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Cheap Tricks for computer success
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Searchin’, searchin’…As mentioned in a recent Cheap Trick of the Week, you can narrow down your search in most search engines by using the title prefix. For instance, if you enter title:aardvark in search engines such as Yahoo, HotBot, AltaVista, InfoSeek and Excite, you’ll get results that include only those with the word "aardvark" in their Web site title, such as "The Aardvark Page". But now two more search tips are revealed. You can also use the url prefix to select only sites that have the word in their URLs (Web site addresses). So url:aardvark will turn up results like www.souprecipes.com/aardvark.html. Or use the domain prefix to narrow your search to domains, such as .com, .org, .ca and so on. For example, a search on aardvark domain:.org might turn up www.exoticpets.org/aardvark.html. In Yahoo, the title and url prefixes can be shortened to t and u, as in t:aardvark and u:aardvark. Free *Cheap Trick* of the Week: March 20, 2000 |
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| This naturally leads into a related discussion. What if you're on a manufacturer's Website and can't find the information you need? So many of these Websites are designed without the user in mind that it's truly amazing. Some are well-designed and you can find what you want. But what about the others? Suppose you need:
How the heck can you find this on most manufacturer sites or vendor sites? The navigation drives you around in circles, and the search function says "No results found." How do you find what you're looking for? The answer is leave that site and use Google. Because most Webmasters submit a sitemap to Google, even items they make impossible to find on their own sites show up in a Google search. When searching, though, make sure you use words that pertain exactly to what you're looking for with the most germane word first. Leave out words that don't define anything (e.g. articles such as "the"). Generally, the taxonomy should be in this order manufacturer name, model number, item.
What about searching on your hard drive? Use a similar taxonomy, but it won't work unless you are making a habit of saving with good filenames. Think in terms of how you'd identify the item so it's unique. One good technique is to put the date at the end of a document. Note that dates on a computer are ALWAYS in the format YYYY-MM-DD. That is, 2011-12-17. This puts the most significant digits first, facilitating logical sorting. When writing a date for humans, use the format DD-MMM-YYYY to avoid confusion.
Not everyone sees totally numerical dates the same way. Most people in the world would read 11-12-2011 as 11 December 2011, not November 12, 2011. To be clear, be explicit. Now, regarding that searching again. If you organize your file structure intelligently, you will seldom need to use a search function to find anything on your computer. Save files with this goal in mind, specifying where a file goes rather than letting it save to some unknown location. You should have a separate drive with your data, and programs/operating system on the other drive. But if all your stuff is on one drive, then have a folder 0data as the root location for all of your data folders. And build a sensible structure in there as if you're setting up a paper filing system. |