Fukushima. Osama Bin Laden. The Arab Spring. The Royal Wedding. Natural Disasters. Argentine Soccer Teams. Elizabeth Taylor. Gabrielle Giffords. iPad2 & iPhone 5. Steve Jobs..... Google Presents their 11th annual Zeitgeist: 2011 Year In Review (youtube) "What mattered in 2011? Zeitgeist sorted billions of Google searches to capture the year's 10 fastest-rising global queries and the rest of the spirit of 2011." [more inside]
posted by zarq on Dec 15, 2011 - 26 comments

Getting to advanced reading level content. As pioneered by Adrien Chen of Gawker, by far the most interesting application of the tool is its ability to rate the overall level of material on any given site, simply by dropping site: [domain.com] into the search box.
posted by Muirwylde on Dec 21, 2010 - 52 comments

Google presents: Zeitgeist 2010: How the World Searched, based on the aggregation of billions of search queries people typed into their search engine this year. Accompanying YouTube Video
posted by zarq on Dec 12, 2010 - 12 comments

A Search Service that Can Peer into the Future. A Yahoo Research tool mines news archives for meaning—illuminating past, present, and even future events. Showing news stories on a timeline has been tried before. But Time Explorer, a prototype news search engine created as a venture of Yahoo's Research Lab and the Living Knowledge Project, generates timelines that will stretch into the future as well as the past. Here is what a search for MetaFilter produces. [more inside]
posted by netbros on Aug 29, 2010 - 27 comments

Busk is a search engine dedicated to items which are in the news. It gathers the results from thousands of sites and many of them contain full content including pictures, videos, and podcasts. [more inside]
posted by gman on Jun 2, 2010 - 15 comments

Customized Google News , launched today, requires no registration, unlike Yahoo News or MSNBC News or even clean-format My Way News. A revolution in customization without commitment, based on Google's largely no-registration strategy. One giant leap in Google commoditization. I'd link you to the Google Blog entry, but although it reached my RSS reader it disappeared from the blog.
posted by NickDouglas on Mar 10, 2005 - 40 comments

Schoolchildren Strip-Searched for Lost $5 This, from the same school district that overruled a teacher who failed cheating students. I dunno about you, but making a bunch of 3rd graders get naked in school seems a little out of bounds. Feel free to tell the school board what you think of this little exercise in pedophiliac totalitarianism.
posted by dejah420 on Mar 22, 2002 - 56 comments

Google Current Events: Always the innovator, Google's brains make it easier to find news (and archives of news) about all of today's events.
posted by anildash on Sep 11, 2001 - 1 comment

newsnow.com search. here is a link to a search run through News Now (UK) for "terrorist" - lots of information streaming in from all over the globe.
posted by ryanshepard on Sep 11, 2001 - 0 comments

More google ???: phone/address listings (with a map right to your house!), and (useless) news headlines which contain search terms (some screenshots in case they are just testing).
posted by sylloge on Aug 23, 2001 - 13 comments