There’s a new perfume up in the air. Something’s happening. You know that song with that line “Stop, hey, what’s that sound? Everybody look what’s going down…”? Well, stop, because something’s going down. Mashlogic has joined the fray of search-engine free search. What I mean is that Mashlogic is not a search engine. It is a Firefox plugin. Like KallOut and headup, Mashlogic takes the search traffic away from an engine, and puts it in a little information bubble that pops up over selected words that might interest you. And it’s incredibly easy to manage.

Here’s a picture as an example.

As you can see here, I was reading an article that had John McCain’s name in it. Mashlogic will put a small dotted line under his name, and then give you information about him. A Wikipedia article is just for starters. They’ve got the latest polls, headlines and articles about him, and if you’re worried about information overload, you can toggle which “mashes” Mashlogic should supply you with. Say, if you don’t care about polling because you know it’s only a way to drug people into thinking they know the future when they don’t, then you can shut off the polling option by fixing the settings.

And how to fix the settings? Once you install Mashlogic on Firefox, you’ll get a button on the toolbar that allows you to check which options you want, meaning what information you want to get, and what you want to ignore. It’ll even give you information about itself!

While speaking with co-founder Ranjit Padmanabhan today, we agreed that applications like Mashlogic have the potential to pull traffic away from search engines and even out the playing field a bit. Every time you get information from Mashlogic, you’re taking one click away from the search giants.
A little more stuff Mashlogic can do for you: If you slide your cursor over a company name, it’ll give you stock values (though given the times I’m not sure you’ll want to see them) and it’ll also give you job opportunities hosted by SimplyHired. A media streamer for song titles, and a currency converter too, though I’m not sure how that one works yet. If anyone wants to leave a comment explaining that, please do so.

And if you want to check this thing out, here’s an invite. I strongly recommend doing so.

Tune in this week for broad coverage of the new search-engine free phenomenon, featureing Mashlogic, headup, and KallOut! Know the advantages and disadvantages of each! Be a mavin! Impress your friends! Win a search trivia contest? Maybe…

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 23rd, 2008 at 3:40 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.