"Youtube" is the winner across all age groups, with Facebook and Google rounding out the top three. In the four hole, the teens and the tweens are both searching for "sex," which is just good life practice. But kids seven and under apparently prefer to skip the formalities and search for straight-up porn. That's more than Club Penguin, more than the Cartoon Network, and way more than Hannah Montana.

So three thoughts from this.

One: Hey, kids, stop searching for Google. It doesn't make any sense.

Two: I believe the children are our future.

Three: Our future is doomed. [Symantec via CNET]

After Dragon Dictation, this is the second app that Nuance has released gratis for a limited time this month. The only thing stopping Dragon Search from being a must-have is that voice search with your Google app will bring up largely the same top results, so for casual surfing it's a bit redundant. If you're looking for a deeper dive, though, the scrolling Search Carousel UI is actually a useful tool. Dragon Search also acts as a nice cheat to use voice search for the iTunes store, which might save your thumbs some damage in the long run. [iTunes]

What follows is a guide for getting Thunderbird 3 set up as a dedicated offline email client, as well as a more convenient and powerful online inbox aggregator—allowing you to manage everything from your regular email accounts to Google Voice, Google Wave, and other non-email inboxes with a little setting up. If you're using a standard Gmail account, setting it up with Thunderbird 3 is really easy—just type in your username and password when you first start up. If you're a Google Apps user or have another IMAP-available email client, follow Google's IMAP instructions to get started.

Set up content tabs for Google Wave, Voice, or any site

We showed you last week how easy it is to create a persistent Google Wave tab in Thunderbird 3, helping you keep tabs on the not-quite-there-but-really-interesting messaging and collaboration service. The short version? Head to the Tools menu, select Error Console, then enter this code (copy the whole thing) and hit Evaluate:

If you're a Google Voice user, you can pull off a similar persistent Voice inbox tab, per commenter steelpitt's advice:

And, as trstn points out, you can easily enter most any web site as the address in the contentPage section. Heck, you can even keep your web-based Gmail open, if you feel like having a fallback if Thunderbird frustrates you.

Learn its search and filter powers (and let it index overnight)

Thunderbird's new search powers are, in a word, awesome. One of the most powerful arguments for sticking to Gmail's web interface is its uber-powerful search operators. Thunderbird's search powers aren't quite as comprehensive, but they do help you quickly find a message using the same kind of filters and operators.

For my personal Gmail account, search results loaded about as fast they did on the web version. After a quick keyword search, you can filter by sender, prioritized by how many emails they've sent you, or by folder location, and add filters like "To Me," "From Me," starred items, and with attachments. Those are, of course, the basics of web-based Gmail, but when you're using Thunderbird offline, they can still search through every single message, not just the 3 months and change you've loaded into Google Gears.

A good bit of advice, though, from Seth Rosenblatt at CNET: give Thunderbird time to run through your messages. Leaving it running overnight is about what's needed for accounts that have been active for a few years, and overnight plus a day in the background should work for most any account.

Set up permanent and one-shot offline sessions

Gmail offers offline inbox access and composition, and even offline message attachments, but it's limited in size, and even Google warns you that you'll see some serious slowdown if you stash more than the standard 3 months of messages in your Google Gears database. Thunderbird, on the other hand, is a tried and true road warrior, and lets you keep as much material as you want on your hard drive.

To edit which messages, and how many of them, are kept local for searching and retrieval, head to the Edit menu and then Account Settings. Under the Synchronization & Storage menu for a particular email account, hit Advanced to set which folders get the synchronization treatment. Don't select all of them out of security, though—you'll see that you can do one-shot folder syncs, just below. When you've got a good set checked off, set the maximum message size in back in the main storage settings.

When you're getting ready to head out on a trip, hit the File->Offline menu and select Download/Sync. You'll get the menu you see above, asking you to either go ahead and use your default settings, or choose certain folders to bring offline for this offline jaunt. Do the sync, and you're ready to read, write, and do your general email thing without a net connection.

You'll still want to "compact" your mail folders every now and again—made easier with one of the buttons in the Toolbar Buttons add-on.

Install ThunderBrowse

At its core, ThunderBrowse is a tiny, fast browser that bakes itself into Thunderbird to allow reading web sites without switching over to your browser. More than that, though, ThunderBrowse's preferences let you fine-tune how JavaScript, images, and plug-ins like Flash are handled in HTML-formatted emails. Put simply, ThunderBrowse makes it more convenient to stick to text-only emails, clicking to open the HTML-formatted space hogs only if you choose.

"Yeah, that's nice, but I like my Chrome/Safari/Opera," you say? ThunderBrowse is still worth the very quick download.

To start with, ThunderBrowse lets you customize how your external browser is launched. You can open most links in ThunderBrowse, but save middle-clicked links for your high-powered browser. Customize how email links are launched in that browser? You sure can. ThunderBrowse is also fairly snappy and light, so even if you're using an ultra-speedy browser, it might be just as fast to launch a site you're glancing at inside Thunderbird, rather than wait for an external browser to pick up the URL and load it. Your mileage may vary, but I've found ThunderBrowse tremendously helpful in running through emails with speed.

Bartz couldn't resist a shout out to the beleaguered golfer when speaking to analysts in New York yesterday afternoon. Yahoo's traffic has been doing gangbusters since the Tiger story broke, which in some ways validates their strategy to be a "portal" rather than a search company. When something big and gossipy like this happens, Yahoo's multichannel setup allows them to cover it from a number of different angles. On the other hand, if your sprawling search and content company is set up so that a single tabloid story can "make" your quarter, well, what happens if that story doesn't break?

Oh, that's right. Google drinks your milkshake. [WSJ via Huffington Post]

The new search mode comes with partnerships Google announced today with Facebook and MySpace. Feeds from both sites, along with Twitter comments, blog postings, and other web sources will be rolled into Real Time results page for up-to-the-second updates. They've also added a "Hot Topics" section to Google Trends to show the most common topics people are writing about at any given moment.

Other news from today's event includes Google Goggles, which lets you search via any picture you take with your phone, and an automatic translator that lets you speak English into your phone and have it translated into Spanish in, again, real time. The translator should be available in 2010, and Goggles can be tried now in Google Labs.

Google's not exactly feeling Bing breathing down their necks, but it's nice to see competition driving some fast and furious innovation at the Googleplex. [Google via TechCrunch]

While Google's always delivered customized search results to people logged into their Google account—that is, search results tailored to you, based on your web history (yes, even outside of Google, like Gizmodo), past searches and previous results you've clicked on—it's now going to be doing that for everybody. Even if you're not logged in, you're going to get personalized results and yes, more targeted ads, based on past searches, tracked by an anonymous cookie that stays on your computer for 180 days. (BTW, it's not like Google's just started keeping track of your searches, it's just now Google's using that info more directly, that's all.)

You can turn it off here, though I'm guessing that won't turn off the dirty feeling you've got right now.

[Google via Bits]

Here's a quote from Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft's senior vice president in charge of online audiences:

What I would say is, our focus is on improving the user experience and driving our differentiation of user intent and decision-making. It's not to necessarily pay people to de-index our competition. That's not our focus. So, I wouldn't think of it that way. It's more about how do we build a better experience for people. If there's a way to share in the economics of search in that, then we're game to do that.

Note that this isn't exactly a denial, nor is it exactly a confirmation. Mehdi says paying people to delist from Google is "not our focus," but that doesn't mean they won't do it. It doesn't mean they will, either—matter of fact, it doesn't mean much of anything. Hopefully we get a clarification soon so we know exactly what "not our focus" means. [TechFlash]

This started when Microsoft and Google paid for access to Twitter's millions of tweets and Bing paid Facebook and Twitter for access to their pages. Think about this perspective, if you ran Fox the WSJ and other major content makers, wouldn't you think that your content is worth more than all those 140 character posts? Right, you would. And if those sites are charging 100s of millions and up, for their content, wouldn't you ask for a lot more? You probably would, and if you're Murdoch, the most powerful man in media, you'd probably get what you want. Pulling out of Google would be just another part of Murdoch setting up his paywall. But it's going to set a nasty precedent for the rest of the short tail of mega media companies to get a lot of Google's cash. Maybe a lot of these companies value Google's help in promoting their stuff, but it never hurts to ask for money, especially when media and publishing are super duper hard up on cash these days, in general. I'm not an investor in big media or any tech companies, so its not a problem to me, in that way. But it is a problem to me as a guy who lives and works through search engines.

Microsoft is just being evil again. Now, this isn't typical Microsoft bashing — someone has to fight Google. And in a way, you have to hand it to Microsoft. They're the underdog here fighting a Google that grows in power every day, and their Facebook content deal won't likely be matched by Google any time soon. But this is so typically Bad Microsoft, because they've cleverly short cut the straightforward fight for marketshare by features and gone for a deal-based solution to the problem. Like the PC and OS fight in the 80s they're competing with business tactics instead of quality. (And Bing is great, so I'm not making a complete 1:1 comparison to Windows.) We're sort of left with—instead of a David and Goliath—a Clash of the Titans situation with pieces of rock and lighting falling from the sky and crushing us. Microsoft fails to see/care that the fragmentation that Microsoft is trying to achieve is not only going to hurt Google — it is going to hurt YOU AND ME.

This is the Microsoft we know from the last century, before great underdog products like Xbox and Zune. This is from a company who's CEO recently told us that sales are more important than critical acclaim, preferring profit over better product. And this is a company that gets in its anticompetitive digs when it can: For example, in Internet Explorer, it's really hard to set Google as your default browser, not being listed in the alternative choices to Bing. Yet, in Google Chrome, it's easy to set Bing as the default search.

Again, imagine that half of the top 500 media companies are delisted from Google. And imagine that Google stoops to this strategy and buys out the other half of that 500. Now imagine you have to search for something and now have to type it in twice because who the fuck is going to remember (no one) which search engine covers which content? *

People, I'm telling you, this is bad news. People talk about net neutrality like it's only about the data's prioritization over the pipes. But what good is equivalence in data speed and prioritization if you can't find it in the first place?

*the fix for all this is that we'll use search engine aggregators, which is just another layer of bullshit to sort through.

Wolfram Alpha will still live on as a standalone site, since Microsoft is just licensing their search API for Bing. And to be fair, this is what most people—including us—envisioned for Wolfram Alpha from the start:

I'm aware of the theoretical differences between the two, and I'm sure Wolfram Alpha's creators' blood would boil at the thought, but the engine's most natural home might be as a direct complement to Google, as a tab on their homepage or as a replacement for their modest current nonsearch functions.

Well, uh, almost. Maybe this'll be a good time to give Bing another shot? [CNET]

So what does this mean, exactly? Well, if you believe roughly 75% of Lifehacker's polled readers, it means that Google search is about to get more accurate, relevant and useful. Or that we're about to feel like Google search has gotten more accurate, relevant and useful, because we read an article about it somewhere. Win/win! [Lifehacker]

WolframAlpha folks are billing this as a half-priced graphic calculator, with that added benefit that it plugs into the existing WolframAlpha search engine, but again I keep coming back to the fact that I can point my browser at that web site and it costs me substantially less than $50 to do so.

Said WolframAlpha rep Josh Dilworth in an email to Gizmodo today, "How many people will buy it? We're not sure, but looking at the other apps that are $50+, we think that we're of at least comparable in utility and functionality, if not more. And, part of what the company is also doing is making a statement about the non-trivial nature of WolframAlpha's capabilities, and how much the system has matured since launch."

What better way to show maturity than peg your inaugural App Store app with one of the higher price tags in the whole system. Amiright? Commenters, help a blogger out and let me know what I'd be paying a premium for if I purchased this. [App Shopper via Scoble]

He says that uberlarge categories—"non-niche" ones, like PCs and phones that sell over 300 million units a year—won't be dominated by a single player. There'll be multiple guys in the game, and he still thinks "the software that's gonna be most popular in those phones is gonna be software that's sold by somebody who doesn't make their own phone."

Yes, this is the same Steve Ballmer who admits Microsoft boned Windows Mobile hard and is about to come out with some Microsoft-branded phones for youngsters. That's just a small of part of an interview that covers lots of ground and is definitely worth watching—it's a view of Ballmer you probably haven't seen before. [TechCrunch]

Except Visual search can't really do any of these things yet, because it's just a small collection of indexed photo albums, at least for now. Oh well! Give it a try anyway, right here. (Warning: You must be Silverlit). [Microsoft]

Why, it's just a handy list of the five best online apartment search tools the web has to offer. Perfect for apartment hunting season (i.e. September-ish, back to school time, etc).

As with all Lifehacker lists, this one was generated by readers like you. [Lifehacker]

Abu-Hadba's statement that "Most of what Google does is defensive" isn't actually the tech world's most hypocritical statement (when was the last time Microsoft created something that wasn't a version of an already-successful product?). He means that everything Google does is designed to keep their core business, search and advertising, growing and dominant. The impetus behind Chrome OS, according to him, isn't to encourage simpler and easier computing, but weirdly enough, to distract other companies from attacking its own cash cow.

This is an interesting conversation because Microsoft has been doing just that, attacking Google's core, with Bing—yet Abu-Habda doesn't see Bing as a similar distraction to stop others from attacking Microsoft's core business, Windows. So why is Microsoft allowed to venture into new-for-them waters with projects like Xbox, Zune, Silverlight, Bing and more, while Google is an inherently defensive company for announcing a ballsy new project of their own?

Microsoft might just be a bit nervous about Chrome OS, which we don't think is really warranted at this point. Microsoft's got an outrageously dominant OS marketshare, and seeing as how we know just about nothing about Chrome OS, it's quite a bit soon to be launching attacks at a product that may well not be a competitor at all. [Venture Beat via Crunchgear]

Ballmer's been talking about search now for the last couple years as something Microsoft needs to put more money and effort into. The failed Yahoo deal last year was one play that didn't quite work out. So they're trying Bing.

What do you think? Is search Microsoft's biggest mistake? If you ask me (you didn't), I'd say Microsoft's biggest mistake is the guy answering this question. [TGDaily]

Searching for desktop backgrounds is super easy in Bing—there's even a special image size category for it. You can narrow results down by color, or type (illustration or photo) too.

Consumer tools are sort of Bing's thing. Meaning? You can get the contact numbers of any company really fast, even if they've hidden them. Which they always do.

Bing's Search categories are great for quick gadget research. Bing takes a (generally decent) guess at the most important information about the device, and provides a nice little menu of subsearches in the sidebar.

That huge image in the Bing background? It changes (almost) every day, and each one has interesting, related links embedded. It'd be nice if you could turn it off, but it's sorta fun, in the same way Google's custom logos are.
You can create an RSS feed for any search. They're not as up-to-date as a Google Alert, for example, but it's a nice way to gather and sort info on an active subject.

Bing's video preview basically solves the biggest problems with video search—terrible file naming and bad thumbnails. Special bonus for international users: You can use these long-ish previews to sneak around IP filtering for sites like Hulu and NBC. Above: Conan, from London. HA.

Bing's result previews create a little summary for each result, so you don't have to click if you're just looking for basic info. Especially effective on reference material, like dictionaries or Wikipedia.