The only way most people know of searching for something on the Web or having something translated online is by performing multiple actions that usually involve copying text, opening a browser, looking for a site, pasting the text, etc. Websearch Launcher performs all those actions in one simple gesture – select the text and click on the icon that will look for it on the Web or translate it online, all in the most commonly used and reputed websites.
This free utility is certainly a shift of paradigm when it comes to the number of actions, mouse clicks, and keystrokes that we all need to make to select a text snippet and have it translated into another language or looked up on the Web. Not to mention the times it also involves going backwards and forwards on your browser, or opening multiple windows or tabs, just to perform a simple search or to have that foreign word translated into your language. Looking at its interface and try to understand how it works and where are the things you are looking for also requires an open mind, though. The interface design itself is not the most intuitive I’ve come across so far – it mixes the links to the sites (on the left) with the settings on the right (these can be removed, if you wish), all mixed with different typesets and font sizes, buttons, minute images, cryptic explanations, etc., that make it hard to comprehend at times. Finding the buttons that manage the whole thing and finding out how they work is also less intuitive that I would have anticipated. It is true that the site is plagued with instructions and useful help pages, and that once you have read them all, things get much clearer and simpler.
This novel utility will let you select (copy to the clipboard) any text snippet either on a website or a document your reading in your favorite tool and search the Web with it or have it translated into any language without going through the clumsy process described above. It offers you direct links to various Google pages in various languages, all renowned search engines, video sites, meta search engines, online encyclopedias, and even to the most reputed software-related sites. It can open the new action in a new tab on your browser or on a different browser if you wish, so that you don’t have to go back to where you were every time you perform a new search or ask for a new translation. When it comes to translations, Websearch Launcher offers you direct access to Deepl, Google Translate, Bing, Yandex, Linguee, etc., to get online translations into English, Dutch, Spanish, Russian, German, French, Italian, and Chinese, though nothing prevents you from changing to a different target language once you’re there.
The program is relatively easy to start to work with despite its cluttered interface and its sometimes-strange explanations of how to make it work. Mastering it and making it all work as expected is a completely different matter. Some buttons turn unresponsive at times for reasons beyond me, and things that were supposed to work one way suddenly seem to go the other way. Therefore, the notion of having a tool like Websearch Launcher to perform certain complicated tasks in a shorter and more efficient way is more than welcome – however, to make it a really worthwhile experience for the user, it still requires some more work in the intuitiveness and responsiveness areas. By its version number, it seems the tool has been just recently released, and besides it is completely free – it can only get better and better in time.
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