Blingo Buzz: Cool Tools & Browser Hacks

Windows users who are trying Microsoft's new Internet Explorer 7 beta will be glad to know that you can now add Blingo to the search box at the top of every window. And you don't need to install any toolbars, either, thanks to a nice new search feature in IE7.

To add Blingo to your search box, just visit our Toolbars & Plugins page. There you'll find three simple steps, and in about 60 seconds tops, you'll have Blingo at your fingertips.

If you want to add "Step 4: do a little jig" we will understand completely.

If you're a Mac user, there's a good chance you use Safari to browse the web. Safari has a search box in the upper right corner of every window for handy searching, just like Firefox, with one difference: it's stuck on Google.

Now you can add Blingo to your Safari search box. Here are two ways to do it:

• AcidSearch is a Safari plugin that adds several interesting features to the search box, and it can point your search box at whatever engine you like. Take a look at this great screencast, which shows you step-by-step how to add Blingo to Safari after you install AcidSearch. (Thanks to Garrett Murray, a Blingo user we've never even met, for creating that helpful little video!)

• Inquisitor is another Safari plugin, and if you've installed it then you just need to add Blingo to the top of your search engine list. Tell Inquisitor to use this search string: "http://www.blingo.com/search?q=%@"

Best of luck to all of our Mac users! Many of us at the Blingo Headquarters in California use Safari every day.

If you're a Mac user with the latest version of Mac OSX, you've probably noticed the new Dashboard feature. Well now someone has made a widget that lets you monitor the Blingo winner list from your dashboard. Pretty nifty.

Check it out. (We corrected this link.)

Of course this is not a product of Blingo itself, so use your own discretion when you download programs from the Internet. But when we tried it out it seemed pretty cool. Thanks Derek!

I wonder if this other fellow ever released his neat-looking Blingo widget for Konfabulator, another dashboard application? And there's yet another Konfabulator widget that we have not tried here.

Shawn, a recent Blingo winner, made this cool little desktop widget for Blingo and posted it to his blog:

He's also got a nice photo of a pair of movie tickets on Flickr:

Thanks Shawn.