Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Google Blog Search is launched in beta. As long as I stay all over “cyprus” and “leonid” I don’t really mind.

Xtra-Google - The Best of Google on one searchable page.

Xtra-Google is a page with all Google services on the same page. Enter your query in the search box and click on the appropriate service’ button. Optionally, you can have your search results displayed in a new window. This page is a great choice for a start page of your browser.

Most of you probably already know this, but I have just found out myself, so I’ll share just in case some of you missed it too…

Recent versions of Mozilla Firefox have a feature called a search bar. It is usually located to the right of the address bar. By default, this search bar is configured to use Google. That is, instead of going to Google, you can just type your query in that search bar, hit Enter and you will get the search results. This is very convenient and saves a lot of time and clicking around.

Now, if you click o the small Google icon in the search bar, you will be presented with a list of other search engines, that you can use instead of the default Google option. There is also a menu item marked “Add Engines“. If you click on it, you will be taken to this page, where you can find hundreds and hundreds of other engines that you can use. Two that I have been missing the most were Google Images and IMDB.

Check this out and you will most probably save yourselve a lot of time.

P.S.: On Linux, these engines are installed into some global directory, so your Firefox will need root access.

BlogDigger is yet another search engine that uses RSS and Atom feeds from lots and lots of blogs to find information of interest for you. Blogs contains a whole bunch of useful staff these days, so this comes as a handy tool.

It’s interface resembles Google very much. It even has the News section, where you can read the most recent posts.

“The Google Pagerank Algorithm and How It Works” by Ian Rogers is an interesting articles that explains the power behind Google search engine, complete with formulas and examples. This is a must read for everyone who is interested in promoting websites.