Find the search helpers that work just for you

The World Wide Web is full of too much of everything. This, of course, leads to chaos which is like trying to find a needle in the haystack. Search engines, one can argue, try and make life easier by giving you a place to start. But even those, unfortunately, aren’t customized to your taste. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a search engine that reads your mind? A news site that churns out news only on topics you are interested in? And even an application that brings together all your social networks and serves snippets of updates right on your desktop ? It might sound like wishful thinking, but it’s really not because there are applications that do just that. Here are a few search helpers:

ENSEMBLI

Take, for instance, Ensembli, a free-to-sign-up service, which brags about serving news customized just to your taste. The concept is simple; initially, Ensembli will ask you to pick a few topics you would like to follow like ‘politics’, ‘sports’ and so on. Then the service will refine its selections based on your actions. This application isn’t as impressive at first glance, because initially the content you see will be largely based on what other users have clicked on. Over time, the service starts to surprise you when the impact of other users’ actions on what you see wears off and Ensembli’s own pattern-matching starts taking over.

After it learns enough about you, the engine will correlate what you click on with all the feeds it is monitoring to show you a more personal selection of stories. Eventually, when the application gathers enough data, it will even remember the type of stories you deleted and show only those that will really interest you.

XMARKS

Bookmarks are a great way to remember your favorite haunts on the web. But the biggest problem with bookmarks is their lack of portability . For instance, you saved some on the Internet Explorer . There is no way you can open those on the Firefox browser. Then trying to port these between your office and home machine is a lost cause. This is where services like Xmarks come in. The main goal of this application is to synchronize bookmarks automatically among all your computers and across all the main brands of web browsers.

The application has a different version of Xmarks (bookmarks) customized for each of the three main browsers, but they all talk to the same password-protected web account that contains the most updated version of your bookmarks. So when you add, delete, rename or rearrange any bookmark in any browser on any of your computers, the Xmarks software sends the change up to your online account.

JADOOS

Social networking can be fairly daunting. Apart from checking on the regular updates from friends, you also need to manage lots of information, including logins and passwords, and keeping track of what you have posted where and when. Jadoos creates a browser widget that is almost like your TV remote control. So, when you click a button, it will automatically open up your Facebook, Orkut or Twitter account, thus eliminating the need to remember umpteen logins and passwords.

SOBEES

And if you’d rather not open a browser window for something like Jadoos, than Sobees could be your thing. Sobees again is basically an application designed to collect and categorize the web-based information that you are particularly interested in. The only difference is that Sobees does it in a desktop application instead of a browser or a website.

The application is designed in modules. You can choose to add a panel with Twitter updates, another one with Facebook news feeds and one more with information on a topic that you normally follow constantly . This could include news, blogs or even photo websites such as Flickr. In short, Sobees creates a snapshot of all your favourite web services.