I've been such a total Google junkie since it kicked all of the search engine's collective asses. Nothing else has come close, so I haven't even bothered looking anywhere else for perhaps a couple of years now. It just hit me that I'm a little uncomfortable with that total reliance on one source (and their algorithms) for my searching.
So, following Mark Evans' lead, I'm going to try going a week without Google. I'm not approaching this from a "Google is EVIL" angle - I think they're the exact opposite - they've had opportunity to be evil, and have shown that they want to make the effort to be Good. I just need to take a look around to see what else is coming along...
First, I'm going to try Ice Rocket - kinda Google-like, but it's been doing some cool stuff with RSS and blogs long before The Goog rolled that stuff out.
I think I should poke around and see if the Meta Search Aggregators are progressing. Remember Dog Pile? They were teh cool before Google ruled us all. (heh - just checked and it's still running! I'll have to check it out...)
Update: Woah. Just did a quick (Dogpile) search for "metasearch", and came up with a bunch of candidates:
- Dog Pile
- MetaSearch
- Search AllInOne
- Search.com
- Highway 61
- Monster Crawler
- Starting Point
- PlanetSearch
I haven't done any research into legitimacy of any of these tools yet, and haven't tried them out (except for Dog Pile), but there's the (short, incomplete) list.
Update: Just did a search for "Calgary" on each of these metasearchers, and only 2 engines returned stuff that wasn't mostly ads, or just piping in Google's results. Dog Pile and Search AllInOne - of the two, Dog Pile was more useful.