A colleague sent me a link to another up and coming search engine called Vivisimo. It's a bit different than Snap, which I wrote about yesterday, but like Snap, it handles search results in a way that is genuinely useful, as compared to the typical "jillions of hits" Google result.
Vivisimo seems to do two things very well. First, it tries to identify the most likely results, rather than just returning all of them. Snap and Vivisimo both seem to give you about the same number results on a query, which is to say, many fewer than Google, and those returned are of higher quality.
Vivisimo also clusters results, which is really neat. A little expandable outline appears on the left, and clicking various branches of the tree returns subsets of the total set of results. It does this by looking at related words that do not appear in your query. You have to try it to appreciate it, but once you try it, I think you'll see what an improvement it is over Google.