Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Search Cloudlet Reveals Better Search Terms [Featured Firefox Extension]

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/KsHsr5uzKLc/search-cloudlet-reveals-better-search-terms

Windows/Mac/Linux (Firefox): Search Cloudlet adds a click-on tag cloud to your Google and Yahoo searches, helping you find deep-seated terms and phrases and refine your results, as you'll see below.

The free add-on, developed by the International Software and Productivity Engineering Institute, can adjust the number of keyword results you see below each search, and automatically re-searches as you click to add them in. Search Cloudlet ends up being pretty handy for searches where you don't quite know what you're looking for—because if you didn't, say, know what the big story about Macworld was, hitting the large-sized "Jobs" and then "Keynote" would deliver the goods in the search results.

Check out some of Search Cloudlet's additional features below:

When looking to narrow where your results are coming from—and, in some cases, exclude sites that spam up the findings—the Cloudlet's "Sites" button is quite handy:

Click over to Google News, and you'll get a different set of options, allowing you to refine by news source and locality. The same tools are also usable in Google's blog search.

Nothing a true Google hacker can't do in pure text in the search box, but definitely much handier, visual, and open-ended. Search Cloudlet is a free download, works wherever Firefox does.