Learning by Doing » search

I Am Mr. Gunn

Mr. Gunn — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 23:29:47 +0000

I dominate the whole first page of Google results for the query, “mr gunn“. Things can always change, but for now, I’ve effectively claimed Mr. Gunn as my identity. I’m not doing nearly as well on “William Gunn“, but I haven’t working on that as much, and there’s considerably more competition there.

Tech Tip: Convert POST forms into GET to link directly to search results.

Mr. Gunn — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 17:14:28 +0000

Say you want to link to all clinical trials on a certain disease or using a certain treatment method. ClinicalTrials.gov has an advanced search, where you can enter your criteria. However, because the form uses the POST method to send the search query, the page URL doesn’t change and you have no way of bookmarking the resulting page. Not all search forms work like this. Google, for example, has the query in the URL, like so: http://www.google.com/search?q=post+get+url+bookmark so you can just copy and paste the URL from whatever page you’re on. It turns out that even if the form uses POST, you can often submit a GET request and get the same results. There’s even a bookmarklet that will convert the POST form to GET for you. Just click the bookmarklet on the search form page, then hit the button as usual. This time the parameters that were sent will be shown in the URL, and you can copy that URL, link to it, and it will fetch the results directly. Here’s a link to all the clinical trials being conducted on Multiple Myeloma

A way to search only the blogs that you read

admin — Sat, 19 Jul 2003 02:42:10 +0000

Much props to Micah Alpern who has created a way to search the blogs that you read.

As he says:

Sometimes I want to know what the world thinks (google)

Sometimes I want to know what those I respect think (blogs I read)

Sometimes I want to know what I think (my weblog)

I couldn’t help noticing that Google’s “terms of use” specifically forbid using the Google API for services that directly compete with Google. Does this mean it’s off-limits for MT users?

My implementation is underneath my blogroll. Check it out!
[well, it's not anymore, since I moved from Blogger, but it's defunct now with the prevalence of RSS]
via NSOP