SearchFast!

The Internet isn’t called the Information Superhighway for nothing. In just a few years, it became the place for almost any activity you can perform in reality, and it looks like it’s not even halfway through with progress. Various search engines want to help you get the best results in the shortest time possible, and applications like SearchFast! provide a bit more flexibility.

Needless to say that the application takes some of your time to install all the files it needs to properly function. Sadly, there’s no prompt to place a shortcut on your desktop, so remember where it got deployed, because it also doesn’t automatically start when setup is finished.

Running it makes the application hide to the system tray without any kind of warning. You can easily distinguish it because of the brightly-colored icon, but there’s little it can help you with. Unfortunately, there’s no documentation to tell you what the application does or how to trigger its functions.

As such, you might want to know that the application wants to make it easier to perform search operations in Google, Ask, Yahoo!, as well as Bing. The program itself has no built-in function to use these popular search engines, but brings up your default web browser with the home page of the service you asked for.

The only way to make this possible is through hotkeys, and you need to know what they are, since they’re not shown, nor subject to manual change. Pressing Alt in combination with G, A, Y, or B triggers corresponding services, and you can tell which is which by their initials.

The sad part is you can’t modify hotkeys, so if any other program uses them, there’s little you can do about it. The tray icon lets you disable them, as well as the service completely. As useful as this shortcut may be, search engines launch in the DE domain, with no possibility to change this.

Bottom line is that SearchFast! doesn’t bring anything new on the block, but tries to simplify what others of its kind complicate. However, configurations were completely left out in the development process, with a change to create hotkey conflicts, while the fixed search domain leaves a bit more to be desired overall.