Five free Chrome tools for faster, easier searches

Your search for the perfect search is over. Five free tools from the Chrome Web Store work with the Chrome browser to make searching easier, or help you tweak your search queries to minimize unwanted results. If you want to delve only into Wikipedia, or if you want to ignore certain sites—especially ones that seem suspect—you can do it with one of these helpers.

I’m lazy. I admit it. Sometimes, the idea of typing a query into a search engine is enough to discourage me from running a Web search altogether. But with Highlight to Search, I can embrace my laziness and still conduct the Web searches I need.

Highlight to Search adds your highlighted text to its search field, and then displays other suggestions based on the search term.

Once you've installed this Chrome extension, Highlight to Search lets you conduct searches for keywords you select on a webpage. Highlight a word or phrase, and Highlight to Search will display a small magnifying glass icon.

Click that, and you’ll see your highlighted phrase along with other search suggestions. Pick one, click again, and your search is complete: Highlight to Search opens a new tab, displaying Google’s search results for your query.

Searching doesn’t get any easier than that.

I resisted the allure of Wikipedia for a long time. It can’t be trusted, I said. It’s not reliable, I claimed. And now I’m over it.

Wikipedia Search displays its results in a drop-down window that lets you read them without leaving the page you're browsing.

Opening my mind to Wikipedia also opened the door to Wikipedia Search. This Chrome App and browser extension lets you search Wikipedia without leaving your current webpage.

Wikipedia Search displays images in easy-to-browse results.

All of the information you seek appears in a window that drops down from the Wikipedia Search icon added to your browser bar. The attractive and well-designed window includes images and links. You also have the option of clicking a button to view the Wikipedia page in a new browser tab.

Wikipedia Search isn’t perfect: On two occasions, it returned an error page in response to a basic search query. (In both instances, however, the error disappeared when I repeated my query.) Nevertheless, it remains a great way to dig up information from a vast trove of content without interrupting your browsing.

There's such a thing as TMI (too much information) in search, too. Say that you prefer the food reviews posted on Urbanspoon to those on Chow or Yelp. A reliable way to prevent sites that you don't want to read from surfacing in searches is to use Google’s own Personal Blocklist (by Google). Make no mistake: That's its name.

When future searches return results from sites you've blocked, Personal Blocklist lets you know with a message at the bottom of the page and a link to view those results.

This Chrome extension adds a link to all of your Google search results, so you can block search results from a given domain. Click it, and all such results disappear from view. The domain goes to your personal blocklist, which you can manage by clicking the Personal Blocklist icon added to your Chrome bar. Here, you can choose to block only subsets of certain domains, remove sites from your blocklist, or add others simply by typing them in.

When future searches return results from those sites, Google notifies you with a message at the bottom of the page and a link to view those results. Personal Blocklist (by Google) isn’t a universal cure to search-engine overload, but it is a handy way to tailor your results.

You know better than to trust everything you find on the Web, but distinguishing what you can trust from what you can’t is often difficult. To help you figure it out, WOT (a Chrome extension from the website reputation and review service) crowdsources the job.

WOT adds small traffic-light icons next to your search results, showing you how others regard each site.

WOT adds small icons next to search results that all major search engines return, along with links that appear on your social networks and Webmail services. The icons use the traffic-light scheme: Green means the site is widely considered to be reliable; yellow suggests that you should treat the site with caution; and red indicates that it may pose a security threat.

Clicking the icon takes you to WOT’s site. There you see more details about the site, and you can read what other users have to say about it. WOT allows you to add your own information about any site on the Web, just by clicking the WOT icon on to your Chrome menu bar.

WOT doesn’t guarantee your safety on the Web, but it does help you navigate its dangers with the help of thousands of cyber-friends.

One of my all-time favorite browser tools, the Google Toolbar, isn't available for Google Chrome. According to Google, that’s because many of the Google Toolbar's features are built into Chrome itself. Still, I miss having a toolbar, which is why I love SearchBar. This Chrome extension adds a customizable search toolbar to Chrome.

SearchBar is accessible via the small icon in your Chrome menu bar, or it can live at the top of your browser window permanently.

SearchBar adds a magnifying-glass icon to Chrome’s menu bar. Click it, and a search toolbar appears. For easier access to the toolbar, use the settings menu to create a custom key combination, or have it display whenever you're browsing. To use it, enter your query, and click the site you’d like to search.

Highlight text on the webpage, and SearchBar automatically adds it to the search field.

The default options are Google, Wikipedia, YouTube, and Wolfram Alpha, but you can customize the choices by using SearchBar’s settings menu. SearchBar lacks the slickness of Google’s own toolbar, which becomes its own part of your browser. But since Google Toolbar isn’t available for Chrome, SearchBar is the next best thing.

Anyone can type a search term into a text bar. But these five tools do more, helping you dig exactly what you want out of the search results more quickly and easily. And they're free, so you don't have to dig out your wallet at all.

Liane Cassavoy is a veteran technology and business journalist. She contributes regularly to PCWorld and has written about business issues and products for Entrepreneur Magazine and other publications. She is the author of two business start-up guides published by Entrepreneur Press.
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Review: 64-bit PaintShop Pro X6 is faster, but its interface is still clunky

For most professionals, Adobe Photoshop CS is the only photo editing tool worthy of consideration. Casual snapshooters can choose from a wealth of free and Web-based editors. For everyone in the middle—photo enthusiasts, serious shooters, and even pros dissatisfied with Adobe's new Creative Cloud—there's Corel's PaintShop Pro.

A viable Photoshop alternative for 20 years, PaintShop Pro offers 90 percent of Adobe's features for a tenth the price. In PaintShop Pro X6, Corel offers almost nothing new...which isn't such a bad thing. With a few exceptions, this upgrade is all about improved performance.

At long last, PaintShop Pro is a 64-bit application. That should mean faster processing and the ability to work with larger and more numerous images. Corel offers a slew of benchmarks to show that X6 runs faster than its predecessors, and in practice I found it to run notably quicker.

PaintShop Pro’s Edit workspace is essentially unchanged from previous editions, but that doesn't diminish its power, including layer and mask support and a bevy of selection tools.

Using my own stopwatch, I found that on the same PC, X6 shaves a few seconds off the startup time. Images—both JPG and RAW—load about 10 percent faster, and X6 catalogs folders and displays images more than twice as fast. Everything is snappier, giving the impression that you're at the helm of a tightly run ship.

The ship needs a new quartermaster, though. PaintShop Pro's relatively unchanged interface puts efficient design second to displaying lots and lots of tools. You access the three workspaces—Manage, Adjust, and Editing—via tabs at the top of the screen.

The Manage workspace makes it easy to review and edit metadata, as well as index your photos into "collections" for faster searching and browsing.

The Manage workspace is sort of like a light box mode. You inspect photos, review metadata, and enter ratings and keywords there. Although this view is perhaps the most crowded and confusing, it's all highly configurable. You can turn various panes, palettes, and toolbars off and rearrange things to your liking.

You can avoid the Manage view entirely, if you like: The program doesn't force you to import photos into a proprietary library, so you can always navigate through existing folders. If you don't use Corel's "collections," though, you're missing out. They let you tag photos for easier retrieval, and they load more quickly as well.

They also give you access to a face recognition mode, but it's perhaps more trouble than it's worth. Among other difficulties, browsing photos by people is difficult because you see tightly cropped faces only, not the entire image.

For a fast, lightweight editor, head over to the Adjust workspace, which houses about a dozen common tools Corel deems useful for lightweight editing and as go-to tools for novices. Here again, though, Corel's interface instincts strike a sour note. Some tools, such as cropping, red eye, and straightening appear in toolbar form under the histogram, but you have to access Smart Photo Fix, white balance, fill light, and others from a textual list below. There's no apparent rhyme or reason for why it's organized this way.

For lightweight editing, you can stay in the simpler Adjust workspace, which has a surprising range of tools—from exposure adjustments and Instagram-style effects to a clone brush.

That said, the tools are great. You could spend most of your time in this simplified interface, especially if all you need is to touch up digital photos with some exposure adjustments, noise reduction, and the occasional tourist removal via a clone brush.  This is also the easiest place to reach the hundred-odd Instagram-like Instant Effects.

The Editing workspace is where PaintShop Pro most closely resembles Photoshop. It's chock-full of layer support, selection tools, levels and curves controls, and even the ability to use industry standard Adobe Photoshop plug-ins.

There are relatively few "big ideas" that PaintShop Pro doesn't deliver on. Not only does the program include a very serviceable High Dynamic Range feature for combining a series of photos shot with a range of exposures, it can split one RAW image into three, and then reassemble them into an HDR shot. The effect isn't nearly as good as a true HDR, of course—PSP can't magically extend the dynamic range beyond what the camera sensor captured—but the effect can be convincing with the right source material.

Emphasize your subject with some depth-of-field style blurring.

Jealous of Photoshop's context-aware fill? You won't find that here, but you can use the Smart Cleaver to cut out objects and shrink the image as if they were never there. Depth of Field lets you blur the background with a few clicks. And  Photo Merge combines multiple photos of the same scene so you can keep the best shot of each person in a group. Just one surprising omission: There's still no panoramic stitching tool.

Good luck memorizing where to find these tools, though. They're scattered across multiple menus as if the wind blew them there.

Aside from the snappier performance, you'll have to look closely to notice the handful of differences from X5. I particularly like the new Auto Selection tool: Just draw a box around something in your photo, and PSP automatically selects it. You can then fine-tune the selection as usual.

The HDR compositor can accept multiple photos with a variety of exposures, or just one image that it splits apart using an exposure bias that you specify.

PaintShop Pro is currently available only as an upgrade to existing customers. It comes in two flavors: PaintShop Pro X6 ($60 upgrade) and X6 Ultimate ($80 upgrade). Ultimate includes a few extras, including the standalone FaceFilter program for editing portraits. On September 4, anyone can buy X6 for $80 and X6 Ultimate for $100.

A useful upgrade at a palatable price

If you're seeking an alternative to Photoshop, Corel PaintShop Pro is an unquestionable bargain. Unless you program Photoshop Actions in your sleep, you won't be missing much, if anything.

Whether you should upgrade from X5 is a trickier question. Casual photo tweakers probably won't notice much of a difference. But if you are currently frustrated by X5's 32-bit limitations for managing a large number of photos in your workspace, stepping up to X6 will save you considerable time.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

Dave Johnson is a writer and photographer who has covered technology for magazines such as PCWorld and Wired. He is currently the Editorial Director for eHow.com's Tech channel. Dave is the author of How to Do Everything with Your Digital Camera, and over a dozen other books.
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Review: Zotero makes research easier, faster, more robust

Everyone researching with electronic sources knows the pains of collecting articles, managing a library, and, worst of all, creating citations. Zotero is a veteran (and completely free) browser add-on that solves nearly all these problems. Originally available only for Firefox, cross-platform tool Zotero has recently become available for Chrome and Safari as well via its standalone desktop version.

Zotero's plugins for Microsoft Office and LibreOffice make it easier to track citations.

Zotero makes it easy to collect research papers off the Web, attach PDFs, find relevant articles in your library, and sync it across PCs. With the help of a Microsoft Word/LibreOffice plugin, Zotero takes the pain out of citations and bibliography, doing all the heavy lifting for you, using any of the major citation styles. It's indispensable for students.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the edition appropriate to your system.

Yaara is a foodie, horse-lover, and biologist who enjoys being a geek as a full-time job.
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Faster Than a PS3: Nvidia Mobile Keppler Graphics Will Power Next Tegra CPU

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AMD Claims New Elite A-Series APU 50 Percent Faster Than Intel Core i7

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Apple’s Smartphone Share Rises, But Android Growing Faster

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Pogoplug Series 4 Review: Remote Drive Access Made Simpler and Faster

The Pogoplug lets you turn any USB-attached drive into a network-accessible drive. The Pogoplug Series 4 is a vast improvement over previous models, starting with the upgrade of the USB ports to the 3.0 standard. In addition, series 4 offers a SATA/USM (Universal Storage Module, such as Seagate's Expansion drives use) slot on the top of the unit and an SD Card slot.

Pogoplug makes implementing your own remotely accessible storage extremely easy. Power up the unit, attach it to your network router or switch, and step through a simple online setup procedure using your browser--and you can access the unit and any attached drives from anyplace that has an Internet connection. You don't even have to enter a unit ID, as in the past. I'm one of the very few people to have experienced trouble with the Pogoplug's auto-configuration. Long story short: If the light on the front of your unit doesn't turn green as it should, put the Pogoplug in your router's DMZ until the light turns green, and then place it back behind the firewall.

The Pogoplug website portal where you upload, download, share, and view files is capable enough to get the task done. You use an email address and a password to log on. Of course, you're limited to the speed of your connection, but if you connect from the same local network, the Pogoplug is smart enough to bypass the Web portal and use the local connection for much faster uploads and downloads--a major benefit when you need to transfer large amounts of data before hitting the road.

The portal supports media streaming through your browser, and it understands a reasonable array of common music, image, and video file types, though it could use some tweaking. It misplaced an OGG Vorbis audio file in the movies section, and it doesn't visually delineate files and folders adequately. I could also argue for requiring a double-click rather than a single-click to tunnel down into folders, but that's being picky. The portal is certainly usable, but it has plenty of room for improvement. Pogoplug also provides passable remote access apps for both Android and iOS.

With Series 4, Pogoplug has finally addressed a major concern about the company's devices--that they would be useless if the company/portal ever went belly up. The company now has a PC/Mac/Linux software client that lets you directly access (restore) the files stored with the Pogoplug storage, and back up files from your PC. Portal or no, you can now use the Pogoplug for local network storage.

Since the danger that your Pogoplug might morph into an unreachable box has vanished, I can recommend it without reservation as a stress-free way to access and share files across the Internet without actually storing them online. The portal would benefit from some minor adjustments, but otherwise the Pogoplug Series 4 experience is top-notch.

From PC World. Shop computer and accessories from Amazon here

Pogoplug Series 4 Review: Remote Drive Access Made Simpler and Faster

The Pogoplug lets you turn any USB-attached drive into a network-accessible drive. The Pogoplug Series 4 is a vast improvement over previous models, starting with the upgrade of the USB ports to the 3.0 standard. In addition, series 4 offers a SATA/USM (Universal Storage Module, such as Seagate's Expansion drives use) slot on the top of the unit and an SD Card slot.

Pogoplug makes implementing your own remotely accessible storage extremely easy. Power up the unit, attach it to your network router or switch, and step through a simple online setup procedure using your browser--and you can access the unit and any attached drives from anyplace that has an Internet connection. You don't even have to enter a unit ID, as in the past. I'm one of the very few people to have experienced trouble with the Pogoplug's auto-configuration. Long story short: If the light on the front of your unit doesn't turn green as it should, put the Pogoplug in your router's DMZ until the light turns green, and then place it back behind the firewall.

The Pogoplug website portal where you upload, download, share, and view files is capable enough to get the task done. You use an email address and a password to log on. Of course, you're limited to the speed of your connection, but if you connect from the same local network, the Pogoplug is smart enough to bypass the Web portal and use the local connection for much faster uploads and downloads--a major benefit when you need to transfer large amounts of data before hitting the road.

The portal supports media streaming through your browser, and it understands a reasonable array of common music, image, and video file types, though it could use some tweaking. It misplaced an OGG Vorbis audio file in the movies section, and it doesn't visually delineate files and folders adequately. I could also argue for requiring a double-click rather than a single-click to tunnel down into folders, but that's being picky. The portal is certainly usable, but it has plenty of room for improvement. Pogoplug also provides passable remote access apps for both Android and iOS.

With Series 4, Pogoplug has finally addressed a major concern about the company's devices--that they would be useless if the company/portal ever went belly up. The company now has a PC/Mac/Linux software client that lets you directly access (restore) the files stored with the Pogoplug storage, and back up files from your PC. Portal or no, you can now use the Pogoplug for local network storage.

Since the danger that your Pogoplug might morph into an unreachable box has vanished, I can recommend it without reservation as a stress-free way to access and share files across the Internet without actually storing them online. The portal would benefit from some minor adjustments, but otherwise the Pogoplug Series 4 experience is top-notch.

From PC World. Shop computer and accessories from Amazon here

How to Switch Tasks Faster in Windows 8

If you do even a little bit of multitasking, Windows 8's Switcher menu — its preferred way of changing tasks —  can be extremely confusing. While the menu of thumbnails that appears on the left side of the screen shows separate tiles for each of your Metro-style Windows  8 apps, it lumps all of your desktop windows into a single thumbnail, no matter how many applications you have open.

If you use Switcher and  want to switch to a program that’s running on the desktop, you must navigate back to the desktop and find it there, an extra unnecessary step. Fortunately, you don’t need to use Switcher at all, because there are a couple of other ways to change tasks that are much quicker.

The good old ALT + Tab keyboard shortcut will show you a menu with every desktop and Windows 8 app on it. You can keep hitting ALT + Tab to select the app you want, but after you’ve switched apps, the menu disappears.

 If you are in the Modern UI and you dock the desktop, the dock will contain a list of thumbnails that show all your open desktop apps. Unfortunately, if you want to see a list of open Windows 8 apps, you’ll need to open the Switcher so this method still doesn’t give you a single unified task menu.

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