Although Google has a monopoly market share of searches, there is no shortage of alternatives, and Read/Write Web has a running list of the Top 100. The one for April includes 12 new search engines, though quite a few well known ones -- Ask, Live Search, Yahoo, Vivisimo, Knuru etc -- are missing. (The Top 100 has already listed 160 search engines so they may have appeared and been dropped.)
The list has been improving with user feedback, so here are my two requests, based on the belief that the really interesting search engines are the ones that do things differently. First, if a search engine is using somebody else's search results (eg Google's), say what it's using. Second, please put the metasearch engines like DogPile in a separate list.
There are lots of ways to innovate in search, including how you select and spider sites, how you process and rank the results, and how you present them. A real alternative is a site that innovates in all three areas, rather than just taking Google's results and filtering them, useful though that may be.
