Here are a couple of tips to help you use Google more productively. Google supports many advanced search criteria to refine a search. This Google page gives you an overview of the available criteria. The two criteria that I use most frequently are “this exact phrase” and “search within a site”. Let me give you examples of how I use these features.

If I’m trying to figure out the cause of a particular error message that I receive in Adobe Photoshop, then I’ll go to Google’s Advance Search page  and type in the exact text of the error message in the “this exact word or phrase” box. This will reduce the number of results that Google displays since typically Google does a search on any of these words. Additionally, I’ll further refine my search by typing in adobe.com in the “Search within a site or domain.” As a result Google will only show me web pages from Adobe.com that contain this exact error message. I would expect to receive a number of pages from Adobe’s tech support pages and from user discussions pages which contain references to this error message. Using Google’s advance search features I can find the information that I’m looking for more quickly.

Is your Dock crowded or even over-crowded with icons? If so, then maybe you would benefit from using an application launcher. An application launcher allows you to open any application installed on your Mac using your keyboard. This page at Pure-Mac lists a number of application launchers. I’ve tried a few of them and I prefer LaunchBar. This feature list gives you an indication of the myriad of things that LaunchBar can do.

It’s now possible to have your iPhone transcribe your speech. Last week, Dragon Dictate, a temporarily free application was added to the iTunes App Store. This application records your voice and then transcribes it and lets you paste the text into a new email message, text message or any other iPhone application. I tested it last week. It’s not perfect but it works surprisingly well. The transcription is accomplished by sending the audio recording to Dragon’s servers which quickly do their best to recognize what you spoke and convert it into text. This recognition process is not always 100% accurate, but one has the chance to edit it and correct mistakes. Another problem that I encountered was the recording sometimes stopped abruptly and inexplicably. This wasn’t a big deal since I could resume recording easily enough. Dictating emails was faster then typing a message on the iPhone’s keyboard so this is a significant time saver. I’m sure that Dragon will charge for this application in the future. I’m confident that I’ll continue to use this application.