I was playing with the IMAGE ZOOM firefox addon today and decided to use it on the Google logo (found on top of search results page, not Google home page). Well, when I zoomed in and out, I saw the “items behind the curtain”. they are essentially icons used in the search results (arrows are for rating website when logged into your google account). Neat, but that’s about it…

I know that using the Google Image Labeler only benefits Google, but damn it all, they made helping them addicting.

An interesting read from The Economist: Who’s afraid of Google?

Powerset, a new yet-to-be-released natural language search engine just posted their work on “parsing and indexing…the hardest corpus [they] could find: Miss South Carlolina’s response to the question, ‘Recent polls have shown that a fifth of Americans can’t locate the US on a map. Why do you think this is?’ ”

If you are curious about Powerset, here are some Powerset news clippings

Check out the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines as picked by a website I’ve never heard of before. Still, it’s a nice list.

I rarely write about new search engines since they are pretty much a dime a dozen these days, but SideKiq not only has meta-bility searching (has several traditional and vertical search engines, including Ask.com’s AskX), but also has a great unique layout.