TODAY'S TOURBUS TOPIC: GOOGLE SUGGEST / DARK COURIER

Howdy, y'all, and greetings once again from deep behind the orange curtain in beautiful Irvine, California, where the troops of Lapu- Lapu, a chieftain of Mactan, defeated Spanish forces under Ferdinand Magellan. :P

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On with the show...

Google Suggest Audience: Everyone

Finding stuff in a search engine is sometimes quite difficult. Choose the wrong search terms and you end up with either a squillion hits or none. What we need is a way to see how many hits our search terms are going to generate BEFORE we do our searches. That way we can refine our search terms as we type them.

Enter Google Suggest. Just point your web browser to

http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1

and start typing. Google Suggest provides you with search suggestions, in real time, as you type. Key in a few letters of a particular search term and Google Suggest displays a list of words it thinks match.

For example, if you search for "Patrick Crispen," Google Suggest shows you keyword suggestions as you key in each letter in my name. It's kind of humorous because, as you type each letter in my name, Google's suggestions include a infamous hotel heiress, a Yankee football team, a sitcom mom, that 'liberty or death' guy, a British pop artist, a Hollywood producer, and then little old me.

The interesting part comes when you get to the letter "i" in my last name. My last name is spelled the exact same way you spell the verb "to make something crisp." [Yeah, I have a weird last name. Sue me. You can find a rather humorous and complete history of my last name at http://crispen.org/Bob/about.html ] What Google Suggest shows, however, is that while there are 19,900 pages out there that spell my last name correctly, a full 150,000 pages incorrectly spell my last name "Crispin." Vanity aside, knowing alternative spellings--and the number of hits those spellings generate--can be quite helpful when you do online research. And that's really where Google Suggest excels.

Google Suggest works in Internet Explorer 6.0 (or newer), Netscape 7.1 (or newer), Mozilla 1.4 (or newer), Firefox 0.8 (or newer), Opera 7.54 (or newer), or Safari 1.2.2 (or newer). But there are two catches:

1. Both JavaScript and cookies must be enabled in your browser.

2. You can only get to Google Suggest by going to
http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1. You can't get to Google Suggest directly from Google's homepage.

For more information about Google Suggest, check out the free FAQ page at

http://labs.google.com/suggestfaq.html

Is Google Suggest a replacement for the regular, plain old Google searches we know and love? Nah. But if you aren't quite sure what you're looking for, or if you want to see how many hits a particular search term or phrase might generate, Google Suggest is for you. :)

RELATED NEWS: - http://tourbus.com/google-news.html

Free Dark Courier Font Audience: PC users

The biggest problem with Howard Kettler's Courier font or Adrian Frutiger's Courier New font--the ubiquitous monospace "typewriter" fonts built into almost every copy of Windows--is that while the fonts look great on a computer screen, they're pretty difficult to read on paper. Why? Because they're just not dark enough. Fortunately, the folks at Hewlett Packard have a create a new, darker Courier font that looks great both on screen and on paper.

Oh, and it's free.

To download HP's Dark Courier True Type font for your PC, just point your web browser to

http://tinyurl.com/88hsj

and click on the blue "download" button. This downloads a 178 KB self-extracting zip file named "lj611en.exe." Once you finish downloading the file,

1. Double-click on it. This creates a new folder on your C:\
drive named "lj611" and puts four different versions of the Dark Courier font into that folder.

2. Get into your computer's control panel by going to either
Start > Settings > Control Panel [in Win 9X] or Start > Control Panel in Windows XP. This opens your computer's Control Panel.

3. Double-click on the Fonts folder icon. [If you have Windows
XP and don't see a Fonts folder in your Control Panel, either click on the "Switch to Classic View" link on the top left side of your Control Panel or click on the "Appearance and Themes" link and then click on the Fonts folder on the top left side of your Control Panel immediately beneath the words "See Also."]

4. In your Fonts folder, choose File > Install New Font.

5. Browse to C:\lj611\ and then click on the "Select All" button.
Then click on the "OK" button.

6. Close everything.

That's it. Your four new fonts are now installed. [Of course, you could have accomplished the same thing by dragging and dropping the fonts into your PC's fonts folder, but where's the fun in that?]

RELATED NEWS: - http://tourbus.com/fonts-news.html

That's it for today. Have a safe and happy week and we'll talk again soon!

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