March 20, 2009, Vol. 3, Issue 5

You know how we love cool new tools. Anything we can find to make our lives (and yours, of course) even easier. The good news is that those crazy techies are continuing to develop new ways to make finding that one fact you need even easier. So we decided to make this issue focused on just a few of the new tools that you really should check out.

Social Media Quick Search

Tusavvy is a new service offered by zSoup. (Where do people come up with these names?) It’s a new social search engine – we just can’t get enough of those!  Tusavvy uses tags, rankings, interests to determine results – they say something about “socially annotated web data providing concise results using a lexicon built by tags, and rankings selected by social factors like the user’s accumulated interests” but really all you need to know is that it works pretty darn well.  It’s in public beta now and you can register here.

Now where can I find that PowerPoint?

DocJax is a search engine for documents, and works by allowing you to search documents and e-books from across the web, preview them, and even download them for free. It lists all top document results from Google and Yahoo, searching for all popular document formats (PDF, DOC, XLS and PPT). You can even limit the format to be searched (like only searching for PDF files). And while you can find and download documents and e-books, please respect copyrights. (But you knew that.)

Where’s Waldo?

Imagine your blog post is almost done, but you need a picture of a cat with a harmonica. (Well, the cat could be named Waldo, couldn’t it?) Why not check out CompFight? Compfight is not affiliated with flickr™ but makes good use of the flickr™ API to find images. You can search with tags, text or both, and even use the creative commons filter to find commercially usable images, or only original images. Picture that!

What’s new?

My cousin said she’d heard about a story discussing the biofuel industry in Mozambique, but she couldn’t seem to find it. Try Newssift, a new news search tool (try saying that 10 times fast) from the Financial Times group! Now in beta, this site is a unique search tool that indexes millions of articles from thousands of global business news sources. It’s a nifty vertical search tool, and its searches are based on meaning and relationships, giving you some serious relevance. And the article my cuz was talking about was in Mother Jones. You can read it here.

TTFN

We hope these keep you busy and make your searches more rewarding. Until next time, when you can spare us another three minutes, we wish you Happy Searching.