I would quite happily use another search engine apart from Google if there was one 'as good as'. All the big names seem to give similar results.

All that will happen if we all stop using Google is that some other search engine will take it's place.

Google are number one because they made a search engine that just does what it's meant to... Find the results you are looking for.

http://clusty.com/

http://turbo10.com/

http://www.snap.com/

Quintura uses Yahoo's search. They cheated.

Tim ("Meh" comment) is right -- Google made a search engine that just did what it was meant to. Unfortunately, they couldn't leave well enough alone, so they decided to destroy that search engine. If you can remember back far enough, remember when Google returned useful results on the first page? Now, at least half the time I search for something, it's not even on the page Google returns. I get extremely frustrated because I see the page and don't see what I'm looking for. I use Firefox's "Find" feature, and it doesn't find it. Eventually, I go back to Google and look at the cached version of the page, only to find out that the text I was looking for isn't on the page at all; it's in a link pointing to the page. Well I couldn't give a damn if it's in a link pointing to the page! I want to see the text I'm searching for; I don't want to find something that the words I'm searching for point to. PageRank was the worst thing Google could have done to their search results. The second worst thing is omitting results because they're "similar" to other results. Though that does lead to the interesting phenomenon of seeing 8 pages of results when you're on page 1, then 7 pages when you're on page 2, then 5 pages when you're on page 3, then 4 pages by the time you hit page 4. At least they could "filter" the results beforehand so you don't have disappearing pages.

There apperes to be no reason to not use them. So what if you dont. A bit of a non story. And who on earth is that sad that they cant get through a day without using a surch engine?

It's "Powered by Yahoo XML", which makes it one of the top five if you ask me.

... AltaVista ruled the world along with HotBot.

Did I really waste 5 minutes of my life reading about this?

I could've spent that 5 mins making a clone of this site in PHP: that's 2 minutes to make the website and 3 minutes to email the register for some free marketing...

An interesting alternative to Google is Scroogle (http://www.scroogle.org). They are using the Google search results without the advertisement bit. By using http://www.scroogle.org/scraper.html, you get the same clean search interface as Google provides.

That's just not possible for me - from the moment I turn my computer on in the morning, to when I go to bed at night, I'm inescapably linked to Google.

I use GMail to check all of my email accounts, and I have Google Talk running all the time. I use the incredibly lovely Google Desktop sidebar to display my RSS feeds, calendars, and latest emails.

While at work, I check my email using the extremely useful GMail java app for mobile phones, and occasionally, I use the Google Maps app too (I'm a bicycle courier).

To go 24 hours without Google?

/Maybe/ if I only don't use it for searching for anything...

I don't often find a problem with google's search results, except when searching for tinpot companies that don't actually have a web site.

In that case, yes you get all manner of unhelpful pages from sites that have done no more than to list permutations of keywords or pages that simply list every company they can find in printed directories without actually providing any useful information about the company. But in almost every case, once you start seeing those results there's no point in searching further down -- it's hardly google's fault that the company you're looking for doesn't have a web site and if it did have one, then that company would almost certainly be appearing near the top of the results.

A simple answer would be for google to let its users have the option of suppressing sites that are primarily lists of keywords or lists of companies from the directory.

on Quintura and it's map thing linked up horror, clicked on go from there. After a wait (v. slow) it returned a link to The Sun newspaper, Sun Micro Systems and lots pf pther Sun related stuff. WTF? Way off track...

Use Google search, just stop clicking on the adverts and type in the advert URL instead. Google would loose billions!

I don't know why anyone uses that thing. Dodgy cookies, dodgy policy in China, and a rampant desire to index everything and everyone on the planet, including books, maps and God knows what else.

Been using Altavista for about 12 years, seems to do the trick. Sometimes I use Wisenut or turbo10.

The Son of Sam killer?

Are these stories real, or made up?

What's this story doing on el Reg? A blogger suggests not using the major search engines for a day, some of their readers can't manage it, some can. Big whoop. I can see it getting on Digg or Reddit, I'm not sure quite why it's on a professional news site.

This article seems to be here just to promote his blog. Great for him - he seems to have some SEO roots - but why did it get past the editors?

Leave your computer off for the day.

I don't quite understand the fashionable dislike of Google's AdWords though. If nobody clicked them, Google's business plan would fail, the theory disproven and we'd be back to paid search placements. And that would be better how?

Yes, free search would be nice, but nothing in this world is free.

I find Exalead (http://www.exalead.com) more intuitive than Google, and i use it for some months instead google search, but I could'nt live one day without Gmail...