Sortfix Or A Next Generation Search Tool

Although SortFix has been around for a while, I hadn’t heard of it until recently. I also didn’t really have a reason to give it a try because the vast majority of my Google searches were providing me with the results I was looking for.

The idea here is that you can do a normal search for something and then you will be presented with a screen that will allow you to narrow down your search using a graphical user interface (GUI). This will produce a search similar to something that a power searcher would do in Google. After doing this a few times, it becomes fairly evident how its done and one could start “power searching” on their own.
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Social Search’s Effect on SEO

There always seems to be something affecting your SEO rankings. Most recently, people have had issues with personalized search. Another kink in the chain may be social search.

The first thing is that Social Search can’t replace Hyptertext search (such as Google/Yahoo!/Bing/etc). Social search has 3 inherent drawbacks, time to receive information, credibility of the source, and subject/objectivity. Technically subjectivity is an issue with hypertext searches as well, but since the information is considered more permanent, people tend to be a little less opinionated and a little more objective (if the information is factual).
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Model Specific Formatted Search Results Using Thinking Sphinx

Having recently implemented Thinking Sphinx on one of my web sites, I thought it would be cool to be able to search every indexed model. With Thinking Sphinx, it’s easy to have a bunch of different classes returned in the results. The tougher part is displaying them in a way that is organized (although admittedly not very DRY).
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Being Smart is all about Being Resourceful

The internet us the ability to not while keeping up the appearance that we do. Now that’s not to say that you should be a know it all, but you should definitely know how and where to get information if you need it. If you use a specific open source technology at work, then you need to know how to support (because odds are, it was written by a few interested people and doesn’t have a company behind it). So you should know where the forums are, where the documentation is, where the mailing lists and the mailing list archives are, etc. Do they have an IRC channel where you can talk to live users who might be able to help on a more immediate basis? Maybe there was an even a book written that you can get your hands on, a PDF, or even a screencast. If you lucky, you might write a Tweet about your frustration and one of the products creators will answer (which happened to me recently).
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