Have a question for the Web? For most surfers, that's a job for Google (GOOG), which claims 64% of online searches. The site has become the go-to reference for hundreds of millions of queries every day.

But there is a growing field of upstart search sites—each with its own bag of tricks. From Microsoft's (MSFT) new Bing search engine to the data-crunching Wolfram|Alpha and the crowd-sourced Hunch, there may be more approaches to asking and answering questions than ever before on the Internet. Can Google retain its dominance of the search business?

Decide for yourself. This BusinessWeek slide show highlights 18 provocative players in online search.

Creative Commons has announced the launch of DiscoverEd, a search engine of “open” educational resources. Open as in as having a CC or other license that makes them more available for use. DiscoverEd is available in beta at http://discovered.creativecommons.org.

The materials in the search engine were not gathered from an open Web crawl; rather they were assembled from third-party repositories like the Open Courseware Consortium and the National Science Digital Library. This means that you won’t get as many results from a general search (and that it’s generally okay to do a more general search) and that the results have somewhat better details.

If you like to search for "music lyrics" or "free" things, you are engaging in risky cyber behavior. And "free music downloads" puts 20 percent of web surfers in harm's way of malicious software, known as "malware."

A new research report by U.S.-based antivirus software company McAfee has identified the most dangerous Internet search words that place users on pages with a higher likelihood of cyber attacks.

One of the rare services that Google was forced to shut down was Google Answers. Perhaps they anticipated that it was a battle they could not win because getting quick answers to your questions is easier than ever - on Twitter. You can, of course, just ask the question, but we’ve found five sites that try to add some structure to the process, and checked out if they’re worth your time.

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.