Yahoo started to add a new feature to their search results pages called Searchscan which basically informs the user when a website is listed in the search results that has potentially dangerous content. According to Cybernet News three different warning messages are displayed in the search results depending on the dangers that await the user on these websites. One website can be flagged with more than one of the warning messages.

A Dangerous Downloads warning means that the website is serving potentially dangerous software that contains viruses or spyware. Unsolicited Emails on the other hand refers to websites that either send unsolicited emails to users or sell user emails. Sites that are flagged as Browser Exploits will not appear in the search engines anymore.

The options provide a way to change the default Searchscan setting which warns the user from potentially dangerous websites to removing those websites from the search results list or disabling Searchscan altogether.

continue reading "Yahoo marks dangerous search results"

The Internet is a big place with a lot of information. While most of it is helpful, there’s also a lot of rubbish. For example, social networking sites like Facebook can help you find long-lost school friends and keep in touch with them.

Then, there’s Pipl. The site is a search engine. Nothing different about that, you say. Except that you can use the site to search for people. It’s as easy as typing in a first and last name and basic info like state and country of residence. After that, sit back and wait for the results.

The creepy part is that you will actually find very personal information showing up. Depending on the kind of trail your target has left, you can get a list of addresses, telephone numbers, etc. You even come across direct links to profiles on the various social networking sites.

continue reading "Find Personal Information about People"

I recently stumbled upon a very beta Microsoft product called SearchTogether. It will be a collaboration platform in the form of an IE plugin that lets people work together when searching the web.

At first glance from the screenshots, it seems to me that it will be a chat-twitter mix, integrated with IE and Live messenger. I have doubts about the usability of this, since you can collaborate just as well using online messengers. You won’t get web search history, but would that really be necessary? I don’t know, it might turn out awesome, who knows.

The beta download will be available in Spring 2008, so possibly sometime soon, along with a probable revamp of the site a bit since it looks a bit shabby right now, I’m eagerly awaiting Microsoft’s next move against Google, sitting back, watching the fight and getting cool beta stuff along the way is so great!

This article is going to list some of the best Usenet search engines that are freely available. The Usenet is considered by many a dark side of the Internet, something that those who know do not talk about and those who do not know don’t want to know about because it seems utterly complicated to begin with.

The real benefits of the Usenet in my opinion are speed, if you have a good provider that is, reliability and better privacy, because of SSL and no direct user to user connections. On the downside we have the monthly fee, a Usenet client that has to be installed and configured and some time to subscribe to the right groups.

Usenet Search Engines help users find files faster. Most support the nzb protocol which combines all file information in one file that can be loaded into most Usenet clients. Good search engines should support advanced parameters, 200 day records, nzb creation and index most groups, at least the thousand+ important ones.

continue reading "The best Usenet Search Engines"

Way back in February I found a cool tool to browse Wikipedia from the desktop called IndyWiki, so let’s get our hats and whips ready and a take a look at the application.

My first impression was that this is too simple, it doesn’t have any fancy buttons, it looks like it’s lacking some features and I generally got the impression of a quick mock-up program. When I started using it however I found that while some of my initial comments were well founded, the application is surprisingly usable, and at the very least, it provides a different experience than we’re used to.

Basically you search for a term and two things happen. You are taken to the Wikipedia page of the term (or disambiguation page), but the page itself doesn’t load, only the table of contents and the text. While this is happening, images are also loading at the top, which have some relevancy to the term, These images are also from Wikipedia, but not necessarily the same article.

continue reading "IndyWiki a desktop Wikipedia tool"