How do you find a new search engine if all you know is Google? Typing “search engine” into the usual box might lead you to Microsoft’s newly launched Bing, the combined search at Dogpile, or the former king of search, Altavista.

But for those willing to dig around, searching for search engines can reveal a treasure trove: The net is rich with specialized search services, all trying to find a way to get their slice of the billions of dollars Google makes every year answering queries.

For this article, we surveyed some 50 specialty search services and picked out our favorites. What follows is not a systematic ranking or review, but a general guide to a very vibrant world that few have bothered to explore in depth.

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A commenter in response to the news story, I think, hit the nail, on the head, “the internet is not the disease but the symptom.”

If a marriage is good, one will want to spend more time with their spouse, and perhaps if strained, will try to escape in various ways, which might include going online. Or, in my case, both spouses could spend a lot of time online and then use it to make their marriage better. Glenn and I discuss stuff online all the time and always have something fun to talk about. I have never laughed as hard at some of the things I read or had to think so much in response to some of them. So, I guess, like any hobby or vice (take your pick), it depends on how one uses it as to whether it is positive or negative.

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The decision to cease the newsprint edition of United Church News was made on March 20 by the board of directors of the Office of General Ministries (OGM), which has been struggling with skyrocketing costs for the newspaper’s production. Postage and printing costs have more than doubled during the past five years, with costs now surpassing $125,000 per issue.

The National edition will publish one more issue in September. The Conference editions ”” or “wrap arounds” ”” ended with the April edition, although Conferences were offered the opportunity to print one additional issue if willing to share the costs equally with the UCC’s National setting.

“This was a difficult decision for board members, because it was rooted in significant financial angst,” said the Rev. J. Bennett Guess, the UCC’s communications director and a former editor of United Church News. “But it also paves the way for the development of an expanded online news portal and, most likely, a new and different print publication for the United Church of Christ.”

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I caught this in the morning this week by accident–it is important. Watch it all.

So I went over to TitusOne, which I view as the most reliable, least strident site in the “conservative blogosphere,” to learn what’s happening in Fort Worth. Kendall Harmon is carrying many, many news reports from the ACNA meet-up. It had been many weeks (maybe even a couple of months) since I’d visited his site.

And I was shocked by what I observed. His postings (especially about Big Events like this one purportedly is) used to get dozens and dozens of comments. But go look. His many ACNA-related posts are only getting a handful comments. Reports like these used to get dozens of comments. That is weird! What the heck is going on? T19 is still getting hits; it’s just not getting much discussion. How come?

I have a hunch that the True Believers have moved over to StandFirm because they’re weary of TitusOneNine’s fairly constrained links and excerpts. Maybe they want the screaming free-for-all that StandFirm feeds them in its posts and allows in its comments. But even over at SFiF, the posts don’t seem to be getting the volume of comments that they used to.

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The Pentagon will create a Cyber Command to oversee the U.S. military’s efforts to protect its computer networks and operate in cyberspace, under an order signed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Tuesday.

The new headquarters, likely to be based at Fort Meade, Maryland, outside Washington, D.C., will be responsible for defending U.S. military systems but not other U.S. government or private networks, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said.

Asked if the command would be capable of offensive operations as well as protecting the Department of Defense, Whitman declined to answer directly.

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Check it out.

It took years, if not decades, to correct this misinformation. The dubious reports from Iran, though of questionable significance in the first place, took, at most, a few days to dispel.

While it is less interesting to focus on the Internet””yes, the Internet in general””as a vital tool for Iranian dissidents, it’s necessary to point out that, for non-Iranians both observing and covering the rebellion, Twitter is playing a secondary role to websites like YouTube and Flickr, both of which have provided compelling images and video from the streets of Tehran. And while Twitter is not the reason students are on the streets, it has played a significant role in allowing the opposition to organize and spread its message to supporters in the West. To dismiss it as pure media hype would be foolish.

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Eyes roll when Rabbi Hayim Herring tells his fellow clergy that they should spend an hour a day on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.

Listeners at his seminars smirk when he says blogging should be considered mandatory or that they should post short video clips from their sermons on YouTube.

It’s a lot better than the reaction he used to get.

“They used to look at me as if I’d just said a four-letter word,” said Herring, the former senior rabbi at Beth El Synagogue in the Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park. Now he’s executive director of STAR (Synagogues: Transformation and Renewal). In its seven years, the organization has seen more converts to what many call one of the dirtiest words in religion: marketing.

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The number of adults who turn to the Internet for health information has nearly doubled in the past two years, from 31% to 60%, according to a study.

That puts the Internet in a tie for third place (with books and print materials) as the source adults most often turn to for health information.

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See how many you recognize.

Could this not be used more often?.

A plan to create a new Pentagon cybercommand is raising significant privacy and diplomatic concerns, as the Obama administration moves ahead on efforts to protect the nation from cyberattack and to prepare for possible offensive operations against adversaries’ computer networks.

President Obama has said that the new cyberdefense strategy he unveiled last month will provide protections for personal privacy and civil liberties. But senior Pentagon and military officials say that Mr. Obama’s assurances may be challenging to guarantee in practice, particularly in trying to monitor the thousands of daily attacks on security systems in the United States that have set off a race to develop better cyberweapons.

Much of the new military command’s work is expected to be carried out by the National Security Agency, whose role in intercepting the domestic end of international calls and e-mail messages after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, under secret orders issued by the Bush administration, has already generated intense controversy.

There is simply no way, the officials say, to effectively conduct computer operations without entering networks inside the United States, where the military is prohibited from operating, or traveling electronic paths through countries that are not themselves American targets.

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Worth the time.

As long as we’re talking about getting people to pay for what they value online, Edward Gottesman suggests in the British magazine Prospect, what about taxing everyone a few cents per e-mail to cut down on the estimated 90 percent of it that is unwanted spam choking the Web?

Yuck. Read it all.

A “dirty tricks” campaign has blown up in the faces of liberal activists in the Episcopal Church, as the publication of purloined e-mails has led to allegations of “conduct unbecoming a member of the clergy” being lodged against the leader of the gay-pressure group Integrity and a member of the Episcopal Church’s Executive Council.

Bishops associated with the Anglican Communion Institute (ACI) have asked the bishops of Los Angeles and Delaware to look in to the conduct of the Rev Susan Russell and the Rev Canon Mark Harris for having surreptitiously obtained and then posting on their blogs the text of private correspondence exchanged among the ACI and its attorney.

A request has also been made to Bishop John Chane of Washington to review the actions of one of his staffers in the anti-ACI campaign. The dispute centres around e-mails published by Canon Harris and Ms Russell though written and exchanged by the ACI leadership on the crafting of a position paper entitled the “Bishops’ Statement on the Polity of the Episcopal Church”, released last month by the ACI and subsequently endorsed by 14 bishops.

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Voting has ended in what is being touted as the nation’s first all-digital election, and city officials say it has been a success.

Some 115,000 voters in Honolulu’s neighborhood council election were able to pick winners entirely online or via telephone. The voting, which started May 6, ended Friday.

City officials say the experiment appears to have generated few problems; it has even saved the financially strapped city around $100,000.

“It is kind of the wave of the future,” said Bryan Mick, a community relations specialist with the city Neighborhood Commission, “so we’re kind of glad in a way that we got to be the ones who initiated it.”

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The Wolfram Alpha engine is set to be launched. Rather than a search engine, it is an ‘answer engine’ that interprets actual questions and answers them in accordance with their intended meaning…The Wolfram Alpha, at first, will seem rather underwhelming, and will merely enable high-school and college students (as well as bloggers) to conduct their research more easily. But as refinements accumulate and users go through their own learning curve, we could see a major transformation in Internet usage starting around 2012.

Read it all and follow the links too.

“IT is my mission in life to get this job,” said Amanda Casgar, who is better known to executives at Murphy-Goode Winery in Sonoma County as applicant No. 505.

Three weeks ago Murphy-Goode began a search for a “social media whiz,” a wine enthusiast interested in moving to Healdsburg, Calif., for six months to promote the vineyard’s malbec and chardonnay on blogs, Facebook and Twitter. The job ”” which comes with the official title “lifestyle correspondent” ”” pays $10,000 a month, plus free accommodations at a private home within walking distance of the tasting room. Ms. Casgar, a former magazine marketing executive, has been endorsing herself as enthusiastically as she would a bottle of petit verdot.

Already an occasional Twitterer, she increased the number of tweets she posts; they are mostly about wine. She created a Web site, “Goode Times With Amanda Casgar,” to chronicle her job quest. Like about a half-dozen other eager applicants, she has started a fan group on Facebook, buying ads for 50 cents a click to generate traffic.

And last week Ms. Casgar spent two days filming her video résumé, rejecting the idea to sing a rap song (“I want to demonstrate my personality without being too cheesy or a loser,” she explained) in favor of a sketch dubbed “random acts of wineness.”

Talk about investing in the future. The position of social media specialist, introduced by companies like Comcast, General Motors and JetBlue Airways, has become the hottest new corporate job among the Twitterati.

Read it all from yesterday’s New York Times.

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I spent eight years at the Episcopal Church Center’s communication office, and I’d say about 60 percent of the time (a conservative estimate!) the intrepid and much-maligned journalists in our office first found out what was going on just two floors above us…through somebody’s blog.

—Jan Nunley (emphasis hers)

David Loveless’ wife pulled him aside before he left the house one morning and gave him a talking-to. It was one of those “uh-oh” conversations that happen between husbands and wives.

Moments later, the senior pastor of Discovery Church in Orlando was still thinking about what it means to have a partner who can straighten you out when things start to swerve off course. So, using his BlackBerry, he posted a “tweet” on social-networking site Twitter, recounting the lesson he just learned and asking his followers whether they had somebody like that in their lives.

The use of social media ”” Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and podcasts ”” is changing the way churches communicate with their congregations. The church bulletin is not going away, but it’s being augmented by the instant, interactive communication of the laptop, iPhone and BlackBerry.

“It’s a better way to reach people where they are at these days,” said Adrian Traurig, who handles worship and creative arts for Journey Christian Church in Apopka. “It keeps people connected. We post all our events and all the happenings here at Journey.”

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The nine-digit Social Security Number is holding strong after 73 years. The 10-digit phone number is six decades old and counting. But the Internet will soon outlive its equivalent numbering system for identifying Web surfers and the sites they visit, which could have disruptive and costly consequences for life online.

As originally designed, Internet Protocol addresses contained 32 bits, represented in four sets of numbers from 0 to 255. There are 4.3 billion different possible combinations, which seemed like plenty to Vint Cerf, who helped develop the IP standards in the late 1970s.

“It was an experiment with an uncertain outcome,” Mr. Cerf, now chief Internet evangelist for Google, says of the Internet. Some other online pioneers argued for 128 bits, but they lost out. “I couldn’t imagine arguing that we needed 340 trillion trillion trillion addresses to carry out an experiment,” Mr. Cerf says.

Read it all from this morning’s Wall Street Journal.

Emboldened by a few glasses of wine one Saturday night, Tara Hunt ranted on Twitter about her frustrations with San Francisco’s dating scene. She soon regretted it.

At work a couple of days later, her venting was topic No. 1 in the boardroom at Intuit, where Hunt works in marketing. Her colleagues had read the message and, to her embarrassment, chimed in about her love life.

“For those who don’t know me well, it might leave the wrong impression of who I am,” said Hunt, who is a fixture on the Silicon Valley startup scene.

Twitter, Facebook and other similar online services are making it easier than ever for people to share their thoughts with others. But the obsession many people have for posting updates also raises the question: When does sharing about one’s personal life cross the line and become too much information?

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The biggest internet revolution for a generation will be unveiled this month with the launch of software that will understand questions and give specific, tailored answers in a way that the web has never managed before.

The new system, Wolfram Alpha, showcased at Harvard University in the US last week, takes the first step towards what many consider to be the internet’s Holy Grail ”“ a global store of information that understands and responds to ordinary language in the same way a person does.

Although the system is still new, it has already produced massive interest and excitement among technology pundits and internet watchers.

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High school students, beware! College admissions and financial aid officers in California and elsewhere may be peeking over your digital shoulder at the personal information you post on your Facebook or MySpace page.

And they might decide to toss out your application after reading what you wrote about that cool party last week or how you want to conduct your romantic life at college.

According to a new report by the National Assn. for College Admission Counseling, about a quarter of U.S. colleges reported doing some research about applicants on social networking sites or through Internet search engines….

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Internet users face regular “brownouts” that will freeze their computers as capacity runs out in cyberspace, according to research to be published later this year.

Experts predict that consumer demand, already growing at 60 per cent a year, will start to exceed supply from as early as next year because of more people working online and the soaring popularity of bandwidth-hungry websites such as YouTube and services such as the BBC’s iPlayer.

It will initially lead to computers being disrupted and going offline for several minutes at a time. From 2012, however, PCs and laptops are likely to operate at a much reduced speed, rendering the internet an “unreliable toy”.

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When American forces in Iraq wanted to lure members of Al Qaeda into a trap, they hacked into one of the group’s computers and altered information that drove them into American gun sights.

When President George W. Bush ordered new ways to slow Iran’s progress toward a nuclear bomb last year, he approved a plan for an experimental covert program ”” its results still unclear ”” to bore into their computers and undermine the project.

And the Pentagon has commissioned military contractors to develop a highly classified replica of the Internet of the future. The goal is to simulate what it would take for adversaries to shut down the country’s power stations, telecommunications and aviation systems, or freeze the financial markets ”” in an effort to build better defenses against such attacks, as well as a new generation of online weapons.

Just as the invention of the atomic bomb changed warfare and deterrence 64 years ago, a new international race has begun to develop cyberweapons and systems to protect against them.

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Read it carefully and read it all.