Useful internet software, websites and blogsites.: Juice - An Excellent Quick Reference Sidebar for Firefox

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Juice - An Excellent Quick Reference Sidebar for Firefox

via MakeUseOf.com by Stefan Neagu on 12/17/08

Juice is a lightweight addon for Firefox which brings you a wealth of relevant info for anything you need with a single click. Simply highlight the word and drag it to the side and Juice will quickly get for you the related Wikipedia entry, videos, pics and lots of other relevant information - all neatly organized in the sidebar.

juice for firefox

This sidebar makes research a breeze. Juice is currently in open-beta and available for free from Linkool Labs.

firefox sidebar right

Juice has proven to be very useful, and has saved me extra open tabs and a lot of time. The Juice algorithm gathers information from multiple sources and aggregates it in a very simple, easy to use interface. For instance, you can just drag and drop "Google" (or any other company's name) from an article to read the company description on CrunchBase, the latest stock quotations, news articles from major media outlets as well as blogs, images and video.

juice-firefox sidebar addon

Plus the amazing thing about this addon is its speed and accuracy. It takes a second at the most for all this information to display - and it is contextually sensitive - which means a search for something like "apple" won't relay you news about fruits if you're visiting a tech-related website.

The Juice website explains the 'magic' feature:

This engine, comprised of a natural language processing system and a dictionary management system, helps to evolve the semantic web by connecting keywords with the most relevant, rich content from third-party web services.

It's engine fails gracefully when it can't find information using its algorithm - to an improved Google search - with tabs for Images, News, Videos and Blogs. There are no obtrusive ads - a big plus when it comes to these personalized searches.

Here's Juice's demo video from YouTube :

When it comes to beta applications, especially these days, with tight release schedules and even more demanding investors, you come to expect crashes and hangs. Not with Juice which took 2,3MB extra memory and didn't cause any problems at all. The download itself is small, the download bar stopping at about 500KB.

It's my job to test different things and write about them, but I don't often continue using the product regularly. Like John C. Dvorak said: "99% of everything is crap". Juice definitely deserves its space on my computer.

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