I was on LifeHacker today in attempt to be more productive with my time spent on the Internet, and I came across a new browser extension called Cooliris. It is great. With this extension you will never have to leave Google again. How? Well, let me let them explain:

Cooliris is a set of free browser extensions that gives you the power to quickly preview the underlying content of links without clicking. Simply rest your mouse over a link and see the content immediately. No more clicking back and forth!

So, you can do all of your searching in Google, or your favorite search engine, and just put your mouse over the link or image that Google serves up. A window will pop-up, if you want it to, and let you see what is contained within a site before you click on the link. Just think of all of the time you will save. It is very useful, and prevents you from having to click on links that are vague or useless. You will eventually have to leave Google, but not until you are 99.99% sure you want to go to the site you are clicking on.

I have got into the habit of posting a lot of reviews about different Web sites and products, so I thought I needed a rating scale for those of you who are more visually gifted. Kind of a quick guide… I will call it the Sweet Scale. The light red being the least sweet, the dark red will be the best product ever. Since the Internet changes daily, and people like to continue to invent new things, the scale will evolve with time. Let me know if it makes a difference in what you do online… I’m thinking this could be like Consumer Reports, but with a cooler name…

Forbes and about 1,000 other news sites today announced that Google is ending its foray into the online answer business. They are attempting to consolidate their services, so that they are more streamlined, and possibly more attractive to investors. What I find interesting is that they are removing a service that is really starting to take off. User generated content is getting huge and will only get bigger. Yahoo! Answers is one example of how the trend can go. They are actually putting “answers” into their search results. This is great. Real people offering real answers in a search result page.

While Google’s product made questioners pay experts for quality responses, Yahoo! Answers, launched in December 2005, is free. Yahoo!’s product gets 24 times more traffic than Google Answers, according to research firm Hitwise. Yahoo! (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ) also integrates answers to user-generated questions into results in its search engine, and has solicited questions from celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and physicist Stephen Hawking.

Maybe Google is planning on doing something else with its mountain o’ cash. Operating system?

Mobissimo looks cool, but it is lacking in functionality that would make the site great. I was looking for travel options for the spring, and wanted to customize my results based on criteria such as airline. It took more work than what it was worth, and the “from” and “to” selector took a lot of time, so did the date selector. I think they have a lot of potentional with their blog and activity search, but in my opinion the basic usability is not at the level of other sites. Indeed.com, would be a good model to follow with their refinement options post-search.

Cool things about Mobissimo:

• Mobiblog - their industry observations
• Activity Search
• Activity Tags - let’s you see where others are going
• MobiChat - chat with others about travel destinations
• MobiDeals - an alert system

One other note, make sure you do not type in mobbissimo.com, it goes to a “travel” site that seems a little shady…

I have been trying to help a friend of mine find a new job using several of the job boards and search engines. We have had little luck. You know how e-mail has spam and search engines have spam. Well, the majority of job boards have spam as well.
Indeed.com, (one search. all jobs) helps cut through the clutter. My friend is looking for a job in financial operations, so we typed in financial operations into Indeed, and received over 2,500 jobs matching those keywords. How does that cut through the clutter? Well, first of all these 2500+ jobs are under one umbrella. No more site jumping. Big deal, right? Well that isn’t the best part. Indeed offers “refinements” on the left-hand side of the results that allows the visitor to easily “refine” their job search. You can refine by job title, company, location, job type and if it is an employer or recruiter posting. It is really cool.

Here is an example search:

• Financial Operations, Houston, TX
• Click Deloitte under company refinement
• Clicked on job title Capital Markets Manager
• Click on job result takes me to Deloitte’s site on CareerBuilder

You have to try it out… if you are looking for a job. If not, tell a friend.

*This post is not paid for, I just like to write about cool things I find on the Web.

Google has teamed up with Global Schoolnet to come up with ideas to reduce global warming. They used Google Docs and Spreadsheets to connect students around to world, so that they could discuss ideas on how to reduce global warming. They came up with 50 ideas, many that are really easy and just plain common sense. We need to stop being so lazy, and implement some of these.

Google recently partnered with Global SchoolNet to invite teachers and students to use Google Docs & Spreadsheets collaborative software in a project to brainstorm strategies for combating global warming. Children of all ages from more than 80 schools around the world participated, and on November 27th we took out a full-page ad in USA Today to put their ideas in the spotlight.

Majority of Consumers Researching Purchases Online

Research done by Performics indicates that 58% of adult shoppers plan on researching and comparing their purchases online before going to the store to buy them.  They also predict that each Monday between now and Christmas will see an increase in sales online. Harris Interactive found that:

“…in a report commissioned by Google Checkout that 40 percent of employed U.S. adults say they’ll be doing at least some of their online holiday shopping from work this year, with one in four of those shoppers logging on to track down that perfect gift on Monday, November 27. “

Why is that? Are we too busy at home during the weekends to shop? Have we become so efficient in our jobs that we have extra time to shop while at work? Is our Internet connection faster at work? (Thank you bossman for my T1… ) Who knows? What is your excuse?

In the spirit of the shopping season, I thought I would let you know about a great FireFox add-on that will let you search over 50,000 merchants from one place. Pronto.com is a price comparison search engine (subject-specific), that allows you to find thousands of different products ranging from electronics and computers to home and garden products.
The cool part and differintiator, is that you do not have to even go to the site. Pronto sits in your browser, and  shows up when you are searching for products on product sites. For example, I was on Buy.com looking for an sd memory card. I came to Kingston 2GB secure digital card page, and Pronto popped up with an option to compare the price of this product at two other merchants. The ironic thing is that Buy.com was not one of the merchants. This is a very helpful service, and the alert is very unobtrusive, nor does it take up a lot of resources when it activates. I am interested to see what merchants will say when their products are not showing up. If Pronto gets the scale and traffic to affect merchants traffic and overall revenue, this could be fun to watch.

MediaPost Publications - A Nostalgic Perspective On Search - 11/24/2006

See how far we have come, and how far we need to go in order to continue to provide relevant results to our customers.  What is the next big thing social search, subject-specific, clustering? Who knows. Whatever it is, it should be fun.

As you may have heard, Goolge is a good search engine that gives relevant results. Right? Google has relevant results? Yes if you think 1,170,000 results when searching for homes in West University Place in Houston, TX is relevant. You just wanted home listings, but instead you get a few home ideas and a bunch of other results of Web sites that have West University somewhere on the sites’ pages. What you really wanted were listings of homes in the West University area.

How can you get these type of “relevant” results? Through subject-specific or vertical search engines such as Zillow.com and Trulia.com. Both of these are real estate search engines that give visitors the listings they are looking for. Trulia, for example, looks at thousands of sites and serves up the listings, so that the visitor does not have to travel to those sites. Once the results come up the visitor can sort by price, bedrooms, bathrooms, square feet and property types. Trulia also offers a lot of other services that are very useful in a home search such as neighborhood guys and pricing trends.
The irony is that Trulia uses Google Maps to show the location of the homes in the listings. With that said, I imagine it is only a matter of time before they are absorbed by Google, and added the search giant’s arsenal of cool tools.

What I find interesting about subject-specific search engines, is that they do not look like the ordinary search engine. Trulia provides a lot of other helpful real estate information besides home listings. I see subject-specific search engines playing a large role in the search industry’s future. The majors have already made movements in that direction, and offer quality vertical search products, such as Yahoo! Finance. There are hundreds more out there.
When you think about it, 1,170,000 results is good when considering the billions of pages indexed by Google. Most likely they are kind of relevant to what you are looking for, but if you have an option to use a subject-specific engine to find exactly what you are looking for, you sould step-out of your comfort zone and try something new with vertical search. It’s the future, really.