Simple and useful, exactly the way I like ’em: Cloudlet effectively brings tag-based search to Google and Yahoo in the form of an add-on for the Firefox browser (except for the latest 3.1 beta). That’s about all it does, and it does it well.
You really have to try it before you judge it, but as far as I’m concerned it’s a winner even if experimental and still in beta. It basically inserts a context-aware tag cloud into the traditional search interface to help you navigate through your search queries swiftly and intelligently. You can filter by keyword tags, but also by websites and even domain name extensions, and turning it off is as easy as clicking your mouse. The add-on even works on Google News both for source and location tag clouds, and enables you to filter down by author in Google BlogSearch.
You can watch a demo video here, but I kindly recommend you to turn off sound, unless you’re into Eastern European classical music.
It looks a whole lot like Tweetag, which does the same for searching Twitter, and also reminds me of Quintura, an alternative search engine platform that is centered around tag clouds for navigation.
I’ve been switching back and forth between Chrome and Firefox ever since Google came out with its own browser (it’s all about the speed, baby), but these extensions are exactly what’s stopping me from going with Chrome altogether.
Cloudlet was developed by the International Software & Productivity Engineering Institute (INTSPEI), a research organization with offices in New York and Kiev (Ukraine).
