This two items have been batted around the blogosphere and I thought it necessary to mention them and give my .2 cents.

Google:
Slashdot referneces and article from Buzzle.com which looked at Google's recently filed a US patent which revealed a great deal about their mysterious page ranking system. Google does their best to eliminate spam from their search results. If a site is new (less than one year old) it will be ranked lower than sites who have been exsistance longer. This information is important on how legitamate sites fare in Google's ranking system.
I think this information is important to read for anybody doing Internet searching. As I learned in library school, if you can think like the indexers you have a better chance at retrieving your information. So, if you think like the Google, you have a better chance of discovering that hard to fine necessary site.

Yahoo:
Yahoo is attempting to dive into the deep end, of the web that is. ZDNET has article on Yahoo's effort to allow users to search for information contained within subscription-based Web sites. All librarians know that there is a wealth of information available online that search engines just don't index. It is commonly called the deep web, and subscription based sites are a part of the deep web. Well Yahoo Search Subscriptions will allow searchers to access to seven different subscription Web sites simultaneously: the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal Online, ConsumerReports.org, TheStreet.com, The New England Journal of Medicine, Forrester Research, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Soon to be added are: LexisNexis, Factiva and the Association of Computing Machinery.

Don't jump grab your scuba outfit just yet. Before you dive in you must have a subscription to the above databases/sites to access the information.