I’ve recently discovered the meta search engine Keyboardr. Keyboardr pulls together the results from Google, Wikipedia and YouTube, but that’s not all. It has an added cool factor. And it’s not just the fact that they spelled “keyboarder” without the “e.” I’ve found it’s a great tool for 2 things:

1. People who are extremely lazy. And by extremely lazy, I’m talking too lazy to move one hand from the keyboard to the mouse. Or maybe you have a bad case of laptop touchpad hatred like me. For these folks, Keyboardr lets you search the web in a “mouseless” fashion, allowing you to use the arrow keys and enter button to scroll through search results and select the page you wish to explore. 
2. Competitive research. I love how the results update instantly, as you are typing in a keyword phrase. This allows you to quickly get a glimpse of all of the sites that rank for any given phrase in Google, Wikipedia and Youtube.

As you’re browsing a site you may come across a term or phrase that you’d like to know more about. For such instances, most browsers now come with a search toolbar. If you have a handy dandy search toolbar you can highlight that word or phrase and drag-and-drop the text in to your search box. Try it out.

Two main reasons that I use this: it is faster than typing out a long phrase AND it keeps my last copied text. This is especially useful if you’ve got something to copy and paste over and over but you don’t want to lose it with each search. For example, if I’m browsing Thoughtprocess Interactive and I want to know more about search engine optimization:

Sound familiar? If not, you’ve either got a shortage of tech savvy friends or something embarrassing and/or horrible showed up that they didn’t want to mention.

Most of us have Googled ourselves at one point or another. Why not? It’s out there for everyone else to see and we should know what they’re looking at! Well, Google has a (not so) recent release that gives you the power over what they see.

Google Profiles lets you define yourself in the way YOU want to be defined. It may not get rid of the spring break pictures from freshman year of college but at least it’s a start.