Webstagram is a web viewer and search engine for photos taken by Instragram users. You can just dive into the popular or hot listings on the site, or use the search to find photos taken by a specific user or by tag.

Each photo that you see on the Webstagram website actually links back to the Instagr.am website where you can view it in tiny, medium, large or original size. The Webstagram page itself lists comments and likes directly on the page which are also taken from Instagram.

Users can log into their Instagram account to use part of the functionality on the web viewer’s site as well.

The site serves three main purposes. It first can be used by Instagram users for inspiration. Ever wanted to see what the iPhone app is capable off? Look no further than the popular or hot listings on the site.

The second purpose is as an image search engine and viewer, and the third to use features of the service on the website. Instagram users can for instance view the photos that people they follow have taken. They can furthermore follow and unfollow users, use social faetures such as like and comment, or see their own followers and the people they are following.

The search functionality is available to all users, regardless whether they are just visiting or logged in with their Instagram account.

Encryption increased the privacy of the search engine user by preventing people from intercepting the search terms and results.

This did have a consequence though for schools and organizations that relied on filtering techniques to prevent access to blocked contents in their networks.

Google HTTPS search made it possible to bypass some of the filters, schools and organizations reacted by blocking encrypted Google Search. This however did block other Google services that relied on encryption such as Google Apps.

Google, after analysing the situation, decided to move HTTPS search to a new domain to resolve the issues.

https://encrypted.google.com is the new domain for encrypted web search. Administrators can block that domain without affecting other Google services.

Dave Girouard, President, Google Enterprise metnioned that Google is “continuing to explore longer-term options” to “return encrypted search to https://www.google.com without introducing issues with school content filters”.

encrypted google com

Search engine users can still access https://www.google.com/, any search that they perform on the engine is redirected to the new encrypted web search domain.

The Bing team announced yesterday that the layout and design of Bing search has been changed for all users. The most obvious change is a placement change of the Quick Tabs bar. Quick Tabs are links to query relevant search results, e.g. Images, News and Videos, a search filter so to speak.

The Quick Tabs bar has been moved to the top of Bing pages just below the search form and above the search results.

bing new design

Selecting a tab in the results changes not only the search results that are displayed but also the related information in the sidebar. A search for Firefox will display the standard Bing search results for the browser. A switch to the Wikipedia tab displays the Wikipedia entry about Firefox right on the Bing page.

bing search

The Bing developers have also made specific changes to certain types of searches, specifically when searching for entertainment, autos and finance related topics.

Searching for specific songs in Bing displays a Lyrics Quick Tab which, when clicked on, displays the lyrics of the song in the Bing interface.

bing lyrics

Bing has integrated additional information about artists including photos, videos and tour dates that are easily accessible from the Quick Tabs bar. US users will also have access to the five million songs of the Zune library with 30 seconds previews of every song available.

bing songs

Games have been integrated into Bing as well. About 100 different games can be played directly in the search engine, a search for Bejeweled and other popular games yields a Play Now button to play the game directly in Bing.

bing games

Similar additions have been made to TV show and movie searches providing search engine visitors with additional information right in the results.

Auto specific searches now display a specs quick tab that lists vehicle specific information directly in the search engine.

bing auto

Finance searches lastly have been extended by a lot. A click on the Finance quick tab link when searching for finance related information displays heaps of direct information.

bing finance

The Bing search engine is evolving just like Google Search, Yahoo or Ask. The changes should be helpful for a lot of searchers. Some webmasters on the other hand might dislike that trend as it reduces their exposure in those sectors tremendously. Who for example needs a lyrics website if the search engine displays all the lyrics directly?

Search Selected makes the process easier by enabling a global hotkey that will automatically launch a search for the selected phrase. Global hotkey means that search can be launched from any application in Windows where text can be selected.

Search Selected runs silently in the background until the keyboard shortcut [CTRL Shift C] is activated. The tool will automatically launch a search for the selected search phrase in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. The only option that is offered by the program is a selection of search engines including Google Search, Bing or Yahoo Search.

The only aspect of the program that some users might not like is the fact that searches are opened in Internet Explorer with no option to change the web browser. This happens even if Internet Explorer is not the default web browser.

The background process is lightweight and uses less than 5 Megabytes of computer memory. Users who are interested in the software program can download it from the developer’s website.

These search terms are more dangerous than, lets say warez, because most users know that warez can lead to malicious software quite easily while they most likely do not suspect the same from these popular search terms.

The McAfee researches searched for more than 2600 popular keywords examining the first five pages of results across five popular search engines with McAfee’s Site Advisor technology. The top 50 most dangerous search terms in the US were listed in the research paper as well. The phrase “word unscrambler” is taking up the top spot followed by lyrics, myspace and free music downloads.

The researches discovered that lyrics and free made up the two most category-specific risks on the web these days. The research paper can be downloaded directly at McAfee.

The time based search option for example is an exact replica of the feature found in the advanced options. It lets a user narrow down search results by time. The remaining options on the other hand are not the same and can change Google search drastically. The first filter makes it possible to narrow down the search results by type. It is possible to only display videos, forums or reviews.

Selecting a filter will limit the available filters in the other categories. This is however a great way of finding video, forum or review resources in Google. The forum and review filter seems to have the occasional unrelated entry (e.g. a non-forum link in the forum filter) though.

Probably even more interesting is the option to display more text and or images from the pages in the search results. The first option will expand the space of every search result in Google and fill it with additional text from that website. The second will display thumbnail images of images found on these pages. It is only possible to select one filter at a time but they do change the way the search results are presented dramatically.

Lastly there is an option to display related searches, a wonder wheel or a timeline which are also displayed on top or on the left of the search results page.

These filters will remain active all the time until the user changes them again or leaves the Google page. Google managed to add some interesting search options to their search engine which help filter and expand the search results effectively.

Wolfram|Alpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

The goal of Wolfram|Alpha is therefor not to index as many pages as possible. It clearly states that they want to collect and curate objective data only which limits the search range drastically. It shines when it comes to search queries like “weather berlin germany june 3, 1988″, “next solar ecplipse” or “us deficit” although it largely depends on how the search request is entered. A search for “current us deficit” for example will not yield any results at all while the “us deficit” query will display results.

The search engine is in alpha stage and it is very likely that it will improve over time.

Wolfram|Alpha aims to bring expert-level knowledge and capabilities to the broadest possible range of people—spanning all professions and education levels. Our goal is to accept completely free-form input, and to serve as a knowledge engine that generates powerful results and presents them with maximum clarity.

Wolfram|Alpha is an ambitious, long-term intellectual endeavor that we intend will deliver increasing capabilities over the years and decades to come. With a world-class team and participation from top outside experts in countless fields, our goal is to create something that will stand as a major milestone of 21st century intellectual achievement.

It is a Google Killer? No, definitely not. It does however provide better results than other search engines for results that can be computed mathematically.

Every user who is running the Faroo client contributes to the web search engine in two ways. So called words, some would say keywords, are stored on the user’s computer which are linked to websites. If another user of the system searches for those words they will be retrieved from the first user – or another user who is also hosting those words – and send to the user searching for them.

This means that every user has to contribute disk space to the Faroo project so that the words and information can be hosted. The disk space that is provided can be set in the options from 1 Gigabyte to unlimited storage space.

The second contribution of every user is the web surfing. If he visits a new website it will be added to the crawler to keep the index up to date.

Faroo is receiving additional information compared to convention search engines such as Google. Among that data is information like the time a user spend on a website and the users behavior on that site which are factors for the ranking calculations.

Faroo does not keep search logs and protects the privacy of its users. Search queries are encrypted which provides an interesting option for users in countries that like to censor search results.

Every search engine is only as good as its results. Can Faroo deliver the same search quality that Google or Yahoo are offering? Searching for names like ghacks, cnn or microsoft did return the correct results on the first pages.

The quality of two or three word queries on the other hand was not optimal yet and more often than not lead to mediocre results. This can be mainly attributed to the number of users who are currently actively using the search engine.

At the time of writing only 106 users were connected to the system which is obviously to low to crawl the entire World Wide Web and provide results for any search term one might enter in the search form.

If Faroo manages to attract enough users that fuel the engine it could become a contender in the search engine market.

What most users do not know is that Google expanded the service recently offering not only on the fly translations but also translated search results. The new feature is called Translated Search and it works the following way.

The user enters a search term in a language of his choosing, picks his language and the language of the websites that he wants to search. Google will automatically translate the words that the user entered and perform a search on the search inventory that meet the locale requirement.

The search results will be processed and translated before they are displayed on the user’s computer screen. The results are divided into two columns. The left column contains the translated preview of the website and the right the original text.

A click on a result in the left column will load the translated version of the website while a click on the right will load the original version. This feature is excellent for users who want to search in a language that they do not speak.

The default type is comprehensive which means that Google observes everything for the user. It can be changed to video, blog or web related alerts which would exclude the rest of the types. Alerts can be send out once per day which is the default value. That can be changed to once per week and to when it happens which could mean that you get bombarded with emails if you happen to observe a popular term.

A Google account is needed to configure and manage the alerts. The mail on the other hand can be entered freely and does not have to be the Gmail address.

Make Use Of have posted about a service called Feed My Search today which converts Google Alerts into RSS Feeds. That’s definitely convenient to use and highly recommended.