Filed under: Internet, Search
If you do a lot of shopping at Amazon and a lot of comparison shopping or product research on Google, you might want to check out the
GoogAzon add-on for Firefox. Once installed, any time you search for an item on Google, you'll also see the top search result for your query from Amazon.
If a single product listing isn't good enough, just click the "see top 10 items" button and a list of 10 items from Amazon will drop down. Hovering over a link brings up an image of the product. You can also click the Share button to email a product link.
Despite it's name, GoogAzon isn't limited to Google searches. It also works with Yahoo! and MSN Live.
GoogAzon does appear to inject an Amazon Affiliate code into the links, so the plugin's author will likely make a few bucks any time you actually buy an item found through a GoogAzon search. But it shouldn't cost you anything extra.
[via
Firefox Facts]
GoogAzon Firefox Add-on ads Amazon listings to web search results originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 20 Nov 2008 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Filed under: Video, Web
Long before Hulu, or even YouTube were offering online video, and long before Apple or Amazon were selling digital downloads of TV shows and feature lenght films, there was
CinemaNow and
MovieLink. The two sites may have been well ahead of their time, but they also never managed to get the kind of attention that newer online video sites have garnered. Last year
Blockbuster purchased MovieLink for about $7 million. And this week, software firm
Sonic Solutions picked up CinemaNow for just $3 million.
CinemaNow has a library of about 6,000 movies and TV shows. Sonic Solutions hopes to leverage CinemaNow's technology and assetts to expand its service that allows you to download videos and burn them to DVD.
[via
paidContent]
Online movie site CinemaNow sold for $3 million originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 20 Nov 2008 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Filed under: News, Windows
There's no question that we all want computers that boot up and shut down more quickly. While a fresh install of Windows XP might boot as quickly as 30 seconds on some computers, the more applications you load onto your computer, the slower it will boot. Things get even worse with Windows Vista which loads about as quickly as paint dries. While Microsoft and other OS makers are working to cut boot times, if you're using a current generation operating system, odds are you spend at least a few minutes every day waiting for your computer to startup and shut down.
Now here's the big question of the day - if this is your work computer we're talking about,
should you be paid for that time? Apparently employees at seveal companies including AT7T and Cigna have filed lawsuits alleging that they weren't paid for the time it took to turn their computers on and off each day, a process which they claim takes 15 to 30 minutes.
The employees say they should be paid for their time, because they're doing other work related activities while the computer loads, while employers argue that just as often, they aren't. But you know what? It's not like the employees are lying in bed sleeping at home. It's hardly their fault their bosses installed software that takes for-friggin-ever to boot. Not that I'm taking sides in this dispute.
What do you think? Sound off in the comments.
[via
TaxProf Blog and
Gizmodo]
Should you be paid for the time it takes to boot your computer? originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 20 Nov 2008 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Filed under: Audio, Internet, Video, Google, Web
Online video site YouTube has been offering a "watch in higher quality" option since earlier this year. But higher quality doesn't mean high definition. It simply means that the videos are encoded in a higher bit rate and if you have a fast enough internet connection to keep up, the videos look a little better.
But now it looks like YouTube is starting to add some honest to goodness high definition, 720p videos to the site. Members of the
Video Help forums have spotted some videos available in HD, including the popular "
Where the Hell is Matt" video.
Not all videos are going to be available in HD rigiht away, because most videos uploaded to YouTube aren't high definition in the first place, and because YouTube appears to be quietly testing the feature on a small number of videos. It appears YouTube is also experimenting with stereo sound for its online videos. Up until recently most videos were mono only.
YouTube is hardly the first online video site to dabble in HD.
DailyMotion,
Vimeo, and several other video portals have been offering HD movies for a while, but YouTube is stll by far the most heavily trafficked web video site.
[via
Wired]
YouTube experimenting with 720p HD video originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 20 Nov 2008 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Filed under: Audio, Video, Windows, Freeware
MiniTube is a plugin for WinAmp that attempts to find music videos from YouTube for every song in your playlist. Here's how it's supposed to work: A song starts to play, and MiniTube will automatically find the best music video available for the song and start playing it. That's the theory anyway. But the actual practice is a bit shakier.
That's because MiniTube just grabs the first video it can find that roughly matches the song's metadata. That means there's a pretty decent chance you'll get the wrong video from the right artist, a video of an amateur musicians performing the correct song, or something else entirely. Sometimes MiniTube will find the right video, but if the metadata on your MP3s is anything less than perfect, more often than not, it won't.
MiniTube does address one potential problem fairly well. Because the audio of the YouTube video will undoubtedly be out of synch with the audio file, you can choose to either play your audio file and mute the audio on the video, or mute Winamp and play the audio and video from the YouTube video.
[via
gHacks]
MiniTube Winamp plugin adds YouTube videos to your playlist originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 20 Nov 2008 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Filed under: Fun, Google, Search, Web
We've all been there. You're working, and an instant message window pops up. It's your friend, who I'll call "Captain Obvious," and he wants to know what that new James Bond movie is called. Even if you know, why is he asking you? That's what Google is for. Instead of answering his question straight away, just say "Here,
let me Google that for you."
Let Me Google That For You will give your friend a step-by-step reminder about how to Google. Step 1 (type In your question) shows the question being input into the Google search box. Step 2: click search. Step 3 is "Was that so hard?" and then your friend jumps to the relevant Google results page. That ought to be a strong enough hint for Captain Obvious, but it's funny enough not to feel too mean.
Friends asking you stupid questions? Let me Google that for you. originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 20 Nov 2008 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Filed under: Yahoo!, Search
Yahoo! is rolling out a new search page called
Yahoo! Glue that lets you see a bunch of different sorts of search results on a single page. The service pulls data from Yahoo! News, Images, Shopping, and Answers pages. But it also draws data from third party services including lastFM, YouTube, and WikiPedia.
One of the more surprising modules I found was a list of blog posts from Google Blog Search. One module that's surprisingly absent? Yahoo! web search results.
The search engine will only return results for a limited number of queries right now, which doesn't make a ton of sense, since the pages are
crafted by a computer algorithm, not human intervention.
[via
TechCrunch]
Yahoo Glue bundles image, video, news, and third party search results originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 20 Nov 2008 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Filed under: Security, Text, Utilities, Windows
Every Word file can contain a fairly large amount of metadata. This is stuff like the revision logs (for tracking changes), name of the author, last time edited, and last time printed. All that information is there for a reason, but embarrassing incidents have been known to occur when people don't realize what they're sending in their metadata. If you want to avoid that, you could delete it all by hand, or you could get
Doc Scrubber, a free metadata-removal app.
Doc Scrubber can quickly tell you what all the "hidden info" on your docs says, or just delete it for you. It'll handle multiple docs at once, and is compatible with Word 97, 2000 and XP files. It doesn't do DOCX files, but those also don't handle metadata the same way, so they're less likely to expose your info.
Doc Scrubber removes hidden data from your documents originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 20 Nov 2008 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Some logged-in Google users are seeing an interesting new feature enabled on their results pages this morning. SearchWiki adds two buttons to the right of each result that let users move their favorite or most relevant results to the top spot or kill out a result entirely for their page only, as well as add notes for yourself on certain results and add entirely new results to that crucial first page. You (and other users) will be able to see the changes your username has made, along with aggregate numbers for other users' actions (x voted up, x removed). While they're just for your information right now, Google engineers have said they might consider letting group decisions impact global results. I don't have SearchWiki enabled in my account yet, so I can't tell if the "I'm Feeling Lucky" results work with the re-ordering (so cool if so). Check out Google demonstration video below, and tell us what you dig and don't about SearchWiki in the comments. Screenshot from Google Operating System.
