Need better search results on Google?

Need more recent results for Google searches?

Want to reduce irrelevant Google search results?

Consider using the More Search tools menu located in the left toolbar on the Google search website.

I’ve noticed a lot of Google search users arriving here on Best Hubris and other websites are trying to add dates to their searches in order to get better Google search results and reduce irrelevant Google search data. For example, several searchers appear to be inputting 2010 into Google searches hoping to get results from the current year.

Unfortunately, the Google search ranking algorithm doesn’t work that way very well. Any webpage that has the number 2010 in its text will qualify, while webpages and articles posted during 2010, but without the actual number used in the text will not qualify. This webpage for example has the keyword 2010 on it three times so far. That means it will match searches for 2010 better than many other pages that are just as current.

So, if you are looking for current HP LaserJet 1012 drivers for Windows 7 by putting 2010 in your search, you might find this page instead of the one on this website that actually has a way to use HP LaserJet 1012 printer drivers on Windows 7 with a workaround.

Most searches will show a choice of dates limiting functions that include Past Month, and Past Year. Using these search date parameters will do a lot to make your Google search results more relevant.

For more specific date range based searches, use the custom date search function.

A good tip for better Google searches made easy is to just enter a start date into the custom date search interface. Google will automatically use the current date as the end date giving users a way to search the Internet from a specific date up until now fast and easy.

For example, if you are searching for information about how to use Windows 7 or want to search on new Windows 7 features, limit your Google search dates to March 1, 2010 or April 1, 2010 start dates to capture information published about the actual full Windows 7 release software and avoid all of those webpages and articles that were written about the Windows 7 beta.

That way if you want more information about advanced search in Windows 7 you won’t be reading all the speculation about what might be in the final product, or trying to match up screen shots of Windows 7 search features that were taking on Windows 7 Release Candidate instead of the full retail version of Windows 7.

Google announced today, and that announcement was re-broadcast via unofficial Google spokesman Matt Cutts to make sure people actually noticed, that the company had released a long-awaited command line tool for accessing Google.

Well, sort of. If by accessing Google, you mean accessing everything except for the core Google service of search.

Ready made for the “much ado about nothing” files, come the Google Command Line Tool and Google API. Unoriginally titled, GoogleCL, Google Command Line (I guess) is a Python application build using Python gdata libraries in order to make Google Data API calls from a command line. This would be so very important and a great tool for web developers and search engine researchers everywhere, if it only had any functionality at all related to search. Instead, GoogleCL allows you to play with a bunch of the toy Google products and services.

Want to upload a bunch of pictures to Picasa from the command line? Sure, no problem.

Want to create Calendar events from your command line? You can do that too!

Want to read about Southwest airlines rewards credit card? Oh, wait, that’s my thing. Oops.

What about managing contacts from the command line? You bet!

How about posting YouTube videos? Of course.

If it is a tangential side Google service developed in order to show up Microsoft or Apple, then it can be accessed using the Google command line tool.

How About Command Line Search Tool and API?

No! What are you crazy? People would use that to poke holes in the already fragile Google search index and search results rankings by being able to automate tedious processes like checking search ranking positions, whether or not a particular webpage has been indexed or not, and how many incoming links point to a webpage, and where they come from.

Google wants you to like them, and wants you to think that they are the best source of cool, free, open-source tools in the galaxy, but they aren’t dumb. Search makes money. Sure, AdWords brings in the actual dollars, but the only reason anyone bothers is because advertisers know that “everyone” uses Google search regardless of operating system, browser, and in many cases, even location.

The reason everyone uses Google’s search is because it is the best search engine on the Internet. Of course, the entire underpinnings of the company’s search rankings is coming apart at the seems as more and more content publishers seek to manipulate Google’s search rankings for their own benefit. Now that SEO is something that everyone, everywhere, does and pretty much everyone does the same way, the only thing that really matters any more is link count and how close the title tag matches the search. A command line interface might expose that reality to more people (or at least allow it to be proven beyond doubt).

So, enjoy the latest plaything from Google. Just don’t expect it to change your life.

Have a great day.

More and more online services and shopping websites are including advance search options for users. Whether looking to buy online now, or just checking out the website to see if it is a useful resource that the user will come back to later, having this better search capability working and working well is critical.

However, too many websites miss the boat on one of the most important search methods. While everyone seems to nail down giving users the ability to choose a single option from a list, the vast majority are missing the obvious option of giving users the ability to also choose to search all EXCEPT for one member of the list.

Consider Google’s own Shopping Search engine which functions by retrieving products for sale online that match the shopper’s search keywords. For all but the most uncommon products, Google search returns hundreds or thousands of results. While this is a great demonstration of Google’s ability to index almost any shopping website, it could also quickly overwhelm shoppers and cause them do abandon their online shopping search.

To alleviate the problem of too much information being too hard to sort through, the Google Shopping Searches provide a variety of filtering options to their users including, price filtering, minimum store rating filters, and filtering by category. The option to filter results to a single store is also included. But, what is conspicuously absent is the ability to eliminate a particular store from the results.

For example, when searching for certain products, especially higher-end items, or those that are sensitive or otherwise important to the shopper, it may be very desirable to eliminate all results from eBay. This is actually quite difficult to do.

Since the retailer ratings only apply to eBay in general, and not each individual seller, they cannot be eliminated this way. Simply including –eBay in your search query doesn’t work either because the word "ebay" isn’t in the webpage that has been found, it is only in the name of store, which is not part of the search criteria.

The best way to eliminate eBay, or any other single store (or multiple stores for a truly advanced search) from the shopping results would be to have a "Not" or "Except" option that could be used on the "Stores" list. Alas, neither Google, nor many other shopping sites offer this ability. Since most shopping searches at Google are clogged with result from eBay, many users move on to other shopping search engines instead, creating a big potential loss for Google.

It isn’t just the big search engines either. Consider the stock photography meta search site EveryStockPhoto which was recently the subject of a favorable write up at Web Worker Daily. I spent just 5 seconds on the site before realizing that it had enormous potential. But, after 5 minutes, I left without bookmarking the site, and with no intention of returning.

The problem?

EveryStockPhoto searches several stock photography websites for stock photos that match your needs. One of those sites is Flickr. As you might imagine, based on size alone, Flickr results dominate the results returned on any EveryStockPhoto search. Unfortunately, unlike dedicated stock photography websites, Flickr has a wide variety of users, some of whom are very savvy about rights, and licensing images, and a lot more who are not quite as savvy.

As a professional freelancer, I can’t afford to have any potential trouble around my products, even simple misunderstandings about whether or not a photograph was or was not intentionally licensed. Regardless of how the ultimate legality was eventually decided, most likely in my favor, just the appearance of trouble would be enough to scare off many clients for a long time to come.

Unfortunately, there is no way to eliminate Flickr from the results, or even sort by source so that I could manually ignore them. I can choose which site to search, but that kind of defeats the purpose, since each site already has its own search functionality. In fact, a site like Everystockphoto might be better off having a NOT search instead of a regular select one search.

And, so it goes.

Regular readers know that I am a professional writer. One of the things that I write on constantly for several different clients is computers and technology. Writing about technology means writing about the Internet, websites, and programs. Writing articles about computer technology that are not boring means writing about new and useful programs, whether online services, or locally installed utilities.

In addition to writing about new utilities, I also am constantly looking for new computer tools that will make me more efficient, more productive, and therefore, more successful, all while earning more money. That, my friends, is a tall order.

The key to finding new software is to keep up on technology by reading several of the numerous resources and websites out there that publish Internet news, computer tips, and review new software programs. This works great for finding new things to write about. However, it isn’t so great for finding a specific new utility or program to do something right now. You either have to remember what was already written about and go looking for it, or you have to wait for someone to hit your particular need on the head.

Like Inigo Mantoya, I hate waiting.

Search for Free Computer Programs and Utilities Effectively

Unfortunately, searching for new software isn’t as easy as just typing what you are looking for into Google. For starters, if you are looking for something that is new to you, or that you are not all that familiar with, you might be searching for all the wrong keywords.  This happened to me last year when I wanted a utility to make may Windows XP computer boot up in a certain order so that I didn’t get error messages about there being no network connection from programs that booted up before the wireless network was ready.

I searched in vain for boot order utilities and various other keywords. The problem was that there are plenty of good, well-known utilities, that REMOVE programs from your startup. I didn’t want to remove these programs, I wanted them to start at boot-time, I just wanted them to do so in an order that made sense.

Finally, a colleague pointed me to a program called Startup Delayer. Then, the light bulb came on. There are plenty of utilities out there that affect how your programs boot by delaying, or otherwise stalling certain ones. This has the effect of altering the boot-up order, but they don’t describe their features as “Change Windows XP boot order.”

Once I had the right keywords, I was set. As it turns out, you can substantially speed up Windows boot time by using a startup delayer. Just like if you double-clicked a dozen program icons at the same time, Windows would try and run them all at once making every program take longer to start up, when Windows boots, it tries running all those programs at the same time. By delaying the programs that don’t affect your routine or the user interface (like those that run in the background) just a few seconds, your computer comes online and is functional faster. You just don’t notice the other processes are still starting up in the background because you can already start typing, or whatever.

The other, more annoying, problem is that there are too many websites out there that do nothing but catalog EVERY program that comes along. That isn’t very helpful when you don’t want to try out 10 utilities, you just want to pick and choose from the best.

Even trying to search for reviews or descriptions is useless because tons of websites don’t do anything other than copy and paste in the software description right from the developer’s webpage. That is hardly objective. There are plenty of other lazy, sneaky, tricky, or downright unethical websites clogging up search results for computer software as well.

So, how to find useful new software fast and easy?

Use the site operator for your searches.

The site operator works by typing site: into your search query followed by the domain name of the website you want to search. This limits your search to only a single domain. Find a handful of trustworthy sites that feature the kind of software you like and you can use those to find your new utility. Then, click near the top left of the results screen where it says More Options. Click on Past Year. That will help limit your searches to the current crop of software and utilities and make sure that rave reviews you are reading are about the current version AND that they are comparing to the most recent versions of competing utilities.

There are plenty of good sites out there. Currently, I use (in no particular order): makeuseof.com, lifehacker.com, and downloadsquad.com. If I would rather browse, I head over to filehippo.com.

Today I need a new replacement clipboard utility. The one I have isn’t very easy to use and hogs a lot of memory, so it is never running when I need it. I want one that keeps more than one entry on the clipboard, though I don’t need it to keep 100, and it I want it to run in a very small amount of memory. Preferably, I want one that doesn’t require the super resource hogging .NET.

So, I’m off to search: clipboard utility site:makeuseof.com then clipboard enhanced site:downloadsquad.com, and so on.

Wish me luck.

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Microsoft Bing was recently released.  Early reviews suggested that it was an enormous improvement over the original MSN based search, as well as an improvement over Microsoft’s Live Search.

Although many reviewers reserved judgment about whether Bing was better than Google, a few search engine reviews were so bold as to claim that Bing was equal to Google Search.  No major reviewer would make the claim that Bing was better than Google Search.  All of which begs the question, "Why should anyone bother to switch?"

One possible motivator is privacy.  Google keeps user’s search data for 90 days.  But, that isn’t all that Google collects.  Google Ads have been installed an countless websites around the web, each of which potentially collects another data point about you and your Internet habits.  Google Analytics has been installed on even more websites resulting in yet another potential collection.  In short, Google can already see you coming and going, maybe it would be best to perform your searches somewhere else, if another search engine was just as good as Google searches.

Unfortunately, Bing is not as good as Google Search.  I haven’t performed any tests, and I haven’t bothered reading anyone else’s tests or searching reviews, or search engine results.  I don’t have to.  I can tell you that Microsoft Bing is not as good as Google Search without performing a single search query.

How?

Microsoft’s Bing search service offers no method to restrict your searches by date.  The lack of a time restricted search is just one reason I never took Live Search seriously either.

Nothing knocks quite as much web spam off the first page of search results like restricting a search to the past month, or past year.  Sites looking to snooker you into clicking to see their ad-filled pages built up high-ranking sites and then move on.  Revisiting those pages risks unintentionally making edits which lowers the search engine ranking.

More importantly, there are numerous topics for which information that is two years old is no longer accurate.  Things like taxes, computer programs, electronics, media, real estate, investing, jobs and careers, and even fields like medicine can have important changes that take what was once true and make it inaccurate, at best, and completely false at worst.

Without a way to limit your searches by time, there is no way to know if the information you find is out of date, unless you already know something about what you are searching for.  Doesn’t that defeat the whole point of a search engine?

After all, if you know something about what you are searching for, you might already have a good idea where to find some good information.

In "News" searches only, you can choose to sort by most recent instead of by best match.  Of course, that trades one issue for another.  Instead of having to wade through the search engine results of a regular web search to find links that a recent, you get to comb through the results by date looking for ones that are relevant.  Neither choice is worth doing.

Think I’m exaggerating?  Maybe you’re curious about Microsoft’s current search efforts, but you aren’t a huge techie and you don’t know what this year’s search engine is named.

Try this search on Bing: "microsoft search engine"

Actual Screenshot from Microsoft Bing 7/29/09 

That 3rd result about "Microsoft’s New Search Engine" looks promising, doesn’t it?  (Too bad it’s about Microsoft’s previous search engine.  Oh, wait.  It is actually about the attempt BEFORE the last attempt!  In fact, it is about the beta release of Microsoft’s MSN search engine at search.msn.com!  If you’re wondering that is from 2004, five years ago.

Google recently rolled out a "More Options" link on every search page that allows you to use time-based criteria easier and more effectively for any search.  Before that innovation, Google allowed you to search within a specific time frame from its "Advanced Search" screen. 

In other words, Google has offered date based searching for a long time.  Microsoft, a company that has made its entire living off of playing copy cat to other’s innovations, missed the boat on this particular feature.  Or, perhaps, they are simply incapable of delivering such queries and results at this time.  Either way, the lack of date based searching makes MS Bing a non-starter for this user before a single search is performed.

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