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Yahoo's SearchMonkey platform allows publishers to easily write applications that integrate structured data from their own sites into Yahoo's search results. Most of these applications still have to be turned on explicitly by the user, but Yahoo has also started to integrate some of them into its regular search results. Today, Yahoo turned on results from the Citysearch and Zagat SearchMonkey applications for all users.

In the past, we have written extensively about the potential of BOSS, Yahoo's open search web services platform. BOSS is an open API that lets developers access and manipulate Yahoo's search results. A wide range of companies, including Hakia and Me.dium, are currently using it to power their own search engines. One of the more interesting applications of BOSS we have come across lately is PopGist. PopGist blends search results with Techmeme-like discussion sections that list related stories from other sites.

Iterend, a new blog search and discovery engine, is entering a highly competitive market. It competes with Technorati, Google's Blog Search, Sphere, Icerocket, and many other smaller players. Iterend is trying to differentiate itself from the competition by putting a stronger focus on tracking memes, clustering results, and using tag clouds for navigation. While we mostly like Iterend's design and feature set, the search engine itself is not very useful yet, as the crawler is extremely slow and the index often only reflects stories that are more than 20 hours old.

What do you do when you need to research something on the web? You just google it, right? Using a web search engine like Google is usually fine for casual searches, but when you need to delve deep into a subject, it just won't do. What you really need is a research engine that explores the unindexed reaches of the Deep Web. For that, there's now Infovell, "the world's research engine."

The internet is a whole lot of nothing without a search engine or two. While the staying power of search engines has never been in question, it's been interesting to see how they've evolved to the point of replacing the address bar.

With more information being published on the internet and different filters for interpreting this information being created, here's a look at a our picks of unique search engines that are making headlines and changing the way we search.