Tag: search

Internet Search Tips

This title almost sounds stupid, right?  I mean, pretty much everyone who has ever been online knows how to Google.  Even kids.

But I promise you it’s not.  Searching for quick and simple stuff – yes, sure, is easy.  But not many people I’ve met know how to use even Google’s advanced search options (despite there being a gadzillion articles online), let alone other search engines.  Searching for something non-trivial, like research papers and books, is even trickier.

Hence the Internet Search Tips.  Here’s the intro from the author:

Over time, I developed a certain google-fu and expertise in finding references, papers, and books online. Some of these tricks are not well-known, like checking the Internet Archive (IA) for books. I try to write down my search workflow, and give general advice about finding and hosting documents.

php-jsonq – a simple, elegant PHP package to query over any type of JSON data


php-jsonq provides an easy, yet powerful way to build queries for any JSON data (or PHP data structures for that matter, which are a step away).  This has a variety of useful applications – data migration, API response filtering, complex configurations manipulation, and so on, and so forth.




Vim, cfdo, Ale and RipGrep


This blog post goes over several grep-like tools and their integration with Vim.  If that’s something you do often, it’s worth a read.  The tools are:

  • Vim’s built-in “:cdo” and “:cfdo” commands.  Here’s another blog post with a nice explanation of what these are and how to use them.
  • Ale – asynchronous lint engine.
  • RipGrep – a very fast tool for recursively searching directories for a regular expression.  Extra bits for Vim integration are provided by the vim-ripgrep plugin.




TNTSearch – a fully featured full text search engine written in PHP


TNTSearch – a fully featured full text search engine written in PHP.  Here’s also a blog post that shows how to use it with the Laravel framework.  Which shouldn’t be too difficult to adjust for any other PHP framework.




Creative Commons beta tests new search


Creative Commons is beta testing a new search implementation.  It helps with finding creative work (mostly images for now) that one can use commercially, modify, adapt, and build upon.  For now, it brings the results from a few different sources that you’d have to search separately before – 500px, Flickr, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Public Library, and Rijksmuseum.

I’m sure once the functionality and performance are stabilized, more resources and types of creatives will be added.  After all, Creative Commons works with quite a few platforms.

Oh, and if you’ve spent the last few years in a cave and don’t know what Creative Commons is all about, here are a couple of links for you:

Via WordPress Tavern.