I picked up the Google Hacks book tonight at the brick and mortar B&N. Hack #85 talks about googlematic, which lets you search google through your IM client. Turns out this has been a done a couple times (YIMGoogle, AOGoogle) but I can’t find any that are online.

Googlematic is offline right now because it became too popular, which resulted in the bot exceeding the number of searches allowed by google through the Google Web APIs. Matt, the guy who wrote it, was cool enough to release the source to it though, which you can download here.