New search perks

Yahoo, MSN, A9, Jeeves, Google, etc., are just falling all over themselves to give us new ways to search the Web. This week's developments are A9's "yellow pages" and Google's TV search. As USATODAY put it, "the yellow pages are coming to life" and we Web users now get to search for local businesses with pictures. Amazon's "A9 has added 20 million thumbnail pictures of storefronts [in the US's "top 10 markets"] to its new business directory" for when you don't remember the name of that sushi bar, but you remember its amazing cinnabar front door. Hmm - I *think* I'd use this sometimes. [Imagine what it was like to drive around 10 big cities with a digital camera taking photos of all those storefronts (that's what really happened).] Then there's Google's new feature whereby you can "search the content of television programs from the likes of PBS, the NBA, Fox News, and C-SPAN," InfoWorld reports, adding that it will "open up a new world of easy access to research and will ramp up search competition with Yahoo and others." Called "Google Video," it makes available the closed captioning content of a growing number of TV programs which Google's "spiders" began crawling or indexing last month.

Meanwhile, not to be outdone, AOL has improved its search engine with a new look and "better answers faster," it says. Here's SearchEngineWatch on this.