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The browser wars are back. Display is being stripped to minimal - look for a wrench to find those options. You have to purposely make the menu bar appear. Hope you love tabs because the browsers all have them. The browsers also offer private, non trackable browsing. And they all boast many extensions - though Firefox is still superior in that department.

Start with an overview of the new features in Greg Notess' article for Online - Browser Battles Return (Sep / Oct 2011)

Consider Chrome - it's fast and sleek though connected rather tightly to Google. Why Use Chrome?

Firefox users - this is still the best browser for search addons. Browse the add-ons page and subscribe to the newsletter.

Internet Explorer 9 is better than previous versions. PC World has a short Getting Started Guide. Microsoft has a full Internet Explorer 9 Product Guide.

PCWorld will help you with news and tips on all the browsers.

For guidance on getting the most from your browser, check the About.com Browser guide by Scott Orgera.

To really understand the browser, turn to Google for its online book 20 Things I Learned about Browsers and the Web

Lastly - two things. It's still good to have a second browser in case of problems, and it's important to keep those browsers up to date with the latest security changes.

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You can get many good leads on current topics by following social media - principally Twitter. Do this by finding the right people to follow and by searching on tags.

Topsy - truly real time search of social media. Advanced Search supports operators. Pulls in from web (Facebook, Scribd etc), Twitter, YouTube. Can create alerts.

Bing Social - basic search of Twitter and Facebook. Can identify shared links, show public updates real time, suggest users on twitter, and show tweets on maps for an area.

Addict-o-matic - mega search on Twitter, news sources - Yahoo and Bing, blogs - Google and Twingly, Flickr and YouTube, and several others. Will provide a rough cut as a starting point.

Tweetdeck - social dashboard for watching your feeds from Twitter and Facebook (not LinkedIn). Can reply and re-tweet. Will also see referrals to you. Can pick up mentions.

HootSuite - custom interface for working with social streams. Can monitor mentions of companies, products, keywords. Pulls in Twitter, Facebook, Linked In. Requires registration. Has a basic free version.

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Words matter - the more we have and the better we understand them the richer we are. These sites make learning fun and keep us alert to our world.

Newswordy identifies buzzwords in circulation. The word will pertain to a big topic of the day - such as turmoil in financial markets. Newswordy gives the definition, an example from current news, and use (and misuse) of that word in blogs and tweets. Presents a very interesting view of the news of the day.

Wordspy picks out newly coined words, and words with new meanings. Any idea what a bacn is? "Non-personal, non-spam email messages that you have signed up for, but do not necessarily want or have time to read."

Save the words works to reclaim old, rarely used words. Adopt a word, get a word a day, use it - fine words like retirant (retiree), or buccellation. Oxford Dictionary helps them out.

Eggcorns - no not acorns - eggcorns - little twists to words and phrases that are created through a confusion in phonetic spelling. It's not alimentary my dear Watson.

The Global Language Monitor "is a media analytics company that documents, analyzes and tracks trends in language the world over". The top words and phrases in the years 2000 to 2009 is a snapshot history of that period.

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At last, Marshall McLuhan, who amazed the world with enigmatic, Delphic thoughts about communications and technology in the 1950s and 1960s, is receiving his due in events to mark the 100th anniversary of his birth.

Now it is time to comb the used book shops for The Mechanical Bride (1951), The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964).

Get reacquainted with the great man, or read him for the first time through this starter list. Start with what he said, and then what others said.

The return of Marshall McLuhan by Michael Valpy, Globe and Mail, July 15, 2011 - short history and very concise summary of his understanding of communications and technology.

Marshall McLuhan - the official, non-profit site. Crash course with McLuhanism, common questions, a/v Marshall McLuhan speaks - introduction by Tom Wolfe, and much more.

McLuhan100 - a blog about the activities to celebrate and honour the man and his ideas. One of these is an audio tour of McLuhan's Toronto with Nora Young, host of CBC's Spark.

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man - some excerpts through eBook Browse. Look for other titles there.

Marshall McLuhan: the medium and the messenger: a biography, by Philip Marchand, 1989 - Google Books preview of this well regarded biography.

YouTube search for Marshall McLuhan - hear and see him in interviews and lectures.

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"Personal curation" is a new phrase that is receiving some currency. It means to select and organize resources for your personal use. Consider it as a personal news feed of handpicked sources. There are many tools that make this easier.

MyAlltop - pick from 32,000 websites and blogs to build your own magazine rack of headlines.

Google Reader - add feeds from blogs and news sources for easy reading.

Feedly - converts Google Reader into a newspaper. Browser plugins are available for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari.

Paper.li - publish a news page with information from your connections in Twitter or Facebook. It is very simple and much more attractive than Twitter's own view. Alternatively, create a page on a new topic by picking up users, lists, tags and searches. Can also find other people's papers and read them.

eqentia - create a personal news portal using Twitter, Google Reader, 70 channels created by eqentia, and numerous news searches. Can add annotations and republish.

9 content curation tools that better organise the web, webdistortion (Mar 10, 2011)

Recently, I've been doing historical research into events and people in Toronto from 1900 to 1940. I've been surprised at the amount of material available on the web - largely discoverable through Google. As well, it is always advisable to use databases at the local library.

Google Search using number range: Using number range at Google for years can help identify articles or events. For example, research Ernest Hemingway's connection to Toronto between 1920 to 1930 -- "ernest hemingway" toronto 1920..1930

Google timeline is even better - search on "ernest hemingway" toronto - and click on Timeline under more search tools - and select from the timeline the period of interest. Results come from the news archive, Google books, Scholar, and other sources. Can find items this way that you'll never find by any other method.

Internet Archive: these results will show in a Google or Bing search, but you can search directly the texts from North American libraries and others. There are some wonderful resources here including directories to the City of Toronto up to 1923.

Google Books: Many pre-1930 texts are available in full, and others are in a fairly generous preview. If you get stuck with snippet only, you can often find the book in a local library.

Toronto Public Library: TPL has articles and online research where you will find the two Proquest resources for Toronto Star: Pages of the Past, and Globe and Mail: Canada's Heritage. Tip - search for exact phrase - anything else is an exercise in frustration. You'll need a TPL library number to do this. People in other Canadian cities may have access to newspaper archives for their area through the library.

Tired of television fare today? Or perhaps you are a student and need to find out how it used to be. Many broadcasters are opening their programming archives for us to view early film by streaming or download.

TVOntario just announced its archive of 375 episodes of writers, the arts, current affairs, big ideas, and Elwy Host at the movies.

National Film Board of Canada has hundreds of films, documentaries, animinations - there are over 13,000 Canadian productions. Download even to your iPhone. I have found productions on the Inuit from the 1950s here. Keep your playlists on a personal page.

CBC Digital Archives is another rich source of clips from television and radio. The site has a good navigational guide. Subscribe to the weekly newsletter to learn about new content and get the pick from the past.

BBC Archives may be the premier collection. Unfortunately, viewing of much of it is limited to people in the UK. Still, you can listen to the radio broadcasts. Use the tabs on the page to explore by subject, programme, people. You'll find George's VI's first speech.

It's Canadian Thanksgiving and the December holidays aren't far away. Let's think about those holiday meals.

Yummly is a "powerful food search portal". This is a meta-search engine that picks up the major recipe sites. Its strength is in the filtering - "Not only can you filter results by type of food, course, and ingredient, but you can also break down recipes by diet, allergy, nutrition, price, cuisine, time, taste, and sources. " And you can re-size the recipe for number of servings and get nutritional information.

LCBO Food and Drink - one of the best magazines for recipes and wine pairings, this resource from the Liquor Control Board of Ontario is online. Don't have a dinner party without it.

Lucy's Kitchen - Lucy Waverman is the chef-in-residence at LCBO Food and Drink and the Globe and Mail. Go directly to her website.

RecipeBridge is a specialty vertical search on just recipes. It collects from 200 culinary web sites. Browse by category, or search by a recipe name (eg chicken cacciatore) or ingredients - then refine by other ingredients.

Gourmet lives on in its own website and through Epicurious. Gourmet Online has web exclusive recipes, ten-minute main dishes, and enough photos to make you salivate at the computer screen. Do Gourmet on Facebook too.

Cooks Illustrated will tell you what you need to know about equipment, the whys and wherefores of a recipe, detailed instructions on how to prepare food. There is an astonishing amount of useful information at the site - become a culinary expert.

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We expect all our daily information needs to be a few keystrokes away. Many of those needs are for finding restaurants, services, entertainment, stores and other businesses nearby - all local search. In Canada, we have a few services:

Yelp.ca says that is has restaurants, dentists, bars, beauty salons, doctors (and a lot more) for most major cities in Canada. Enter your address, make your request, and get a list of what's near you - with ratings, comments, and maybe photos. You don't have to be a member to use it, but if you join you can contribute and follow what your friends like and recommend. Connects to Facebook (of course). Works well on searches for locavores or farmers markets.

FourWhere picks up listings and reviews by users in Yelp, Gowalla, and Foursquare and shows them on a Google Map. That's some mashup. This also works in Canada - and was built by Sysomos, Toronto-based social media software company. Find venues in your neighbourhood. It even has the small town of Sooke, BC covered, and Iqaluit in Nunavut.

Yellow Pages and CanPages are the yellow-pages approach to local search. Both are owned by Yellow Media. We can expect to see some consolidation in 2011. Both have mobile apps, and similar features. CanPages may have a better listing of business categories. Yellow Pages has specialty sites such as Toronto Plus. Yellow Pages also supplies listings to Yahoo Canada's local search.

Google Canada will show local search results on obvious queries - such as pizza toronto. You can narrow that to your immediate neighbourhood by including street address and city. If you prefer, you can go directly to the Local Search entry page. It wil find pizza, but doesn't do well on farmers' markets.

What not to try: Bing Canada - no business listings.

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Semantic search engines go beyond the words to try to understand the meaning of the query. They use a variety of techniques to identify entities in the query and the content (place, names, dates), discern the context of the query, and enrich the query with related or associated terms obtained through a form of taxonomy or ontology. Natural language processing for parsing sentence syntax figures into the analysis.

DuckDuckGo - helps the searcher select the intended meaning from a list of optons. Paris - do you want the city, or a person? It can help further with suggested topics.

Hakia- analyzes the text of a document for terms that represent its meaning and associates these with terms in its repository of concept relations, thus expanding the understanding of content for that document. A query is matched to the larger understanding rather than on an exact keyword match.

Kngine - aims to bring together semantic search, semantic web, and data representation technologies. Today, it has an uncanny ability to find data (Kngine stats). On general concepts it gives a choice of meanings taken from Freebase. It can also show aspects of a topic (such as is shown for placenames).

Kosmix - utilizes some semantic analysis to organize search results by format and present related topics.

Lexxe - answers questions using natural language technology - and does so quite well. It will suggest more aspects to the query through "clusters".

Quertle - uses linguistic technology and its understanding of biomedical terms to search literature at PubMed. It looks for relationship of terms: eg caffeine and sleep. The power terms represent classes of objects: eg diseases.

Yebol - uses some semantic technologies to make sense of results. It identifies top sites, and related searches, and breaks the page into parts for web, images, twitter etc.

For more see the wiki page at HLWiki Canada.

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We can get great insights into a topic by seeing its progression over time. Several search tools provide timelines as a visual tool to see the progression of a topic over time from inception to current state. The topic can be a person, place, or issue.

Google can display a timeline for news stories in the Google Archives and from a general web search.

For News , select Archives from the date ranges, or go directly to Google News Archive Search.

For Web, use More Search Tools in the left rail and select Timeline. For example, this history for AECL Canada.

There is also a mini timeline for Real Time Search that shows tweets and facebook entries by time slot. Look for it under Updates.

Cuil will show a timeline on some queries. It's most easily seen with gulf war, showing entries on the pre-conditions for the war, the details of the war, and aftermath.

Dipity put a new face on timelines with data drawn from social media sources (YouTube, FLickr, Diig, Twitter ...). Registered users can create topics and share these fully or selectively. Seattle Times used Dipity to display timeline and map on the Police shootings in Lakewood Wa in 2009.

For the general searcher, there is a search box on the main page - make it a "web search". Example - queen elizabeth.

Also Dipity Timetube is a mashup where you can search YouTube and see the videos on a timeline, flipbook, or map view.

Note: The Google Timeline view at Viewzi, noted for its variety of visual display of search results, no longer returns results. Pity..

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Analysts have been looking at what's hot in the minds of searchers since the early days of Yahoo Buzz and the Google Zeitgeist. Today Google mines its search logs to suggest terms and related searches to searchers and provide researchers and marketers tools to analyze keywords.

Google Suggest with its automatic display or queries as you type can indicate aspects of a topic that are attracting attention. It's a kind of instant pulse - but Google only shows 10.

Related searches will spin from yours - searches others have done recently that seem semantically related to yours. They do change from day to day. Wonder Wheel is a visual way of exploring these.

Google Trends and Google Insight are the high-powered tools that enable one to look at patterns in search queries and detect trends. They use the same search history data but offer different treatment.

Trends is available for country versions of Google and will show Hot Topics for that country. Keyword searches will show occurrence in queries worldwide over time, the regions, and languages, and pinpoint some key stories. Another graph shows news reference volume over time. You can control on region and year. This is a supreme way to get an overall view of a topic. Note that the search trend data has been scaled and normalized.

Insights digs deeper to compare search volume patterns across region, categories (topics), and time - and to do so for Web, News, Images, and Product. Wonder if there is a growing interest in the arctic in Canada? Limit the search to Science to see that arctic ice is strong as a query. Loosen the filters to get a worldwide view.

Google has several help pages and videos on these. For Insights, start with About Google Insights for Search [2 min]

There are some developed applications. Google Flu Trends is one that monitors search terms that are good indicators of flu activity.

Economists might find some predictive power too -- Predicting the Present with Google Trends (April 2009)

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No longer do we need to haul a large print dictionary from the shelf. The dictionary can be a click away when we need to learn the meaning of a word, do background research to get context, or find more words to express a concept. These are also good tools for learning a language.

RefSeek has a good list of dictionaries.

One favourite is The Free Dictionary, a comprehensive dictionary with many languages, and including extensive reference materials from several encyclopedia. The Free Dictionary can be added to the search bar in Firefox and IE.

Answers.com has a Reference Library with several dictionaries and encyclopedia (one of which is Wikipedia) that is organized thematically and can be searched. An add-on to your browser will enable you to right click on any word you wish to look up.

Merriam Webster often turns up in search results. Online search is available for the dictionary, thesaurus, medical terms, and Spanish-English translation. Has many features, but also many advertisements.

Dictionary.com, from Ask.com, and will handle dictionary look-up, thesaurus, encyclopedia, and some translation. Has several features for the word lover (along with many sponsored results and ads).

Aternatives to Google's Dictionary Links at Google Operating Systems has suggestions on how to embed a dictionary into the browser.

Merriam offers a Visual Dictionary Online with 6,000 images. You can search by keyword, but browsing by a theme may be better for learning.

Add-ons are available for all browsers to facilitate instant word lookup. This can be done by adding a dictionary search to the Search Bar in Firefox or IE, or adding an extension for more function. Look in your browser for a link (usually under Tools) to the catalog. You can also do a web search, or find the tool at the dictionary website. Shop around.

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Wonder when the summer yard sales will begin in your neighbourhood? Are there local ratepayer issues? These events might be covered in a hyperlocal news site near you. Often these take the form of blogs - placeblogs, as they are sometimes called.

In Toronto, there is BlogTo. The news is about Toronto covering city politics, buildings, events, and with sections on the neighbourhoods. Restaurants and retail are named for the neighbourhoods but the "talk" is not here yet.

BlogTo is one of three sites Freshdaily runs - "hyper-local arts, music, film, fashion, food and news." There is also Vancouver - Beyond Robson, and Montreal - MidNight Poutine

Placeblogger will find blogs that are about a city. It is a US service but includes many major cites Canadian cities. It picks up items from placeblogs about the city - and is a straightforward way to find those placeblogs.

Web sites of local print newspapers in small towns will list events and provide some updates.

But to see what can be done with hyperlocal news, we must look to the United States. Everyblock, owned by MSNBC, has articles, reviews, announcements, and public records - fire department, land use, restaurant inspections - right down to zip code and block record.

Hyperlocal news is flourishing in the United States and especially Seattle. New media ventures blossom in Seattle in SeattlePI (Mar 16, 2010)

Robert Washburn, professor of e-journalism at Loyalist College, posts about hyperlocal news in the The Canadian Journalism Project.

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If you do any searching at all, you know the difficulty of trying to figure out the best way to save what you find - should you juggle your tabs, save a bookmark to your browser or to an online service, copy and paste to Word or Notepad? None of these. There are several excellent tools that work with the browser by which you can save the link, clip part of the page, save all the page, add other things - videos, images, add notes, keep bibliographic data, search it all, and share.

The following are in order of function offered, starting with the basic.

Clipmarks - Clip text, images, videos from web pages by placing mouse cursor over area to be saved. Keep the collection private or let it be public. Share with friends through email or syndicate through Facebook, Twitter, delicious. Bookmarklet works in all browsers.

Diigo - A social bookmarking tool on steroids - save the link and the page - form groups on topics and work together. Works better with the toolbar.

iCyte - "Save any webpage you like on iCyte's server, with highlights on the important text, plus notes and tags for quick reference". Share through email, twitter or facebook. Works with Firefox 3.x and IE 7 and 8.

makeuseof has this article on iCyte: Capture Web Pages And Highlight Text In A Flash (Sept 25, 2009)

Evernote - Save links and clip web page content or add nearly anything through a browser add-on. Organize into notebooks, search, and share. Free version lets others view your notebook. Fee version lets colleagues join in. Content is online. Walt Mossberg called it Digital File Cabinet You Can Bring With You Anywhere (Jan 2010)

Zotero - Academic researchers love it - use the toolbar to capture bibliographic information, archive web pages, store pdfs and other files, organize into locations, sync across computers - and then there is the community - discover researchers in various fields. It also integrates with OpenOffice and MS Word. Works with Firefox.

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My aim in the Internet News blog is to provide a digest of news items that have to do with web searching - tools, techniques, aids, resources. Everyperson as a web searcher is the audience.

My sources include blogs written for search engine marketers since they must know how search engines work in order to do their jobs. There are also press releases about new product launches. Some sources have information about search tools, and some about peripheral tools such as the browser. Some have content directed to the actual searcher.

Pandia Search Engine News - the Pandia team of Per and Susanne Koch based in Norway delivers the single best compilation of news about search for searchers and search engine marketers. They also write feature articles on search tools.

Search Engine Land - Danny Sullivan and associates cover the waterfront for search engine marketers and optimizers. Searchers can learn a lot from the news updates and the in depth review articles.

Search Engine Journal - The blog has search engine news for marketers, but frequent contributor Ann Smarty describes search tactics. She is sharp. Also follow her at SEOSmarty.

Webware - CNet News merges stories about "cool web apps" from its many publications to create the daily Webware. Many of the tools searchers will want to know about.

Research Buzz - Tara Calishain is a searcher par excellence. She has been reviewing web collections, testing new search features, and sharing techniques for many years.

Charles Knight, specialist in alternative search engines, has opened a new blog called The Next Web Search It is "devoted to all things search related "

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If for nothing else, we will remember 2009 as the year Twitter and real time status updates dominated search. Here are five of the top search stories during the year.

A Pew Internet study reported that 19 percent of Internet users say they use Twitter or another service to share updates about themselves, or to see updates about others. Tools for searching tweets became a growth industry. Here's one of many lists.

Google Search Options (May 13) - With the new Show-Options page Google finally added some web search aids. Timeline and Wonderwheel were two notable improvements. There were more changes later in the year, and more are expected in 2010.

Meet Bing, Microsoft’s New Search Engine by Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (May 28) - DS described Microsoft's latest design effort to attract users with a new interface.

Bing did make a difference in user interface in the year but perhaps more so in the Image and Video search.

Wolfram|Alpha after the hype, Pandia (Aug 25) - Wolfram|Alpha works with data and does computations. It disappointed many reviewers in the beginning, but new function is continually being added.

Real Time in Google (Dec 8) - After weeks of rumours, Google added a real time stream from Twitter in web search. So far it's not particularly noticeable or useful. Around the same time Yahoo picked up a feed, and Bing created a separate Twitter search tool.

Previous Featured Sites - January 2010 - Present