There’s a whole lot of mystique, paranoia, and guessing as to how Google comes up with its generally best-in-class search results. Steven Levy at Wired digs in to discover what really makes Google’s search engine different, and how it learns from us.
PageRank, the generally accepted metric of, among other things, how often a page is linked to, is only a small part of the larger story at Google. Talking to Google’s engineers and tracing the history of publicly announced search features, Levy discovers that a good deal of what Google has learned about search comes from the searchers themselves.
Take, for instance, the way Google’s engine learns which words are synonyms. “We discovered a nifty thing very early on,” Singhal says. “People change words in their queries. So someone would say, ‘pictures of dogs,’ and then they’d say, ‘pictures of puppies.’ So that told us that maybe ‘dogs’ and ‘puppies’ were interchangeable. We also learned that when you boil water, it’s hot water. We were relearning semantics from humans, and that was a great advance.”
If you’re at all intrigued by what Google gets right or wrong, Levy’s piece is well worth the read. It’s a lot of straight talk from inside Google about search, written up in plain English.
If you’re looking to buy tickets to a sporting or music event, pay a visit to SeatGeek before you hit Buy at your regular vendor.
If you can’t get used to the new search feature in Windows 7, or you just prefer using 
Sometimes your vacations are elaborate, months-long planned excursions. Other times, you just want to get out of Dodge as cheap and quick as possible. Voyij can help with the latter.
Twitter has become a nationwide phenomenon, and like any phenom, all the Twitter talk grows quickly tiresome. But despite what you may think, Twitter isn’t just for narcissists; it’s actually insanely useful.
Search is hands down the most useful feature of Twitter—whether or not you actually participate by posting anything to the site. Consider, for example, a very trivial example: I live on the West coast, so when the American Idol results show ends every Wednesday on the East coast, it's only 7pm here. I could wait two hours, then suffer through another hour of the Wednesday night, up-with-people variety show, but I really just want to know who was voted off. News sites move too slowly, and at one point blogs had aimed to fill this instant-answers void, but guess what: When you want to find out who was voted off Idol as soon as the results are available, Twitter is the quickest and easiest way to get this answer. Try it sometime. Within seconds of the announcement on Idol, Twitter fills with hundreds of posts answering this question for me.
Virtually every company has a Twitter account these days, which means if there’s a product you really care about, following them on Twitter is often the easiest way to stay up to date with the latest developments. But more often than not (in the context of Twitter, at least), the thing we care about most is ourselves. We’ve already shown you how to 
We've been using newsreaders to subscribe to RSS feeds for years now, but newsreaders still haven't completely caught on with the world at large. It seems less manageable to us, but many people are perfectly happy using Twitter as a tool to keep up with the latest news—which is partly why CNN has 
This is closer to what people think about when they think Twitter. But, as I said above, Twitter communication doesn't have to be a cesspool of "what I ate this morning" and "just flushed the toilet." You can choose whose updates you want to be notified of and how you get those updates. Upshot: If you and your pals use Twitter well, it can be a fantastic communication tool. If not, of course it's useless—but that's not really Twitter's fault. Also, if privacy is a concern, you can always protect your updates.
Whether you want to add a new event to Google Calendar, a new to-do to Remember the Milk, or a new note to Evernote, you can do it all via Twitter. It took us a while to warm up to Twitter from a productivity angle, but this kind of integration made us admit that 
Provided you have enough followers (with enough knowledge), Twitter is also a powerful place to ask questions and get answers. Before I started writing this post, for example, I asked my followers 
Recipe search engine Recipe Puppy finds meals by a list of ingredients or keywords, searching through more than 500,000 recipes across dozens of web sites.
Deal-finding web site FatWallet has always had an excellent forum for saving cash, and while that made it 
Windows only: You can get amazing deals on Craigslist, but you won’t save any cash if you can’t find the bargains. CraigsList Reader lets you deep-search multiple Craigslist location to find the loot.
MP3 Search is a web music finder with a simple interface. If you’re in need of some quick tunes to listen to, or you’re hunting down pieces of an obscure mix, take a peek.