Today's Friday Favorite is a new one to me, but it's been around for a while. I just picked up the latest version of HistoryHound from St. Clair Software -- more famous, probably, for Default Folder X -- and have been using it constantly for days. Its hotkey already has its own spot in my muscle memory. Here's what it does:

HistoryHound indexes bookmarks, history and cache from all of your browsers, with presets for Camino, Firefox 2 & 3, Flock, iCab, OmniWeb, Opera, Safari, Shiira and URL Manager Pro. It means being able to bookmark willy-nilly in any browser and know that you'll be able to quickly locate noteworthy sites again, in any application.

Not just the bookmarks, though; in the background -- with a very low footprint -- HistoryHound starts indexing the full text of each page. Then you can search for exact or fuzzy matches, or with Spotlight-style boolean keywords for any text on the landing page. Search comes in two flavors: a tiny popup panel which can be assigned to a hotkey and provides a list of matches as you type, and a full, Webkit-enabled search window with page previews and a multi-column result list.

One of the little frustrations in my everyday use of Leopard was the way it searched in folders. When in a Finder window, there was a handy-looking search box in the upper right-hand corner. I would place the cursor, type my query, and be annoyed by the fact that OS X searched my entire Mac.

Nooo. If I wanted to search the whole thing, I would have asked to search the whole thing.

Thank goodness Snow Leopard fixes this minor workflow speed bump. Now you can choose what you'd like to use as a default: Search This Mac or Search the Current Folder. You can even say "I'll have another" by choosing to Use the Previous Search Scope.

Unfortunately the default out-of-the-box action is still set to look everywhere on your Mac. But don't worry, it's easy to change.

1. Make sure Finder is your active app (either click on the Finder icon in the dock, click the desktop or a visible Finder window, or cmd-Tab to switch to the Finder).
2. Choose Preferences in the Finder menu. Or you can just use the Command-comma key combo to invoke Preferences.
3. In Finder Preferences, click on the Advanced tab.
4. Choose your desired search scope from the drop-down menu under the heading "When performing a search."
5. Close the Preferences and enjoy a search or two.

That's it. Just one example of the many little changes in Snow Leopard that make life with the OS easier and more efficient. I hope you find what you're looking for!

The knowledge engine at the heart of the recently launched Wolfram|Alpha site can answer queries that would baffle traditional search engines. It can make amazing comparisons, perform linguistic searches, and provides a way to do calculations that are impossible elsewhere other than in a copy of Mathematica.

Now there's a mobile Web portal for Wolfram|Alpha that is designed for viewing on either an iPhone or iPod touch. Point Safari on your mobile device to http://www.wolframalpha.com/iphone, and you can compute queries as well as test most of the functionality of the Wolfram|Alpha engine. You'll need to set a bookmark icon on your home screen to go back to the page (just press the + icon at the bottom of the Safari screen).

Wolfram is also asking for input on what people would like to see in future versions of mobile websites or apps. You can join the conversation here.

Are any TUAW readers eagerly waiting for Mathematica Mobile to be released for the iPhone platform?

Google released a new tool for Mac users today. With Google Quick Search Box (QSB), you can perform searches of anything on your Mac or the Web with a few keystrokes. After downloading QSB, I installed it and gave it a test drive on my MacBook Air. After a short first look, I can say that QSB is going to be in constant use on my Macs.

The application takes up about 18 MB of space on your Mac hard disk, and once it is installed a small search box hovers on your screen (see above). You can toggle the presence of the box by pressing Control-Space Bar. The keyboard shortcut, as well as the appearance of the search box, can be customized in a very thorough preferences panel.

Postbox, the email client built for heavy email users, entered Public Beta on Sunday. Postbox is designed to allow you to search, organize, and manage your email more more efficiently.

Postbox includes a powerful search tool that lets you use Gmail-style search terms (like "from:Steve" or "before August 2008") to easily find messages. The Gmail-like features don't end there: Postbox automatically organizes threaded emails by subject. Messages can be tagged with one or more topics for easy recall later.

Perhaps Postbox's greatest feature is its ability to recognize what's in your email, and keep it front-and-center. For instance, if you're composing a new message, you can use the Compose sidebar to find attachments in other messages to drag into your new message. The inspector panel on the preview window highlights links, addresses and attachments in the message so you can get to them easily.

For me, I use my inbox like a to-do list. Thankfully, Postbox has a built-in Archive utility that lets you specify an archive folder for each account (which I already had set up). Once you're done with a message, clicking Archive or pressing A moves that message (or many messages) right into your archive.

Add to this to-dos, integrated search, social network integration, message annotation, tabbed browsing, and a high-security Mozilla foundation, and you've got an amazing Swiss Army-knife tool for hard-core emailers.

Note: This tip is Leopard-only, sorry Tiger holdouts.

The Command-? trick is easily one of my favorites among the less-ballyhooed feature expansions of Leopard. If you missed that one, it allows you to search for menu items in any application by pulling down the "Help" menu, which can be triggered from the keyboard with the Command-? (Command-Shift-/) shortcut. Typing the first few letters of the menu item you're searching for will highlight its location in the dropdown menus. I use it a lot, but somehow missed one great capability noted by TUAW reader Maarten: in Safari, the menu item search extends to your bookmark collection and Safari history!

Because the bookmarks and history items are contained in the menubar's menus, they're searched along with the other menu items, allowing blazing-fast navigation of the sites listed in the Bookmarks and History menus. I like speed; I have my bookmarks toolbar set up with numbered titles which correlate to their Command-number shortcut (the first non-folder item in the toolbar can be accessed with Command-1, the second with Command-2, etc.), and I have keyword shortcuts assigned to my other most-accessed bookmarks using various tools. There's only so much room in my life, however, for organizing bookmarks and assigning keywords. History search can be a tedious prospect, too, even using Spotlight or Safari's History menu hierarchy. This trick provides instant search and it's only a keyboard shortcut away. Because the History results are sorted into sub-menus named by date, the results from the history menu appear with their access date first, so it's easy to navigate the results to find what you're looking for.

The concept behind this tip applies to all kinds of applications. I started experimenting and found that the search bar in the help menu almost always included recent documents and open windows ... basically anything the application lists in its menus. The bookmarks/history search works in most other browsers, too. I use Firefox as well as Safari, so I was happy to find it worked there, with one minor caveat: the Command-? shortcut in Firefox opens the Firefox Help webpage, not the Help menu item, requiring a mouse click to focus the search box in the dropdown. I haven't found a way to add shortcut keys for top-level menu items in System Preferences, so if anyone knows that, or another way to access the search menu via a shortcut key, I'd love to know about it.

Happy searching, and a big thanks to Maarten for the tip!

According to the New York Times and the Google iPhone page, the big G is about to add voice recognition capabilities to its iPhone search app (iTunes link), with the new version showing up on the App Store any minute now. You'll be able to ask questions (the kind Google can answer, of course; someone else will have to tell you if those pants make you look fat) and get speedy search results returned from the web or your own address book.

[As of Saturday afternoon 3:30pm ET, the new version is still not in the App Store; interestingly, the Google page no longer has the video embed of the voice recognition demo, nor does it show the new feature listing. Perhaps there was a last-minute delay?

Update, Sunday AM: Techcrunch is reporting an anticipated Monday release for the new version. No details given on the reason for the delay. -Ed.]

Update, Monday PM: The app isn't listed as updated in the App Store, but removing the old Google Mobile app from the phone and reinstalling it brings it back with the voice search capability. Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

The voice recordings from the application will be sent to Google's servers for processing "in the cloud." Given the size of Google's infrastructure and its ability to transfer gargantuan amounts of data, it may have the advantage over existing voice-driven search apps such as Yahoo's oneSearch. Google execs seem hesitant to quantify the accuracy of the voice recognition software, but here's hoping it at least tops some of the iPhone voice-dialers I've been playing with.

You can see a sample video of Googlers testing the feature in the continuation of this post.

[via Truemors / blogtopten]

According to iPhoneHellas.gr, version 2.2 of the iPhone firmware will be made available on November 21. The site says that the tipster is "reliable" but offered few details. Gizmodo calls the site "consistently reliable."

The tipster did say, however, that the update will not contain Greek keyboard support. Rumor has it that the update will contain:

• Street View, public transportation and walking directions for Maps
• An always-visible search field in Safari
• A rating request before you delete an app
• The ability to download podcasts directly to your handset
• Location sharing via email
• Support for Emoji icons
• An option to turn off auto-correction

There is still no word, of course, about the most requested and elusive of options: copy and paste. Gizmodo seems to think that -- if the release date is indeed on the 21st -- the major features of the update have been frozen. Looks like we'll have to wait until 2.3.

[Via O'Grady's PowerPage.]

Steve Ballmer is imitating his CEO predecessor by suggesting that Apple separate its iPhone hardware from OS X, according to Ars Technica.

Nokia leads the smartphone market today with about a 30 percent share, he said. "If you want to reach more than that, you have to separate the hardware and software in the platform," he said in an discussion forum with the Churchill Club, a Silicon Valley business and technology group.

In 1985, Bill Gates approached Apple (and its then-CEO, John Sculley) with prospects in hand to convince it to license Mac OS to third-party vendors. As we all know, that didn't happen (at least not with Microsoft as a partner), keeping the bond tight between Apple hardware and software. Microsoft wound up doing it themselves with Windows.

The idea that Ballmer thinks other companies should be more like Microsoft isn't shocking at all; in fact, what else was the man supposed to say? Like Jobs with Apple, Ballmer's talks and interviews wield a great deal of influence on Microsoft's stock price. If he said anything other than what he did, MSFT would have taken a hit. As CEO, that's unconscionable.

As the iTunes Store has grown, its search feature hasn't. Enter a bit of text in the search field, and you get results for

1. Albums
2. Podcasts
3. Movies
4. TV seasons
5. Music videos
6. iTunes Essentials
7. iTunes U
8. Apps

The results were manageable when we were just browsing music, television and movies. Today, it's just too large. Even some of the sub-categories are getting crowded. Recently, the App store was receiving a lot of eBooks from AppEngines. Earlier this week, a "Books" section was added to the App Store.

That's a good step, but I'd like to be able to filter results before execution. For example, an App Store search, a music search or podcasts. iTunes Power Search [link] does this pretty well, but I'd bet that most users don't use it. This ought to be the default search procedure.

Of course, I'm old and crotchety, so take this with a gain of iSalt.

Thanks to Matt for the eBook App Store tip!

Positive Spin Media's media search tool, Pandora (formerly NetScrape) has been bumped up to version 2.3. The new version primarily fixes some issues that Pandora had with reading some pages with non-English languages or encoding. The update is free to registered users, and you can download the update today.

If you haven't seen Pandora before, it's worth a look. Pandora uses a plug-in architecture to wander the big image search engines (i.e., Google and Flickr) or your hard drive, and supports finding and fetching any type of media -- not just images. Once you've found the media, Pandora provides easy slide show creation so you can show it off. I like the fact that you can start off multiple searches simultaneously and have them run

The Pandora demo is limited to 50 image viewings, and if you love it you can buy it for $29.95.

We're all excited for iPhone firmware 2.0, due in July. So are the guys at blarkKABOOM. So much so that they examined the video of the press event with a fine-tooth comb.

They noticed what appears to be a small search icon in the iPhone's Contacts application. The icon wasn't in the video demo, so we have no idea how it could work, but it did appear in the screenshots.

Half the fun of major software updates from Apple is finding the unadvertised features. We're very eager to get started.

The world of Safari plug-ins has a sparse and somewhat barren landscape; however, sometimes you run into some plug-ins that are must-haves. Keywurl is one such Safari plug-in. Keywurl adds the ability for Safari to do keyword searching just like Firefox does -- which will end up saving you time.

You can assign specific keyword searches in the Safari preferences. So for instance, if I wanted to search for "Steve Jobs" on Wikipedia, then I would type "wiki Steve Jobs" in Safari's address bar; the query would then be sent to Wikipedia, where it would be parsed in a search and the wiki page displayed.

It takes a pretty strong constitution to exhibit native apps for the iPhone on the Macworld show floor (and probably a fairly hefty bankroll -- booths ain't free), but the Polar Bear Farm guys are up to the challenge. We caught a demo of the Search tool for iPhone, available only for jailbroken phones at the moment but expected to ship for unmodified devices shortly after the SDK becomes public. Check out the video for the details.

Spotlight is great for searching your computer and networked Macs from the menu bar, but what if you want to search the internet also? Well, here comes Google Buddy, which allows you to search Google using the menu bar. There are multiple ways to search using Google Buddy:

1. Simple Search - this presents a spotlight-esque menu item that allows you to search for any web page using Google
   
2. Advanced Search - this allows you to use the advanced features that Google offers, such as searching using modifiers (all, exactly, any, none) or searching a specific site
   
3. Image Search - just as the name hints, it allows you to search Google images
4. Advanced Video Search - this allows you to search Google Video (however, since Google now owns YouTube, they should have included a YouTube search feature as well)
5. Advanced News Search - allows you to search Google's News archive
6. Special Searches - this feature allows you to search for movies, weather, links, and phone numbers

While using this application, the one disadvantage that I found was the auto-completion. While auto-completion is good, Google Buddy's auto-complete seemed to be "too-fast," so fast in fact that I ended up searching for wrong items. Luckily, there is an option in the preferences to turn this off ("Show search suggestions" check box). This looks like an excellent piece of software for the Mac, and it now has a permanent home in my menu bar! Google Buddy is available from Recurring Dream for the small price of $11.95; there is also a demo available.