A few GONY readers have taken an interesting approach to yesterday’s unexpected dust-up with David Pogue by sending along tips that do his original, perfectly serviceable tip one better. In case you’ve forgotten, Pogue’s original tip was that there’s this site Google that can locate stuff on the Internet—OH GOD NO WAIT—I mean, his original tip was that Google serves as an easy alternative to website’s dedicated search fields, and that you can often get better results by Googling for, say, “amazon futurama” than by typing “futurama” into Amazon’s search.

A couple people have noted that employing the site operator is a slightly better way to achieve this end. That is, instead of typing “amazon futurama” you instead type “site:amazon.com futurama.” That tells Google to only search its index of, you guessed it, amazon.com.

Many of the commenters on Pogue’s blog have advocated this approach, too. The site operator is one of the first lessons in Google-fu, but it is just a touch more complicated than Pogue’s approach, so I can see why he kept it simple for the layperson.

Susan Schweitzer writes in to argue that Pogue really should have talked about search shortcuts:

If Pogue wanted to reveal a really overlooked search feature, he would tell his readers about this:

- Use Firefox.
- Go to a page with a search box.
- Right-click in that search box, and from the resulting pop-up menu, choose “add a Keyword for this search.”
- In the resulting bookmarks menu, type the name of the site, and then a really short keyword (one letter is great); hit enter.
- Put the cursor in the location bar and type the keyword followed by whatever you want to search for.

For example, I could go to wikipedia, right click in their main search box, and use “w” as a keyword. Now, when I want to search Wikipedia, I just type “Command-L” [Alt-D on Windows] to get to the location bar, then type “w david pogue” and I get taken directly to his Wikipedia page.

I use this for so many websites, and in fact when I’m not on my own computer I end up semi-consciously attempting to do this and it pisses me off that other people haven’t set things up this way.

Ding ding ding, Susan wins. I use basically the same approach on Safari with Saft.

You can combine a search shortcut with Google’s site operator to create the search tip to end all search tips. At least, I hope it’s the search tip to end all search tips because I am tired of talking about this.