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Getting burned on airline ticket-price increases stinks. Today, the ticket-price guesstimating site Farecast (our initial Farecast coverage here) rolled out a new feature called Fare Guard. This $10-per-ticket service lets you lock down the lowest price provided by Farecast for seven days. If the price of the ticket goes up during that time, you can still purchase it at the original, locked price.

In essence Fare Guard is ticket-price travel insurance. Unfortunately, while the service covers any fare increases, it recompenses your expenses after the fact. That means you'll be waiting for a check in the mail from Farecast … Read more

Microsoft showed off new technologies this week that it hopes will attract advertisers to its new AdCenter advertising platform and help it compete against Google.

The technologies, detailed in Redmond, Wash., as well as over the Web and the phone, are being developed in the AdCenter Labs, which is a partnership between Microsoft Research and AdCenter. Among the technologies demonstrated was one that would use a Webcam and facial-recognition software to predict the gender and age of someone viewing an ad or Web page. While it definitely has practical applications, it seems a little too Big Brother for me.

Another … Read more

One of the things I love most about Google is how it has made other search competitors focus on simplicity and elegance in their interfaces. A prime example of this trend is Ask X, which can be described as the better-looking sibling of Ask.com.

Ask X uses Ajax to provide users with a refresh-free searching experience. Clicking among various search options such as images or video automatically refreshes your results without having to reload the page. The same goes for any new search you enter. Ask X has three window panes: one for typing searches, one for viewing results, … Read more

Price Protectr is a service that monitors online stores and alerts you to any changes in price within 30 days of buying a product. If it sounds simple it is, and frankly that's the way it should be.

Nobody likes finding out they could have saved money if they had paid attention to price drops, but it's easier said than done. Price Protectr does the work for you. All you have to do is give them the URL of the product you bought and your e-mail, and it will keep an eye on it for 30 days. If … Read more

Google is talking with military agencies in Iraq after learning that terrorists attacking British bases in Basra appear to have been using aerial footage from Google Earth to pinpoint strikes, according to the United Kingdom's Daily Telegraph.

Among documents seized in raids on insurgents' homes were printouts from photos taken from Google Earth that show the location of buildings, tents, latrines and lightly armored vehicles, the news site reported. On the back of one set of photos, someone had written the precise longitude and latitude of the Shatt Al Arab Hotel, where 1,000 Staffordshire Regiment soldiers are headquartered, … Read more

Swivel is a data visualization service that lets you add your own data sets or search from a large pool of public submissions. If this sounds boring, it shouldn't. It's actually kind of fun and very similar to browsing Flickr. Data is presented in several ways, from pie charts to bar graphs to scatter plots. You can also easily tab over in any graphical chart representation to get the raw chart numbers. Where was this when I was in college?

Most of the content on Swivel is fairly bland, such as the prime loan rates for banks, but … Read more

At times, I've found that Wikipedia's internal search engine is sometimes a little bit lackluster: on occasion, I legitimately can't find what I'm looking for. This will probably improve somewhat when Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales launches his Wikiasari search engine. Though it's apparently going to be a search engine for the whole Web, not just Wikipedia, I'm betting that the technology could have an effect on improving the online encyclopedia's internal search capabilities.

Or there could be a third-party search engine that gets there first, which could be the case with WikiSeek. Created … Read more

There are a few niches of the "new Internet" that are just about full. Social networking that doesn't gear to a particular sub-group is one of them (though I'd argue that there's still ample room for niche social networks, like this one that we looked at a few days ago). So is broadband video. But start-ups in both those categories keep trying to find ways to stand out: one of those, I've seen, is by putting an emphasis on search engine optimization (SEO). In the video category, we saw this with Veotag. And on … Read more

Everyone's lost something. In most cases, retracing your steps results in either a quick find or the impromptu reorganization of your linen closet. TheFoundBin is a new service that helps both losers and finders come together through the Internet. Craigslist and LostAndFound have been doing this for a few years now, but TheFoundBin has some helpful features and a visual appeal that the others don't.

TheFoundBin combines Google Maps with some basic form tools to tell people what you've lost or found along with where it happened. You can include any helpful photos of the item, as … Read more