You may have encountered Google Suggest in Google News in the past few months and if you haven't already, you're about to start seeing it in your search box as well.
Google Suggest is movin' on up from Google Labs onto the Google homepage in increments this week. If you haven't seen it yet, you will.
According to Google this should help you:
enter more specific search criteria quickly
reduce the chance of spelling errors
save keystrokes
be annoyed with Google yet again
I guess it might be cool, though it only saved me two keystrokes when I was googling Download Squad. And I think I can type in my search criteria more quickly than I can type part of it and read a list, type some more to see more choices and on and on. But, who knows, maybe I might like it. Like Mikey and his cereal.
TypoBuddy, like previously reviewed TypoTracker, helps you find deals by searching for misspelled variations of the items you search for. Why?
Because most people that search for a particular item will try to spell it right - meaning that listings with typos might go unnoticed, and you'll wind up getting a sweet deal just because some seller was careless enough to not check his or her typing.
It's a great concept, but does it work?
I tried submitting a few queries to both sites, first looking for "thinkpad." Although TypoBuddy told me it had found 100 misspelled matches, clicking through to the eBay results netted only 76 - still very respectable. The search automatically homes in on your locale, so you may need to change locations to get more results.
Microsoft built a lot of new functionality into Windows Vista's search feature, but what about those of us that are still sticking with our trusty old XP installs? Our default search is a decrepit old fart of a program, and one that still resembles the version from a decade ago.
Well, it's time for a change. Two great freeware programs do the job much better, so why keep dealing with a slow, lackluster search?
Portable application buffs should check out Locate32. When you launch the app for the first time, you'll need to tell it to build a database file. After that, it'll take a seat in your system tray and run updates on your specified schedule. You can further tweak by specifying a maximum CPU usage before starting the job to ensure indexing doesn't bog down your system during busy periods.
Indexing took just a minute and a half on my notebook's 120GB hard drive, and subsequent searches displayed results in a flash. Searches you want to execute frequently can be added to the presets button.
If you're after torrent downloads, chances are you're searching Piratebay, IsoHunt, Mininova, and possibly a few others. Why not save yourself time and effort and search them all in one place?
USniff provides a nicely styled web 2.0 interface for multi-site torrent searches and allows you to query up to eight sites simultaneously. Results load extremely quickly, and I was pleased to see that they sort by number of seeds by default.
It's ajax, so filtering and re-sorting your results is almost instant. The design is totally clean so far, there's not even a single banner ad in sight. You'll still have to click through to the actual tracker, of course, to grab the actual torrents. USniff doesn't host anything...blah blah blah...insert usual torrent search engine disclaimer here.
For anyone looking for multiple options to download that new Ubuntu release (since you're all using torrents for purely legal downloads, of course!), take a gander at USniff.
Zoho officially has more online office applications than most people could ever possibly need. But the latest addition makes a lot of sense. Zoho Share lets users upload documents (PDF, DOC, XLS, etc) and share them with other users either via the Zoho web site or by embedding docs on another page. In other words, Zoho Share doesn't do much of anythin gthat Scribd and DocStoc don't already do. But Zoho will also let you import documents from Zoho Sheet, Zoho Writer and other online office docs, which means you can easily create and share your files using the same service.
Zoho Share is available as a public preview, and is still pretty rough around the edges. For example, I was unable to upload any documents, and thanks to the lack of a FAQ, it took me a while to figure out how to import docuements from other Zoho services. Eventually I figured out that by marking a Zoho Writer/Sheet or other document as public, it would show up in a Zoho Share search.
If you're looking for PowerPoint style presentations with pictures of cute kitens, or sample resumes, you can find them at Zoho Share. But like any YouTube-for-documents style service, Zoho Share will only really be useful if the company can build a strong enough user base to ensure that you'll always find what you're looking for -- or if Zoho decides not to emphasize the search and find functionality of the site as much as the fact that you can use Zoho Share to embed documents you upload yourself on your own web site. You know, if the company ever fixes the upload feature.
A few months back, Download Squad's Danny Mendez wrote about Yahoo!'s acquisition of popular Safari InputManager Inquisitor. At the time, Danny was worried that Yahoo's purchase would make the tool unusable with other search engines, but those fears were unfounded, and Inquisitor continues to work well with either Google OR Yahoo.
Inquisitor is cool because it adds Spotlight-like functionality to the default Safari search box (it's kind of like the Awesome Bar for Firefox 3), along with easy access to other search results from places like Flickr or IMDB or Wikipedia. The design is also utterly kick-ass.
In the new release, users who choose to use Yahoo! search engine will see much, much faster results, thanks to integration with Yahoo's new BOSS platform. Like, instantaneously fast. Like, fast enough to make me consider changing my default search engine fast.
Inquisitor now supports eight languages in addition to English: Japanese, Korean, Traditional Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and German.
The interface has also become more streamlined and looks really, really great.
Inquisitor is free and available for Mac's running OS X 10.4 and up.
Wikipedia is a great source of information, and it's getting bigger every day. If you're like me, you'd be hard pressed to go a day without looking something up on Wikipedia. But sometimes you might not have Internet access -- devastating, I know! -- and you still need to know whether there's a grammatically correct sentence made up entirely of the word "buffalo." Well, it's a good thing there's Wikitaxi, an offline Wikipedia app.
With Wikitaxi, you can snag the entire database of Wikipedia -- or, if you're pressed for bandwidth, the Simple English version is a lot smaller -- and read it offline on your Windows machine. It comes with a separate importer app that you can point at a database, and then you can use the main Wikitaxi app to run searches on it. Those clever people at Lifehacker suggest that you carry it around on a USB drive: then you can prove that buffalo thing to your friends at a moment's notice!
Some days it's all good and you're enjoying reading the news for the masses on Digg or Reddit. Other days you want something with a bit more substance. Maybe you're having dinner with your future in-laws and you need a good, solid, grown-up conversation starter. Check out Polymeme, which bills itself as the "experts' take on what's important on the web."
Polymeme tracks information in 20 areas, from Green & Energy to Books & Poetry with things like TV & Cinema and New Media thrown in for good measure. Top news stories are gathered from Polymeme's database of 25,000 blogs using algorithms that monitor the most viewed and linked to stories in each of the 20 categories.
By having the 20 different areas of news to monitor, Polymeme is able to find the hottest articles, blog posts and information from mainstream, alternative and citizen-driven media sources in each area instead of just the hottest news on the web as a whole. Site information calls it the "wisdom of clusters and not just the wisdom of crowds."
If you enjoy reading articles from places like Scientific American, MSNBC and Slate or you just need to step up your RSS feeds, Polymeme might be just what you're looking for.
Because copying and pasting is just too much effort sometimes, the fine developers of Kallout have been kind enough to create a tool that improves the ease and convenience of performing searches.
Download the 3.2mb installer (Windows Vista and XP only), and Kallout will nestle itself into your system tray and go to work. To activate it, just highlight some text in any program and Kallout's blue balloon icon will appear, bestowing upon you its numerous search options. Some results (like Wikipedia, Google, and Google Maps) are overlayed directly on your current window. Others, like Facebook and MySpace, launch in your browser.
Results can be a little iffy, which stands to reason for a piece of software supporting so many different searches (41 as I'm writing this). Testing Williams College on Facebook, for example, probably won't find you any alums because it's tied to display names. Some results are incredibly slow to arrive - eBay, I'm talking to you - but you can hardly blame Kallout for that. Highlighting iPod gave me an almost instant list of reference books from Amazon, but the eBay results took so long to appear I nearly fell asleep.
Unfortunately, it's a bit on the beastly side, consuming about 24 megs of memory on my XP system. Still, if you like having a vast array of search options constantly at the ready, Kallout is tough to beat.
chosr is a web based bookmarking and productivity tool. It uses a Quicksilver type interface and apparently, if you're a Quicksilver user it's very intuitive. If, like me, you're not, it takes a little bit to get the hang of the interface. (More about Quicksilver).
The idea is that basic keystrokes move you through a three panel screen. So if I want to search for Download Squad in the first box I would use the period key to open my text entering mode and type in Download Squad. I would then press the tab key to move to the next window where I would again press the period key to enter text. You can type in various search methods like Google, wikipedia, YouTube, etc. Tab over to the third square and the default for searching "in new window" will probably already be there. Press enter and a new window with your search results will open.
Want to bookmark it in your chosr file? Copy the url, paste into the first box, after hitting the period, tab to the second box and type bookmark and you will be ready to go. Then you can bookmark all your daily sites, tab through them and basically eliminate your mouse for some things.
I have not used Quicksilver before so it seemed very awkward to me. For example at one point I got to a list where one of the options was to change the background. I was happy about that since the normal background is rather ugly. I couldn't get the right combination in the right boxes to actually make it work though, which was frustrating.
If you're a regular user of Quicksilver and you enjoy it, you should definitely check out chosr. If you're looking to use your keyboard more and have a few minutes to play with it, then check it out. And if you can change the background, let me know how!
Many people may not have noticed this, but it's impossible to do a global search at Craigslist.org. It sort of makes sense, doesn't it? For most of the public, we'd imagine a global search would turn up useless results, but that only makes Craigslist useful for most of us. What about thoe crazy-curious folks that just need to know all about what's being offered, asked for, etc. around the world?
Marty Orgel submitted to Wired a short-tutorial on how-to do a global search of Craigslist through Google, and it's pretty easy. Just do an advanced search, and in the "Find web pages that have... all of these words" box, type in your search terms. Make sure "directory" is entered into the "But don't show pages that have... any of these unwanted words" box, and type "craigslist.org" into the domain box at the bottom.
The method worked for our global search of "time machine", which turned up 12,700 results from several regions including: New York, Austin, Northern Virginia, and San Diego. Most of them really had to do with a time traveling machine, so, yes, there are several crazy people in the world. Don't worry, though, we're pretty sure many of the listings originated from well-humored teenagers... well, we hope that's the case.
With torrents hiding in all corners of the 'net finding what you want can be difficult. Sure you could go to all the sites that host torrent files one by one or you could use Speckly and search all of them in one shot.
Speckly takes what you're looking for and searches most of the popular torrent sites for you. Speckly further breaks down your search results into categories to help narrow down your results.
In our test we searched for the very popular Linux distro Ubuntu which returned 312 matches. From this Speckly also listed that 198 matches were for the software, 39 for books and 2 for movies. Un-categorized results were listed as others.
Speckly results also lets you know how many" complete sources" (seeders) have the file as well as how long the file has bee online. This all helps in determining the success of retrieving what you are looking for.
All in all Speckly is a great option if you know what you want but don't want to spend the time hoping from one site to the next looking for it.
Attention, law-abiding citizens! If you believe in BitTorrent as a means of distribution for large files, but you're concerned about the claims of piracy that are often associated with it, you should take a look at YouTorrent. Despite having to shut down for a while because of legal issues, YouTorrent is back in operation, with a reported 67,170 torrents that are all legal to share.
YouTorrent is a meta-search that can find verified torrents across a number of popular torrent sites, including Jamendo, Vuze, BitTorrent, Legaltorrents, Legittorrents, Gameupdates, Wortharchiving, BT.etree and Mininova's featured torrents section. With all those sites combined, you can use YouTorrent to search over 6TB of data. This is a very good thing for the torrent community in general, as it shows how widely BitTorrent is used for non-piracy purposes.
Digital and satellite TV stations have given us so many channels to choose from it's sometimes difficult to decided on what to watch. And with the availability of shows on the Internet that decisions has become even harder. What if you could just type in what you felt like watching, maybe something romantic or some dancing and a list of videos that fit your criteria all came to you ready for viewing. If you like the idea of watching videos this way then iSofa may be what you've been waiting for.
In order to use iSofa, simply type in a search string and iSofa will bring back videos that matches your search and displays them in a heads up display type interface. From there you can just let them play in order or pick and choose what videos you want to watch.
The site is clearly in beta as some options only have graphic placeholders instead of actual functions. Also video quality is poor when you have your browser scaled larger than a post-it note, so we wouldn't even recommend you try the full screen option at this time.
Despite the negatives, we really like the idea behind the site and hope that in future versions iSofa increases the video quality as well as include an option to save favorites videos.
So far we like what we've seen and iSofa just might have something here.
More and more TV shows are finding their way online in the form of torrent files. The question is how do you find them? And once you do, how do you keep downloading them? That's where torrent episode downloader, TED for short, comes in.
TED isn't another bit-torrent application. Actually you can't even download a single show with TED. Think of TED as the go to guy between you and your torrent software. You tell TED what shows you want to download and TED will scour the Internet for it and will pass on this information to your torrent application to do the rest of the work.
In addition to single downloads, you can also configure TED to download complete seasons so that once you have determined what show you want downloaded, TED will keep a look out for new episodes.
For the bandwidth conscious crowd TED will also give a brief synopsis of the show so you can determine if its worth the download or not.
Granted there are torrent applications available that have features similar to TED built in, but if you favorite torrent application lacks this then you might want to consider using TED as well.
*Disclaimer: you shouldn't download copyrighted material unless you have permission from the copyright holder to do so.
A few months back, Download Squad's Danny Mendez wrote about Yahoo!'s acquisition of popular Safari InputManager Inquisitor. At the time, Danny was worried that Yahoo's purchase would make the tool unusable with other search engines, but those fears were unfounded, and Inquisitor continues to work well with either Google OR Yahoo.
With torrents hiding in all corners of the 'net finding what you want can be difficult. Sure you could go to all the sites that host torrent files one by one or you could use Speckly and search all of them in one shot.
Attention, law-abiding citizens! If you believe in BitTorrent as a means of distribution for large files, but you're concerned about the claims of piracy that are often associated with it, you should take a look at YouTorrent. Despite having to shut down for a while because of legal issues, YouTorrent is back in operation, with a reported 67,170 torrents that are all legal to share. 
Digital and satellite TV stations have given us so many channels to choose from it's sometimes difficult to decided on what to watch. And with the availability of shows on the Internet that decisions has become even harder. What if you could just type in what you felt like watching, maybe something romantic or some dancing and a list of videos that fit your criteria all came to you ready for viewing. If you like the idea of watching videos this way then iSofa may be what you've been waiting for.
More and more TV shows are finding their way online in the form of torrent files. The question is how do you find them? And once you do, how do you keep downloading them? That's where torrent episode downloader, TED for short, comes in.
