From the obvious ideas department

aquatic

I was on Google one day doing research for a project and it occurred to me it would be tremendously useful to sort results by date. Or size, date modified, etc, sort of like Finder. Well, I got another idea. Why can't we cross-reference in the Finder, and in Google? All this talk of "database" this and that, well that would actually be useful. Not sure how to implement it in the GUI but does everyone know what I mean? You click one heading in a Column, for Size or Kind. Well why can't you sort by say Size, and withIN the Size sorting, sort by Date Created? Give priority to the first selected but among each, sort that way, instead just the single option of good ol' alphabetically. It'd also be cool to do this with Google, if we could even sort to begin with. What's everyone else think and wouldn't this be easy to do? Why isn't it or am I missing something really obvious, which I have definitely done!



Anyone else having an ideas that they think would be obvious but aren't implemented? I guess that's how stuff like the zipper, stickies, toothpaste, and flypaper, were invented.

ludwigvan

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Originally posted by Aquatic

I was on Google one day doing research for a project and it occurred to me it would be tremendously useful to sort results by date.

Date of what?

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Or size...

Odd choice. Why sort by size?

Quote:

...date modified, etc, sort of like Finder.

Well, modified date makes sense.



I'd be more interested in adding and expanding the capabilities of a subject-based results list from a search on Google, sort of like what Vivisimo does. Keyword can only get you so far...

dfiler

Google takes a relatively long time to re-index everything on the web. Meaning, pages can go many months between scans by google.



Also, many pages are loaded dynamically from database backends. What's the modification date on these?



Search by date could be useful but would require additional standardized methods for date tagging even before google flails uselessly against re-indexing lag.



Search by size would be interesting but would be difficult for anything other than static files. Web pages have various kinds of embedded and dynamic content that can't don't have a "size". For instance, scripted tabs within a single page...

aquatic

Those were just examples of criteria which popped out at my because they're in Finder. Perhaps incorporating this in to Google would be harder, but they must at least be researching it right? Now in Finder, it has to be easy. I wonder if there's a way to hack it to do this with BASIC or shell scripting or something. I want to see if I can sort directories on two levels of criteria. I don't program but I want to see if I can do this. It just makes sense. Spotlight isn't really the same thing, either. Searching isn't the same as looking at directories, because you look at lists of things to visually compare, whereas with Spotlight you already know what you're looking for and what you want to do. Hey programmer what do you think! What language would do this easily.

miggs97

Wouldn't Spotlight's smart folders acomplish the same thing? Search by Date created, images that that are 800x400, and contain the word 'Sausage', for example.

neutrino23

If the data is available and it is reliable then you could do this with apple script. Apple script could download a page, parse out the data then sort it as you like. I've done something like this for a web site I visit a lot. I sort by time of day so I can quickly find new posts.