Selected Search is a new add-on for Firefox that makes it easier to start a search from any page you're on. It works by taking text you've highlighted with your mouse, and then bringing up a small pop-up list of all the search engines you have installed. From there you just pick the one you want and it opens up behind the scenes in a new tab.
Firefox has its own built-in contextual shortcut that does this with whatever search engine you've got set up as the primary. The big difference with this extension is that you can very quickly pick whatever engine you want to search with depending on what you've highlighted.
Selected Search lets you quickly do a search on any text you've highlighted with your mouse.
(Credit: CNET)What I really like about this tool is that you can continue to do all the normal things with highlighted text you'd normally do, including dragging it off into other programs or open windows, or using keyboard and contextual shortcuts to copy. It also does not always come up when highlighting text that's in a form, meaning you can keep it installed without interrupting your usual work flow, however this was hit or miss. It came up on certain form fields, but not in others.
Another tool that does the same thing with a little more visual flair is Drag and Drop Zones, which lets users drag highlighted text into a grid of search engines and keyboard shortcuts. It's a little more customizable, but may be a little harder to learn than this.
Google's Quick Search Box
(Credit: Google)Google has released a new Mac application that lets users search both their Macs and the Web in the same window as well as launch applications.
Google Quick Search Box was unveiled in January, but is now ready for a formal release, Google announced on its Mac Blog. It's a pretty lightweight application that Mac users can use as a universal search tool to find local documents, applications or Web sites featuring a certain term: for example, a query for "Wilco" allowed me to launch my iTunes library of Wilco songs, read news stories about the band, and find images.
It's basically a Googlized front end on Mac OS X's Spotlight search, according to a Web page explaining the difference between Google Desktop and Google Quick Search Box. The main difference between the two Google products is that you can launch applications from the Quick Search Box, which isn't possible in Google Desktop.
Techcrunch noticed that you can also use Google Quick Search Box as a Twitter client, because the world apparently needed yet another Twitter client. It doesn't appear that you can use Quick Search Box to actually do real-time searches of Twitter, however, which was the subject of much of the speculation regarding Google's potential interest in Twitter.
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