Keyboardr Lets You Search Using Only The Keyboard

This is a really interesting search engine that caught my eye today which I happened to stumble upon and I really like it. I have been using Google or Live search for years now with an occasional visit to Yahoo. There have not been any great innovations in the search engine realm in years. But this is something I can sink my teeth into.

It is no secret that I love to use my keyboard – no matter if it is typing out console commands, browsing in dos or command line ftp. It might be the inner geek in me but I still love it.

That is where Keyboardr comes in. You simply browse to their site and start typing.

Let’s take a look at it:

I searched for Conficker the April Fool’s Worm that was supposed to ramp up its carnage yesterday. As soon as I started typing, results are displayed below. You select what you want by hitting the arrow keys. If you continue typing, your results will filter all without hitting your mouse or enter yet.

I added "AskTheAdmin" to my query and was returned with the following items. I want the first selection so I hit the enter key on my keyboard.

It opens a new tab in Firefox and I can hit Control + Tab to cycle through my tabs. Keyboardr also separates your search results into normal Google results in the center. Google Images and YouTube on the right and Google Blog results below.

The above images and YouTube videos came up with the AskTheAdmin query. I simply hit my right arrow key and it moved over to that part of the screen and upon hitting enter that item will open up in a new tab.

The author talks about Keyboardr on his blog, this little quote struck me so I thought I would share it with you:

In the first place keyboardr is a meta-search. You get Google, Wikipedia, Youtube altogether. The instant search and the keyboard navigation are replacing the feeling of "searching" with the feeling of "launching".

he goes on to give us a few tips and tricks

• Pressing ESC resets the search, takes you back to the clock instantly !
• One thing only a few know is, google is a all-in-one search. Try searching for "imdb Matrix". Or "lastfm james brown". Or "php str_replace".
• A feature often missed by the users eye, is the "All results" links to get the full version of each search engine. E.g. you need to calculate "5+5", "define:word" or check "weather cologne" then you just open "All results" from Google, right above the results, to get your answers from Google.

Do you use any sort of non-traditional search engines? How is that working out for ya? Please share them with us in the comments!

How can I view a web page that used to be there but isn’t anymore?

Don’t you just hate those Four Oh Four errors? This page can not be displayed…

We wont judge you. Whether it be porn or work related. For good or evil…

The page used to be there. But where did it go? Who cares - We are going to show you how to bring it back!

After being overwhelmed with emails, from amazed readers, after we resurrected the website about the torrent tracker infiltration by a security company. Reader after reader sent us emails inquiring about this magic cache and how to access it.

See the black circle around the word cached? Yup that is your time machine. You will get a snapshot of the page the last time Google crawled it.

Hit this trick/feature up after take down notices or traffic prevents you from seeing what you want to see… Get rid of that a big 404.

Its not always 100 percent functional but it will get you the guts of the site.

How long before Google gets those take down notices for their cache?

_TheAdmiN_

How to let Google do your Googling!

So you have the same repetitive searches you run every day? How about you let Google run the searches for you and hit you with any new sites that have popped up since your last search? This is great for almost anything! All the PR companies we deal with use this habitually.

Just go to http://www.Google.com/Alerts and sign up for an “Alert”. this is what will be searched and returned to you via email:

As you can see by the above screen shot - we have daily updates hitting us on the hip whenever someone posts something about AskTheAdmin. Works great for watching people talk shit and such :)

This is just one of Google’s many untapped resources. Check out this great article from Lifehacker on the top 10 Google Products you probably forgot about!

_TheGoogleThisAdmiN_

How can I get quick Flight Status while i’m mobile?

So this nifty obscure use of Google really helps us out on the go. We fire up our mobile browser (whose home page is Google) and type in our Airline and flight number like so:

And Google does the hard work and gives you what you need to see! This will work from any Internet terminal and not just your mobile. For more obscure uses of Google like currency and metrics conversion check out this LifeHacker post. Do you have any other Google tricks or hacks? Put us on! Let us know in the comments!

_TheGoogleLovingAdmiN_

Can Google News Help My Site?

Hey everyone! Scott here from AndroidGuys, doing a little guest blogging today for AskTheAdmin. Thanks to Karl and the other guys for allowing me the opportunity to reach out and talk with his audience.

A common concern with bloggers is where they show up on a Google search and there’s a good reason for this; If you don’t show up on pages 1 or 2, then you run the risk of not getting the exposure you want. Well there’s another option out there for traffic potential that might be available to you and it’s offered by Google as well. If the subject of this article wasn’t a dead giveaway, it’s called Google News.

Take a minute to have a look… I’ll wait for ya.

Pretty sweet huh? It has become my preferred place to search for news and late-breaking announcements. What they do is combine news from thousands of sources and give you a one-stop-shop to find what you’re looking for. Why bother going to CNN, FoxNews, and MSNBC when you can see what each of them are saying at once?

One of the best features about Google News is that you can subscribe to news feeds. Let’s say you want to be alerted anytime a news article goes up on “Roger Clemens”. Right now, if you did a news search for him, there are articles listed by FOXSports, NY Times, etc. Did you know that you could probably have your baseball blog listed right next to them?

That’s right, depending on what your blog/site is about, you stand a decent chance of getting it listed under Google News. At AndroidGuys, we write about Android, the Open Handset Alliance, and all the other cell phone stuff in between. To compile our articles, we used Google News to gather sources of information and we subscribed to keywords that were relevant to our site. After a few weeks, we realized that we were consistently seeing the same sites showing up, including tech blogs. After reading a few of them we realized that our opinion pieces were just as well written as some of these “news sources” so we naturally started wondering how we could get our articles in there too. It didn’t take a lot of work as Google makes it very easy to submit your site as a source.

The Benefits
Getting your site listed on Google News brings you and your site a few advantages. Here are three big ones.

1. Traffic – Number one on everybody’s list. You gain yet another place to show off your name and writing skills.
2. Credibility – Having your name show up next to PC World, ZDNet, and InformationWeek gives off the impression that you know what you’re talking about.
3. Delivery – Ok, so maybe you don’t have a ton of subscribers to your site. That’s okay because someone might be subscribed to Google News under the term “Barry Bonds Steroids”. Your opinion piece on whether or not he should go into the Hall of Fame might show up in someone’s inbox next to a Sports Illustrated article. Your content is pushed out to people through RSS. In fact, depending on the focus of your site, people can be inadvertently subscribed to your site. The right mix of keywords could have your message delivered to thousands of people at one time.

Sign Up
It’s simple to submit your content for consideration. Just head to the bottom of Google News where it says “Help for Publishers” and check out the topic that might be best suited for your needs. If all you want to do is recommend your site for inclusion, then just click here. It’s pretty easy from there! Google will take a look at your site and find out whether or not it might a good fit to have you in there. An actual person will get back to you if they have questions so don’t worry about trying to win over a computer’s heart.

From the day I asked to be considered, it was less than 10 days before our site received traffic from Google News. A large chunk of our referrals come from here and we get the sense that it is much “better” traffic as it is from people looking for news and not just whatever shows up under searches. Every so often, we’ll get a visitor searching the news for a term that we never even realized we wrote about. This traffic was all free too, courtesy of Google.

What are you waiting for? Submit your site for consideration! If your writing is good and your site is appealing, then you’ll be getting subscribers, referrals, and return visits like never before.

If you’re interested in Google Android and/or cell phone news, please head over to AndroidGuys or subscribe to our feed! Thanks again to AskTheAdmin for letting me drop by today.

Adobe Air steals the show on my desktop - Analytics Users Rejoice!

Commodore 64 here to report on the next big splash on the scene. First some history.

If any geeks out there remember a time when it was actually a plus for things to run in a browser - along came Macromedia with its FLASHy browser plugin that seemed to work consistently everywhere and broke the boundaries of old-fashioned HTML forever, although still stuck in the 4 walls of a browser.

This was when I was Foxin with the Flash back in ‘99. Admin and I used to sit and try to dream up the next big way to take over the world and Flash was AWESOME, but not everybody knew what a “Browser” was.

To combat this obvious blasphemy, Macromedia added a cute little feature to it’s Flash app which is still one of my favorite old-school, quick and easy, in your face, ad deployment methods - the Flash Player embedded .exe file that ran smoothly and humbly on your desktop with no need for a browser, or fonts, or drivers, or anything really. And your stuff always looked the way you intended it to look. I’m not talking about the Flash plugin - that was, and remains, a pretty reliable medium and is commonplace today in most people’s “Browsers.”

No, I’m talking about that little, self contained .exe file that basically consisted of your Flash creation embedded in an executable wrapper that played consistently; at least among all the different PC’s and versions of Windows on the market. Deployment was the goal of this little self contained nugget of interactive animation, and for the most part, it succeeded.

Now - fast forward to 2008 - in a quick recap - Adobe has acquired Macromedia and all of its Application Library - re-brands all the goodies and resells them, along with a bunch of integration with Adobe’s flagships: Photoshop and Illustrator. All in all a pretty nice package. But through all the hustle and bustle, acquisitions and years of development, the good old Macromedia Flash Player got lost in time.

Today the browser is king of the PC as a deployment medium, which would explain why the self contained .exe Flash Player got lost. In the wilderness of browser wars, plug-ins, add-ins, widgets and the such, emerges a reversion back to the desktop, breaking out of the browser once more, as history kind of repeats itself in a sick, geeky way. This time it breaks out on a caveat.
Take me for example. I work day in and day out, mostly with at least 3 browser instances open and I don’t always want applications that only run in a browser. Especially when that browser does a poor job of memory management and tends to slow to a crawl. One of my favorite applications to have running in a browser tab is Google Analytics. Being a long-time sociology buff and front end web developer, I’m sure many like myself would agree that Google Analytics is a plethora of insight and information. And in the position of a front-end guy, I can actually do something with this info.

Bear with me, here’s where it all ties together.

Adobe has re-released (in my opinion) the self-contained .exe Flash player, but gave it a complete facelift and a few power-ups. This comes in the form of Adobe’s new out-of-browser deployment environment called Adobe Air. And, oh yeah, did I mention it’s FREE, as in F R E E, just the way we like it - read on.
From the Adobe website:

The Adobe® AIR™ runtime lets developers use proven web technologies to build rich Internet applications that deploy to the desktop and run across operating systems. Adobe AIR offers an exciting new way to engage customers with innovative, branded desktop applications, without requiring changes to existing technology, people, or processes.

Now kiddies, if that wasn’t enough, they have a crapload of super-widget like plug-ins to totally deck out your desktop here and here.

Now, the cherry on the cake. While perusing through the catalog of plug-ins I found the sickest, sweetest app for Air.

Anybody out there who uses analytics would agree that it is already one of the most feature-rich FREE applications out there. Now it’s even faster, smoother, and graceful due to the efforts of one very enterprising Adobe (ColdFusion, I believe) developer who calls himself septek.

Septek developed an app for Adobe Air that seamlessly integrates Air with Google Analytics. Words can’t describe how tight this little app is, though here I am trying to. In the end you have a smooth, clean, ultra fast version of analytics that runs right off of your desktop, rather than your browser. Which can free you up to use your browser for other things that don’t have an Air counterpart. Let’s see if the author’s description does this gem any justice:

The Google Analytics Reporting Suite brings Google Analytics to the desktop, with a host of features that help you understand how your website is performing and where you can improve. From tracking your visitors, referrals and campaigns to viewing your AdWords ROI metrics, the Google Analytics Reporting suite is a must-have for every web business.

In my opinion that description only scratches the surface of what Analytics can do in general. But this front-end for Google’s reporting suite really makes the experience that much more pleasing. Here’s an example:
Personally, I’ve been waiting for a slick new front-end for analytics and this little Air app is the answer to my wish. Anybody out there who uses analytics will be pleasantly surprised by the sleek, smoothness of this new UI front end for an application that was already pretty far up on the road to perfect.

Kudos to septek for a sensational app for Adobe Air, and kudos to Adobe for opening up this development environment for everyone.

On a side note, AskTheAdmin has hit an all-time milestone in its growth.

As of now, if you search Google for simply the word “admin” we come up as #4 in the search result. Check it out for yourself if you dont believe me.

You think your big time!?! #4 on any natural Google search is BIG time. Props all around!

Peace
Commodore 64 (The one you used to play Bruce Lee on)