Pretty much everyone carries around a little USB drive with them these days, but most people aren’t utilizing them for much more than carrying around a few Word files and some mp3s. If you’d like to make better use of these things that dangle off your keychain, The Portable Freeware Collection is a great site to find free programs that are either built from the ground up to work on a USB drive or, by following their usually simple directions, can be made to work on one.

You can search by categories such as audio/video players, editors for most media types, system utilities and even games. They also update quite frequently, so the site won’t feel like it’s stagnating as some other freeware lists out there do.

It’s mostly due to this site that I’m running out of space on my drive.

Some of you may have tried the rather nifty Google Suggest that auto-completes your search entry based on the most popular searched for queries. If you liked it, you’ll probably be glad to know that this functionality is going to be included by default in the search bar in Firefox 2.0.

Here is a shot of it in action:

Yahoo! also seems to provide suggestions in the beta, but I was unable to find a version of it on their site.

If you can’t wait for Firefox 2.0 to get out of beta to try this, here is an extension that will do mostly the same thing for current versions of the browser. The extension was coded by Google themselves, so hopefully that means it’s stable.

For those who think that the recent AOL privacy slip-up is not an issue since the data was masked by User IDs, here is a perfect example of just how easy it is to connect a people to their data.

Let’s just hope, as the article says, that there is a silver lining behind this type of situation and people begin to pay attention to these types of privacy issues.

Unfortunately, people are far too lazy and tend to quickly forget that most things they do online should be thought of as a matter of public record. Who among us doesn’t have an embarrassing forum post or some other form of online shenanigans databased and indexed “forever” via Google or the Wayback Machine?

Proof of this lies in the alarming amount of people that still use the name of their cat or significant other as their main password.

In spite of the horrible press that MySpace has been receiving lately (or possibly because of it), Google has laid down $900 million to MySpace owners News Corp. for the right to provide search services for the popular social networking site.

The deal replaces Yahoo!, who previously supplied MySpace with search services.

With that much money to spend, maybe Google should just skip the middle man and buy Yahoo! out themselves. Wait, no, competition is good.

Do you assume that the details about you search for are just between you and your search engine? If you use AOL, you might be sorely mistaken.

Of course, other search engines have shown us glimpses of what people search for in the past, but it’s usually not connected to users in any way, as was the case with AOL’s release.

I’d almost say that they get what they deserve for using AOL, but bad things can happen when information like that is released inadvertently.

Apart from an internet connection and a computer, what else do you need when you want to search for something online?

Yes! A browser.

It’s true that many people still seem to think that the little blue e (or the little compass, if you’re on a Mac) is the internet, but more savvy users like yourselves know that a browser is just another program and that it can easily be replaced.

Mozilla Firefox has become amazingly popular in the last couple of years, but for those of you who still don’t know about it, allow me to pimp it out a bit. There are many security and usability reasons why you might like Firefox better than other browsers, but I’ll stick to pointing out its integrated search features.

By default, Firefox comes with a search bar positioned to the right of the address bar:

Other browsers such as Opera have this, and it seems that IE7 will add this whenever it is actually released, but I prefer the way Firefox does things. You can enter your keywords, including any other search syntax, such as Google’s site: command, and the search results will be displayed in the browser.

The default search engine used will be Google, but you can easily change that by clicking on the G icon. You can also add other engines by clicking “Add Engines.” This takes you to the Mozilla Add-ons site from where you can add new inegrated search engines.

If you dislike using the search bar, or if you get rid of it because it takes too much space, you can enter your search directly into the address bar, which will do a Google “I’m Feeling Lucky” search. This can be changed to use something else since sometimes the results don’t seem all that lucky, but I’ll leave the details of that for another post.

If you want to use another search engine from the address bar, first go to the site and then right click in the entry area and select “Add a Keyword for this Search…”

The keyword search is saved as a bookmark. A dialog will open asking you for a name, the keyword that will activate the search and where you would like to save the bookmark. I recommend the Quick Searches folder which should already be in your bookmarks.

Now searching with Ask.com is as easy as entering “ask anything” into your address bar. One cool thing to remember is that if you hit ALT + Enter, your search will open in a new tab, which in case you didn’t know, is one of Firefox’s best features.

That’s pretty much all you need to know about searching in this browser. What are you waiting for? Go download and make your searching more efficient.

Rarely does a day pass without one of my friends IMing me with some tech related question that I know they could have easily figured out on their own had they simply searched for it. Instead of telling them the answer, or just linking them to a site that will answer their question, I have gotten into the habit of linking them to the same search query that I would have used in their place.

For example, someone recently asked me how to open a .rar file she had downloaded. Instead of sending her to:

http://www.rarsoft.com/

I sent her to:

http://www.google.com/search?q=open+rar+file

It doesn’t always work, but to paraphrase the old saying, “Clean a friend’s spyware and they will surf happy for a day. Teach them how to clean it themselves and they’ll surf happy for, well, a week tops.”

Also, it’s a good way to remind your friends that you’re not their own personal tech support service. If after a while they don’t get the hint, though, linking them to this Wikipedia entry can be quite cathartic.