ProductiveWise

I’v opened a Fan Page for ProductiveWise on Facebook. You’re invited to join it.

I often find that Google isn’t quite tuned in to my search needs. Although I would rather that it only searched sites I know and trust, I often get results from sites that don’t look trustworthy or aren’t of high quality. That is why I’ve created a custom search engine that only searches the best technology sites – The ‘Top-Notch Technology and Media Blogs’ Search Engine.

Try it out

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Linkedin can be a great tool to find the right people for a job, a project or for one time help. In fact, it is that good that sometimes you get too many results and can’t see the forest for the trees. In this post I’m going to explain how to use Linkedin’s advanced search features in order to find people for specific tasks.

Let’s assume you’re looking for a PHP developer for your company. Here’s how you can use linked in to find people to hire:

1. In the search box type in PHP and hit search. The results will display people who mentioned the word PHP in their profile (note that people who are in your network show up first).
2. Refine the results by selecting or typing-in a location in the Location box on the left. Now, you will only see people from that location.
3. To further refine the results, in the groups box choose a group such as “Job networking” (of course you will have to be a member of that group in order to see it). That way you will get back people who are searching for a Job.

I made a video that illustrates how to do that, see it below:

Heavy Chrome users might find it a bit difficult to manage all their bookmarks, because there is no easy way to place a new sites in a specific folder. Here is a little tip that will help you manage your bookmarks: You can save a bookmark simply by dragging it to a folder.

I’ve created a 30 seconds video that explains how to do that. check it out below.

(If you got this post through e-mail or RSS and you can see the video, try watching it in the original post.)

Sometimes, finding the right person on Linkedin is not enough. The reason is that only paying users with premium account can send messages to people outside their network (That is, if you are not already connected to someone, you can’t message him).

Now, if it happens to you often, probably the best solution is to pay to upgrade your account. But if you don’t think it will pay off, here is a little built-in hack that can help you overcome this limitation.

The solution

In short – to send almost anyone on linkedin a message, simply join a group he or she is a member of.

Explanation

When you join a group on Linkedin, by default the members of the group can send you messages. Although you can turn this option off (see image below) people usually don’t tend to change default settings. Therefore, usually you will be able to send message to all the other members of the group.

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Over the past year I’ve written several posts about different Google applications. These include Google search, Google Reader, Gmail, Google Maps, and more. In case you’ve missed some, here is your chance to catch up with some great Goolge practices and tips (note that some of them where published on MakeUseOf.com):

Google Reader

• Google Reader Tips and Practices for Power Users
• 4 Steps to Optimize Your RSS Subscription List in Google Reader
• Before Google – Use Your RSS Reader as a Search Engine

Gmail

• Top 5 Gmail Keyboard Shortcuts to Boost Your Productivity
• Make Gmail More Secure By Setting It to Use HTTPS Connection
• The Easiest way to Create a New Email Message Instantly

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I’ve recently explained on MakeUseOf.com how to use Google Maps as a tool for distributed teams. In this post I am going to review other tools that support and improve the work of distributed teams. The tools will help you improve the way you share files, communicate, and work collaboratively with people not near you.

File sharing

One of the basic needs of a distributed team is the ability to share files. For ad-hoc teams, who do not work together on a regular basis, Drop.io is a great solution. Drop.io is a private sharing and collaboration web app. It lets you instantly create a mini site, called ‘a drop’, into which you can upload any type of file. You can annotate the file with comments or sections of text and use the chat feature for synchronized work sessions.

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Do you ever feel that if you could only tell Google a bit more about what you’re trying to find, the search results would be much better? Well, as you probably know, Google has some advanced search operators that help to refine search queries. You can use them to better focus your queries by specifying things like which sites to search, use placeholders, search for exact matches, and more. Here is a quick guide to Google’s advanced search operators.

Starting with advancead operators

Double quotation marks (” “) for exact much: When you enclose a phrase in quotation marks, Google returns only pages that contain that exact phrase. The results have to contain all the words and in the exact same order as you wrote them. Search for “The first Twitter user”, for example, and you’ll only get back pages that contain exactly that phrase. This advanced search feature is one of the most useful in my opinion.

Asterisk (*) is a placeholder for one or more words: adding * replaces any number of words in your query. Example: let’s say you want to find articles that teach Google search practices, like this one. You could use the following query for that task:

“how to Search * with Google”

The quotation marks will make sure that you’ll get back pages with that sentence in them. But since there’s Asterisk in the query, you’ll find different versions of it. So, you might get back this sentence: How to Search Faces with Google, this one: How to SearchEffectively with google, or any other variation that matches the query. See the results in the image below or try the query yourself.

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If you’ve ever tried Twitter’s search, you’ve probably found that it’s not very good. Indeed, Other Twitter search alternatives exist, such as Trendistic, Tweefind, Tweetzi, and Twazzup. But wouldn’t you rather just use Google for the task?

To search Twitter with Google, all you need to do is add to the search query a limitation that tells it to search only within Twitter (and not the whole web). To do that, simply add the following string to the query:

site:http://twitter.com

So, for example, to find mentions of this blog, we’ll add the word ‘productivewise’ to the query, as shown below (notice that there is a space between the search term, productivewise, and the sit URL) :

site:http://twitter.com/ productivewise

The results are displayed in the image below.

Click this link to search Google with the above query (opens in a new window).

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I took this video of Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, at a GarageGeeks meetup. The image is bad but the sound is good. Enjoy.

Jimmy Wales speaks at GarageGeeks – October 2009 from Eyal Sela on Vimeo.