The bright developer behind Inquisitor has announced today that Yahoo! has acquired the rights to his program, which searches for and suggests results as you type. It's very similar to Spotlight except that it searches the Internet instead of your Mac's HDDs.
We worry that Yahoo! might ruin Inquisitor by preventing it from working with other search engines, but the developer insists he will remain the lead mind behind the program. He will not be working with Yahoo! as their official employee, so at least he's keeping his creative freedom. Though we don't know if the company will allow him to apply that freedom to the program since it's technically Yahoo's now.
Our suggestion, if you use Inquisitor, is to turn off the search for updates feature, which may lead you to accidentally update the program to a crippled version. If you're happy with the way Inquisitor works, there's no point in risking an update. Otherwise, don't agree to an update without researching the changes first. We wouldn't want you to restrict Safari's search bar to Yahoo. No one deserves that.
Ever wish you could search YouTube, Google, Digg, Windows Live News, Flickr, and abut a dozen other news sources simultaneously? Addict-o-matic is a new search engine that does just that. And so naturally the first thing we did was search for our names, and the names of everyone we know.
The service does a pretty good job of pulling up the latest blog entries and YouTube videos for a given topic. But to be honest, there's just way too much information on the page to consider using Addict-o-matic for much more than ego surfing. If you actually wanted to get the latest news on the presidential primaries, for example, you'd be assaulted by a ton of headlines in separate boxes -- and many of those headlines would be repeats of articles you could find in other boxes on the page.
Yahoo! has partnered with McAfee to integrated the security firm's SiteAdvisor technology in Yahoo! search results. That means Yahoo! will remove some of the most dangerous sites from search results altogether, and will include highly visible warning messages on search listings that force downloads, include browser exploits, or sites that send unsolicited emails.
Google offers a similar service, through a partnership with Stop Badware. But Google doesn't check for web sites that initiated automatic downloads when you load them, or sites that include links to harmful web pages. Yahoo!'s new SearchScan feature does.
SearchScan will be turned on by default for Yahoo! users in the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, France, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, and Spain. You can turn it off by visiting the SearchScan settings page.
Now that YouTorrent is exclusively dedicated to boring, legal torrents, you might be looking for another BitTorrent search engine that searches a large number of BitTorrent trackers. LOOKTorrent fits the bill. Kind of.
The site lets you choose from a list of 25 BitTorrent trackers that you want to search. Enter your search term, and you'll start to find results from those pages. But unlike YouTorrent, which combines the results from each site onto one easy to use page, LOOKTorrent basically takes you to Mininova, The Pirate Bay, or whatever other sites you choose, while keeping a LOOKTorrent navigation tab at the top of the screen. If you don't find what you're looking for at one site, you can search the next. One at a time.
LOOKtorrent could come in handy if you can't find what you're looking for on one site, and need a good list of 25 BitTorrent trackers. But if you want all of your results on one page, you're probably better off with NowTorrents, ScrapeTorrent, or PizzaTorrent.
What do Gmail, Facebook, MapQuest, and Weather.com all have in common? They're web sites, but they're also web-based services, providing access to interactive tools like email, mapping, or weather forecasting. Typically, if you want to take information from one web page and enter it in another, you have to do a lot of copying and pasting. For example, if you find an address online and want to see it on a map, you have to copy the address, open a new window or tab, open a map service like Google Maps, and paste the address before you get your results.
But why take the data to the web service, when the web service can come to the data? This morning Vysr is launching a new browser plugin for Firefox and Internet Explorer called RoamAbout. It lets you access a series of web tools from any page.
At launch, a handful of services like Facebook, del.icio.us, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, MapQuest, and Google Maps will be supported. Users can highlight an address on any web page, and click a button in the toolbar to plot the address on a map and then email the map to a friend. Or you can select a zip code or city name and check the weather by hitting another button to pull up the Weather.com interface.
Just a few days after Microsoft rolled out a new traffic prediction feature for Windows Live Maps, Google has followed suit with traffic predictions for Google Maps. Both services use historical traffic data to predict likely congestion points and travel time in the future. But there are two major differences:
Windows Live Maps will suggest the best driving directions for avoiding traffic, Google Maps will not
Google Maps lets you choose the day of the week and time of day to see projected traffic patterns, Windows Live Maps will not.
While both services are pretty useful, what we really want is a service that will combine both of these features. Mapquest, we're looking at you.
Are you sick of having multiple tabs open at one time because you have numerous items that you want to read or research? The Taboo Firefox extension will help cure your "tabitis" (their term, not ours, so don't hate on it) and minimize the glut of tabs on your tab bar.
Once Taboo is installed, you'll have two new items on your toolbar. When you click the first button, Taboo will take a snapshot of any web page you are on, including session state information (such as the scroll location and any data you've entered into forms), and store it for later. You can do this with as many tabs as you need.
When you want access to one of your saved tabs, click on the other Taboo button, and Taboo will load thumbnails of your saved pages into a new tab. From there, all you need to do is click on a saved page, and it will automatically load, complete with scroll location and any text you may have entered.
The saved pages are kept through browsing sessions and shutdowns, and for as many days as you like. Taboo even has a calendar view of all your saved tabs, if you want to access pages from days or weeks ago. You can also search among your pages using the url or page title as a keyword.
Taboo requires Firefox 2, and isn't yet compatible with the Firefox 3 beta.
Podcast aggregator and search engine Odeo is beta testing a new web site, and from what we've seen so far, it's a vast improvement over Odeo's existing page. The first thing you'll notice (if you're invited to join the beta after signing up for an invite), is a new, cleaner look that makes it easier to find featured podcasts and browse by categories. But much more impressive is the new search feature. We didn't realize how poor the old search feature was until we tried searching for podcasts using the new search box and actually got accurate results immediately.
Here are a few other features of the new site:
Users can rate and comment on shows
Users can now submit feeds for podcasts that aren't included in the Odeo library
There's a pretty new Flash player
The beta page is still a work in progress and not every feature is available. For example, in order to get embed code for placing podcasts on your web site you have to click through to Odeo classic. But we're pretty excited at the direction Odeo is taking.
Microsoft has rolled out a new improved news search engine under its Live Search banner. Overall Live Search News looks a lot like you'd expect a news search engine to look if you've used another one like say, Google News. But there are a few features that make Live Search News stand out:
An orange banner will pop up and highlight breaking news at the top of the site, but only when there's actual breaking news, which is kind of refreshing in today's 24/7 news environment when many news agencies are pretending there's always something breaking.
See that blue sidebar on the right? Yeah, we thought it was for advertising at first too, but it's actually local news selected for you based on your IP address. No need to sign up and change your settings to get local news tailored to you.
Once you enter a search term, you can further refine your search from a list of categories, or select from a list of related searches.
Videos are featured right on the main page, and if you mouse over them you can preview the videos before deciding whether to click to watch the full video.
Overall, we're pretty impressed with the new Live Search News. Our only real complaint is that there doesn't appear to be a way to subscribe to RSS feeds for searches.
Google Maps is all well and good if you're trying to find directions for your road trip across America. But what if you're a freshman in college and you can never seem to remember how to get from the dining hall to the library? Campus Destinations is a new college-centric map/search engine that can help you on your way.
The service includes listings for academic, residential and other buildings on a handful of US university campuses. There are also listings for nearby restaurants and other destinations. You can find directions from one spot to another by entering items like "art building," and "library" rather than street addresses. Currently 10 university campuses are covered, but we're hoping to see more added soon.
BitTorrent search engine YouTorrent is for sale, according to TorrentFreak. The news isn't particularly surprising. YouTorrent has become quite popular over the last few months, but for some reason the owners have yet to put advertisements on the site, so it doesn't appear to be making any money. At the same time YouTorrent gets over 10 million visitors per month, which has got to be hell on the company's bandwidth bill.
We'd say YouTorrent shouldn't have a hard time attracting a buyer with a good monetization plan. But YouTorrent kind of shot themselves in the foot on their way to the auction block. The company has removed the majority of BitTorrent trackers from its index, which means you can now only search 100% free and legal torrent sites like Vuze, BitTorrent, and LegalTorrents. In other words, you won't find any cracked software, or illegal music or movie downloads. Sure, the move will help the service avoid lawsuits, but it will probably dramatically reduce YouTorrent's user base as well, which could make the site a heck of a lot less valuable.
If you're looking for a good YouTorrent clone that doesn't suck, check out NowTorrents or PizzaTorrent.
Keyboard application launchers are all the rage, and we're always on the lookout for any new entries into the field. One such entry is nDroid, a simple keyboard launcher that performs basic launch tasks, but also has a few tricks up its sleeve.
nDroid is launched by a default hotkey: CTRL+ALT+Z. The hotkey combination brings up the default nDroid window. Type in the name of an application, a document, etc...and nDroid will find any appropriate matches on your computer. In our test searches nDroid was very fast and found relevant results.
nDroid also has a few extra niceties:
Type a ? followed by a mathematical expression and nDroid will calculate the answer.
Shift + Enter will open the application's parent folder in Windows Explorer.
CTRL + Enter will run the typed text as a full command, just like the "Run" option in the Start menu.
So nDroid essentially takes the place of the Run command, the calculator, and to a certain extent, Windows Explorer. Very sweet.
nDroid is built with an open architecture, which means that anybody can build plugins to extend nDroid's functionality.
It seems Yahoo! recently lost faith in its ability to advertise, and it almost seems desperate to try something very different. In fact, the company seems so desperate in a Web-world increasingly dominated by Google, that it's going to give AdSense a shot. Yes, Yahoo! will host Google ads on its own site.
Though the mini-partnership is cute and we're sure they'd make a fun but powerful couple, don't make any assumptions about their intentions yet. As much as Google would like to get in that pair of pants, Yahoo will only support AdSense in up to 3% of all search results for now. If AdSense does what it promises to do -- make more money than Yahoo's advertising services -- the two companies should enter into a more committed relationship.
It feels like Yahoo's just giving up, but you can't blame 'em. Google's an innovative monster, and how do you compete with that? I guess if you can't beat 'em, catch a ride on their coattails.
MetroLyrics, one of the largest online sites to search for and find song lyrics, has just announced the addition of Gracenote's catalog of lyrics into its existing database.
In case you didn't know, Gracenote is currently the largest database of licensed (read: accurate) song lyrics out there, and has agreements with the big dogs: EMI, Universal/BMG, Sony/ATV, and Warner/Chappell. That last line included the most forward slashes we've ever used in a single sentence. Ever.
In its humble beginnings, MetroLyrics was mainly driven by community submission, meaning an individual would submit lyrics to a song that he or she liked, and then the community would rate the accuracy of those lyrics. Of course, because none of these submissions were authorized by the music companies, they were probably infringing on some sort of copyright. Worse still, their accuracy could never be completely assured.
After all, how could you know for sure that you downloaded the correct lyrics to "It's the end of the world as we know it" by REM? How would you know whether this line reproduced here:
Right you vitriolic, patriotic, slam, fight, bright light, Feeling pretty psyched
Was correct or not?
Don't we already live in enough uncertainty?
The inclusion of the Gracenote catalog is a boon for MetroLyrics and its users. We're not sure at this point how MetroLyrics intends to monetize their site; including the Gracenote catalog seems to imply that the artists will get proper compensation for the use of their creative output, and it's not clear whether that compensation will come from online advertising or from the users themselves. Only time will tell.
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