I moved to Ixquick and liked what I saw in the beginning. It too had the same issues that Bing had unfortunately. Complex search queries usually yielded results pages that would not help me in my research.

I switched to Duck Duck Go about two weeks ago and have not looked back since. Let me start the review by saying that I still have to switch to Google or Bing sometimes to get the results that I want. But that’s true for every search engine. There have been searches where Google could not provide me with results that I was looking for.

What I really like about Duck Duck Go is its simplicity. It is what Google has been a long time ago, a search engine that concentrates on search, and not on shoving advertisement and Google service promotions down the user’s throat.

The search results – often – begin with information at the top that are taken from Wikipedia. It is a quick one-liner that provides you with basic information about the site, service or name. The box links to Wikipedia and the official site, as well as related categories on the Duck Duck Go search engine. You can disable that box in the search settings.

Below the box is either the official site, outlined with a special button for better visibility, or a sponsored link result. This sponsored link is clearly distinguishable from the rest of the results.

Search suggestions on the right can help you redefine the search. For Ghacks, you find suggestions such as software, windows or Google listed there that can be appended to the search phrase with a click.

Search results are not personalized, and users are not tracked when using the search engine.

The search engine offers access to so called !bangs that you can use to redirect your search directly to a supported site.

You can for instance enter !youtube phrase to be redirected to YouTube’s search results page for the phrase you have entered. Hundreds of bangs exist, from searching popular blogs like Arstechnica or Lifehacker over Chrome, Firefox and Opera add-ons and userscripts to software downloads or company websites.

You can furthermore use \ in front of your search term to be taken directly to the first search result.

Interested users can check out the goodies page which highlights some of the advanced capabilities of the search engine. This includes conversions and calculations that you can make directly in the search engine, dates that you can look up and other interesting stuff.
There is also a list of keyboard shortcuts, that include navigating back and forth with j and k, t to go to the top or m to highlight the first result (which you could then open with a tap on the enter key).

Switch To DuckDuckGo in your browser

Google Chrome users need to click on the wrench icon in the upper right corner, and select Settings from the menu that opens.

They then need to locate Search on the first page and click on the Manage search engines button. Locate DuckDuckGo in the list, hover over its entry and click on the Make default button that appears.

Firefox users need to enter about:config into their browser’s address bar. They then need to filter for the term keyword.URL, double click the parameter on the results page and replace the value with http://duckduckgo.com/?q=.

Microsoft Internet Explorer users can head over to the Internet Explorer Gallery to install the Duck Duck go search provider plugin which adds the search engine to Microsoft’s browser.

What’s Missing?

Duck Duck Go does not maintain its own image search engine. If you want to search for images, you can either use a !bang to start the search on Duck Duck Go, or open an image search engine to search there directly.

The search engine does not link to cached versions of a page listed in the results. It is sometimes the only way to access information posted on the site, for instance if it is temporarily or permanently down.

Some searches still require you to switch search engines to find suitable results. My personal experience was that I had to switch engines less often than when I used Bing or Ixquick.

Verdict

I have not looked back yet after switching to Duck Duck Go. It is definitely an improvement over Bing or Ixquick. And while it may not be on pair with Google, it is close enough to justify the switch. I can still switch to Google or Bing if I cannot find a solution or answer in the search engine, which is even easier when using !bangs.

I’d encourage you to try the search engine for a week or so, to see if it meets your expectations. If not, you can still go back to Google or Bing. If it does, congratulations and welcome to the family.

Google’s suggestion to use quotes “” for exact searches works most of the time but not all the time. Even searches in quotes are sometimes “interpreted” by Google. While the search giant may get it right some of the times, they fail at other times. The removal of the + search operator, some say to make way for the Google+ search options that have been implemented in Google Search, has made it even more difficulty to get exact results in the search results. Up until now, users had no real options to force Google to only return results for the query that they typed in.

In particular, Google may make automatic spelling corrections, personalize search, use synonyms and similar terms, searches for words with the same stem and making some terms optional. That’s a lot of manipulation, especially when users want to find exact matches only.

This changes with the new Verbatim search option that is rolled out right now by Google. The new option is hidden in the left sidebar menu and becomes only available after a click on More search tools there.

The feature is being rolled out and will be available to all Google users in the coming days. Webmasters should also take note that Google announced that they will apply “similar ideas directly” to their algorithms.

The Google Verbatim search option is a welcome addition that experienced users will come to like.

Users who want to force Google to search for the exact search term directly can add &tbs=li:1 to the query to do just that.

What’s your take on Google Verbatim? Let me know in the comments. You can read the official announcement at the Google Inside Search blog.

The Remove Google +1 buttons from the search result userscript removes the +1 buttons from all google.com search result pages. The userscript works on all google search domains, including google.com but also country specific domains such as google.de, google.co.uk and google.fr.

The userscript uses a wildcard as the domain extension to include all google.* domains so that it should work on all google-dot-something properties.

Please note that you will still see Google +1 results in the search engines if you or your Google+ friends have recommended a particular site that is displayed.

The second feature of the userscript is the removal of the preview link that is displayed when you hover with the mouse cursor over a result in the results listing.

The removal of the previews in Google search may lead to a problem for users who need to access the cached and similar links that have been placed there by Google (see Where Are Google Search Cached And Similar Links? for all details)

Webmasters and users who need access to those links can install the Resurrect Google Cache & Related links userscript to move them back right to their original positions in the search results.

Removing the Google+ buttons in the search results removes some of the noise that Google added lately to the result listings. The developer noted that the remaining Google+ information (if you or your friends +1′ed a link) are not removed because of performance issues “when Google is using Ajax”. The userscript is compatible with Firefox and Google Chrome.

Are you a Google+ user? If so, what’s your take on the social networking site? Activities seemed to have died off a bit lately, or is that only my impression?

Microsoft has created the Firefox with Bing website to distribute a special version of the Firefox web browser. This particular version of Firefox ships with Bing set as the browser’s homepage, default search engine and search provider in Firefox’s address bar.

Internet users who click on the Get Firefox with Bing button are redirected to a download on the Mozilla website. The download pops up automatically, the download itself is the latest stable Firefox browser version. Users who install the latest stable version of Firefox this way will use Bing instead of Google in the browser.

This does not really change anything else. Firefox versions available for download directly at Mozilla will still ship with Google as the default search provider. And that’s the place where most Firefox downloads happen.

It is up to Microsoft to promote Firefox with Bing, and it remains to be seen if a lot of users will take up Bing’s offer and download the Bing Firefox version from the promo page.

Existing Firefox users can install the Bing add-on for the browser instead to add the same functionality. If you do not want to install and add-on for that, you can head over to the Mycroft Project website instead to pick search providers from the list there.

So, Mozilla is teaming up with Microsoft, and probably rewarded handsomely for it. Some may see the move as a first step to become less dependent on Google, which in my opinion is a path that Mozilla should have taken a long time ago.

You can read the official announced over at the Bing Community blog.

What’s your take on this?

Google users who use the + operator nowadays for their searches will see a notification at the top notifying them that the “+ operator has been replaced” and that they now have to use double quotation marks to search for an exact word or phrase in the search engine.

Instead of searching for technology +news in Google, users now have to use the search phrase technology “news” instead for the desired result.

What if you want multiple exact words or phrases included in your search phrase? Then you need to use double quotation marks for all the terms. Say you want to search for technology and both news and blog included on each of the resulting pages. You would then search Google for technology “news” “blog”.

A Google Rep on the official Google Search support forum confirmed the change.

We’ve made the ways you can tell Google exactly what you want more consistent by expanding the functionality of the quotation marks operator. In addition to using this operator to search for an exact phrase, you can now add quotation marks around a single word to tell Google to match that word precisely. So, if in the past you would have searched for [magazine +latina], you should now search for [magazine "latina"].

We’re constantly making changes to Google Search – adding new features, tweaking the look and feel, running experiments, – all to get you the information you need as quickly and as easily as possible. This recent change is another step toward simplifying the search experience to get you to the info you want.

The question here is if the new method simplifies search. Users now have to use two symbols instead of one to include exact single word searches. It simplifies search if an exact search phrase needs to be included on the websites in the results, as users would have used double quotation marks in this case anyway for the desired result.

Some users on Webmaster World have criticized Google for that move as it can now happen that pages appear in the search results that do not include the exact phrase. While the pages are mostly relevant to the search query itself, it can happen that the exact term does not appear on said pages (e.g. some results for the query “new york train timetable” do not contain that exact phrase.

Webmasters know that Google saves information about every web page googlebot, the company’s search engine crawler, visits. While it was not possible to access the cached link of every website in existence as some did not show up, it was a nice way of accessing a site’s content in case that it was temporarily or permanently unavailable.

Users were also able to access a site’s contents without actually visiting that site. Handy in networks where that particular website was blocked. And the similar link feature was interesting to discover new related websites and services.

Google has revamped the design of the results pages noticeably in past years. They introduced a permanent sidebar on the left linking to specialized searches and advanced filters. The company introduced so called instant previews of every site in the search engines.

Two elements that have been removed in the process are the cached link and similar link. If you visit a Google search results page nowadays you will not find the cached or similar link there anymore. The links are still there but in hiding.

Google has moved cached and similar links to the instant preview area. This is not as intuitive as it may sounds. You need to hover your mouse over a search result to display the instant preview arrows on the right of it. If you now move your mouse over that area you will see a screenshot of how the particular site looked on googlebots last visit.

Displayed near the top next to the page’s title are the cached and similar links. A left-click opens the cached or similar pages in the same tab, a middle-click in a new tab in the web browser.

There you have it. Both features are still there, albeit more hidden and less comfortable to access. (via)

Google as a reaction moved encrypted search to its own subdomain under https://encrypted.google.com/ which seemed to have resolved the issue at that time.

Yesterday Google made the announcement that they will roll out encrypted search for logged in users automatically on google.com. What this means is that logged in Google users will be automatically redirected to https://www.google.com/ from http://www.google.com/. Users who are not logged in can access the encrypted page directly or use the standard unencrypted search page instead.

The core benefit of https over http is that the traffic is encrypted. Encryption means that attackers, employees or the user’s Internet Service Provider (ISP) cannot spy on the traffic that is exchanged between the user’s PC and the Google server. They do not see what a user does on Google.

The very same people do see the properties that users access after leaving the encrypted Google domain, for instance by clicking on a search result. And Google, obviously, sees it all just like before.

Google will roll out the feature for all of the company’s users in the coming weeks. The move to https could become a serious issue for web statistics applications as webmasters will no longer see the search query that their users came from in web statistic apps.

These information are often used to optimize the site for a particular keyword or group of users.

Google notes that webmasters will still be able to see the top 1000 search queries in Google Webmaster Tools. And with the integration of some Webmaster Tools data in Google Analytics, one could wonder if Google is intentionally favoring their own web traffic analysis solution with the move.

Other search engines, Ixquick comes to mind, have been offering encrypted search for some time as well.

What’s your take on encrypted search? (Google Blog, via)

While that’s distracting from the search form, it also is something that is highly popular.

Bing today announced an addition to their search engine’s homepage. Users with HTML5 capable browsers may see a video playing instead of the static wallpaper image.

The developers note that this is not something that Bing users should expect to see every day, but that it will be used regularly in the future. Most modern web browsers (e.g. Internet Explorer 9, Google Chrome, Firefox or Opera) should display the video just fine.

It has to be noted that only the US homepage of the search engine is currently showing the HTML5 video on the frontpage. Users from other countries that head over to Bing need to change the country to United States first in the upper right corner to see the HTML5 video in action.

Bing announced that the videos will be rolled out to international markets in the coming months, so that users from all over the world can view the videos on localized versions of the search engine.

I personally have to admit that it looks really well on the homepage, and that loading times do not seem to be longer than before. I was not able to test the connection on a slower machine. It can be that users connecting with low speed Internet connection may have a different experience.

Microsoft has created a video that gives us a look behind the scenes of the Bing homepage.

Have you seen the new HTMl5 video on the Bing homepage? If so, what’s your take on it?

Bing up until now did not make use of some of those techniques. The company did however announce a new concept called adaptive search yesterday. Adaptive Search basically uses previous searches to determine the best results for a user on Bing. These results are then displayed more prominently on the search engine (they get bonus points so to speak).

The concept is all about ambiguity. Search engines sometimes do not know what you are looking for. Say you enter cars in the search form. You could be looking for automotive information, or the movie cars, or someone with the last name Cars.

Adaptive search looks at a user’s previous searches to determine which results the user is after. Someone who searched for Disney and Cars 2 before may see more information about the movie Cars than about automobiles. The same is true for a user who searched for car brands like Mercedes before, only that this user would see more automotive related results.

Here is a video that demonstrates the concept.

Some users may have privacy concerns. Microsoft notes that the feature can be disabled by turning off the search history on Bing.

Adaptive search has its shortcomings. Lets take the Australia example from the Bing news page. Say you research your next vacation in Australia. You perform a few searches and get all things sorted out. Just before the start of your vacation, you decided to look up the movie Australia to watch it before the trip. If you just enter Australia, you might end up with no movie information whatsoever. You can counter this by searching for Australia movie obviously.

What’s your take on Adaptive Search?

To get to the password page, you need to enter the phrase “password of xx characters” where xx is the length of the password that you want to generate.

Wolfram Alpha then displays a random password, its phonetic form and additional passwords in its interface. The password uses alpha-numeric characters by default. You can regenerate the passwords if you like with a click on new password.

Probably the most interesting information on the page is the time it would take to crack the password. It would for instance take up to 165 quadrillion years at 100,000 passwords per second to crack a 16 character password.

You can click on the specific password rules link at the top of the screen to allow or disallow specific password rules. Allowed by default are upper and lower case letters, numbers and similar characters. Disallowed are special characters. If you add special characters to the mix you increase the time it would take to brute force the password by a lot.

It is obviously possible to change the character count, which is handy as some applications limit the password length to six, eight or twelve digits.

The password generator at the Wolfram Alpha site can be handy in situations where you need to come up with a secure password but do not have access to a software based password generator. This can be the case on your computer at work where you are not allowed to install third party software.

Have you used Wolfram Alpha in the past? If so, what did you like, did not you like about it?

One would assume that search engines like Google or Bing had the tools to distinguish between original and copy and act accordingly. This unfortunately though is not always the case.

These sites often rank for long tail keywords which drive some traffic from the search engines to the sites. And since the majority of them runs Adsense ads, they make a pretty penny from that.

It is bad enough that those sites can copy and paste contents automatically on their blogs and earn money from it. Even worse is the fact that the process of setting up a new scraper site does not take more than ten minutes tops, and with automation even less.

So called auto blogs have been a trend in recent years in the Black Hat communities.

Some legit webmasters even experience something that they should not: A scraper site outranking the site where the article was published originally.

The search engines leave webmasters who experience the issue more or less alone. They basically ask the webmaster to fill out DCMA requests and send them to the scraper sites. Problem here is that many use proxy hosting or other forms of obfuscation so that it is not possible to contact the webmaster directly. Plus, webmasters usually deal with multiple scraper sites which leads to a never ending cat and mouse game, especially if you take the easy set up of new sites into account.

Webmasters have criticized Google in particular for this in the past, considering that Google could identify the majority of domain owners easily through their Adsense program as the majority of scraper sites uses Adsense for monetization.

Google recently asked webmasters to report scraper pages to them. The data will be used to test and improve algorithms that target those scraper sites.

Webmasters can submit scraper sites on this web form.

It is about time that Google puts an end to this practice, especially since the company’s recent drive to promoting “quality” sites in their search engines.

Here are several good resources for webmasters who want to do more than just reporting.

How to deal with content thieves
How to deal with content scrapers
Report Spam To Google

If you are a webmaster, what’s your experience with scraper sites?

Google today announced that they have modified site links. When you now search for Ghacks in the Google search engine, you will notice that the site links use up a lot of space. On my 1920×1200 resolution and a maximized window, that’s about two thirds of the screen.

Here is a screenshot of Google’s old sitelinks layout for comparison.

Why has Google made the decision to change the sitelinks layout? The Webmaster Central blog lists four reasons: Visibility, Flexibility, Clarity and Quality.

• Visibility: The font size of the link text has been increased. Both the url and the first free words of the description added.
• Flexibility: Sitelinks are now query dependent, and the maximum number of sitelinks has been increased from eight to twelve.
• Clarity: Sitelinks and standard search results are now separated, which means that a sitelink entry will not appear in the general search results and vice verse.
• Quality: Google with the update has “combined the signals” used for “site links and ranking”.

I personally think that Google went a bit overboard with the new sitelinks design. It takes an extreme amount of space. Both the description and url information are more or less useless, considering that you won’t usually see the full url or more than the first five or six words of the description on the search results page.

I’d rather like to see options to customize the layout. For my site, I’d remove the descriptions completely and start the urls after the domain name, as it should be clear that results come from the same domain (with the exception if a subdomain is listed of course).

Another thing that I think is missing is the ability to pick your own links for the sitelinks. Google picks them automatically, and your only option of influencing the listing is by demoting urls in the Webmaster Tools. First, that is no guarantee that the link won’t show up as a sitelink anymore, and second it does not guarantee that a better link is picked by Google’s algorithm.

For my site, I’d really like to add more categories and get rid of the articles that are displayed. That’s however not really possible.

You find more information about Google’s new sitelinks at the Google Webmaster Central blog. Have you encountered the new sitelinks in Google’s search engine yet? If so, what’s your opinion?

More recent updates made some sites recover while others still would not return to their previous rankings. The core problem with Panda was that Google did not release a definition of quality. And if you ask one hundred Internet users about their definition of a quality website, you will likely get one hundred different answers.

Google first rolled out Panda to websites in the United States, and there only to English sites and queries. A later update launched Panda for all English speaking websites regardless of their location in the world. Today’s announcement at the Google Webmaster Central Blog marks the next step of the “high-quality sites algorithm” as Google likes to call it. Panda is now used on non-English versions of Google Search as well, with the exception of the Chinese, Japanese and Korean language versions.

According to the information posted, Panda will affect between 6 to 9 per cent of all queries “to a degree that a user might notice”. That’s lower than the initial 12% of affected sites of English queries, but still a considerable amount.

With Panda out in the open almost everywhere: What is your personal impression of Google’s search engine quality as of late? Has Panda improved the results significantly by pushing down lower quality sites? Or did you experience a decrease a value, something that might even have made you use another search engine?

Let me know in the comments.

Sometimes though you wait and wonder why the darn page is not in the index right now. This can also be a problem for an established site, for instance if you have changed content on a popular post or on your site in general. You’d like to see the new contents indexed in the search engines which usually does not happen right after you have hit the save button.

Google has now announced that they have added an option for webmasters to submit their urls to the search engine in Google Webmaster Tools.

The existing Fetch as Googlebot feature in Webmaster Tools has been improved with a submit to index option which basically allows you to submit the fetched url to Google for evaluation and inclusion in the index.

Here is how this works. Open Google Webmaster Tools and follow the Diagnostics > Fetch As Googlebot option in the left sidebar. You have to select the right domain first, of course. You need to add it if it is not already listed in Webmaster Tools.

You need to enter the url that you want to crawl. This can be a website’s homepage, a subpage or any other page that is publicly accessible on the Internet. Click Fetch to retrieve the site as Googlebot. This process may take between a few seconds to a few minutes. Once done you get a status report on the same page and an option to submit to index.

You get a prompt first where you can select to submit only the single url or the url and all pages that it links to.

Google currently has a limit of 50 individual page submissions per week, and 10 page with all linked pages submissions per week. The numbers are shown on the Fetch as Googlebot page.

Google has revamped the public Crawl URL form as well. The core difference besides the captcha is that webmasters and users do not have to verify ownership of the page or site to submit it to the index.

The new Submit to Index feature is handy for webmasters who have troubles getting their website or a specific part of that website indexed in Google. (via)

What’s the reasoning behind adding friend likes to the search results? According to Microsoft, it stems from the fact that the majority of people may delay decisions until they have asked a friend for advice.

Bing tries to speed up the decision making process by combining standard search results with the likes of a user’s Facebook friends and likes of all Facebook users.

The decision delay can be shortened by combining the technology of Bing with Facebook, to incorporate the friend effect into search. Bing now uses the interests shown by friends on Facebook to deliver a personalized search experience. With more than 30 billion pieces of content shared each month on Facebook alone, there is power in the collective know-how of the Web, and Bing is the first search engine to harness this information in a useful way.

So how does the integration look like on Bing search results pages?

Likes are displayed beneath individual results on Bing. Webmasters should take note that Bing may promote results to the first page if friend’s have liked them, even if they would not be on the first page of results for the query otherwise.

The Facebook integration does not stop here as Bing will make use of Facebook likes to present the searcher with popular sites and messages from companies and brands that match the query.

For example, when planning a vacation and searching for a rental car, Bing will show recent Facebook posts alerting people to a new deal at the top of the results.

Facebook has been integrated in other areas as well. If you search for a city for instance, you will see who lives in or nearby. Other features include flight deals that lead directly to company offers on Facebook and shared shopping lists for your local area.

Here is a video that visualizes most of the features:

<br/><a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-us&#038;vid=243216f7-9941-4f48-a2d0-2065e06a47b5&#038;src=SLPl:embed::uuids&#038;fg=sharenoembed" target="_new"title="Facebook Friends Now Fueling Faster Decisions on Bing">Video: Facebook Friends Now Fueling Faster Decisions on Bing</a>

Criticism

Liking a website does not really give you the reason behind that like. What are some of the reasons behind a like? A friend may have done business with the site, may like the design of the site or the product offered. It may also be that the site was liked because your friend was paid to like it, or that it was liked because another friend liked it.

You basically cannot tell from a like why it was added by a friend.

Another aspect to consider is the trust you put into your friend’s likes. If your grandparents liked a hotel in Florida, does it mean that you will like it as well? What about book recommendations. All your female friends recommend the latest Harry Potter, does it mean that you will like the book as well if you are male?

There is a lot to consider about individual likes before you can make the decision if it will aid you in your decision making process.

Disable Bing’s Facebook Integration

You can disable most “Friend Effect” features by being logged out of Facebook when searching on Bing. You furthermore need to make sure that you have not linked Bing to Facebook on the Bing page.

You still get general Facebook recommendations but not personal ones.

<br/><a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-us&#038;vid=d4847c17-86be-449f-89da-bc5ad973d7ce&#038;src=SLPl:embed::uuids&#038;fg=sharenoembed" target="_new"title="Bing Puts User Control at the Center of Search Experience">Video: Bing Puts User Control at the Center of Search Experience</a>

You can find out more about that at Bing’s social site.

Closing Words

All major search engines are integrating social results into the search results. That should not be a problem as long as they offer options to block the results from showing.

What’s your take on the friend effect and social integration into search in general?

I suspected that Bing’s quality was not really better as that of Google, but I wanted to make a point, and thought it would be interesting to see how I would do with Bing as my main search engine.

When I say Bing I think of an English search engine. Yes, Bing has localized sites but the results there are not good at all. That, and Microsoft’s obvious concentration on the US market forced me to switch to localized Google search engines for many non-English queries.

Bings English results are not as bad as many Internet users might think they are. Plus, it has some features that Google does not have. What I really like is that the official site is highlighted on Bing search results.

The association that the first entry on the search results page is always the official site is not always correct, and this may help users distinguish between official sites and unofficial ones. It is on the other hand brand related, Ghacks for instance has no official site listing on Bing.

I also like that there is generally less advertisement and Microsoft properties on search results pages. Yes, there are some queries where you see ads all over the place plus links to other Microsoft properties, but most pages are cleaner than Google’s.

The quality of the results depends highly on your searches. I’d generally say that Bing displays less splogs (Spam Blogs) and exact keyword domains with thin content in the results. This may be because most sites like those tend to concentrate on Google when it comes to SEO.

For some searches, I had to switch to Google after searching on Bing for a while. This can be mainly attributed to Google’s time filter which Bing only displays on some results pages and not all.

I personally like the time filter a lot, especially on searches where “old pages” are shown on the first search results page. This happens for Windows troubleshooting searches a lot. You search for something and see that only Windows XP or Windows 2000 results are shown, even though you are looking for Windows 7 results. Adding Windows 7, or other descriptive terms helps sometimes but not always. A limit to display only search results of the past year does wonders to the results though. This has helped me more than once, and I consider it essential.

The biggest factor that is holding Bing back in my opinion is the concentration on the US market. Sure, it is Microsoft’s home market, and concentration on a single market works for other search engines, Baidu anyone, very well. But Microsoft wants to compete with Google and not Baidu, which means that they have to improve the results on their localized search engines and the features on those search engines to compete with the almighty Google (Google has a market share of 90%+ in many European countries, which makes me wonder why the EU never stepped in here.)

I do about 80% of my searches on Bing nowadays, and the remaining 20% on Google. I usually switch to Google if the Bing results do not turn up the right results, or if I want to use a localized search engine. Bing’s results have improved over the course of the year.

Have you tried Bing?

When you open the Filestube page for the first time you see lots of links on that page. At the top, you find a small bar with account related features and options to display videos, games, lyrics or software directly in the results listing.

FilesTube’s core is the meta search engine that is placed prominently on the homepage of the service. A click on search will search all supported file hosting sites for files of that kind. You can use the filter list to limit the search to specific file extensions, or switch to the advanced search interface to add other filters like file sizes, dates or hosting sites to the search.

The file search result’s listings lists the number of results returned for the search query. A sidebar is available to filter or redefine the search. It is for instance possible to only display search results from particular file hosting sites, or sort the files by popularity, date or size instead of relevance.

Results are displayed with detailed information, ranging from the file’s name, size and upload date to the file hosting site that it is stored on.

A click on a file opens another page on FilesTube that can be used to click through to the file host that is hosting the download. The page has lots of buttons and other stuff that make it difficulty for inexperienced users to find the right download button.

One interesting feature of FilesTube is the ability to create RSS alerts for file searches. Say you always want to be informed if a new file of that type is uploaded to a file hosting site, or that you have not found what you were looking for and want to be notified if that particular file that you are looking for is uploaded to one of the file hosts. Then RSS feeds are your best option to monitor file hosting sites for uploads with that name.

One of the biggest user complaints regarding FilesTube is the messy look of the site, with ads and sponsored links placed in close proximity of contents.

You can register an account with FilesTubes which is completely free and comes with benefits like a download history or making and managing file lists. The site appears to be fully usable without an account though.

Other Features

If you look hard enough, you find other useful features on the Filestube.com website. Trends is one for instance. It displays the top 320 searches of the actual day, or a specific month. That way you can determine what’s hot and what’s not in a heartbeat, at least when it comes to file sharing trends.

You obviously find the usual assortment of always of high interest searches related to pornography and celebrities, but also current hot topics which usually are about tv shows, movies and music.

Another, seemingly new service is groups, which can be used by FilesTube account owners to create groups that they want to share with other users. Those are basically compiled and sorted lists of files that users have discovered on file sharing sites.

FilesTube Video

FilesTube.com Search Tools

The following section lists tools, for instance browser extensions or userscripts, that improve the experience on FilesTube.

• Filestube.com Cleanup [userscript] – Removes all advertisement and sponsored links from the Filestube.com website.
• FilesTube.Clean Redux [userscript] – Removes all page elements, including ads and sponsored links, that most users do not want to see on the Filestube website.
• The Cavern Links Checker [userscript] – Checks for working links on file hosting sites before you visit the file host site itself.
• FilesTube [Firefox Add-on] – Adds FilesTube as a search engine provider to the list of Firefox search engines, so that you can search directly from the Firefox interface.
• JDownloader [all operating systems] – Universal file downloader that makes the downloading of files from file hosting sites more comfortable.

Closing Words

FilesTube has a surprisingly high rating at web reputation services like Web of Trust. It ranks as excellent for trusthworthiness, reliability and privacy there, only Child Safety is rated as unsatisfactory which can be attributed to the semi-direct access to porn on the site.

The service has been recently in the news as Yahoo began to block FilesTube links in Yahoo Messenger.

Many of the pages have in common, that they display different results for search engine visitors, and visitors who do not come from search engines. This is relatively easy to do by checking the web browser’s referrer value.

The new Firefox add-on Search Engine Security protects users from some referrer based attacks by changing the referrer of the web browser when coming from search engine pages. The extension supports Google, Bing and Yahoo currently.

It basically displays a different referrer than the one it should display. The effect depends largely on the attack site. Users may circumvent attacks if the site checks the browser’s referrer to display a harmless page to non-search engine users.

While that’s obviously no 100% protection against these kind of attacks, it is another layer of protection.

The extension works on the default search engine domains and localized search engines. Zscaler SES on or off is displayed below the search form to indicate if the add-on is enabled on that particular search engine.

Search Engine Security can protect Firefox users from redirect attacks that load fake antivirus pages, videos or other malicious contents. Firefox users can download the extension from the official Mozilla Firefox add-on repository.

You can disable the add-on on for a specific search engine in the options. Here you can also add sites to a whitelist, which may be happy if a legit website checks referrers and displays different contents based on those. Lastly, it is possible to add or change the referrer itself in the preferences.

The question recently came up if it is possible to change the right-click context menu search engine from Google to another search engine. After some tweaking and testing, I found out that it is directly tied to the default search engine in Firefox.

Please note that there are two default search engines in the browser. First the search engine that is used when you enter text in the address bar of the browser, and then the search engine that is used when you use the search form to search on the Internet.

Firefox opens a Google search results page when you select search Google for from the Firefox right-click menu. The search engine context menu entry is linked directly to the search engine of the search form in Firefox.

When you change that default search engine, you change the search engine of the right-click menu as well.

The search form in my version of Firefox is hidden, and I’m sure that I’m not the only user who is only searching via Firefox’s address bar. You need to unhide the search form and switch the search engine in that form to change the right-click context menu search engine as well.

This is done by selecting View > Toolbars > Customize, and dragging and dropping the search engine to a toolbar of the browser.

There is no option to quickly change between search engines, especially not if you hide the search form by default. The Firefox add-on Context Search comes to the rescue. It can be used to select one of the installed search engines directly in the Firefox right-click menu.

The extension displays all installed search engines in the context menu, handy if you regularly switch between search engines in the browser.

So what’s the best way to deal with search engines that do not provide the information you need, even if you know how to perform advanced searches?

Right, you create your own. I’m not saying that I did program a new search engine though; It is merely a custom search engine based on Google that concentrates on the best tech sites in the world.

You can access and try the search here http://www.ghacks.net/search.htm and I’d love to hear your thoughts about it, especially:

• Are sites missing from search that you believe should be included?
• Are sites included that do not belong there?
• Would you like to see additional features?
• Would you like to see other design elements, more design elements?

Please note that the search engine is no replacement for Google Search, Bing Search or Yahoo, Ask and other search engines. Let me give you an example why:

If you search the custom search engine for eBay you won’t see eBay at the top. Why? Because it is not included in the list of sites. If you need a search engine to find eBay you should stick to the standard search engines.

A list of tech sites that are included in the search engine is available here as a Excel document: tech-sites

What you will get results for are related searches, best eBay sniper software, firefox 4 changes, ipad 2 reviews, windows 7 service pack 1 download, windows troubleshooting tips, computer repair and so on.

If you are looking for tips and tricks, best practices, gadget and software reviews, freeware and everything else that makes tech great, then this search engine is right for you. You won’t find low quality results in the mix, no scraper sites and no spam and ad infested sites.

I’m sure that the search engine needs refinement, new sites that I missed to add, more controls and the like. I did have to start somewhere and this is it. You can test if your favorite tech site is included with a site:domain name search, e.g. site:ghacks.net.

Oh, and don’t forget, let me know what you think. Here is the link again: Tech Search.