Email, search and beyond

I got my Gmail account today. Am happy since I've never been able to get an email account with my name, but getting into the gmail pool before it is released to the general public meant that my name was still available. Check out some of the interesting features. (Ever wondered where some of the interesting stuff from Google Labs with no apparent use on the search page goes? Keyboard shortcuts has been implemented in a big way in Gmail - allows me to use Gmail like pine without taking my hands off the keyboard. Neat.)

If you are looking for an alternative way to search, here are a few good options:

• Scirus is a great search engine for journals and publications along with the usual web search options. Great for research!
• Vivisimo has some great clustering technology which groups your search results (clusters them) so that if you search for apple, you might find a cluster of results related to fruits, and another cluster related to hardware. A neat way to organize search results (and I suspect there will be a much better version in Google soon since they are testing some neat technology)