Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Customising Google Search

Spam Sites in Search

How many times have you clicked on a Google search result only to be presented with a spam site that just wraps other site content with ads?  I find technical searches on Google are littered with this dross.  It's pissed me off enough to look at using Bing and Bing is far better at hiding this crap from the search list.

I tried this chrome extension, and whilst the idea is sound, it doesn't work particularly well with instant search.

However, there is another option.  Use a customised Google Search Site.  You can read more here on how to set this up.  Whilst the screen looks very basic, it does work at removing dross sites, although you do need to manually blacklist each one 'as you find it'.

You can even link this into chrome to be the default search engine.  You'll need to tweak a few things in the URL to get it to work, specifically adding %s to indicate where the search terms need to go.  Want dated searches?  Add &tbs=qdr:y to get results in the last year and add the date select to your searches.

So finally, I have a Google search that can filter out those spastic sites.

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Moving to WordPress

The Android posts have moved over to WordPress, mainly to keep the development off the personal blog, but also because WordPress is so much better at editing complicated pages with images.  Blogger seems to have been dumbed down :-(

I might see how the Google Sites stuff works, as I need some better control over the CSS - oh, wait, they don't allow that either :-(

Contact Search Updated

Works with OS 1.6 devices

The latest changes to Contact Search have been around the Database access classes to allow 1.6 devices to work.

For OS2.0, Google improved the framework around data access for Contacts and these are not compatible with 1.6.  It was a large piece of work to write the 1.6 data access code and refactor the contact searching to be able to run both.

Coming to the Market near you soon ;-)

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Contact Search Updated

Contact Search has been updated to v1.1.0

This version

  • has options to select a simple search, or a multi-word search.
  • can configure the categories you want to search, such as name and address only. 
  • now prompts you the first time you install to set the search settings.