Kallout Adds Pop-Up Search Integration to Windows

Because copying and pasting is just too much effort sometimes, the fine developers of Kallout have been kind enough to create a tool that improves the ease and convenience of performing searches.

Download the 3.2mb installer (Windows Vista and XP only), and Kallout will nestle itself into your system tray and go to work. To activate it, just highlight some text in any program and Kallout's blue balloon icon will appear, bestowing upon you its numerous search options. Some results (like Wikipedia, Google, and Google Maps) are overlayed directly on your current window. Others, like Facebook and MySpace, launch in your browser.

Results can be a little iffy, which stands to reason for a piece of software supporting so many different searches (41 as I'm writing this). Testing Williams College on Facebook, for example, probably won't find you any alums because it's tied to display names. Some results are incredibly slow to arrive - eBay, I'm talking to you - but you can hardly blame Kallout for that. Highlighting iPod gave me an almost instant list of reference books from Amazon, but the eBay results took so long to appear I nearly fell asleep.

Unfortunately, it's a bit on the beastly side, consuming about 24 megs of memory on my XP system. Still, if you like having a vast array of search options constantly at the ready, Kallout is tough to beat.

[via MakeUseOf]

Tags: amazon, freeware, google, search, wikipedia