For years I mainly used AltaVista for searches, as it always seemed to turn up the best results. I’d use Yahoo! if I was looking for a category of similar sites. I started to use Infoseek occasionally, and found that it often turned up the same results as AltaVista. For a while I used Inference Find, which no one seems to have heard about, but which usually turns up very good results when I’m looking for something obscure.

Now, however, Google has won me over. Very very very simple design (who knows if they’ll keep it), but it seems to turn up much better results. But the big winner with Google is the caching. They cache everything, so that if you click on a link and it gives you a 404 you can just click on the “cached” version and see what you were missing. I find that I use that feature on probably 50% of the searches I do.