Get the Web Your Way

Quickbrowse consolidates your favorite Web sites into one long page, so you cut your surfing time.

Nearly every day, I visit the same sites to get my news, entertainment, and financial fix. But it's time-consuming to jump from site to site, waiting for each page to load and then digging around for the information I'm looking for.

That's where Quickbrowse.com comes in. Quickbrowse "stitches" together multiple Web pages on one page. Say you visit Kiplinger.com, CNBC and the Wall Street Journal every day. This service lets you view all of those sites (or portions of each) on one long page and offers other tools to customize the delivery of news and information.

Save time while surfing

The site was created by a freelance news correspondent who was looking for a way to cut down the time he spent each day doing research. By creating a metasearch tool, he was able to access all of his most frequently visited sites all on one page; his brainchild then took on a life of its own and became Quickbrowse.

Piggybacking on the success of the original metasearch service, the site offers several tools.

myQuickbrowse lets you cobble your favorite sites into one long HTML page. You can view it by going to Quickbrowse.com or via email delivered daily, weekly or only when there's a change.

QbNewsstand is a grid of leading publications (the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Newsweek, etc.) and topics such as business, sports and weather. Just check the publication and corresponding section that you want delivered to your email each day, and voila, it'll turn up in your inbox.

QbSearch lets you choose up to 18 search engines and displays 20 results per search engine instead of the usual ten results per page. All results are then delivered on one long page, so you don't lose track of where you are (similar to metasearch tools such as Dogpile.com and Search.com).

Other time savers

You can also use the QuickLinks option -- by mousing over the cloverleaf-shaped button on the bottom right of the result page -- to scan your result page, select all the links you want to view, and then click the hovering QuickLinks button to view them all combined into a single page.

There's more: Say you're interested in financial news; you can create a personalized "portal" that links to financial columnists such as Thom Calandra and Bill Barnhart, stock market news, financial publications, online resources and discussion boards.

Using the "Stocks" feature you can enter the stock symbols you want to track as well as message boards, research, news and price. This information is culled from a variety of sources and on pages that require a log in, such as My Yahoo!, you log in one time and then Quickbrowse remembers your settings for the future.

Fine-tuning

Although the service is useful, it's far from perfect. Since all of the information is located on one long page, it can take a while to download via email, especially if you don't have cable or DSL. Also, I received my HTML-enhanced emails in the evening, so I received the news up to a day after it had gone online.

To get around the old-news problem, you can make Quickbrowse your home page by going to "Internet Options" in MS Explorer and pasting your QuickBrowse page's unique URL into the "Home Page" address box.

Finally, as far as I could tell, there is no way to change the order of the links in your collection, so new links are added at the bottom of the page. Being able to prioritize the links would be a nice feature.

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