With all the hype and user interfaces of Web 2.0, it seems ridiculous to go back to the old fashioned command line. Ask a geek and you will always find that he prefers the keyboard over the mouse simply because its “the damn fastest way” to work.

For our dear readers who are back in time from Year 2050’s multitouch interfaces and voice recognitions and don’t remember what a command line is, I would like to remind them that the command line is the allegedly boring but the all powerful geeky way to work, where you write commands and your system says, “yes master I will do it!” (of course it can say bad command or filename too!).

I am a big Google fan but one of the things that is seriously tempting me away to Yahoo is the SearchMonkey Application Platform. Online search is starting to undergo big changes and Yahoo, for once, is leading the charge. Google on the other hand is doing things in dribs and drabs by bringing out little things a bit at a time. Don’t get me wrong, what Google is giving us is good but when you stack it up against Yahoo’s SearchMonkey, it doesn’t start to compare.

Search engines have become a common necessity. With the vast amount of web sites out there, it has become much easier to find websites using search engines. Of course the most popular are Google, Yahoo, Windows Live and Ask. I have found some that are not as common and most certainly deserve to be used.

Tina has already done a huge summary of search engines that you should try out but here are another five you should take a look at.

We know that the search engine market is primarily dominated by Google, followed by Yahoo and Microsoft Live Search. Hence today, if a new search engine is launched on the same lines and if it produces search results in a similar manner like the big players, then it is highly unlikely that it will survive in this field.

Keeping this fact in mind, the new players in the search engine market are trying to be innovative and do things differently. One of them is Addict-o-matic, which lets you type a query and then instead of displaying the results from the entire web, it shows the results from certain other sites like some top social media sites, in a single page.

After summarizing how to use Google to yield the best search results, it’s time to have a look at what is out there besides Google. Although Google tries hard to take over the world, or at least the internet, it’s still far from being a monopolist. Yes, there are many more search engines out there, and here’s a small* collection of unusual and fun search engines you should know about.

(1) Alternative Algorithm & Interface

Mooter
Mooter organizes each search in clusters of relevant categories, so that you can further dive into specific topics to find specific results. Of course you can see all the results anytime. Nice concept, but seems like the service has not been updated since 2005.

We all know that selecting the right keywords is an important prerequisite for a good search engine visibility of a blog/website. There are many keyword tools available online, some of them being completely free and some are paid but offer a free edition with a few features.

We decided to list the best of the free tools which can help you research different keywords specific to your site and optimize the site.

1: Google Adwords Research Tool

Although this tool is primarily meant for Adwords bidders, this is also widely used by webmasters and publishers to measure the popularity of different keywords based on their Google search volume.