I'm using Google less and less these days. Ask.com and Clusty usually return fewer results and better results. As I've written in the past, I think Google has taken its eye off its core business while it tries to suck up every bit of data you have on your desktop. Google search results are frequently inferior to these other search engines. Clusty is particularly interesting because it automatically tries to cluster results into groups.
Once you have tried a clustered search, you may find you like it. It works particularly well when a combination of words may produce results that span different topic areas. You can click on the correct cluster and eliminate the otherwise tedious effort of sorting through irrelevant results manually.