Number six on the annual list was Apple’s iPhone 5, the Mac-maker’s highest placing search term, and ironically, one for a product that didn’t actually ship in 2011. Instead of an iPhone 5, Apple released the iPhone 4S, but leading up to the unveiling of that product, speculation was rampant and the iPhone 5 name was on the tip of everyone’s tongue.

The rumored device reportedly featured a larger screen and thinner body, in addition to the 8 megapixel camera and Siri voice assistant that shipped with the 4S. It’s high positioning on this list bodes well for when Apple actually releases an iPhone 5 (if it’ll be called that) in 2012. The iPhone 5 hit its stride in the week of Sept. 25, 2011, at basically the fever pitch point of rumors about the iPhone one week ahead of the 4S unveiling.

The iPad 2 was the number 10 fastest-rising term in 2011, and had the benefit of being an actual shipping product, too. Searches for iPad 2 rose 939 percent from 2010 to 2011, and peaked in February two weeks ahead of the day the tablet actually went on sale in the U.S. online and in stores. The iPad 3 didn’t make the top 10 overall, but it is number 10 in the category of Consumer Electronics for Google’s 2011 fastest-rising global search terms. Something tells me it’ll pick up considerably in popularity over the next few months.

Finally, Apple co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs also scored a place, coming in at number nine on the list. The consumer electronics pioneer passed away in October of 2011, and that’s exactly when his popularity on the search engine reached its peak. Jobs’ death was front-page news around the world, and his death prompted multiple media events, documentaries and the early release of his authorized biography.

Apple had other successes too in terms of capturing the attention of Googlers worldwide, including the iPhone 4S, which the second-fastest riser in the Consumer Electronics subcategory, just behind the Amazon Kindle Fire. The full Google Zeitgeist site is a very pretty, interactive exploration of the year in review from the perspective of the world’s most popular search engine, and definitely merits a closer look if you want to discover more.

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Microsoft did a nice job with the iPad Bing app. I’ve included a gallery below so you can see for yourself just how pretty the free app is. The sweeping vistas that make Bing so visually distinctive on the web look great on the iPad’s screen. The dynamically updated section thumbnails along the bottom of the interface not only look good, but they also offer some pretty great centrally located useful features as well. You can call up news headlines, weather, movie trailers and more with a single tap from the home screen. And everything transitions beautifully from one screen to another with the help of snappy and smooth animations.

As is often the case with Google offerings, its own dedicated universal iOS app looks bare-bones and more a case of all function, no flash by comparison. Microsoft even includes a voice search feature like Google, too. But despite its many virtues, I predict it’ll suffer the same fate as the Google app has on my iPhone and iPad: I’ll probably only open it a couple more times, and eventually I’ll delete it from my home screen.

Why? Because search is not something I need all that often on my tablet or smartphone, thanks to the wide availability of narrow-focus single speciality apps. And even in those instances where I do want to search the web, I can access Google or Bing in my device’s mobile Safari browser in just as many clicks as it would take me to get to it in a dedicated app, and the apps will kick me out to Safari to track down my results anyway. Search apps may use a dedicated browser by default, which Bing does, but that’s just another problem since in-app browsers don’t offer Apple’s recently-introduced WebKit optimizations.

Bing would probably work kind of nice as a sort of always-on picture frame/desk clock/info center, but that’s not how I use my mobile devices, and I’d much rather open Reeder, Flipboard or Zite to go hunting for news, or use Google Maps for directions. Bing does a bunch of things adequately, but in the age of apps, I’ve come to expect and prefer software that does one thing and does it very well instead of Swiss Army-style titles that tries to do too much.

The fact is, the only real search I need is built-in to my iOS device thanks to Apple’s own Spotlight search, which is always just a swipe or two away. More often than not these days, if I’m searching on my mobile device I’m looking for something local, and that’s something no third-party offerings can provide, and even if they did I’d probably just use Spotlight anyway.

Do you use third-party dedicated search apps on your device, and if so, what for?

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It isn’t enabled by default on the iPhone, requiring you to activate it by clicking a link below the search bar when you first navigate to Google.com. It’s also available only in the U.S. initially, and not at any of the international domains like Google.ca, etc. If you aren’t seeing it yet, Google advises that you wait a moment and refresh. You have to be using iOS 4 on the iPhone, or Android 2.2 or above for the feature to work, too. Google has a demo video, which you can see below.

I found that it works about as quickly as the desktop version, and that on the iPhone, the functionality is somewhat limited by the fact that your on-screen keyboard obscures most of your results. Still, all you have to do is hit the “Done” button to view your aut0-populated list, so it is a lot faster than searching via Google’s mobile site used to be. In fact, since you don’t have to load a new page, and you can usually see right away if you have your desired top hit, navigating one-handed becomes much faster overall.

It’s a nice addition, and possibly more useful than its desktop counterpart, since it caters to the limitations of mobile browsing. I tested on 3G and Wi-Fi connections. Let us know how well it’s working for you.

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Goggles is a Labs product that Google introduced back in December of last year for Android devices. As its name implies, it involves the visual spectrum, allowing you to snap a photo using your device’s camera and using that to initiate a search. Now you can both talk to, and show Google’s iPhone app what it is you’re looking for.

Just download Google Mobile App from the App Store for free, and tap the camera button to search using Goggles. Goggles will then highlight elements of the image it recognizes, and you can tap on those areas to find out more. Google has a short video explaining the process:

Before you start taking pictures of your friends and your dog, though, be aware that this technology is still relatively new, hence the Labs designation that Google affixes to all its experimental software. It should work great for recognizing things like landmarks, or DVD and video game artwork, though.

If you don’t have it yet, don’t worry, the update’s being pushed out gradually to all the international App Stores. If you do have it, how’s it working for you? Let us know below.

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At the moment I’ve got 1,303 items in the trash bin in my OS X Dock — not that much compared to the usual pile that accumulates there when my normal maintenance has me only cleaning it out once every couple of months. Usually, it’s not a problem. Occasionally, though, I’ll throw something away by mistake, at which point I’m reminded that you can’t just click on the bin and search through the trash like you can with other folders in your Dock.

It may sound like a small annoyance, but if I’m digging through the trash, it’s because I really need to find that thing I tossed out. Without a chance to search for it I’m left with no other option but to browse through a pile of files that typically number in the thousands. All this turns a small annoyance into a rather large one. There’s got to be a better way to deal with all this Trash.

Ordinarily when searching for files in the Finder you can choose to limit the scope of your search to the current folder by selecting it from the search bar. This is a big help when you know the file you want is somewhere in this folder, but you’re not entirely sure what its name is.

But trying this approach after clicking on the trash icon leaves you searching the entire system with no way to limit your scope. I suppose I could just do a better job regularly taking out the trash — this would leave me with fewer files to browse through when the time comes — but I know myself and that’s just not going to happen. Another option would be to write a script to handle trash maintenance, but that might just make a bad problem worse if my script gets rid of something I accidentally threw away before I have a chance to retrieve it.

The best solution, it seems, is also the easiest one. I use “Go To Folder” in the finder to navigate to the otherwise hidden trash directory at ~/.Trash and drag that folder into the Dock. Now when I accidentally throw something away I won’t have to browse through thousands of items looking for the lone needle in the haystack. I can just use .Trash to limit my search scope as I would with any other directory in the system.

View screencast of how to do this.

Mac OS X offers a computing experience that, according to many, is still unparalleled by its competitors. Built on a rock solid UNIX foundation and continually adding refinements that make interaction easier, OS X has a lot of powerful functionality that many users were unaware existed. One of these is the idea of “Smart Folders” and with a little primer, you can begin using them to make your Mac experience easier (and faster).

A Brief History

The idea of these Smart Folders are not unique to OS X. In fact, the idea started originally in the mid ‘90s with the now defunct BeOS. When Dominic Giampaolo, a software developer for Be, began working for Apple in 2002, some of the best elements of the BeOS made their way into Apple’s modern operating system. We know these features as “Smart Folders” and Spotlight, both of which launched in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, two years after Giampaolo began working for Apple.

A “Smart Folder” (or “Search Folder” as Windows Vista calls them when Microsoft introduced its version in 2006) is based on the idea that this folder is basically a “virtual folder” of its actual contents. This virtual folder doesn’t physically store copies of its contents inside but rather utilizes a database to store attributes about the files (defined either by the system or the user). This offers several advantages: they have a small file size, the ability for on-the-fly fine tuning of the criteria used to define the content as well as allowing the content to dynamically update as new files meet the criteria. Whoa. What does all of that mean? We’re getting there.

Smart Folders Save Time

In short, Smart Folders save you time. You basically give them a list of rules to follow and they automatically fill themselves with content based on the criteria you’ve defined. It’s important though, to realize that these Smart Folders do not actually represent copies of the content, but merely virtually link to them. If you delete a file out of a Smart Folder, you’ve also deleted it from its original location.

How To Make Smart Folders

Making a Smart Folder is quite easy. In fact, if you’re running Leopard or Snow Leopard, several of them have already been created. You might recognize them due to their trademark purple folder icon (also used to serve the same role in other applications, but we’ll discuss that in future articles). In the left side of a default Finder window, you’ll see an area called “Search For” with entries for “Today,” “Yesterday,” “Past Week” and some more. These are built in smart folders that automatically search your entire system for files meeting those criteria. But we can do far more powerful things with Smart Folders if we make our own.

1. To get started, when in the Finder, go to the File menu and select “New Smart Folder.” You’ll have a Finder window that looks like a search window. (You can also start this process simply by searching from a Finder window.)
2. Next, using the bar beneath the title bar of the window, select the location you’d like this folder to search. The default options are your Mac, your home folder and Shared (any other computers you may connected to). If you’d like it to confine the search to a specific folder, simply navigate to that folder and use the Spotlight function built into the Finder window. (Type something into the field to bring up a search; you can then delete what you typed to move to the next step).
3. Unless you’ve specified some phrase or string in the Spotlight search region in the upper right of the window, at this point you’re not going to be seeing any search results. Let’s give it some actual criteria to search.
4. Click the round plus (+) icon on the right side of the window to show another bar beneath the search location. Where it says “Kind” and “Any” is your first search criteria. These work in pairs. You can change “Any” to documents, images, movies or anything you want. Instantly, you’ll see your search results start to populate based on your selection. Perhaps instead of searching by kind, you want to search by name, contents or date. Clicking “Kind” will allow these changes as well as a mystical “other” option which gives you tons of options for a plethora of different uses. Since OS X is media friendly, you can also select criteria that corresponds to metadata in your media files, such as aperture value of a photo, sample rate for an audio file, video bit rate for video files and more.
5. You can continue to add additional criteria by clicking the plus and adding another row of criterion. Each additional criterion further fine tunes your search. For an item to appear in the results, it will need to meet every rule you have created for it.
6. If you want to save a Smart Folder search, click the Save button in the upper right of the window. Your searches are saved in “Saved Searches” inside the Library folder of your home folder. There’s also a checkbox to automatically add your new search to your Finder sidebar.
7. Editing a Smart Folder is as simple as right clicking it in the sidebar and selecting “Show Search Criteria” or selecting the same option from the gears menu once you’ve double clicked a saved Smart Folder.

Again, the beauty and power of Smart Folders comes from the fact that once you’ve defined the rules, this folder will automatically continue to update as new files are created or saved that meet its criteria.

Folder Inspiration

Smart Folders sound great and once you’ve set one up, you’ll see the process is pretty simple. It’s also pretty powerful but, for inspiration, here’s a few examples of interesting and useful Smart Folders that you could create on your system.

Recent Documents: To view all your recent documents, set the kind to document and the last opened date to within the last 3 days.

Important Files: If you use Finder labels, select “Other” and choose “File label.” Then pick the file label that matches your desired results.

By Device: Have several cameras? You can use “Device make” and “Device model” to specify a particular camera (as well as any other EXIF data).

Do you use Smart Folders? Have any tips you’d like to share or comments on this post? Let me know what you think; I’d love to hear your feedback.

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There’s little chance of that happening, but a new Facebook app could help make the App Store more navigable, and do so with a little help from your friends. Mplayit is a new service being offered on Facebook that aims to bring some sense to the jungle that is the 100,000-strong App Store using a more intelligent browsing system based on recommendations and demos.

The idea is that there’s no one better to recommend iPhone apps you’d like than your friends. Using Mplayit, friends can make recommendations via the app which will appear on their profile page and in the news feed. That way, you’ll have a trustworthy source when you’re shopping for new software for your device.

By far the most useful aspect of Mplayit during my brief use of it was the app recommendations and shared apps. The rest, including popularity, search and categories, is already available to users via the App Store itself.

I’m not exactly sure how apps get onto the recommended list, since I would assume that they would be the ones which are the most recommended, but then what’s to differentiate them from the shared app? Whatever the methodology behind their selection, the fact remains that they are good picks, and well-deserving of attention. The list provides a good variety, too, covering apps with a range of functions instead of just presenting, say, all the top Twitter apps.

The best part of Mplayit, from the standpoint of people who need to see to believe, is that most apps come complete with videos and images previewing the functionality of the software running on an actual iPhone, and a full text description, too. That’s what puts Mplayit ahead of other iPhone app discovery sites like AppShopper.com or 148apps. Of course, each app also includes buy links that redirect you to the App Store, and a link through which you can add the program to your collection, which helps Mplayit track app popularity and recommendation information.

Many people are reluctant to use Facebook apps because of privacy concerns and fears of spamming the news feeds of friends, but after trying out the service for a little while, I haven’t found any cause for concern with Mplayit. The best part is that you can still use most aspects of the app without granting it access to your profile information.

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The AT&T Jobs App (iTunes link) is the first app of its kind, one designed by a company to promote only its specific job listings. Job seekers will find updated info on openings, career-related events, and even company information, so you can take it with you to the interview and do a little last minute cramming while you’re waiting to see HR staff.

Scott Smith, AT&T’s Vice President of Staffing, had this to say about the app and the reasoning behind its creation to mobile site Mobiletor.com:

The AT&T Jobs App combines greater accessibility with up-to-date information on career advancement at AT&T on one of the world’s most popular devices. This app provides a mobile and interactive way for applicants to network and identify employment opportunities, while expanding the reach of our AT&T career portal to even more people.

You can also use the app to suggest jobs to qualified people in your network of friends and family, thanks to a job post sharing feature, or forward it to your email address so you can give more detailed attention at home on your primary computer.

Finding jobs is as simple as performing a fully customizable search, or by browsing the available positions via categories like broadband, retail, and wireless. You can also search using criteria like geographic area and qualifications required, which should expedite the process of finding a suitable listing somewhat.

If you’re interested in doing something in person, you can browse a list of all the events AT&T is holding or participating in relating to job seeking. Many are college-based job fairs, but there are also info sessions and teleconferences listed. Finally, the Media section provides potential employees with plenty of information about the company and the industry so that they can study up.

It may not be perfectly executed (job listings load in an in-app web view, for example, instead of as properly integrated components of the app), you can’t apply to any job directly from your device (though would you want to?), and there’s no feature to take advantage of your phone’s location services to find jobs or events in your immediate area.

Still, it’s a step in the right direction for major employers, and others would do well to follow AT&T’s example. If you want to reach as wide an audience as possible, which should theoretically net you the best job candidates, what better way to do so than to offer iPhone accessibility, which most people probably have on them even when there isn’t a computer in reach.

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At first, I thought this sounded like only half an idea. There are already some great Twitter clients in the Mac software space, most of which have integrated search functions built right in, so how does Incoming! carve out a niche by offering search alone? What I found out was that depending on your Twitter habits, it might actually be the only app you need.

What it offers is a very robust search manager, well above and beyond what the average built-in Twitter search in other clients provide. You can filter results by matching exact phrases, finding any or all of multiple terms, or by exclusionary keywords (so that I can search for “Apple” but exclude “Pie,” for instance). You can even specify positive or negative attitudes (which just searches for a smiley or frowny emoticon, but it works), or specify that you want only questions.

The interface also provides lots of options for filtering your tweets and navigating between searches and trending topics. On the left, your searches appear in the sidebar, and are only removed when you click the “Remove Search” button. Below that list is a pane containing trends. Double-clicking on any trending term will automatically create a search for said term. On the right you have your list of results and the actual tweet-viewing window. You can filter results by influence, username, following/follower count, updates and date.

At no point during any of this do you log into your Twitter account or post any tweets of your own. Some users will no doubt find this bothersome, and question the app’s usefulness, but if you use Twitter for research as much as I do, the arm’s length passivity of Incoming! is just what the doctor ordered. It might also appeal to people who don’t yet want to take the Twitter plunge themselves by signing up for an account, but want access to all the content that’s available via the service, in a much more manageable package than Twitter.com’s own search page.

For those who absolutely need to reply and retweet, you still can; Incoming! just opens the native Twitter web interface to allow you to do so. The application also has some nice extras, like allowing you to export your results to a CSV database file format, providing “Translate” and “Translate All” options, and allowing you to instantly see all of the links and images your search has returned taken out of their individual tweets. It’s the closest thing to a Google for Twitter I’ve yet come across.

The software is currently in beta, which I think explains why the auto-refresh function wasn’t working for me. It’s free, so long as you only want to run three searches at once. Registration removes the search limit cap, and costs $14 while the beta is on, or $24 after that.

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Through iTunes Connect, the submission service for the App Store, developers may now use keywords totaling 255 characters.

“It is important to enter keywords for all applications as soon as possible so your application can continue to be successfully located on the App Store,” the update from Apple reads. “Keywords can be updated with the submission of a new binary.”

With the unrivaled success of the App Store and its alleged 65,000 apps, it has become harder and harder for consumers to find what they are looking for. This was noted by Apple COO Tim Cook at the conference call for last quarter.

We are always looking for ways to categorize apps differently, and we do have some ideas in this area. As you know, today we do it by type of app and also show popular apps and top-selling apps, etc. We realize there’s opportunity for further improvement and are working on that.

Unfortunately, keywords are probably not the answer. Unless Apple closely regulates the system, unscrupulous developers could abuse keywords in the same way meta tags are abused for web search. Misleading keywords boosts ranking in search results, be it on the web or at the App Store. Of course, keywords are easy to implement for Apple, but if the company is looking for a simple and effective improvement to search, the browse function is a better choice.

Browsing games by popularity

Under Quick Links, in the right sidebar of iTunes Store home screen, Browse allows for quick and easy searching of the App Store via three categories: iTunes Store, Category and Subcategory. Using App Store → Games → All shows a list of 2500 items, which can the be sorted by column. It also includes the ability to add columns, like Popularity. The biggest drawback is that only one column can be used for sorting at a time, so you can’t search for, as an example, most popular paid games.

One could easily imagine greater granularity — a few more categories and sorting by multiple columns. More importantly, Apple would be in control of the search system, rather than developers who might find it hard to resist gaming keywords for fun and profit.

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