Have you ever wanted to rip all the PDF and DOC files from a focussed Google or Google Scholar search, quickly save them all to a folder, index them with something powerful like dtSearch, and then search the real full-text from across all of them — rather than whatever bits the Googlebot indexed as it swept past, and whatever bits the Google Search ran its search from?

Or archive the entire run of a PDF ejournal that’s sitting at site:www.our-ejournal/articles/ ?

The new free OutWit Docs Firefox plugin does that, and works with the latest version of Firefox. There’s one major drawback — it hijacks the space right next to your browser’s Home icon, with a naff shiny 3D-stylee icon…

Unacceptable. It can however be moved after a bit of fiddling (Right-click, ‘customize’, and drag it out) and then placed somewhere a little more suitable and out-of-sight.

When using it, though, you also quickly come to appreciate why people should name their academic PDF files something_meaningful.pdf rather than xy2f6fjg00.pdf  And why filenames should have year rather than month first…

As a severe test of what after all is a mere 0.1.0.20 app, it took 9 minutes to whisk through 90 years worth of Field Artillery journal (1911-2007), running from a Google search of site:sill-www.army.mil/FAMAG/ , to find 800Mb in 996 PDF files, and to then start to download them. This was, of course, the point at which I wanted OutWit to have a big red STOP button, although quitting the app did the trick.