Comments on: What’s on your FireFox search dropdown?

By: walt

walt — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 15:33:05 +0000

Amy,

Interesting thing about perceptions:

You put “(gasp!)” next to Wikipedia–but not next to Answers.com.

Try a bunch of searches on Answers.com. You may find that, for stuff beyond dictionary definitions, a lot of your “answers” are going to come directly from…Wikipedia. But with a whole lot of advertising (and, admittedly, a nice fill-in-the-search feature). And, to be sure, additional material from other sources, some of them “authoritative.”

By: Amy

Amy — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 14:22:10 +0000

Great post! Mine are pretty boring, compared to some of these other lists, but now I have some great ideas of others to add – thanks!

Google
Yahoo
Amazon.com
Answers.com
Creative Commons
eBay
IMDb
Webster
Wikipedia (gasp!)
WorldCat

By: walt

walt — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 16:01:22 +0000

Greg, thanks for the suggestion. I might give it a try. (I’m typically a late adopter when it comes to plugins and extensions…)

By: Greg

Greg — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 00:39:56 +0000

I keep my list pretty short, but two of my as-of-yet-unmentioned favorites are Google Maps and Allmusic.

Also, if you don’t use the Conquery extension, I highly recommend it. It allows you to highlight browser text and then right-click and query the selected text in any of the engines in your search list. It’s very handy to highlight an address and right-click to search it in Google Maps.

By: walt

walt — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 16:17:01 +0000

Keep ‘em coming; little reason for me to comment except to promise that I will not, repeat not, start another wiki consisting of links to people’s FF2 search-engine lists…if that’s even possible.
(“Another wiki”–LIS-related wikis seem to be proliferating as much as or more than individual ones are growing, which strikes me as odd. Since I’ve never started a wiki, I can’t start “another one” in that sense.)

By: lukethelibrarian

lukethelibrarian — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 12:25:02 +0000

In addition to the defaults, I also have…

Ask
Clusty
Internet Public Library (IPL)
Librarians Internet Index (LII)
Reference Extract
Yotophoto

…but now y’all have given me some ideas for others I’d like to add!

Thanks for posting this, Walt – cool idea.

By: Christina Pikas

Christina Pikas — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 01:48:45 +0000

Wow, I need to get the NIST ones! Thanks, Amanda.
My work ones are (not in order, going by memory)
Google
Google Intranet (we have the Google appliance)
Ask
Yahoo
Open Worldcat
Amazon
E-journal finder (I built this to search our sfx-generated journal a-z list and I use it all the time)
JHU library catalog kw search
UMD library catalog kw search
JH Search engineering category (a meta-lib run federated search)
Google Scholar
Google Books
Rollyo — my attempt at “scholarly science”
Wikipedia
My Furl Archive
Wikipedia
Engineering Village 2 (for Compendex)
Inspec (via EbscoHost – home built)
Creative Commons

I rarely run VPN from home so I don’t have the databases or e-journal finder there. I have food network and epicurious food.

Before ff2, I used ConQuery extensively to access these — so I didn’t even have to type. I’ve loaded Context Search so we’ll see how that goes.

By: Steve Lawson

Steve Lawson — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 19:45:39 +0000

My list is similar to Walt’s, but I also have the Flickr tag search and two custom searches I made for my library catalog and our state union catalog using the instructions I found on libdev and O’Reilly’s “Firefox Hacks” book. Here is the libdev link:

http://libdev.plymouth.edu/post/31

But all I really use are Google, Ask, and those custom ones.

By: walt

walt — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 18:52:50 +0000

I’m impressed (by both lists); clearly, I’m a rank amateur.

By: Amanda Robertson

Amanda Robertson — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 17:47:05 +0000

Here’s my work list. My home list is shorter and more focused on general search and more specialized things like torrent search engines and Food Network’s search engine.

Search Engines:

Google
Ask
Clusty
Yahoo
Exalead
Grokker
Amazon
Answers.com

Wikipedia:
Wikipedia (en)

Libraries/Work:
Google Scholar
National Archives

Social Software:
del.icio.us
Technorati

Chemistry:
Chemistry Glossary Online
ChemBuyersGuide
ChemExper
ChemFinder
ChemIndustry
Google Science Directory
NIST CAS Number
NIST Chemical Name

Acronyms:
Acronym Finder
Acronym Attic
Acronyma

News/Media:
Google News
Creative Commons

Misc:
Ebay

The insane number of acronym search engines is because even after a year and a half a consultant will throw me an acronym and I’ll have no clue what he’s talking about. They’re probably the most used after the major search engines, followed by Wikipedia. The Chem sites I actually rarely use, but it’s easier than just bookmarking them all, and I do use each one of them occasionally. Google Scholar I’ve been using more and more frequently lately, when I get requests for specific articles.