I am, as usual, speechless.

Also, I had no idea there were so many people searching for information about The Lucas Collection from Pottery Barn. Really, people, did you think to try potterybarn.com?

It turns out GDS looks for browser handling instructions in a dimly lit and dusty corner of the Windows Registry, a place not subject to the commands sent from the “Set Program Access and Defaults” applet or “Tools | Options | Default Browser” setting. If you would like to sever ties completely between GDS and IE, here’s how:

1. Open the registry editor: regedit
2. Find: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\htmlfile\shell\open\command
3. You will likely see a string value with the full path to iexplore.exe. Replace the value with: "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -nohome
4. Enjoy GDS once again.

I found this solution in the archives of the Google Desktop Google Group. Thanks CB!

One final note for those who’ve installed the latest GDS v3 beta, do not enable “search across computers.” At this point, it’s an unnecesarry privacy and security risk. More on that here and here.

What does this plugin do? It adds to the list of search engines you can pick from in the Firefox toolbar. By default, you get Google, Yahoo!, and other major sites. There are a plethora of other engines you can add. (One of my favorites is for Netflix.) After installing the plugin, you’ll see a new option in the drop-down menu next to the toolbar search box for the Seattle Public Library. If you select it, enter some key words in the text box, and press Enter, your search terms will be passed to the SPL catalog website where the results will be returned. Nifty! What could be simpler?

Now, this is a basic keyword search, and the results are sorted by publication date. This means you can put in a book title, or an author’s name, or whatever, and the catalog will do its best to return good results based on those words. If the results aren’t what you were hoping for, you have the option of executing a more advanced search right on SPL’s website.

A big thanks to Corey Seeman of the University of Toledo for offering excellent documentation on his search plugin.

Get the plugin.

Have fun, happy searching, and use your library!

For a related hack, try my LibraryLookup Greasemonkey script for one-click searching of books using Amazon and the SPL Catalog.

Nailed one today. At the office, our intranet site search has been sucking lately, in particular the full-text search of corporate resumes which are kept in both Word and PDF format. For another project, I’ve been boning up on Adobe’s XMP, tagging, and searching PDF metadata. Using what I’ve learned from that project, I was able to make the full-text searching of the resumes 10 times better, and there’s room to make it more better (huh?) by getting the resume metadata in order. A little metadata instruction for the document handlers is all that’s required.

Next up will be to improve over-all site search with advanced search capability (include/exclude certain directories, sort options, natural language, etc.)

See more progress on: Ship it

So far, not many events are tagged, and when you search for a tag that doesn’t exist you get an ugly error message, but eventually, hopefully, users will use tags early and often and all over upcoming.org.

Here’s the Upcoming.org tag search bookmarklet. Simply drag and drop the link to your bookmarks toolbar, then select a word on a web page and click the bookmarklet.

C:\Documents and Settings\{username}\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Google Desktop Search

It quickly filled up the free space on my C: partition.

If you look at the GDS preferences, you’ll find no way to change the location of the index. But you can by editing the registry:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\Google Desktop

1. Exit Google Desktop Search.
2. Open data_dir in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\Google Desktop and change the path to fit the location you want (e.g. E:\Google\Google Desktop Search).
3. Cut the existing “Google Desktop Search” folder from C:\Documents and Settings\{username}\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\ and paste it into E:\Google to retain the existing index.
4. Restart Google Desktop Search

I’ve been posting the same entries to both blogs. Technorati rarely adds my Movable Type entries to its database whereas they appear almost immediately after I post via WordPress. Both systems are pinging Technorati during post time. Question is, why has Technorati been ignoring my Movable Type blog?

Technorati, WordPress, MovableType, Search

For the record, the Mini does support Dublin Core metadata within PDF files, which includes author, creator, subject, etc. The Google Mini looks like a tremendous value for small-scale indexing and searching.

It indexes your damn Outlook email! This is unbelievable. Get it now.

Update: The blogosphere has exploded with news and opinions of Google Desktop Search. Check out Feedster’s search results, 12,670 results and climbing.

Update on 10/15: If you’re a Firefox user, I highly recommend Ken Schutte’s Slogger extension for creating a local browser history that Google Desktop can index. Slogger has many nice configuration options and allows you to save every page you visit in full HTML. Note: the version posted on mozilla.org does not work with Firefox 1.0, but the latest version on Ken’s site does. Also, you’ll need a lot of disk space to cache the entire content of every web page you visit. Luckily, you can choose to save pages in plain text to conserve disk space.