Jim Roepcke seems to have his finger on the pulse of the search engine world, finding these two stories which highlight important, very positive changes at Google:
Google Acquires Deja’s Usenet Discussion Service
Google Ventures into the Invisible Web: The Web’s First Large-Scale PDF Search
Adding the ability to quickly search through hundreds of millions of Usenet posts and PDF files should dramatically improve what was already the best search engine on the Internet. I especially like the Google’s willingness to show me a text version of a PDF file, though fear it Google may find itself in litigation over that feature (since I suspect it will be more objectionable to some content providers than the “cached version” of HTML pages that Google currently provides).