Unfortunately on g**g** technologies but the idea of a search shell is quite fun - look here
A modern alternative is the Silverlight based search front-end tafiti (not new, but to some people i may be)
For a while I've wondered if it wasn't possible to do something similar with the Live Search API (there is an API for Live Search, right?) and PowerShell.
It would probably be difficult to implement proper hyperlinks, but on the other hand, you could always just pipe the selected search result to a new browser process, I guess :)
