Vast Active Library and Information Science blog. From a recent library science graduate in Wellington, New Zealand. A focus on reference and current awareness tools and issues, especially free, web-based resources.

 
Greg reviews the HotBot Quick-Search Deskbar. This is a seriously good search tool. Not only will it search across the major search engines, you can set it to search a specific reference site, using a short term at the start of your search (e.g. amaz to search amazon.com, ul to search Snopes Urban Legends, md to search WebMD - plus literally hundreds more. And functions like a temperature converter, and a countdown timer. All from a search box that fits into your desktop taskbar. AND it takes only seconds to download, and is a cinch to install. Doesn't carry ads - I'm not sure if there's any spyware (I'm not smart enough to stop it). But we do have a firewall, and it didn't trigger that...recommended, anyway. I think I'm going to send an all-users email about this one - even the less computer literate should get this one.

| posted by Simon at 11:10 pm