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Catching up … Google recently announced that it was changing the name of Froogle to Google Product Search. Apparently not enough people were getting the pun, or something. Meanwhile, Google Catalogs, which I rather liked when it was launched, continues to quietly molder away in a corner. Unfortunate!

Anyway, the reason I’m bringing this up is to offer a couple of tips to people who dislike searching Google Product Search as much as I do — or rather did, since I found a way to alleviate the pain. I used to find Google Product Search hard to use, either bringing me too many results or too little. I found that using just one syntax — intitle: — made finding things a lot easier.

Usually what I do is put the general idea of what I’m looking for in the intitle: and then any additional keywords in the rest of the query. So if I’m looking for a red denim jacket, I might try red denim intitle:jacket . Cuts down the search results a lot.

You might want to explore http://www.google.com/advanced_product_search , though I find that the searching by price area is really a crap shoot, especially since you’re also searching eBay auctions. Sometimes the prices are really wacky…

There’s a metasearch for everything else, so why not. yoName, at http://www.yoname.com , allows you to put in a username, e-mail address, or first and last name, and find people across several different social networks. It’s in beta.

I first tried the search with a friend’s name. I know he’s on MySpace. yoName ran the search across several networks, including Xanga, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Friendster. Here’s the funny part — yoName announced potential matches on a few of the networks but for MySpace, announced confidently that it had found my friend. It hadn’t — it found somebody else with the same name. I didn’t see a way to say “Wrong one, try again.”

It gets even more complicated if you’re using a more general keyword. I know a lot of bands have spots on MySpace, so I tried doing a search for Wolfmother. Sure, I got Wolfmother’s MySpace page — and tens of thousands of other pages that mentioned Wolfmother, videos by Wolfmother, etc etc. So unless you search for a very specific name, you might get some extraneous results.

Enough crabbing, let’s talk about the good parts. When you get a set of results from yoName, you have the option to quickly preview the first ten results in-page. It doesn’t look like you can view all the results though — and if you’re only looking for a single person, why would you want to? Sometimes the previews are a little misaligned because of banner ads, etc, but they’re easy to read.

I don’t use MySpace, but just by doing some experimental searching with yoName I got a sense of the huge cross-section of people (and musical groups) that are on there. Possibly frustrating if you’re trying to do an absolute search, interesting as a browser/explorer.

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