I'm not Google fanboy but I'd like to know what contenders you are talking about here because I have not found anything which returns the same level of quality in its results and I'm a librarian, not just a casual user. Bing is useless, Yahoo is beyond useless. I try and use DuckDuckGo as a Google Search replacement and I find it good most of the time but I sometimes find myself adding a !g before things to get decent results for more in-depth topics.