#Tip of the day for journalists: Set up a custom site search in Alfred
Mac users may be familiar with a free productivity tool that is available in the App Store called Alfred.
Alfred is a powerful tool that allows you to launch and search apps and web sites in a couple of clicks.
For example, you can open Alfred (by pressing ‘alt’ and ‘space’) and then carry out a calculation, search your contacts or start typing the the name of an application and launch it.
If you are a Mac user and journalist, you probably find yourself carrying out a number of site searches a day to find previously published content.
For example, I have carried out a number of site searches today to find previously published content on Journalism.co.uk. I could do this typing the Google advanced operator site:journalism.co.uk into my Google search box followed by the query (for example site:journalism.co.uk “tip of the day”). As I have Alfred set up to perform this site search I can run the search in 21 fewer clicks.
Here’s how:
- Open Alfred and go to ‘preferences’ (the shortcut is ‘Apple’ and ‘,’)
- Go to ‘features‘ then ‘custom searches‘
- Type the following into the first box, replacing ‘journalism.co.uk’ with your site URL.
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site:journalism.co.uk%20{query}
- Fill in the other fields, choosing a shortcut for your site. For example, I picked the letter J so when I open Alfred (‘alt’ and ‘space’) I can type ‘J’ and then my keyword search. Alfred launches Chrome and displays the search results.
That saves me typing site:journalism.co.uk every time I need to search.
There is more on Alfred’s custom search here.
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