Mary Ellen Bates, gave a talk called “30 Search Tips in 40 Minutes.” I attended the same talk last year and I highly recommend her talks. As well as sharing cool new sites she focuses on usefulness. Some highlights:

*She mentioned Exalead as having some of the best advanced search syntax capabilities for web searching, including phonetic and approximate spelling. (See my review of Exalead from last November.
*http://www.housingmaps.com/ - maps Craigslist real estate listings to Google Maps so you can see on a map where the listings are located.
*She mentioned, by my count, 11 different Yahoo! products and services, such as Y!Q, podcasts.yahoo.com, Konfabulator, MyWeb, Yahoo! Search Subscriptions, Site Explorer, and more.
*Amazon’s Statistically Improbably Phrases - a data mining feature for searching books that shows which phrases in a book are “statistically improbable”. These phrases provide more unique index terms and then let users find other books with the same terms.