Firefox is already pretty amazing, but we're always looking for another add-on to make it even more kick-ass. Enter CyberSearch, an update of AwesomeSearch which adds tons of search functionality to your browser. It even displays results right in the Awesome Bar's drop-down.
Search results without Adsense ads? Oh, it's possible.
CyberSearch also lets you set up keyword or letter patterns that tell it to restrict sites to specific URLs - preface your search with 'techy' and you'll only get results from Lifehacker, CyberNetNews(go figure), and Download Squad (we had nothing to do with that, we swear!).
Since it's built on Google's API, you're still getting the same results you'd get if you went to Google first anyways. Hello, efficiency!
With all the social networking sites out there it's hard to keep track of who's on what site and what are they doing. Whoisi is attempting to bring everything together so that keeping track of your friends doesn't feel like a second job.
Just enter their user name and have it added to the whoisi database. From there add them to your "follow" list and every time you visit the site it will display their latest activities. Keep in mind that once added, anyone can follow them from the whoisi site.
An interesting feature of whoisi is the ability for anyone to edit information about any user. You can add additional sites that this person is a member of or delete the site. Currently whoisi supports information from Flickr, Picasa, Twitter, LinkdIn and rss feeds.
Once you get over that whole privacy thing of anyone can add you to the site, the convenience of being able to follow all your friends on a simple website is quite appealing.
The only thing Facebook messages have ever been good for is getting a friend's real contact info so you can talk outside of Facebook. But what happens when you lose that critical message with your buddy's new address or screenname? Facebook fails you, and you have to scroll back through all your messages to find the right one. Not anymore! The 'Book has introduced a search bar for your inbox.
Rejoice! A new feature that should have been there all along! We think this is a step in the right direction, even though it's not exactly the highly-touted data portability we're still waiting for. At least this gives us something better to do on Facebook than tend to our very impressive L'il Green Patch.
What do you get when you add Technorati + Mahalo + Google? One part human led guide team, one part ranking of individual posts, and one part powerful algorithm that decides what's hot and what's not, based on what is fed into it.
Today, Loud3r is launching 25 separate sites on 25 different niche topics that range from Motorcycles to Web 2.0. Big deal, right? There are content gathering tools everywhere these days, why bother with this one?
Each of the 25 niche sites is set up to kickstart its own community, with features reminiscent of Digg. You can give feedback on the stories, and it will help their algorithm get smarter. The more sources that the guide feeds the engine, plus the more you interact, the better user experience you'll get.
If you thought things were over between Microsoft and Yahoo!, you ain't seen nothing yet. Because now it's really, officially, super duper over. Yahoo! issued a press releases this afternoon making it clear that that not only will Microsoft not be purchasing all of Yahoo!, but Yahoo! won't be selling Microsoft even a part of its business. Not its search engine; not its email service; not even the key to replace the toilet paper and paper towels in the company restrooms (although honestly, we're not sure that was ever on the table).
According to the Yahoo! press release, Yahoo! board members decided that it would not be in the company's best interest to sell its search business. Microsoft, on the other hand, released a statement saying that such a partnership would have provided value for Yahoo! shareholders while ensuring a competitive marketplace.
Oh, and while Microsoft has withdrawn its proposal to buy all of Yahoo!, if Yahoo! decides to change its mind and come crawling back, Microsoft says its offer to buy just the search engine "remains available for discussion." So umm, yeah, maybe it's not really over yet.
Microsoft's SearchTogether plugin for Internet Explorer 7 lets you share your search history with others. The plugin also provides tools for leaving comments and voting on search listings.
Why exactly would anyone want to use this service? Say you're planning a vacation and you're looking up air fare, hotels, tourist destinations, and restaurants where you might want to eat. As you search, you can save your history and share it with other members of your family who you'll be traveling with. You can also see the searches they've conducted and let them know what you think of the results. Of course, this is just an example. You can also work on group projects, plan a dinner menu, or look for birthday presents for your dad.
You need a Windows Live ID to run SearchTogether. But Microsoft doesn't require you to use Windows Live Search as your search engine. You can use Google, Yahoo! or Live Search, or select multiple search engines.
Though it is currently accessible only to a closed set of beta testers, it seems the 22 minds behind Polar Rose are trying to create a sort of "Google" for people pictures -- a system that is always indexing visual information. But that's only the beginning of the service.
Beta testers have recently been given access to an Internet Explorer and Firefox plug-in that will scan faces on a loaded web-page, placing an orange or red rose icon in the lower right-hand corner of every face on the page. The color of the icon depends on whether or not the system can stick a name to the face, and this is determined by whether or not the face has been registered with the system. Any unnamed faces can be registered with the system from there, though, don't expect miracles. The plug-in struggles with low-quality or poorly lit photos.
This is "cool," of course, and we tend to like advanced stuff like this even if it's not personally useful to us. But what happens if a web-user doesn't want his/her face indexed? As is often with new technology/services (stop-light cameras, Google, Facebook, RFID cards, etc.) this may one day begin to spark the paranoia of privacy rights activists -- assuming it gets big enough to get noticed by less nerdy common folk.
If you've ever tried using the search feature in Windows XP or earlier Windows operating systems, you know that it can take several long minutes to get your results. Windows Search cuts that time down to seconds by constantly indexing every file on your desktop. If you have a lot of documents and media files on your PC, that index file can eat up a few hundred megabytes or even a few gigabytes, so you'll want to make sure you've got some free hard disk space before installing Windows Search.
Several other Microsoft products including Outlook 2007, OneNote 2007 and Windows Vista use Windows Search technology. But you can also download and install the standalone search client for any Windows XP, Vista, or Server 2003 system.
Windows Search 4.0 includes a number of bug fixes, allows you to index encrypted files, and provides search results faster than previous versions. If you're looking for a different free desktop search application, you might want to check out Google Desktop or Copernic Desktop Search.
Search engines don't get much easier to use than Google. You type what you're looking for into a text box, and the web site will spit results back at you. But if you're looking for a slightly geekier experience, you owe it to yourself to check out goosh.
Goosh has the look and feel of a Unix or Linux shell, but the site is powered by Google. If you want to conduct a web search, just enter a search term, like "download" and hit enter. If you want to search Google News you can type "news download" (without the quotes) or just "n download." You can even search Google Maps by typing "place" before your query. For a complete list of commands, type "help."
The site gives you access to a bunch of Google services from a single web page, which is kind of useful. But the site's true appeal lies in the fact that it's incredibly geeky.
When it comes to tracking down some icons for a project -- nothing real fancy, and preferably under some kind of open license -- image searching on Google doesn't always do the trick. ICONLook is a search site that you can try instead: it's specifically for icons, and it has some useful features that make it worth a peek if you're in a pinch. These are generally OS-type icons, for stuff like apps, documents and search buttons, so don't get your hopes up for anything too fanciful. Heck, we couldn't even find anything as wild and crazy as a cat icon on ICONLook.
Selection is not ICONLook's strong point. Even within the categories it's designed for, there's not a lot of variety. On the plus side, many of the icons are available in a number of different sizes, and there are links to the source and the license for each one. This puts to rest any worries that this might be some kind of hack job, or the work of nefarious icon pirates. Instead, what you get is a legitimate, middle of the road selection of licensed icons that will hopefully expand to become more useful.
UPDATE: An astute reader was able to find a cat on ICONLook. We stand corrected, but we still feel the site could use a bigger library. Thanks, Jeff_RE!
Last year Google and Microsoft spent a lot of time trying to one up one another in the area of book search. Both companies launched products that would let users search within the text of thousands of books and display results in a web browser. Some of the books were public domain while others were copyrighted works scanned either with the consent of the copyright holders or in some cases without it. The whole thing was actually rather controversial. Except here's the thing - we're not sure either company bothered to find out if anybody was going to use the book search products.
Microsoft digitized more than 750,000 books and 80 million journal articles over the past year or two. But the company has since had an epiphany - if you want to be in the search engine business you don't need to post content online, you just need to crawl it. So rather than continuing to scan books and articles that few people will read, Microsoft will wait for publishers to post their own content online and then scan it. We're betting Microsoft probably could have saved a lot of money if they had come to this decision a bit earlier.
Anyone want to guess how long it takes for Google to follow suit? Or is there actually a business model under which book scanning and search products actually make economic sense for Google?
It's hard being Microsoft. Oh, not when you're talking about desktop software. The company pretty much owns the desktop operating system. But on the web, Google is pretty much king. And no matter how hard Microsoft has tried, the company has been unable ot make a dent in Google's dominance of the search engine market. So Microsoft is tryng something new: Bribing people to use its Live Search.
Here's how it works. If you use Live Search Cashback page to search for products, When you buy qualifiying items, Microsoft will throw a little bit of money into a cashback account for you. When your balance reaches $5 or more, they'll send you the money. Microsoft has reportedly partnered with retailers including Barnes & Noble, Sears, Home Depot, and J&R Electronics to offer cash back deals of between 2 and 30 percent.
Of course, you don't make any money if you don't spend some. And while Microsoft might be able to convince a few folks to use their product search engine, it remains unclear whether the move will convince people to use Live Search for their everyday search needs.
Over the last few years, technology news site Techmeme has gotten a lot of attention in the technology blogosphere. That's because it's a tool for tracking conversations and hot topics in the tech blogosphere. Yes, part of the reason we as tech bloggers pay so much attention to Techmeme is because we're self absorbed. But the site has also been a great source of news. Want to know what today's biggest stories are? Techmeme will tell you.
But Techmeme has historically done a pretty lousy job of telling you yesterday's big stories. Or last week's. Or last years. Because the site has lacked any sort of a search function. But today, Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera finally added a search box to the site.
Only the top stories are indexed. And by default only the fist few sentences from each story. So Techmeme isn't exactly a Google News killer. You won't find every article ever written about a topic. But what you will find are some of the top stories (or at least the most discussed/blogged about stories) written about a topic. Or if you want to find every article from a certain source that made it onto Techmeme, you can just search for a URL. For example sourceurl:"http://www.downloadsquad.com" brings up a list of Download Squad stories that have been featured on the site.
The launch of the search tool actually makes Techmeme a site worth visiting if you're not just trying to figure out which stories Download Squad, TechCrunch, CNET, ReadWriteWeb, and Engadget are covering today.
Dorble is a music search engine that lets you find free MP3s on the web. You can either listen to tracks in a web-based music player or download them with a little right-click action.
We should make it clear, when we say free, we don't mean legal. Dorble, like several other popular music search engines isn't bringing you music that's been properly licensed for distribution. Rather, it scours the web (or some small section of it) for MP3 files that have been uploaded, often without the copyright holders' permission. Of course, it's possible that some of the music you find will be legal, but much of what you'll find on Dorble isn't.
That said, Dorble has a pretty Cover Flow-style interface on the front page that let you search for some of the most popular artists with a simple click. Dorble isn't as good as SeeqPod at finding music from relatively obscure artists. But if you're looking for Madonna or Jack Johnson and you can live without Mike Doughty and Over the Rhine, Dorble's worth checking out.
Powerset has launched a public beta of their new natural language search engine. What exactly do we mean by natural language search? First of all, you can enter keywords like you would with any other search engine. But Powerset can also handle phrases and questions. But Powerset's semantic tools go far beyond that. For example, if you search for "paintings by Dali," the search engine will understand that you are looking for paintings, and if it can find some images, it will put them at the the top of the page.
Right now Powerset searches exactly one site. But since that site is Wikipedia, you can still find a ton of useful information. But you're going to have more luck with queries like "who shot Lincoln?" than "when will the 3G iPhone be released."
When you click through to read a Wikipedia article, Powerset will bring up a sidebar tool that lets you view either an outline of the article or "Factz," which are typically some of the key points in an article. If you click on a fact, you'll be taken immediately to the relevant part of the Wikipedia article.
It's not clear whether Powerset is a Google killer, since the search engine currently doesn't index the web, just one site right now. So it's not clear how well it would be able to prioritize data from millions of pages. But it works quite well as an advanced search tool for a single site like Wikipedia.
Firefox is already pretty amazing, but we're always looking for another add-on to make it even more kick-ass. Enter CyberSearch, an update of AwesomeSearch which adds tons of search functionality to your browser. It even displays results right in the Awesome Bar's drop-down.
