There are almost certainly behind the scenes deals between google and some of the larger .com domains. Anyhow I find the engine unusable without at least employing -site:.com
I haven’t tried that, thanks for the tip. It is far from perfect of course, because there are tons of great high quality sites that use .com. What we really need is a good search engine that is the scale of google, but those don’t happen along very often. Cuil was really big, but they really messed it up.