Search your way, forget about the big guns. This is the Surfing & Searching group.
Create your own start page in seconds
Lots of sites aspire to be your one-stop portal. But Netvibes gives you enough tools and variety to really make it happen. Tie in RSS feeds, a to-do list, your Web-based or POP e-mail, Web and blog searches, and bookmarks. Feed in music and video from Metacafe, MySpace, YouTube. Then log in and access your page from any computer, giving you a true portable command station wherever you go.
netvibes.com
Use Every Engine At Once
Google owns more than half of all Web searches. But there’s still gold to be found in other engines, so harness ’em all in one shot with Dogpile. The site will remove duplicate results and give you the answers you need, from both regular engines like Google and Yahoo, as well as natural-language sites like Ask.com that look for best answers, not just the sites that have the most links.
dogpile.com
Customize Your Own Search Engine
If you’re tired of seeing pages of irrelevant search results, Rollyo has your solution. The site limits your searches to a special group of Web sites, filtering out junk you’ll never read. Create custom news searches that cull from a select group of news sites and blogs; then share your “searchrolls” with other members of the Rollyo community, or try out some of theirs.
rollyo.com
Get Answers To Burning Questions
You can always ask your buddy a question, but why not leverage the power of the Internet’s hive mind? Yahoo Answers lets you post queries – instantly, in an Ajax-powered window – and Immediately begin to see answers from other members. If you’re in a less inquisitive mood, browse question categories on the side, or earn points by sharing your knowledge with others.
answers.yahoo.com
Highlight and Grab Text from the Web
I-Lighter takes everyone’s favorite marker online and adds a downloadable toolbar and taskbar icon. Use the virtual yellow marker to highlight and save important text. Add notes to your highlights, and then return later to review everything in one shot. It’s a real boon for doing research – and you won’t ruin any books in the process.
i-lighter.com
Get Your Widget Groove On
Realize the power of live information delivered to your desktop by using widgets. Yahoo has more than 4,000 of them, broken down into both useful and time-wasting categories such as System Utilities, News Feeds, Cam Viewers, and Geek Stuff. My favorite widgets include a day planner that ties into Outlook and Callwave’s widget that lets you send text messages from your desktop.
widgets.yahoo.com
Start your own blog for FREE
There are lots of blogging engines out there, but the open-source WordPress gets my vote because of it’s ease of use. WordPress lets you switch themes or templates on the fly, and you can use this tool as your entire corporate publishing platform.
wordpress.com
If you’re looking for a unique template for WordPress, check out my portfolio – I’ll create one for you. Like that little business tie-in huh? heh.