None company has search algorhytms better than Google. None company has better maps than Google.

I hate google, but I block them with everything I have (for example, I block google ads, adsense, adwords, google analytics, most of google cookies, etc etc), but I still use them.

Also, never use google checkout. they save your credit card info by default.
Usually, everything in Google is "opt-out" , never opt-in , this is why I hate them.

But I still use them, because there is no better alternative.

Also, Youtube. How can you not use Youtube? :P

I am not concerned much about privacy, but Google is being shit recently. I search for something, and it gives me two pages' worth of links from the same site.

http://www.excite.com/

eXcite?

I'm using DuckDuckGo for some time now... and it already has some nice tools...
Google is only for, err.. other things..

Here's what I use now.

https://ixquick.com/

I've used duckduckgo for similar reasons, but I still get better results with google. I relised after a while that I was mostly using duckduckgo as a default page, but manually going to google when I wanted to find something.

Still haven't found an equivalent. Would be glad to test various suggestions too. I miss the time where there was still a few different dominant search englines, with altavista, etc.

I use ask.com and I love it. I never have any problems not finding what I want on there. They have a norton safe search version of ask.com too. It can tell you if a site is safe or not and has community reviews on each site. Well of course not every site is reviewed but it can help sometimes.

The oldest web search engine is still active:

http://www.aliweb.com/

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=google+alternatives

SCNR

I hate google spying on me and making a profile for me but there is nothing out there, better than google, right now. There are more Pros than Cons when using google.

It has already been mentioned, but I'm throwing in another vote for ixquick. Also using startpage if I want to check Google results.

Seconded. I added this to my firefox search list a few months ago. Sometimes I'll do a comparison search with Google in case I'm missing the results I'm looking for. But the search results from ixquick have been just fine.

SCNR = "sorry could not resist"

Ah, these young 'uns without proper usenet education ... ;)

I was a big "HotBot" fan back in the day.

Altavista, too!