Keith Lofstrom wrote: > I like iGoogle, and the ability to put extra little search engines > on my Google home page. I do NOT like the fact that they have been > pimping it up with extra crud, like the left side tab (with > default name Home ), and most recently the little "Chat" popup > that causes a screen redraw. > > It turns out the old version of iGoogle is still available (for now, > until they change it). > > Instead of: http://www.google.com/ > or: http://www.google.com/ig > as a home page, use: http://www.google.com/ig?gl=all > > The old straight lines come back (they render faster) and the left > side tab goes away. That also turns off the annoying "chat" popups, > which cause the page to re-render in my case. > > > BTW, my favorite iGoogle gadget is the Multi Search Gadget > "mysearches" at: > > http://www.google.com/ig/directory?gl=all&url=mysearches.googlecode.com%2Fsvn%2Ftrunk%2Fsearch.xml > > Enter search text and click one of the icons below it (wikipedia, > imdb, amazon, etc., perhaps 20 icons out of hundreds) and it goes > to that service in a new page or tab. It is only partially > customizable. You must select from the 200 or so sites that the > author programmed in, and can't add your own to the list. But it > still saves a lot of screen space. > > Perhaps some ambitious person here can rewrite it so it is > customizable. Or at least tell me how to make a localhost > version of the gadget so I can tweak on it myself. > > Keith >
You might want to check out samfind: http://preview.tinyurl.com/adcxdz It's similar, but you can add custom sites to search. It doesn't use the pretty icons. It breaks the searches into topics like "search," "news," "maps," "videos," "blogs," etc., and has some default sites for each topic. (For "videos": YouTube, Live Video, Break Video, and Spike.) You can add or delete sites to each topic, you can add more topics from a predefined list, and create your own topics. It's pretty flexible, and has a "view all" button that will search multiple sites simultaneously. For example, under videos, enter a title or subject to search for, click "view all," and it will search all four of those sites, or whichever sites you've defined for the "video" topic if you've made changes. It's a lot of clicking for my taste, I'm more inclined to do ctrl+l > gg searchterm > enter ("gg" being my Firefox smart search keyword for Google) or ctrl+l > gi searchterm > enter ("gi" for Google Image). But sometimes I do want to search several sites at once, and samfind is good for that. I don't have the tabs or the chat thingy on iGoogle, but I think that's because I use "Google Apps for Your Domain." The Google Apps version of the customizable homepage is somewhat more minimal than the regular iGoogle, more like what you're describing as the old version of iGoogle. You can customize the headers and footers and color scheme, but you can't add tabs. Michael M. _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
