Google Swirl is a new Google Labs experiment that lets a user search through images in a "visual and semantic" way, allowing users to search through radiating treeviews of conceptually related images. (requires flash)
posted by boo_radley on Nov 17, 2009 - 27 comments

"We ran over 5,000 experiments last year. Probably 10 experiments for every successful launch. We launch on the order of 100 to 120 a quarter. We have dozens of people working just on the measurement part. We have statisticians who know how to analyze data, we have engineers to build the tools. We have at least five or 10 tools where I can go and see here are five bad things that happened." Udi Manber, Google’s vice-president of technology, explains the business of running a search department. "It takes a very, very good engineer about two years to really understand search." From a surprisingly candid series of articles detailing the business of Google, "Can Google Stay on Top of the Web?" [more inside]
posted by geoff. on Oct 10, 2009 - 21 comments

Spezify is a metasearch engine. The interface is in Flash.
posted by ardgedee on Sep 29, 2009 - 38 comments

Top 100 search terms of the <18 crowd during summer. If you're Glenn Quagmire, don't read this. All others, continue! An article with at least superficial credibility (they admit kids search for porn, etc.) about what kids, tweens and teens search for online. Randomness includes Megan Fox, Walmart, Youtube and Naked Girls. (And Craigslist. What the hell do kids need on Craigslist?)
posted by ShadePlant on Aug 14, 2009 - 75 comments

Peter Morville is widely recognized as a father of the information architecture field, and he serves as an advocate for the critical roles that search and findability play in defining web user experience. His recent project titled Search Patterns, is a sandbox for collecting search examples, patterns, and anti-patterns; for example spime search, the ability to query objects in motion and find things in the real world. Morville is also on the editorial board of the new Journal of Information Architecture.
posted by netbros on Jul 31, 2009 - 4 comments

Microsoft's Bing now provide Yahoo! seach. Yahoo, a 1994 internet pioneer of search, has now agreed to stop researching search tech and start using Bing. Some say it's a small deal, a Google deal rerun, and one says it's a tar pit. As pointed out, nobody yet knows if Yahoo can choose another provider if it all goes wrong.
posted by jaduncan on Jul 29, 2009 - 72 comments

"Worio is a discovery engine that works alongside keyword search to expose you to stuff you've been missing using search alone." (via) [more inside]
posted by gman on Jun 17, 2009 - 17 comments

Hunch picks up "where a search engine leaves off," according to cofounder Caterina Fake, who previously cofounded the photo-sharing site Flickr and later worked on Yahoo Answers. Fake points out that a normal search engine would provide a user interested in buying a digital camera with links to hundreds of sites that review and compare the latest models. The user then has to sort through that information and figure out which camera is right for her. Instead, Hunch asks users pointed questions and narrows down the list of results for the user.
posted by Man with Lantern on Jun 15, 2009 - 46 comments

Curious about the health of your bank? You might find BankTracker helpful. This site crunches the FDIC's publicly available numbers on banks' deposits, loans, and nonperforming loans, and makes them available in a search interface for banks and credit unions. [more inside]
posted by A dead Quaker on Jun 13, 2009 - 15 comments

Google has released an experimental search tool, Google Squared, that presents search results in the form of a table. Each column represents some attribute or dimension of the things returned - for example, searching for US presidents yields a column for date of birth, and rows for Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, etc. [more inside]
posted by Zarkonnen on Jun 5, 2009 - 70 comments

Microsoft's new search engine, Bing, goes beta. Cribbed from live.com, the layout for bing is... strangely familiar. Early reviews are mixed, with mixed results, mostly noting that the results less useful than google, especially when it comes to google.
posted by boo_radley on Jun 1, 2009 - 173 comments

The FCC investigated a pirate radio station in Boulder, Colorado earlier this month and left a copy of their official inspection policy asserting that they have the authority to perform warrantless searches of private property if there is any FCC-licensed equipment on the property, including cordless phones, cell phones, wireless routers, intercom systems, and baby monitors. [more inside]
posted by notashroom on May 21, 2009 - 36 comments

Wolfram Alpha is about to go live. Wolfram Alpha is an answer engine which may just change the way we think about search results.
posted by rollbiz on May 15, 2009 - 133 comments

Cooks around the world deserve a simple place to find any recipe. Enter RecipeBridge. Have an ingredient you don't know what to do with? Enter it into RecipeBridge for recipe ideas returned from more than 200 cooking sites. C'est magnifique.
posted by netbros on May 9, 2009 - 5 comments

The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that a search of your trash doesn't violate your privacy. This decision is in line with that of the United States. [more inside]
posted by Lemurrhea on Apr 9, 2009 - 80 comments

Dave Chalmers has just launched PhilPapers, a directory of nearly 200,000 online papers in philosophy. This is a jawdropping and amazing resource for philosophical research. For evidence of the scope of this project and the care that has been given to it, see the taxonomy of philosophy that was developed for the site.
posted by painquale on Jan 28, 2009 - 28 comments

You might get lucky and find work from home but it won't be easy. You could try wading through the many sites offering advice and opinion on the dire job situation. The Wall Street Journal looks at short employment stints, employment test cheating and who's especially vulnerable to layoffs; Lindsey Pollak offers tips to students and others on tips landing a first job. There are lawyers to help older workers avert discriminatory layoffs and a job bank for people over 50. There are, of course, many job search sites, some better than others. Some are avoiding search engines and going directly to Facebook or Linked In to make connections with potential recruiters. [more inside]
posted by etaoin on Jan 12, 2009 - 27 comments

Revealed: the environmental impact of Google searches - "Physicist Alex Wissner-Gross says that performing two Google searches uses up as much energy as boiling the kettle for a cup of tea."
posted by nthdegx on Jan 11, 2009 - 74 comments

middlespot.com is a search interface for teachers, librarians, researchers and anyone who wants to interpret information faster from their search results, collect and annotate relevant results into groups, and share those collections with people relying on their expertise. [more inside]
posted by netbros on Dec 31, 2008 - 4 comments

StateStats: Explore the popularity of search queries in U.S. states [more inside]
posted by sambosambo on Dec 4, 2008 - 40 comments

Google Flu Trends brings us epidemiology through search analytics. The prevalence of certain search terms seems to be a good predictor of CDC flu reports a couple of weeks later. The New York Times has a story on this project.
posted by grouse on Nov 11, 2008 - 21 comments

"Girl, he died a hero with tons of people loving him." A jack-of-all-trades worker from Florida came to Houston to help clean up in the aftermath of Hurricane Ike, and was killed while trying to save three dogs on a freeway. At first, it seemed the man, while praised as a local hero, and receiving tons of support in death from animal lovers, would remain an unknown loner in death as he had been in life. Then a Google search and an exchange of e-mails led one Houston woman to the man's daughter, living in Pittsburgh. The young woman had been searching for her father for thirteen years.
posted by WolfDaddy on Oct 8, 2008 - 37 comments

To celebrate their 10th birthday Google have brought back their oldest available index dating back to 2001.
posted by HaloMan on Sep 30, 2008 - 110 comments

Word Spectrum; SearchClock; Digg Rings; Bible Cross-references: the gorgeous analytical vizualizations of Chris Harrison. [more inside]
posted by cortex on Sep 18, 2008 - 17 comments

TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology. [more inside]
posted by monospace on Aug 21, 2008 - 34 comments

Things [blank] people like. New search engine RushmoreDrive is a first step into the waters of Identity Based searching. Specifically, it weighs your demographic heavily when ordering your search results.
posted by tkolar on Aug 19, 2008 - 33 comments

Google Search Engine Ranking Factors v2 "represents the collective wisdom of 37 leaders in the world of organic search engine optimization. Together, they have voted on the various factors that are estimated to comprise Google's ranking algorithm." The highest ranked factor is Keyword Use in Title Tag.
posted by Soup on Aug 18, 2008 - 56 comments

Science Hack is a unique search engine for science videos focusing on Physics, Chemistry, and Space. For example, things to do with sulfur hexafluoride. Still growing, the editors are presently indexing other scientific fields of study including Geology, Psychology, Robotics and Computers. Ever wonder why things go bang?
posted by netbros on Aug 7, 2008 - 6 comments

Tired of getting busted for illegally peeing* in New York City? Try Diaroogle.com, a toilet search engine that "helps you find quality public toilets from your mobile phone." [more inside]
posted by dhammond on Aug 6, 2008 - 40 comments

[first name of a candidate] and pre/2 [last name of a candidate] w/7 bush or gore or republican! or democrat! or charg! or accus! or criticiz! or blam! or defend! or iran contra or clinton or spotted owl or florida recount or sex! or controvers! or racis! or fraud! or investigat! or bankrupt! or layoff! or downsiz! or PNTR or NAFTA or outsourc! or indict! or enron or kerry or iraq or wmd! or arrest! or intox! or fired or sex! or racis! or intox! or slur! or arrest! or fired or controvers! or abortion! or gay! or homosexual! or gun! or firearm!
posted by unSane on Jul 29, 2008 - 85 comments

Cuil is a new search engine developed by former Google employees, and claims to index 3x more pages than Google. CNN Money story has the basics. My attempts were met with timeouts. [more inside]
posted by Ynoxas on Jul 28, 2008 - 189 comments

Criminal Searches - Making you feel safer or increasing your fear? [more inside]
posted by tellurian on Jul 24, 2008 - 44 comments

Have Food Will Travel: Pearl River Delta is a travelogue teaser video from Leonard Shek, a second generation Chinese American from San Francisco. Shek traveled to the Guangdong Province as part of the SF Chinese Culture Center's In Search of Roots program. While the main purpose of the trips is for Chinese Americans to explore where their parents or grandparents came from, Shek wanted to explore the origins of the food he grew up with.
posted by spec80 on Jul 9, 2008 - 2 comments

Viewzi is a kind of metasearch tool built around 'views'. It's kind of the antiGoogle in that it's not so much for quick answers as for idle looking around, and it's all about the UI, but it's interesting and pretty and kind of fun. Beta, naturally, and fully buzzword compliant. Flash haters will probably hate it. Usability people may have an aneurism. That's OK. [via] [more inside]
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken on Jul 2, 2008 - 9 comments

Le réseau - Starting in the late 19th century, Belgian Paul Otlet envisioned the basics of a human powered Wikipedia and Google. He created a 12 million item database on index cards and accepted queries via mail or telegraph. The article describes his work and the Mundaneum museum in his honor. Be sure to watch the video. There is a full documentary on Otlet as well.
posted by Argyle on Jun 17, 2008 - 8 comments

Lost and forgotten videos? Find your way back: TimeTube! via
posted by Kronos_to_Earth on May 10, 2008 - 10 comments

The SEO Rapper (a.k.a. The Poetic Prophet) spits rhymes on such topics as Design Coding, Link Building, Paid Search, and Conversion Closing for all your marketing campaign and web design needs.
posted by dhammond on Mar 27, 2008 - 9 comments

Oamos is a "metasearch engine" that generates a sprawling cornucopia of sound, text and images based on your query.
posted by dhammond on Feb 13, 2008 - 14 comments

Search into + 250,000 blogs in Spanish The Spanish blog portal Bitacoras.com released a widget to search into more than 250,000 blogs written in Spanish.
posted by jlori on Jan 3, 2008 - 7 comments

net.art generator [via William Gibson] The art is created through a Google image search and some automatic image manipulation. For examples, go here.
posted by Kattullus on Dec 17, 2007 - 21 comments

Future Reading. Anthony Grafton explores what we can learn about the future of the text from the history of libraries, publishers, and the sorting of books. [more inside]
posted by Toekneesan on Nov 1, 2007 - 8 comments

The World's Largest Database of Frequently Asked Questions. [more inside]
posted by psmealey on Oct 25, 2007 - 58 comments

If Google was designed for Google.
posted by armoured-ant on Oct 16, 2007 - 36 comments

Spot the Five Differences. It is fun. [flash]
posted by brain_drain on Oct 10, 2007 - 88 comments

Google launches a site dedicated to the upcoming Australian Federal Election with Youtube channels from each party, electoral boundaries integrated into Google Maps, a search engine to allow you to view what each candidate has said on a range of issues, from immigration to interest rates, news from your electorate, and graphs of media activity on candidates and issues. Australians have been lacking a comprehensive political resource like the UK's The Work For You, and Google has brought it one step closer. Unfortunately, many of the resources are in the form of gadgets you add to your iGoogle homepage, rather than standalone applications.
posted by Jimbob on Sep 16, 2007 - 29 comments

Steve Fossett Missing: Help find him by searching satellite imagery
posted by nthdegx on Sep 9, 2007 - 66 comments

See who's editing Wikipedia. The most shameful Wikipedia spin jobs and another one from Fox News. Meet Virgil Griffith and find a few interesting Wikipedia battles of your own with his new creation.
posted by spock on Aug 14, 2007 - 92 comments

Add keyboard shortcuts to Google results pages. One of several new experimental search styles provided by Google Labs.
posted by grouse on Jun 6, 2007 - 22 comments

Sputtr is a front-end for searching a variety of popular sites, of course dipped in some Web 2.0 sauce.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane on May 12, 2007 - 29 comments

"Alright Joes, come with me for a strip search." [NSFW unless you work for the Bureau of Prisons] The correct way to conduct a strip search. [via]
posted by kirkaracha on Apr 27, 2007 - 28 comments