Best free stuff online: Tools and services

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By Kim Zetter

(IDG) -- If you think the only thing free on the Net these days is the free fall of all those dot-com companies, we've got news.

You can still get something for nothing online -- sites, services and downloads that are great for work or play. And we've found the best of the bunch: an array of winners you haven't read about a million times before.

A search-engine sleeper

Yahoo! and Google and AltaVista -- there are lots of great search engines already. So why check out an obscure new contender like ILor?

For starters, it's built on top of Google, so you get the same excellent search results that you'd get at Google's site. But ILor gives you four new options for viewing the results. Place your cursor over a link on the results page, and you can add the link to a custom list.

Later, you can view the list, which is great if you're searching several topics and want to track all relevant results. Or you can e-mail it to a friend. You can also open the link in a new window (and avoid having to hit the Back button to return to your results); open the link in a minimized window that's out of the way until you need it; or anchor your results page (this puts a link to the page in a small window so you can dig deeply into a site and then return to your results with a single click).

The tools are so useful you'll wonder why Google doesn't offer them.

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News you can use

If you need a cure for the information-overload blues, try Infogate, a terrific utility that cuts through the mass of news on the Net to zero in on the stories you want to read.

The 790KB Infogate download produces a toolbar with a live feed of headlines (which are updated as long as you're connected to the Internet) categorized by topics you choose.

Click the Personalization button and type keywords to get breaking news from sources like CNN.com. You can set the toolbar to alert you when, for instance, the latest NCAA tournament scores come in. To read full stories, click on a headline while you're online, and a window will open with links to the stories. The program's "follow me" feature sends information to your cell phone or pager.

Collective memory

Long before the dawn of the Web, Usenet connected people of like minds and interests in its electronic version of a 19th-century salon. Now Google Groups gives you search engine-style access to over 700 million messages posted to Usenet groups during the past 20 years.

It's a fascinating compendium of information on everything from the Challenger explosion to Microsoft's legal woes. Google has even culled historical gems from the archive with special links; an example is Tim Berners-Lee's announcement of what later became the World Wide Web. And this isn't just the cyber equivalent of a time capsule. You'll find up-to-the-minute chatter and advice on every topic under the sun -- and you can post your own messages.

Calculate this

Tired of having your system bog down for half an hour while you download a file that was supposed to take only minutes? Before you hit the Download Now button, stop by the Calculators On-Line Center's File Download Time Calculator and enter the size of the file you want to snag.

The calculator will quickly estimate the amount of time the download should actually take, based on its size and the speed of your Net connection (56-kbps modem, DSL, or whatever).

While you're at it, check out some of the more than 14,000 other specialized calculators listed here, such as one for measuring focal depth and exposure times for different photography conditions. Another intriguing offering is a Java applet that calculates how far from a traffic light you need to hit your brakes to stop on time. (The calculation is based on car speed and brake-delay time -- no mention of multitaskers with cell phones in the equation.)

Window cleaning

Looking simultaneously at several sites -- say, at the home pages of four online newspapers -- usually means having to toggle back and forth between multiple windows. But Quickbrowse cleans up window clutter by pasting up to six pages that you specify into one, long window for easy scrolling (for $13 every three months, you can obtain additional pages and receive a daily e-mail of your sites).

You can specify a list that contains the URLs you want, or simply choose from ready-made lists for themes such as tech news or comic strips. The Quickbrowse site also offers QbSearch, a metasearch engine that employs the same clever principle: Enter search terms, and you can get results from up to 17 different engines and directories, stitched into a single page. (It's a handy way to search multiple sites with one click, even though Google is conspicuously absent from the source list.) Use the Quickbrowse This button to choose links from the search results and have all the pages open in a single window.

Squelch those ads

Take Madison Avenue to the cleaners with WebWasher, a utility for eliminating bandwidth-hogging online ads.

This 1.2MB program also blocks cookies and Web bugs that let companies monitor your online wanderings. (You can specify which cookies you want to block, allowing only those that ease your Web movements.) Most important, without all those annoying pop-up and jumbo-size ads, your surfing will go smoother and faster.

To catch a spy

You downloaded a fantastic free utility, and now your screen is rife with pop-up ads. Could the program be spyware? Spychecker will help you find out. Spyware is ad-supported software that deposits a tracking tool on your hard drive to send data about you and your surfing habits to advertisers.

Not all ad-supported software is spyware, and most ad companies say the data they collect isn't matched to your identity. But Spychecker lets you decide what to tolerate. At Spychecker's site, type in the name of the freeware app you're considering, and Spychecker will tell you whether that program is a known spy. The site also supplies the name of the advertiser behind the spyware, as well as a link to the company's privacy policy. To see whether your PC is already infected with spyware, use Ad-Aware, a free 833KB utility that detects and eliminates the most commonly used spyware.

This is the first of a five-part series featuring various free Web tools. Coming next: free information and advice.