Don't have much to say except check out the video in this Lifehacker article. I haven't tried out most of these new features, but I'm sure, knowing Google, they will be useful. I'm especially interested in seeing the results when filtering by Reviews.
I recently ran across an article and video on Lifehacker that talked about Wolfram Alpha's search capabilities. Unfortunately, you can't get access to it unless you're one of the chosen few. ReadWriteWeb just posted a story about some new enhancements to Google's search functionality, one of which resembles Wolfram. More cool stuff in the making, but still far from the interaction that kgb and Chacha provide, let alone the human touch of folks at libraries.
BTW, the Sky Map application for Google Android is gonna be mind-numbingly awesome.
Daytum
I tried out a site called Daytum where you can enter data and then display it in various ways (charts/graphs). Its a real quick sign-up and fairly easy to navigate. Like most Web 2.0 tools you can link to your results.
This seems like a cool e-book at a glance. Might even be nice to have laying around just to look at every once in a while. Check it out when you have the time and/or inclination.
A recent Geek.com article and the subsequent opinion from Rick about Google and Apple having a couple board members in common states what I've been thinking for quite awhile -- companies collude in order to maximize profits. The movie and music industries have been doing this for a real long time in the form of price-fixing. The big four distributors (at the time five) were even ordered by our justice system to give back some money to their customers along with some free cds. Its still going on, too, in various other forms. In the case of technology companies, they work hard to ensure that small incremental improvements take place in order to get folks to pay multiple times for the same gadgets with minimal increases in power, efficiency, and/or functionality.
