Amazonian Tree of Services
I am developing greater respect for Amazon. A9.com and Mechanical Turk are two sub-corporations of Amazon. Yet, there is little media buzz surrounding Amazon's branching reach (besides Bezos' space endeavors).

• A9.com is tempting to be my search portal of choice (or 2nd) because it is a search aggregator allowing simultaneous search with multiple and specialized search sites. You can choose to include Wiki to less common/more specialized portals like German, Japanese, programming, or law. Yes, it is annoying for it's lack of Google searches among all the searches they offer to aggregate. Another feature I have yet to find on A9 is a news aggregator.
  
• Mechanical Turk uses what Jeff Bezos calls Artificial Artificial Intelligence (hmmm... clever name). As Wiki tells us it is computers outsourcing tasks to humans regarding tasks that humans do faster.
  

In other search explorations, Microsoft's Live.com has become oh so similar to Google.com. Consider the minimalistic interface, map search (note Virtual Earth's nice new Bird's Eye view), Academic search (like Google Scholar), and most telling, the caching of web sites.

Search
I was about to promote A9.com (a susidiary of Amazon.com) as an alternative search portal to Google. It is apparent now that it is in large part a mashup with live.com, the search portal of Microsoft's Windows Live. This gives me some pause to promote something extending Microsoft's reach. In addition A9.com no longer has a map search, unique for having street-level-photographic views. This gives me pause in promoting something that may still be in flux. A9.com does deliver in allowing one to "search more at once" though absent from its search options are Google and Flicker.
(Speaking of Microsoft I must say the company has made strides in improving brand image.)