There are even several choices for different search engine apps. Which one you use depends a lot on what features you’re looking for, as well as which one you usually prefer when searching. Most of them are free, as you shouldn’t have to pay for searching, but there’s one that costs just a little. Depending on your usage, it could be worth it.

I’m doing a search here for news about Apple. I tried first using the search tool within the Safari browser in iOS. I have a lot of choices, certainly more than I had with the first Safari browser in the original iOS. Across the top in the black bar, I can search for News, Images, Maps, Shopping, etc… and I can sign in to my Google account for more options. In a list to the right, it shows related searches. If I click on the wrench, it gives me time options, as well as other interesting choices, such as reading level, translation, verbatim, etc. Additionally, in the Settings app, you can choose whether to search with Google, Bing, or Yahoo! There are ample amount of options here.

Google App

The Google App works much the same way as Google in Safari, but it provides you a few more options. If I just go to a regular search, it gives me the same search list, as well as the related searches to the right, and a few to the top. Clicking on the arrow in the upper left takes me to additional options that include a voice search. If you don’t have a newer iPhone or are using an iPad, and don’t have the use of Siri, you can search with voice here. It’s nice for when you’re tied up doing something else, yet you still have to use your eyes to navigate to the right spot here. Additionally, you can check in with the library of other Google apps. When you return to your search, it gives you the additional options you have with Google in Safari. Tapping a search option opens it in a separate tab. Gestures allows you to have the viewing window side by side with your search results.

Bing App

You just can’t get more attractive than the Bing App. The one optimized for the iPad is even more so. It has large images opened up in the middle, and you can swipe to different images if you prefer. You can click on an info icon in the bottom right for more information of what you’re looking at, and can click on certain pieces of the image to get more information about that section of the image. It’s not all about that though. There is also a search for voice option, and an attractive listing at the bottom of local weather, maps, searching trends, news, movies, and finance. Tapping those takes you to more options. And of course, there’s a search function in the top left that gives you standard search options.

Yahoo App

About the only reason to use the Yahoo! App would be if you are used to searching with Yahoo! online and are on your iPhone. It’s not optimized at all for the iPad. It does offer you great local suggestions. If you’re looking for a restaurant, movie, or coffee shop close by, it’ll give you those options on a map. It also shows you the current search trends, allows you to search by voice, and of course offers the same standard search options along the top there.

Ask App

Like Bing, the Ask App isn’t optimized for the iPad, and is only useful if you’re on an iPhone. It offers more choices if you sign up for a free account. The app shows you what is currently being searched for by others using Ask. It can search normally on the web and can also search for answers from people, just like ask.com does. If you look for specific answers, you need to either create an account or sign in with Facebook. It should be noted that if you ask something previously asked, it will show up in a web search, just as with any other search app. If you have many pointed questions you are looking to have answered, it might be useful.

BingYaMaGoggle! App

The BingYaMaGoggle! App combines all of the search functions in one place for you. There are other apps that do the same, but they aren’t as easy to use and as attractive. If you do a lot of searching and hate switching back and forth between search engines looking for the right answer, it’s worth the $1.99 price tag. It searches Bing, Yahoo!, Google, AOL, and Ask.com. At any time you can have it open the choices in Safari. My only question is where they get the “Ma” in the title.

Which is your favorite method to perform a search in iOS?

Image credit: Danard Vincente

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One way I have been handling multiple email addresses is to use Gmail as an email hub. The way I will show you will allow you to send and receive emails from your Gmail account.

Note: An important part of this process is being able to forward your email to your Gmail account. Email services like Yahoo do not let you forward your Yahoo mail emails without being a premium or business customer. Please check if you are able to forward your emails to Gmail before you proceed.

I am using Hotmail for my example. The screens you see may vary, but the general steps should be the same regardless of the email program. Even if you have multiple Gmail accounts, this will work.

Part 1: Setting up email forwarding

Once you are logged into your email account, you will need to go to the settings menu. In Hotmail you will need to click on your name in the top right corner of the screen and select “Options“.

On the left side, click on Mail. Once in the Mail settings, you will need to click on Email Forwarding.

In the email forwarding tab, you will see a place to enter your Gmail address. With Hotmail, you will need to check the box telling Hotmail you want to forward your emails to another address. As you can see, there is a note telling you to sign in once every 270 days or your Hotmail account will be cancelled.

If you want to keep a copy of the forwarded email, there is a usually a box you can check to keep a copy on the Hotmail server. Click Done.

Keep your Hotmail account open, you will need to go back to it shortly.

Part 2: Sending from Gmail

After you log into your Gmail account, you will see your name and a gear. Click on the gear to see the mail options. In the drop down, select Mail Settings.

When in the Mail Settings, click on the Accounts and Import tab.

In this tab, about half way down, you will see a section called Send mail as: Click on the tab that says Send mail from another address.

A window will pop up with two text boxes.The first is what you want your name to show up as when you send an email. The second is the email address you want to send from. Fill in the email address and click Next step.

If you are changing email accounts and weening people off the old one, you can choose a different reply-to address here.

The next step is to select the SMTP or outgoing server. I am recommending to use Gmail’s outgoing server for ease of setup. This will save all of your outgoing messages to your Gmail Sent folder.

After you select the outgoing server, you will need to send a verification email to your other email account.

This is why I wanted you to keep your Hotmail or other email account open. When the email from Google arrives in your Hotmail inbox, you can click on the link in the email to verify that you really want to let Google send emails from this account.

Alternatively, you can copy and paste the verification code from the email to the Gmail verification window you last saw.

You should be all set to try a test email. To do this, go to your Gmail inbox and compose a message. In the message composition window, you will now see a drop down option where it displays your email address.

When you send or receive an email from your Hotmail address, the recipient will notice no difference. It will be as though you are logging into your Hotmail account and sending it from there.

What are your tips for managing multiple email accounts?

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Poll results and this week’s poll after the jump.

The question for this week’s poll is: Do You Wish to See Delicious Shut Down?

At first, Yahoo said that it’s going to shut down Delicious. Next, it said that it is going to offload Delicious (instead of shutting it down). What about you? Do you wish to see Delicious get shut down?

Take Our Poll

Feel free to comment if you are using other bookmarking services.

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By site specific search I mean that you can use a search engine to find content from a specific blog, website or forum. Sometimes you may want to search a popular blog for some tutorial and it’s not always very comfortable to open blogs in different tabs and use their search box to find the content you are looking for.

Instead, you can search any website from Google, Yahoo or Bing. The advantage is that you can filter all the posts that match with specific keywords directly from a search engine.

Perform a Site Specific Search With Google, Yahoo or Bing

The search engines index the content of all websites daily and by using the site operator, you can limit your search within a specific website. The general syntax for the site operator is keyword site: domain.com

For example: performing this site search query shows all the posts from maketecheasier.com which contain the word “Images” in the post title:

Using the same syntax, you can perform a site specific search at Yahoo and Bing as well. For example: This search at Yahoo and this one at Bing shows all the posts that contain the word software in the post title. Let’s take a look at the search results pages now:

Using the At Operator

Google recently introduced an “at” operator which lets you perform the site specific searches more easily. The syntax is keywords at domain.com

This operator shows more results from a specific domain and it’s quite easy to remember as well.

Please note that you can use regular phrases and not just single phrases, when using the site operator or the “at” operator in any of the above search engines.

Using the Advanced Search Options

All the search engines have an “Advanced search” option which you can be used to perform a search within a single or group of domains. Let’s take Google as an example.

Go to the Google homepage and click “Advanced search” placed just right to the Google search box. You will be taken to a new page which looks something like the following:

Enter the name of the site you want to search in the text field “Search within a site or domain” .Then enter the keywords or phrases in the “all these words” text box. You can further exclude some words in the “don’t show pages” text box.

When you are done, hit “Advanced search” and Google will return the results from the specific domain of your choice. The advanced search has an advantage when there are an overwhelming number of results from a specific domain and you want to exclude some keywords from your search (e.g. using Firefox in the main text box and using linux in the excluding text box shows results which contain the word Firefox but not the word Linux.)

The procedure is exactly the same for Yahoo Advanced Search and Bing as well, take a look at the following screenshots:

Search a Specific Site From your Browser – Firefox and Google Chrome

Another neat way to perform a site specific search is to use a browser extension and add a custom search box in Firefox awesome bar. This will allow you to search any website directly, without having to open it and use the internal built in search box. Here are the steps:

1. Install the Add to Search Bar extension and restart Firefox.

2.Go to the website where you would want to perform a custom search often. Right click the search box and choose”"

3. Now click the Firefox Awesome bar and select the custom search engine you just added.

4. Now you can simply type the keywords and hit “Enter” to perform a site specific search using the Firefox’s search box. The extension allows you to add any number of sites, so if you can multiple blogs or websites without any problem.

What methods you use to perform a site specific search? Please let us know your ideas through a comment.

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When I am sitting at my desk and trying to focus on work, it is all too easy to lend my attention to something much more interesting than what I should be doing. Going to a search site or looking at the auto suggestions when typing in a bookmark tag can easily steal your attention.

I have recently been trying out a different homepage at work. 43marks isn’t as flashy as some of the homepages out there, but flashy is usually distracting. How 43marks differs from other homepages, is how much it offers in such a simple layout. 43marks combines two things people use on a daily basis: bookmarks and search engines.

Having four options to search at your fingertips without all of the typical distractions and random links associated with some sites is a breath of fresh air. Google, Yahoo, Bing and Wikipedia are probably the most commonly used search engines. All of them aggregate the “top sites” in a different way. Type in a search term and get the results from Google; to see what Yahoo,Bing or Wikipedia simply click that tab and the results shift to the other search engine’s results.

To personalize your 43marks homepage, follow these steps:

1. Click on the the “customize yours” tab in the top right corner of the main page.

2. Enter in a user name, email address and a password twice.

3. Once you are all set up, you will have a default list of bookmarks and RSS feeds.

4. To change the bookmarks and RSS feeds, click [Manage]

5. Three options are presented to you: Manage Bookmarks, Manage RSS Feeds and User Settings.

If you want to wipe the slate clean, 43marks does give an option to delete all bookmarks.

6. In the RSS Manage RSS Feeds tab, the same option to start from scratch is available.

* A pretty easy way to add a feed is to click on the RSS icon most sites have. This will pull up a page with the feed address listed. The feed URL should look something like this – http://feeds.feedburner.com/MakeTechEasier

The RSS part works well, but if you want to change a feed from ESPN to Make Tech Easier, you need to delete the old one and add in the new name and address.

7. In the User Settings, you are presented a four options:

• Choose whether you want your page to be private or public so anyone can see your list of bookmarks and RSS feeds. If you choose public, just give our the URL to your page. Mine is 43marks.com/trevor_dobrygoski

• How you would like the RSS feeds displayed – Expanded or collapsed
• The maximum number of books marks to display in each category column
• How you want the bookmark or RSS link to open when clicked

With all of the distractions present to anyone who works online, 43marks is a great solution to wrangle the information you NEED to look at and none that you don’t.

What tools do you use to cut down on distractions when you work online?

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If you are a Mac and Yahoo user, a good news for you is that you can make use of MacFreePOPs to configure your desktop email client (particularly mail.app) to receive your Yahoo mail. You won’t be able to send mail though. (Windows and Linux users can use the popular YPOPs to configure their desktop clients to access Yahoo)

First download MacFreePop here.

Run MacFrePop. You should see the screen below:

If the update button is available, make sure you click it and update all the internal files. Failure to update the files might render this application useless.

Click on the Extra options to show a list of configuration options. Click on the freepopsd service tab.

Place a check in the first row of options and change the port to 2000 and the address to 127.0.0.1

Once that is done, click on the Start freepopsd service to start the server running.

Now open up your mail.app.

Go to Mail->Preferences and select on the Accounts tab. At the bottom, click on the ‘+’ to add a new mail account.

Enter your name, email address and the password. Leave the “Automatically set up account” option alone.

Click Continue.

Select POP from the dropdown option.

In the Incoming Mail Server field, enter “127.0.0.1“.

In the User Name field, enter the full email address (including the @yahoo.com). Click Continue.

MacFreePop does not allow you to send emails from your Yahoo account, but you can still configure it to send via third party email accounts (or your existing accounts).

At the Outgoing Mail Server dropdown option, choose a setting that you have previously configured. Click Continue.

You should be done with the new account setup. Back in the Account options screen, highlight the newly created account on the left pane and select the Advanced tab on the right pane.

In the Port field, change it to 2000.

Exit the Preferences window.

Back to your Inbox, click on Get Mail. Your mail.app will start to download all your Yahoo emails now.

Troubleshooting

Why can’t I receive emails?

• Make sure that you update all the internal files of MacFreePop by clicking the Update Available button.
• Make sure that you start the freepopsd server before you start to retrieve emails.
• Make sure that in the account setup section, you use ’127.0.0.1′ as the Incoming server.
• Make sure that you have changed the port to 2000 in the Account setup.

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The question is: Is there any application that allows you to manage multiple email accounts? In desktop, Zimbra answers this question. For Web-based application that is independent of any application or platform. Zoho mail seems to be a great choice.

In this tutorial, I would like to demonstrate how you can manage multiple email accounts (in this case, Gmail, Yahoo and Live) with Zoho mail.

Steps to Manage Multiple Email accounts with Zoho Mail

1. Sign up for Zoho mail account or sign in with your Gmail or Yahoo ID.

2. Once you login to your Zoho mail, Go to Settings ->Common Settings -> My Preference and add your other email accounts.

3. After adding your Yahoo or Gmail email addresses, Zoho will sent you a verification ID of which you have to enter to finalize the email settings.

4. Repeat the above step to add as many mail accounts as you want. The following image shows the result after adding all the mail accounts

5. Now sign in to your respective emails individually which are all added in Zoho account to enable Mail forwarding options

Gmail allows you to configure all incoming mails to forward another email address, yet keep a copy of the original in the inbox

For Yahoo, the forwarding option is available only to the old users. New user will have to upgrade to the premium account to enjoy the forwarding service.

Similar to Yahoo mail, Live mail also have limitations in their forwarding options.

6. Once you have set up the mail forward options in all the Email accounts, you can now use the Filters and Folders options in Zoho mail to segregate the mails when they arrive at the inbox.

In the home page of Zoho mail, add folders like Yahoo, Gmail or any other name that you fancy.

Once you have added the folders, go to Settings ->Personalize mail options -> Filters. Add filters separately for Yahoo, Gmail and Live mail. Enter the Filter name and fill the criteria as “to” contains “yourname@yahoo.com” and perform move to the specific folder.

7. When composing/replying a mail, you can easily switch between the various accounts so other won’t know that you are sending from Zoho mail.

Conclusion

You might have plenty of email accounts, each set up for different purposes: personal, groups, newsletter, work and so on. What Zoho mail does and allows you to do is to become a hub for you to maintain all the email accounts. Other benefits include the offline mail option with Google Gears and the eye catching cool Zoho mail experience with a short mail alias name@zoho.com.

For those who are using Gmail to micromanage their multiple emails, you can try out Zoho mail and feel the differences. Tell us about your experience in the comments.

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