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Next to searching from the Lenzcape application, you can also use the search plugin to search directly from the browser’s searchbar. This is how I am using Lenzcape myself usually.

The searchbar is particularly easy when you know the area that you want to search (that’s the lenz in lenzcape’s terminology). Further, the more you need to search in a specific area, the more it will pay off to create a lenz for that area.

Lenzcape’s searchbar in Firefox

To illustrate what I mean, let’s take grails as an example. I used grails to develop Lenzcape, so I am often searching grails related stuff. The base lenz for grails is “dev/grails” and following the search syntax you separate the lenz part of the query and the terms that you want to search for with a “)”. In this way you can type dev/grails ) redirect in the searchbar and it will search for redirect just in the grails area.

But you can also search more specific grails topics such as:

• grails issues: dev/grails/issue ) redirect
• grails reference documentation: dev/grails/doc ) redirect or if you want to search a particular version dev/grails/doc/1.0 ) redirect or dev/grails/doc/1.1 ) redirect
• grails api: dev/grails/api ) redirect, dev/grails/api/1.0 ) redirect or dev/grails/api/1.1 ) redirect
• grails on git: dev/grails/git ) redirect

These lenzes all work for you as well because they are predefined. But you can also extend lenzes by integrating them with your own bookmarks. For example, I have included a few grails blogs with tag dev/grails/blog to my personal bookmarks. In this way I can search my bookmarked grails blogs via dev/grails/blog ) redirect. Note that if you type this using the search bar you will get no results unless you have also added bookmarks with tag “dev/grails/blog”.

In a former post I wrote that I would show how you can build your own lenzes in Lenzcape.

Initially I intended to show it in a blog post, but later when I got the idea to make a live demo, I thought it would be clearer (and cooler) to include it in the live demo. So check out the live demo if you want to see how you can build your own lenzes!

I have been busy redesigning Lenzcape. After the initial tryout version, I think the current state of this version is beta. Have a look at it and make sure you don’t miss the live demo.

Thanks to everyone who provided me feedback about the initial version. This has been really helpful to me. I look forward to hear what you think about this new version.

The traditional tools that are used to find your little gem on the web are the general search engine and the bookmark manager. With Lenzcape you can combine the power of bookmarking and searching. It allows you to search through the pages of your favorite, bookmarked sites in such a way that you are able to find your gem more effectively and efficiently. An example is probably the best way to understand how this is done exactly. So let me explain via an example.

The recipe example

Let’s take recipes as an example and suppose that we want to try out a new recipe with spinach tonight.

We will first discuss how that is usually done (i.e. via a general search engine, your bookmarks or combination of those). And then I’ll show you how you can improve on this using Lenzcape.

Finding a recipe via your general search engine

Probably, the first thing you will do is go to your favorite search engine and type something like “recipe spinach”. The results at google will show you all kinds of recipe sites of which most of them will actually contain recipes.

But you recognize the problems:

• It takes time to scan through the google hits and filter the good sites from the bad ones.
• There may be great sites beyond the result pages that you check out, but you will hardly find the time to view anything beyond the first 2 result pages.
• Moreover, when you are on the result page that you do visit, you’ll get to see only a small excerpt, so you need to do your filtering based on very incomplete information.
• After this, you spend time on the sites that you have selected to find the information you want. This is a diverse set of sites and most of them will be unknown to you, so it will cost you time to get acquainted with each of these sites and get to the real information.
• And when it is time to make your choice, you will probably have many tabs open, so you spend time here as well finding the right tabs in your browser again and revisiting your hot picks.

And then finally you will have your recipe.

Finding a recipe via your bookmark manager

If cooking is a hobby of you then you will probably also have bookmarked some of your favorite recipe sites. So you can look up these bookmarks in your bookmark manager and search for some recipes from there. The advantage of using bookmarks over the search engine is that you know that these are all quality recipe sites and that each of them will lead you to good candidate recipes. So no rubbish sites to browse through. You may even know the structure of these sites so you will get to the recipes faster.

But there are still some major problems:

• First, you will have to find all of the sites of your topic in your bookmark manager.
• And then you will have to go through all of these bookmarked sites individually to select your recipe, in the same way as you did via the general search engine.

Finding a recipe via Lenzcape

Now compare this with how you will find spinach recipes via Lenzcape. This is the first page that Lenzcape returns.

You can see it live here

See the difference? Lenzcape immediately returns spinach recipes, the exact information that you are looking for! No need to go to several sites and separate the garbage from the gems. All you have to do is pick your recipe.

The advantages of using Lenzcape:

• No need to filter out the bad sites because they are not returned.
• The query results are of much higher quality. They lead you straight to the gems.
• Because of this there’s no need to go and visit all the individual sites and find your way (or rather their way) to the information that you are after.
• Using the bookmark manager, you will only use a few of your bookmarks to find your recipe. Browsing through more sites will simply cost too much time. Lenzcape, on the other hand scales just fine with the number of sites that you have bookmarked.
• Similarly, using a general search engine, you will only tend to consider sites that are on the first result page or maybe the second if you have some spare time. When you use Lenzcape you will probably notice that you will have time to look at more pages, because the information that you are looking for is outlined nicely for you.

Zooming in: finding a soup recipe

The screenshot shows that there’s a soup and a dessert lenz under my recipes.
This shows another of Lenzcape’s features: you can zoom in for more specialized searches and zoom out for more general searches.

For example, these are the results when you are looking for spinach soups. You see that all the main dishes with spinach are gone, just soups with spinach are returned.

(See it live here)

When to use Lenzcape

Lenzcape is not meant for all types of searches. Generally, topics that you don’t bother to have any bookmarks for, you will probably also not need a special search engine for (although there may be a popular lenz defined for that).

In contrast, it is a tool that makes the pages of your bookmarked sites fully searchable. Where Lenzcape shines are topics that you often need to get back to, either for your profession or hobby. On these topics you typically will have bookmarks. And the more bookmarks you have on these topics, the more advantageous Lenzcape is.

Other examples are:

• find an encyclopedia article
• find a definition of a word
• find a book title
• find books that have their full texts on the web (compare with the one above)
• find a software library

All of these are already included in the Lenzcape application, ready to be used.

How you can build your own lenzes

In the next post I will show you how you can create and manage lenzes with Lenzcape (Update: this is now part of the live demo). It is really not difficult, it’s very much like bookmarking, but there are a few things that you should know to make full use of Lenzcape.

It is also not a lot of work to get started. My recipe search engine that was used for this example contains just 15 bookmarks and that’s including the dessert and soup sublenzes.

By the way. I have added the recipe lenz as a popular lenz on Lenzcape application (hobby > recipe). Bon appetit!

After OnJobs, I have been busy with another site that is related to search engines: LenZcape. Although both sites are about specialized search engines, they are also quite different. OnJobs is a specialized search engine focused on a very specific area (job vacancies in the Netherlands). LenZcape on the other hand is much more powerful. It gives you the power to create what I made for OnJobs: specialized search engines (called lenzes on LenZcape). In fact, OnJobs is now running as a lenz on LenZcape.

Getting started is easy

And it’s easy enough to create your first specialized search engine. Just add a bookmark, say wikipedia, and you have created a lenz that can search the complete wikipedia site!

But that’s just the start. While you are adding and organizing your bookmarks, you are really starting to cultivate the LenZcape: lenzes will adapt themselves and refocus along with your bookmarks. So LenZcape gives you control over your bookmarks as well as your search engines, all in one place.

If you are interested, have a look and enjoy!
Your feedback - either via the contact page on LenZcape or by adding a comment here - is appreciated.