Search tips

Compared with Outlook and other commercial e-mail programs (are there any other commercial e-mail programs left?) Mozilla's free Thunderbird e-mail client has a lot going for it. Not the least of Thunderbird's time-saving features are its search capabilities.

If you don't see the search toolbar directly above the main Thunderbird window, click View > Toolbars > Search Bar. By default, you can view all your mail, all your unread mail, all mail with one of Thunderbird's five built-in labels attached (Important, Work, Personal, To Do, Later), mail from people in your address book, messages received recently, … Read more

The first application I open and the last one I close each workday is Gmail.

Even though I use the service's labels and filters to sort my mail, I often found myself scrolling through the 600-plus messages in my Gmail in-box to find the one I need.

Then I discovered Gmail's search operators, and my scrolling days were over.

For instance, when I need to find the message from Ellen with the agenda attached, I type from:ellen filename:doc. If I need to find the message I sent my brother Larry about the NCAA basketball tournament pool … Read more

Keeping your e-mail organized isn't a full-time job; it just seems like it is.

I gave up trying to clear out my Outlook inbox years ago. I rely on the program's search features, which are improved in Outlook 2007, though finding specific messages is still a challenge. That's why I jumped at the chance to try out the beta version of Xobni (pronounced "ZOB-nee"), a new program that sifts your messages automatically and provides insight about your relationship to the sender. It's an invitation-only download for now, so you have to request that a … Read more

After I compared three popular desktop-search programs a couple of weeks ago, the folks at Google contacted me about a couple of inaccuracies in that post. I had thought that because local files are listed above Web sites when you use Google to search in your browser, the ads that appear on the results page are related to the content of the local files. In fact, Google keeps an index of your local files on its servers only when you enable the Search Across Computers feature, which is off by default. And even then, the index disappears once the search … Read more

You've got your pick of free desktop-search utilities, nearly any of which are faster and less processor-intensive than Windows' built-in file-search feature. I've used at least a half-dozen different file-search tools in the last few years, but three have stood the test of time: Google Desktop Search, Microsoft's Windows Desktop Search (or simply Windows Search in Vista, where it replaces the old Indexing Service), and the oldest and best of the bunch, Copernic Desktop Search. After bouncing between the three, I've settled on Copernic for its speed, ease of use, and relatively small footprint.

That's … Read more

Nobody wants to spend time scrolling through thousands of search results to find the page that contains the information they're looking for. In fact, few people bother looking beyond the first page of 10 results, choosing instead to recraft their search phrase and try again. But with the help of a few search operators, you can increase substantially the chances that you'll find what you're looking for on your first search try. (Note: not all of these work in every search engine.)

Restating the Obvious Operators I'll wager you know all about using the plus sign (+) … Read more