Neat Search Gadgets

Blogger seems now to have access to most (maybe all) the Google gadgets which can be added to an iGoogle personal homepage. There are tens of thousands of these handy tools. Since letting you do more net search easier and faster with better results is one main aim of this blog, I've put a small number of search-related gadgets at the bottom of this webpage.



Try them. They're easy to use. During your visit to Starting Points, you can do your own searches and customize them to a significant degree. The only exception is Breaking News which I pre-set to generate every few seconds self-refreshing current news on all the blog's subjects mentioned in its masthead. In Breaking News, you can click on any headline which appears to get the full story -- which will open in a new browser tab.

While I may change or add some other bottom-page gadgets as the blog evolves, here's a how-to on the other stuff there now as I write this.

TwitterSearch appears because I gradually became convinced Twitter could consistently yield useful results. Type in any searchword in any language and hit return. When the page is refreshed in your browser, or you return to the blog, the default search reverts to the last one carried out by any user of the gadget.

Easy Wikipedia Search lets you search nine different language versions of Wikipedia. Every version of Wikipedia has its own content. Non-English versions are not translations of the English version. Use the drop-down menu to choose a Wikipedia version other than the English one. The developer accidentally put French -- FR -- twice in the menu. Otherwise, the gadget seems to work well. Just remember to type your search keyword in the language of the Wikipedia you are using! For privacy and convenience reasons, your search keyword/s and results vanish after you leave the blog.

Google Mini Search lets you search three Google databases at once -- websites, videos, and blogs. Look for the three cute little boxes above each type of search result. By default, the first box brings just one result, the second brings up more, and the third brings up all Google's results for the search term/s. Again, your keywords and results are not saved on the blog page display after you leave it.

Search YouTube works simply. Type your search term/s and hit your keyboard's enter (return) key. You get a list of YouTube videos with image, filenames, and links. Just hit the image or link and you get taken directly to the video you select in a new tab. From that point on, you are operating on the very flexible YouTube site with its many options. Your YouTube searches vanish from this blogpage after you leave it. Others coming in at the same or later times will find the searchbox empty.