Most search engines today are pretty much the same. Yahoo!, Google and MSN all look pretty much like they did 10 years ago when AltaVista was new and webCrawler was the ultimate search engine. All the portal add-ins, gadgets and widgets are nice. But search is still search (and that's a good thing, right?)

So it's refreshing to see some different approaches.

The first puts a more human face on search. Okay, so it's a very in-your-face interface (especially if you get a little cheeky) by if you want to look at the web in a new way, just ask Ms Dewey to find something for you....

The other slightly different take on the standard search (more on the results than the interface) is SearchMash (which rumour has it comes from Google... though it's not very Google looking!) - it owes quite a bit of the way it seems to work to A9 (the Amazon search engine) which let's you search lots of things pretty much at the same time.

At the moment I can't decide if Google or MSN are my favourite search engines (they're similar, yet different!)... but Ms. Dewey is special!