Clusty’s New Firefox Toolbar

Clusty, the new search engine from Vivisimo, has launched a new toolbar for Mozilla’s Firefox. What I like about it is the ClustyClip feature that allows you to right-click on a word and open a matching dictionary or Wikipedia entry in a small pop-up window. Doesn’t always seem to work but it’s neat anyway. An … Read more

Plaxo’s Trojan Horse

Was Plaxo just a Trojan Horse into Outlook? Plaxo, the controversial contact management service, never really came clean on how it was going to make money, a fact which has contributed to user suspicion about its motives and its commitment to keeping secure and private all the contact data it handles and stores on behalf … Read more

A New Search Engine, All The Old Issues

In case you haven’t heard, Amazon has launched its own search engine, A9 and a toolbar (for now compatible only with IE) which dovetails with your Amazon account. Supposed advantages over other search engines (here’s A9’s own list): Simultaneously searches Amazon’s book store while searching the web. Amazon book search results, and a history of your … Read more

Dogpile’s RSS Toolbar Is Now Out

The guys at InfoSpace tell me their Dogpile toolbar, mentioned a few weeks back, is now out. It will search the web, search white/yellow pages, block pop-ups (who doesn’t, these days?), run a customized ticker (which includes RSS feeds), and let you search for stuff just by right clicking your mouse. Needless to say, it … Read more

How To Cut A Long URL Short

Nothing that new here, but I thought it useful to point out: A way to turn long URLs into short ones, so you can paste links into emails without them wrapping (and therefore becoming unusable) etc etc. In most cases you just visit the site, enter the URL you want to abbreviate, and hey presto! … Read more