Alright, Google do seem to be taking over the world and that's not a good thing. Probably. But have you tried the neat tricks that they provide in the search box? For example you can prefix your search with define: then a word and it gets the dictionary definitions for you. Try define: Blackburnian Warbler for example. It can also do conversions and calcuations for you. Try typing something like 8 feet in metres or 6 * 12 + 39. That's pretty clever. Take a look at http://www.google.co.uk/help/features.html for a full list including things like who links to your site, travel conditons (US only I'm afraid), and site specific searches. Apparently if you search for www by itself it lists the most popular sites in their database - guess who's top? Here's another: Search for miserable failure and see what you get.
Just to even it up a bit, I've recently started using www.AllTheWeb.com - the results seem pretty accurate, and it's certainly fast. I don't know about you but I think I have probably been a bit hooked on Google for the past year, and almost forgot to try others search engines when google did not cut the mustard. I vow now to use the following more frequently: http://www.gigablast.com, www.altavista.com, www.lycos.com - those for starters at least...if you have a favourite, let the Warbler know!
I've also been doing some idle research on search engine optimisation. After wading through all the usual junk, I came across a couple of pretty interesting ones. The first www.goodkeywords.com is a free Windows download that lets you see the ranking of your phrases and keywords on various search engines, and a simliar more comprehensive service (though this one you have to pay for) is available at http://www.wordtracker.com/. Both would prove valuable for choosing keywords to use on your site. As for a general site, I thought http://www.rank-outsider.co.uk/ looked quite interesting, and has a good self-help section
The Warbler