Search

Remember back in July when Ask.com told us the company would “soon” be launching a tool that would let you automatically erase your search history to protect your privacy? Yeah, well soon is finally here, 5 months later.

The world’s fourth most popular search engine has officially launched AskEraser, the most aggressive search engine anonymizing tool we’re aware of. All you have to do is click the little AskEraser button at the top right side of the screen. A window will pop up asking if you’d like to turn on AskEraser. Once enabled, Ask will no longer keep records of your search terms or place cookies on your computer.

AskEraser works with the service’s web, image, video, maps, news, blog, and local search engines. The feature is not retroactive. If Ask.com already has your search history, it won’t disappear just because you turn AskEraser on today. But the site will “forget” your data after 18 months.

Now for the funny part. AskEraser will remain on until you click the AskEraser button again to turn it off, no matter how many times you visit the web site. How does the search engine remember your preferences? By placing a cookie on your computer that lasts for two years. Yeah, it’s kind of ironic, but the alternative would be requiring you to click the button every time you visit the site.

[via Search Engine Land]

Mapquest has added a few features to its gas prices page, including a calculator that will let you figure out how much your next road trip will cost you. Mapquest has allowed users to look up gas prices at nearby filling stations since last year, but now you can take the number, plug it into a calculator, enter you car’s mileage and get a decent estimate. We know you could do the same calculation in your head, but why waste the brain cells when you don’t have to?

Mapquest has also added alternative fuel stations to its listing, making it easy to find a place to fill up with biodiesel, ethanol, compressed natural gas, hydrogen, propane, or liquefied natural gas.

Sometimes it’s hard to find what you’re looking for online. You go to Google, type in your search terms, and a few million results pop up. How are you ever going to find what you’re looking for that way? Sure, if your search terms accurately described what you were looking for, the top results should be relevant. But sometimes it’s hard to find the right search terms.

That’s where SortFix comes in. You can use this site to search Google, Yahoo! or DMOZ. After you enter your search words, SortFix will show your results on the lower half of the screen. On the top you’ll see a list of associated words. You can drag words that are relevant to the “Add to Search” box and the words that you want to ignore to the “Remove” box. Click Search again and you should get more accurate results, plus some new terms that you can add or remove.

Overall, you probably spend a little longer looking things up using SortFix than you would if you just went to Google. But in the end you might get more relevant results. Check out a cute little demo video showing how to search for homemade ice cream recipes after the jump.

[via Go2Web2]

The Guardian reports that Google is in talks with Simon Fuller, the man behind Britain’s Pop Idol, America’s American Idol, The Spice Girls, and a whole bunch of other sugar-coated pop icons. Although these talks have reportedly been going on for the past year, it’s not clear what, if anything Google and Fuller are planning, other than the fact that it will have something to do with TV.

So here our are top guesses:

1. Who can count to a Googleplex? - a game show where contestants have to count out loud to see who can go the longest without eating, sleeping, or losing their voice.
2. American searcher - a talent show where 10 contestants go in, and at the end of 10 weeks, the person who can perform the quickest, most accurate searches wins ummm… something that they’ve been searching for.
3. Dancing with Google AdWords - A weekly dance-off competition not unlike those you may have seen elsewhere, but Google gets to insert the ads.
4. Lost… and Found - a short run miniseries that shows how quickly you can get off an island if you just have a good internet connection.
5. Google isn’t actually interested in a TV show, they just want to clear the rights to use the name “Google Fuller” for a new search product.

What do you think Google and Fuller are up to?

Google is a pretty powerful search tool. You knew that. You can use it to find information, but you can also use it to find downloadable MP3s, books, videos, and other items. We’re going to assume you’re just looking for legally available downloads, but the truth of the matter is if someone’s posted an MP3 (copyrighted or not) to their web page, Google can find it.

But who has the time to memorize all the search modifiers like “-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:”index of” “last modified” “parent directory” description size (.mp3|.wma|.ogg) ?” That’s where Google Hacks comes in. This handy little app will let you search for dozens of file types, song lyrics, cached pages, fonts, and other little goodies hanging out on the web.

Just download and install Google Hacks for Mac, Linux, or Windows, fire it up and enter your search term and check the boxes next to the type of search you want to perform. Your results will show up in your default web browser.

[via Life Rocks!]

You can get directions on your PC, your phone, or by talking to that friendly gas station attendant. But if you’re the sort of person who never likes to admit you’re lost, Google’s got you covered. The company plans to add Google Maps features to 3500 U.S. gas station pumps starting next month.

Not only will you get access to on-screen directions thanks to a specially designed pump with internet access, but you’ll be able to print out directions. At launch, there won’t be a keyboard, meaning you can’t type in specific directions. But gas station owners will be able to input nearby hotels, restaurants, and other hot spots.

The pumps won’t be ad supported, since there’s little chance that you’re going to click on a button to buy a new pair of shoes while you’re at the gas station. Instead, gas station owners can offer local businesses the opportunity to provide coupons, for a fee.

[via Engadget]

Earlier this month MapQuest got a much needed facelift. Now it’s MapQuest Mobile’s turn. AOL (which owns both apQuest and the blog you’re reading right now) has added several useful new features to the mobile interface for MapQuest as part of an overhaul of AOL’s mobile services.

There are three major updates:

1. Gas prices: You can now use MapQuest to find the cheapest gas stations near a given location from your cellphone.
2. Multi-point directions: You can add up to six locations to your directions and get step by step directions for moving from one point to the next.
3. Walking directions: If you’re on foot, you can now get walking directions from your phone.

You can get to the mobile version of MapQuest by visiting www.mapquest.com on most mobile web browsers.

It must be a strange week to be an intellectual property lawyer for Amazon. Days after the US Patent Office threw out a patent for “one-click” checkout button, the USPTO has granted Amazon a patent for something that seems at least as obvious: placing a “search string at the end of a URL without any special formatting.”

Wait, that can’t possibly mean what we think it means. They have a patent on URLS like “www.a9.com/San Francisco Hotels”? Yup, that’s exactly what it means. Amazon claims that what differentiates these URLs from others is the lack of special formatting language like “search?q=.”

Now, there are at least two basic problems with this as far as we can tell:

1. Generally you’re only supposed to be able to get a patent for things that aren’t obvious.
2. We’re pretty sure there will be a lot of companies who can show “prior art,” meaning they had URLs following this format long before Amazon filed for the patent in 2004.

Anyone want to predict how long it will take Amazon to try patenting a system for ordering products online using a keyboard and mouse?
[via Slashdot]

Microsoft has launched an updated version of Live Search. Some of the changes will be visible in the user interface, but the company also made a bunch of changes under the hood to make the search engine more useful and reliable.

• Increased the site index by more than 400%
• Improved understanding of query intent
• Auto-spell correction
• Faster page-loads
• Uses more click-stream data to improve page ranking and relevancy
• Improved answers to questions about specific items like weather, images, celebrities, entertainment, maps, or sports

The interface is also a bit cleaner. The search box has moved to the left. The tabs for searching images, video, news have been replaced with text links (which are a bit harder to notice than tabs at first). And the fonts look a little less 1985-ish.

Apparently 40 percent of the searches on Live.com involve entertainment, shopping, health, and local search, so Microsoft has focused heavily on these four areas.

ClipBlast is a search engine that specializes in video. On the site users can enter a search term, and ClipBlast will crawl the web and find all the video content available on that particular term. The site also has video broken up into genre categories such as Animal, Celebrity, Fashion, History. Film, and Golf so you can find video quickly on a particular topic that interests you. Unlike other similar sites that pull video from only one or a few different sources ClipBlast is pulling video from everywhere so you are just as likely to get results from CBS as you are YouTube or MetaCafe.

ClipBlast also allows registered users to personalize their video searches by saving their searches from the past, their favorite video providers, or individual video clips they enjoyed. If you like to catch every video clip that hits the web on a particular topic you can also sign up for video alerts so you can be notified via email when a new video hits the web. Similar sites to ClipBlast include blinkx and everyzing.