IBM and Yahoo have teamed up to bring geeks and conspiracy buffs around the world UFO Crawler, which is a micro-level search engine designed to bring up only information related to UFOs, ghosts, the unexplained, and creepy things that go bump in the night.

If you are planning on taking a trip to Europe, hostels can offer an affordable place to stay. This new search engine cuts right to the chase, and will help you find the best rates and comparisons.

Moscow-based search engine Quintura will relaunch its visual search engine with a new user interface.

The company, which is backed by Mangrove Capital Partners (Skype, AllPeers, Piczo, Nimbuzz) and OpenView Venture Partners, has developed technology that clusters related search terms to the initial query and presents those terms as a tag cloud. Users can refine their searches by clicking on any word in the cloud - words that are closer and bigger than other words are more correlated to the initial query than other terms. Mousing over any word in the cloud shows related terms to that as well.

The company wisely moved away from a downloadable search application last year to a pure online service. The new interface moves the tag cloud to the left and search results to the right - previously the search results were below the cloud and seemed somewhat crowded.The site also has decent image and video search, and child-safe search.

Powerset a San Francisco based search engine company is close to announcing a new search technology that may propel it past Google. The technology attempts to understand the meanings between words, similar to the way humans understand language, this technology has been coined “natural language”. The technology was developed at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) and has been 30 years in the making.

“The deal is significant because practical use of linguistic technology has eluded Google. The giant search engine has said it wants to implement language-understanding technology one day. However, tests of linguistic approaches haven’t made any difference in Google’s results so far, it says (see our Q&A with Google Director of Research Peter Norvig below; also see his speech last year about this at Berkeley). Google has shunned reliance on word meanings, instead focusing on finding the most popular pages that contain the keywords. As for relationships between words, Google relies on statistical relationships, such as frequency they appear together, but not on linguistic relationships.”

“The deal with PARC, which is owned by Xerox, is Powerset’s answer to its critics, such as search expert Danny Sullivan, who all but heaped scorn on Powerset’s ambitions when we first wrote about them. At the time, Sullivan didn’t know the degree to which Powerset has focused on this.”

“The move is significant because Google’s own technology, based on “page rank,” has been virtually replicated by other search engines like Yahoo and MSN, and so isn’t as difficult to emulate as it was a few years ago. Powerset could possibly steal a lead if it improves search results by a significant measure with natural language and simultaneously incorporates a near-equivalent to Google’s existing capabilities. Powerset has been hiring lots of Yahoo search experts and others, to help it do that.”

“We’d be surprised if Google doesn’t scrutinize Powerset closely, perhaps even consider an acquisition (although in our Q&A today with Norvig, below, he says Google is now working on natural language after all). Until now, though, Google’s disciplined focus on a statistical approach may have blinded it to the possibilities of a linguistic approach, Powerset’s executives say. Powerset plans to launch the search engine publicly this year.”

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Another search engine has set itself up as charity donating website. This time around it is Three45.

Just click on the charity you want to help out, and click away.

Forget “Jeeves”, it is time to ask the hottest search engine ever, Ms Dewey what you’re looking for.

She may be nothing more than a skin of flash videos streaming one after another on top of a Live.com search engine, but it is a “little” interactive. If you just leave the site running and not search for anything, Ms Dewey will get sad, frustrated, or start playing with her day planner. It is a cute idea, and if they can get a few more quick down-blouse shots, this could very well be the engine to topple Google.

Winzy is a beta testing search engine that allows its users to win prizes like money or video game systems just for using the website. There are a few catches, at least that I see. You’ll need to open an account, and it appears that you need to download their toolbar (who knows what is attached to it). Still, what is a little unknown downloading when the result could be a brand new Wii or Xbox 360!

For the adventurous types, try your luck here.

Search Engine War is a very small website with probably little to no influence over anything, but they do have a nifty one question search engine preference poll with both US and Russian websites, and is in both English and Russian. The Cold War is over! Let the Search Engine War begin.

Over at Google Operating System’s Blogspot (an unofficial Google new site) there is an interesting tidbit on Wikipedia’s plans to create a search engine, using the same user-aided approach as their flagship creation.

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, plans to launch a search engine code-named Wikiasari in the first quarter of 2007. Following the model of Wikipedia, the new search engine will have user-editable search results.

“Google is very good at many types of search, but in many instances it produces nothing but spam and useless crap. Try searching for the term [Tampa hotels], for example, and you will not get any useful results,” said Jimmy Wales. Well, maybe the example is not very good, because I see mostly useful results.

Mr. Wales did the impossible by creating an excellent resource of information with the support of a community. Now he wants to repeat the success, but this time the project will be supported by advertising.

“Essentially, if you consider one of the basic tasks of a search engine, it is to make a decision: ‘this page is good, this page sucks’. Computers are notoriously bad at making such judgments, so algorithmic search has to go about it in a roundabout way. But we have a really great method for doing that ourselves. We just look at the page. It usually only takes a second to figure out if the page is good, so the key here is building a community of trust that can do that,” added Wikipedia’s founder.

I think the main job of a search engine is to understand how relevant a page is for a particular query. To scale, a search engine should that algorithmically. While people have a better ability to decide if a page is relevant, that doesn’t mean spammers won’t try to push their sites.

But the main reason for creating a search engine is that he thinks search is broken “for the same reason that proprietary software is always broken: lack of freedom, lack of community, lack accountability, lack of transparency.” Google, for example, won’t become open source because it uses proprietary algorithms, other search engines could copy its code and people could tweak their sites to abuse it.

It will be interesting to see if a search engine based only on human intelligence really works.

So, you’re sitting around saying to yourself, “ya know, do I really need two kidneys? Maybe someone would like one of mine.” Or something to that effect. If you are, then head over to this unique search engine of sorts, matchingdonors.com .

Here, patients in need of organs can list their location, what they need, and their current situation. It is the season to be sharing, so if you’ve got a spare kidney, part of a liver, or even a lung you think you can live without, take a look to see if someone in your area could use it. Who knows, you could even save a life. That would get you on Santa’s permanent “nice” list.