If you’ve never created a personalized homepage, or custom start-up page for your browser, there are a lot to choose from. My personal favorite is iGoogle but Pageflakes looks interesting too. A custom homepages is a place to gather all the news, feeds, email, gadgets, widgets and apps that are important to you, to give you a single place to start your web sessions from. For a closer look at fourteen different homepage services, read Mashable.
Ever need a question answered when you are away from your computer, and only have a cell phone? ChaCha is a free mobile search service that responds to queries asked via telephone or send as a text message (SMS). To ask a question, either call 1-800-2ChaCha or text your question to 242242 (C-H-A-C-H-A on your keyboard). A live person (called a guide) will research your question, and answer via text message.
Google’s Street View is now live at Google Maps for five cities (San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, Denver and Miami) with more cities coming soon. Street View is a 360-degree street-level photograph that has some people upset about privacy concerns. Here, for example, is a view of a San Francisco restaurant I dined at over the long Memorial Day weekend. Google retorts that all photos are taken from public streets, and therefore they are not violating anyone’s privacy. What do you think?
Need a timeline for a school report? TimeSearch is a specialized history search engine that delivers results as timelines. You only need to say what areas (or themes) and time period interest you, and you’ll be rewarded with a timeline of important events with links to related websites and images.
Do you know the difference between a “bebo”, “rebelde” and a “mininova”? Google has just published their list of the top ten searches of the year. If you have any interest in pop culture, you owe it to yourself to explore these search terms: 2006 Yearend Google Zeitgeist .
Many people do not realize that their browser address bar can act as a search engine. For example, instead of a URL, you can enter a search query, such as “Who is Barbara Feldman?” Here are instructions from Google on how to change your default search engine. Of course, these instructions assume you are changing your default to Google (http://www.google.com ) . To change to MSN Search (http://search.msn.com ) or Yahoo! ( http://www.yahoo.com ) just use their URL instead.
How do you teach a computer to categorize and label photographs and other images? Identifying objects in a picture is easy for a person, but very difficult for a machine. A graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University has a found a way to solve the problem by garnering the help of hundreds of thousands of human volunteers. How? He’s turned the challenge into two fun online games. Check them out at ESP Game and Peekaboom.
When you are looking for a single fact or an answer to a simple problem, here are three sites to search in addition to the usual Google and Yahoo. Answers.com delivers definitions and explanations on over one million topics. Amazon.com Search Inside the Book delivers millions of pages from print books. And Wikipedia which is not edited by professional fact checkers, but is still a pretty reliable resource for non-controversial topics.
To improve search results, try using more than more keyword, use quotes around exact text such as the title of a book, and use the “+” sign for important keywords. More search engine tips can be found at Google Help: Search Features and Yahoo! Shortcuts .
Want to get to know your favorite search engines a little better? Try reading their official blogs. Here are a few of the biggest: Google Blog, Yahoo! Search Blog, MSN Search WebLog , Ask Jeeves Search Blog. If you prefer a feed format, all are available in RSS.
