Ask MetaFilter posts tagged with search

Ok Sherlock, get your pipe.

anthropoid — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 13:30:12 -0800

Can you help me find an email address for Harriet Hall, MD - aka the "Skepdoc"? She's an author on the Science Based Medicine blog and I'd like to send here email regarding a post she wrote instead of commenting in the thread. The blog seems to have no "contact us" page, even when one registers and logs in. It just seems so odd!

A google search tells me only that she contributes to a number of blogs (also with no way of contacting her) and there's a picture of her on Flickr.

Any ideas? I'd like it to be as professional as possible, if that makes any sense.

Thank you, as always.

How to make simple metasearch engine?

shivohum — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:20:11 -0800

I want to create a simple page that will query search engines of my choice (i.e. in the form www.z.com/?q=blah) and just concatenate the first page of results into one page. Is there any super-easy way to do this? It would be great if it looked pretty and/or was mobile-phone-friendly, too, but this is not necessary. Thanks.

HELP!! Need to find a website.

ss448 — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 08:56:34 -0800

HELP ME FIND A WEBSITE??!?! I know his name, how can i find out what domains are registered to his name. So i know PERSON X owns an internet company, but I have no idea what the web address is. How can I find out what domains are registered to his name?

Hot Google on Google Action Denied!

ian1977 — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 21:40:13 -0800

Is there any way to embed (is that the right word?) a Google Custom Search Engine on a Google Site? I posted this to the Google Sites help group but to no avail, it is surprisingly low activity-ish.

What I want to do is have my Google Site host my Google Custom Search engine. But when I try to paste the code (given by Google) into the HTML box it errors out. Is there anyone out there who has done this or knows a work-around or am I S.O.L?

I find this really strange because it would seem like Google would be all over hosting their CSEs on their Google Sites. But what do I know?

Oh where is my lost paragraph...

overglow — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 21:38:19 -0800

Is there a way to search all of the revisions when doing a search in Google Documents?

Amazon search strategy

roofus — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 02:10:44 -0800

Is it possible to run a search at Amazon that excludes "Used and new" items? I have an Amazon voucher to spend, so I'd like to see listings that include only items dispatched directly from Amazon itself ("Buy new"), not from third party vendors. When this was asked three years ago, the answer seemed to be "no", but I wondered if there were any new web apps that might allow such requests via the API or somesuch.

I know how to find Tony Curtis and Kirk Douglas. How do I find Wilt Chamberlain and Mick Jagger?

rileyray3000 — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 12:42:31 -0800

Is there anything like an IMDB for rock music? or for sports figures? I'm trying to do a search for famous men over 65 who haven't kicked the bucket yet. With IMDB it's pretty easy to do so for guys in entertainment (TV, Film, radio even). But when it comes to rock or sports, not so much. Any idea if such sites exist with similar functionality to IMDB?

Change searching in windows in Firefox

Mo Nickels — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 07:25:56 -0800

How can I change the behavior of searching in windows in Firefox? The Firefox search-in-browser bar is, and has always has been, awful. [I posted this to the Firefox forums and got no response.]

I am not referring to searches done using URL shortcuts nor am I referring to searches done using search box in the upper right corner of the browser window.

The search-in-browser bar is what I am calling the bar that appears at the bottom of the browser window when you search for content inside of the page that is currently loaded by hitting ctrl-F on Windows or command-F on Mac. I use Firefox 3.0 for both platforms.

The search-in-browser bar is broken (or, if you prefer, intentionally coded in such a way that it behaves in a broken fashion) in that it:

a. Continues to appear on the screen even long after it has last been used.

b. Continues to appear on the screen when a link is clicked and a new page is loaded.

c. "Match case" seems to be arbitrarily selected in between searches.

d. Takes up an inordinate amount of screen real estate, especially in a browser window that fills the monitor. This is particularly problematic on a laptop with a small screen.

What I would like to find is a way to change this behavior. I have looked for things to change in about:config and for an appropriate extension but found no joy.

What I'd like to have happen in Firefox:

1. The search-in-browser bar should disappear in user-settable amount of time after it has last been used, either X amount of time after the last search is made or after the last time a related search key command is entered. I know that you can sometimes hit escape to get the search-in-browser bar to disappear, but that doesn't always work either--it sometimes stupidly requires that you click back into the search field and *then* hit escape--not even rehitting ctrl-F/command-F and then hitting escape works.

2. The search-in-browser bar should disappear when a link is clicked and a new page is loaded.

3. "Match case" should never be selected by default or at the start of a search; or, it should be a user preference as to whether it is a default or not.

4. Ideally, the search-in-browser bar should be able to be turned off. It should return to being a pop-up window as it was on previous versions of Firefox, or it should be a user preference as to whether it should be attached to the window or should be a free-standing pop-up window.

Youtube Search

hubs — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 11:18:13 -0800

Could anyone tell how I can search youtube by video length? For instance I want to find all videos that are 13 seconds long. Could anybody tell me how to filter a search in this manner.

How do I find al word documents containing a particular phrase?

Tnuocca — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 15:54:18 -0800

Hi, I'm trying to find some old Word documents in Windows Vista and I don't seem to get the option to look through file contents when I use search. Could someone please tell me how I can do an advanced search to find all documents containing a particular phrase in Windows Vista? As well as searching within documents, are there any free software programmes that allow you to arrange files on a timeline? It would be really great if I could see at a glance on what day each file was created.

Thanks for your assistance.

Need help hiding my name online!!

giddygirlie — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 11:47:38 -0800

Keeping my name private on my website - can robots.txt help? I only use my first name on my website, for privacy concerns, but my husband is a public person (professional comic book artist) so he uses his full name.

I just noticed today that if I google my own name, my website comes up as #1 on the search listing. I think this is because I have linked to my husband's site (the URL is his name) so now google is finding my first and last name together and referencing my personal website.

Is there a way to write a robots.txt file that will discourage robots from finding my name on the site? My alternative is to replace all instances of linking to his site with a tinyurl link instead and hope that google refreshes its cache soon.

I don't keep any content that is offensive, I just don't like work people spying on my personal life. :)

Rapist Search

king walnut — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 17:52:43 -0800

Is this photo real? I can only find it on funny pic sites, so probably not I guess, but I wonder if anyone knows for sure. I checked snopes and a few other places.

Please help me find appliance stores in Paris

devilshgrin — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 13:40:33 -0800

A friend of mine owns an appliance store in the United States. He will be taking a trip to Europe and while in Paris he was hoping to check out how they do things there. I have tried looking for appliance stores in the French version of Google Maps, also tried google.fr looking for "appliance stores" Paris. I have not come up with any good results.

Does anyone have a suggestion for how I might be able to locate appliance stores in Paris? Do they have appliance stores like we have in the US? (i.e. washers, dryers, refrigerators, electronics under one roof)

Mappable results would be major plus.

Holy Grail of web-based file management?

metajc — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 10:36:01 -0800

Holy Grail of web-based file management needed for girlfriend's non-profit ... so far, no luck. My girlfriend has been picking my brain for months about ideas for a file management system for her office. I've scoured Metafilter and shown her many sites but nothing has been perfect.

Her criteria:
- Hosts all kinds of files from JPEGs to spreadsheets
- Web-based
- Intuitive, Accessible to non-Geeks
- Searchable / Tags
- Bulletin board for messages, links, web addresses
- Tasks and Calendars would be great
- Budget is limited (Boss hasn't mentioned $ figure though)

Has already looked at:
- Basecamp (I think she likes it but hasn't settled)
- Wikispaces (?)
- Access (I would think this would be intimidating)
- PHPfileNavigator2 ("too clunky" and questioned the search capability)

Personally, I use Basecamp but I think there has been resistance for some reason. If you all want to vote or have other apps in mind, I thank you kindly. Let's put this to bed.

Please help me sort my vocabulary list in Excel!

Vorteks — Tue, 27 May 2008 13:34:08 -0800

Complicated Excel formula question involving text-search and Japanese characters. Can you help? I have two spreadsheets.

Spreadsheet A contains a list of Japanese vocabulary words I need to learn for the JLPT this year. Spreadsheet B contains a list of Japanese characters in one column along with the characters "Heisig number" (an ordinal number indicating where that character appears in the book "Remembering The Kanji" by James Heisig).

I want to add a column to Spreadsheet A that will contain the highest Heisig number among the characters that make up the vocabulary word. The purpose of this is to sort the words in Spreadsheet A so that I can memorize only the words that can be written using the Kanji I've learned so far.

Confused? Here's an example: Spreadsheet A, cell 57A contains the word "朝寝坊". Using Spreadsheet B to looking up the 3 characters in that word, I find the Heisig number for 朝 is 52, 寝 is 1150, and 坊 is 492. 1150 is the highest of those 3 numbers, so I'd like Spreadsheet A, cell 57B to read "1150". Is there a way to set up a formula to do this? I've never pushed Excel this far before.

Thank you in advance, Hive Mind!

Alternatives to Yahoo Pipes, please.

feelinglistless — Sun, 25 May 2008 14:28:32 -0800

I'd like set up an RSS feed which offers results of a search from news feeds I've selected. Alternatives to Yahoo Pipes, please. I've tried Yahoo Pipes, but I've found it a bit inflexible, and keeps timing out especially when there's a certain amount of feeds to combine and filter at the same time. Trying to cut it down using RSS Mix confuses it even more.

I've tried doing searches on the feeds by adding them to Bloglines, but the search only on own feeds service seems to be broken.

Basically, I'd like something as flexible as Google News or Blog searches (and which can create the resulting RSS feed) but which only looks at the hundred or so RSS feeds I'm choosing rather than everything.

Does this make sense?

What web portal software for PDF/HTML search?

RecalcitrantYouth — Fri, 23 May 2008 12:35:27 -0800

I’m trying to build a simple web portal to share PDF and HTML documentation with our customers, and allow them to search the documentation. I figured this would be many FOSS tools available to do this, but I keep running into roadblocks… My requirements are fairly simple (at least I think they are):
1. Indexing and search of PDF and HTML files (ideally with Lucene or another search engine with similar capabilities)
2. Indexing and search of files not directly linked from portal pages (e.g. HTML sub-pages within Doxygen docs)
3. Access control so customers can only see and search content they‘re entitled to
4. Easy file upload would be nice

I’ve looked at a bunch of different Content Management Systems and Portals (Drupal, Joomla, Jahia, Liferay, Hippo, Magnolia and others), all of which have many other nice features, but none so far have been able to do simple PDF/HTML search with access control.

From the feature list on cmsmatrix.org, most CMSs seem focused on other areas (blogging, news, portlets), so I'm not sure anymore that a CMS is even what I'm looking for.

Any recommendations? Am I missing something obvious here? Should I be looking for something other than a CMS?

What's the best site to conduct background checks?

thewittyname — Thu, 22 May 2008 20:58:15 -0800

What's the best website to research someone's background? I know there are several websites where you can conduct background searches on people, usually for a fee. Which ones are good, and which ones should I avoid?

Can you help me to find this novel from its plot description?

Carmody — Mon, 19 May 2008 17:26:27 -0800

In the early 80's, I read a library book that featured a heroine stumbling into a parallel world and encountering chicken-legged vampires (not Baba Yaga) and their master. I can't recall the title nor author of this novel and you will earn my eternal gratitude if you can identify this work for me so that I can locate and read it again. As a young teenager many many moons ago, I read a library book that featured the below in roughly the following order (and to varying degrees of accuracy due to my poor memory):

- girl riding bike has accident
- ends up in parallel, but feudal-like earth
- kindly invited in by elderly couple, who proceed to board up the house ready for nighfall just like the other villagers
- at night, the vampires arrive and attempt to entice the inhabitants out and/or break-in
- can't recall exact means, but husband is bitten and killed?
- wife and girl put him in a sack and tie it tightly
- sack moves and husband jumps out as a chicken-legged vampire
- husband is either killed again or released to join other vampires
- next day girl vows to end the vampires' reign and, following wife's directions visits the castle source of the infestation where she promptly gets the reciprocated hots for the vampire leader and I can't, ferthelifeofme, recall whether she beds him or kills him or both.

If anyone can please tell me the title or author of this novel, you will earn my eternal gratitude. I have subscribed to goth and vampire-themed news groups solely in order to enquire about it. Unfortunately, since the only stand-out theme is "chicken-legged vampires" ("vampire romance" having been done to death) I tend to get laughed off the forums.

The novel was probably written in the 60s, 70s or early 80s and I can't recall whether the author was male or female. And before you ask, the library I borrowed it from has long since trashed its records and thrown out the book. And when I visited a large bookseller and described the storyline, the assistant gave me a fixed smile while she frantically groped under the counter for the panic button.

And it wasn't all a dream.

Thanks for your time.

Looking for a random picture from the interwebs....

jtfowl0 — Tue, 06 May 2008 11:34:06 -0800

Does anybody know where I can find a full picture of the guy in this image? I don't remember much else about the image that would be helpful, only that he is standing facing the camera and I think he is wearing a black suit and tie. This picture is part of a running gag I had with an old friend and would love to find it again. Help me, Green!

Can I "Feel Lucky" at a particular site?

bonecrusher — Mon, 05 May 2008 11:20:30 -0800

Does anyone know how to combine sitesearch and Feeling Lucky in google URLs? I'm trying to create a search string that will search MSDN for a particular keyword and take me to the first match. The following URL does what I want (from this old ask.mefi), except it won't limit the search to a particular domain:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&btnI=Feeling+Lucky&q=strlen

If I add a site to the query string, though, it no longer behaves like the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button. Instead, it shows a list of matches:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&as_sitesearch=msdn.microsoft.com&btnI=Feeling+Lucky&q=strlen

Is what I'm doing impossible?

How can I get automate my daily news searches?

abkadefgee — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 12:28:39 -0800

How can I automate the news searches that I'm performing on the same subjects day after day after day? I'm working for an employer who needs current information on what the press is saying each day. It would be great if it were an issue of what the big national papers were saying and I could simply use Google News, but I need information from our state and local papers, including those that have only a weekly distribution cycle.

Right now, I'm forced to spend time searching through ten websites a day, often to find no new information. It seems like there should be a way to automate this process so that new information pops up in my email box or RSS reader and I can see what's new right away.

So far, I've been considering applications like Dapper, Yahoo Pipes, Google Alerts, or Feed43. I can't simply subscribe to RSS feeds from the sites directly, since most of them are written in 1998-style code and don't have RSS feeds or tagging of articles.

Google Alerts seems to be out of the running since it often pops up with articles that are months old and misses the local papers.

Dapper seems like it could be great, except that I'm having some trouble tweaking it so that it doesn't send me an update just because a banner ad changes. I think I could get it to work, but I could use a tutorial.

Yahoo Pipes seems like it could be very powerful, but it's a bit intimidating.

Feed43 I've heard good things about, but it doesn't seem to do much more than turn pages into RSS feeds and this doesn't help me with the search.

If you have any tips for using the above services or could point me in the direction of a better solution, I'd really appreciate it. I'd bet someone else out there has had to work through a similar situation at some point. Thanks in advance!

Experience with Saferentals.com

flxyp — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 12:16:38 -0800

Has anyone had any success using Saferentals.com? I came across their list for NYC and their listings seems too good to be true. I'd love to hear what the hive mind have to say and your experiences with this site. Thanks.

Article about secret restaurant techniques

stuart_s — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 13:14:59 -0800

I'm looking for a particular magazine article. It was about how chef's use uncommon ingredients to separate their food from what home cooks are generally capable of. Not ingredients that are prominently featured on the menu. The little dash of this or that which the diner can't identify. The article seemed to suggest that the ingredients were a crutch or a cheat at least in some instances. Finally, one secret ingredient was something that the chef drizzles over (raw?) fish. I thought it might have been perilla oil? I thought it might have appeared in the New York Times? I thought that one of the other tricks might have been truffle oil. I've spent far too long searching on nyt.com for all manner of combinations of those terms and other and I'm no longer sure of any of these things.

It's driving me crazy! Thanks.

Where are these queries without a referer header coming from?

Fred Mars — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 07:53:20 -0800

I modified my website's search engine to log queries--including the search string, timestamp, referer, and visitor IP--in order to discover what visitors are searching for from which pages. Several of the queries have a blank referer and come from the IP 66.249.70.235. Those query strings are not spam-like. Typically they have some relation to my site's topic. The IP appears to belong to the Googlebot, buy why would it behave that way? The queries seem like things a human would enter. Is there some method of accessing a site's search engine that strips the referer header and leaves a bogus IP? As I said, nothing about this appears malicious. I am just wondering what is happening.