It's always a bonus to uncover a shortcut or program enhancement, and here we bring you 100 tips and tricks that we hope will make your computing experience quicker, simpler or more rewarding.
Search and be found
1 Use the Google 'Advanced Search' input page to specify date ranges, languages, domain restrictions, file formats and the like – straight off the search page.
2.The Internet Explorer search pane offers Australian users configuration options of either Nine MSN or Looksmart as a primary search engine. Pretend to be American by visiting Tools | Internet Options and selecting 'English (United States) [en-us)' from the languages option. Highlight the US setting and move it up above the Aus setting, restart IE 6, hit the Customise button in the Explorer bar and your options will have increased to eight search engines.
3 Try searching within the HTML <title> tags of pages for a quick and efficient hit. The search syntax being title:<keyword> unless you're using Google, where either allintitle or intitle are used to find all or any of the keywords – allintitle:pc authority magazine will return only pages where these three keywords are within the page title tags.
4 Make the most of Google by using obscure search commands such as 'inurl' to specify keywords that must appear within the URL of a site – keyword inurl:doc would only return pages with a doc reference in the URL, so increasing the chances of hitting Microsoft Word docs. The filetype command is also useful for finding specific file types – keyword filetype:pdf would only return hits containing Adobe PDF documents.
5 Forget Boolean search terms such as AND or NOT. Simply use + or - instead because all the main engines understand these now.
For even better results, try combining them to filter your search closer to perfection.
6 Use the Wayback Machine at www.archive.org to search for copies of more than 10 billion Web pages dating back to 1996. If you ever wondered what PC Authority looked like back then, well now you can find out thanks to the cached copy here.
7 Search at http://groups.google.com to find postings within a searchable Usenet discussion archive covering 20 years and 700 million messages based upon the old Deja News archive.
8 Submit your site details to the relatively unpublicised Open Directory Project, aka DMOZ, at http://dmoz.org, which already powers core directory resources for sites such as AOL, Netscape, Google, Lycos and HotBot. Get listed here and the chances are you'll soon be listed at some of the major search site players as well.
9 Implement a dedicated search submission strategy at site design level: use different keyword placement in HTML <title> tags and in the textual content on every page to get the widest coverage; keywords near the top of a page, such as in the headline or title strapping, are often assumed to be more relevant than those further down, so score better relevance ratings.
10 Don't use keyword spamming. Using the same word over and over on a page will get you blacklisted. Remember that keyword frequency needs to remain in context.