Google Variants & Google Tools
Google Scholar Search
finds technical papers, great!!
Google Suggest
suggests search terms and their hit counts as you type along, very helpful
Google Gaps
find terms within x words of each other
Google Fegan Finder
allows use of NOT
Site Flavored Google
can be used to generate a google search box that returns hits from a theme (like your web page theme). Could be useful trying to sort out hits when is a band or something with same name, you could limit searches to sites like what you wanted.
Google-Set-Vista
visualizing google data sets, hard to explain, great for genealogy
DoubleTrust
compares Google and Yahoo results, excellent