I recently attended the Internet Librarian Conference. I was pleased to learn of
new websites.and I want to pass that information on to you to try: Google Squared puts search results in a spreadsheet format
and allows for editing. It gives the user the beginnings of a value added
table. Wolfram Alpha returns high quality results and is so different
that it calls itself a ‘computational knowledge engine’. Rather than using the
open web, it licenses data sources and gives links to the source it drew from.
This will be wonderful for scientific questions. For Travel questions Bing
from Microsoft is looking promising because it sorts links in to relevant
searches. Their smart travel search also allows you to compare, sort, and
narrow down flight and hotel results for hundreds of websites. One Riot
crawls the social web and finds relevant, timely search results and reports who
first tweeted it. University Channel was mentioned to explore lectures
and podcasts. Search Cloudlet inserts smart tag clouds into Google /
Yahoo / Twitter interface to help you search faster. This free
productivity-boosting add-on works in Firefox.