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Alternative search engine DuckDuckGo has announced a partnership with Web of Trust (WOT) to help improve the quality of its search results. DuckDuckGo already goes the extra mile to remove spam from search results, to crowd-source info, and to protect users' privacy, and as founder Gabriel Weinberg notes in announcing the partnership, working with WOT "further extends all three of these focuses."

Advertising network Chitika has released some surprising search engine statistics today, putting Microsoft Bing ahead of long-time runner-up Yahoo in the number two spot behind (still dominant) Google.

While other services, like StatCounter have the two engines neck in neck, Chitika's latest stats put Bing ahead of Yahoo by 4.5%.

Twitter has just announced a number of partnerships with a companies engaged in "real-time search and discovery". According to the blog post, the company is "happily turning the Firehose on for some new partners focused mainly on exploring the incredibly rich field of real-time search and discovery."

This partnership is sure to dramatically increase the number of people reached by Twitter's current user-base and could mean some big things for the microblog, not only in terms of exposure but in terms of its much rumored ad platform.

Our friends at Collecta, a fantastic real-time search application, have just launched a new feature for all site owners: free, customizable, embeddable widgets.

Widgets can be created around any search term imaginable and customized in a number of ways. Results are automatically refreshed, just as they are on the Collecta site, and include results from blogs, microblogs, news feeds and photo sharing services.

The Guardian, ostensibly a UK newspaper, but also a major proponent for opening data held by governments to use by outside software developers, has launched some software of its own: a search engine that unearths datasets and pathways to data sets provided by governments around the world. World Government Data Search is now live.

Yesterday the UK government released its new data site, data.gov.uk, to rave reviews (including ours). The new Guardian search engine searches across the UK, US, New Zealand and Australian governments' data sites. The company also offered up a gallery of the 10 best visualizations and mash-ups built on top of government data like this.

Looking to spruce up that bland PowerPoint presentation for your next meeting with possible investors? Or do you need high-quality photographs for your product's homepage or blog? Lifehacker recently profiled Sprixi, a free use image search engine, is an excellent source for finding just the right image to add those finishing touches.

Developed by Sydney, Australia-based company Thirsty Minds, Sprixi crawls Flickr and OpenClipArt.org for images licensed under Creative Commons and implements a user-based recommendation system to produce relevant results. While viewing photos, you can tell Sprixi whether or not an image is a useful result. Based on this data, Sprixi displays the most relevant images as rated by users at the top of the results.

80Legs is a web crawling and online content analysis service which first impressed us back in April at the Web 2.0 Expo. At that time, the company was launching into a private beta, but today at the DEMOfall 09 conference, they're going live. In the time that has passed since their initial debut, the company has been working on scaling out the performance and power of their service while also preparing to launch a new feature which should appeal to both developers and non-developers alike: an "app store." This feature allows 80Legs users to write applications that run on top of the 80Legs service and gives them the ability to share those apps with others.

Trying to explain Wowd, a Silicon Valley-based search venture, is a buzzword extravaganza.

Using cloud architecture and crowdsourced data on web pages, this real-time discovery and recommendation engine ranks pages based on whether users actually visited them and returns results from all over the web, not just a handful of indexed pages. Read on for the details on Wowd's technology, a video interview with their CEO, and yes, invitations to join the private beta.

There are, of course, already numerous Twitter search engines at this point and every new one will have to offer users a very good reason to switch from their current favorite. Tweetmi is jumping into the fray with a Twitter search engine that focuses on presenting users with a more personalized view. While the service also works well as a regular real-time Twitter search engine, users who sign in to Tweetmi will also see the most active users in their Twitter stream and the top stories from the people they already follow.

What's the easiest travel website? The best test prep software? The most powerful and secure online payment processor? How would you find the answers to these questions, at least from the perspective of your online peers?

RankSpeed is a sentiment-based search engine. It tracks mentions of websites and web-based services in blogs and on Twitter, then ranks their search results based on sentiment analysis.