"AdSense now offers the ability to monetize web and site search! WebSearch plus AdSense for search combines Google's powerful search with monetized and customizable search results pages. Simply placing the code on any web page that meets our program criteria will generate a WebSearch box, allowing users to search without leaving your site, and providing additional revenue for you."

Monetize?! Eh? Anyway tonight I added Google Search to my blog, in the header bar. I doubt I'll be "monetizing" much out of this, but I did need Search functionality so this is very handy. You can search my weblog or the World Wide Web. Give it a try :-)

Here's how The Search Race works:

1) You need to sign up for a free Search Race account before you can vote.

2) You can vote for as many search engines as you like, but you cannot vote for a single search engine more than once.

3) You can submit new search engines.

4) The Search Race will continue until we get to the Search Engine of the Year.

When a user preforms a search, the results will only show pages that are included in the collaboratively edited vertical search index. netsearchengine.net hopes that this will make your search results more focused and relevant to your search related needs. Give http://netsearchengine.net a try and let us know what you think.

Wouldn't it be easier if you could simply enter one query and have it run through a bunch of search sites?

To use Search.io, simply enter your search term and select your specific area of interest. Topics range from the default "search engines" to "blogs" to "torrents." There's even a search for popular "Web 2.0" sites. And for the more voyeuristic types, there's a listing of the latest searches.

While some of the tab sets seem to be stretching it a bit - I'm pretty sure the last time I cared about finding information in Alta Vista or Lycos was some time in the last century - the concept has a great deal of potential.

In fact, I've already added a couple of the search options to my toolbar - like the people and social bookmarks searches - and I'm going to keep using them to see if they speed my searches. I'm sure that once I've been using the service for a while, I'll find some ways to employ creative queries that will streamline my searching even further.

To test drive tabbed search for yourself, visit Search.io.

At least as interesting are the Hitwise numbers about percentage of traffic driven by search to sites in various categories. Health and Medical sites get 44% of their traffic from search engines, 29% from Google alone, says Hitwise. The lowest category for search traffic is Business and Financial sites, where only 17% of traffic is from search, 10% from Google. That category, though, is also the one seeing the biggest growth in search traffic - up 21% year over year, with Google's search traffic to these sites up a whopping 30%.

Entertainment and Travel both saw big growth in search traffic over the last year as well (see chart, click for full chart with additional columns), while Health and Medical and Shopping and Classifieds saw search traffic grow the least.

Take-aways for me are that the world of Business search optimization and ad buying must be going strong and Health and Medical are probably search-saturated. How else would you read this chart?

Today, Google has announced that the same options are coming to mobile search. Now, mobile users will have the same options on-the-go as they do when using Google search from their personal computer.

As Google software engineer Reza Ziaei wrote this evening on the Google Mobile blog, "You can do this simply by searching for the name of the product. Then, on the search results page, use 'Options' to filter by 'Forums' and refine further by choosing 'Past week.' See the screenshots below for a sample query. Try these and other Search Options yourself by simply doing a mobile search on google.com and selecting Options."

This announcement comes on the heels of Google's announcement of enhanced mobile local search options and results last week.

Tafiti won't ever be a mainstream search engine, because ultimately speed and efficiency are what most punters want in a search engine - and Google continues to deliver on those things. However I can see Tafiti becoming a nice niche search engine for researchers, given more iterations. It may well contribute some technology to a future version of Live Search too.

The trends tab offers a drop down list of top ten trending topics (Chris Brown being the current most discussed topic), and the search box allows you to search in real time on any topic. Refresh your screen to see if you have the option yet, or take a look at our screen shots below.

Search for ReadWriteWeb:

The new search feature is something we've all been eagerly awaiting, especially since Twitter's announcement last month; clearly they've now "kicked the tires" enough and it's ready for the world.

Woodard also assumes that his data still underestimates the true size of the tail, as he deliberately filtered out all adult searches and only looked at data from the last three months. The fact that Hitwise relies on data from roughly 10 million U.S. users surely makes the data somewhat limited in its scope as well.

Also, looking at this data is yet another good reminder of the fact that search has replaced bookmarks and memorizing URLs for a lot of people. Most of the top search terms like 'google,' or 'usps,' are, after all, identical to their URLs.

The new Yahoo! interface includes more recommended search queries for related images than Google, a next-image picking slideshow on each image's page, and an easy direct link to the image itself. Unfortunately, there is not a filter by copyright conditions, which is a major shortcoming.

Google's interface does not make it as easy to scan through multiple images as quickly, but both could use meaningful support for limiting searches to Creative Commons or public domain images. The new Yahoo! Image Search option of limiting to within or outside of Flickr isn't really useful at all.

None the less, we're impressed with this small change from the search giant and we expect that for casual image searching, Yahoo may now be the engine of choice for more people.

There is no sign of life on the site and the Feedster blog has already been killed off (the big 404 in the sky).

In terms of the blog search market in general, Feedster has been struggling for 3+ years now - this RWW post in July 2005 shows how Feedster was falling behind Technorati even then. Now Feedster seems to be, if not in the DeadPool, then at least in the PurgatoryPool. PubSub was another victim in this market.

Nowadays, the blog search market seems to be made up of 3 main players - Google Blog Search, Technorati and Bloglines/Ask.com - and a lot of smaller players such as Zuula and Blogdigger. Personally I still use Technorati a few times a week, and the search function of Google Reader. I also am a heavy user of Google's main search, which I find brings up good blog results (i.e. often I don't see the need for a specialist blog search engine). I did a quick poll of the other RWW writers. Josh said he still uses Technorati sometimes, but also Google Blog search. Marshall said that he uses Ask.com for minimizing spam, relies heavily on feeds with subscribers in Bloglines, and uses Technorati too. He finds that Google Blog Search is good for speed.

What blog search engine do you use - and why?

Yahoo Video Search lets users filter searches by the length of the videos. Search queries can also be restricted to official videos from a band or artist. Just like it does with non-music related searches, Yahoo also features recently shared videos from Twitter at the top of the search results.

Yahoo Video displays videos from services like YouTube, DailyMotion or MetaCafe right on the search results page. For the vast majority of video services like Artist Direct, however, users have to leave the site to see these videos. In our tests, this new feature mostly worked as advertised, though it sometimes showed songs that weren't part of the album we had selected.

Reaction to Google Music Search?

It is worth noting that while Google launched its new Google Music Search service last month, Yahoo also offers a seamless integration with Rhapsody on its site.

According to Biz Stone, the integrated search will become available to all users in the near future, after "a bunch of us have kicked the tires a bit."

Until now, a lot of users were probably not even aware of the fact that Twitter had a search engine, and Biz Stone explicitly mentions that private accounts will not be indexed by Twitter's search engine. According to Stone, over 90% of all Twitter users make their updates public.

Twitter's real-time search is probably one of Twitter's most valuable features, as it allows you to keep track of an event as it unfolds in real-time. Here at RWW, we use it daily - either through Tweetdeck's or Twhirl's built-in search, or directly on the web.

Are you on Twitter? Here are the accounts of ReadWriteWeb's writers if you'd like to follow us.

One trend that ASE editor Charles Knight is beginning to see is that some of the alts are getting larger. Charles noted: "We have always said that there are 4-5 major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, Ask) and 100 Top ASE. But we may have to revisit that. Some ASE (maybe - blinkx, GigaBlast, Exalead, picsearch, Answers.com, Eurekster, Quintura - this is a new concept) seem to be growing larger than a typical ASE, but are not ‚Äúmajor‚Ä? yet either."

Exalead was chosen as the Search Engine of the Month for October - it is a Web and image search engine.

Check out the entire list and accompanying analysis over on AltSearchEngines.

It's pretty crazy to think that this service has become as high profile (if not popular) as it has without the ability to search for users by their names. Now that it's here there are other search functions we still find more useful, though.

MG Seigler complains on Venturebeat that basic search of messages still isn't integrated into the main site yet, moths after the acquisition of Twitter search engine Summize. That doesn't bother us at all - we've just visited a Twitter search results page for "marshallk OR RRW OR marshalk OR RWW OR ReadWriteWeb OR marshalk OR Jobwire OR sarahintampa" so many times that's the first place our browsers go when we type "s" into the address bar.

Likewise, the most useful Twitter search experience is often a 3rd party site, Twellow, which searches user description fields and categorizes users by occupation and interests! That's a great way to get involved with Twitter fast - something many people could use help with; an estimated half milloin Twitter users still aren't following anyone at all.

You can test out the new Twitter people search for yourself here.