How To Find Good Freeware Programs

Finding good freeware software can be tricky sometimes, because many shareware programs position themselves in search engines as “Free to download” and you can download only trial version of the program which has limited features.

Recently I had to download a couple entire websites for offline browsing (because they were shutting down) and was searching for a decent program that can download all website html and other type of files making original file structure. I searched in Google for a bit and found “SurfOffline Professional 2” which could download entire site in a simple wizard style process. However there is a price tag from $39.95 to $120. And it’s no use spending money on software that you will use once.

Finding something on the internet takes more and more time because there is exponentially increasing number of information and products online. Google does a wonderful job helping people find what they need. But in order to find something you have to make the right query.

Here is another approach I used and found best Website Downloader and Offline browser. In my Firefox there’s an addon called Quirk Search Status. It displays useful information (Page Rank, Alexa rank, Compete rank, etc.) for the current page you’re browsing.

And here comes the interesting part. This addon also displays related pages for the current domain you’re viewing. For example, when you’re on yahoo.com it will show related domains msn, craigslist and others. So I went to the SurfOffline Professional 2 website and looked for related sites. And sure enough found other suggested related websites:

firefox addon

firefox addon

First from the left was SpadixDb site with completely free website downloader called BackstreetBrowser. It has done amazing job downloading those 2 sites that I wanted to browse offline.

So different approach to search saved some time and money for me just by having simple Firefox addon.


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