Flock

Trying Flock

del.icio.us

I tried del.icio.us some time ago, but it wasn't very convenient. Having to go to a webpage to get my bookmarks, in a lenghty format, having to go to another webpage to add a bookmark, too much for too little.
Then a friend reminded me of it, at a time when I was working on different computers, with need of online bookmarks.
So I searched for a convenient way to use del.icio.us.
I surely am not the first one to find it, but here it is - firefox only:
First go to your del.icio.us bookmark page, This icon should appear in your status bar, it's for live bookmarks. Click and choose 'Subscribe to feed for xx bookmarks'.
If it doesn't appear, open bookmark manager, click File, New live bookmark, and enter the url of your bookmark page.
Now your del.icio.us bookmarks will appear in a folder together with your regular bookmarks.

Then the 'add bookmark' button.
Del.icio.us proposes a 'remember this' bookmark, which brings you to a web page to enter details about the new bookmark. with a little modification (see below), you can skip the details and just save the bookmark with no tags.
To do this, edit the bookmark, and change this
javascript:location.href='http://del.icio.us/YOURID?v=3&url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+'&title='+encodeURIComponent(document.title)
with this
javascript:location.href='http://del.icio.us/YOURID?v=3&url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+'&description='+encodeURIComponent(document.title)

Google web accelerator

It seems google web accelerator is availlable for download again.
As I recall, it came up early May 2005, and went down shortly after that.

You should read some comments before using it.
at 37signal,
at metafilter,
at o'reilly radar,
at bnc.
You can also read google web accelerator faqs here and there.

Considering drawbacks previously raised, I will wait for some more reviewing before installing this.
Anyone uses it ?

Clusty

Recently tried clusty, a clustering search engine.
I usually use google, but when I didn't find what I was searching for I tried clusty, and found.
Don't know if this clustering thing is of any use, it enables to categorize your search in a different way... Sort of post-processing.
Just like google, clusty has web, news, images, shopping searches, also has wikipedia, blogs and jobs searches.
Note: Google's blog search is currently beta.

BTW, when looking for alternatives to google, I had a look to mozdex. This is an open source search engine, currently beta. With not much activity during last year. It seems a lot of buzz followed it's opening (in 2004), but nothing followed. I guess it's dead.