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Tag Archives: search

How-to Remove Spam from Mac Mail Search Results

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I’m a big fan of search.  Prior to my Mac I was using Google Desktop Search, and now Spotlight is a key part of my workflow.  As a Mac Mail + Hosted Gmail + IMAP user, I’ve noticed my search results always include Spam, and due to the ridiculous quantity of spam I get, most searches tend to overflow with it.  For example, here’s me looking for an email from someone named “becky”:

Yup, that’s a spamtastic result.  In fact here’s how much spam there is in my inbox:

Now for the good news.  It’s fixable.  Here are the simple steps you can do to stop seeing spam in your mac mail search results.  I’ve even included pretty pictures to help show all the required steps.

1. Go to your gmail (or hosted gmail) inbox, then click on settings:

2. Go to the “labs” tab, find “Advanced IMAP Controls”, and enable it.  Don’t forget to save changes along the way!

3. Return to settings, click Labels, and uncheck the “show in IMAP” option.

4. OK, all done with the gmail side of things, let’s switch back to Mac Mail.  First, close Mail (not 100% sure you have to do this, but it worked for me), then relaunch it.  When open, scroll all the way down on the LEFT side of the screen to find the “gmail” area of your folders.  Find your mail server, and right-click (aka command-click) on the word “Gmail”.  In the options menu, click “synchronize” (by the way, not 100% sure this step is required either, but again, it worked for me).

5. In a moment, your spam folder should disappear, as if by magic…

Ahh, yes, the joy of hidden spam.  Which is the only good kind of spam.  Well, that and no spam, of course…

And just to confirm, here’s the same search for our mysterious friend becky:

And there you have it.  Thanks to commentor “Andrew Wynn” on this post (scroll way down).  By the way, you can use this method to hide other folders as well, such as personal content, automatic filters, etc.  Hope this helps!

How I'd Build a Search Engine

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Over the past year, we’ve seen no fewer than three major attempts to compete with Google come to market, with mixed results.  Cuil’s disastrous launch last Summer all but killed their chances of success.  Wolfram is in murky waters trying to remain distinctly not a search engine. And Microsoft is presently trying to buy their way onto the scene with Bing. I think there’s little-to-no debate that we should not let our entire worldview and information dissemination be in the hands of a single company (a recent study showed over 70% US market share – that’s just plain dangerous).

But how does one out-Google Google?  I’ll start with the “don’t”s, the things that should be avoided.

  • Bigger ain’t better. Nobody, and I mean nobody, cares that your search index is 17.37835% deeper than Google’s.  Search is at worst a semi-solved problem, which means the average person looking for something online probably perceives Google will have it.
  • Don’t confuse simple with simplistic. If you didn’t know, Google’s design is as simplistic as it is because they didn’t really know HTML when they started!  For some reason, this has caused legions of lookalikes, despite plenty of better examples of usability design.
  • Overhype can be bad. It’s a tricky challenge, but to even play in this space it is essential to set, then meet or exceed expectations.  Wolfram is doing this fairly well, Cuil did it badly.
  • Don’t enable spam. If there’s one evil Google is blatantly doing, it’s enabling spam.  Spam blogs. Spam news sites. Spam landing pages. The sheer ability to create and profit from a hosted domain with nothing but uselessness is a horror Google has unleashed upon us, and is unfortunately financially motivated to continue to enable.  I believe this is the weakest chink in Google’s armor, and there’s at least some opportunity to someone promising “spam-free search results.”  Be the ball.

Now for the “what would I do” part…

  • Launch with a great vanity search. When I read peoples’ experiences with Cuil or Bing, they invariably mention the egosearch they did.  It’s a fairly safe bet that most people will search for their own names within their first few searches, and this experience should rock.  When I google myself, I find my blog, my linkedin profile, my Flickr page, and other things I’d expect to see.  The first day I Cuil’ed myself, I saw nothing, due to a technical error.  A very very costly technical error.  When I Bing myself, I see much of the “correct” results, but 2 entries for FriendFeed, 1 for Ether, and some other seeming obscurities – and I don’t want obscure first.  I genuinely believe a good vanity search experience is a make/break issue for a new search player.notjeremybing
  • Do more than search. Part of what makes Google such a great product is the way it encompasses everything from a calculator to a flight tracker to movie listings and more.  These extra features make it stickier, and make me as a user less likely to leave.  So you have to play a similar game and offer services well beyond search.  Personally, I’d do this through some form of open API that enables third parties to do the work, thus reducing your need to innovate across the board and build a richer community around your product.
  • Enable opt-out of purchasing (and more). Ever try searching for a product to find information, yet find nothing but sales links?  Not only the Google product listings, but the first few pages tend to get dominated by companies who have mastered SEO to the point where they own virtually any search for a product.  How about enabling the user to disable showing anything related to sales, giving them the benefit of the doubt that they just might want to do something other than a transaction?  Now let’s take this further, and create a rich search experience that truly lets the searcher weed out the wrong kinds of results for the search they are conducting.
  • Understand context. Sure, Google’s great at surface-level context filtering. If you type in a stock ticker symbol, you get finance information. Search for a movie, you’ll see local playing times.  But that’s about the end of the depth.  Integrate services like Yahoo! Answers, Wikipedia, Wolfram, and more, and enable much deeper context about search.  The biggest challenge people have with finding information is sifting through the data, so the more they are provided with usable results, the more they’ll like, trust, and rely on your service.
  • Deeply engage with the community. As far as I’ve seen, the forces behind other search engines have built their products, then invited people to come use them, and sometimes provide some feedback.  I’d take a different approach and get the outside world involved in my product at an early stage, and keep it up well after the launch.  Don’t confuse community engagement with a lack of product vision/direction, but take feedback from developers, advertisers, content creators, and other key sectors to help make sure you are building the right services all along the way.  It’s important that any potential stakeholder (i.e. those whose efforts can directly contribute to the product’s success) have a mechanism for involvement.
  • Cross-program. I talk about this concept a lot, but you don’t counter CSI with another crime drama, you counter with a comedy or a medical romance or a quirky soap opera.  Rather than be a different Google, be a different search concept.  Go entirely visual.  Go radically deep into data.  Find information and surface in early results.  Use more smarts.  Provide more customization.  Etc.
  • Oh, and build a good spidering and indexing system, blah blah blah.  It’s probably important too.

So there are the first few steps to get going, mystery super-stealth search company 3.0.  Please get the ball rolling, we need you soon.  No offense to Google or anything, I just feel the world should not be so utterly dependent on a single company for any one thing.  Just pretend it’s a semi-decent Bond flick (100% Lazenby-free), and the bad guy (let’s give him a scar, but no weird accent) really controls the links to all the information we consume.  Okay, that metaphor starts falling apart right about now, but I trust you to see it through to it’s natural end.

50 Common Words with Wacky Google Results

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I was trying to figure out how much a bucket cost earlier this week, and googled “bucket” to find out.  I was surprised to discover that anything remotely useful didn’t show up in the first few results.  So, in some bizarre method of either wasting hours of my life or providing complementary services to the SEO folks out there, I went looking for other common, everyday words who had similarly weird results in Google.  This list is not in order of wackiness (but I did consult this list for help).

  1. Bucket.  Some “real” results, but otherwise dominated by Photobucket, a movie, and other miscellaneous non-buckety stuff.  Nothing as cool as the results for spatula either.
  2. Word.  Completely dominated by MS Word, or products that in some way augment MS Word.
  3. Thing. After a comic book, the next few entries Google showed me asked me if I really meant “thong”. Well, I do now!
  4. Seven. The only single-digit number whose top results had nothing to do with numbers.
  5. Live. All MSN, all the time.
  6. Stop. All sorts of goofiness, the highlight being a link to sign up in order to help stop alien abductions. I do not lie.
  7. Run. Nothing super-wrong about the results, but they’re all over the map.
  8. Sea. Instead of a picture of the ocean, the top result is a convenient map showing you where the Seattle-Tacoma Airport is located.  Just in case.
  9. Saw. (get it? sea-saw?) While these aren’t inaccurate results, I most certainly pity the squeamish individual who is innocently looking to pick up a woodworking tool.
  10. City. I’d like to applaud the City of Chicago for being the number one city!
  11. Country. Yeesh, not only isn’t there a country at the top of the list, it’s dominated by country music.
  12. Sad. Nothing out of the ordinary for “happy”, but sad was really sad.
  13. Dirt. Another one dominated by movies & TV.
  14. Table.  Great for people looking for some HTML advice. Awful for the other 99.8% of humans.
  15. Bug. (yeah, I’m cheating here) Top results include the animated film and Bug Labs.  Cool to me, probably would confuse some of my relatives though.  🙂
  16. Apple. Not a fruit-related link in sight.
  17. Orange. While incomparable to the previous entry, it too is at risk for scurvy.
  18. House. Mostly TV shows and a little government to “mix it up” a bit.
  19. Plasma. I only included this one because it was surprising how few of the first results were about plasma TVs. Go fgure.
  20. Lamp. Way out there.  Even the Latin American Microform Project beats out a nice table lamp!
  21. First. Then again, I doubt anyone would be interested in the word first contextually anyway.
  22. Remote.  Results are quite poor for the outdoorsy users.
  23. Well. A couple of entries for a poor place for babies to play, but a bank manages to top the list.
  24. String. Ah, I see that luxury knitting yarns did eke out super string theory, but these were both buried beneath programming terms.
  25. Chip. No silicon or potato references on page one!
  26. Ball. Results show that high society is not very good at SEO.
  27. Angel. Ditto for religion!
  28. Force. In a slight twist, I’d like to applaud the Internet for only 2 of the top 10 results having a Star Wars tie-in.
  29. Falcon. If it weren’t for a Wikipedia entry you’d never even know about the bird.
  30. Owl. Similarly suffering from a lack of ornithology enthusiasts.
  31. Small. The only small thing here is the number of results about small things. Bah-dum, ching!  Don’t forget to tip your waiter!
  32. Big. Insert some Biggie Smalls reference here (it ties the two lines together so nicely).
  33. Wall. Clearly the people in Wall Township were tired of losing traffic to their home page.
  34. Star. Another example where the geeks are just disappointing us all.
  35. Smart. Well, the results aren’t…
  36. Dumb. After losing quite a few minutes to some of these, I figured I’d include it to share the painlove.
  37. Sharp. Lots of consumer electronics, not much about knives.
  38. Girl. Exactly as one would expect, a link to a skateboarding company.
  39. School. A coup for the Montgomery County Public School system. A big fail for anyone not from Rockville, MD.
  40. Robert. Amazingly this no longer goes straight to the Scobleizer himself.
  41. Pop.  I think this effectively ends the pop vs soda debate.
  42. Bowl. Very understandable results, placing lingerie well above ceramics.
  43. Cake. Not terribly abnormal, but I really wasn’t expecting a stock quote that was highly contextual to my interest in a tasty dessert.
  44. Store. A highly arbitrary list of retailers.
  45. Trend. I guess anyone on top of the trends probably isn’t googling this one too often.
  46. Ego. Even paintball products managed to place themselves above any of the “a-list bloggers”… 😉
  47. Past. In a dismal sign for smart people everywhere, google assumed I meant “PSAT” and then provided me with lots of resources to do a better job on the exam.
  48. Bail. Seems to be missing links to rich bankers and/or automakers.
  49. Toe. No links to me or my Dad, whatsoever.
  50. Failure.  I was quite disappointed to find that failure no longer linked to Bush’s bio.  Not to worry, I think we all know it pretty well anyway…

So what’s the point, you might wonder?  I didn’t really have a “deep mission” here to uncover some secrets of the universe, but it was interesting nonetheless (especially since I googled at least another hundred or so “common” words to find the results above).  As we continue down the path of defining our world more and more by what we find with a simple google search, I hope we don’t every end up putting too much faith in the almighty from Mountain View.  Google search, as I’ve discussed before, is not “reality” and it’s cleary not a digital reflection of the world we live in.  If it was, bucket makes, models, vendors, and pricing would’ve been much more prevalent than some mediocre movie.