High and Low

[andrewducker]

[Poll #1497040]

Comments

[davidcook.livejournal.com]

I should note that I didn't do anything myself to set up the custom searches, Firefox did it automatically ...

[andrewducker]

Do you mean the address bar or the search bar there?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Address bar.

In Firefox, type "wiki $subject" in the address bar of your browser.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

"imdb $subject" also works, as does "amazon $subject", and presumably a dozen other things I don't use, but are included in Firefox by default.

[andrewducker]

The default amazon $wossname does amazon.com, so I shortened it to "a" and pointed it to amazon.co.uk - same with imdb - shortened to "i". And, as noted below, I use a google search for wikipedia, as it seems to produce better results.

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

Perhaps I should change my selction, I have customer searches set up because they install by default but I never use them.

[hawkida.livejournal.com]

Actually, same here. I'd forgotten they were there.

[andrewducker]

Do you mean the ones in the search box or the address bar?

[hawkida.livejournal.com]

My only regret is that I no longer see the Google doodles.

[simont]

I tried setting up custom searches once, but it didn't seem any quicker to select Wikipedia from the search box dropdown and type into the edit box than it was to select Wikipedia from my bookmarks dropdown and type into that edit box.

I do, on the other hand, have a hotkey which grabs whatever text is currently in the clipboard and looks it up on Wikipedia, and another one for Google. That I do find useful – no matter what I'm reading about in what application, if I can cut and paste it then in one more keystroke I can have a web page pop up telling me about it.

[andrewducker]

I meant having a custom search set up so that going to the address bar and typing "w George Bush" does a google search of wikipedia for George Bush:
http://www.google.com/search?q=george%20bush+site:en.wikipedia.org

Which is what I have set up.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s

[andrewducker]

I tend to find that Wikipedia's search speed was slower than Google's. But Wikipedia may have become faster since then.

[simont]

Ah, I misunderstood what you were talking about. In that case, changed my vote to "You can do that?" :-)

[princealbert.livejournal.com]

tho i find it quicker to type "F6 en." to get straight onto wikipedia for searches

[andrewducker]

I have a Google search set up for wikipedia, I find that google searches wikipedia faster than wikipedia does. And I'm fairly sure that typing "Alt-D w robots" is faster than loading wikipedia before doing a search.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I think the wikipedia saerch may be marginally superior if you already know the name of the page you're searching for, (because it can give you that exact page and not pages which are more popular but include that name) but that's not very useful.

I _always_ use google first, and only resort to site specific searches if that doesn't work. (Normally when the local search is more of a database query.)

[princealbert.livejournal.com]

err, 16mb speed here, 20mb at my flat the web may just be quicker than your typing!

[poisonduk.livejournal.com]

I likes 16mb speed there!!!

[andrewducker]

You have to load wikipedia, and then use the mouse to select the search box before you type "whatever". This seems slower than Typing "Alt-D w Whatever".

On the other hand - I notice that there's now a ajax search box, which does make things a lot nicer. It's not complete though, so for complex searches you're still having to hit the web twice and use the mouse twice.

Hmm - thinking about it, what I'd like is keyboard shortcuts for the Google search page!

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I'm interested to see everyone still _does_ use google. I switched to google ages ago when it was clearly better and easier than (?) altavista, so probably won't notice immediately if anything better than google _does_ come along.

Other companies still persist in having search engines, which is useful if google did manage to go kaput for some reason.

[andrewducker]

Well, 10% of a massive market is still possibly profitable.

I think I was using HotBot before Google... It was shit.

[cdave]

But let you tweek your results in the way Google does with - + and quote marks.

So you didn't have to leave the first page of results if you kept tweaking your query. Like I use Google now.

[andrewducker]

By "shit" I meant "Not nearly good enough if it launched nowadays". I seem to recall it was still better than 95% of all search engines of the time :->

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, I suppose it's well worth it. I mean, your poll has <3% shared amongst all non-google search providers, and I bet that goes down to 0-divided-by-number-of-people-on-friends-list, but even so, worth it. (To be fair, your friends isn't representative of everyone :))

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

By custom searches, do you mean Mycroft plugins, or bookmarks with a %s token and a keyword?
I have both.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

And the latter aren't usually searches but just RL shorteners, eg for a function on the Drupal API site I type 'dapi functionname'.

[andrewducker]

The latter. The former are in the search box, not the address bar.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

I figured as much and that you would have said search box if you meant it.
Though they're not technically searches, they can just be made so.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I set up several custom searches at home, but when I started using another PC regularly, felt I should try to use the apparently universal search box. But my fingers still have the reflex to type "wiki something-i-want-to-know-about" and "imdb film-name" etc so maybe I should just stick with the searches.

[andrewducker]

I have those shortened to "w" and "i" :->

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

:) I seem to remember those (or at least "w") were set up as default quick searches when I set up my own ones, but they don't seem to be in this current firefox; I don't know if those were just suggested, or quick search was de-emphasised in a more recent version.

I could have used single letters, but i thought I'd get it wrong, and now my fingers are too used to that: "wiki" is longer than "w" but shorter than "wiki^H^H^H" :)

I always type them on other computers, although that's not too bad: if you "i'm feeling lucky" for "wiki thing" or "imdb filmname" you often DO get the right page. I just wish the default wasn't to "i'm feeling lucky" if you type spaces and no dots into the search bar.

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

In my case, I use Chromium as my main browser, so everything's Google pretty much by default.

[ashfae.livejournal.com]

Okay, there's an automatic google one in the address bar, but I never use it.

[ninox.livejournal.com]

Google is still my fail safe but I do play around with others from time to time. There are a couple of custom searches I have used in work in the past, but have fell by the wayside because of general trends and technological improvements.

I must admit that I recommend and teach people how to search specific websites using Google, because in general it is far more powerful that any home grown attempt.

Professionally I am still not a wikipedia fan.

[andrewducker]

IT CONTAINS THE TRUTH!

[ninox.livejournal.com]

Contains Lies as well! Ideal for your LJ!

[cheekbones3.livejournal.com]

I nearly answered Ask.com for the search engine since it ate my former favourite Teoma, but Google often appears better, much as it bugs me.

[rhythmaning.livejournal.com]

I tweeted about a free Yahoo-based search engine that offset carbon, but somehow I seem not to have used it at all.