From The Complete Guide to Google Wave: How to Use Google Wave
| ← Chapter 3: Manage Your Wave Contacts | Chapter 4: Find and Organize Waves | Chapter 5: Dive Deeper into Wave → |
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Now that you're up and running with Wave, learn how to manage a busy Wave Inbox.
Once your Inbox is teeming with quickly updating waves, it's time to get good at finding and organizing important information. Google Wave's search box, tags, folders, follow, and archive controls can help you keep your Inbox under control. Like Gmail, you can move waves out of your Inbox by archiving them, or unfollow chatty waves to turn off their unread content notifications. You can file waves in your personal folders and sub-folders to organize them in your Wave client, or label a wave with tags that all its participants can see. Like all Google products, the search box is front and center in Wave, and Wave provides several special search terms that can help you narrow results in useful ways. Once you've crafted your favorite searches, you can save them for reuse and filter waves based on those criteria.
Reduce Wave Inbox Clutter and Unwanted Notifications
Once you're participating in a significant number of active waves, your Inbox gets busy fast.
Every time a wave updates, it moves to the top of your Inbox and its subject line turns bold. Wave's instant, real-time notifications are a double-edged sword: wonderful when you're waiting for important updates, terrible when new information you don't care about distracts you. The Archive and Unfollow buttons can help you clean out your Inbox and silence chatty waves one by one.
Archive Waves
To archive a wave, open it and click the Archive button on its toolbar. To archive several waves in one shot, select them individually by ticking their checkboxes in the Search panel. Alternately, select an series of waves by ticking a wave's checkbox, then holding down the Shift key, and clicking on another one down the list. Once you've selected the appropriate waves, click the Archive button on the Search panel's toolbar.[1]
To "unarchive" a wave and move it back to your Inbox, select it and click the Inbox button on the Search panel.
Unfollow and Follow Waves
Ever get added to an email chain you don't care about—but that just won't stop showing up in your Inbox with reply after reply? In Wave, to stop getting notifications that a particular wave has updated, you can "unfollow" it. Select the wave and click the Unfollow button on its toolbar. An unfollowed wave still updates as participants edit it, but you won't get a notification that there's new content to read. If you search for that wave, its contents and all its updates are still available, even though you didn't get every new change notification. Unfollowed waves have a special gray "Unfollowed" label on them when they appear in search results, as shown in Figure 4-1.
In the Wave preview, there's no way to remove yourself from a wave someone else added you to. If someone adds you to a wave you don't care about, unfollow it to opt out of its update notifications. You can always find waves you've unfollowed using the is:unfollowed operator in Wave's search box.
Similarly, if there's a public wave that you want to get update notifications about in your Inbox, select it and click the Follow button. This will have the same effect as if someone added you individually to that wave: any time that public wave updates it will appear as a new wave in your Inbox. Click the Unfollow button on a wave to unfollow it.
Mark Waves Read or Unread
Like Follow/Unfollow and Archive, there is also a Read and Unread button on the Wave toolbar in both the Search panel and in an open wave. When you click the Read button, a wave does not appear bold or with new blips in the Search panel. When you click the Unread button on an open wave or selected wave(s), all the blips in those waves get marked as unread, and the wave becomes bold in the Search panel.
There is currently no way to mark individual blips within a wave as unread. To mark an individual blip as read, click on it to select it.
"Delete" Waves
To send a wave to the Trash, select or open it and click the Trash button on the Search panel toolbar or on the wave's own toolbar. Currently, trashing a wave doesn't actually delete it; the wave still exists in the Trash folder. Deleting a wave entirely would be the equivalent of removing yourself from it as a participant, and since removing non-bot participants is not yet possible, neither is actually deleting waves. On October 30th, 2009 Google Wave product manager Greg Dalesandre said that the ability to delete waves and remove participants from waves is "coming soon."[2]
File Waves in Folders (and Sub-folders)
Like most email clients (except Gmail!), Wave offers a traditional folder system for filing your waves.[3] To create a new folder, go to the Navigation panel, click the + (plus) button next to Folders, and type the name of your folder. The name can be as long as you like, and can contain spaces and special characters (such as punctuation).
To create a sub-folder, click a folder's drop-down menu and select Add Folder. The sub-folder appears indented beneath its parent folder, as shown in Figure 4-2.
To delete or rename a folder, click its drop-down and select Delete or Rename. (Know that you cannot delete folders that have sub-folders in them unless all of the sub-folders have been deleted first. The Delete item does not appear in a parent folder's drop-down menu until its sub-folders are deleted.) From the same folder drop-down menu, you can also customize the order of your folder list, and assign colors to folders.
To move a wave into a folder, go to the Search panel and select the wave. Click the Move to button on the toolbar, and then select the destination folder from the list.
If your browser has the Google Gears plug-in[4] installed, you can drag and drop a wave or several waves from the Search panel onto a folder name.
When you move a wave to a folder, you're transferring it from its current location to the destination. A wave cannot be in more than one folder at a time. Only you can see and use the folders you create, and control them. Therefore, Wave folders are best for private, single-destination filing.
If old-school folders are too limiting and private for your purposes, use tags instead.
Tag Your Waves
Tags provide a more free-form way to "file" your waves. Unlike folders, you can add as many tags to the waves you participate in as you want. Also unlike folders, everyone who is participating in the wave can see those tags, add to them, and delete them. Tags do not appear on your Navigation panel. They show up only at the bottom of open waves, and in the Search panel on each wave listed there.
To add a tag to a wave, first open the wave. On its bottom panel, click the + (plus) button to the right of the word Tags, as shown in Figure 4-3. Enter a tag and press Enter. To add another tag, repeat. You can add only one tag at a time, and tag names can have spaces in them. To remove a tag, hover over it and click the red X that appears.
Like hash tags on Twitter, or bookmark tags on Delicious, your wave's tags are "public" in the sense that anyone who can see that wave can also see its tags. Therefore, tags are a great way for people to add their waves to a pool of waves on the same topic.
tag:cwg search, it was easy to see if any new book waves or updates on existing book-related waves had occurred in one filtered list.
Already the Wave community is coming up with common tags for organizing public discussions like WaveDiscuss and WaveHelp. Search for with:public WaveDiscuss to see them—and learn about more advanced search techniques like this in the following sections.
Search Your Waves
Wave puts a deep repository of live-updating information at your fingertips, but it's a complete mess unless you know how to find what you're looking for. The Wave search box, much like Google's web search box, is the key to getting exactly the results you need. Basic keyword searches return waves that contain those terms, while advanced search terms can pinpoint specific waves based on recipients, tags, and other attributes.
Basic Search Techniques
Common search engine conventions you're already comfortable using in Google and Yahoo web search work in Wave as well. To search for waves that contain a keyword like "browncoat," just enter browncoat into the search box and press Enter. To find all waves that contain the words "Kaylee" or "browncoat," separate the keywords with an uppercase "or": Kaylee OR browncoat. If you want waves that have both the words "Kaylee" and "browncoat" in them, enter Kaylee browncoat. (This query returns the same results as a search for Kaylee AND browncoat. By default, adding words to your query narrows results to only waves that contain all the terms.)
To search for an exact phrase like "I don't wanna explode", enclose it in quotes. This works well for proper names, too: a search for "Joss Whedon" does not return waves with just the words "Joss" in them, or even waves that mention "Joss" in one place and "Whedon" in the other.
The minus sign also excludes waves that match certain criteria from your results. If you want to find waves that mention Firefly but not Buffy, you'd search for Firefly -Buffy.
These basic search techniques get you pretty far. But Wave's real search power comes in its special search terms that return waves based on participants, tags, folders, and other attributes.
Advanced Operators: Find Waves by Title or Caption
The format of Wave's advanced search operators is operator:value.[6] Just as you can search the web and narrow results using a query like site:completewaveguide.com Firefly, you can do the same with Wave. The trick is knowing which operators do what.
By default, a basic keyword search looks in the title and body of the waves you participate in. To limit your search to just wave titles, use title:keyword. Enclose multiple words in quotes. To search all your wave titles for the word "Reavers," search for title:Reavers. To search for all wave titles with the words "space opera," search for title:"space opera".
title:"Invite others to Google Wave" search, which only returns waves with the exact title "Invite others to Google Wave."
Because you can associate captions with images in Wave, you can also specifically search the contents of captions. (Read more about adding images with captions to your waves in Chapter 5, Dive Deeper into Wave.) To search image captions, use the caption:keyword operator. For example, to search waves that contain images with "Gina Torres" in the caption, search for caption:"Gina Torres".
Advanced Operators: Find Waves by Participants
Waves are collaborative documents and conversations, so you'll want to know how to find waves by the people involved in them. These search operators help you find wave participants based on their role in the wave: whether they've created it, been added to it, or contributed to it. In this list, name doesn't refer to a person's full name; it's the first part of his or her Wave ID. That is, if the Wave user's ID is zoe@serenity.com, replace name with zoe.
You can also use the keyword me to refer to yourself. For example, if your Wave ID is you@example.com, you could find waves you created using creator:you@example.com, or the shorter, simpler creator:me.
Here is the full list of Wave search operators that find waves based on their participants.
| Search Operator | Returns |
|---|---|
creator:nameor from:name
| All waves created by name. |
participant:nameor with:name
| All waves where name is a direct participant (name may be a user or a group). |
contributor:nameor by:name
| All waves where name edited at least one blip. |
to:name
| All waves where name is a participant, but not the creator. |
onlyto:name
| All waves where name is the only participant, beside the creator. |
onlyby:name
| All waves where name is the only contributor. |
onlywith:name
| All waves where name is the creator and only participant on a blip within a wave. |
dfrom:name
| All waves from name directly to you, or waves with only two participants, where name is a contributor. |
dto:name
| All waves to name directly from you, or waves with only two participants, where the other participant is also a contributor. |
is:note
| All waves in which you are the only participant. |
group:address
| All waves with the Google Group email address. |
by:mal onlyto:me to double-check.
If you're getting unexpected results when you search for waves by participant, remember a wave's structure: a given wave can consist of many blips with different participants. For instance, a group wave with half a dozen participants that has a private reply to just one person in it will show up in search results for onlyto:name searches for that one person.
Advanced Operators: Find Waves by Location or Read State
You may want to find waves based on what folder they're in, what tag they have, or whether they're read, unread, followed, or unfollowed. Here's the full list of advanced Wave search operators that return waves based on location and state.
| Search Operator | Returns |
|---|---|
is:read
| All waves where all blips within the wave (including all private replies) have been read. |
is:unread
| All waves with at least one blip that has not been read. |
is:filed
| Only waves that have been filed in your folders. |
is:unfiled
| Only waves not filed in folders you created (and are either still in:inbox or only in:all).
|
in:folder_name
| All waves located in folder_name. |
in:search_name
| All waves in your saved search called search_name. (See the following section, Saved Searches and Wave Filters, for more on saving searches.) |
is:unfollowed
| Only waves that you've unfollowed. |
is:followed
| Only waves that you are following. |
has:tag
| All waves with any tag. |
tag:name
| All waves with the tag name. |
is:read in:inbox. Then hold down the Shift key to select the search results and click the Archive button on the Search panel's toolbar.
Advanced Operators: Find Waves by Attachment, Gadget, or Links
To narrow search results to waves with file attachments, gadgets, or links in them use these advanced operators.
| Search Operator | Returns |
|---|---|
has:attachment
| All waves with an attachment. |
has:document
| All waves with a document attached. |
filename:keyword
| All waves with an attachment containing keyword in the filename. |
mimetype:keyword
| All waves with an attachment with mimetype containing keyword in the filename. |
has:image
| All waves with an image attached. |
has:gadget
| All waves containing any gadget. |
has:gadgetname
| All waves containing gadgetname. |
gadgeturl:keyword
| All waves containing a gadget with keyword in the URL. |
gadgettitle:keyword
| All waves containing a gadget with keyword in the title. |
has:link
| All waves with links in them |
link:URL
| All waves with a link to URL. |
with:public link:completewaveguide.com.
Advanced Operators: Find Waves by Time Period
So far Wave's menu of search operators is pretty thorough—but strangely, date searches aren't what you'd expect. Instead of searching for waves by a specific date, you search by time period relative to today's date using a date term value.
In its search documentation,[7] Google explains:
Accepted date terms are day, week, month, or year. You can abbreviate days, weeks, months, and years to a single letter—d, w, m, and y, respectively. You can also add N before any of the date operators to specify the number of days, weeks, months, or years over which you'd like to search. N must be greater than zero. For example, searching with past:3days will find waves from today, yesterday, and the day before yesterday.
The full list of relative date term operators is as follows.
| Search Operator | Returns |
|---|---|
past:date_term
| All waves within date_term. |
previous:date_term
| All waves from the previous date_term. |
before:date_term
| All waves from before date_term. |
after:date_term
| All waves from after date_term. |
-past:m. That search returns all waves that have not been updated during the current month.
Advanced Operators: Find Waves by Language
Although it doesn't appear in Wave's official search documentation, Wave can also search waves by what language they're written in with the lang:lang_abbrev operator. For example, lang:en returns waves written in English. To see only public waves not written in English, use the with:public -lang:en operator. Use this operator with caution: because it is undocumented, its behavior could be unpredictable (especially with waves that contain text in multiple languages).
The more you use Wave, the more you'll notice that advanced searches for waves are baked into its interface. For example, your Inbox is the results of an in:inbox search. The Trash is just results for an in:trash search.
You can even see recent conversations with a specific person by clicking the Recent Waves button on the Contact pop-up—that displays results for a with:name search, where name is the contact in question.
Combine Wave Search Operators into Useful Recipes
Wave's search capabilities are most powerful when you chain criteria together to see custom lists of your waves. Here are a few useful Wave search recipes you can try.
- Search public waves with
with:public: To find public discussions about almost anything, search using thewith:publicoperator, which returns waves withpublic@a.gwave.comas a participant. For example, to search all public waves for the word "browncoats," usewith:public browncoats. - Create an only-to-me Inbox with
onlyto:me is:unread: See unread waves in which you and the creator are the only participants. This is a great way to find waves you probably need to respond to. - See "Sent" waves with
creator:me -is:note: See all the waves you've created and added others to participate in; this set of results creates something loosely akin to an email program's Sent box. - See waves you've created for private use with
is:note: Even though Wave is a collaboration tool, you can still create waves and add no other participants, whether you're in the process of drafting something to share later, or just keeping some "notes to self." Theis:noteoperator returns only waves you've created, and in which you're the only participant.
Once you tweak your favorite searches to fit your needs, you can save them for reuse.
Saved Searches and Wave Filters
Once you've saved a search, it appears on the Navigation panel under Searches (just above Folders). Like folders, you can click a search's drop-down menu to edit the query or its name, move it up or down the saved searches list, or add a color to it. Also like folders, you can create a new saved search by clicking the + (plus) button next to Searches on the Navigation panel.
group:wave-guide-wavers@googlegroups.com so you don't have to remember the group address every time.
Filter Incoming Waves Based on Search Criteria
The Save search pop-up also contains another interesting and powerful section: Filter Actions. Like email filtering rules, here you can tell Wave to automatically perform actions on waves that meet the search criteria in the Query field.
In the Wave preview, there are only two available filter actions: Mark as read and Archive. By checking the Archive box on a saved search, you're telling Wave to automatically move any waves that meet the search criteria out of your Inbox. By checking the Mark as read box on a saved search, you're telling Wave to mark those waves as read. (Automatically checking a wave as read has a similar effect as unfollowing a wave in that you're suppressing unread notifications, except that the state of these waves is read, not unfollowed.) Checking both boxes means new waves that meet your search criteria are both archived and marked as read.
With only Mark as read and Archive, the Wave preview's filter actions are very limited right now. Hopefully a fuller set of actions will become available and wave filtering will be as robust as Gmail's.
Mastering its search capabilities is a major part of getting the information you need out of Wave. In the next chapter, Dive Deeper into Wave, you'll learn how to make rich waves worth searching for.
References
- ↑ Google Wave Help: How do I use the toolbar to manage waves?, Google.com
- ↑ Greg Dalesandre, Twitter.com
- ↑ Google Wave Help: How do I use folders to organize my waves?, Google.com
- ↑ Google Gears, Google.com
- ↑ Google Wave Help: What's the best way to search for waves?, Google.com
- ↑ Google Wave Help: What are the advanced search terms for Google Wave?, Google.com
- ↑ Google Wave Help: What are the advanced search terms for Google Wave?, Google.com
| ← Chapter 3: Manage Your Wave Contacts | Chapter 4: Find and Organize Waves | Chapter 5: Dive Deeper into Wave → |
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