Writing Prompt and Search Resources

I have started this three times now, because thunderstorms here in South Florida keep knocking me out of the computer.

I found a new resource for writing prompts, http://plutor.org/threewords/, which gives you three words, and a five minute timer, on Writeboard, in which to write.

I thought that this might make a good post, and was the destination url from another good resource, search engine BananaSlug, where you put in your search term, ‘writing prompts’ in this case, and then choose from a number of categories; such as great ideas, a.word.a.day, and others; to obtain a random word to narrow your search. This is an interesting concept, in my opinion, and produces some interesting results.

If you are a writer in search of some ideas, I recommend you try these. Even if you are not a writer, you can come up with some great ideas using BananaSlug.

Give them a try and let me know.

Thanks to Grace Kerina, via her Odds & Ends Compendium, for sending me to BananaSlug.

Internet - Ixquick Search Engine

Today I read the posting September 1, 2006 "Search Engine Embraces Privacy" on Sandy Berger's Blog "Keeping It Short and Simple" and the related Compu-Kiss article "Ixquick Search Engine Embraces Privacy".

I was intrigued enough by these, to try out Ixquick www.ixquick.com myself; from what I have seen and experienced so far I think that I will be using this myself, along with my current favorite Google.

My reasons are not so much privacy related. If the Justice Department really wants to know my surfing habits, I am sure they can find out by other means anyway.

I personally like the star system to show the relevancy of the search results, see the Compu-Kiss article for more details. As Ixquick is a Meta Search Engine, you are actually searching multiple search engines at the same time and the stars indicate how many of those turn the result up in their top 10./P>

All in all, at this point, I think the Ixquick Meta Search Engine, is well worth trying out.

Once you have tried it out, let me know what you think.

Internet - Web Directories

If you are trying to find general information on a subject by searching the internet, your best bet will probably be using a web directory, rather than a search engine.

A web directory is a tree style organization by major topics. Under the major topics are sub-topics, then sub-sub-topics, and so on.

I will use the Google Directory for the example below. There are other Web directories, such as Yahoo, the Open Directory Project, but Google is what I use the most.

The Major topics of the Google Directory, at the time of this writing, are: Arts, Business, Computers, Games, Health, Home, Kids and Teens, News, Recreation, Reference, Regional, Science, Shopping, Society, Sports and World.

Lets say that you want to know more about designing and maintaining a web site.

If you select Internet, under the Computer topic, then Web Design and Development you will find a list of more sub-topics related to your search: Accessibility, Authoring, FAQs, Help and Tutorials, Hosting, and more each of which will have further subtopics; within these might be more and eventually you will get a listing of websites related to what you are looking for.

With a search engine like Google, Yahoo and many others, you enter a keyword or phrase to search an index, refining by adding more specific keywords or phrases, until you get what you are looking for. A web directory, saves a lot of typing and figuring out what keyword or phrase to use to get to where you want, most of this has already been done, you just need to drill down to get what you are looking for.

I almost always use a web directory, when trying to find information on a very broad topic. Try using web directories yourself for broad searches and I believe you will find you spend less time getting pertinent information.

As always, leave a comment and let me know if this works for you and if not why not.

Google - Exact Phrase Searching

You have moved to a new area and want to find a computer user group nearby. You go to Google.com and search for: computer user group,(results: about 366,000,000).

To search for the exact phrase in Google just enclose the same phrase in double quotation marks like this: "computer user group", (results: about 123,000).

It should be a lot easier to narrow down when you use an exact phrase search. As you can see by the very broad example above, you would have to dig through over 300 million results of sites without the exact phrase, but only a little over 100 thousand with the exact phrase.

If I search within the 100 thousand for CT (Connecticut) it is narrowed down to 587, for MD (Maryland) 810, etc.

Coming up with a good search phrase and searching for that exact phrase, should keep you from getting frustrated.

Google - View In HTML Instead of PDF

If you use Google to search a lot for information, a great number of the best search results will be PDF (Portable Document Format).

When you click on the link a copy of Acrobat Reader opens, and takes considerable time opening if it is a large PDF file.

A way I find to be much faster is to use the Google "View as HTML" option, normally to the right of the second line in the listing.

It won't be real pretty, but you can quickly see if the information you are looking for is there, without having to wait for Acrobat Reader to open.

I find that this helps me a lot and I hear a lot of grumbling at work from those who do a lot of Google searches. I have shown a couple of those grumblers this little time saver and it seems to work for them also.

Go ahead and try this the next time a PDF shows up in your Google search, it won't hurt anything and you can always go back and bring up the PDF through Acrobat Reader, if you don't like this view.

If you do try this, let me know what you think.