UNUSUAL BOOKMARKLETS

I'm sure, at some point, Google and Apple will probably make it easier for us to add more search engines to their browsers. But I'm not willing to wait that long. For now, bookmarklets, are our only choice. Safari For Windows and Google Chrome both use the Webkit Browser Engine here at The Webkit Open Source Project.

99% of the bookmarklets, on this site, now also work with Internet Explorer. The reason some don't is because Microsoft only allows you to put 255 characters in a favelet/bookmarklet. None of the other browsers have a limit. A favelet and a bookmarklet is the same thing. Microsoft calls them favelets because their bookmarks are called Favorites. All the other companies call them bookmarklets because their bookmarks are called bookmarks.

Please Read This: If you have been here before you will notice I have changed the name of this site several times. I have finally settled on UnusualBookmarklets.com. I won't be changing it again. I decided I was limiting myself too much by making this site about only Google Chrome. Since these bookmarklets work in all browsers I decided to include them as well. So, trust me, no more name changes.

SAFARI BROWSER FOR WINDOWS: Don't you just love an unstable browser? When I first started this site I was having a lot of trouble getting bookmarklets to work in that crazy thing. Now, after reinstalling it, the bookmarklets work as good as they do in any other browser. Well after 5 hours I finally got them all in Safari and working. BOOKMARKLETS INSTALLED IN SAFARI SCREENSHOT Adding them to Chrome, Firefox and Flock goes a lot faster because you can simply drag and drop them into their appropriate folders. In Safari you have to drag and drop them into the "Tools" folder and then open the Bookmarks Manager and drag and drop them into any subfolders you might want them in. It takes twice as long this way. Doing this with Opera is a lot slower. I suggest you only use a few bookmarklets with that browser since it might take a month to put them all in there.

The bookmarklets on this site will also work with most other browsers. But each of them have a better way of adding search engines. The only browser they won't work with is Internet Explorer or one of it's clones like Maxthon or TheWorld. Firefox, Seamonkey, Netscape, but not Flock have the OpensearchFox Addon that allows you to add any search engine very quickly and easily. Internet Explorer forces you to make a different bookmarklet (favelet) for each version of their browser. This is a real pain and not worth the trouble. Besides they now have a better way with the new features in Internet Explorer 8.

No matter which browser you use you should use the Translation Bookmarklets and the Reference Bookmarklets. They don't work perfectly but are better than nothing at all. They will never replace human translators or reference librarians.

Netscape is no longer supported by America Online. But I still like to play with it. In the old days we called it Nutscape. AOL stopped supporting it in February 2008. It wasn't perfect but I miss it already. I loved the bookmarks section in version 3.1 Gold. No one has ever come close to it since. If you didn't want your friends, colleagues, or parents to see what you had bookmarked you could give each bookmark an alias.

The only language that I speak and write is USA English. The Spanish and French classes were always full at Aledo, Ill High School. Therefore, I won't be translating these marklets to any other languages. But if you would like too go right ahead. Feel free to steal these and improve on them. They are really easy to make. If I can do it so can you. I didn't write the JavaScript that makes these bookmarklets work. All I did was put the text and links in the scripts and put them on this site. What could be easier than that? The scripts came from Bookmarklets.com. It shocked me to find out that the owner of that site was murdered a few years ago. :(

TIP: To use all of the bookmarklets on this website you can either click on them and type in your keywords or you can highlight text on a page and click on the bookmarklet and it will search automatically.

I'll be adding more bookmarklets later so come back periodically to see what I've done.

HAVE YOU SEEN OPERA LATELY?

When tabs were first introduced I was hoping a browser company would make it possible cascade and tile the tabs so I could watch two to four videos at one time or play a game and watch a video at the same time. Well, Opera, the worst browser on the Web, finally did it. I also love their page prefetching, and voice browsing as well. Firefox will always be my favorite but Opera is running a close second right now. I'm typing this in while watching two videos on Hulu.com at 4am. But this is all I use it for. Beyond those two features it's still lame next to Firefox. Chrome isn't my favorite browser. But I thought this site might help it some.

SEARCHING GOOGLE

Searching Google can be fun if you know the tricks. I do a lot of searching everyday and understanding Google's Advanced Operators turns that task from a chore into something I look forward to. If I can't find what I want it simply doesn't exist or it's in a database that I don't have access to (Invisible Web). Here are a couple of tricks I have learned using them.

If you are using the "site:" search operator you have to be careful how you enter the domain name. Otherwise, you won't get the results you are looking for.

If you do this "site:www.cnn.com" you will only get results in www.cnn.com and it's subdirectories. If you do this "site:cnn.com" you will get everything including subdomains. Leaving out the "www" acts as a wildcard.

You can also use Google's site search operator to search any subdirectory you want. For example "site:www.cnn.com/CRIME/" will allow you to serach only in the CRIME subdirectory.

You can even search a single page "struggle serbs site:cnn.com/WORLD/Bosnia/index.html" or "larry site:transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/lkl.html"

You should visit the Google Hacking Database. There you will find hundreds of experiments in searching Google using those Advanced Operators. You had better eat lunch first. You are going to be there a long time. Here is an example. Type the following into Google without the quotes, "inurl:view/index.html" and you will be able to view thousands of network security cameras. Many are in university classrooms. These weren't meant for you and I to view. They are for security only. So when you go there don't hang around a long time. Otherwise, they will password protect it and then none of us will be able to view it.

Another tip is each section of Google has its own Advanced Operators. Google Web Search uses all of them. But Google Image search only uses a few. Click on help in each section to see which ones work with that.

There are different types of search engines. There are searchable indexes like Yahoo!. There are search spiders that crawl the web cataloging everything in its path. It only ignores what it is told to in the site's "robot.txt" file. Some malevolent (evil) spiders ignore "robot.txt" files. Others are called Meta Searches. These don't search the web. All they do is search the indexes of search engines and searchable indexes. Then give you the top ten most relevant results from each one. The largest Meta Search was Savvy.com. It searched a total of 23 search engines. But only one at a time. It is now part of Search.com which is owned by Cnet.com. Then you have database search engines and the list goes on and on.

You will never see all of the Web. Search engines only catalog Web sites and things that are embeded in them. There are lots of Web pages that aren't in search engines because their owner decided to make them private or kept you out until you register to see them. Also there are lots of things in databases that the search engines can't catalog because they are also private or you have to pay to see them. This is called the Invisible Web and is said to be 10 times larger than the Visible Web. In otherwords, the part of the web you see is only a tiny part of of the whole. Even some of these databases that allow the general public to access them require specific software that may not work on Windows, Linux, or Mac. You may need a Unix powered main frame. Some require special monitors. I saw a picture of outer space once that had a width of 12,000 pixels. I had to do a whole lot of sideways scrolling to see that one. It almost crashed my computer. Another problem is Search engines only show you approximately the top 1000 or so most relevant search results. That leaves billions you will never see unless someone has linked to them somewhere. Every year lots of sites are removed from search engines due to inactivity (no one visiting them) to make room for active sites.

There about 1 billion search engines on the Web. Some are for general searches and others are setup for specific purposes. All of them are unique and not all of them have the same things in them. If you only use one of them you will be missing out on a lot of great content. Always click on the help link in any search engine. You might be surprised at what you can find when you use the tips you'll see in there. Good luck!

FYI: On the Web and in some books you'll see Google Hacks, Yahoo Hacks etc. These aren't real hacks. They only call them that to draw your attention. Using "intitle:"index of" ( exe | zip | rar ) photoshop" in Google's Web Search form will not hack into Google's computers and bring them down. All it does is give you a better way of searching for Web sites and data. If these Advanced Search Operators really did crash their computers Google and Yahoo would not have created them for us.

MY HOST

If you are looking for a free host you can't do any better than NOADSFREE. They give you more for free than many paid hosts do. Here is some of the advantages they offer, 5.5 GB space, 200 GB bandwidth, 50 MySQL Databases, 50 Addon Domains, 50 Parked Domains, 50 Subdomains, FTP, PHP 5, phpMyAdmin, Auto Script Installer, Online File Manager, cPanel, safe_mode off, cURL enabled, sendmail enabled, Clustered servers. After the signup process is complete, you will be taken to the login page http://cpanel.noadsfree.com/. Be sure to bookmark it because you won't find a link to it on any of their pages. If you lose it look for it in your browser's history. Search in there for "cPanel". Join their forum for help with your account. The moderator "Stealthyone" is very helpful. I had some problems caused by me that he showed me how to fix.

If you have a domain name parked at Godaddy.com email the support staff for help. They were relentless in helping me. What I did was I had signed up for "unusualbookmaklets.com". The "r" is missing. I didn't know I had 5 days to cancel that domain. After that it's too late. You are simply stuck with it. I now have two domain names, had to pay for both, but can only use one. I never submit a form without triple checking everything. This one got passed me.

If you get errors while validating my pages with the W3C Validator know this, they validated before I uploaded them. My host put a Statcounter.com in my code when I uploaded my pages. This code is where the errors are.