DocMazy is a novel kind of search engine exclusively dedicated to finding documents. Instead of returning websites, it digs up PDFs, DOCs, spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and text files. DocMazy was designed to find information that gets buried in other search engines because documents often don't score well in search engine algorithms, or aren't indexed by search engines at all.

Once you find the doc you're looking for, you can download it or view it online. DocMazy uses iPaper, which opens a preview without making you leave the results page. All in all, it's a pretty nice tool if you're looking for the kind of longer, more detailed information that often isn't published in its entirety on a webpage.

If your job has you tasked with monitoring your company's online presence, you're probably dealing with Twitter in some way. Running occasional manual searches for your company's name is one way to go, but a better way would be to sign up with a service like TweetBeep.

TweetBeep is a free service that will email you as frequently as once per hour with any Twitter mentions of the search terms of your choice. The service is ad-supported, but if you find that you need it, TweetBeep also offers a premium option for $20US/month that allows you to receive updates as frequently as every 15 minutes, up to 200 different alert searches, and no advertising.

While TweetBeep allows you to set a number of criteria for your alerts, one of the most interesting is the ability to set an "Attitude" criteria. You can choose from three:

• Positive attitude
• Negative attitude
• Asking a question

This appears to be a fantastic way to stay on top of how people are perceiving your company or brand, and gives you the ability to very quickly react to your customers or users. It can also be useful for heavy Twitter users to ensure they don't miss any mentions. I should note that as of the time of this writing I had some difficulty with the email confirmation process - it took multiple requests and over an hour before my email confirmation arrived in my inbox.

[via Stay N' Alive]

Mozilla's Ubiquity dazzlingly cool preview release promises to make commands a great deal easier to remember and use by removing those annoying hyphens. With a totally updated parser -- unimaginatively referred to as "Parser 2" Ubiquity also promises support for a ton of new languages.

"[The old parser] was based on a lot of assumptions about English that are not necessarily true in other languages", explains the preview release announcement. Spaces between words, or noun-verb ordering are more flexible under the new parser, opening Ubiquity to a non-English speaking audience and getting rid of those picky little hyphens for Anglophones.

Unfortunately, that also means a great many commands you might be used to are currently incompatible. The new version greeted me with a warning, notifying me that some commands -- known in Ubiquity parlance as "verbs" -- didn't load because of incompatibility with Parser 2. A quick look shows old verbs like "flip-page" and "desaturate-image" are in need of an upgrade.

Still, for fans of Ubiquity's slick hands-never-leave-the-keyboard workflow, this is an upgrade that's been a long time coming.

It looks like real-time search - mainly built around Twitter - is the hot new bandwagon to jump on. Twitscoop, Scoopler, Twingly, Searchmerge, Collecta ... we've written about all of these this year, and the grab for real-time search traffic hasn't stopped yet. CrowdEye is the latest entry to catch our attention in this already-crowded field.

CrowdEye is limited compared to some of the above-mentioned competitors, in that it only searches Twitter. Collecta, for example, searches photos, news stories, and other microblogging services, and offers the option to filter any of those out if they're too much for you. CrowdEye does offer some Twitter data that its competitors don't, though: the popular links results are nice, and the graph of popularity over time for your search term could also be useful. For getting a comprehensive picture of what's going on in real time, though, I think search sites are going to have to go beyond Twitter. Even popular Twitpics and Yfrog pictures would add a lot to CrowdEye, and that seems within the site's capabilities to do.

The real-time search arena, fueled by the popularity of Twitter, continues to heat up. Collecta is the latest and most visually appealing stab at getting real-time search right. It draws on images, articles, blog comments and microblogs for data, and refreshes automatically. The layout is a cool three-column affair, with filters on the right, live results in the middle, and a preview of your selected result on the right.

The ability to filter out different kinds of results is useful. Sometimes you just want to see photos or articles, and ignore all the Twitter, Identica and Jaiku chatter, or vice versa. Twitter is really the core of these real-time search sites, though, and Collecta is no different. It's got Twitter's trending topics on the front page. In terms of speed, Collecta is faster than the competitors I've tried out. If you've got a hankering for real-time search, this looks like the site to check out at the moment.

Spezify is a kind of freeform search tool that incorporates websites, videos, images, microblog posts and more into a grid of results. It's not going to beat Google at finding some specific thing you're looking for, but it's impressive if you're looking to get an overview of a topic, especially if you're a visual person. Instead of showing text results, like Google, Spezify is more like a multimedia wall that you can scroll across vertically or horizontally to take in information at a glance.

Spezify also provides a list of related words at the top of the results screen, which can help you explore a topic further. Videos in the results are all embedded, and can be played without leaving the site, and a lot of the text results feature slightly longer previews than Google results do. All in all, I don't think Spezify is meant to replace any of the major search engines, but you might consider using it when you want a visual summary of a given topic.

Android users can now search Google Maps using voice commands, and access Google Transit info from their mobile devices. To use the voice seach, just speak an address or a search term while you're using Google Maps for Android. Google says it currently understands American, Australian and British accents. They've also added store hours, prices, ratings and reviews to their results.

Google Maps for Android also now includes transit and walking directions for over 250 cities, just like Google Maps on the web does. Although it didn't make the headline of Google's blog post, the are also some improvements to Google Latitude, the new(ish) location-based service. You can now make Latitude update your location continuously as long as your phone is on, and use the new "Updates" feature to leave location-specific comments about the places you go.

The last time we talked about the uproar over Bing's live video previews including some explicit material, Lee was reporting that Microsoft had changed the default safesearch features to block porn. A week later, they've taken one further step to reassure concerned customers that they're not going to accidentally see XXX videos. Potentially explicit videos and images are now served from their own domain, explicit.bing.net.

They've also gone ahead and added the source URL into the query string. The average user's not going to look at that, but it makes things easy for corporate filters to just block anything with "explicit.bing.net" in the string. I'm not sure if this is overcorrecting for a mistake that, as Lee argued, wasn't that bad to begin with. It should definitely put to rest any remain concerns that Bing should be renamed Microsoft Live Porn, though.

There's some speculation over at the Google Operating System that Google is planning a microblogging search engine that will work a lot like Google Blog Search does now. gOS found some text on one of Google's help pages describing the format for a microblog search: entering "recent updates about" in front of a search term will search miroblogging services -- Twitter being the most important of the bunch -- for that term.

This hasn't been implemented yet, but the text that gOS found seems to suggest that it will be. Under the heading "recent updates about QUERY," they found this description: "This is the MicroBlogsearch Universal result group header text. A Microblog is a blog with very short entries. Twitter is the popular service associated with this format." This is all the evidence we have to go on so far, and it indicates nothing about which non-Twitter services will be included and what a possible Google MicroBlogsearch results page would look like.

John Watson, the man behind the many fun photo-related web applications at BigHugeLabs was feeling a little down last week, and in response he produced yet another web app. But this one is a little different; while his other web apps often provide inspiration as a by-product of other actions, Watson's latest site, dubbed Ideas, is intended as a source of inspiration as a primary focus.

When you visit Ideas, you are presented with a large search box, beside which sits a button that simply states, "inspire me!" Type in a word, and the site will present you with a series of sets of information that is somehow related to the word entered. If you're feeling bereft of ideas for even a word to enter, a few examples are provided such as love, beauty, sorrow, yes, red, winter, home, africa, kiss.

Depending on the word you enter, Ideas may or may not be able to find examples of the following types:

• Famous quote
• Creative Commons licensed photos from Flickr
• Color swatches from COLOURlovers.com
• Songs from Last.fm
• Related words from BigHugeLabs.com
• Videos from YouTube.com
• Listings from Etsy.com
• Bookmarks from Delicious.com
• Article from Wikipedia.com

What a great way for creative people that are looking for a little boost in the inspiration department to start with a specific word and serendipitously follow a trail to something that may well inspire them.

Microsoft may be branding Bing as a "decision engine" rather than a search engine. But as far as web-based decision engines go, Bing's got nothing on Hunch, a new web tool which emerged from private beta this morning.

Hunch basically lets you ask any question and get a pretty decent answer... after answering a bunch of other questions. For example, if you ask "what netbook should I buy," Hunch will ask you what your priorities are for screen size, battery life, and other features and then offer a few suggestions. You can agree or disagree with the results or read user opinions as well. Users can also create profiles, which help the service learn more about you and offer better results.

Hunch can handle a number of different question types, ranging from "Should I visit Ireland? " to "Is Joaquin Phoenix serious?" Some of the questions you're asked are clearly meant to be funny, but that doesn't mean they won't help you make a good decision. And since Hunch is continually gathering feedback from community members, the questions and answers are likely to continue getting better as time goes on.

While Hunch can't answer some basic questions that Google, Bing, or Yahoo! can handle with ease (what's the weather forecast in my zip code, who won the Oscar for best picture this year, and so on), that's not what Hunch is designed to do. It's designed to help you make decisions, and in a lot of cases, that's exactly what it will help you do. I don't imagine hunch is the kind of service you'll need to use every day. But it could certainly come in handy next time you're trying to decide which cellphone plane you should sign up for, or which movie you should check out for date night.

When Alexander Hamilton founded the New York Post back in 1801, he probably had no idea that the paper would eventually be turned into a sensationalist tabloid by Rupert Murdoch. Similarly, when Rupert Murdoch purchased the Post in 1976, he probably didn't think the paper would ever try to cover tech news.

The same paper that brings you headlines like "18-YEAR OLD ARRESTED FOR SERIAL CAT MURDERS" and "FOOD CART SCAMMERS RAISE THE DEAD" have decided to cover the ongoing Google v. Bing feud.

Apparently Sergey Brin is shaking in his boots, so worried about the threat Bing! poses that he's hired a group of former Vietnam POWs that escaped a maximum security stockade and sought refuge in the Los Angeles underground...No wait, that's the A-Team.

Brin has put together a team of "top engineers to work on urgent upgrades to his Web service." His web service? Which one, Post? Apps? Gmail? No, you mean "to his search engine."

Late last year, Google added the ability to customize search results by promoting or removing items. These "SearchWiki" features also let you share, comment on, and add results to a page. Although the promote and remove buttons appear next to every site in a Google search, most of us either ignore them or are a bit annoyed by them. If you're one of those people, you'll be glad to know there's now an item in Google preferences to turn off SearchWiki with one click.

To do it, just go to http://www.google.com/preferences, or click the preferences link on Google.com, and check "Hide the ability to share, promote, remove, comment or add your own results." One click, no more arrows and X's next to every search result. If this is the first you're hearing of SearchWiki, check out our original post about it before you decide whether to turn it off.

[via Lifehacker]

A few months ago, Brad wrote about a Firefox plugin called SimilarWeb that shows a sidebar full of sites related to the one you're currently looking at. SimilarWeb is still around, but now anybody can use a non-plugin version called SimilarSites. Instead of installing anything, you just type in the URL of a site you're interested in and get recommendations. The add-on might look cooler, but the web version works in any browser.

The recommendations on SimilarSites are quite accurate. When I put in Download Squad, it recommended our esteemed sometimes-rivals over at Lifehacker, as well as one of our sister sites, Engadget. Digging deeper, you'll find slightly more obscure software blogs that look pretty interesting. This is the real strength of SimilarSites.

Everybody's heard of Lifehacker, but now I have some new-to-me sites to add to my RSS reader. Give it a whirl with your favorite site and see what you find.