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Google-Fu – The art of effective search

Fed up with having to wade through lots of junk in your Google search results? We’ll show you a few tips to quickly find exactly what you’re looking for. You can start with the Google Advanced Search but there are quicker ways to get the same results.

Consider your search…
To begin with, you need to spend a moment thinking about the most accurate term to describe what it is that you’re searching for. The key is to start out as specific as possible, then widen the search if you’re not getting the results you expect. This is the single most important point of this whole guide.

For example, you might be looking for information about a particular Family Guy episode. If you simply searched for family guy, you would be swamped with results (143 million to be precise). OK, some of them will lead you to the information you’re looking for but that’s a few clicks away. A better search would be family guy episode guide which is more specific and yields the wikipedia page List of Family Guy Episodes as the top result.

Quote me…
Sometimes, especially when searching for common words, your results can appear totally unrelated to your search. This is often because the words appear separately on the same page. The search dyson manual would show any pages that contain the word dyson and the word manual. To further narrow your search, enclose it in quotation marks; “dyson manual” and only results that contain that exact phrase will be returned.

I know about the quotes already…
OK, so you’ve sussed the quotes. Let’s get down with some more advanced “switches” as they are known.

OR – Search for either one, such as “price high OR low” searches for “price” with “high” or “low”.
“–” – Search while excluding a word, such as “apple -tree” searches where word “tree” is not used.
“+” – Force inclusion of a word, such as “Name +of +the Game” to require the words “of” & “the” to appear on a matching page.
“*” – Wildcard operator to match any words between other specific words.

Some of the query options are as follows:

define: – The query prefix “define:” will provide a definition of the words listed after it.
stocks: – After “stocks:” the query terms are treated as stock ticker symbols for lookup.
site: – Restrict the results to those websites in the given domain, such as, site:www.acmeacme.com. The option “site:com” will search all domain URLs named with “.com” (no space after “site:”).
allintitle: – Only the page titles are searched (not the remaining text on each webpage).
intitle: – Prefix to search in a webpage title, such as “intitle:google search” will list pages with word “google” in the title, and word “search” anywhere (no space after “intitle:”).
allinurl: – Only the page URL address lines are searched (not the text inside each webpage).
inurl: – Prefix for each word to be found in the URL; others words are matched anywhere, such as “inurl:acme search” matches “acme” in a URL, but matches “search” anywhere (no space after “inurl:”).

The page-display options (or query types) are:

cache: – Highlights the search-words within the cached document, such as “cache:www.google.com xxx” shows cached content with word “xxx” highlighted.
link: – The prefix “link:” will list webpages that have links to the specified webpage, such as “link:www.google.com” lists webpages linking to the Google homepage.
related: – The prefix “related:” will list webpages that are “similar” to a specified web page.
info: – The prefix “info:” will display some background information about one specified webpage, such as, info:www.google.com. Typically, the info is the first text (160 bytes, about 23 words) contained in the page, displayed in the style of a results entry (for just the 1 page as matching the search).
filetype: – results will only show files of the desired type (ex filetype:pdf will return pdf files)

More info…

Bonus…
It’s not just Google that has switches, the Twitter advanced search is pretty nifty too:

Let us know your search tips in the comments here or on Twitter and remember to share this post of you found it useful.

Improve your browsing speed and stay safe with Adblock Plus

It often takes longer to download the ads on a page than the page content itself (in the case of flash ads anyway) and how annoying are those ads covering the bottom section of YouTube videos!? Firefox and Chrome addon Adblock Plus is here to save the day.

Ads are not just annoying, they are potentially harmful too. Although the site you’re visiting may be legit, the ads they carry (which are often out of their control) can infect your machine with all kinds of malware so blocking them is a very good idea.

Download Adblock Plus for Firefox or Chrome and never see another ad again!

Unfortunately, Adblock Plus isn’t available for Internet Explorer. Yet another reason to ditch Internet Explorer for a better internet experience.

Let us know what you think in the comments here or on Facebook and remember to share with your networks.

Our first HTML5 site – Glass Splashback Colour

We’ve just put the finishing touches to our first HTML5 website: Glass Splashback Colour. GSC is an offshoot of Glassact UK, a specialist glass company from Norwich supplying glass splashbacks, glass worktops, image glass and bespoke architectural glass. They already had a website but it was built using a free online site builder which meant it wasn’t properly optimised for the search engines, it was poorly laid out and took an age to load.

We’ve redesigned the site from the ground up to be search engine friendly, cross browser compatible, fast to display and responsive (meaning the layout adjusts depending on your screen size). Try it for yourself: visit Glass Splashback Colour, resize your browser and you will see fonts and images change size, content moves around the page and some items are hidden and others appear.

With the massive worldwide increase in visitors using mobile devices, we now design all of our websites to be responsive. We believe the visitor should have a great experience no matter what kind of device is being used to view a site. There’s nothing that annoys visitors more than having to scroll sideways as it interrupts the flow of reading.

You may notice that although the HTML validates, the CSS does not. This is mainly due to vendor prefixes which are currently required to get CSS3 features working in older browsers. As time goes on and people upgrade their browsers, this kind of code will become more and more redundant but for now, it’s a necessary evil. While I’ve got my web designer hat on, it’s probably a good time to remind you to ditch Internet Explorer for a better internet experience.

When we’re designing a site, validation isn’t top of our list. Our view looks something like this:

User experience
Search engine optimisation
Load time
Accessibility
Valid code

We’re not alone in this view, some of the most popular websites of today do not validate: Apple, Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter, Yahoo, Number 10, Digg, The Times, Microsoft and ebay all have pages that don’t validate. That’s not to say you shouldn’t bother trying, just don’t put it above all else. After all, valid code doesn’t mean good code just as invalid code doesn’t mean bad code.

If your website could do with a makeover, be it in look and feel, to make it responsive or just for SEO, contact us today for a no obligation quote.

What are QR codes and how to use them

We’ve had lots of questions about QR codes recently… What are QR codes? How do I use QR codes? Are QR codes just a fad? We’ll answer these questions and more.

What are QR codes?

A QR code (abbreviated from Quick Response code) is essentially just like a regular barcode that we’re all used to seeing on every product we buy. You don’t need any special hardware to scan a QR code, all you need is something you probably have very close to you right now… your phone. There are apps for scanning these codes for all the major platforms and we’ll list some of them below.

The beauty of a QR code is that they can link to almost anything; a bunch of text, a website URL, a telephone number, full contact details (vCard), a Google Maps location, wifi connection login and much more. The other great thing is that you can easily create them yourself with one of the online QR code generators also listed below.
Continue reading “What are QR codes and how to use them”

Scrollable box without using an iframe

Here’s a super simple CSS tip to create a scrollable box on your website, without having to use the dreaded iframe tag. Scrollable boxes are great for cramming lots of content into a small space. They are perfect for announcements or short news feeds.

The solution which forms the basis of this technique is the overflow attribute. It can be set to .scrollable { width:250px; height:300px; overflow:scroll; }

Give a div the class you specified above and you’re good to go.
<div class="scrollable"> [Put your content here] </div>

Example 1:

Ornatus omittam scaevola eos ea, eu his amet quas insolens, nam alii honestatis appellantur id. Vim eirmod imperdiet delicatissimi an, quo pertinax inimicus consetetur at. Id facete euismod mel. Quo mandamus eloquentiam et. Nam ad consul malorum ullamcorper, has ea bonorum verterem. In accusam dissentiunt est, id eos prima mutat solum. Everti percipitur ne vel, ea ubique legimus vix.
Lorem ipsum sea ad molestiae similique repudiandae, qui et habeo reque nonumy. Placerat efficiantur vim ex, eam nulla maiestatis definitiones ei. Duo et inermis definitiones, an vix omittam offendit. At cum noster aliquando constituam. Suas eripuit qui eu, et eam copiosae dissentiet. Labores delicata ad sea, in soluta definitiones eam. Et mea solet nonummy.

The problem with setting overflow:scroll is that it creates both vertical and horizontal scroll bars and often the horizontal bar is not required (or desired).

A better idea is to set overflow-y:scroll (or overflow-x if you need horizontal only scrolling) leaving you with the desired effect.

Example 2:

Let us know what you think in the comments here or on Facebook.