search engines

Clay Shirky gives an excellent talk re-phrasing the conundrum of information overload. He explains that information overload has existed for centuries (at least since the printing press), so it is not a problem, it is a fact, or a condition that we have naturally immersed ourselves. The problem however is not an increase in information, but that our filters (social and institutional, not just technological) are no longer working.

general search alternatives:
viewzi: a lot of different ways of seeing and searching through data
mnemomap: nice interface with semantic map and a variety of tools
searchme: turns web search into quicklook visual browsing, a little too sexy for its own good
bryns brain: another sexy interface with web previews
touchgraph: uses Java to visually displays results from the Google search API
research beyond google: some useful resources for doing academic or statistical research
textmap: visualizes tons of data related to search topics or issues (news histogram, relational network, juxtapositions)
a couple of categorizing engines: grokker, clusty and quintura