Here’s another whacky trick that Google have quietly introduced, adding to the impression they are fast cementing their role as one-stop portal: Book searching. According to SearchEngineWatch (via the excellent TechDirt), Google Print is an experimental service that “indexes excerpts of popular books, blending the content from these works into regular Google search results”. These … Read more
Search seems to be this week’s Thang. eWeek reports that Groxis is about to launch a new version of its desktop software that can retrieve results from multiple search engines and instantly categorize them. Rather than returning a simple list of results, Grokker 2 groups them into various categories that are displayed in a visual … Read more
At what point does Google stop being a search engine and start being what we used to call a Portal? Or has it already happened? Yesterday it announced a new search feature for tracking shipments via Federal Express and United Parcel Service. Type in your tracking number into Google and it will take you directly … Read more
Not the catchiest name, but Practisearch seems to do a lot of what the Google Deskbar does: Select the text you want to search, press a hotkey, and a Google web page will open already with the search results for that text. It also does other stuff. It costs $20.
Here’s a new way of finding what you want to buy: Ask Jeeves. Ask Jeeves started out as a place you could ask normal questions (‘How long is a piece of string?’) and get answers that closely match your question, culled from the web (‘Want to buy a G-string?’). At least that’s been my experience. … Read more