Thanks to contractual obligations that are purportedly ending this year, Google’s days as Safari’s search provider could be numbered. And Yahoo wants to take its spot.
During Yahoo’s quarterly earnings call yesterday, Marissa Mayer reiterated her interest in being Safari’s main search engine. “The Safari platform is basically one of the premier search deals in the world if not the premier search deal in the world,” she said in response to a question about Yahoo’s plans for search.
A longtime Cult of Mac reader wrote in with a question about some odd-looking folders she sees on her Mac.
“The ‘All Pictures’ folder has a sprocket looking icon,” she writes. “Same with All PDF documents and Recently Changed documents.
Are these files located elsewhere and if I deleted a file from one of the above folders does it remove it from all my files? Don’t understand the purpose of these.”
Excellent question, for sure. Let’s take a look at what these folders are, and how to use them to their full potential.
As more and more of our lives are lived on social media, the importance of being able to efficiently search through content is greater than ever.
With that in mind, Facebook is currently user-testing a new feature letting mobile users sift through old posts by friends using keywords — allowing them to more easily find content that would otherwise be lost.
The feature, which only counts for posts you’re allowed to see (meaning that private posts won’t show up) has currently only been rolled out to a select few, but will likely be officially added into an update of the Facebook iOS app in the near future.
Apple has been waging a fierce war against Flash ever since the iPhone debuted without the power to run Adobe’s battery hungry, multimedia software. Finally, seven years into the battle, Google is adding another blow by flagging Flash content in mobile search results with a warning that sites might not work properly.
Gusto is yet another iPhone email app that promises to fix your email, and it looks pretty good. It’s Gmail-only and iPhone-only, and its gimmick is that it separates your mail messages into categories according to their attachments. It also has killer search capabilities.
Here’s how to do Spotify voice search on the iPhone or iPad.
Alternatively you can buy the new Vela app for $0.99, and skip all the tedious screen tapping.
Let’s be honest, searching in the iTunes Store sucks, especially on the desktop. It’s often slow, and the results are difficult to navigate. Apple has tried to simplify things by displaying one result at a time in the App Store on iOS, but that approach also means that it can take longer to find the specific app you want in a sea of knockoffs.
A new web tool called “fnd” makes it easier to quickly search and navigate not just the App Store, but the iTunes Store in general.
Can we all agree that iTunes’ App Store search is truly, truly awful? That you can not only never find what you’re looking for, but you have to wait forever for the results to load?
Good. Then you’re going to love Fnd, a web-based search tool for the whole iTunes Store. It’s accurate, fast and not at all annoying.
Apple has added a new “related apps” feature to the app store when viewed on an iOS device. Now, along the top of the screen, over the details of an app, you’ll see the breadcrumb trail in the picture above.
Evernote now does natural-language searches. Type something like “images from Barcelona” into the search box and your query will automatically be turned into a search query with the form contains:images place:Barcelona.
You can also search on the device that created the note, document types, tags and notebooks and pretty much everything else you can think of. It’s like a local Google for your notes.
Searching for stuff is a big part of what we do on our computers, right? I know that I use Google daily for searching, both for topical information as well as just plain old “where is that website” search. Both Safari and Chrome search right from the address bar, and Spotlight has been in the upper right corner of Mac OS X for several iterations now.
There’s a faster way to access your preferred search engine and Spotlight, however, using only your keyboard.
You can hit Command-F to find anything on your Mac, or you can hit Command-Space to invoke Spotlight, which took over for Sherlock as the built-in searching system many moons ago. In Windows 8, you can use the Search “charm.”
On the iPhone and iPad, however, some might be a little confused. There’s no keyboard commands in iOS, and Apple has even moved the Search functionality in iOS 7 from the furthermost left icon page.
What’s an iPhone owner to do when she wants to search for that specific app that she’s buried in a folder somewhere on her device, or needs the phone number of her best friend, because she’s always just used Siri to call her and has no idea what her number actually is?
The Google Chrome browser for Mac and PC now understands your “Ok Google” voice commands thanks to an official “Voice Search Hotword extension” that’s available to download now from the Chrome Web Store. You can use it to make handsfree web searches, quick conversions, and even to set reminders.
When you searched for apps in the App Store in iOS 6, you got a bunch of cards that you could swipe through to find the specific app you were looking for. To get back to the beginning, you’d need to swipe back as many of the apps as you’d swiped through, and that could take some time.
There’s a new little trick in iOS 7 that makes it a lot easier to pop back to the beginning of the cards.
Phlo is a handy little Universal iOS app which lets you search a bunch of different search engines simultaneously. Just tap in your search term and then hop between various sites using the popover sidebar list.
You know the document you’re looking for, but you can’t remember where it’s saved. Did you upload it to Dropbox or Google Drive, or was it sent to you in an email? Fortunately, a new iPhone app called FindIt lets you quickly search all three — all at once.
Ever wondered which episodes of our own CultCast feature conversations about WWDC? Or which episodes of the original The Talk Show have Dan Benjamin and John Gruber discussing a Bond movie?
Then try Poodle.FM, an experimental search engine for podcasts from the folks behind the podcatcher app Instacast.
I asked Siri something yesterday, and s/he – as usual – misheard me. Whatever I actually asked, Siri thought I said “Election Tacos,” and as that didn’t really fit in with Siri’s abilities, he did a web search. Only instead of popping me into Safari, the results were shown right on the lock screen. And that’s not all.
During today’s WWDC keynote, Apple’s Eddy Cue briefly mentioned Bing integration in iOS 7. While demoing new features in Siri, Cue mentioned that Bing is used to power web searches. Nothing was said about Google, and that shouldn’t come as a surprise.
Apple has been distancing itself from Google for quite some time. For instance, Apple Maps is now on iOS and OS X. Bing integration in Siri, while a more subtle move, is definitely a knife jab at Google. And Microsoft couldn’t be happier.
Google has brought the new voice search features announced at Google I/O last week to its Google Chrome web browser for desktops. The latest version of the app (version 27) puts a little microphone icon alongside the search bar on Google.com which lets you find the things you’re looking for without touching your keyboard.
Apple began adding the Galaxy S4 to its ongoing patent-infringement case against Samsung last week, and it has now specified five patents which it believes the device is breaching. The Cupertino company has also taken aim at Google Now, which allegedly infringes its unified search patent.
iBooks is not only a fantastic e-reading app on your iPhone or iPad, but it’s also a fantastic study tool. If you need to read books for class or your own learning objectives, you can use iBooks to highlight words or passages, search the text for specific words or phrases, and make notes that appear in the margins as little colored sticky notes.
Using these tools could help you become a much more organized studier, letting you go back to a passage in a book to remember the important things with a couple of taps. Here’s how, using iBooks 3.1, the latest version of iBooks.
Google Maps is already one of the best mapping services on the planet, but Google isn’t content to rest on its laurels. At the Google I/O keynote this morning Google announced that it will launch a new version of Google Maps for iOS and Android later this year.
The new Google Maps will come with a simplified UI, as well as new features like real-time traffic, dynamic re-routing, reviews from Zagat and there will even be a dedicated Google Maps app for iPad.
Google updated its Google Search app earlier this week to introduce Google Now to iOS. The feature brings Android’s awesome digital assistant to your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch, allowing you to get information like the weather, sports scores, and travel assistance all in one place.
But many users have found that it also has a significantly negative affect on battery life. Because many of Google Now’s “cards” rely on location data, the service constantly gets updates on its whereabouts from nearby cell towers and Wi-Fi hotspots, and this means it’s eating away at your battery all the time.
A common method for finding apps in the iTunes App Store is to do a quick search in Google. Searching the App Store for “Tweetbot” can take a lot longer than Googling “Tweetbot App Store” in a browser.
Links to iTunes have always been near the top of the first page when you search for an app, but iTunes results have recently started appearing lower in Google’s search results with no explanation.
