This article is a great summary of some of the new "Search 2.0" search engines that represent third generation technologies. The first generation of search engines were those that simply indexed the content of Web pages, with the venerable Alta Vista as the best example. Google defined second generation search technology, which looked at links to and from a Web page as a way of determining relevance.
Third generation search engines go well beyond the aging Google model, using intelligent clustering of results, natural language processing, and more human input to improve search results. Clusty is one of my favorites, which tries to cluster results into categories. This is especially helpful when a search query tends to include results from more than one topic area, which happens a lot. When you get search results back, you can quickly pick the appropriate cluster and whack out a lot of dreck. For example, if you put in the word 'record,' which can have different meanings in different contexts, Clusty returns 199 clusters, with the top ten results sets on the first page. It is pretty likely one of those sets is the correct one.
Another interesting one is Lexxe, which says it uses natural language processing to improve query results. It seems to work. The same two word query that Google coughed up 68,000 results for returned just 100 results in Lexxe.
One might reasonably ask why Google has not bothered to improve its search engine. Currently, the company probably thinks it does not have to--its quarterly earnings shot up again. But the Internet can turn on a dime, and I continue to believe that Google could fall, and fall quickly. In the meantime, try some of these new search engines; they save time and produce better results.