Search Tools
If you’ve surfed the web a lot, you’ve probably accumulated very many favorites, in folders and sub-folders. To help you find favorites that may be buried a few layers deep, try installing the Dzsoft Favorites Search engine, which is a free download. It expands all folders and files whose name or URL contains the keyword you enter. (Neat Net Tricks)
At Google’s Zeitgeist page, they count keyword inquiries in many categories and rank them according to frequency. So, according to them, the world’s most popular athlete is David Beckham. David who? I hear you ask? (Beckham is a football star in the UK, hero worshipped throughout the world.) Similarly find the top ten men, women, movies, TV shows, destinations, and news stories of the year. You can also see how some of these top lists vary by country: USA, France, Germany, Japan and UK. (Seann Alderking)
They say a picture is worth a thousand words — or at least, a graphic is. Another interesting attempt to present the results of a search in a more compelling way can be found at KartOO. Rather than trying to describe it, I suggest you visit the site of this meta search engine, key in your inquiry and sit back and relax for a few moments. You’ll immediately get a good intuitive understanding of what’s best among the results, but to get the very best from them, click the Help button. Requires Flash. (Neat Net Tricks)
The Open Directory Project is “the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors.” What that means is that for a given topic, say baseball, a human editor maintains an index of subtopics, say from Amateur to Youth. Within a subtopic he lists a series of links each introduced by a sentence or phrase. He is committed to listing only “the best” links and proudly keeps them up to date. (David Henry)
In the early days of the Web, Yahoo! came up with a widely imitated, user-friendly way of searching, with its multi level indices. Now a librarian has done the same thing at Digital Librarian, but with the professional’s thoroughness and comprehensiveness. This easy to use directory surely will help you locate practically anything you want on the Web. (Net Surfer Digest)
It looks like Google has done it again, this time at its (beta-) Image Search site, where you enter your keywords as usual, but get back a page full of thumbnail images, mostly photos. You can then see the full sized image in isolation, so to speak, or in the context of its website. They claim to have 150 million images available as of July 2001. (Net Surfer’s Digest)
Google also brings you expertise on practically any keywords you enter, through the medium of the old Usenet. Just visit its familiar interface at Google Groups, also in beta (7/01). While you are about it, visit also the new Google Zeitgeist – The most common search queries, trends, and surprises according to Google. (Tourbus).
