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.
As expected, Twitter has purchased Summize, a search engine designed for the micro-blogging service. The pairing seems pretty obvious. While Twitter may have started as a means of individual expression, the service has quickly grown into a repository of news and opinions.
Want to know what people think of the latest blockbuster movie? Just enter the title into Summize and you'll get a whole slew of results. Want to see what people are saying about a politician? Summize can help. The search engine can also help you find other Twitter users who share your interests, making it easy to expand your own social network.
Twitter has launched a new site that looks and works pretty much exactly like Summize, at search.twitter.com. The only difference is that the new site says Twitter and not Summize. If you visit Summize.com, you'll automatically be taken to the new site.
Terms of the deal have not been made public, but Silicon Alley Insider reports that Twitter paid $15 million for Summize. It might have made more sense for the company to develop its own search engine in-house. But since somebody's already done the work, and since Twitter is sitting on a pile of venture capital, an acquisition was probably the easiest way to go.
Google is rolling out a speech recognition tool that adds a whole new dimension to video search. Previously, if you wanted to search for a YouTube video, you'd have to rely on the title and tags. Now you can actually search for spoken text in a video. Well, in selected videos only. Right now the speech recognition is only available in a handful of political videos.
You can check out the new feature by adding the Google Election Video Search Gadget to your iGoogle page. Or you can view the gadget as a standalone page. Just enter a search term and Google will locate videos where the word is uttered. Google will also add little yellow markers to the timeline letting you know where the word occurs.
Google uses speech recognition technology to automatically transcribe the text of these videos and add them to an index. Videos uploaded by politicians to their official YouTube channels are indexed within a few hours.
Google certainly isn't the first site to combine speech recognition with video search. Blinkx and EveryZing offer similar services. But Google is the 800 pound gorilla in both the search and online video worlds.
Want to know what people are talking about on Twitter without actually bothering to go to Twitter? Check out a Twitter-focused search engine. Summize and Twitscoop can both help you answer questions like "does the new Will Smith movie stink?" or "is Nancy Pelosi really trying to ban Twitter from Congress?" But this week Twitscoop rolled out a nifty new feature that makes it even easier to see what people are talking about without typing anything at all in the search box: a tag cloud that's updated in real-time.
The video above should give you an idea of what the tag cloud looks like, but the video capture software slowed our computer down a bit, so imagine the whole thing sped up a bit. As more and more Twitter users enter keywords in their messages, the tag cloud is updated.
Twitscoop's tag cloud should make for interesting reading during a major news event like a presidential debate. But even on slower news days, Twitscoop provides an overview of the conversations taking place among Twitter users. Sure, they're probably not representative of the public at large, but they're certainly representative of something... early adopters maybe?
PlanetEye is a new travel site that uses Microsoft technology and partnerships with third party services like OpenTable and Travelocity to provide a ton of information about in one place. Just enter a destination and PlanetEye will bring up a map with a bunch of dots representing points of interest. Click on a dot to see shared pictures from that location.
You can also click on the hotels, restaurants, or attractions buttons in the sidebar to switch from the picture view to something a bit more useful. Or you can turn off the map and click on the City Guide to bring up a list of places to eat, sleep, and visit.
If you've registered for a free account, you can save information you find on the site to a "travel pack" which you can share with other users or just use as a tool for planning your own vacation.
Flickr has hundreds of millions of photos, and extensive search functions to help you get to the ones you want. But Flickr users, being acreative, discerning bunch, need even more search types. Searching by color is particularly useful for designers, and Multicolr Search Lab, from Idée Inc., delivers it elegantly.
Multicolr searches over 3 million of Flickr's "interesting" images, delivering results that match the colors you specify. It's fast, returning results almost instantly when we tested it out. It's also powerful, able to match up to 10 colors at once. Multicolr is already a designer's dream. Just add a Creative-Commons-only checkbox, and it would be practically perfect.
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.
