I haven’t been able to dig into these, but here are some new search tools to check out:
Ask Jeeves - videos of how to use Ask: http://searchtools.ask.com/. Watch a smart woman in glasses show a guy how to search for Australia on Ask.
Collarity - query suggest and a slider to let you have results personalized to you or your community. Sounds intriguing, I need to look closer at this.
Like Visual Search - apparently Riya discovered it was too difficult to build facial-recognition software so they switched to product recognition. Search for clothing items to find similar items for sale.
Spock - people search engine (not live yet).