With developers rushing like wild dogs to build and launch applications to make your Twitter experience more productive, how can you choose which is the best tool to use if you’re running queries on your company name and competitor’s product line, or references on small-town bakeries or Red Sox pitchers?

Thankfully, there is no shortage of search applications. But how different are their interfaces, how similar are their results, and what options do they offer? Let’s see.

If you are looking into innovative ways to browse and explore search engine results, visual search engines may provide exactly what you have been looking for.

Instead of long lists of page titles and URLs, visual search engines deliver visually rich maps of content results, often utilizing also size, color and positioning to communicate at a glance a greater array of information about the items found.

There are millions and millions of webpages out there. However, as most of us have troubles finding an old letter on our own computer, how can we find relevant information on this "global hard drive?"

This is a video of a Google factory tour of search.

Track down anyone from long lost schoolmates to the new friend whose number you've lost with this assortment of powerful people-search engines. Earlier this week we asked you to share which search engines you use to find people. The votes have been tallied, and now we're back with the five most popular people-search engines.

A new “Social White Pages” tool Snitch.name searches for a name you specify across several popular social media sites: FaceBook, Vimeo, Flickr, Wadja, Twitter, MySpace, Hi5, Friendfeed, Netlog, and LinkedIn. As a result you will see snapshots of profile pages in an iFrame and will be able to befriend the person at all social sites from one page.

YoName.com has a bit different selection of social networks: Bebo, Blogger, Buzznet, Deviantart, IRC-Galleria, Last.fm, Webshots, Xanga, etc. However it seems to return fewer results than Snitch.name. But it is still worth checking out and search for both the person’s name and username for more results.

One day last summer, Google’s search engine trundled quietly past a milestone. It added the one trillionth address to the list of Web pages it knows about. But as impossibly big as that number may seem, it represents only a fraction of the entire Web.

Beyond those trillion pages lies an even vaster Web of hidden data: financial information, shopping catalogs, flight schedules, medical research and all kinds of other material stored in databases that remain largely invisible to search engines.

Visual searches just keep getting better and better. Viewzi is a metasearch engine that lets you view relational data in a fun and easy-to-use visual paradigm. Currently, there are fourteen ways to view a search term, including mp3, video, 3d photo, basic photo, web screenshots, and more.

Web Search is an online search tool Bovee & Thill developed that enables business communication instructors to have 334 search engines at their fingertips for quick, comprehensive searching online.

"A vast number of great search engines are now available, including many specialized ones, but it often takes considerable time and effort to find the best ones that suit your needs,” says Bovee, “but our new search tool gives you instant access within seconds to hundreds of search engines to do keyword searching on literally any topic you wish."

The tool uses a simple, attractive, intuitive interface, engineered to help business communication instructors find precisely what they want, whether it’s PowerPoints files, Adobe Acrobat PDFs, Microsoft Word documents, or Excel files.

Users can also search for academic content or instructional assistance, or search online libraries, news sites, newspapers and magazines, newsletters, blogsites, the blogosphere, forums and groups, wikis, reference, government, information about people, social bookmarking sites, press releases, company information, photographs, videos, videoblogs, podcasts, or RSS newsfeeds.

The tool also includes major search, metasearch, visible search, invisible web search, and social bookmarking search engines.

"The tool we’ve developed is an interface to the whole world of web information, using the best search technologies, which enable the user to access information more in-depth, easier, and more rapidly than ever before," says Thill.

Google has announced the launch of SearchWiki, a major addition to its user interface that allows users to edit search results. When using SearchWiki, you can re-order, remove, or add web pages to the search results for any query. You can also add notes to specific listings. You have to be logged in to a Google account so that the changes you make will be saved and shown the next time you run the same search.

“This is a way for search to adapt to a more interactive experience,” says Google Product Manager Cedric Dupont. “We ran a bunch of experiments, and the response was overwhelmingly positive from our users. They asked for this feature.”