It’s a bit tangential to our core purpose here (which, by the way, is to create a drop-in, collaborative web word processor script, that also happens to the the best word processor on your desktop), but Ubuntu users will be pleased to know that I’ve taken a (small) bit of time off of working on Scatterand to created a web search place for the Unity shell in Ubuntu 11.04.
As you can see from the above screenshot, rather than trying to displace the web browser in giving you a list of pages to peruse, the web search place takes on a different role: getting to to a relevant information *source* quickly. Click a source icon and you’ll be taken to a relevant page on that site.
Itching to try it out? There’s a PPA on launchpad, and the entire source code (in Python) is available under the GPL.