Started work on a special mobile version of fefoo

After trying to use fefoo on the mobile it is clear that I need to make a special mobile version which is touch friendly and needs a very different way of interaction. Have been thinking about it for a while but lets see when I can get it out.

More feedback questions

Questions: I don't even know if there is something that can be done about it, but the following sites make the toolbar disappear: spezify, baidu, answers.yahoo.com and a few more sites.

The simplest answer to this is that nothing can be done. The frame removing scripts on these sites removes the toolbar. In the near future I plan to make fefoo as a browser extension. Till then I don't think anything can be done about it.

Question: Maybe the script simply tries to get the favicon from the site, but the following sites don't show the favicon in the toolbar: docjax, gazhoo, about and a few other sites.

There can be a number of reasons for it. The favicon location has changed. Favicons are encoded in a format that the browser does not display. On one browser it might work and on another browser the icon might now work.

Feature request: Propose popular searches as I type in the search box
Its already there in the code but just not polished enough to be turned on for everyone. If you use fefoo from the browser toolbar you should get a list of popular terms as you type.

Thanks for your amazing bug reports. I have tried to fix all the broken sites. On some of the sites the code is right but its not working. Since most of these sites get the results using "AJAX" the code which runs without JavaScript is broken on the server side. Hopefully they will fix it in time. I will remove the sites in case they still don't work in the next few weeks.

If you have a bug reports/feature request/ideas don't forget to send it across. You can email the ideas and requests to fefoo@googlegroups.com or join the Google Group http://groups.google.com/group/fefoo if you have any questions or want some help. You can also send it out using the feedback form.

Getting a lot of good feedback and bug reports

Over the last few days I've been getting quite a lot of bug reports and feedback from a user. Please do leave you email address in the feedback form. It makes it easier to get back to you. Am not sure if you use twitter or follow this blog. I will try and answer one of your questions here.

Why should I add fefoo as the default engine even when it only searches on Google?
When you add fefoo as the default engine it uses Google without the toolbar on top because personally 95% of the times I want to search on Google. Thought the toolbar is helpful in most cases I would not like to be stuck with it on every page. To turn on the toolbar while you search from the search bar add a ":" (colon) in front of your search. Now if you are searching for ": Baby Shark Song" just add a colon in front of the search. This will force fefoo to show you the toolbar.

[INFOCUS] Issuu is the youtube of magazines

Issuu is a great site if you like reading magazine articles. The selection of articles is really good. To use it from fefoo use the command :issuu

Have added issuu to the books. The other site that is a lot like issuu is mygazines. To use it use the command :mygazines

You can find both issuu and mygazines in the books category. If you want some other site to be added please leave a link in the comments.

[INFOCUS] The webmasters category

Besides managing search engine there are 19 webmaster tools that are part of the webmasters category which you can use to manage your websites. To try this category type the URL of your blog or website to use the tools in this category.

Enter a domain name eg. fefoo.com

When you search you will see a toolbar on top which will help you to select the webmaster tool you want to use. You can click on the icon or select the webmaster tool from the combo box. By default it uses the Wayback Machine. The various webmaster tools that are in fefoo range from SEO tools, domain management tools and stats tools.

Wayback Machine

This tool allows you to see how the website has evolved over the years. You can see a snapshot of the website over the years. Use the command :wayback [domain name] to use it directly from fefoo. Only the keyword given in bold is required rest is optional. You can use this fefoo command from the fefoo homepage. Now you can also add fefoo to your browser and use these commands from the search bar. You can add this firefox add-on to add it to firefox. For other browsers follow these instructions.

Justping

This is a great utility if you want to see if your website is available across the globe. They have servers around the world and you can ping from those servers to find out if your website is working from there. fefoo command :justping.

Who.is

If you want to find information about the domain name you can use this tool to get detailed information about the domain. fefoo command :who.is

Quarkbase

Has a detailed database about a domain. It gets information from multiple sources to generate detailed information about a domain. fefoo command :quarkbase

Dataopedia

Is similar to quarkbase and gives detailed information about the company which owns the domain. fefoo command :dataopedia

Alexa Traffic Details

Gives you stats about a domain generated by Alexa. You can see daily and monthly traffic changes on a domain. fefoo command :alexa

Quantcast

Is again similar to Alexa and gives stats about traffic on a given website. fefoo command :quancast

Compete

Using this tool you can get detailed site analysis about a website. fefoo command :compete

YouNoodle

Has information about startups based on a domain name. fefoo command :younoodle

DNS tools from domaintools.com

There are 4 DNS based tools that you can use from fefoo.

• Ping: Pings the specified host to see if its alive. fefoo command :ping
• Traceroute: Traces the route from the domaintools.com servers to the domain name. fefoo command :traceroute
• DNS Lookup: You can look up the DNS entries of the given domain name. This also gives you information about the name servers being used by the domain name. fefoo command :dns
• Domain Search: Search for a domain name. Also displays other similar names that might be available. fefoo command :domain

Google Safe Browsing

This tool will tell you if the domain that you are searching for has hosted any malicious content in the last 90 days. fefoo command :googlesafe

Pagerank Tools

There are three tools which you can use to find the page rank of your website. You can use any one of them if either of them is down.

• Smartpagerank: fefoo command :smartpagerank
• iWebtool Pagerank: fefoo command :iwebtool
• Checkpagrank: :checkpagerand

Backlink Watch

This is one very important tool which you can use to find detailed information about who all is linking to your website. fefoo command :backlinkwatch

fefoo is now available for iGoogle and Netvibes homepage

If you have set your homepage to http://www.google.com/ig you can now add fefoo to your homepage. You will be able to search on any of the 250+ search engines in 40 different categories right from your homepage.

Click on the button to add it to iGoogle now.

To add it to netvibes

fefoo as a replacement for about:blank

Whenever I install a new browser the first task is to change the homepage to about:blank. Till now the main reason to do that was speed. The loading speed was one of the main goals when I started with fefoo, it had to load as fast as about:blank, even on the slowest of connection.

Before you read any further you should test it out http://fefoo.com, this page should open in fraction of a second almost as fast as about:blank. It might take a few seconds the very first time you visit fefoo but after that it should load really fast. If it does not load as fast as about:blank you can stop reading further.

If you are still reading on, I would assume http://fefoo.com opened up almost as fast as about:blank. fefoo is meant to work like an offline web application that has more than 200 search engines bookmarked for easy access and many other commands built in which you can discover over time. You can set http://fefoo.com as the homepage instead of using about:blank without ever worrying about it being slow. It is made entirely in JavaScript and runs from the browser. It uses caching to achieve the speed.

Today fefoo is a lot more than just a bookmark of search engines but it started out as a replacement for the about:blank page. Even though fefoo has a lot more features its still heavily optimized to open really fast. You can search using Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Youtube, Twitter Search, Wolfarm|Alpha and 200 other search engines right from your fefoo homepage. Also with categories of searches like Web, Images, Blogs, Videos, Torrents, Music, News and another 35 more search categories, you can concentrate on searching rather than thinking of the site that you will use to search. fefoo can also help you to discover new search engines. As an example in the music category new engines are added every other week. The day SeeqPod was removed from the music category on fefoo another three sites were added to the music category. This makes discovering new search engines really easy.