Mediafire was one of the file hosting sites that benefited from the Megaupload take down in January 2012. The site managed to increase its traffic significantly and it appeared as if it would be able to withstand the storm that reached other file hosting sites shortly thereafter. Other file hosting sites frantically started to protect [...]

Some time ago I started to look into Google Search alternatives. This had a number of reasons, from too much noise on Google results pages over deteriorating quality to privacy concerns. I first switched to Bing, the most prominent alternative market share wise. And while it proved to be a solid search engine, especially for [...]

Instagr.am is a popular photo taking and sharing application for Apple’s iPhone. You can basically use it to take snapshots with the phone’s camera and send them directly to sites such as Facebook, Twitter or Flickr. It comes with other social features that make it that more enticing to a crowd that likes to socialize [...]

Ever since Google starting pumping up the results of their search engine with all kind of nonsense – read first and third party advertisement mainly but also other stuff like the unfair favoring of big brands – I have been looking for an alternative. And while I have found it in Bing, I have to [...]

Advertisements are what keeps many of the sites going on the Internet, including the site you are currently reading. As a user, I do understand that too many ads, or ads in the wrong position, or ads that are highly distracting, reduce the user experience. While I rarely stumble upon sites anymore that have their [...]

Google in recent years has started to make many modifications to Google Search, from auto suggestions over live previews to Google Instant. Not every user likes all or even any of those changes which makes those features highly annoying in the eyes of those users. I even know a few who switched to another search [...]

Many search engines are no longer tools that you use to find unfiltered results. Modern search engines like Google Search or Bing filter results for each individual user to display what they think are the most useful results for that particular user. This means that ten people who search for the same search phrase at [...]

Sometimes I’m searching on Google to copy the search results link into another application. This is an extremely frustrating experience as links are manipulated by Google. When you copy a link in Google’s search results you’ll notice that the link target are displayed correctly when you hover the mouse cursor over the link, but when [...]

While testing a new userscript for Google I noticed that the company once again had changed search on their site. I was greeted with a “Welcome to Search plus Your World” phrase at the top which takes search results personalization a step further. When you are logged in your Google account you will get personal [...]

Internet Explorer gives you options to select a default search engine, also called search provider, during the initial setup on first start. You find a list of search providers that are currently installed in the browser under Manage Add-ons. Please note that this guide uses Internet Explorer 9 to walk you through the steps of [...]

I have already talked about Google Verbatim, a new search tool that is currently rolled out for all users of the Google Search engine. With Verbatim, users can search for contents that match their search query exactly. This means no interpretations by Google, no adding of synonyms, removal of words or personalization of the search [...]

One of the stories that dominated tech news yesterday was that Mozilla started shipping a version of the Firefox browser with Microsoft’s Bing search engine as the default search engine instead of Google Search. Some news sites made it look like as if Mozilla dropped Google as the browser’s search provider in favor of Microsoft’s [...]

I reviewed the Personal Blocklist extension for the Chrome web browser back in February of this year. The extension offered to block specific domains from appearing in Google’s search results. Blocked domains and sites would simple be removed from results pages. One of the issues I had with the extension was that alternatives were not [...]

Advanced search operators like the + or – symbols can be used to optimize a search. The – operator for instance makes sure that the term following is not included on pages in the search results. An example for this is the query technology -blog which would only display results that would match the technology [...]

Logged in Google users who do not follow the news as closely as the majority of Ghacks visitors may have noticed that Google started to redirect their searches on google.com from http to https automatically. While that is certainly not a issue on most systems, it could lead to issues on some. If you are [...]

If you have been using Google Search in past years you may have noticed a cached and similar link next to nearly every search result on Google. The cached entry linked to a cached copy of the web page that Google stored on their own servers. The similar link on the other hand listed related [...]

The Bing homepage and the Google homepage have several things in common. They both embed a search form prominently on the page. The page itself has been designed to be almost distraction free. Both pages have something else in common; Media on the page. The Google page displays so called Doodles instead of the standard [...]

Bing just like Google may display sitelinks or authority links underneath the first search result for a certain query. Google recently gave those sitelinks more room which I criticized for being to large for what little value they add to the search results page. Bing basically stayed with the initial design that displays a list [...]

A recent search engine trend is to personalize the user experience. You can best see this on Google Search, where you not only see personalized search results based on previous searches and activities, but also +1′s by friends. If you take ten users and ask them to search on Google Search for the same topic, [...]

So called sitelinks are displayed if a specific search term has an authority site associated with it. If you search for Ghacks for instance, you will notice that my site is displayed at the top. Below the standard listing are the site links, which previously used about the same amount of space as a standard [...]

I have reviewed Google’s Search by Images yesterday and was impressed by the new search feature. The image recognition works extremely well in most cases. Search will still turn out blank occasionally but most of the time you get the information that you wanted to find. Today I’m going to look at different uses of [...]

Searching by image is a new feature of Google Search that was introduced yesterday as well. It basically allows the web user to upload an image to Google to search for it on Google. The search will be on all Google properties, including Google Search and Google images. A search like this can come in [...]

Voice Search is the second new technology next to page prerendering that Google introduced exclusively for Chrome web browser users yesterday on Inside Search. Android smartphone users may already be aware of Voice Search, as it is available for their devices. The majority of desktop users on the other hand are new to the concept [...]

Prerendering is a technology that can speed up web browsing by loading web pages in advance. The advantage of prerendering is an almost instant page loading time for prerendered pages. There are disadvantages though. The average web page has anywhere from a few dozen to more than one hundred links. Prerendering all link targets would [...]

Both Bing and Google are dead serious that search engine users want a search that is more social, that weaves recommendation’s, likes and personal messages into the results. This change is happening right now, as both Bing and Google are already adding social recommendations in their search results. The two search engines may promote results [...]

Bing back in February announced the integration of Facebook likes into the search results. Friend recommendations appeared only on some results pages at that time. This changed yesterday with the roll out of the second stage of Facebook integration. What’s the reasoning behind adding friend likes to the search results? According to Microsoft, it stems [...]

We know that Google is constantly running experiments on google.com. Those experiments are only visible to a subset of visitors to test them before they may go live for all users eventually. The majority of tests make small changes to the search page or result’s listing. Some users may not even notice that they are [...]

You may know that I have switched by primary search engine from Google to Bing sometime last year. I was fed up with Google for several reasons, including their constant push of Google owned properties into the search engine results and the deteriorating quality of search. I suspected that Bing’s quality was not really better [...]

FilesTube is a popular meta file search engine that lets you search file hosting sites for hosted files. It supports a variety of file hosts, from Rapidshare and Mediafire over 4Shared and Megaupload to Filesonic and Fileserve. The search engine is extremely popular, with an Alexa metrics rank of 145 at the moment. When you [...]

Did you know that Google has a labs-like feature for Google Search? Labs-like feature, what was that again? The Google Chrome browser, Google Mail and other Google products offer experimental features to all users. Google is sometimes unsure if a feature should be fully integrated into their product, which is why they are offering them [...]

Instant search results, results that appear before the search engine visitor even started typing, appear to be a relatively new trend that is pushed by search engine companies such as Google, Yahoo or Microsoft. Google introduced its Google Instant feature not long ago which presented auto-updating search result pages to the user. Now it is [...]

I’m not the only one who thinks that search quality has taken a dive in recent years. I do not want to paraphrase the whole argument again, but I believe it is a result of search engines trying to keep the users longer on their “property” and the rise of autoblogs, spam sites and other [...]

The Chrome extension Personal Blocklist was apparently only the first step in Google’s quest for a personalized user experience on Google Search. You may remember that Personal Blocklist was introduced to give Chrome users options to block domain names from appearing in Google’s search results. The domains are simply filtered out of the results, which [...]

Google has turned from a search engine into a jack of all trades. The company started many different en devours ever since its rise to power; Some successful, like Google Maps, others not so like Google Video. Problems related to that became apparent years ago when Google started to include their own properties prominently in [...]

Is social the next search? Rumors about Facebook Search have been spread for years; The data that Facebook’s developers could utilize sounds enormous: Content from more than 500 million users who share loads of contents on Facebook. The obvious benefit in comparison to traditional search engines? The data is user generated. Google or Bing crawl [...]

I love to search for new userscripts on the official website. The owners of the site use Google Search to display search results which in itself is not bad. The one thing that bothered me for quite a while were missing sorting and filtering options. I’d like to see the newest entries on top for [...]

Google is making a lot of changes lately which can partially be attributed to the rising criticism that search quality has taken the dive in recent years. The aim of the latest change that has been rolled out yesterday in the US is to move “more” quality sites to the top of the search results, [...]

The Bing team made an announcement over at the official Bing blog that may be interesting for users who use the Bing United States search engine. Personalized search is one of the latest buzz words, especially Google seems to be pushing it. It basically means that my search engines may be totally different than yours [...]

If you have followed the news lately you may have noticed articles about Bing stealing Google’s search results on all major tech blogs. Lifehacker, Download Squad, Neowin and dozens of other blogs repeated what the original source over at Searchengineland claimed. According to Danny Sullivan’s article Google setup a honeypot to lure Bing into the [...]

Microsoft yesterday made the announcement on the official Bing blog that they have updated Bing’s image search. The feature update includes interesting additions and changes to the image search on bing that improve the user’s options, and make searching on Bing more comfortable than before. A new landing page was introduced that is showing the [...]

When it comes to searching for information, I prefer results from a handful of trusted websites. Limited the results to select web properties only offers several advantages over the standard catch-all approach to search results. Web searchers can be sure that only results from their selected sites appear in the results listing. This improves not [...]

For a few months now Instant Previews has been part of the Google search engine. The feature is triggered with a click on one of the magnifying glasses displayed on search results pages and works from then on on that page just by hovering over a search result. The image displays a visual representation of [...]

Facebook offers a search form at the top of every page. This can be used by logged in Facebook users to find people or groups on the social networking site. Recently the search was improved by adding Bing search results to some user queries. If you search for wine for instance you find Wine groups [...]

Google’s new addition to it search engine, Instant Previews, is getting lots of press since its introduction. Google claims the new feature adds 5% to the search engine users satisfaction, others do not like the feature at all and want to disable it (see How To Disable Google Instant Previews for that). If you have [...]

Google Instant Previews is the latest in a series of improvements that Google has added to their search engine. Instant Previews add a small spying glass next to each page title in the Google search results. Hovering over the spying glass does nothing, as Instant Previews needs to be activated once by clicking on any [...]

Google has not touched their core business search for a long time. Only recently have they started to implement changes to their search engine, that many that it almost feels like a different search engine by now. Features like the search sidebar, instant search, integration of other Google products and a massive increase in advertisement [...]

One of the very first articles on this site was about how to find files using Google. It is still possible to use specific advanced search parameters to find files you are looking for, including music, e-books, games and applications. There is a lot of stuff out there, and depending on the country you are [...]

Mashups. Everyone seems to think that people love mashups. Not really sure where this came from but we have to live with the consequences. Facebook and the Bing search engine yesterday announced a new mashup, that merges Bing search results with Facebook social information. The feature which is going to be rolled out in the [...]

Google Instant Search, which was introduced by Google earlier this month is posed to stay, it appears. I personally dislike the new feature for a number of reasons, including search results pages that change to fast, if you type fast, and the increased bandwidth requirements and having to press a key to accept a search [...]

Google engineers have been experimenting with auto-updating search results for a while now. The new technology basically displays search results as the search engine user types. The new feature is currently rolling out to users on Google domains in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Russia, Italy and Spain, but only if they use [...]