When it came out, a lot of my buddies switched to Google from Yahoo!, Excite, etc - the main reason was the lightweight, fast-loading main page. However, I was using Meta-Crawler at the time and switching to Google was a step down.

As somebody who searches mostly for science & IT-related info, I find Google to be rather time-consuming & loaded with garbage results.

Also, Google has always had some major issues in usability: for instance, when you enter a name and THEN click images, why doesn't it automatically run the search for you instead of simply carrying over your search term to a blank "Google Images" homepage?

Anyhow, Google's a decade old, and we've learned some major lessons from it: I think it's time for usability to drive additional features again in the search market, and instead of pushing towards "portal sites" I hope that smaller PHP engines like the ones listed here help evolve towards more usable search results rather than a bloated list of "SEO-enhanced" Google-pages and cheapo-advertisements.

Not a complaint, but maybe an indicator that the next trend in the Web will be a return to actual usability, rather than the current push towards inundating people with data rather than giving them knowledge.

Tim Ventura
http://www.bpo-automation.com
http://www.americanantigravity.com