Everybody seems to be thinking that outside MSN Search, Google is the only game in town. Well, sorry, there is Yahoo too.

These last months the majority of e-zines were full of stories about Google; Google's IPO, Google developping a new browser, Google releasing its desktop search (the OOo file formats may get included inside the tool, by the way), Google and its Gmail, Google becomes President, Google whatever.
Google is, to date, the fastest search engine on the internet.
Microsoft has been trying for ages to become the number one, and now it seems that it's farther from that position than ever.

Despite its 100 million dollars investment in its search technologies, Microsoft didn't manage to come close to Google's performance and worse, it isn't likely to change, despite what the folks of Redmond say.

I do use Google myself, but I can't say that I don't use other search engines. I've even used MSN search, recently, just to see how it scored. As I said above, it didn't perform well. Actually, I would even say that it was a rather painful XPrience.
I was surprized, however, to see that there are some very cool search engines that (re-) gained my favor these days.
Let's take altavista. AltaVista was the Stock exchange puppet during the dotcom years and also the first commercial search engine. It scored great for that time but quickly became a victim of its own success, and the entire altavista service (including free email, where I had my very first email) was shutdown around 2001. Only the search engine survived, and it was then bought by a company called by HMCI or something before being acquired by the famous Overture/Yahoo behemoth.
The very good point for these services is that they weren't simply sucked out by Yahoo.com search engine. Their technologies were also integrated inside Overture and Yahoo, and this is how two great search technologies, namely AltaVista and All the Web (FAST technologies) seemingly disappeared from the net, only to strengthen the almighty-in-second Yahoo! search engine.

I'm a web romantic, however. I do like to use the Overture search services, but not just by browing up to yahoo.com .
I do go to altavista.com , alltheweb.com (bet you didn't know that one), hotbot.com, go.com, and even the rather recent and very active gigablast.com ...

Are you as nuts as I am ? Do you go to now defunct commercial online ventures? And do you use altavista search engine exclusively? Please, drop me a line!