ResearchBuzz

Hey, what’s up with the odd Yahoo Search Blog URLs? Well, no matter — I’m here to tell you about Yahoo’s new feature wherein they will send a page of search results to your mobile phone.

That is, if you’re searching for local information — regular old Web search apparently won’t cut it (which is too bad; sometimes I wouldn’t mind being able to do a quick Web search and then just send the information to my phone.) Anyway, do a search for local information with keywords and then some kind of location information, like paintball 90210. (When I tried searching for movies 90210, that apparently tripped another Yahoo Shortcut and it didn’t work.)

Anyway, when you do a search like that you’ll get a list of local destinations and then a link like Get results for “paintball 90210″ on your mobile phone. Click that link and you’ll get a popup window into which you put your cell phone number. You’ll get a text message with a link to the search results. Just a link, mind you. Not the actual results. I guess they’re trying to save people who might have to pay a lot for text messaging, but the option to get actual content would be nice…

Yahoo also has a regular mobile search, of course, if you want to browse from your phone. It’s at http://m.yahoo.com/.

Mozilla has announced a bunch of upgrades. Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.2 has been released, as has Firefox 1.5.0.10. But the real reason I’m mentioning this here, as you can see in this announcement, is that security updates for Firefox 1.5 will be discontinued on April 24. so if you’re using Firefox 1.5, you want to think seriously about upgrading..

In other Mozilla news, two new versions of Seamonkey have been released. I’ve been using that on Puppy Linux and I like it pretty well. If you use Thunderbird, you’ll be interested to know that 1.5.0.10 is now available.

Reading about these other projects, I got curious about what’s going on with Penelope, which as you might remember is going to be the open source answer to Eudora. The short answer appears to be not much. The home page hasn’t been changed since mid-January and there don’t appear to be any releases available. I will have to be patient…

This post came from ResearchBuzz, a site with news and information about online data collections. Visit us at ResearchBuzz.com .

Rijk van Geijtenbeek has created a very nice page at http://my.opera.com/Rijk/homes/blog/extensions.html. It’s a table that takes the top 150 Firefox Extensions and compares their functionality with Opera 9. Each entry is color coded; either out-of-the-box functionality in Opera 9, available add-on/widget for Opera, very limited functionality or extensive customizing required, or functionality not available.

Don’t get me wrong; a lot of the Firefox extensions have a “Functionality Not Available” in Opera 9. On the other hand I was pleased to see how much functionality WAS available; Opera’s come a long way. I also learned a lot from the listings; where functionality is available in Opera the extension listing explains how it’s done.

I wonder how IE would look stacked up against Firefox and 150 extensions?