We’ve all been there. Getting ready for an important interview and not being able to decide on which shoes (the brown or the black?) look best with your navy blue suit (FYI: go for the brown). Or in a store and not being able to decide if the zesty orange sweater makes you look like, well, an orange. Or if your favourite blue jeans do actually make your butt look big? What to do? Who to ask for help? Can sale assistants really be trusted to offer impartial advice? And we all know fitting room mirrors lie…

Up until now, we’ve mostly relied on asking our mothers/friends/partners to help us make our style choices. Not anymore. Recently, a couple of community-based platforms have sprung up offering to do what we’ve been asking our mothers/friends/partners to do in the past. Say, for example, you can’t decide on which belt looks best with your new, skinny jeans. Try on belt A, take a snap and post it. Follow the same steps with belt B. And then ask the other members to give their realtime feedback on which looks best: belt A or B?

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Christmas is over for another year. The turkey gobbled, the wine drunk and gifts unwrapped. But how many of us were genuinely happy with our Christmas present haul? For those delighted with their presents, good for them! But what of those who've been left with a pile of unwanted tat? At some time or another, most of us will have been in a situation where we’ve received a gift that we don’t like. If only there was a way to avoid this. Maybe there will be in the not-too-distant future…

Online retail giant Amazon may have the solution: they are currently in the process of implementing a tool that could prevent dodgy gifts from ever reaching the underneath of the Christmas tree. Many people do their Christmas shopping online (in fact, online shopping hit an all time high this festive season) and it could spell good news that Amazon has patented a new method of 'gift exchange'.

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Firstly, the Finday team would like to wish you a happy New Year! 2010 has drawn to a close and we’re romping through January. So, tell us, how are those resolutions going? We all have such fantastic intentions, as we try to clear our bleary eyes (and, usually, even blearier heads) on New Year’s Day. ‘I’m going to lose, err, 30lbs by March,’ say some. ‘I’ll never smoke again,’ say others. ‘I will go to the gym at least three times a week,’ sound familiar? Personally, as I live in Spain, I made a pledge to myself to (dramatically) improve my (very bad) Spanish. And how’s that going? Well, to be honest, not that great. Que hacerlo mejor (must do better)…

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This week we've released a new tool that allows Finday users to participate more directly in the development of new features and to improve existing ones.Starting Monday you'll see a brand new little red tab on the left side of your browser, called feedback. If you click on it, you'll be able to rate our website and make any comment you'd like on Finday: Do you find it useful? How do you think we could improve our service? Have we forgotten something? Have you spotted an error on the site? Don't be shy, we want to hear what you have to say!

This new function has been added to the constant improvements we're making on Finday so it can deserve a place on your browser's homepage. And if not, what are you waiting for? Use the feedback tab and tell us what you think of Finday!

To increase the number of useful results you get from your searches, it is best to always keep in mind the 3 golden rules for searches:

1) Restrict, 2) Expand, and 3) Obtain.

Today, we'll finish this series of 3 entries with the last one.

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For the past few months, the search engine waters have increased their activity and things have reached a boiling point.  Microsoft and Yahoo! teamed up to overthrow Google, the reigning King, by renaming the old Live Search, now known as "Bing". Google included some improvements on its end, by trying out a test version of its own engine called Caffeine, and added some new features to its classic interface. But in the end, as 2009 was leaving us, the fact of the matter is that this year the question remains the same: which of the two is the best?

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To increase the number of useful results you get from your searches, it is best to always keep in mind the 3 golden rules for searches:

1) Restrict, 2) Expand, and 3) Obtain.

We continue this series of 3 entries with the second one:

Expand

• Do not forget that search engines can differ between languages in terms of locating content. If you want to expand the search to the entire Internet (and therefore get many more results), don't narrow your search to websites written only in your language.
• Automatic filters are not perfect, and if there are no children using your user account and you don´t mind the occasional explicit or risqué image, you should also deactivate the content filters.
• Searches don't just come in text form: remember that most browsers also allow you to locate images, videos, news, blogs or forums, so if you can't find what you want within normal results, stretch the reach of your search to different kinds of sites.
• Some search engines offer the possibility of expanding your results with "related searches":  use it!

More to come