Surf Google, Wikipedia and Youtube in One Window with Navigaya.com

I feel kind of like a broken record pushing Navigaya.com. All of my friends both real and online are getting damned sick of hearing about it. But, regardless of the social ostracism I stand to suffer, I’m gonna push it again here and now because I think it’s just that good!

I can’t urge you enough to go check it out. I can’t promise it’s something you’ll love, but it just might become your new favourite thing. 

NB – The first thing you need to know about Navigaya is that it’s built entirely on Flash, so if you don’t have it installed, you’ll be prompted to get it when you visit (the site just can’t work without it).

Navigaya is a web portal that enhances your surfing experience by streaming Youtube music video playlists as a background in your browser while allowing you to search or surf the web in an overlaid window.

The site has a default playlist that is a quite engaging yet unobtrusive mix of ambient electronica which includes Radiohead, Royksopp and Faithless. But if classy synth-sounds aren’t your preferred music to surf by, you can edit and change playlists or (once you sign up with a Navigaya account) build your own, well as controlling the volume and opacity of the video feed. You also have the option to choose whether or not the web surfing window takes up all of the screen estate or is centrally minimized, allowing you to see the clips playing behind it.

 Beyond adding a new audio-visual dimension to browsing, Navigaya has added value to the humble web search by allowing you to search multiple resources like Google and Wikipedia simultaneously. A simple menu option allows you to add or remove search engines as you like, depending on whose input you value and results from each domain are shown in separate tiled windows, each of which you can easily maximise if you spot something of interest.

Links to web resources like Google Docs, Maps and Calendar and sources for web-TV, music and movies are embedded in an intuitive dock-like bar at the bottom of the screen and there’s also a variant on RSS feed reading available from another drop-down menu, with embedded feeds from many varied news sources, grouped by topic and genre. 

If that all sounds like a bit much for one website, and bear in mind I’m only scratching the surface here, there’s an enlightening tutorial video available to show you around (find it here).

Go. Check it out. You might not like it. You may love it. But at least go and experience it.