By replacing Drupal's core search with Solr, it's possible to gain very fine control of the results. Not only is Solr very flexble, but the apachesolr module is generous with its hooks. One potential use is boosting the score based on dates, so that recent documents receive a higher relevancy score. We've used this for a ticket calendar to help visitors find upcoming events.

To see what mds and more importantly its child mdworker is actually doing - use fs_usage to log what files it is opening:

sudo fs_usage -w -f filesys mdworker
Though there is a lot of unintelligable stuff in there, it does tell you when it opens a file to begin reading from it. Copying a PDF into my filesystem shows mdworker opening the file then immediately after lots of activity...

p.s. if you want a little less detail, this will just list the open file points:

sudo fs_usage -w -f filesys mdworker | egrep "open"

TinEye is a reverse image search engine. It finds out where an image came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or if there is a higher resolution version.

Great way to search only those you follow on Twitter.

Automated website crawlers are powerful tools to help crawl and index content on the web. As a webmaster, you may wish to guide them towards your useful content and away from irrelevant content. The methods described in these documents are the de-facto web-wide standards to control crawling and indexing of web-based content. They consist of the robots.txt file to control crawling, as well as the robots meta tag and X-Robots-Tag HTTP header element to control indexing. The robots.txt standard predates Google and is the accepted method of controlling crawling of a website.
This document represents the current usage of the robots.txt web-crawler control directives as well as indexing directives as they are used at Google. These directives are generally supported by all major web-crawlers and search engines.

Ett tips om hur man kan använda Quicksilver för att söka webbsajter (eller sökmotorer).

En liten beskrivning av hur man gör en livesökfunktion, med inriktning mot WordPress.

En översikt över avancerade sökmöjligheter hos Google.

Hur man stänger av Spotlight och får tillbaka den gamla (pre-Tiger) varianten där man bara söker på filnamn.

Ett tillägg till Firefox för att ge förbättrade sökresultatssidor på sökmotorer. Ger miniatyrbild och annat smått och gott.

Jag testar Google Video Search. Uppenbarligen var Dee Snider med i ett avsnitt av Drew Carey. Måste ha.