Google Wave Search Commands Tips and Tricks

A big part of navigating through your Google Wave inbox are the search commands. They help you find public waves, your archived messages, or just waves related to work. Here are some of the most important commands to keep in mind while working on your Google Wave:

1) is:read and is:unread: This will help you find all of the waves you have or have not read. is:active is the same as is:unread currently.
2) is:mute and is:unmute: The same type of deal – This helps you find conversations you may have muted or unmuted.
3) title:(keyword): This command helps you find waves with a specific word in their titles.
4) caption:(keyword): This helps you find waves with a keyword in the captions of attached images and files.
5) from:(address): This command will help you find waves from specific people. On the same token, from:me finds waves from you. to:(address) finds waves where it’s just you and the person you’re searching for.
6) past:(date), previous:(date), after:(date), and before:(date): These four commands help you search for waves in time periods, based on days, weeks, months, and years. Use “d” for day, “w” for week, “m” for month, and “y” for year. So, if you want to find something from before 3 months ago, you’d type “before:3m”. Yes, it’s complicated.
7) has: The has command will search for whether a wave has an attachment, a document, an image, or even a gadget (has:gadget).
There are actually a lot more commands. To read them all, you need to check out Google Wave’s advanced search terms list.

Wave Navigation:
There are an abundance of keyboard shortcuts that make using Google Wave a more streamlined experience. Thanks to a list first created by Google’s Greg Dalesandre in the development version of Google Wave, we can bring you a full list of keyboard shortcuts, which we’ll update periodically.

First, here are the commands for Wave Navigation:

1) Up/Down Arrows: As you might expect, use the arrows to navigate messages.
2) Tab/Shift-tab: Same functionality as the Up/Down arrows (outside of edit mode).
3) Home/End: Moves you to the first or last message.
4) Space: Go to next unread message (note: it doesn’t have to be within the same wave).
5) Left/Right Arrows: Switch focus between digest panel and wave panel.
6) Page Up/Down: Currently doesn’t work properly due to a bug.
7) Ctrl-Space: Marks all messages as read.

Messages in Wave:
1) Enter: Replies to messages. Your reply will appear just below the selected message. If it’s the first reply, it will not be indented (but otherwise it will be).
2) Ctrl-R: The same as enter.
3) Shift-Enter: Replies to messages at the end of a thread. Replies of this nature appear at the bottom with the same indentation in almost all cases.
4) Highlight Text + Enter: Creates an inline reply. Your reply will be indented inside the current message.
5) Ctrl-E: Edit a message.
6) Ctrl-Enter (while editing): Inserts an inline reply at the caret.

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Add Twitter to Google Wave and start Tweeting and Waving

Google Wave is a pretty exciting application to work on and I'm currently exploring the features in it for the past couple of days. As many of the people still doesn't know How to add twitter to Google Wave i'm writing this post in order to help all those who are looking for any help on this. Alright  to start with Once you are inside your Google Wave, you need to click on the add contacts option which is the on the left side panel and add the corresponding address tweety-wave@appspot.com [Note its a hyphen(-) here not a dot(.)]

Next click on the Submit button and add the Tweety Wave to your contacts list

Now click on the Tweety the twitbot from your Contacts list and next click on New Wave. (Arrows as shown in the figure above).

Authenticating

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How Google adress the spam reports

Ever wondered how Google deals with Spam ?. How they prioritise the sites, block them, handle the queries, etc. No ?. Nothing to worry here, Google published a video which explains how they prioritise spam reports.

The spam report form asks for the queries, resulting page, website url, keywords, etc so that Google can calculate the number of users who are exposed to spam site on a daily basis for the target query along with the list of related queries.

In the below video Mattcutts explains more on this

Google increases its Search box size

Google which primarily focuses on the search market for its business has made a small change to its home page and its search results pages. It has increased its search box size in a view to help its users to view larger text when they type so that they can see their query more clearly. Google also uses a larger text size for the suggestions coming below the search box, making it easier to select one of the possible refinements.

Google Search box before the change:

Google Search box after the change:

Currently Google Ranks in #5 position for the keyword "search" in its SERP's. With this change lets see whether it can increase its place to #1 :)

What is SEO - Definition of Search Engine Optimization

For many of those who are not having much information or knowledge on what SEO is all about and trying to find out the real definition for SEO here comes a useful and good post on it from shoemoney which is quite very useful for beginners (even for experts).

I would like to give some snippets from that article here. Let me start first with

Danny sullivan:

"An SEO is someone who understands how people search for information (on the web and in other ways) and ensures that they or their clients are visible in the unpaid listings that are provided. A search marketer, by the way, is someone that ensures listing in both paid and unpaid listings."

Rand Fishkin:

"SEO is the combination of tactics and strategies, including, but not limited to, optimization of information architecture, usability, content focus, audience targeting, design, development, keyword research, keyword placement, link building, social media marketing and any other online or offline branding/marketing elements that support the goal of receiving more traffic from search engines."

Andy Beal:

"Making changes to the on-page and off-page relevance of a web page in an effort to increase the volume of quality traffic from the search engines."

Aaron Wall:

SEO is the art and science of publishing and marketing content in a way that brings significant profitable and targeted traffic to your website. As the web has grown and Google has become more sophisticated, the field of SEO has been aggressively merging with traditional marketing, with emphasis on branding, framing, story telling, user engagement, viral marketing, and public relations.

Abraham Lincoln once said “With public sentiment, nothing can fail. Without it, nothing can succeed.” That is where profitable sustainable SEO is headed.

Darren Rowse:

How do I define SEO? Good question – there are a number of thoughts that come to mind:

1. the right answer – SEO is something that helps a website to increase it’s ranking in a search engine.

2. my ‘historical’ answer (ie what I would have answered a few years ago) – SEO is about manipulating Search Engines in order to get them to send you as much traffic as possible.

3. the ‘in practice’ answer (ie how it impacts me these days) – SEO for me these days is a combination of:

• about knowing some of the general principles that help a site or page to rank well in search engines

• building the best quality site that I can with content that meets the needs of readers (and as a result attracts links from other sites).

I guess I’ve come to learn that when you build a high quality website that SEO tends to largely look after itself.

Joost Devalk:

Search Engine Optimization is the practice of improving a sites’ content, code, server settings, internal structure and external linking, with the intent of making the site rank higher in the search engines. If done well, SEO is a part of each (online) marketing act, resulting in the improved visibility of the site.

Note that I do NOT think that a site should rank higher than “it’s meant to be” if there IS such a thing. In the end, SEO should make a site WORTHY of a higher ranking, not push it beyond what it’s worth. In practice, this means that if a site is sh*t, link building for it is neigh to impossible, so it won’t work, and we’ll tell people to improve their site. That means that in the end, an SEO is more off a total online marketer and site consultant than just someone pulling some tricks to quickly make a site rank better.

Now everone has come up with their own definitions and views above. Let me take the pleasure of defining SEO in my own terms here too :)

SEO Knol:

SEO is the process of improving the quality and quantity of a website in the search engines; Where in Quality comes up with the relavent (quality) links pointing out to your website and quantity is the number of website links which are coming in to your websites.