I've tried others but Google seems to wipe the floor with them all for accuracy. Can anyone recommend a search engine as good as Google that isn't Google?
I have occasionally found clusty (http://www.clusty.com/) to be useful. It needs some more help tuning its direct search results, but the clustering stuff it does is pretty neat.
http://www.ask.com/ is very fast. Text auto-completing option saves time. Rolling over the binoculars in each result shows a miniature preview of the web page! Image results have zooming roll-overs. Video playback uses JavaScript mini-windows to avoid changing the page.
Can you provide queries where yahoo.com, google.com, and live.com are differentiable to a significant degree? Just out of curiousity, moreso than critique.
I use Lucene in our apps for indexing files and and other usefull things. It is a java based indexing lib. if you are not happy with google or anyone else and have a specific thing in mind, you can use it to create your own search engine.