Internet Research

Google informs me that one of the Open Source CMS Search Engines I built a while back now indexes over 18 million pages. Though it's a drop in the bucket next to broad category search engines, it's not too bad for a specialty search tool.

I am well-known to my friends as an information junkie. Information overload? Ha! No such thing. I just need bigger barrels so I can get it into my system. This last week I found two tools that help me manage: PubSub and Great News.

Info junkies are loving the proliferation of RSS technology. If you’ve missed it, RSS is a syndication protocol that lets various content providers distribute their content in a semi-automatic fashion. As a consumer of information, you can subscribe (usually for free) to various RSS feeds to grab the headlines and article summaries as they appear. The system is not glamorous; these are summaries, not full blown articles, but the immediacy and ease of use make RSS a real winner.

Amazon’s search startup, A9.com, has launched a new service called Open Search and it may shake things up a bit. Read on to see how this new open standards search offering works and how it might impact the industry.

A9 is a late-comer to the search engine wars and has always had its work cut out, trying to find a distinction with a difference. Search results come from Google and supplemented by information form theAmazon.com database, the Internet Movie Database and GuruNet. Considering that the results generated by querying A9 are all drawn from other sources, A9 has always been forced to differentiate itself with its feature set.

Authors Calishain and Dornfest are back with even more tips, tricks, and hacks aimed at the Google search engine and its family of related services. Like the first edition, the second edition relies heavily on programming techniques that make use of the Google API. Unlike, the first edition, the second strives to be more egalitarian in its approach, giving much more for the non-programmers in the crowd.

By now you must have heard about the Firefox browser from Open Source champions Mozilla. One of the joys of Firefox is that it is not a “take it or leave it” package of features. Rather, Firefox is expandable and enjoys the benefits of being associated with an active developers community of programmers and enthusiasts who turn out a wide variety of enhancements (called “extensions”) which give you the ability to customize Firefox to your needs.

In the best Research Launchpad tradition of letting you benefit from my extensive (and unfortunately sometimes wasted) hours online, I’ve prepared a quick survey of Mozilla Firefox extensions that are relevant to searchers, and indeed to most any aspiring power surfer:

Amazon Sidebar