Just a quick post to tell folks about two nifty plugins (add-ons) for Firefox that make Google searches more . . . well . . . interesting (especially when you search for Edupunk). The first is Search Cloudlet which will include a “tag cloud” in your search results that allows you to refine said results more quickly. You can instantly see which related tags are most common and narrow your results accordingly. When you click on individual tags, you essentially add keywords to refine the search. By switching your cloud from Tags to Sites, you can select from sites that are most commonly associated with your search term and narrow the results by website. It’s fun, fast, and can lead to more serendipitous results. You can also search by top level domain names (.net, .com, .edu), or turn it off within the page if it does get in your way.

The other plugin is Googlepedia, which as you can see from the photo above, inserts a Wikipedia entry right into the Google results page. It nicely replaces the useless paid advertisements space to the right with a useful Wikipedia result. God help you if you search for Edupunk (and no, I don’t mean edulink).

If you thought Google was a funny name for a search engine, this nostalgic site shows that it was formerly known as Backrub. Phew!