Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with Search

Looking for books where a person or people are searching for a long lost person.

reenum — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 08:41:37 -0800

Looking for books where a person or people are searching for a long lost person. I loved Hunting Eichmann and would like to read more books about a person or a group of people banding together to find a long lost person.

I'd prefer nonfiction, but well written fiction will work too.

Thanks!

How to search multiple sites at once

jverdone — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 12:31:44 -0800

Is there a software/service that allows you to search specific websites rather than just through than the internet as a whole? I have a select list of sites I refer to weekly to find specific content. Any ideas? Ideally, it would be a service that allows me search multiple keywords and even add new sites from CSV.

Need a text search program like a browser URL bar.

inthe80s — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 12:49:40 -0800

Is there a utility for Windows that will take a text file, and let you enter words into a field and remove entries from the list as you type in more words? Something like typing in the address bar of a browser, where as you type, the entries that no longer match are removed. I have a text file with entries of performer/song titles, one to a line. I generally just use the search function of a text editor to find all the matching lines for a keyword. However if there was something that would remove entries the more I typed, I wouldn't spend as much time typing out full performer names or song titles.

Winamp does this with the "Jump to file" box in it's playlist. I need something for text files however.

Jeez Google pt. 2 - We still want clean URLs

cashman — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:11:33 -0800

Remove these crappy ultra-long links from my Google Search Results when I right-click! What's the best way to get rid of these ultra-long Google urls that pop-up when you right-click a link in Google search results? It's basically a rehash of this AskMe from 2008.

I don't use greasemonkey. I had customizegoogle installed but that was abandoned and no longer works - does optimizegoogle do this? I just want to get my right-click links back. I tried removing web history, logging in or out doesn't matter, and deleting cookies, etc - nothing seems to stop it, and I hate it.

Lil help?!

Utilising the Twitter API

nostrich — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 15:39:46 -0800

Where to start: extracting images from a Twitter search and presenting them on a webpage? I have almost no programming knowledge, but I have a small project in mind, and have no idea where to start. (And also about a week to do it in, since it's a time-sensitive project.)

Here's what I want to do:
- Get the results of a Twitter search along the lines of "something something twitpic filter:links" (ie, get all the results of a search for "something something" that include a link to a Twitpic image).
- Get a thumbnail of each Twitpic image
- Present these thumbnails on a webpage

Twitter's API can do what I want, as can Twitpic's, I'm just not sure where I should start. Presumably, I need to get the tweets, perform some kind of regex voodoo to extract the Twitpic links, and borrow Twitpic's API to get thumbnails for them.

This sounds like it should be fairly easy, but I'm a guy that doesn't have fluency in any programming language, so I can't even picture what my first step would be. I'm probably approaching this a little backwards, too -- trying to consider how Twitter's API is rate-limited, and it would need some form of caching, etc, etc. (Though I can't program, I do have some basic fundamental knowledge of the concepts and idea involved, like rate-limiting and cacheing, and such.)

So where do you think I should start? Learning the basics of X programming language seems like a sensible step 1, but I don't have much interest in actually learning to program in X, just in learning to do this in X. Whatever X may be.

It doesn't really matter if I can't do this in a week, but if it took much more than a week to do, I'm not sure it would be worth the time.

What do you think?

List Bookmarks to Geocities Domain

rahnefan — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 08:42:49 -0800

Quick! Geocities closes shop tomorrow! Is there an efficient way to search my favorites/bookmarks for geocities pages that might be in there? So I can steal the content before it goes bye bye? Content is king -- I'd rather save a page to my hard drive than lose the content altogether.

If you think about it, if someone helps CF Kane get the sled back earlier, a lot of people lead much better lives. So who is that hero?

rileyray3000 — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 15:53:57 -0800

Say that Citizen Kane really wanted to find Rosebud - who would he call? Is there a kind of specific person who tracks down these personal lost things? So I’m doing research for a project and I’m wondering if there is a specific class of person of searcher, or researcher or private investigator who goes looking for objects that are lost. Kind of like art provenance people but more general if that helps.

If there’s a name or kind that exists and you can tell me, that would help. And if there really is some sort of expert out there you can name that I could then try to reach out to and ask some questions that would help more.

I need a kind soul in South Korea to find school records of a woman born in 1937

cda — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 14:11:52 -0800

I need a kind soul in South Korea to find school records of a woman born in 1937, to help us begin our search for the birth family of our adopted cousin. Our cousin has asked for our help in finding her Korean birth family. I thought finding her mother's school records would be a good place to start. Her father was an American soldier stationed in Korea. Her mother was a Korean woman. In 1962 my cousin's father brought her back to America, without her mother, and she knows very little about her Korean family. Her father has passed away. We do have names and birth dates of her mother, her mother's siblings and for her grandparents. It's possible her grandfather was Japanese. The family lived in Seoul, although our cousin was born in Pusan for some reason.

If you or someone you know lives in South Korea and you have an interest in history or an interest in helping adoption searches please let me know. And failing that, if you know a private investigator in Seoul who speaks English, that would be helpful.

Like what Doogie Howser used. Only minus the acne and gay subtext.

rileyray3000 — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 10:21:22 -0800

My five year written book journal is almost done. I'm looking for some some sort of very easy mac journal program to replace it. As much as I've loved the journaling up to now, I don't like that I can't search it easily. So I think I'm going with a program of some sort this time around. Are there any journal programs you recommend and that fit the bill for simple, easy and searchable?

To the (regexpmobile|globmobile) Robin!

idiopath — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 19:22:28 -0800

Can I use shell style globs or something like regexp to search for online content? I want to be able to search for '*mobile' or '.*mobile$' or something similar and get something like "bookmobile, popemobile, spacemobile, pimpmobile, weinermobile ..." as a result.

I am looking for a general way to search for things like this based on internet (particularly web) usage, not just a list of compound words that end in mobile.

"Proactive? Paradigm? Aren't those just words dumb people use to sound smart?"

drjimmy11 — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 08:49:10 -0800

Where does one proactively look for software (specifically Flex) jobs these days? So I'm on the market. I have about ten years web/software development experience overall, with the last 3 focused in Flex. I'm in Los Angeles and not keen to move.

In the past I would just put my resume up on Dice and get bombarded by recruiters. This time though, the response has been a little more sparse, and I'd like to find something sooner than later.

So:

Are the major search sites (Monster, Careerbuilder) as useless as I remember them for tech jobs?

Is there anywhere tech-specific besides Dice I should post my resume, or search for jobs? This would include job sites or message boards or whatever.

Are there any other strategies I'm missing, or should I just browse the websites of specific employers who i think I might like?

Thanks!

How do I search all my folders -- Archive too! -- in Outlook 2007?

zooropa — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 06:13:16 -0800

How can I search all my folders at once in Outlook 2007? I'm using Outlook 2007 at work and I have setup Auto Archive to ... duh ... archive my old e-mail. Simple enough, right?

Now I want to be able to do a one-click search of both my active e-mail folders and the Archive Folders. How do I do that?

And yes, I've tried selecting "search all Outlook folders." This doesn't seem to pull up anything from the Archive Folders (just the active).

Help!?

Don't know why they didn't offer a plain-text list

Jaltcoh — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 08:10:50 -0800

Is there a way to quickly check if a certain song (or artist) is on Pitchfork's list of the top 500 tracks of the decade? I've been Googling to try to see if anyone has posted a plain-text version of the whole list on one page, but I haven't found it. For instance, let's say I'm wondering if there are any Norah Jones songs on the list. I could Google something like [pitchfork "top 500 tracks" "norah jones"], but this is really haphazard since it'll return any page with any reference to Pitchfork, Norah Jones, etc. Limiting it to [site:pitchfork.com] still doesn't solve the problem. Any suggestions?

Searching data within an Excel cell.

sperose — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 07:15:14 -0800

Excel2007Filter: I want to be able to search information between two things in a single cell in Excel. So a cell may have 4-9 typed in it, but I want that cell to be highlighted if a user searches for 7. Or 4. Or anything between 4 and 9 inclusively. (More details and a screenshot of the spreadsheet inside.) This is for running Excel 2007 on Windows XP, in case it matters.

I have a spreadsheet with 127 rows and 97 columns. Just about each cell has some sort of range of data in it.

Here's some examples of the data:
just numbers (1-26)
combinations (3263 #141-170)letters and numbers (A. A45 #1323-1349)
dates (E 203 Oct 16, 1991-Nov 30, 1992)
letters and numbers (E1411-E1415)
words and numbers (C. 2906 Units 59-64)

Ideally, what I want to have happen is that there will be a set of cells that will be used for searching. The user would type in the data they have (example: E 203 November 1, 1991), the cell with that information would light up.

I'm pretty sure that I'll have to have different search cells that will have to be filled in different ways in order to get all the information searchable. So there would be a cell for the category (E), a cell for the series (203), and a cell for the date (November 1, 1991).

The problem is, I'm not sure how to get Excel to recognize the information in the middle. I'm sure searching for Oct 16, 1991 will make the cell light up, but I want to get the information in between Oct 16, 1991-Nov 30, 1992 to be picked up by the searching as well.

Here's a screenshot of part of the spreadsheet for more detail.

I've got a passing familiarity with Excel and formulas, but I have zero knowledge of VBA.

Please help me Mefi!

Locating data in memory

inquisitive — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 06:59:07 -0800

I need to access certain data loaded in memory by an application. There are certain application specific encrypted files, which the program decrypts and loads into memory. Can I see the data in the memory used by the application? Is it possible to search the entire memory footprint of an application?

If I know some keywords in the encrypted file, can I search based on those words and locate the decrypted data in memory ?

Are there any other techniques?

Can I get the addresses of all the memory areas used by the application including the EXE file, and save everything into a file?

Would using a Heading1 here help?

chocolate_butch — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 06:54:07 -0800

Aside from ease of editing and maintaining individual documents, are there arguments for the use of styles in Microsoft Word? Specifically, I was thinking about this from a semantic markup perspective and company-wide document search and retrieval. Would using a stylesheet make finding documents easier / more relevant / more accurate than if the stylesheet was not employed?

My Google-fu is failing on a search that tells me either way. Lots of info about semantic HTML out there, not having much luck on semantics in Word docs.

published google doc - autoindexed or hidden until linked?

nolnar — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 04:42:42 -0800

Is a published Google Doc document autoindexed by Google or hidden until it is first linked by another page? I am sure the answer to this is in plain sight somewhere but I've been googling for 30 minutes (!) without finding the answer so I'd better ask for help.

Movie in which thieves sync their heist with songs?

oxit — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 09:13:06 -0800

What's that movie in which two male thieves synchronise the timing of their heist by whistling jazz songs? I've seen it probably in the eighties, the jazz songs most probably where swing standards and the whistling might have been singing or even humming. Still I think the respectives parts of the movie where accompanied with the real music, played by a band.

Unfortunately search engines and movie database's similarity features didn't help. Thanks for letting me tap your memorisation.

Natural Language Processing, relative basis for search.

kuatto — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 16:05:43 -0800

Natural Language Processing (NLP) Filter. I'm looking for a method (or category of methods) to judge the relevancy of a small unit of text, 100-200 chars, against similar units of text. I have a large set of these textual units, I'm trying to discover the "relatedness" of my query unit (an item drawn from that set) to any other unit in the set, but judged relatively to the set as a whole.

In other words, I'm not looking for just an ordered list of rankings of my query applied to every document in the set. Rather an ordered list of rankings of my query applied to every document in the set then normalized by the magnitude of my query applied to the set as a whole (perhaps via some averaging function.)

Do traditional search engines (open source, like lucene or xapian) do this already?

What I mean by relatedness is that we are talking about the same things by some, arbitrary, empirical measure. In other words, there is no supervised or unsupervised learning, just some off-the-shelf measure of 'relatedness'.

Falling between the cracks.

Mitheral — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 13:06:04 -0800

Why does this google search not find this AskMe thread? Or what can I do to my search terms to make this search work? Usually when I'm looking for a comment I've made I do a site search for a couple key terms and add my username to narrow the scope. However the above search does not find my comment even though both of the key terms are present in it. Choosing show omitted results also doesn't return that thread.

In askme rather than meta as I think my problem is with google

Name That Tune

dagnyduquette — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 08:06:04 -0800

I'm going crazy trying to find the title of a Wilco song I heard yesterday. It's a song that references women from different parts of the country wanting to "get with" the protagonist. My efforts to search their lyrics by album has come up fruitless.

How to search through your own Facebook profile?

Isdaron — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 06:07:15 -0800

Is it possible to search through your own Facebook profile? After having used Facebook for about two years now, I'm wondering: How am I supposed to find e. g. a posted link from a year ago? Sure, I could scroll down my profile and always click on "show older posts" but this is really not the way it should work, should it? Maybe I'm just completely ignorant, but could someone please point out, how you are able to search through the posted contents within your own profile? Thanks, Bjoern

I can has Wimmelbild?

dejah420 — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 14:27:33 -0800

The Adventures of the Black Hand Gang, are there other books that are similar? We have the collection of all of Herr Press's stories, but we've almost finished them, and my son would love to have more books in the same genre. Basically the way the story works is that the text is on the left side, with a detailed overcrowded picture (Wimmelbild) on the right. A question is posed that can be solved by finding the answer in the picture.

I've not had any luck searching for anything similar, but I'd love to find something similar, and perhaps a little more modern. (For example, one of the clues was a reel-to-reel tape recorder, which is completely outside of the frame of reference for a child born almost 40 years after the story was written.)

Suggestions for books or genre/keywords would be greatly appreciated!

I won't pay ya, no way, why don't you get a job?

b33j — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 00:53:56 -0800

18 year old Australian introverted indoorsy uni drop-out seeks employment in recession. No qualifications (a business cert from school), no drivers license, no skills (maybe typing), no experience, no references, limited public transport. What now? This is for my son. I want him to get a job now that he's dropped out, and he understands that he must, but where does he start?

Can he access (Australian) government job placement assistance even though he's supported by his parents? Who's that with? (A long time ago, it was the CES.)

He's certain that he would be bad at anything involving people, ie customer service, sales, waiting tables. I tend to think this attitude would bugger up his interviews but I don't know how to change it, or if I should even try.

I'm prepared to help pay for him to upskilll, but I'm worried he will drop out (again) and waste my cash. It's all very well to say he can pay me back, but without a job, that's just funny.

Suggestions for his action, and for me to encourage him without demoralizing him, please?

Can You Search For XML Text?

netbros — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 03:41:31 -0800

Do Google and Bing spider XML pages? Some of my HTML pages link to other XML pages. Do Google, Bing and the other search engines index these XML pages?