Search Engine Updates

The LibrarianInBlack blog gave a run down of sessions attended at the Computers in Libraries conference, including several sessions on Google/Bing and other search stuff updates. A few key things I noticed:

• Mention of Microsoft Academic Search which is apparently similar to Google Scholar, only it looks like it only searches for scholarly content in the sciences.
• Blekko was mentioned a few times. Honestly, after a quick read of their About page, I have no idea how this search engine works, but supposedly it in someway keeps out results from "content farms" (big phase in a lot of these) like Ask.com, ehow, and allexperts.
• Google has a proximity search command. Use "AROUND (#) keyword" for example "megan AROUND (5) awesome" to find all of those sites where "megan" is within 4 words of "awesome."
• FaganFinder.com has been around for a while but was acknowledged for being rejuvenated, and to "educate your users that there is life beyond Google, this is a good starting point for them."