Find the best prices with ShopWiki!

Wow wow, what do we have here? Christmas is coming and ShopWiki comes in just handy! This is a search engine dedicated to sniffing out the best deals in shops everywhere on cyberspace. Granted, we have the all-imposing Google search engine but that is really not niche enough if we want to look for the best deal for a specific item. Yes, for those super geeks out there, I know you can enter a Google command such as "toothbrush $105...$150". This neat trick will basically grab you all mentions of toothbrushes costing between $105 and $150. I have tried searching this way on occasions too but it isn't really the best way. 2 quick reasons. One - you will see a lot of "junk" sites that are not even selling any products. Two - you can't sort the items in any order. ShopWiki is neat in that it only searches online stores and it allows you to sort the prices in ascending/descending order! Beyond this, you can also drag a slider and set the price range you desire. We online shopaholics all know how important such filtering is. If it is not important, we would just paint our glasses black and skip looking at the price tags. Geez, I think even Bill Gates looks at the price tags sometimes - not that he can't afford things but if only he doesn't get cheated! As my experiment, the key phrase I tried was "rune rings". Well, I have been eyeing one for some time but have not made up my mind yet. Out came the results and wow, there's one going for $4. I was excited... 7 stores... they turned out to be all from the thehungersite network of shops but the correct price is really $19.95. I clicked on the link showing $4 and it was directed to the one costing $19.95. There isn't really an error here. I suspect this item has been offered at a discounted price before (geez, I must have missed it... sob...) but here, it seems I have stumbled upon a drawback of ShopWiki. Apparently they do not check the validity of the items. That said, I do not think it is that big an issue. Prices of items once placed online seldom change and besides, with much of the filtering already done, we just need to click away those with no longer valid prices. If you prefer to just surf around and let inspiration come to you (perfect for Christmas shopping), you can just scan through the ready categories such as Board Games, Laptops, Kids' Clothes, whatever! Or if you want to search for DVD players in cars, just go look. In fact, you can even shop by brand if you so prefer. So run along and give ShopWiki a try the next time you need to do some shopping. :D * This is a sponsored post.

Want to dig up someone's background?

At first glance, I thought it is another Google. After all, if we need some background information on someone, all we need to do it to google their name. And quite often, it works well enough if that person has an online presence. So what's so different about pipl? Let me paste here what pipl says about itself: There are various reasons why you might need to search for people, you may need to find a lost relative, an old flame, a classmate or a business contact, but if you are using a search engine such as Google or Yahoo to search for people you have probably realized by now that it might work in some cases but in most cases it won't. How come the best search engines fail so miserably when it comes to people search? The answer lies in a little known but very important part of the web called "the deep web". Also known as "invisible web", the term "deep web" refers to a vast repository of underlying content, such as documents in online databases that general-purpose web crawlers cannot reach. The deep web content is estimated at 500 times that of the surface web, yet has remained mostly untapped due to the limitations of traditional search engines. Since most personal profiles, public records and other people-related documents are stored in databases and not on static web pages, most of the higher-quality information about people is simply "invisible" to a regular search engine. WOW... it sure sounds scary, doesn't it? I went to do an experiment with my name and I must confess that I am *so glad* that it didn't work. True enough, there were several people who seem to have the same name as me (darn, I thought I am unique) but none of the dug up identities was me. PHEW! Perhaps it's because I am in Singapore. Such offerings normally cater well to only places like the United States. But no harm trying if you need to check up on someone. After all, even if it doesn't work for me, it doesn't mean it won't work for you. It is always better to have more tools at your disposal than one. *wink* Oh yea, here's the link - http://www.pipl.com . :P