indexing
Latest
Reddit comments are finally searchable
Reddit users can now get search results from replies to posts, rather than just the original posts and topics within a community.
Google delays ranking all sites based on their mobile version to March 2021
Due to the coronavirus, webmasters have almost another full year to prepare themselves for Google's switch to mobile-first indexing.
Google will start ranking sites by their mobile version in September
Google will start indexing all websites by their mobile versions beginning in September. Google was already using mobile-first indexing for new domains, but this change will apply the phone-friendly indexing to all domains.
Google search is showing invitations to private WhatsApp groups
Your private WhatsApp group might not be as private as you'd like. DW journalist Jordan Wildon has noticed that Google is indexing at least some WhatsApp group invitations in its search, making it possible to slip into groups that owners might not want to be public. While many of these are fairly innocuous, some include sensitive data. Motherboard discovered one group apparently aimed at UN-accredited non-governmental organizations where it was possible to see the list of all 48 participants, including their phone numbers.
Google makes mobile-first search indexing the default for new domains
Google started its mobile-first search indexing over a year ago, and now it's ready to make that approach the law of the land. As of July 1st, 2019, Google will index the phone-oriented sites by default for any new web domain it registers. If you're starting a new site, you'll want to be sure its mobile version is polished and full-featured -- that's the version Google will use to parse the site's structure and extract useful snippets.
NeoFinder powerfully catalogs and indexes your photos, music and much more
NeoFinder is a fast and efficient cataloger (digital asset manager) for all your data. TUAW's not previously discussed NeoFinder, but with high recommendations and praise, it's recently come to our attention in the TUAW head office, so we though we'd give it a mention. From documents to photos and folders, NeoFinder will keep track of all your files and folders -- wherever they may be stored -- and make them easily searchable and accessible with a full inventory, including preview thumbnails for supported photos, documents audio and video. In a nutshell, NeoFinder is like a supercharged Finder with very specific search parameters. Even with powerful built-in Mac OS X features like Spotlight and QuickLook, it can be so frustrating when you can't find exactly what you're looking for because you can't remember exactly where you put it. If you work with large quantities of photos, audio files, video or documents, but have found yourself struggling to find that file -- it could be in any number of offline hard drives, discs or backups -- then NeoFinder if probably what you need. First released some 16 years ago, NeoFinder (formerly CDFinder) has moved with the times, continuously being developed and updated into its current 6.0.1 iteration, which now supports Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. Other stand out features include geotagging, cross-platform network with abeMeda for Windows and the ability to look inside archived files like ZIP, TAR, RAR and Stuffit files. I downloaded the free trial of NeoFinder and used it for some time. Though this is not a full review, I found it to be intuitive, fast and accurate. It certainly handled everything I could throw at it. But where NeoFinder shines, I expect, will be with large amounts of data. The NeoFinder websites touts users like NASA and the BBC. I can only imagine the amounts of data those guys will catalog and store. NeoFinder is available to download as a trial (with up to 10 catalogs) or purchase the activation code for US$39.99 for a private license, which removes the catalog restriction. Do you use NeoFinder or other cataloging/indexing software? How does it work for you and your demands? Let us know about it in the comments below.
Google bots learning to read webpages like humans, one step closer to knowing everything
Google just launched its Knowledge Graph, a tool intended to deliver more accurate information by analyzing the way users search. Of course, with a desire to provide better search results comes a need for improved site-reading capabilities. JavaScript and AJAX have traditionally put a wrench in Google bots' journey through a webpage, but it looks like the search engine has developed some smarter specimens. While digging through Apache logs, a developer spotted evidence that bots now execute the JavaScript they encounter -- and rather than just mining for URLS, the crawlers seem to be mimicking how users click on objects to activate them. That means bots can dig deeper into the web, accessing databases and other content that wasn't previously indexable. Looks like Google is one step closer to success on its quest to know everything.
British Library and Google Books partner up to digitize 250,000 out-of-copyright works
Oh paper, ye olde guardian of human wisdom, culture, and history, why must you be so fragile and voluminous? Not a question we ask ourselves every day, admittedly, but when you're talking about the British Library's extensive collection of tomes from the 18th and 19th century, those books, pamphlets and periodicals do stack up pretty quickly. Thankfully, Google's book digitization project has come to the rescue of bewildered researchers, with a new partnership with the British Library that will result in the availability of digital copies of works from that period -- spanning the time of the French and Industrial Revolutions, the Crimean War, the invention of the telegraph, and the end of slavery. In total, some 250,000 such items, all of them long out of copyright, will find a home on Google Books and the British Library's website, and Google has even been nice enough to bear the full cost of transforming them into web-accessible gems of knowledge. Jump past the break for the similarly digital press release.
Google helps scholars mine 1.7 million Victorian era book titles for clues to our historical attitudes
Whether we like, loathe, or never even considered the idea of it, quantitative literary analysis seems ready for its moment in the spotlight. Dan Cohen and Fred Gibbs, a pair of historians of science over at George Mason University, have been playing around with the titles of some nearly 1.7 million books -- accounting for all the known volumes published in Britain during the 19th century -- in a search for enlightenment about the Victorian era's cultural trends and developments. By looking at how often certain words appear in text titles over time, they can find corroboration or perhaps even refutation for the commonly held theories about that time -- although they themselves warn that correlation isn't always indicative of causation. Their research has been made possible by Google's Books venture, which is busily digitizing just about every instance of the written word ever, and the next stage will be to try and mine the actual texts themselves for further clues about what our older selves thought about the world. Any bets on when the word "fail" was first used as a noun?
Media Catalog 4.0 faster, supports Quick Look
People who are religious about backups, especially those who use removable media like CDs or DVDs as backup media, often find themselves in a world of hurt when they try to find individual files on a pile of discs. It's worse than finding the proverbial needle in a haystack!Developer Robert Kuilman released version 4.0 of his Media Catalog application today (July 7, 2008). Media Catalog makes quick work of cataloguing all of those archive CDs, DVDs, and external hard drives. While test-drivng Media Catalog, I popped in a few old backup CDs. The application catalogued hundreds of files in a few seconds, then popped the CDs out. You can also drag-and-drop volumes onto the application to add them to the catalog. Searching is extremely fast, and you can use Quick Look to preview documents as long as the original media is mounted.Kuilman rewrote his indexing code and speed has improved up to 770% over version 3.9. You can try out Media Catalog 4.0 for free (limited to five media), or purchase it for $24.95.
TUAW Tip: force Spotlight to re-index some apps
I recently was fortunate enough to upgrade to a MacBook Pro, which means my wife can now get her mobile on with a MacBook. After I moved everything over and got to work with the new machine, I noticed some strangeness with Spotlight and Yojimbo: apparently, thanks to some quirk of bits and bytes, Apple's fancy schmancy search wasn't bringing up any of my Yojimbo items. After requesting some support from Bare Bones Software, a most useful employee of theirs shared a handy trick that forced Spotlight to re-index my items. It worked like a charm, and it was simple to pull off.If you have a 3rd party app that isn't behaving well with Spotlight, you could try surfing to ~/Library/Caches/Metadata. This is where apps, especially database-driven ones that want to be indexed by Spotlight, place cache data in order to make it into search results. For me, simply quitting Yojimbo, tossing out the Yojimbo folder sitting inside that Metadata folder and restarting Yojimbo forced Spotlight to get to work. The little magnifying glass began flowing on and off, and my Yojimbo items were soon appearing in my Spotlight search results just as they should.Now I don't know if this is the end-all solution to Spotlight indexing issues like this. I only know it worked for me, and judging from the emails that occasionally bounce over the Yojimbo mailing list, I'm not the only one who's ever tangled with Spotlight's indexing quirks. I hope this tip can help you unravel any Spotlight searching issues of your own.
