Google Image Search is perhaps the best know image search engine. But MakeUseOf reveals five others worth knowing about, including Cyclo.ps, a meta-search engine that lets you search up to eight stock photo sites at once, including Flickr, Shutterstock, and Photos.com.

Speedcine is an index of about 13,000 full-length movies you can legally watch online. Some of the sites it links to offer free movies, such as Hulu and Fancast , while others charge, such as Amazon’s Video on Demand. While still in beta, Speedcine warns that not all movies are listed in the alphabetic index on the front page; some can only be found by title search.

For Twitter power users, the single-tasked Twitter Search (http://twitter.com/search/ ) may not be enough of a good thing. TweetGrid allows you to define a custom grid of Twitter search results, such as 1×2 or 3×3, each cell displaying different search results. TweetDeck is a multi-column Twitter client that also gives you the option of displaying multiple search results at once.

Microsoft recently unveiled their newest search engine, Bing as a replacement for Live.com. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says that Bing is focusing on helping users with four common search tasks: shopping, travel, health and local. Here is a video tour of Bing, produced by Microsoft.

If you’ve never created a personalized homepage, or custom start-up page for your browser, there are a lot to choose from. My personal favorite is iGoogle but Pageflakes looks interesting too. A custom homepages is a place to gather all the news, feeds, email, gadgets, widgets and apps that are important to you, to give you a single place to start your web sessions from. For a closer look at fourteen different homepage services, read Mashable.

Ever need a question answered when you are away from your computer, and only have a cell phone? ChaCha is a free mobile search service that responds to queries asked via telephone or send as a text message (SMS). To ask a question, either call 1-800-2ChaCha or text your question to 242242 (C-H-A-C-H-A on your keyboard). A live person (called a guide) will research your question, and answer via text message.

Google’s Street View is now live at Google Maps for five cities (San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, Denver and Miami) with more cities coming soon. Street View is a 360-degree street-level photograph that has some people upset about privacy concerns. Here, for example, is a view of a San Francisco restaurant I dined at over the long Memorial Day weekend. Google retorts that all photos are taken from public streets, and therefore they are not violating anyone’s privacy. What do you think?

Need a timeline for a school report? TimeSearch is a specialized history search engine that delivers results as timelines. You only need to say what areas (or themes) and time period interest you, and you’ll be rewarded with a timeline of important events with links to related websites and images.

Do you know the difference between a “bebo”, “rebelde” and a “mininova”? Google has just published their list of the top ten searches of the year. If you have any interest in pop culture, you owe it to yourself to explore these search terms: 2006 Yearend Google Zeitgeist .

Many people do not realize that their browser address bar can act as a search engine. For example, instead of a URL, you can enter a search query, such as “Who is Barbara Feldman?” Here are instructions from Google on how to change your default search engine. Of course, these instructions assume you are changing your default to Google (http://www.google.com ) . To change to MSN Search (http://search.msn.com ) or Yahoo! ( http://www.yahoo.com ) just use their URL instead.