Wednesday, September 10, 2014

Better Internet Searching: Punctuation and Symbols in Search

As a 'power search user' using punctuation marks and symbols in your search is almost inevitable. 

Google search allows the following:

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433?hl=en&ref_topic=3180167

You can use some punctuation and symbols to change your search terms. Except for the examples below, most punctuation is ignored. For example, a search for [courtney@dogs.com] is seen by Google as [courtney dogs com]. 

Punctuation and symbols that work in Google search

Symbol What you can use it for
[+] Search for things like blood type [AB+] or for a Google+ page like [+Chrome]
[@] Find social tags like [@google] 
[&] Find strongly connected ideas and phrases like [A&E]
[%] Search for a percent value like [40% of 80]
[$] Indicate prices, like [nikon $400]
[#] Search for trending topics indicated by hashtags like [#lifewithoutgoogle]
[-] Indicate that words around it are strongly connected like [twelve-year-old dog]
[_] Connect two words like [quick_sort]. Your search results will find this pair of words either linked together (quicksort) or connected by an underscore (quick_sort).

In case you are using Bing to search, you can use the following:

http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-in/bing/ff808438.aspx


SymbolFunction
+
Finds webpages that contain all the terms that are preceded by the + symbol. Also allows you to include terms that are usually ignored.
" "
Finds the exact words in a phrase.
()
Finds or excludes webpages that contain a group of words.
AND
or &
Finds webpages that contain all the terms or phrases.
NOT
or -
Excludes webpages that contain a term or phrase.
OR or|
Finds webpages that contain either of the terms or phrases.
noteNote
  • By default, all searches in Bing are AND searches.
  • You must capitalize the NOT and OR operators. Otherwise, Bing will ignore them as stop words, which are commonly occurring words and numbers that are omitted to speed a full-text search.
  • Stop words and all punctuation marks, except for the symbols noted in this topic, are ignored unless they are surrounded by quotation marks or preceded by the + symbol.<
  • Only the first 10 terms are used to get search results.
  • Term grouping and Boolean operators are supported in the following preferred order:
    • parentheses ()
    • quotation marks ""
    • NOT + -
    • AND &
    • OR |
  • Because OR is the operator with lowest precedence, enclose OR terms in parentheses when combined with other operators in a search.
  • Some features and functionality described here may not be available in your country or region.




Better Internet Searching: Using Search Operators in Google Search

The Google search bar allows us to include a number of search operators to make sure that the context of the search is better explained. 

This will help narrow down the results to (hopefully) more relevant results

Here is quite a comprehensive list of operators that can be used in Google search:

http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators_reference.html

Web Search
allinanchor:allintext:allintitle:allinurl:cache:define:filetype:id:,inanchor:info:intext:intitle:inurl:link:related:site:
Image Search
allintitle:allinurl:filetype:inurl:intitle:site:
Groups
allintext:allintitle:author:group:insubject:intext:intitle:
Directory
allintext:allintitle:allinurl:ext:filetype:intext:intitle:inurl:
News
allintext:allintitle:allinurl:intext:intitle:inurl:location:source:
Product Search
allintext:allintitle:

Here is a small list of search operators that one can use in Bing search:
http://blogs.bing.com/webmaster/2012/10/19/advanced-query-operators-filetype-ext-understanding-the-differences/


Here is what Google says abour using Operators
http://www.google.com/help/operators.html
OR
https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/136861?p=adv_sitespecific&hl=en&rd=1

Reproducing what Google has to say:

Narrow down your search results by adding symbols and words to your search called search operators. Don’t worry about memorizing every operator - you can also use the Advanced Search page to create these searches.
When you search using an operator, don't add any spaces between the operator and your query. A search forsite:nytimes.com will work, but site: nytimes.com will not.
Search for an exact word or phrase 
"search"
Use quotes to search for an exact word or set of words on a web page. This is helpful when searching for song lyrics or a line from a book. But only use this if you're looking for an exact word or phrase, otherwise you'll exclude many helpful results by mistake.
"imagine all the people"
Exclude a word
-search
Add a dash (-) before a word or site to exclude all results that include that word. This is especially useful for words with multiple meanings, like Jaguar the car brand and jaguar the animal. 
jaguar speed -car
pandas -site:wikipedia.org
Search within a site or domain
site:
Get results only from certain sites or domains. For example, you can find all mentions of "olympics" on the NBC website, or any .gov websites. 
olympics site:nbc.com 
olympics site:.gov
Search for pages that link to a URL
link:
Find pages that link to a certain page. For example, you can find all the pages that link to google.com.
link:google.com
Search for pages that are similar to a URL
related:
Find sites that are similar to a URL you already know. If you search for related sites to the Time.com, you'll find other news publication sites you may be interested in.
related:time.com
Fill in the blank
*
Add an asterisk within a search as a placeholder for any unknown or wildcard terms. Use with quotation marks to find variations of that exact phrase or to remember words in the middle of a phrase.
"a * saved is a * earned"
Search for either word
OR
If you want to search for pages that may have just one of several words, includeOR (capitalized) between the words. Without the OR, your results would typically show only pages that match both terms.
world cup location 2014 OR 2018
Search for a number range
..
Separate numbers by two periods without spaces (..) to see results that contain numbers in a given range of things like dates, prices, and measurements.
camera $50..$100
Find information about a site
info:
Get information about a URL, including the cached version of the page, similar pages, and pages that link to the site. 
info:google.com
See a cached version of a site
cache:
See what a page looks like the last time Google crawled the site. 
cache:washington.edu

Punctuation

When you search, most punctuation and special characters are ignored. However, there are some punctuation and symbolsthat work in searches.

Here are a few tutorials on how to mix and match options to search better:
http://www.googleguide.com/using_advanced_operators.html
http://www.googleguide.com/tag/advanced_search

Better Internet Searching: Series...

Just started on a two day training on searching and using Google better. I will post a  series to record what I learn and find on the net about the things I learn in these sessions.

The session is being conducted by Prof. Rajendra Kumbhar and Shubhada Nagarkar. All due credits for the content and info to them.

Hope the series helps others (and me :) ) search and find things faster and better

Links to learning content:


Saturday, June 1, 2013

How to Recover/Fix USB flash drives

I was trying to hack a USB flash drive encrypted and protected by --- when I learnt a number of things about USB flash drives:
  1. All USB flash drives have few main components
    1. The flash memory chips that store the data
    2. The controller that:
      1. Allows access to the data
      2. Lets any OS understand the kind of device being used
  2. Certain controllers can be manipulated to:
    1. Create partitions
    2. Hide partitions
    3. Decided Disk encoding (EXT3FS, FATX, FAT32, HFS, ZFS, ....you name it...)
    4. Encrypt content
    5. Masquerade (across OSes) as different type of storage devices (e.g. a CD-ROM)
Now all this sounds quite terribly dreary but really helps understand the steps that I followed:


  1. Unplugged all other devices from USB ports
  2. Plugged in the dead device...

    and made sure that it was detected and that the OS had loaded at least the mass storage device drivers.
    At this stage, if I tried to access the device or even format it, all I got was an error that told me that the OS could not read the memory on the device ...
    OS Access error

  3. To figure out the:

    1. The exact controller chip used
    2. The memory chips used
    3. State of the controller and the memory chips
      I downloaded and ran Chip Genius
      (You could download this software from:
      http://www.onlinedown.net/soft/67367.htm
      or
      http://en.kbdown.com/237488.html

      I told me that this device had a Silicon Motion SM3255AB controller
      Chip Genius to identify the controller

  4. Next, I downloaded the  SMI 3255AB controller tool from http://dl.mydigit.net/special/up/smi.html
    (If you have a different controller you'll have to search and get the relevant controller)
  5. Running the tool I could see that the memory was accessible and so I could now try flashing the controller back to a default state.
    SMI Controller Tool - Initial Interface
  6.  
  7. Next I clicked the space bar to run the tool and it ran a pretest and formatted the drive thus...
    SMI Controller Tool - Flashing
    SMI Controller Tool - Flashing Complete

    OS has remounted the device and shows it empty and functional
  8. Now, I wanted to make a few low level changes so I clicked Settings (Password in most SMI controller tools is 320) and here is what you would see... (Click Ok once you are done tweaking and then run the flashing process again. Be careful and aware of what you do since it can do nasty things to the device :) )
References:
This solution would not have been possible without the painstaking recording of procedures and facts by a number of sites. Here are some that made my life easier and got more than one USB driver working:

Offline or Standalone Installers

All the software providers conveniently assume that all of us are always connected to awesomely quick internet connections. When installing or updating machines it is horribly ineffective to download the small installers and then have them download the (usually much larger) actual installers. 

Here is a list of links from where you can download the offline or standalone installers of a number of commonly used software and plugins:


Tuesday, March 12, 2013

NTFS - Writing and Reading natively in Mac

I've always been a Windows person and all my external HDDs are NTFS formatted.

Working with people people using Macs posed the standard challenge of not being able to write to NTFS disks when I took my HDDs over. 

Once I got a MacBook for myself, the problem of writing and reading to and from NTFS drives natively in a Mac became real for me as well. 

Installing a 'driver' or an app seems to be the way to solve this problem. Here are ones that promise to do the job:



An aside... In case you are wondering... FUSE is derived from File-system in USEr space. :)


Friday, August 5, 2011

Google Plus Icons

I was looking for Google Plus icons that I could use for a corporate website that I'm in the process of creating. A quick Google search gave produced some very interesting variations of the Google Plus icon, some along with source files. I am sure there a quite a few more but these were good for what I needed.


Here is a site that has collected an impressive collection of variations. Very nice if you are trying to create something new or just looking for some style references.


http://garinkilpatrick.com/awesome-google-plus-buttons/

http://garinkilpatrick.com/awesome-google-plus-buttons/
Here are a couple of links where you can download (and use) the buttons in different styles: