My 10 most interesting new free search tools in 2009 (apart from JURN and Earworm of course):
1. Journal TOCs.
2. Hathi Trust Digital Library.
3. Microsoft Bing. Google responded by adding the useful filtering options on a sidebar. Google CSE’s add the new Custom Search Element.
4. Basic name authority in Google News results.
5. Various search-engines introduce filters allowing users to filter results for Creative Commons content.
6. Microsoft Academic Search (technology and computing-oriented, beta).
7. SurfClarity : persistent session-to-session URL blocking for your Google search results.
8. Auto-detect and auto-translate Chinese on the web, while keeping page-layouts intact.
10. AWOL’s comprehensive 2009 list of Open Access Journals in Ancient Studies. Not really a tool, but if you point an on-the-fly CSE at it, it becomes a search-engine that includes more content (e.g. contributor profiles, calls for papers) than the article-level indexing available via JURN.
And, of special note for innovation in the display of search results, Spezify. And for innovation in the parsing of “in the wild” citations, FireCite.