Evernote is a multi-platform tools that aims to to replace your brain and helps you remember everything! Not only does it take basic things like “Taking Note” to the next level. For some people it also makes the dream of going “Paperless” a reality.

I personally am a big fan and assume that you have at least tried it if not also an active user. If you not a user currently, I highly recommend that you get started and Michael Hyatt has a a great resources page dedicated to all things Evernote related to help you on your way.

Just like that thing between your ears, a brain is only as good as its ability to retrieve information stored inside. What I want to focus on for this post is how you can take Evernote to the next level through better understanding of its search and retrieval capabilities. Here are 3 Evernote search related tips that you must know:

1. Use Tag, Notebook and Stack to improve efficiency. It might sound counterintuitive to focus on structured meta-tagging when all you want to focus on is search. But as you fully embrace Evernote as a memory repository, you will quickly find yourself being overwhelmed by the amount of stuff in it and making retrieval difficult.

To make it easier for you to find stuff, Evernote has some very powerful capabilities to help you put some structure in your repository including Tag, Notebook and Stack (Stack is a relatively new feature that allows you to aggregate notebooks!).

Once setup and organised, Notebook and Stack  give your memory repository a basic high level structure and allows you to search within just the “Work” or “Family” stack quickly without being overwhelmed. You can easily search at either the notebook level or the stack level by clicking on it first then entering your search query. So if all you are interested is in Japan related stuff in your family stack, click on the Family stack before you run your search to avoid including all work related stuff that are related to Japan!

Tags in term gives you another level of filter to further arrow down your search, say if you only want all things Japan related in your family stack that are about food, then all you have to do is also click on the food tag to further narrow your search down! Assuming you tagged correctly in the first place.

2. Get to know the advanced operators: It’s no wonder most people don’t really use advanced operators as Evernote hides its advanced search operators guide deep within its knowledge base! You can use the operators to apply the filterings discussed in point one above much quickly and efficiently. In addition, here are a number of handy ones to know that will make it all that easier to find that allusive note!

resource:image/jpg

Will return all notes that contain an embedded JPG image.

resource:audio/*

Will return all notes that contain some types of audio file.

source:mobile

Will return all notes created on a mobile application of some type

created:day-2

Will return notes that were created in the last two days. or x number of days if you replace 2 with x

3. Leverage the power of the machine! OCR or Optical Character recognition within Evernote is surprisingly good. Where your standard text based search comes unstuck with images of articles, whiteboards or documents, Evernote is able to pick these up after it’s server has processed the documents and recognised the characters within these images! Sound like magic and I must admit when it works it is a bit like magic!  

Not only can you now skip jotting down everything on a whiteboard after a meeting by simply taking a photo of it, Evernote will also allow you to now search within writings that was on the whiteboard! I guess the real tip I can give you here is to take clearer picture of whiteboards and write as neatly as possible as it will dramatically increase your ability to retrieve it later.

Are you an Evernote fan? do you have any other search related tips to share?

Now that Google has announced they are shutting down Google Desktop search, let’s have a look at the best alternatives when it comes to the need to quickly finding that important file on your desktop.

1. Windows/Mac Built in Desktop Search

In many ways, the role of a dedicated desktop search engine has been replaced by the default, built-in operating system search capabilities. The Apple Mac OS desktop search has always been very good, what many people don’t realise is that the new Windows desktop search (Windows Search) that is shipped with Windows 7 is light years ahead of the old, slow, clunky desktop search shipped with previous versions of windows. You can also download it if you are still on Windows XP or Vista.

If you have been burnt by previous versions of Windows desktop search (as I have) and have not tried the latest attempt by Microsoft, I encourage you to give it a go as I think you will be pleasantly surprised!

2. Dedicated Desktop Search Engine Software

On the other hand, why would you still consider installing dedicated, specialist desktop search software on your PC? I, for one, not only has a dedicated desktop search software, I even paid for it!

Whilst for most people, the default desktop search is more than adequate. A dedicated, specialist desktop search software engine makes a lot of sense for power users in a corporate/work environment.

Compared with using the default windows desktop search, I personally find that I am a lot of efficient and effective using the X1 dedicated desktop search software. Specifically, it offers the following features that justifies its additional costs.

• More file format support
• Better performance
• Instant file preview and quick access to file
• Better support for corporate environment
• Remote Search access through iPad/iPhone

Copernic is another desktop search software vendor that offers similar features and have gotten good reviews. Better still, both software offer free trial downloads for you to see if the benefits you get outweighs the costs of the software.

If you consider yourself a power user and am always looking for documents or files at work, then it is definitely worthwhile to give it a go!

I recently came across a great post on how bad the state of search skills is within the broad user base. This particular quote from the article not only caught my attention, it really highlighted how bad the problem is and how much improvement there is to be had with a little bit of education.

“90% of computer users do not know how to use CTRL + F (PC) or Command + F (Mac) to search through a document or Web page.”

Oh dear me! and here I am preaching about advanced Boolean expression and specialist search engines.

I guess we better get back to some of the basics.

Firstly, for 90% of you out there, DO NOT scan your document anymore and use CTRL+F (PC) or Command +F (Mac) to search and go directly to the keyword that you are looking for! Immediate productivity gain, guaranteed.

Secondly, searching for keywords within a page is such a common task (for me anyway), shaving more time through further automation adds up to significant amount of time saved in the long run. Here are a couple more tips to shave off those valuable seconds.

• Avoid CTRL-F all together!

Within Firefox, there is a great feature whereby, searching for a keyword is automatically kicked off when you start typing. The option is under Advanced->General and is disabled by default.

Check it and you would wonder how you ever got by without it!

• Automatically highlight searched keywords.

This one I blogged about way back in 2008 and is still one of my favourite feature of the Google toolbar.

Once you land on a new page after conducting a search through Google, Google toolbar gives you a couple of options in terms of navigating through the keywords you used during the initial search.

You can easily get to the keywords within the document (as show on the tool bar here after a search for “search poor craftsmen statistics) by clicking on the keywords themselves from the toolbar, or you can click on the yellow highlight pen icon (as demonstrated below). All the keywords will then be highlighted with different colours, allowing you to easily navigate and find the ones you are looking for.

I would have happily paid Google for the toolbar just to get this feature.

How about you, do you use CTRL-F today? Have any other tips to offer?

Now that Google has removed real-time search as an option, where should you go to find treasures on the twittersphere? 

Well, you could always try searching on twitter.com/search which I think most people will probably fall back to. By digging into advanced search options, you can indeed be quite effective searching using the twitter.com search engine. There are however, alternatives for people who wants more capabilities and features when it comes to searching through twitterspehere.

Topsy is one such search engine that has been in this game for a while and according to their website, differentiates by:

“Topsy’s algorithms dynamically identify influencers within the Social Web for any searchable criteria, using these influence calculations to rank results. This means realtime search results are highly relevant & devoid of noisy stream of conscious content.”

Here are some of the reasons why you might want to try it out:

• You can search through twitter archives. According to their website, their index goes back as far as three years, and according to them, is the largest on the web today. Search Engine Land has an interesting post on why this might be useful, such as finding Ashton Kutcher’s (or anyone else’s) first tweet?
• The benefits of keeping a large archive of tweets is that they can try try to present results based on relevance and not just timeline.
• Whilst the default twitter search engine also claims to give you relevant results (when you choose “Top” results”), Topsy is a bit more transparent and allows you to drill into why certain tweets comes out on top and who the key influencer is on a topic.

Finally, I think the most impressive feature, (one that no one, including twitter offers) is the ability to filter the results based by date. You can do this easily by going to their advanced search page.

Could be really useful if you want to filter out a particular period of time when there are lot of noises about the topic you are researching about.

What about you, what do you use to search through twitter?

I am a big fan of the TED’s series of seminars and recently came across a really interest talk called “Beware online “filter bubbles” By Eli Pariser.

The simple premise presented during this seminar is that search personalisation where search engines track you and try to tailor the results based on your past searching and clicking history has gone too far.

The funny things is that not that long ago, “Results tailored to you” was supposed to be a positive, now somehow its a bad thing? I think personalisation still plays a role when it comes to fact based searching. For example, being in IT myself, I am perfectly fine with search engines filtering out things related to Java (the coffee variety!) and focus on the programming language when I do search for the term “Java”. For a coffee lovers on the other hand, the results should focus on the other variety.

It’s only when you you bring in the context of subjectivity that things get a little murky. This is especially true in a political context, since you typically click on things you “AGREE WITH” you tend to get more of them. So it is alleged that the same search for “Barrack Obama” will yield two completely different result sets with one set more focused around contents from “MSNBC” (supposed to be more pro-democrat?) and the other set more focused around contents from Fox news (more pro-republican?). The worst part of it (hence the bubble that you can’t get out!) is that it becomes a vicious cycle.

So how do you get out of the search engine personal bubble? Alternative search engines such as Duck Duck Go presents itself as the solution. In fact, they have dedicated a whole URL to try to explain this key differentiation point of theirs. The whole idea is that they don’t track you, don’t lock you in a bubble and the search result you see is exactly the same as someone on the other side of the planet. The associated benefit being that since they don’t track you, don’t store your search history, they are the web’s angelic angel when it comes to protecting your privacy.

I think the verdict is still out on this one….

As the holiday season nears, many people are no doubt planning for their trip away from the city, and the Internet and Search Engines are often the first port of the call when people start to research and plan their trip.

It’s no secret that the Internet is a fantastic resources to search for cheap airfares, holidays ideas and accommodation recommendations. The mix of extensive commercial contents and user supplied material means that as long as you know where to look and how to find the right information, you can really leave nothing to chances when it comes to planning for your next trip.

Here are a few tips that I have used over the years to help me take trip planning to the next level and help me plan for the perfect trip by leveraging the power of the Internet and Search Engines!

• Bing Travel Search

If you live in the USA or are traveling to and from USA, the Bing Travel search engines have some cool features to help you sort our your airfares. Whilst many website allow you to search for the cheapest flight tickets, one of the big feature of Bing Travel search is the ability to predict flight fares going forward and recommend you to buy it today or wait for it to get cheaper.

It also offer the ability to fine tune your search and when you click on the flight will take you directly to the address where you can buy the fare from the vendor.

I must admit, I don’t live in the USA but from what I can see, the features seems comprehensive and I would certainly use it if I were to travel within the USA and hope Bing bring the same search engines to other countries.

• Research the location

Got an address of your hotel? If you do, there are a whole lot that you can do today before you leave home to find out about your destination. Firstly, Google Map can show you where the hotel is on the map, what the front gate looks like, what the surrounding environments are like, all highly useful information when you are staying at a brand new hotel, particularly ones that you are offered very cheap rate! For example, here is a satellite view and front gate view of the Versace hotel up in the Gold Coast in Australia.

Secondly, want to know if you can get a decent Pizza near your hotel? A quick search on Google map, once again reveals where to go for a late night feed when you get there!

• Use forums for reviews

When you do come across various web sites about your destination or accommodations, chances are its filled with pretty pictures and descriptions of how exciting and wonderful the place, such is the nature of commercial contents, they WANT TO SELL YOU SOMETHING.

But If you are like me and are interested in finding out what real people who have visited the place really think about a place or hotel, online forums offers a fantastic venue where people often debate passionately about their favorite (or most hated!) destination. Google now offers you the ability to search within forum via advanced options or you can use any of the specialist forum search engines to dig through people’s experiences and discussions about a holiday destination.

• What is going on today?

Whilst forums are great for finding past experience from people, Twitter search comes into its own when you need to find out the latest about a particular destinations. Latest discussions, sales or promotions, events, or even celebrity sightings! One of the coolest thing about search through twitter is the fact that you never know what you are going to find, so it’s always worth checking out the twitterspehere about your destination!

There you have it, the time you spend on researching and planning for your trip is definitely worth it, as you can leave the thinking at home!

Extending from my previous post on What Treasures Can You Find On Twitter?, I want to now discuss how to search Twitter effectively beyond just using basic keywords.

Just like Google’s search, Twitter offers advanced search functionalities that can really help you find what you are looking for and filter out all the trash. Also, due to the real-time and conversational nature of twitter, there are some unique search operators you need to be aware of in order to search twitter effectively.

Firstly, to get a feel of all the advanced search functionalities, you should head over to the Twitter Advanced Search page where you can literally see all of the different ways you can search through people’s tweets. Just to help you get started, Twitter even provide an example page on how these advanced search operators can be used! By in large, the concepts are quite similar to the standard Google web search, but here are a few things unique to Twitter search and that you should pay close attention to when searching Twitter.

• BE GENEROUS WITH THE EXCLUSION OPERATOR

It is highly likely that your first search attempt on twitter will be frustrating as the results are littered with useless rubbish. This is why the minus or exclusion operator should be your best friend in any Twitter Search. Be adventurous and generous and add more minus operator as you search to help you narrow down to a particular area by excluding areas you are not interested in. Sometimes it takes several attempt to really zero in on the area you are interested. This is particularly true when there is a viral topic going around that you are not particularly interested in and every second tweet has the keyword with the viral topic, in this case, simply use the “-“ operator to zap away these tweets.

• DATE SENSITIIVE

Another great way to zero in on your search is to limit the date range using the “until” or “since” operator. If you know are only interested in people’s reaction about a particular topic from a particular date then limit tweets produced between the date ranges you are interested in. For example, if you want to find out about people’s expression and comments around Michael Jackson’s death, you would use “Michael Jackson since:2009-06-25” since he died on June 25 2009.

• FROM THE RIGHT AUTHOR

Whilst you can search for mentions of persons by including his or her name in the search strings. You can also search through tweets from a particular person by using the “from” operator. This is useful when you want to search through a tweets of a person or accounts that you know provide useful, relevant or trustworthy information.

Together with the “to” operator, it allows you to search for specific tweets sent from a particular person to a particular person, very useful for backtracking and following conversations effectively.

For example, here is a search for all the tweets directed towards Demi Moore and are all the tweets produced by Ashton Kutcher. Adding additional keywords in the search will hopefully produce some interesting results!

• HASHTAG

The use of hastag has caught on as an unofficial way of tagging a particular conversation. Hashtags.org lists popular and hot tags that you might want to include in your search string.

Most major events these days also tend to have an agreed hashtag that everyone use when they comment or joining on the conversation, once you know the hastag, including it will often dramatically increase the relevancy of your search results. For example the tag “#inauguration” was used as people were discussing and commenting on Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration back in Jan 2009.

Do you have any other tips? What’s your killer twitter search trick?

Now that Twitter has added a search box on its home page, I often get people asking me why would I ever want to search through twitter? After all, isn’t it all about people going on about what they had for breakfast? Whilst it is true there are plenty of comments about breakfast cereals on Twitter, there are actually useful treasures if you know what you are looking for. Here are some ideas and examples of of some of the treasures that you might find useful but didn’t know that you can find on twitter!

• Find A Good Deal

This is probably one the most powerful and useful use of Twitter search and one that any bargain hunter needs to pay close attention to.

Many companies today are starting to use Twitter to promote and offload their excess stocks. Companies such as Dell regularly broadcast sales and discount stock through Twitter, It is great for finding good deals on all sorts of products when buying online, in fact, its probably a good idea to search through twitter when buying anything online as a couple of extra keyboard strokes might just save you a few bucks.

Whilst you can search directly on the twitter website for discount codes such as “Dell Discount Code”, there are also specialist twitter deal search sites such as CheapTweet that aggregates discount related tweets publishers and not only can help you find discount coupon codes, but also list general sales promotions that retail outlets are offering at a particular time, highly recommended for any bargain hunters!

• Stock Tips

The real-time nature of Twitter makes it a perfect platform for sharing Stock market related news, announcements, tips and discussions (or rumours!). You can also sometimes find links to useful analyst reports or analysis on a particular company that have just been published and that might influence your buy or sell decision. The trick is to filter out all the noisy tweets (and there are plenty!) by adding useful keywords and exclude noisy keywords for a particular search or use the advanced search options to add addition filter such as date range and hashtags.

If you follow a particular analyst or stock related site that publishes tweets, you can also use the advanced search function to search through tweets from a particular user.

For example, here is twitter search on What @TheMotleyFool has said about Google.

• Check for the Status of Web Services

Not so much treasures but definitely useful nonetheless is the ability to check for critical online services through twitter search. When you are having issues with Gmail or Hotmail, or Skype,  it is often hard to work out whether the issue is due to the latest browser update you did, the new corporate firewall policy or something else. A quick search on twitter can often give you an idea if it is indeed a general outage from the service provider and save you the hassle of ringing up your Internet provider or corporate support desk.

Not only will the twitter search find other user’s experiences with the service, you might also find officially announcements from the service provider. You just might find links to posts on whether it is a scheduled downtime and when is it due to come back up. I have personally use the twitter search on Gmail down numerous times to work out what is going on with Gmail when I am having issue with it and see what the word on the street is, and found it a great time saver!

Go on, have a search on twitter, you just might find some other treasures, if you do, make sure you share it in the comments section below!

Browsers such as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox provides a window to the World Wide Web and are increasingly playing a bigger part in the overall search experience. So much so that Google, the king of search has launched its very own browser to get in on the action and control our window to the Internet.

You may know that tinkering with your browser can help protect your privacy and often improves your overall web experience, but you way not know that you can also customise your browser in various ways to improve your web search productivity. Here are some basic hacks/tips for you to try out!

• Search Toolbars

This one is an easy one and one many people knows about. All the popular (and many non-popular!) search engines provide search toolbars that offers shortcuts and features that make you a more powerful searcher. Search Toolbars typically provides short-cuts and quick access to things such as previously searched keywords and advanced search options right from the toolbar as you conduct your search. One of my favourite feature and a real time saver is being able to highlight your search keyword terms on the page you are viewing (so that you don’t have to use the browser’s “Find” functionality) and is one feature that many people are not aware of but a huge productivity booster.

Check out my previous blog on 3 reasons why search toolbar make you a better searcher to learn how to do this using Google toolbar along with other cool tricks!

• Manage the Default Search Engine

Did you know that you can change the default search engines used when you run web search directly from the search box within the browser?  Further more, you can add more specialised search engines (such as YouTube or Twitter Search) and interchange them as you conduct your search from the browser search box depending what you are trying to find at the time. When you come across your new favourite search engine, why not switch over your default search engine and see what new results you get!

Amit from Digital Inspiration has a great write up on how to change and edit the default search engine when using Firefox.

• Search Related Browser Plugins

Here is where things get really interesting and the advanced users really power up their search productivity. Using Browser plugins you can really customise your search experience any way you want it particularly if you are using the Firefox browser.

Want to customise your Google search results page by including results from other search engines on the same page? The CustomizeGoogle Firefox plugin can do this and much more! Want a preview screen shots of the websites alongside your Google search results? The GooglePreview plugin does exactly that! One specialist search related plugin that I find incredibly useful and you might enjoy as well if you are a movie buff and a fan of Rotten Tomatoes is the Movie Rating Firefox plugin. It allows you to highlight a movie title directly from within a web page and trigger a search on Rotten Tomatoes that not only returns the movie rating but also a brief description of what the movie is about, a real time saver when you want to do some research on a particular movie!

Embrace the browser, learn more about the browser and you will find that it really can be a powerful platform from which to power up your search productivity!

For most people, Google is the only search engine they know (OK maybe you have heard about Bing now!) when in fact there are a number of powerful and useful alternatives search engines out there. Blogs such as AltSearchEngines does a great job in promoting and teaching the merits of these alternative search engines. At Search 1.x, we believe that whilst a lot of these alternative search engines are complete waste of time, some of them definitely offers value to any serious searcher and you should definitely bother checking them out!

And if you are still lacking motivations and think that Google does it all for you, here are some ideas on why you should bother exploring them:

1. They Are The Specialists

As good as Google is at Web search  sometimes a specialist search engine can get a particular job done better and faster. I guess its a bit like how we go to a specialist doctor for specialist treatment.

Specialist blog search engine such as Technorati has been around for a long time and has built a wonderful reputation and set of features that makes it one of the best blog search engines on the web.

One good recently launched example of a specialist search engine is WolframAlpha which claims to be a “computational knowledge engine” which ultimately means that it is a facts engine and allows users to search through a number of specialist databases of facts and figures. If you are interested in finding certain numerical facts or stats, it beats Google hands down and will help you get there faster. For example here is one WolframAlpha query that directly gives you the answer to “Date of Kennedy’s Death” on the results page. Great for trivia nights!

For more specialist search engines that what their special powers are, check out the Search 1.x Search Directory!

2. Real-time Search

This is arguably one of the Google’s biggest short comings in being able to search not last week’s websites, not even yesterday’s blog posts but the discussion and chatters happing now. In trying to answer the question of what’s going on right now, the sources of contents can be new stories, comments, conversations, pictures or videos. The subtle distinction of real-time search when compared with traditional web search being that the source of information is less important than the timely information itself.

Check out my previous blog about conversation searching using the twitter search feature!

More recently, CrowdEye and Collecta are a couple of great up and coming real-time search engines that combines real-time results from various “real-time” content sources including microblog sites such as twitter, popular blogs, and social websites such as facebook. CrowdEye is unique in that it analyses the links that are being tweeted by people and show you what are the hot or popular links. Collecta on the other hand has a bigger content sources that include not only twitter but blog posts, comments, and Flick.

3. Access To All The Results!

If you are an Information Junkie and Google fails to return any relevant results, have you ever wondered what Bing or Twitter search might bring ? Metadata search engines are specifically designed to answer this question by providing a unified results page that include search results from popular search engines in one single page.

Dogpile and Scour are two of the most popular meta search engines that gives you quick access to results from all the popular search engines.

There are however, other ways to get the same results, one such method is to use browser plugins such as the Unified Search Firefox plugin which appends search results from other search engine and sources as you do a Google Search without you having to go to dedicated metadata search engine.

3. Get To See the Future Of Search

Interested in seeing the future of search? Alternative search engines are often where the real innovation happens, so if you are a real life hacker or true technologist you ought to keep up with what’s happening it he world of alternative search engines.

Whilst there are numerous innovation in search happening as we speak, one area that is predicted to drive some real innovation in search is the area of semantic search and the poser child (or alternative search engine) in this space is Hakia

There you go, hopefully one of the above points is enough to get you to look beyond Google and go on, give it a go and let us know about your favourite alternative search engines!