Grub
A serious contender to Google appears on the horizon:
A distributed computing project called Grub, which harnesses individual users' spare computing power and internet bandwidth, began cataloguing millions of web pages this week.
Personally, I would very much rely on a distributed effort to find stuff, rather than have all my personal data enconded in Google - with all the attendant privacy issues that this centralized approach has ellicited.The presence of multiple indexers runnig on various computers makes more sense, is smarter given the Web architecture, and has a larger promise than a centralized command for google. The lack of rules about which can be indexed also means that - unlike Google - a lot of issues are going to surface, such as artificial positioning and hate sites receiving undue attention.
Competition is always good to have.