You can now get StackOverflow search results as a WebMynd widget with our Firefox and Chrome sidebars:

Stack Overflow widget in WebMynd sidebar

In the v1.1 release we’ve also added more intelligent recommendations: we try to add a good source to our sidebar depending on what you’re searching for. If we’re confident that you’ll like that source we’ll also encourage you to add it to your permanent list so you get results from that source each time you search:

Recommending New York Times

Please reach out to us on Twitter or email with your thoughts about this new release. We’ve also tried to improve the UI and performance so the sidebar appears in less than 100ms in most cases. Enjoy!

We’ve partnered with Forbes.com to bring you the Capitalist Toolbar for Firefox and pioneer browser-based technologies that will keep the world’s business leaders informed. This first toolbar application brings you important news and commentary from Forbes.com wherever you are on the web. Learn more and install it now.

The Capitalist Toolbar notifies you of breaking news as it happens by showing you the headlines at the top of your browser window. You will be able to keep track of what you read and be notified about popular stories from the major Forbes.com channels including: Technology, Markets, Entrepreneurs, Personal Finance and Leadership. Wherever you are on the web, you will be able to search for relevant Forbes.com articles, stock quotes and executive biographies related to your task.

The Capitalist Toolbar

We’ve just released a new version of the WebMynd Search Sidebar for Firefox. This is an exciting release because for the first time you can configure search across any public site to appear in our sidebar widgets on the right-hand side of Google, Yahoo, Bing and others.

Here’s an example, showing widgets I configured for myself to search across guardian.co.uk, addons.mozilla.org, developer.mozilla.org.

Custom Sites in WebMynd Sidebar

To access this feature, do a search and click on the Options link in the top right of the sidebar. You can then select to “Configure custom search sources”. Just enter the url of the site and the title you want to give it, then hit “add”

Add a new source

When you save the configuration and next do a search you’ll see that source appear amongst your widgets. If you then decide to remove it temporarily, you can get it back in the Sites menu and Personal category.

Enjoy, and let us know what you think!

We’ve upgraded the WebMynd Search Sidebar for Chrome. As with our Firefox version, you can now choose from many different sources, including NYTimes.com, Twitter, Digg, Wikipedia, YouTube, VideoSurf, and Amazon, and persist your settings.

WebMynd Search Sidebar for Chrome

Please tell us what you think of this update!

First Internet Explorer made browser addons a focus for their v8 release, then Chrome launched their own application gallery. And we’ve seen several startups launch browser based products in the last few weeks: Browsarity (give to charity while you browse), Rapportive (simple CRM on top of Gmail) and then Etacts, having previously launched their ‘personal CRM’ web application quickly followed it with their own browser addon.

Why this growing interest in browser applications, even from Google,  when all functionality is supposed to be moving to the cloud?

The power to modify

One common attribute of all those recently launched products (and indeed WebMynd’s own search applications) is that they use the power of browser-based applications to modify pages. In the case of Browsarity, they re-write links to be affiliate links. The WebMynd, Rapportive and Etacts applications modify the right hand sides of search and webmail pages to incorporate new content.

Etacts' Gmail application

But what’s the value to the user having that power through these apps?

Get it ‘to go’

It’s hard enough to get users to come to your site in the first place, let alone come back again and again. Most people can only remember to go to a certain (small) number of urls, and will only tolerate a certain number of emails saying a friend has poked them. One of those they do remember is Google, so if you are high up in either the organic or paid results for a term your target audience is searching for, you’re fine. For the rest…

What if you only had to get your target audience to visit once and then they could take the information and functionality and use it where they already are?

That’s what browser applications offer. Like with food, some apps are takeaway only: WebMynd, Xobni, Browsarity and Rapportive are in this camp. Others like StumbleUpon, Delicious and Etacts are web applications in their own right with a browser application component.

Middleware for the web?

So it saves users from remembering to go back to your site or you having to remind them by sending spammy (or should I say, ‘viral’) emails. That’s great, but it’s not the full story.

Like with enterprise applications in the ’90s, the web is full of application and data silos – Gmail and Facebook just for starters. Integration is either non-existent, since the application owners want to lock-in users by holding on to their data and keep them on their site. Or point-to-point, like LinkedIn including Tripit and Twitter information.

Of course it’s perfectly possible for Google to let you search Gmail on the right-hand side of their search page, or get Twitter and LinkedIn data on the right-hand side of Gmail messages. But if you want that anytime soon, you’re going to have to use WebMynd, Rapportive and Etacts. And why, when I’m looking on Yelp for somewhere to eat tonight, am I not reminded that a friend sent me an email to my Gmail account recommending me some places 6 months ago? Such a personalized web experience isn’t possible without integration of my personal data silos.

Middleware is software that glues together application silos. So could these browser apps be the start of a distributed middleware for the web?  What integrations would you like to see?

Thanks to MySpace opening up their search API, we’ve launched MyGoogle, a version of WebMynd that turbocharges Google for MySpace fanatics (Firefox only for now).

To be clear, you don’t need to change how you search… just install, do a search on Google as normal, and that’s how it looks!

As well as changing the look and feel of the search results page, it incorporates people, image, and video results from MySpace. It’s based on WebMynd’s experimental interfaces, and we’ll bring more of these, and on other browsers, to you soon. In the meantime, check out other designs or go ahead and redesign google yourself (Firefox only at this point).

For a while now we’ve had a system we’ve used internally to send messages to our users in the search sidebar. We’re able to tweet a link and have it appear in the sponsored section at the top of the sidebar.

Some partners such as OneRiot have also used this to get the word out about breaking news. Now we wanted to let any of our users take advantage of this ability to tweet out cool links and get them on Google, Yahoo and Bing straightaway. We hope people will use it to break news and advertise cool products.

You’ll need to pay $5 to get started with an account, but for the next couple of weeks, while we’re in beta, that will get you as many page impressions as we can serve – up to 300,000 per day though you’ll have to share that with other AdTweeters. In any case you won’t have to reload your account until we’ve shown at least 5,000 impressions of your text ad and link.

Here’s how to get started:

1) With WebMynd for Firefox installed go to:

http://www.webmynd.com/credits

2) Once you’ve confirmed your Twitter account, click on $5 to load up your account using Amazon payments.

3) From the Twitter account you registered, tweet out a link like this:

@_wm_publish 5000 Get your link here http://blog.webmynd.com

Obviously you can use your own text and link. 5000 is the number of impressions that you’re “buying” but remember you can pick any number and you won’t be charged for them for the next couple of weeks while the beta trial is running. You must include @_wm_publish though.

You can go back to the credits page to see the number of impressions that have been delivered, keep track of your AdTweets, and add funds to your account.

Please let us know how you get on!

The ‘Air’ design by Chan Karunamuni has won the RedesignGoogle competition.

Air by Chan Karunamuni

Chan wins a MacBook Air which will replace his “trusty 2006 Macbook Pro, becoming my mobile satellite for surfing and designing on the go.”

We created RedesignGoogle so you could personalize the appearance of the Google search results page. The design hasn’t changed for ten years and we wanted to seek out the best ideas for innovation by running this competition.

Chan says: “Google spends a lot of time tweaking their front page when they really should be working on their results page, which has stayed the same for about a decade now. I had a few ideas floating around of what Google might look like in 5 or 10 years, so I decided to attempt to implement them within the constraints the contest provided… it’s a dream project: who wouldn’t want to take a shot at redesigning the most popular digital service in the history of mankind?”

“The goal behind Air was very simple: to reduce as much visual noise in the original design as possible. For example, the menu doesn’t appear until the page thinks you want to make a new search, based on your mouse location. The search button doesn’t clutter the header unless you’re editing a query, and all secondary information in the results is out of your way until you need it.”

Other popular and highly-ranked entries were Go Ogle by randsco, which has a more risque take on the future of search (with the help of Alena Seredova), whereas Plex by Peng Zhong is described as “Google torn apart and completely rebuilt from ground zero.” and came a very close second.

GoOgle by randsco

Plex by Peng Zhong

Thousands of entries were submitted to the RedesignGoogle gallery. A shortlist of 13 was compiled based on users’ votes, comments and number of downloads of each design. Then these were judged by Jason Kincaid (TechCrunch writer), Paul Graham (Y Combinator partner) and Imran Zaidi (WebMynd design lead) to determine the winner.

During the competition, we launched a new feature which allowed the designers to add Javascript (including use of the JQuery library) to their designs so it is no longer just re-skinning Google with CSS, but also adding functionality. The ‘Air’ design takes advantage of this with its Twitter-like paging: click the arrow at the bottom and the next page of results is loaded right there.

WebMynd Sidebar

As well as letting you change the appearance and function of the Google search results page, the WebMynd browser addon (which powered the RedesignGoogle competition) adds search results from the sources you most value in a sidebar to the right-hand side of search results pages.

The future of the RedesignGoogle gallery will be to let designers not only change the appearance and function of search results pages, but also add new results and even change the ordering of existing ones.

You can see our moves in this direction with our own experimental interfaces – first we launched Phoenix:

Phoenix

… and then Manhattan and Osaka. Thousands of our addon users have adopted these interfaces for their day-to-day searching.

We look forward to seeing how people innovate with our new features… watch this space!

We’ve just released version 0.9.2 of our Firefox add-on and it features some major performance improvements, plus a new customizable sharing screen. Switching between the search and sharing sidebars is much faster now, and the sharing sidebar now lets you share links on a wider variety of sites, including Tumblr, Posterous and LinkedIn.

We’ve also upgraded to jQuery 1.4 and fixed a number of minor bugs, so you can expect a faster and more stable user experience overall. Install WebMynd 0.9.2 to try it out for yourself, and as always, please contact us if you have any questions or comments.

Some users have reported that when they open new windows, the window appears blank and the urlbar empy whereas they were expecting them to open with content. For example, when clicking within an internet banking account to view a cheque image, or using right-click Open in New Window.

The problem is caused by a bug in Torbutton 1.2.3 which clashes with WebMynd. This has been fixed in Torbutton 1.2.4 – download the fixed version here.

You can read more about the problem in the bug report.