Tuesday, May 31, 2005

Want a Mac ...uhm.. Google Mini?

Mac Mini, Google Mini, Mini Cooper? Actually, I'd take all of them :)

The Google Mini comes in blue and it's yours for ony $2.995,00

http://www.google.com/mini/

Testing LostGoggles 1.5 with Google


google-is-sorry
Originally uploaded by butterseite.
Testing LostGoggles means that I spend most of my day between GoLive, different browsers and search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN and A9 these days - hint, hint).

Google obviously doesn't expect a human to make ~1000 queries in a row.

Well, Larry & Sergey... greetings from the the LostGoggles QA department :)

Tuesday, May 24, 2005

bookaboo finds better prices while you shop

If you like LostGoggles, you'll probably also like my newest extension, bookaboo. It adds a small price comparison window (not a popup) to online book stores and shows you the best prices from various merchants like Amazon, Textbookx, Overstock, etc.

It's free: http://bookaboo.org

Sunday, May 22, 2005

Kids prefer to search visually

A friend had invited me to dinner the other day; she has a 12-year old daughter who - of course - knows how to use a PC, and who - of course - know how to google for information about her favourite TV shows.

The interesting thing is the way she uses Google: she only searches in Google Images. She obviously doesn't care (nor know) that Google Images covers only a tiny subset of the actual Web search, and that she probably won't ever see the best content that's available for Charmed. It doesn't bother her at all, because "text is so boring".

(This was, BTW, it first time I would have preferrd a PC with NetNanny; she was also searching for "Beyoncé" and the results were not always what we would have expected ;) )

Of course I installed LostGoggles... let's see if she changes her Googling habits :)

Friday, May 06, 2005

Faster Google thumbnails with Google Web Accelerator

I've noticed that thumbnails seem to appear more quickly when using Google Web Accelerator.

For the technically interested, this effect has to do with the way proxies and caches work: Web Accelerator caches LostGoggles code, and in addition, it also pre-fetches the Google results, making the total experience much smoother; LostGoggles thumbnails (or placeholders, at least) appear almost instantly.