Everyone knows Google is the search engine. It wasn’t always the case – and there is always the potential for something better to come along.

The main opposition is Bing (owned by Microsoft) and Yahoo! (powered by Bing).

Here are some others that you may not have heard of, even though they are quite good:

Duck Duck Go – crazy name, quality search engine that is getting 5 million searches per day. Best for old school searches where you don’t want images / videos / news in the search results

• no tracking / cookies / stored IP addresses
• few ads
• nice links to searches on other sites

Blekko – results aren’t quite as good as those above, but it does quite a good job of splitting results into categories. And there is less Spam than Google/Bing because in some categories (such as health) only trusted sites are used.

Yandex – “the Russian Google”, very similar in many ways, and just as good.

Exalead - despite concentrating on the corporate sector, this web search engine’s results are the equal of Google, plus they provide thumbnails previews & advanced results refinement.

Qwant – results are average, but worth using if you like their different results layouts

All of the above are worthy of trying out, just for a few days, to see if you like them. 

GigaBlast - results were the equal of the top 4, but with less spam and has no ads! 1 Billion pages indexed, and created by one guy. A true underdog that deserved success. Unfortunately it looks like it stopped crawling the web in 2010.