Many people are familiar with Google Labs, Google’s “technology playground” where people can play around with the company’s latest experiments. I don’t think people are as familiar with Yahoo Research, Yahoo’s equivalent (or, at least, I wasn’t).

It really has some gems in its Sandbox, including ones useful for English Language Learners:

PhotoSoup is a great word search game with a twist — instead of being provided with the words you’re supposed to find, you’re shown images.

With the Video Tag Game, you and other players are shown video clips. The object is to try to identify common “tags” for the clips.

Garcon is a tool that analyzes your Delicious links and identifies suggestions for other sites you might like. It’s similar to other tools on The Best Places To Get Blog, Website, , Book, Movie, & Music Recommendations list, but it appears like it might be a little more thorough than those.

It has a number of other experiments worth trying out.