Shameless self promotion .. I know.

Don’t worry.

But if you signed up — SOMEBODY has to benefit .. why not me?

I do hate how search engines assume that the mouse focus should be in their search field.

Lots of times I open a web browser and set the search engine to be my homepage .. and it steals the cursor on me.

Thanks for the tip!

I mostly use Google cause it’s conveniently located in the Firefox toolbar

Me too.

Pat,

I love Google’s simplicity

Me too.

What would make me switch? Well first the layout is extremely important.. I love Google’s simplicity, I mean it’s about search right? Not content shoved everywhere making my poor head spin, and my computer sputter.

More relevant searches, but how do they do that?- already considering they combat spammers as best as they can. I suppose it would be nice to vote some links out, or at least give me the option to get rid of them while logged in. Sorta like they do in adwords (filtering domains).

Well, nothing else that I can think of off hand, Google just fits, when I go to their site it’s like part of my computer, it’s there, it’s important. It would be hard to switch.

However I have noticed lately that yahoo is storing my pages alot faster than google or MSN. Also, yahoo is speedier than MSN, I’d say almost comparable to google.. a big bonus, especially for me, who’s connected via ADSL lite yet.. I still find the yahoo network overwhelming.

I just took a look at some other search engines to compare them and I still really dislike MSN.com and Yahoo home pages. They’re just far too cluttered with information I’m not interested in. I like Google, Live.com and Ask.com because their home pages are relatively clean.

The live.com image search interface is really innovative and has some nice features that Google doesn’t. As far as results go, that’s difficult to tell. I’d need to try them out for a little longer to compare the results.

For dictionary search, I used to use dictionary.com, but I’m finding myself using answers.com more and more recently. The fact that Google’s definition links now go there is a major reason for that, but I found that answers.com lacked

Thomas,

Interesting option with MSN about link searching (and a fantastic example! :-)).

Aaron,

That’s hilarious!

web, jrf,

Thanks for the suggestions. And web, that was quite some promotion!

If I know pretty much what I am looking for, I use ixQuick - http://www.ixquick.com/ - the interface is just as simple and there are just as few ads/sponsored results as in Google (or even less). The results are based on the ‘best of’ results from several search engines together and because of that will normally have what I’m searching for within the very top of their results (first page or even on first position).

Its google results, but I have a chance to win prizes every time I (or my frineds) search for something.

So far a few of my friends have won some movie tickets and a few gift certificates. Not bad for using google like I always have.

If you sign up, use my link so we will be “frineds” and if you win, I also win.

http://www.blingo.com

Google is good for the most part but it returns rubbish sometimes - the “i’m feeling lucky button” is just useless now as rarely returns something you want, it should really be a “you’ll be lucky” button.

Your wish is my Command - Greasemonkey script
Changes the text on the feeling lucky button to ‘You’ll be lucky’

Nothing ground breaking but kept me amused for about 3seconds

Regardless, it’s all about results.

The only exception would be for image searching - I love the way Microsoft have produce their image search as part of their Live Search system. I think that’s an improvement on Google’s current offering.

I would switch only if another search engine offered not only more content but also more relevant search results.

The only search engines I could think would be able to do so in a forseeable future is MSN or Yahoo.

But they probably won’t. Google is involuntary de-facto standard..