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Farecast Deals site launches

Farecast, an airline ticket prediction and purchasing service, has launched a new Deals section that helps people find the best prices on tickets within a 90-day window. Unlike the recently launched Fare Guard, the Deals section is completely free and competes with other discount travel sites like TravelZoo and CheapTickets to aggregate flights that sell for a fraction of their typical cost. The service is currently limited to 38 major airports in the United States.

The search results are separated by the best deals, last-minute flights, weekend and weeklong flights, and flights for families. There's also a section for … Read more

Deutschlanders: E-mail Google Maps to your BMW

Google has announced on their blog a new partnership with BMW's Assist driving service--but only in Germany, so far. BMW drivers using Google Maps Deutschland can now "send" selected geographic data from their PCs directly to their in-car navigators. Consequently, there's no need to look it up at home and then look it up again in the car. (Above: Check out Google's promotional video. Don't worry, it's in English.)

It's not available stateside yet, or with non-BMW navigators, but Google has stressed that this is only the first step in the introduction … Read more

News Roundup: Unbox for Tivo goes live, Friendster + Google, Web radio deathwatch?

TiVo users get unboxed. TiVo users looking to spend their hard-earned money on digital downloads of movies and TV shows online can now do so without leaving the couch. Last month's announcement of the partnership to bring Amazon's Unbox service to TiVo owners has been fulfilled, and now TiVo users can pick from more than a thousand pieces of content to download straight to their set-top box. ( News.com)

Friendster makes Google its ad, search supplier. Google has unseated Yahoo for advertising supremacy at Friendster, one of the oldest social networks that still has 37 million registered users. … Read more

Google Desktop 5: Now with more Vista

Yesterday Google quietly updated its desktop search and widget product, Google Desktop. Users who download the updated product (available at Google or here at Download.com) will notice two things. First, the widget sidebar is now flashier. Instead of using Google's traditional style (flat and boring), the sidebar now looks like it belongs on a Vista desktop (just like Microsoft's own sidebar). It looks good on XP, too. Google updated the graphics on many of its widgets to match.

Functionally, the big improvement is that desktop searches now get previews in the browser window. All results have little … Read more

CrispyShop: A pretty comparison shopping tool

CrispyShop is a new tool for comparison shopping. Launched last week, CrispyShop lets you search and compare prices and specs for pretty much anything sold online, using visualization that's both useful and easy on the eyes. CrispyShop is built on ShoppingPath, a technology that visually sorts and separates search results. All results come from Yahoo Shopping, and provide users with direct links to purchase products from popular Web shopping sites like Newegg and Buy.com.

Search results show up in a scatter plot, with product thumbnails that magnify when you mouse over them, similar to the dock on Mac OS X. … Read more

Court says search engines have First Amendment right to reject ads

A federal court has ruled that search engines have a First Amendment right to reject ads as part of their protected right to speak or not speak. The U.S. District Court in Delaware (PDF) has effectively shut down a lawsuit filed by Christopher Langdon, who had attempted unsuccessfully to sell ads on Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's search Web sites.

Langdon has several Web sites that purport to expose fraud among North Carolina state officials and to discuss atrocities committed by the Chinese government, according to the court filings. Allegedly, Google rejected Langdon's ads because they attacked individuals, … Read more

Five weird ways to see search: Quintura, Clusty, and more

Standard search engines are great for finding individual Web pages to answer discrete questions. But their lists of search results do not help you to understand a field in general. If that's what you need, you might want to check a visual search engine that clusters results, and in doing so gives you a better overview of a field.

Quintura is the most recently updated and most useful of the tools. It creates a tag cloud based on your search term, and when you hover your mouse over a term, it dives into the term and gives you a … Read more

MojoPages: Media-rich user reviews with karma

MojoPages is a new user review site that launched last week. It's similar to Yelp, but MojoPages users can post video clips and pictures to individual reviews about restaurants and local attractions.

In addition to offering a free-form template to create your written masterpiece, MojoPages gives you a form on which you can rate each establishment's value, service, and quality--things often mentioned in a well-written review.

One of the other standouts of MojoPages is the implementation of user photos. Instead of just uploading photos to an establishment's profile page, you can add them to each review. This … Read more

Weekend Webware: Find Wi-fi hotspots with Hotspotr

I discovered Hotspotr at SF Beta this past week. It's a neat little service that mashes up Google maps with a local Wi-Fi hotspot finder. The real pull of the service is you can rate and comment on hotspots as you would with restaurant reviews on a review site like Yelp. It's the perfect service for the casual Wi-Fi traveler to benefit from road warriors who are willing to take the time to review a wireless access point.

The ratings aren't just things such as the overall quality of the wireless signal either; you also can rate … Read more