Best Overall
First Place - Pastee, by Matt Sparks
https://pastee.org/
A secure combined pastebin/tinyurl service which was very polished. We actually ended up using it during the judging. First place gets Matt a trip to Sunnyvale for the finals; we can't wait to see what he comes up with next. More on Pastee here: https://pastee.org/about.
Second Place - Speakli, by Rahul Malik, Dave Paola, and Nathan Lawrence
Speakli is sort of like Ning for Microblogging sites. A bit like Yammer, I guess, but with a different focus. You can create your own Microblogging site with a few clicks complete with a full-featured Mobile widget version of it which was very slick.
Third Place - Internet Archive SearchMonkey App, by Alex Lambert
http://gallery.search.yahoo.com/application?smid=k4O.s
Infobar finds all old versions of a site via the Internet archive.
Alex also enter a pair of other really cool Search Monkey apps, RetailMeNot, which shows coupons related to the result, and BugMeNot, which we should probably not link here. :) Here's RetailMeNot:
http://gallery.search.yahoo.com/application?smid=ztq.s
Best BOSS Hack - The Perfect Search, by Alex Lambert
http://dev.quickfire.org/perfect/
Alex is a hack legend at UIUC; his hacks are eclectic and thought-provoking. In this one he paints a picture of what the Web would be like if everything had to be perfect. What if only sites that validated were indexed? Try doing a few searches on The Perfect Search to find out.
Best SearchMonkey Hack - Gist, by Andy Schmitz
http://gallery.search.yahoo.com/application?smid=IyE.s
Annotating web results or letting users improve the description of a site has been bounced around for a while, but you always have the Wikipedia problem and the spam problem. I thought Gist had a nice idea in that it only allows you take copy complete sentences found on the actual site to create a better blurb/description of that site. He had a cool Javascript hack combined with his SearchMonkey app to implement this in a rather slick fashion.
Best BluePrint Mobile Widget - Speakli, by Rahul Malik, Dave Paola, and Nathan Lawrence
http://www.speakli.com, described above.
Honorable Mention
Other highlights came from Will Duff (last year's UIUC winner) with Yahoo Mail file storage app, at http://williamduff.name/YMFS/, and Dan Barry, with the Map It SearchMonkey App, at
http://gallery.search.yahoo.com/application?smid=oXL.s.
Onwards to Waterloo!