Search Tools
All the recent buzz about the fancy new electronic book reader, Amazon’s Kindle, may obscure the fact that there are other e-readers around such as the Sony reader, and therein lies the rub—of incompatibility. Now there is a website called feedbooks.com that offers us thousands of books in the PDF format that supports your computer’s display as well as these special purpose readers. It seems the most popular download by far is George Orwell’s 1984. You can also contribute your own masterpiece to feedbooks. (Kim Komando)
Can anyone beat Google’s search engine? I doubt it, but a new contender intends to give it a good shot. It’s called Cuil—an old Irish word meaning knowledge—that in most respects is as fast and comprehensive as Google, but is different in that it claims to search three times more sites. Also the results of its search are more readable, each hit consisting of complete sentences or a full paragraph. (Trevetta Wunderlin)
Google has millions of enquiries every day, and being Google, they keep a count of their enquiries. You can see how a search term varies as time passes and becomes less or more prominent, perhaps depending on related news stories. The variations are displayed graphically over the last four years and can be seen at Google Trends. For example, enter the names of your favorite baseball teams and watch how the interest in them waxes or wanes over the years. (St Petersburg Times)
If you are looking for a photo on a particular topic, or are just browsing interesting shots, it’s worth taking a close look at the Smithsonian’s collection. By choosing one or more tag words from the list conveniently provided, you can quickly zero in on images of your choice, then step through them. This is a powerful search tool that will repay time spent in learning its features. (Kim Komando)
Here’s a useful ‘mashup’. Family Watchdog combines information from various state Sex Offenders data bases with maps so you can pinpoint and identify them in your own neighborhood. Enter your zip code and you’ll see who these people are, what their convictions were and where they live. It’s not clear how up to date the reports are, and I couldn’t find that information. Still, be aware. (Les Kizer)
You’re probably familiar with the logos for YouTube, National Geographic and ESPN. But what about All My Faves, where they have gathered together a page full of logos that you can click on to go to the site? Since there are hundreds of logos, the site has gathered them into convenient categories, so you can quickly find what you are looking for. It’s probably the most colorful page on the Internet. (George Lott)
Perhaps you are familiar with clip art of which you can find a ton at Microsoft’s Clip Art site. But the same site also lets you access thousands of sound files that you can attach to an email, for example. You type in a term like “baby” and select sounds from the adjacent drop-down list. Then you can preview and download clips of baby crying, laughing, cooing, talking, etc. (Gary Stanley)
