Use Quix to make advanced searches easier

Google may be the best search engine available today, but it has several frustrations to me. One of the biggest is that it routinely forgets my preferred search settings. At best, Google only remembers your preferences when you are logged in, but personally i find that Google forgets my preferences all of the time, even when logged in.

I finally figured out a way to avoid that frustration plus limit my Google searches to recent pages, regardless of whether I am logged in. The key was to use Quix.

I've written about Quix before but as a quick recap: Quix is a bookmarklet that lets you easily add/change shortcuts by editing a plain text file. I host my plain text file in my public Dropbox folder, so I can edit the file on any of my computers and know that it will be instantly updated on all my computers (including my iPhone and iPad) in minutes.

Read on for the specifics...

First I went to Google's Advanced Search page and set the parameters that I wanted: 50 results per search, open in new windows, prefer pages in English, dated within the last year, and SafeSearch off. I put 'FOOBAR' in the 'all these words' field, and clicked the 'Advanced Search' button.

Then I copied the URL from the address field and replaced 'FOOBAR' with '%s' which is what Quix uses as a variable for 'Whatever the user enters.'

The result looks like this (note: I've added line-breaks for readability, but in your Quix file this should be one long line):

* http://www.google.com/search?q=%s&
hl=en&newwindow=1&num=50&
lr=lang_en& ft=i&tbs=qdr:y&cr=&safe=images Untriggered Search

The asterisk tells Quix to use this kind of search whenever I enter any search without a specific keyword (for example, if I type 'a Star Wars' into Quix, the leading 'a' tells Quix to use Amazon). Google shows a banner on the results page to remind me I have limited my results to the past year. If I click on the "X" on that banner, Google will do the search again with the time restriction removed.

You could do similar things to customize results for Google News or Google Images, or any site which offers advanced search options, such as Twitter (want to limit results to your preferred language?) or Flickr (want to search for images with specific license options?).

If you find yourself frustrated by your default search results on any site, look for advanced search options. Making a Quix shortcut takes only a minute or two once you have it setup. The 20 minutes or so it takes you to understand Quix will pay off in the long run.