by default last year, from previously offering https connections as an option in the search settings. Web users who load http://www.google.com/ in a browser will notice that they are automatically redirected to the https version of the site. The idea here is to improve the overall security of the connection, and to eliminate eavesdropping and traffic snooping attacks while using the service.
Google users previously had the option to turn off https in the search engine, but Google since then has removed the option so that every google.com user is now using the https protocol to connect to Google.
Google a week ago in the company’s official Inside Search blog has announced that https will be rolled out to all international search properties of the company.
We’re now ready to expand this protection, so over the next few weeks we will begin introducing SSL search beyond google.com to our local domains around the globe. As before, we hope that these efforts to expand the use of SSL encryption in our services motivate other companies to adopt SSL more broadly.
International users can currently open the https version of their localized Google search engine, say google.in directly by entering https://www.google.in/ whenever they want to access it. This is a manual process though, which in the coming weeks will be replaced by an automatic redirect. From that moment on it does not really matter if google.in, http://google.in/ or https://google.in/ are entered, as they all lead to the https version of the site.
It is unlikely that users will notice any issues with the protocol change. The best way to test that is to connect to the https version of Google Search right now to see if it does.
Google offers a few preset search filters for time—past hour, day, week, etc.—but if you want much fresher information, you can tweak the URL. This will limit results so see what's happening in more of a near real-time flow of information.
In the address bar, look for the qdr: parameter, e.g.:
The "h" here stands for hour. Substitute the "h" or whatever comes after the qdr: with either n for minutes or s for seconds and the number you want to limit your search by. So, for example, you could make it qdr:n10 as I did here to bring up information indexed in the past ten minutes.
This is a trick we've mentioned previously in conjunction with a handy bookmarklet that did the real-time searching for you so you didn't have to tweak the URL, but unfortunately the bookmarklet seems to have disappeared. Paul Anthony's post at the WebDistortion blog reminded me again of this trick to bring back Google real-time searching, in a sense.
The search team at Google has created a short video that puts all the useful stuff you can do on Google.com, plus some search tricks, in one place.
The search team at Google has created a short video that puts all the useful stuff you can do on Google.com, plus some related search tips and tricks, in one place.
If you are a “power” Google user, you may not find anything new in this video but for the rest of us, this is a good recap of the kind of searches you can perform at Google.com.
And I just learned that you can drag images from the desktop and drop them on to the Google Images website and it will find similar images on the Internet – that’s much faster than using the “Browse” button.
There are many search engines on the internet which can be used to search varies types of websites by entering a keyword to the search engine. However, Google is the most popular search engine in the World. These search engines perform several activities such as crawling, indexing, processing, calculating and relevancy and retrieving in order to deliver the desired search results. Unlike these search engines, there are several search engines which can be used to search images by uploading an image to the search engine instead of typing a keyword. These search engines are called Reverse Image search engines. Therefore, this technology can be used to find duplicate images on the internet. Suppose that your photos are copied by another person without having your permission and that person published photos to the internet, now you can search those photos using these reverse image search engines.
TinEye is the most powerful image search engine in the internet so that you find almost all the duplicate images for your image search. Go to the website from this link http://www.tineye.com
Upload any photo to the TinEye and click search for results. It will give almost all the duplicate images as results.
The following are the other popular reverse image search engines. Google images : Google has recently launch a reverse image search engine Byo Image Search :This search engine is based on the color palette uniformity basically. However, it include theme based algorithm. They utilize a search technology called Piximilar visual. It analyses large number of image attributes such as color, shape, texture, luminosity, complexity etc.Gazpopa : In this search engine, The similarity is compared on the bases of the bases images color and shape match which works nicely however at some times it can get confusing results.RevIMG : It finds images using an algorithms based on shape, dimensions, and colors.Please remember to put your comments below for this article.
Have you ever been overwhelmed with something like 3,330,000 search results for a search you have put into your favourite search engine only to find that you don’t really find anything specific to your requirement until you go through several pages of results the search engine has thrown up at you?? I normally find things that other people don’t and people often come to me for help. So I decided to share the tricks that I use here… searching the web is a skill in itself as you have to make the right choice of words but it surely can be developed. Here I will explain to you with the help of screenshots how to get search results specific to what you are looking for. If you think the screenshot is not clear enough just click on it and it will open up as a bigger and clearer image in a new window. I have put in a google search tool at the top of this page so that you can practice from this page itself while you read my post.
Let us search for : chocolate sponge cake recipe
The above search results show recipes for even vanilla sponge cake, cheese cake, etc. which you aren’t looking for.
Tip 1 : Use double quotation marks (" ") around phrases to make sure that they are searched exactly as is, with the words side by side in the same order.
Now let’s try using quotes and make a search for : “chocolate sponge cake recipe”
See the difference in results below. You will get results which match the exact order of the phrase enclosed in quotes.
Tip 2 : You can use the plus (+) and/or minus (-) signs in front of words to force their inclusion and/or exclusion in searches.
Let us search for : “chocolate sponge cake recipe” + “eggless”
If you don’t want eggless recipes you could try a search like : "chocolate sponge cake recipe" -"eggless" Please note that the minus sign should be immediately to the left of the word/phrase you want results without. There should be no space in between the minus sign and the word/phrase.
Googler Daniel Russell knows how to find the answers to questions you can't get to with a simple Google query. In his weekly Search Research column, Russell issues a search challenge, then follows up later in the week with his solution—using whatever search technology and methodology fits the bill. This week's challenge: A simple, yet seemingly impossible puzzle.
Short answer to the challenge... The Egg of Columbus
(But read on for the rest of the story!)
This search challenge was harder than I thought… but for an interesting reason. I'll take the blame here-the question ("English 4-word idiomatic expression for something thought to be impossible, but shown to be trivial") is not exactly a cleanly defined, clearly answerable kind of question!
As a consequence, people found all KINDS of answers that I hadn't thought about.
Forest for the trees Cutting the Gordian knot Thinking outside the box Keep it simple stupid Hiding in plain sight To square the circle If it were a snake it would have bit me (so close… but too long!) Elephant in the room Needle in a haystack
And even some unusual ones:
Riddle of the Sphinx L'spirit de esclair
Alas, while many are close, they're not exactly right. "Cutting the Gordian knot" has the right sense of a sudden rapid solution to an unsolvable problem.
Thing is, I hadn't thought of that phrase as a possible solution. So kudos to those of you who made all of these suggestions. I'd put "Cutting the Gordian knot" as a correct answer, with "Forest for the trees" and "thinking outside the box" as decent half-credit answers. (They don't saying anything about the solution, just the path to the clever solution.)
As you can see, writing a nice, hard search problem that has a neat, instantly recognizable solution is tricky.
Out of the roughly 20,000 who read this problem, only 3 found the answer I planned: JacobM, Johns1111 and Amarek all found what I'd INTENDED which is such problem/solutions are called "The Egg of Columbus"—as in the sentence "That's a real 'Egg of Columbus' type problem.'
JacobM solved the problem by searching for [ seems | looks impossible ] (where the vetical bar symbol means OR). He found some idiom collections and flipped through them until finding the right one. This is a really good approach!
In the comments, Johns1111 points out that in German this would be "das Ei des Kolumbus," which is a transliteration of "The Egg of Columbus," and, in my opinion, quite correct. Congrats also to Amarek for also finding the same solution.
The Back Story to this problem: This problem was originally given to me by a friend who knew that such a phrase existed, but he couldn't think of what it was. If it makes you feel any better, I worked on-and-off on this question for about 4 weeks, trying new ways to search for it… basically looking for a way to rephrase the question so that the results would contain the answer.
After trying lots of queries (example: [ phrase simple solution hard problem ] or [ idiom for sudden answer discovery ] ) I finally tried the query: [ discovery easy "after the fact" ]
My reasoning was that someone writing about this idiom would have to use the phrase after the fact and use that phrase in the context of discovering an easy solution. That's how I chose my search terms.
Luckily, it worked out well. But truthfully, only after a lot of systematic search on my part.
The Wikipedia entry for "Egg of Columbus" has the following explanation for the phrase which I like.
The Egg of Columbus story might have begun with the Italian historian Girolamo Benzoni. In his book History of the New World (1565) he wrote: Columbus was dining with many Spanish nobles when one of them said: 'Sir Christopher, even if your lordship had not discovered the Indies, there would have been, here in Spain which is a country abundant with great men knowledgeable in cosmography and literature, one who would have started a similar adventure with the same result.' Columbus did not respond to these words but asked for a whole egg to be brought to him. He placed it on the table and said: 'My lords, I will lay a wager with any of you that you are unable to make this egg stand on its end like I will do without any kind of help or aid.' They all tried without success and when the egg returned to Columbus, he tapped it gently on the table breaking it slightly and, with this, the egg stood on its end. All those present were confounded and understood what he meant: that once the feat has been done, anyone knows how to do it.
Image of Columbus breaking the egg by William Hogarth (Wikipedia).
Whether or not the story is true, it has entered into the world as an idiomatic expression for "seemingly impossible to solve, but actually trivial." An excellent idiom.
Search lessons: (1) First, as should be obvious, finding idioms is hard. People who searched in idiom dictionaries were on to something. That's a great strategy for searching out this kind of information. I tried a couple before giving up, hoping to stumble across it (which is what happened).
(2) You sometimes have to search for the right query. I tried a lot of queries in my search (at least 100 over the 4 week period) before I found the right combination of search terms that led me to the answer. I was really interested (which is why I dedicated so much time to the problem).
My big tip about long searches is pretty simple: Keep track of what you've searched for and found. That's especially true for long search processes that take weeks. I just kept an open text file with my "search notes" in it. It really prevented me from duplicating my searches and let me systematically eliminate possibilities.
Daniel M. Russell studies the way people search and research—an anthropologist of search, if you will. You can read more from Russell on his SearchReSearch blog, and stay tuned for his weekly challenges (and answers) here on Lifehacker.
Have you ever been overwhelmed with something like 3,330,000 search results for a search you have put into your favourite search engine only to find that you don’t really find anything specific to your requirement until you go through several pages of results the search engine has thrown up at you?? I normally find things that other people don’t and people often come to me for help. So I decided to share the tricks that I use here… searching the web is a skill in itself as you have to make the right choice of words but it surely can be developed. Here I will explain to you with the help of screenshots how to get search results specific to what you are looking for. If you think the screenshot is not clear enough just click on it and it will open up as a bigger and clearer image in a new window. I have put in a google search tool at the top of this page so that you can practice from this page itself while you read my post.
Let us search for : chocolate sponge cake recipe
The above search results show recipes for even vanilla sponge cake, cheese cake, etc. which you aren’t looking for.
Tip 1 : Use double quotation marks (" ") around phrases to make sure that they are searched exactly as is, with the words side by side in the same order.
Now let’s try using quotes and make a search for : “chocolate sponge cake recipe”
See the difference in results below. You will get results which match the exact order of the phrase enclosed in quotes.
Tip 2 : You can use the plus (+) and/or minus (-) signs in front of words to force their inclusion and/or exclusion in searches.
Let us search for : “chocolate sponge cake recipe” + “eggless”
If you don’t want eggless recipes you could try a search like : "chocolate sponge cake recipe" -"eggless" Please note that the minus sign should be immediately to the left of the word/phrase you want results without. There should be no space in between the minus sign and the word/phrase.
Google will render a heart shape for this Math equation that you can pass to your Valentine.
This Valentine’s day, try sending your geeky loved one a Google search query instead of an e-greeting and they may like the little surprise that’s in store for them.
When you put any Math equation in Google, it will try to plot of a graph of that equation just like your scientific calculation. And one such equation, listed below, renders a heart curve that you can pass on to your Valentine.
To give it a try, just copy-paste the following query in Google. Thanks Suhel.
sqrt(cos(x))*cos(300x)+sqrt(abs(x))-0.7)*(4-x*x)^0.01, sqrt(6-x^2), -sqrt(6-x^2) from -4.5 to 4.5Single Google Query uses 1000 Machines in 0.2 secondsMost Popular Search Query Words – FreeAmine – You made my Valentine’s DayWhat Search Keywords Bring Traffic to Google.com?Google Blog Search Now Reads Links on Web PagesAmit Agarwal is a personal technology columnist at WSJ India, author and founder of Digital Inspiration, a widely-read tech and how-to blog. Send him an email at amit@labnol.org.
Google offers a few preset search filters for time—past hour, day, week, etc.—but if you want much fresher information, you can tweak the URL. This will limit results so see what's happening in more of a near real-time flow of information. 
Googler Daniel Russell knows how to find the answers to questions you can't get to with a simple Google query. In his weekly Search Research column, Russell issues a search challenge, then follows up later in the week with his solution—using whatever search technology and methodology fits the bill. This week's challenge: A simple, yet seemingly impossible puzzle.
Amit Agarwal is a personal technology columnist at WSJ India, author and founder of Digital Inspiration, a widely-read tech and how-to blog. Send him an email at amit@labnol.org.