If you see "powered by Google" on the logo on the search results page, then you’re using the old one. In a post on Google’s Inside AdSense blog, Katrina Kurnit writes:

AdSense for search with CSE gives you more control over your search results without changing how you earn money showing AdSense for search ads. For example, with the new version, you’ll have access to advanced features like refinements and promotions. Our team has developed a number of updates and improvements during the past few months, and you can access more advanced features at www.google.com/cse.

Your existing AdSense for search box will continue to work normally for a few more months, and we’ll be sure to update you when we retire this version. To take advantage of the benefits offered by the new version of AdSense for search and ensure you don’t miss any revenue during the transition, we encourage you to update your code now.

To upgrade go to AdSense setup and "AdSense for Search" then select the sites you want your users to be able to search across, customize the look and feel and update the code for your site. Google offers more info here.

Top News – WebProNews

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The relaunch follows the decision to drop its iconic butler at the beginning of 2006 and the introduction of new applications last year.

Ask will be refocusing on its ability to act as the search engine of choice for those asking questions.

Rivals are increasingly looking at ways to set themselves apart from Google in the competitive world of search.

Data from net measurement firm ComScore found that Ask is more often used by people searching for specific answers to questions.

While such questions account for about 5% of queries to Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live Search, it accounts for 15% of Ask’s searches.

Four wheels

Ask claims the re-designed site will be faster, produce more relevant search results and improved search technology.

The site, which goes live in the US from 6 October and in the UK from 20 October, borrows design ideas from rival Google.

Cesar Mascaraque, European managing director of Ask, believes it is inevitable that there will be similarities with Google.

“All cars have four wheels. No-one wants a car with one wheel,” he said.

He is convinced that Ask is chasing a very specific customer – 35 to 55-year-olds.

“The 20 year-old is never going to use us and, you know what, I don’t care,” he said.

Ask acknowledged that last year’s TV campaign, which portrayed it as an underground alternative to Google, was not as successful as it hoped.

“The ad brought them in but the product let us down,” said a spokeswoman.”This time around we have done a lot of work on the back end.”

Ask will be launching a scaled-down TV ad campaign, confined initially to the Midlands area.

It will focus on the tricky questions to which people want answers.

Lifeblood

Google’s rivals have a marathon task if they want to cut into its market share, said Alex Burmaster, an analyst with market research firm Nielsen NetRatings.

“For anyone coming to the net in the last few years Google is the lifeblood of their online behaviour,” he said.

“Despite changes to the technology and marketing the figures suggest that Ask hasn’t made a difference,” he said.

In the UK, Google dominates with an 80% market share compared to 2% for Ask.

In the US, Google’s share is slightly less at 60% but Ask’s share remains the same.

But searching on Ask remains relatively healthy. During August 46 million searches were conducted via Ask in the UK which accounts for one in five of all people using a search engine.

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Productive Search Engines ( 7 )

QueryCat : Probably the biggest database for Frequently Asked Question. They have over 2.5 Million UV. The results are very neat and I don’t see much any ads there which makes searching much cleaner. The most unique thing you get is apart from Search result you can always leave a question at the end of it. Excellent 5,000,000+ questions and answers.

Factbites : What happens when you cross Search engine with encyclopedia ? This is what they have done. Its a huge index of content of AskTheBrain and NationMaste which are free educational resource and the world’s largest statistical database on comparing counties.

My Live Search : This search engine stands out all the search engine in the list. As by name Its Live meaning instead of searching into indexed pages which could have changed ( but still not changed in the index ), they search live i.e. according to their technology the result is fired on the web live so you get real time data instead of the same result every time. You just need to try this.

Lexxe Search: Another one which is unique with its own idea. This search engine uses advanced Natural Language Processing technologies.It emphasizes the processing of language from the level of words and the meanings associated with them, which is a core feature for Lexxe.

Like when you search for ” How to tweak vista” , you would see the sidebar with Clusters e.g which you can call as category or tags. This makes it easy for drilling down the search result and make it more accurate.

Sproose: A community driven search where you can vote for the search result you get. They even allows you to remove the spam for the search result which either have bad reputation or less score. Perfect for social animals. Voters get some kind of rank for commenting and finding good result. You can even search by username or tags

Tag Search : Mother of all tag search. This search finds if your searched tag matched with any of the tags in Delicious, You tube etc. Making it perfect for tag Searchers

Health Engine : This search engine is perfect if you are looking for Doctors and its perfect for doctors ( if they register here ). If you want to find a doctor overnight this is best. This is Australia based but there are chances to find others too.

Document Search Engines: (3)

Scirus Search : This place is best for if you are doing scientific research with over 450 million scientific items indexed. It also includes journal content,scientists’ homepages, course ware, pre-print server material, patents and institutional repository and website information.

ExaLead : Probably the only search engine that allows you to surf your desktop files and folders from web interface. This is where it makes difference from others. Their small application will allow you to create account and as you are signed in you can use “My PC” tab to search your computer on Web. ( I wonder why did Google did not do this. Hmm Google Desktop Search would have become the top used software then )

Kokogiak booksearch : Its a custom search engine which searches inside books from A9.com, Google.com and MSN Live Search – at the same time.

Video search Engines: (3)

Truveo : This tops the in the list of Video Search. You can almost anything which has video with it. Already pretty much popular its just one stop for video search.

Video Surf: You can not only search videos but also get alerts for certain topics. The search result is what you should take a look at. Feel Google had this. They categorize the search result into Content Types ( Slide shows, Full episodes, Movies ) and According to sources too. You can Sort by relevance, when it was added and view by summary.

Gujam: Another custom search engine but specially for Videos which includes all the major sites like You tube, blip tv, yahoo , google and others. Here is the complete list.

People Search: (2)

ZabaSearch : Find people in US with their phone numbers and address. Their advanced search makes searching more accurate where you can provide middle name specifically with sate.You can even set alerts for particular name which can be your too.

People Locator Search : This search engine is specifically designed to find people whom you had lost touch with. You cause it find a old high school friend. You can use these parameters too :

• Recent residency info and telephone number info
• Relatives and neighbors
• Resident history
• Divorce and marriage records
• Age and birth records
• Criminal history and court documents
• Access to public record database
• Arrest and Warrant History

Image Search Engines: (1)

Imagery : Find all the details of the picture before opening it. That’s what they do in search of an Image. You can find which page it belongs to and whats the size. They also give you option to Directly open that Image or the page. ( This beats out the frame that comes when you do a google Image search ). Perfect for finding Images.

Torrent Search Engines (1)

Toorgel: Perfect Search engine for searching torrent files. Though its custom search engine but it will suffice your torrent file needs.

General Search Engine ( 4)

Search Hacker: This search engine lets you find the most people look for i.e. Videos, Wallaper, Audio. They have even search for Free Stuff And Lowest price things.

Sputtr: This is customized search where you can combine lot of popular sites like Yahoo, Google docs, Google Videos and even the social media sites like technorati, digg and stumble. You can make good use of this for finding new articles submitted around the world. You can even watch Videos on Amazon with this.

Meta Crawlers: This is like other search engines but what makes it stand out is Filter for Language and Adding or removing of domains. This makes search more accurate. If somebody sees results from a domain which doesn’t fit he can just filter it out. They have search like Videos, news etc.

Red Zee: This search engine is fun, You get greeted by a red zebra and then when you search it becomes smart. Not the Zebra but the search!!!. It gives you all search result in form of images. You can click on each of them and they come up over the other giving you a skean peak of what the
page contains.

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SearchWiki lets users customize search by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results. With just a single click users can move the results they like to the top or add a new site. They can also write notes attached to a particular site and remove results that they don’t feel belong.

These modifications will be shown to users every time they do the same search in the future. SearchWiki is available to signed-in Google users and the changes are stores in their Google Account.

The changes made only affect the user’s own searches but one can see how the community has collectively edited the sea

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This gadget can be configured in just a few clicks to help your readers search for information like blog posts, linked web pages and linked sites from the sidebar, etc., all in one go.

The good part is that the search results displayed using this gadget will show inline and match the look and feel of your own blog.

The gadget enables you to perform 3 kinds of searches:

1. This blog: searches across your blog posts
2. Linked from here: searches blog posts, webpages linked from your posts, blog lists, and link lists
3. The web: searches across all pages on the web

With the help of this gadget you could also restrict search results to pages linked from a specific blog list or link list.

Test it for yourself to see how useful this gadget is for you. (Image credit & Source: Official Google Blog)

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