If you are a Mac user using the Tiger version (10.4.) of the MacOS, you have access to a huge number on Dashboard widgets to make your life easier. Pandia takes a look at some web search widgets.

At Apple’s web site, there is a widget browser that gives you easy access to more than 2000 widgets, using a convenient widget browser interface. At the moment of writing, there are 76 widgets in the search category. Not all of these have a worldwide audience, like SFGov.org, which searches the web site for the City of San Francisco or WCA Member Church Search Widget, which lets you locate something called Willow Creek Association Member Churches.

Many of the search widgets give you easy access to search engines and some of them have some cool add-ons as well.

007 with the license to search
This is a collection of three widgets from Claudia Brak, searching Google, Yahoo!, or Google and Yahoo! respectively.

We like that when you perform a search in any of the three widgets, the results are presented in a compact, yet user-friendly manner inside the widget in stead of opening your default browser like many other widgets do.

The 007 search widgets give you a thumbnail preview of the web site and moving the mouse over the title will show the url. Clicking the title will open the page in your default browser.

Ask Jeeves
The Ask Jeeves Widget has very nice design. It features the famous butler, who presents you with a search box and a little window for news headlines.

Using the search box will open your browser and take you to an Ask Jeeves search result page – no frills.

The news window can be configured to show you news headlines from one of these categories: Top stories, world, US, business, sports, science, technology, entertainment, health, politics, and offbeat news. This last category will give you headlines like “Blind woman recovers sight after heart attack� and “Sex change saves prostitute from caning in Singapore�.

You can also get an Immediate Answer Widget from Ask Jeeves. Here, you can type your answer in natural language and get a real answer.

A9 Search Advance
The A9 Search Advance widget is a multi search tool that lets you select one or more sources to search. You can choose from:

• Web search (by Google, but also provided by A9 and Alexa)
• Image Search (by Google)
• Wikipedia
• Referance (by About.com)
• Books (by Amazon)
• Movies (by Amazon’s IMDb)
• RSS Search (by Feedster)
• Your History (previous A9 searches)

You check checkboxes to select sources and retrieve results in your browser at A9.com. Like in a regular A9 search, the results are listed in columns: Each selected source has its own column, which is resizeable and configurable.

More search widgets
There are many other search widgets to choose from. You might be interested in the following: Alexa Search, Clusty Search, Dmoz Search, and Tygo Search.

You can also go to Apple’s search widget web page to see all them all.