Closing a bunch of tabs on my Firefox here, so I thought I’d share some interesting search related resources I’ve come across in the last few weeks:

Brijit is a tool that aggregates content and abstracts it to 100 words or less. It has a pretty comprehensive scope, and covers some sources that you might not otherwise think to keep track of, including certain subscription-only sources. They are primarily of consumer-interest (think things like Wired, GQ, even Playboy!), but does also contain some more business-oriented or ‘serious’ sources, such as BusinessWeek, The Economist, The New York Times, and so on. Though many of these sources do have rss feeds of their own, it might be useful to instead get this aggregated short form content. They also produce feeds by subject, rather than by publication, which is also a pretty awesome feature, though I’m not sure of the comprehensiveness of this service. Though I’ve subbed in to a couple of feeds on this, I haven’t yet been really scanning them for content in a serious way, but as a starting point it looks like a pretty useful resource that might cover some content that you may otherwise not have access to.

Voluminous is a catalogue of free e-books, with apparently over 20,000 books listed. It’s not free, but is a paid-service (though there is a free trial) – it’s also only available for Mac, not PC. Why do all the interesting book-apps come to mac first? /grumble/ It’s kind of interesting, but as it’s searching books that are in the public domain anyway, I’m not entirely sure that I’d be keen to pay for it, as you should be able to search for them for free somewhere. The screen-caps look nice though – think iTunes for books – and I suppose if you were really, really into ebooks it might be worth the purchase.

Searchme is a new search engine that visually breaks down searches into conceptual categories to help you find what you’re looking for. It’s dynamic, so the categories pop up and change as you type, which is pretty neat. Searching for, say, ‘rain’ (what? No – of course I’m not frustrated with the weather!), brings up categories such as weather, music, poetry, (the dreariness must make people more creative!), software, etc. If you add ‘boot’ to the search, you get categories for clothes and sales added. The search results themselves are visual, so you can see the page before you click on it – this doesn’t really enamor me, I like lists, but I suppose if you’re a really visual searcher, or knew what you were looking for, it might help. I don’t think this is a desperately practical search engine, but it’s quite pretty, and rather interesting, so I thought it was worth a mention.

GoogleHacks is seriously old news by now, but for some reason it’d completely passed me by. It’s a pretty neat tool that lets you perform quite complicated and powerful Google searches. Now, whilst you technically can do these searches manually, it’s nice to be able to have a tool that makes it that much easier. It’s mostly focused towards finding new media, and lets you search for various file types.

Today I came across a very cool website - Get London Reading. It’s done by Booktrust with support from 3M. From the name I thought it was going to be a new initiative for getting more people to read (which it is), but the best bit about it is the Google maps mashup they have that shows books set in London.   Being a Google map, you can zoom into street level and find books by each area or street, as well as click on each cover to get a short synopsis and author and publisher details.

There is also a free edition of the Rough Guide to London by the Book, which sounds fantastic and who doesn’t like random trivia about London?

There’s currently only around 400 books, but it has potential. I’ll be using it to find new books to read that’s for sure!

A few months ago I wrote about the Asus Eee PC, and how much I loved it and wanted one. I never got around to actually buying one, and I’m glad I didn’t as they’re about to bring out the latest version and it sounds even better! The screen is bigger, the hard drive is bigger (20Gb instead of 4Gb), and my favourite, gestures on the mouse pad! There’s a review here which goes into detail about all the changes.