search - page 4

With the new-ish integrated search function in OS X, I spend a lot of time clicking over from “This Mac” to “Documents” or “Dropbox,” since I typically start out in the folder I’m searching for anyway. I usually want to just search the folder I’m in, rather than the entire Mac, since that can be a lot of files to search through, especially if the search term I’m using is fairly generic (“I think it was something about kittens…”).

Yesterday, we dove into the Finder preferences to help you tell your Mac what folder to open new Finder windows with. Today, then, we’re gonna rush headlong back to those very same preferences to tell your Mac what to do when you’re searching for a file.

BARCELONA, MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS – I’m willing to bet that you have – at some point – been frustrated by the App Store. More specifically, you have been driven crazy trying to find apps via search. Even apps which you know are there, which you have used before, and about which you know almost everything but their names.

Quixey is a search engine for Apps, and it will ease your App Store pain.

That’s what CamFind‘s developers are claiming — that the app is at least four times more accurate than Google Goggles at recognizing and then searching for the subject of a photo you’ve taken with your iPhone.

If you’re unfamiliar with the two-year-old Google Goggles function (integrated within the Google Search app) the idea is pretty simple. Just snap a photo with your iPhone, and the app tries to recognize what you’ve taken a photo of. Once identified, you can then initiate a Google search for that item.

The official Dropbox app for iOS has today been updated to add push notifications and an all-new PDF viewer. With version 2.1, users will now receive an alert when a folder has been shared with them. The update is available to download from the App Store now.

Google pays Apple around $1 billion a year to be the default search engine on iOS, according to Morgan Stanley analyst Scott Devitt, and that figure is going to rise in the years ahead. That’s more than a lot of companies turn over in a year, and Apple banks it for doing literally nothing.

Amidst rumors of a mysterious smartphone and new iPad apps, Facebook held a big press event today at its headquarters in Menlo Park, California. The topic was search, or more specifically, social search. It’s a new feature Facebook is calling “Graph Search,” and the beta has started rolling out already. It will be available for all of Facebook’s one billion users soon.

Think of Graph Search as Google with a more personal touch. Facebook is leveraging everything it knows about you to help you connect with people who like what you like. Instead of leaving Facebook.com to get your results, all of your social data and timeline history is mined and collated inside Facebook’s walls. That’s good news for Facebook, and bad news for Google.

Facebook is set to hold a press event later today, and it appears the whole thing’s going to be a massive kick in the teeth for Google. Not only is the social network expected to unveil its own smartphone, possibly powered by its own platform, but it’s also expected to hit Google where it really hurts — in search. Rumor has it the company will unveil its own search engine, which will rollout to users “very soon.”

Izik is a new web search app from the makers of Blekko, a web search engine for people who are looking for a change from Google.

You could be forgiven for saying “Blekwhat?” there. Although it’s been around for a few years now, Blekko isn’t what most people think of when they go looking for somewhere else to search.

But that doesn’t mean you should dismiss it without trying it. Blekko does search pretty well in your browser, and this app is a decent attempt to do search differently on your iPad too.

We all have too many apps, I’m guessing. As an app aficionado, I have hundreds of apps across several pages, many of them buried within folders. iOS is organized for visual memory; I’m usually flipping through pages and looking for the app I need based on where it is on the page, how the icon looks, and what other apps it’s near.

Once past the first page or two, however, and especially in folders filled with a bunch of apps, that visual strategy starts to break down. Typically, I’ll swipe right from the Home screen and type in the name of the app, then tap on it to launch it. This works fine, but eventually takes more time than just knowing what folder the app resides in. Here’s how to find out.

No matter how long it spent waiting for approval, Google’s updated search app for iOS was worth the wait. Is it a shameless Siri-clone for web search? Yes, pretty much? Is it fast, instantly usable, and useful? Oh yes. Oh yes it certainly is.

Liquid is a productivity helper for OS X. It comes in two flavors – free and paid. The idea is to speed up your information seeking workflow. You find something you need to research, and a few key presses later you’ve got some data. Or a unit conversion. Or, in the paid version, a language translation. It’s got a lot of features.

Google’s updated search app adds lightning-fast voice-controlled search, just like you get on Android. It’s simple, impressively fast and will run on just about any iDevice you might have, not just the latest hardware.

But it has a long way to go to compete with Siri.

Google has started to index the contents of your e-mail attachments, and you can now search on them in the Gmail interface. This is new, and pretty great.

But if you’re using the iOS Mail app to wrangle your Gmail accounts, it works there too. I discovered this in the process testing out the browser version and — as you might expect — Apple’s version is both more elegant and less useful.

Apple isn’t a company known for silly blunders, but its website is revealing a host of unreleased products today. As we reported just moments ago, the Cupertino company already has links to its iPhone 5 and new iPod touch press releases set up, which can be found by searching for the devices on its website. But that’s not all: a “new iTunes” has also been discovered.

Dolphin is one of the best third-party browsers you’ll find on iOS, and it just got even better on the iPhone, thanks to a new design and user interface, new features, and lots of improvements in version 6.0.

The most noticeable change in the way Safari works in its latest version is in the way it allows you to search. Just like Google’s Chrome web browser, Safari now includes an integrated search in the previously URL-only address bar at the top of the browser.

There are some tricks to narrow down search results, as well as a couple neat ways to save specific searches for later use. Let’s check them out together, shall we?

Google has slowly been introducing its cleaner, richer, more interactive search answers. You may have noticed these interactive “card-like” results when searching for “weather” or “120 X 50.” Google continues to refine its search tools and yesterday announced a few improvements to make these interactive results even better.

Mail app, while not my favorite email client, is one that comes with the Mac OS X operating system. That hasn’t changed with Mac OS X Mountain Lion, either, and the Apple team has added quite a few enhancements and extra features to make Mail a nicer email client.

One such feature is In Line Find, helping you find text within the body of emails. Until now, you’d have to use a separate Find dialog that only gets you one result at a time. Hitting Command-G would take you to the next instance of the text you were looking for, and you’d repeat that keyboard combination over and over to find all occurrences of the text in your email. Not any more – it’s a lot better in Mountain Lion.

Every time Apple holds a keynote or earning call they love to brag about how many apps are available in the App Store. Right now Apple’s boasting that there are 500,000 apps for the iPhone, which you know, sounds really freaking amazing when you’re thinking about buying and iPhone. Think of all the cool stuff you could with 500,000 different apps.

Yes, the App Store is awesome and it’s packed with some truly solid apps, but the truth is that most of the 500,000 apps that Apple brags about don’t ever get noticed. In fact, a recent analysis revealed that two-thirds of all apps in the App Store are “zombies,”  meaning they never get downloaded, are invisible to users, and have no ranking.

Want to hear something silly? Today Google introduced this odd beta feature called Handwrite that’s supposed to change the way you interact with search on your iPad, iPhone or other mobile devices.

The way it works is that instead of pulling up the Google homepage on your iPhone and typing in your search query, you just draw the words instead. It’s suppose to be a “fun and easy new way to search,” but it’s probably one of Google’s worst concepts and here’s why.

If you’ve recently typed “weather” into Google search on your mobile phone, you may have noticed Google’s neat little interactive weather visualizations. The new weather visualizations give you a look at the current forecast, precipitation, wind direction/speeds, as well as an hourly and ten-day forecast. And now, these same cool visualizations are available in search on tablets.

Back in February it was discovered that Google was bypassing Apple’s privacy settings in Mobile Safari on iOS. The search giant was making ad revenue from Safari users’ web activity by ‘tricking’ the default iOS browser to allow multiple tracking cookies.

6 months later, and Google is about to pay the “largest penalty ever levied on a single company” by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Google will pay $22.5 million to settle the charges issued by the FTC, and the code in question has already been disabled by Google in Safari on iOS.

When you have a lot of documents, pictures, songs, and videos on your Mac fighting for every last kilobyte of space, finding the right file at a moment’s notice can be an impossibly long and tiring task. Add in the complications and fragmentation that we get from the “Cloud” where we share different files on Dropbox, Google Drive, Gmail, or Google Docs, and the search gets exponentially harder.

Found is a lightning-fast search tool for your Mac that wants to put an end to all that rubbish and help you find your files wherever they are. It’s an awesome, easy-to-use app with a gorgeous interface and the makers just came out with a new update that makes it even better. A few weeks ago Found gave three lucky Cult of Mac readers a free MacBook Air for trying out the app. Well, they’re back, and the prize is even bigger for Cult of Mac readers who download Found’s newest update.

If you want to search files on your Mac with ease, AND win a free MacBook Pro with Retina display, then all you got to do is follow these simple rules:

Although it sometimes doesn’t understand everything you say, it’s hard not to like Siri. After all, the voice-controlled assistant has made it easier then ever to perform all kinds of tasks on a smartphone using only the natural language that we use on a daily basis. But as we are well aware, Siri isn’t perfect.

Especially when it comes to answering your questions. In fact, Apple analyst Gene Munster believes she’s still two years behind Google after she only managed to answer 68% of the 800 questions he asked in a quiet room.

Sometime last week, it became apparent that Apple had tweaked its App Store search algorithm to display results in order of their user rankings and descriptions, rather than the names of the apps themselves. The change brought some confusion, not only to App Store customers, but also to developers, who found that their apps were no longer appearing under certain searches as they had been.

It now appears that Apple has backtracked on that change, however.